Daylighters

Rachel Caine

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The Morganville Vampires Novels

Glass Houses

The Dead Girls’ Dance

Midnight Al ey

Feast of Fools

Lord of Misrule

Carpe Corpus

Fade Out

Kiss of Death

Ghost Town

Bite Club

Last Breath

Black Dawn

Bit er Blood

Fal of Night

Daylighters

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THE

MORGANVILLE

VAMPIRES

Daylighters

Rachel Caine

NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY

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New American Library

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA), 375 Hudson Street,

New York, New York 10014, USA

First published by New American Library,

a division of Penguin Group (USA)

First Printing, November 2013

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Set in Centaur MT

publisher’s note

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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This one’s for you, dear reader. You’ve been such

enthusiastic residents of Morganville that I can’t

imagine dedicating this book to anyone else.

Thanks for taking this long, strange journey with

me . . . and I hope you never want to leave our little

town. Here, have a resident card. Lines for the

blood bank form to the right. . . .

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Acknowledgements

Without Ter Matthies, this whole series would never have existed.

Thank you, Ter. Love and respect, and I will always remember

your light.

Also: Heidi Berthiaume, Jemina Venter, Sarah Weiss, Janet

Cadsawan, NiNi Burkart, Lucienne Diver, and Anne Sowards—

all of whom deserve my utmost love and respect.

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INTRODUCTION

Morganville, Texas, isn’t like any other dusty small

town. It’s got secrets. It’s a company town . . . and the

company is vampires. If you stay, you work for them,

signing special agreements for Protection and paying a tax in earn-

ings or blood for the privilege of not being, y’know, eaten.

It’s worked for a couple of centuries under the iron- in- velvet

touch of the Founder, Amelie . . . but the past few years have been turmoil, trouble, and rebellion. Claire Danvers left to get away

from it all, embarking on a special study program at MIT. But

even if you can take the girl out of Morganville, you can’t take

Morganville out of the girl— and she ran headlong into a menac-

ing new enemy who knew way too much about vampires. The

Daylight Foundation.

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Now Claire’s returning home with her housemates (Eve, Mi-

chael, and Shane) and her allies (her bipolar mad scientist boss,

Myrnin; Amelie’s ex- second- in- command, Oliver; Claire’s new

vampire friend, Jesse; and Dr. Anderson, a captive scientist who

was once a Morganville native, now turned traitor).

But home sure isn’t the way they left it. . . .

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ONE

Claire stared at the creaking billboard that marked the

town limits of Morganville, Texas, and thought, I ought to

be crying. Her best friend, Eve, already was, in helpless, furious sobs. Claire held on to her and did all the sympathetic things

right— murmured that it would be okay, patted her on the back,

hugged her.

But although she said all the right things, she felt . . . empty.

Dry as the sand that blew through the desert outside the police

cruiser’s windows. They were sitting in the backseat, behind steel

mesh, and the doors wouldn’t open from the inside. It was made

like a taxi, but it most definitely wasn’t since it took you only where you didn’t want to go. Namely, to jail.

And across from where their cruiser was parked, four limp

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vampire bodies were being loaded into two of the town’s

ambulances— strapped tightly to gurneys, in case the wood still

buried in their hearts to keep them temporarily dead didn’t work.

Claire identified the slack faces as they were rolled by: Oliver, once town Founder Amelie’s second- in- command, now disgraced and

in exile. Jesse, the vamp who Claire knew the least well, a beautiful woman who looked ridiculously young and fragile now, robbed

(temporarily, hopefully) of her vampire life. Then Myrnin, Claire’s bipolar vampire boss and friend, his dark hair an untamed mess

around his still, white face.

Finally, and most horribly, Michael Glass, Claire’s friend and

the love of Eve’s life. His skin had turned the color of pure white marble, and his blue eyes were open and dull. He looked deadest of

them all.

“It’s fine,” Claire whispered, making sure to keep Eve’s face

turned away as Michael’s body was rolled past. “Vampires can

shake this off. It’s no problem for them as long as the arrows come out soon; they’re not leaving them in the sun or anything. Just

breathe, okay? Breathe.” It wasn’t so much what she was saying as

the fact that her voice was steady and calm, a lifeline in a tossing ocean of chaos.

Eve took a deep breath, and her sobbing slowed and hitched to

a stop. She sat back as the ambulance doors slammed shut and one

after the other the big vehicles pulled away onto the two- lane

blacktop heading toward downtown Morganville— if Morgan-

ville had anything that could be described as a downtown. She

wiped her eyes on the back of her hand, smearing what little eye

makeup she had left. The glitter of her ruby wedding ring caught

the light, and for a moment Claire’s wall of numbness shuddered

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behind it. “Did you see Michael?” Eve asked. She caught her breath

on another sob, and her reddened eyes held Claire’s. “Did he look

okay?”

Claire couldn’t say that, because the sight of his icy skin and

blank eyes had thoroughly unnerved her. “He’ll be fine. You know

he’s tougher than this,” she said. Which was a totally true thing,

and beyond any argument.

“I know— God, why did this happen? What do they want

from us?”

Eve said it as a rhetorical wail, but it was the question that

churned in Claire’s mind over and over. Why? They’d been heading back to Morganville to warn Amelie about several things, not the

least of which was the deadly growth of an anti- vampire organiza-

tion called the Daylight Foundation— and the fact that one of

Amelie’s most trusted agents, Dr. Irene Anderson (once of Mor-

ganville), had joined the other side.

But they’d been met by the local police instead of Amelie’s peo-

ple, and things had gone downhill from there. The cops had first

separated out the humans— Claire, Eve, and Claire’s boyfriend,

Shane, plus the prisoner, Dr. Anderson. Then, without any warn-

ing, they’d taken down their vampire friends, who had just been

wheeled into the ambulances and driven off to fates unknown.

Claire twisted in the seat to look into the car behind them.

The cops hadn’t had an easy time getting Shane into the other

cruiser; they’d ended up handcuffing him and threatening a Taser-

ing. He sat stiffly in the backseat, staring holes into the distance as if it were in for a beating. Next to him, Dr. Anderson slumped

against the window as though she didn’t care whose prisoner she

was anymore.

Claire knew why they’d separated her from Shane, and she

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knew that Eve needed her right now, but she wanted desperately to

be with him and to ask all the questions burning in her mind. Why would Hannah Moses do this? After all, Police Chief Moses was their ally, their good and trusted friend. But she’d shown no hesitation, no re-morse. The only way to interpret what had just happened was that

Hannah had freely and willingly joined the Daylight Foundation.

Nothing was making any sense, and Claire needed it to make

sense so badly. Humans have taken control of Morganvil e, Hannah had told her, as their friends— their mutual friends— lay still on the

ground. Vampires are being quarantined for their own protection.

It couldn’t be true. It just . . . couldn’t. And yet it so obviously was.

“Where are they taking him?” Eve was staring after the flash-

ing lights of the departing ambulances. “She said something about

quarantine. What does that mean? Do you think they’re taking

them to the hospital? Do they think they have some kind of dis-

ease?”

“I don’t know,” Claire said. She felt helpless, and she knew if

she let herself feel anything, she’d be just as angry as Shane looked sitting in that other cruiser. He seemed ready to chew through the

steel mesh. But if she got angry, she would also have to let in everything else, all the other emotions that bubbled and threatened in-

side her. And if she did that, she would collapse, like Eve was

doing.

Better not to feel anything right now. Better to stay strong.

The driver’s- side door opened, and Hannah Moses got behind

the wheel of the police car. She settled in and buckled her safety

belt in one smooth motion. A deputy got in on the other side—

new, Claire thought. Someone she didn’t know.

But she did recognize the pin he wore on the collar of his

uniform— a rising sun, in gold.

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Symbol of the Daylight Foundation.

Eve lunged forward and grabbed the mesh, threading her fin-

gertips into it as Hannah started the engine of the cruiser. “What

the hell are you doing, Hannah?” she demanded, and rattled the mesh, hard. “Where are you taking Michael?”

“He’s safe,” Hannah said. “Nothing will happen to him. Trust

me, Eve. “

“Yeah, you know what? Bite me. I don’t trust you. You just

stabbed us all in the back, you horrible bi—”

Claire grabbed Eve and dragged her away, changing the word

to a protesting yelp. “Stop,” she whispered fiercely in her best

friend’s ear. “You’re not going to accomplish anything by making

her angry at us. Just wait. Be quiet and wait.”

“Easy for you to say,” Eve hissed. “Shane’s coming with us at

least. Michael— we don’t even know where they’re taking him!”

She had a point. Claire really hated to admit it, but there was

absolutely nothing they could accomplish locked in a police

cruiser. And antagonizing the lady who held the keys to their

handcuffs probably wasn’t the best strategy.

“We’re not giving up,” she told Eve. “We’re just . . . biding our

time.”

“And what do you think they’re going to do to him while we’re

biding, exactly?” Eve asked, yanking at the mesh again. “Yo, Han-

nah! How does it feel to stab your friends in the back? Hope you

didn’t get blood all over your neatly pressed uniform!”

The deputy turned around and gave her a cold, hard stare. “Sit

quietly,” he said. “If you don’t, I’ll shock you until you do.”

“With what, your breath? Ever heard of flossing, Deputy

Dimwit?”

“Eve,” Hannah said. It was a warning, a flat and naked one,

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and it was reinforced by the deputy— whose breath, in all fairness, did kind of reek— taking out a Taser.

Although Eve was still simmering with rage, she let go and sat

back, folding her arms over her chest. Then she kicked his seat.

Didn’t do any good, because the seat was reinforced with a steel

plate, but she probably felt better for doing it.

“Hey,” Claire said, and reached her hand out toward Eve. Eve

hesitated, then took it and gripped hard. “It’ll be okay. He’ll be

okay.”

Eve didn’t say anything. She was probably thinking, You don’t

know that, and she would have been right. Claire didn’t know that.

She felt cold and helpless and vulnerable, and she didn’t know how

any of this could really be okay . . . but for now, in the moments

between opportunities, all she could do was pretend.

She expected they’d be taken straight to the jail, or at least to the courthouse, but instead the two police cruisers turned off and headed for the outskirts of Morganville. Claire recognized the area, and she didn’t like it at all. Nothing good happened out here on the fringes of town; it was full of abandoned buildings and abandoned people.

“Hey,” she said, leaning forward but careful not to touch the

mesh. “Excuse me, but where exactly are you taking us?”

“Don’t worry. You’re not in any danger,” Hannah said. “I have

someone who wants to meet you. We’re almost there.”

When Claire had left Morganville, a lot of rebuilding had been

under way around town, but not in this area. Nobody had thought it

much worth saving, she suspected. It had been home mostly to tum-

bledown old shacks, rotting warehouses, and long- dead factories.

Now gangs of men moved with purpose, most in orange vests,

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and bulldozers noisily leveled uneven ground and piled up the

shattered remains of brick, wood, and rusted steel. Other teams

were putting up the frames of buildings in areas that had already

been cleared. Beyond, it was obvious that a lot more construction

was under way, some of it already painted and finished. She could

imagine what Shane was muttering in the other car: Great, I leave town and suddenly there are good jobs. He liked construction, and there was a lot of men and women out there, dressed in work shirts and

jeans, hammering, hauling, bulldozing, and creating.

It was a whole new Morganville. It looked . . . cheerful. Hopeful.

“What brought this on?” Claire asked. “All these new houses?”

“They’re for the new members,” Hannah said. Her voice was

calm and level, and it didn’t give away anything at all. Her deputy, the one wearing the Daylight Foundation’s rising sun pin on his

collar, glanced back at Claire. “By joining the Daylight Founda-

tion, they can receive free new housing if they want it. It’s attracted a lot of enthusiasm and support. Half of these people working out

here are volunteers.” She slowed the cruiser and made a left turn.

“There’s something to be said for leaving the past behind and

building a new future, don’t you think? Especially in a town whose

history is as dark as Morganville’s.”

Claire didn’t want to agree, because she still felt there was a lot she didn’t know and didn’t fully understand, but what Hannah

had just said made sense— or it would, if she trusted the Daylight

Foundation even a little bit.

Speaking of the Daylighters . . . they’d renovated one of the old

warehouses and built themselves a brand- new headquarters.

It was a large building just ahead, fresh and gleaming with

paint and shining metal, with a big rotating sign on top of the

roof. It shone soft gold in the sunlight as it turned— the same

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symbol that was on the Daylight Foundation pin the deputy wore.

A simple image, something that should have looked hopeful. Sun-

rise, a new day, all that.

Claire didn’t believe it. What she did believe was that the build-

ing, for all the cheerful way it had been painted, looked like it

would be easy to defend if it came to a fight. The windows were all high, narrow, and didn’t look like they opened at all. Thick walls, too. In fact, if you ignored everything but the construction, it could just as easily have been a prison.

Hannah pulled up in the generous parking lot— a newly paved

one, still fresh and black, with bright white stripes marking off

spaces. There were about fifty cars already present, but they filled less than a third of the available slots. You could put half the cars in Morganvil e in here, Claire thought, and have room left over for mas ive bus parking. Two police cruisers were already in place, plus Hannah’s and the one pulling up in the next slot that carried Shane and Dr. Anderson. She thought she might have recognized a few other vehi-

cles, but nothing jumped out at her with any certainty.

There were, she realized, no vampire- dark- tinted cars in the lot

at all. Not a single one.

Hannah turned the engine off, but neither she nor the deputy

got out immediately; instead, Hannah twisted to look at Claire

and Eve through the mesh. “Here’s how this is going to go,” she

said. “You’re going to behave yourselves, get out, and walk with us into the building, and you’re going to act like civilized young ladies while we introduce you to the man in charge.”

“Or what? You’ll put a note in my permanent record?” Eve

scoffed.

“Or you’ll end up handcuffed, maybe Tasered, and the end re-

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said. “So I’d really rather skip all the unpleasantness and make

this as painless as possible for you.”

“Oh, sure, you’re only thinking about us,” Claire said. “I un-

derstand completely.”

Hannah gave her a long, troubled look, as if she understood

that Claire’s apparent surrender was more worrisome than Eve’s

open aggression. “I’m trying to help you kids,” she said. “Don’t

make me regret it.”

“I’m not a kid, and you ambushed my husband,” Eve said. “I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that there are plenty of things you’re going to regret. Probably very briefly, though, if that makes you feel better.”

Hannah exchanged a shrug with her deputy. “Well,” she said,

“I tried. If you want to make it difficult for yourselves, that’s certainly your right, I suppose.”

The two of them got out, and Hannah opened Claire’s door,

grabbed her by the arm, and shoved her against the cruiser with

firm strength.

Then she zip- tied her hands behind her. “Sorry,” she said. “But

I can read the tea leaves. The two of you aren’t going to go quietly.”

Shane was making trouble, too, trouble enough that Claire

heard the deputy in charge of him at the other car cursing as he

tried to manhandle her boyfriend into submission. Hannah let

out an impatient, frustrated growl and spun Claire around to face

her. “Calm him down,” she said. “Do it now.”

Claire lifted her chin. “Why?”

“Because if you don’t, he’s going to get hurt.”

Claire looked past her. Shane must have thrown an elbow before

they’d gotten him under control, because the deputy had a bloody

nose. Now Shane was dodging and kicking, trying to get past the

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man’s defenses again. Probably just to get to her, because there was no way he’d be getting out of the handcuffs he was wearing.

“Shane,” she said. “Don’t.”

Hannah, moving slowly and calmly, unsnapped the strap on

her holster and drew her gun, which she held at her side. She stared straight at Shane. “She’s right,” she said. “Don’t make me raise this weapon, Shane.”

“Screw you,” he said in a ragged pant and gave Hannah a defi-

ant grin.

She raised the gun, all right.

She pointed it at Claire.

Shane froze in place, his grin fading fast. “You’re bluffing.”

“Probably seems that way,” Hannah said. “But you know me

well enough to know I don’t point a weapon unless I’m ready to

shoot to kill. I like you, Shane. I like your girl, here. But you’re testing me, and I really don’t think that’s a good idea.”

He stayed still. The deputy got hold of him and wrenched his

bound hands up high enough to make Shane stand on tiptoe, his

face twisted in pain. He put a hand on Shane’s shoulder. “Walk,

punk,” the man growled.

Shane walked.

Claire did, too. Eve had fallen into a watchful silence, but even

so, Hannah had her zip- tied as well. That was almost certainly a

wise move. People underestimated Eve a lot, because of her funny

sarcasm and cute- as- a- button face, but they did it at their peril.

They left Dr. Anderson handcuffed and silent in the car be-

hind them, and Claire wondered about that.

Someone had put in a fresh sidewalk to the door of the ware-

house, and there were newly planted bushes and sprigs of trees

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to one of those old- time gallows; she didn’t know what was going

to happen to them once they were inside. The thick glass doors

had the rising sun symbol on them, and the words the daylight

foundation beneath it.

And, in gold lettering, all are welcome in the light. That

sounded nice . . . unless you’d met their followers under less well-lit circumstances. Say, in a lab where they were ripping vampires

apart.

Hannah opened one of the double doors, and a breath of

chilled air raised goose bumps on Claire’s bare arms. She had ex-

pected cavelike darkness, but as her eyes adjusted from the bright

outdoor sun, she realized that it was nearly as bright inside, thanks to a giant skylight over the central atrium in which they stood.

Bathed in the glow was a wooden desk with the Daylighters sym-

bol on the front of it, and a well- dressed older woman who smiled

kindly at them.

“Mrs. Hodgson?” Claire blurted. She knew the woman; she

was a neighbor on Lot Street, where their old Victorian house was

located. A nice lady, always puttering in her garden with her flow-

ers and waving to them pleasantly. She’d brought over cookies for

Christmas a couple of times. Snickerdoodles.

“Claire? Eve? And oh, my, Shane, too.” Mrs. Hodgson looked

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