He should have known better.
"Stop!" Myrnin's voice suddenly rang out of the black, urgent and sharp, and Claire paused with her right foot still raised. "Back up. Slowly. Two steps. Do it, Claire!"
She did, putting one foot carefully behind the other, and stopped. "What is it?"
"The floor isn't stable. If you try to cross that way, it'll break through under your weight. You must stay where you are!"
"So concerned for the new girl," Ada's voice said, vibrating out of the cave walls. "Never so concerned for me, were you? Even though you always knew how much I loved you. How much I wanted to be with you. I let you drink my blood, Myrnin. I let you take everything. And then you did this to me."
"Oh, stop whining," Myrnin snapped. "You were grateful enough to become a vampire, and it had nothing to do with your being a lovesick schoolgirl. You wanted a thousand lifetimes to explore the world, to discover, to learn. I gave you that, Ada."
"You were supposed to take care of me."
"According to whom?"
"According to me!" The echoes built again, bouncing wildly, and Claire crouched down in place, hands firmly over her ears again. This time, the echoes died gradually. Once it was quiet, Claire rose to her feet and started moving carefully forward at an angle to her original course, testing the floor before putting her full weight on the stone.
It felt solid.
"Claire, please stop," Myrnin said raggedly. "You can't see. You don't know how dangerous this is."
"Describe it to me. Help me! If you don't, I'll just keep walking."
"That's exactly what she wants. She wants you to try to reach me - " Myrnin broke off with a small cry of pain.
"Myrnin?" Claire forgot all about being careful, and took a step forward. Too fast. She felt the stone snap and crumble and fall away, dark on dark, and she teetered off balance over the edge of a hole that led to the center of the world, apparently. She didn't even hear the falling rocks hit bottom.
Claire slowly shifted her weight to her back foot and stepped back to solid stone again. Her heart was pounding so hard it hurt, and she couldn't seem to slow down her panicked breathing.
"Myrnin, you have to help me," she said. "Tell me which way to go. We can do this."
"Even if you reach me, it's no help to either of us," he said. "She has me. There's no point in your dying, as well."
"Just tell me how to get there."
After a few silent seconds, Myrnin said, "Two steps to your right, then one forward." As she accomplished that, he said, "Claire, she's right. I did take advantage of her. She did love me. I used that to get what I wanted from her."
"You mean, like a guy?" Claire counted steps carefully, then stopped. "Next."
"One step forward, then one diagonally to your left. What I did was considerably worse than you think. I made her a vampire so I could have a reliable assistant, one who loved me and would never betray me. I made her a slave."
"Next. And one thing I can tell you about Ada, she was never a slave, not to you or anybody else. And you really did love her, or you wouldn't have kept her locket all these years."
"Another step straight to your left, then six forward. And don't be daft. I keep gum wrappers. It doesn't mean I love the gum that was once in them."
She counted. He didn't say anything else. Once she got to the end of the directions, she said, "Next. I'm not wrong about Ada. You did love her."
"Straight ahead, one step."
"You're not going to tell me I'm wrong?"
"What's the point? Three steps to your right."
"The point is to keep us talking so I'm not so terrified out of my mind," she said. "What are we going to do about her?"
"Nothing. There's nothing we can do."
"I'm there. Next? Also, there's got to be something. What about - " She was about to say the reset code, and he must have known it, because he let out a sharp hiss for silence. She swallowed the words.
"Focus," Myrnin said. "Forward three small steps. Be careful not to overshoot."
She found out why when she took the steps; her toes overhung what felt like another sinkhole.
Myrnin's voice was close now, very close. "Next," she said.
"This is the difficult part," he said. "You're going to have to jump."
"Jump?" She wasn't sure he was thinking straight. "I can't jump. I can't see!"
"You wanted to get to me, and this is what it takes. If you want to stay where you are - "
"No. Tell me."
"Two steps to your left, and jump straight forward, hard. I'll catch you."
"Myrnin - "
"I'll catch you," he whispered into the dark. "Jump."
She took two running steps and before she could let herself think about what she was doing, dug in her toes and leaped forward.
She crashed into Myrnin's solid body, his cold arms wrapped around her, and for a few breaths he held her close as she shivered. He smelled like metal. Like cold things.
He didn't let go.
"Myrnin?"
"I'm sorry," he said.
And then he bit her.
13
When Claire came awake again, there were lights in the cave - diffuse and dim, but enough to make things out. Like Myrnin, sitting huddled against the cave wall. She must have made some noise, because his head came up, and he looked straight at her.
She didn't think she'd ever seen anybody look so miserable in her life, and for a moment she couldn't think why he would look that way, and then it all came crashing back.