Fade Out Page 0,2

seemed to get narrower as you went along, like a funnel.

Or a throat. Ugh. She wished she hadn't thought of that.

The shack at the end of the alley - a leaning, faded wreck, tired and abandoned - didn't look any different, although there was a shiny new lock on the door. Claire sighed. Myrnin had forgotten to give her a key, of course. That didn't present much of a problem, though; she tested a couple of boards and found one that easily slid aside enough for her to crawl through.

Typical Myrnin planning.

Inside, most of the space was taken up by a set of stairs that went down, like a subway station. There was a bright glow coming up from it.

"There'd better be cake," she said, mostly to herself, and hitched her backpack higher on her shoulder as she headed down into the lab.

The last time she'd been here, it had been totally destroyed, with hardly a stick of furniture or a piece of glass left intact. Someone - most likely Myrnin himself - had gotten busy with a broom and maybe a dump truck to sweep out the mounds of shattered glass, scrapped lab equipment, broken furniture, and (worst of all, to Claire's mind) ravaged books. The place had always had a mad scientist-meets-Jules Verne flair to it, but now it really did - in a totally good way. There were new worktables, many of them wood and marble, and a few shiny metal ones. New electric lights had been installed to replace the odd collection of oil lamps, candles, and bulbs that Thomas Edison might have wired together; now they had indirect lighting behind elegant fan-shaped shields. Modern, but retro-cool.

The floor was still old flagstone, but the hole Myrnin had punched in it the last time she'd been here had also been repaired, or at least covered with a rug. She hoped there was something under the rug, but with Myrnin, you really could never tell. She made a mental note to poke it before she stepped on it.

Myrnin himself was shelving things in a new bookcase that must have been ten feet tall, at least. It came with its own little rolling ladder - no, as Claire looked around, she realized that the entire room was surrounded by the same tall bookcases, and the ladder was on a metal rail so it could slide all around. Neat. "Ah," her boss said, and looked down at her through the little square antique glasses perched on the end of his long, straight nose. "You're late." He was five feet up in the air, on the top step of the ladder, but he hopped off as if it were pretty much nothing, landed light as a cat on his feet, and straightened his vest with an absentminded little tug.

Myrnin wasn't especially tall, but he was just . . . strangely cool. Long, curling, lush black hair that fell to his shoulders. His face was vampire-pale, but it suited him, somehow, and he had the kind of sharp features that would have made him a star if he'd wanted to be in the movies. Big, expressive dark eyes and full lips. Definitely cover-model material.

If the lab was neater, so was Myrnin. He was still favoring old-timey clothes, so the coat was black velvet, and flared out and down to his knees. The ensemble also included a white shirt, bright blue vest, a pocket watch chain gleaming against the tight black satin pants, and . . .

Claire found herself staring at his feet, which were in bunny slippers.

Myrnin looked down. "What?" he asked. "They're quite comfortable." He lifted one to look at it, and the ears wobbled in the air.

"Of course they are," she said. Just when she thought Myrnin was getting his mental act together, he'd do something like that. Or maybe he was just messing with her. He liked to do that, and his dark eyes were fixed on her now, assessing just how weirded-out she was.

Which, on the grand scale of zero to Myrnin, wasn't much.

"I like a good bunny slipper. I'm surprised you didn't get the ones with fangs," she said, and scanned the room. "Wow, the place looks fantastic."

Myrnin's eyes brightened. "They have some with fangs? Excellent." He got a faraway look for a moment, then snapped back to the here and now. "Thank you. I've had quite a time ordering all the instruments and alembics I need, but did you know that you can find almost anything