“I’m so sorry,” Jac said. “It’s all my fault.”
“Why? Did you drug me?”
At Jac’s awful expression, Dawn waved it away, hoping not to travel the rough roads of another “discussion” right now.
“Listen…” She started toward the door. “I need to get back.”
Really, because, passed out, God knows what could’ve happened. Jesus.
“Call you later?” Jac was sitting on the edge of the bed by now, long legs dangling. “Maybe on a better night, after you’ve gotten some sleep. Or at a place where people aren’t such…dickheads.” She cleared her throat at the uncharacteristic word, but still looked kind of proud for saying it.
“Jac, you and the word ‘dickhead’ don’t jive. Stick to ‘weenie’ or ‘dumb dumb’ in the future, ’kay?”
She laughed. “’Kay.”
In spite of the heaviness, they both managed their own uneasy grins. Damn, life was strange. Two months ago, Dawn couldn’t stand to hang with other women. Now she was grinning and fist-bumping with two of them.
Tentatively, she lifted a hand in good-bye, then left, thanking Jac for watching over her again.
As shaky as she was, Dawn wanted to run. In fact, she was in such a hurry to get out of the Bedford house that she fumbled with her jacket, which was hanging on a coat tree at the entrance. Then she tripped on the steps outside when she put her jacket on, and everything spilled out of the pockets, splaying over the rock driveway. Graceful for a freakin’ stuntwoman.
Dawn mindlessly grasped at what she could and then ran-wobbled the rest of the way to her car.
Plopping into the front seat, she winced. Had she just slept wrong?
Her mind went into overdrive doubting it.
She took out her cell from a jacket pocket, knowing she had to check in with the team first thing. Theoretically she’d be safe in her hunk of precious junk; it’d been outfitted for protection by Breisi. It was even equipped with the same type of concentrated UV lights that blazed outside the Limpet house and Kiko’s place, just in case.
When The Voice picked up, Dawn raised her brows; she’d expected Breisi instead. Obviously, the brain had set her phone on forward to the boss, probably because she was sleeping.
“You sound…Are you all right?” were the first words out of his mouth.
Buzz, hum—her body went through the regular routine at the sound of him. And the fact that he seemed so damned concerned touched her in a different place, somewhere not so easy to get to.
“I’m fine,” she said, not knowing how to deal with all this tenderness he’d shown lately. “At least, I think so.”
She told him all about the party, the stars, the blank spots, the carpet that she’d woken up on in Jac’s living room.
“Jac thought I’d just passed out from exhaustion,” Dawn added. “She acted like she didn’t know if there was anything else going on.”
“And you don’t believe her?”
He said it with stony reserve, giving her yet another reason not to fully trust him. After all, he was the one who’d betrayed her, luring her to L.A. with Frank’s disappearance because he needed her to fulfill that asinine prophecy about triumphing over vampires.
“I don’t know if I believe Jac about anything,” she said, rubbing the aching spot on the side of her neck, once again feeling like a chunk of her was missing.
The Voice sucked in a breath.
“What?” Dawn asked.
Pause. Long, long, long pause.
“Dawn,” he said with his usual calm, although it was sharpened by something more. “I’d like you to come back to the office now.”
“I really am tired. Can’t I get some shut-eye and then—”
“Please.”
He’d said it with such emotion that she just sat there, hand to her neck, the same desire—yet different, too—flooding her.
“Promise me,” he said.
“Okay.”
“I suppose an ‘okay’ will have to do.” She could sense him getting back to business, even over the phone. “Tell me, did you note any differences in Jac tonight?”
“Same cheery girl next door. She did look a little on the pale side, but she said it was because of her
eating habits
.”
“It’s well-known that starlets struggle with weight and image issues.”
Before he could get too rational and talk Dawn out of her healthy suspicion, she went for it. “Is she my mom?”
Silence.
“Because I can’t help wondering why the hell you would allow me to see her if all the puzzle pieces are fitting together into a picture I don’t like, Jonah.”
More silence. When he came back on, his tone was eerily controlled. “You just answered your own question. Why would I put you in danger?”
“Let me see…Maybe because you did it when you brought me out here in the first place? My first night, as you recall, I found my lucky old self dodging burning vamp spit.”
“As
you’ll
recall, I wasn’t enthused about the prospect.”
“But you let me go anyway after Kiko talked you into it. It makes me wonder if you’d put me in a bad spot again, is all. Would you?”
He paused, and she knew exactly what he was going to say.
“How far are you willing to go to get him back?”
Frank. At the beginning of all this shit, she’d naïvely told The Voice she would do anything to find Frank. But back then, she hadn’t known what was involved, hadn’t known she’d be putting every part of herself at risk.
When she didn’t answer, he pulled out the big guns.
“Dawn.”
A change, a stirring of the seduction she was so used to. Dark, low, almost irresistible. Her mind misted with the desire for him that she couldn’t contain.
“Don’t,” she said. “Just answer my question. Is she Eva?”
“Dawn…”
Her mind clouded with caresses, thumb tips trailing up her inner thighs, parting her legs, exposing her.
Unable to fight anymore, she weakened, slipping down in the seat at the flash of sexual heat, the bite of agony.
At her limit, she threw a mind block to stop him, to make him answer, goddamnit, to—
Rrrrrrroooooaaaarrrr.
The air seemed to explode, shattering with the punch of glass. She looked to the right, where a side-view mirror had webbed into a thousand pieces. She knew she’d done it, just as spontaneously as she’d done with Robby when she’d hurled him across a room.
“No more!” Her words stuck in her throat.
No more filling her spiritual vacuum with sex. No more chasing away rejection and loneliness with self-destruction. She was sick of everything, sick of herself.
Trembling, she sat up, faced the phone like it was him. And it was close enough, wasn’t it?
“I’m not letting you in again.
Never
again.”
It seemed like years passed in the aftermath of her eruption. Then, finally, he spoke, his voice naked of hypnotic power and steeped in something that sounded like actual sorrow.
“I’m doing what I have to, Dawn.”
Unwilling to subject herself to more, she hung up and shut off her phone, tossing it away. The air died in silence, as if buried by her anger.
But then something he’d said earlier spiraled across her conscience:
I need you more than anything.
Without checking herself, she reached for the phone, sorry for what’d happened. But then she yanked her hand back.
Screwed up, she thought. She wasn’t going to keep being so screwed up.
She started the car, but didn’t even think of going to the office. What she needed to do was regroup and think, goddamnit. The Voice wasn’t enough to stop her from searching for her dad, even if she’d end up having to do it on her own. Which looked very likely right about now.
Damn him. Damn him to hell.
When she got to Kiko’s, the lights were on. She got even more pissed because he should’ve been resting. Couldn’t he get anything through his thick head, either?
His back brace lounged topsy-turvy on the floor as the TV muttered lines from an old noir movie. In the meantime, he was pacing while dialing his phone over and over. He didn’t even seem to know she was in the room.
“What’s this?” She shrugged off her jacket, then went to the back brace, picking it up. “What the hell is this, Kiko?”
He shoved the phone in the air in frustration, his voice slurred. “Can’ get through to
Dancin’ with the Stars
…gotta vote for Stacy an’ Tony.”
“You asshole, that season ended a long time ago.”
She wanted to kick him for being so obviously stoned out of his mind. It was another betrayal because he knew what he was doing to himself. He knew it was wrong and he knew it hurt Breisi and Dawn and, yes, probably even Jonah.
She slumped, tired. Too tired. “Why do you keep taking that crap when they mess you up so bad?”
Kiko lowered the phone. “I hurt tonight, Dawn. Don’t yell at me for hurting.”
Damn him, damn him for being so weak. She hated weakness.
She sank to the floor, unable to conjure anything, not even her own tears. She’d been crying more lately from exhaustion, stress, and emotion than at any other time in her life. Tears were beating her up because she’d come to care too much, so she wasn’t going to allow them anymore.
But…she’d betrayed Kiko, too, hadn’t she? He’d been so proud of her for supposedly containing herself with the men, and she’d failed him just as much as he’d failed her, so she had no right to be angry or sad.
“Dawn? Dawn?” Kiko scooted over to her, patting her back. “Hey. Hey, guess what?”
Jesus, he was trying to cheer her up with that idiotic game they’d fallen into way back when they’d first started out.
She stared straight ahead, wanting to look at him, but not doing it because that’s when she’d start to cry.
“Guess
what
?” he repeated.
She gave in. “The apartment upstairs has been flooded by black goo and…”
He kept patting her back, and her throat just got more raw, overwhelming her chest with sharp, quickened pain.
“Cool,” he said.
“Dark Water.”
At his correct answer, she sobbed once, but bit back another one. Rage and sadness surged, taking her over.
And that’s when Kiko gasped and drew back his hand.
For a second, Dawn didn’t think anything of it. Not until she realized she was wearing Frank’s T-shirt.
Sucking in a breath, she turned to her psychic friend.
His eyes were foggy and she didn’t know if that was because of the drugs or a vision.
“In one of the two red fingers pointing up to the sky,” he mumbled.
Dawn got to her knees, taking him by the shoulders. “What’re you talking about?” High, he was just high. “Damn it, Kiko, you make me…”
She pushed back from him, balling into herself, chasing away the ache in her stomach, in her chest. No crying. If it was the last thing she’d do, she wouldn’t cry anymore.
And, ten minutes later, when Breisi called to let them know that there’d been another murder, it was easier than ever to ice herself over.
Because that’s what she needed to do. Ice every tear.
Cope until she didn’t have to anymore.
S
ORIN
was near an entrance, the night-tinged mouth of an abandoned quarry where shadows swallowed all vision. A place so harmless to the eye that no one Above ever bothered to wander near.
“You made a valiant attempt,” he said into one of the encrypted cell phones all the Underground used. As a breeze carried the scent of a human summer, he took in the aroma. It was almost a gorgeous night.
On the other end of the line, Paul Aspen’s voice came through as clear as curved glass. “You don’t have to say the rest: you wish I’d been successful in finding out what Dawn knows. But I couldn’t get deep enough. Not with her resisting like that.”
“When I discovered she would be attending your party and I asked you for this favor, I knew she would be a hard mind to read. I do wonder, however, how your encore—your need to bite her—will be received by the populace.” Sorin paused, emphasizing his disdain for the Elite. “Some more than others.”
“You think the bite will be the big issue? Mind wiping bugged me the most, but you asked me to do it.” The actor gave a dramatic pause. “Still, it’s not like I erased all Dawn’s vampire experiences—that would’ve made her pals suspicious if she’d come home wondering about things she’d already shared with them. It was just a superficial wipe to take out what
I
did, nothing else. I took the precaution with her because you thought it was best. ‘She is not a normal meal,’ you said, ‘and the stakes are too high to depend on just her permission.’”
What he said was true. Usually, the released Elites fed for amusement upon their Servant entourages in between monthly maintenance infusions from the Master, so the concept of mind wiping for them was considered déclassé. Similarly, to every other vampire, it was a method used only in case of emergency, a tool for serious intervention only. All the same, the bite was what bothered Sorin because it was an act of greater intimacy.
Was it not just like an Elite to take what he wanted and damn the bigger picture?
Sorin shook his head. Perhaps recruiting one of their first Hollywood Underground creations for spy work had not been wise. However, Sorin had never been content with the speed of their current spy work, so he had circumvented the Master’s approval this one time and seized the opportunity to improve their information. After all, spies had indicated that Dawn was away from her team and heading for the property of an Elite who had no attachments to her, and the actor had been willing enough to perform quick spy work for the sake of the Underground. Certainly, they had experienced some initial trouble when an unknown spirit had been detected but, over the phone, Sorin had instructed the Elites at the party on how to use their given talents to charm the interloper into a holding vessel.
Sorin would soon be interrogating that captured spirit himself.
He laid his head back against the rock wall. The information culled from raiding Dawn’s mind would have been their greatest asset. If only they had been successful in this reconnaissance.
On the phone, Paul Aspen sighed negligently, and Sorin could imagine the superstar leaning back in a lounging chair by his pool, sipping from a blood cocktail.
“No one down there is going to know about what I did or didn’t do with Dawn Madison anyway, right?” the actor said. “You told me I was doing this for you on the hush. Say, did the real Master even know? That’d be a hoot—the second in command messing around underneath the chief’s nose.”
Sorin bristled. Elites were the only ones who knew of the real Master’s existence. They loved to remind Sorin that he was no more than a glorified bodyguard and merely their sibling.
“I made my vow to you, Edward.” It was Paul’s old name, the fifties matinee-idol moniker that remained in Sorin’s memory. “This must remain a secret.”
“Because you
didn’t
tell the Master.” The star laughed. “Oh, this is entertaining.”
Only now did Sorin realize how rash this decision had been. “I planned to tell him, Edward, but he is involved with important matters that I dare not interrupt needlessly.”
Yet why should Sorin have to explain to an Elite? Though he was appreciative of the movie star’s aid tonight, the Elite’s act of biting Dawn Madison would cause trouble. In fact, there were two who would be most affected by Sorin’s aggressive decision to sic Paul Aspen on the human.
“I love it,” the actor was saying. “Sorin the minion. You and your superiority. Hah.”
Sorin held his composure, knowing this vampire was younger and, thus, less intelligent in so many ways. An Elite did not contain half as much magic as he—not of the real sort anyway.
Just as he was about to thank the actor once again for his contribution and end their tedious conversation, a bolt of Awareness crashed through his consciousness.
Success!
the real Master’s voice thundered.
Standing, his loose robes fluttering around him in the night wind, Sorin closed the phone without another thought.
He melded Awareness with the Master.
Success?
Lately, they had been exercising a higher level of Awareness, a deeper connection that had grown lax during more peaceful times. Thus, Sorin could almost feel the cold of a bare room, one of the Underground holding areas where the Master was presently standing.
Jessica Reese’s killer,
the Master said.
Even after my most recent miscalculations, we’ve found our troublemaker!
Jarred to action, Sorin headed out of the entrance tunnel, accessing a secret door, one of many leading farther underground.
Who…what…how…?
There were a legion of questions streaming through him at once.
One of our Servants assigned to tail the Limpet suspects hit paydirt. They caught our murderer coming out of a second victim’s apartment tonight, fresh from a new kill.
Master, this is good, very good….
Hold on—the new body was found by human witnesses before our Servants could get to it and destroy any evidence that might lead to more publicity.
No.
Yes, but that’s beyond our control now. But we
can
control what happens from here on out.
Questions continued to baffle Sorin. Who, why, when—?
Specifics are not my concern, Sorin, not right now. Spies have our killer in custody. And I have something in mind….
What?
A plan that’s going to strike a blow to Limpet, and he’s never going to know where it came from. It’s going to keep us safely on the sidelines, but it’s also going to flush our enemy out. We can disable and expose them, and the best part is—we don’t have to do any of the dirty work. I’ve thought of every angle.
At the very idea, Sorin halted in his tracks in front of the last rock door that led to the Underground itself. Vision breaking, he was unable to take another step.
What do you have planned, Master?
He felt his father smile.
I’m going to make an offer that any true vampire would never turn down.
Membership in the Underground.
Yes, but that membership wouldn’t last for long. I won’t keep a common street murderer around.
Sorin agreed with that much, yet what of the rest?
As far as I know from initial spy contact,
the Master thought,
our killer has a Lee Tomlinson fetish. Our spies were able to finesse that our buddy wants to be like Lee, and Lee, of course, wanted to be one of us. With what I have in mind, we’ll make sure these murders won’t shed any more light on vampire activity,
and
we’ll indirectly disable Limpet. Two birds with one stone. We’ll level a preemptive strike that won’t be traced back to us once the deed is done. Afterward, if Limpet really is our enemy, I guarantee he’ll expose himself
—
And we’ll be waiting.
With merely a touch, Sorin coolly unlocked the door in the granite wall and entered the emporium. Instead of the usual lazy activity, the place was exploding with aggression. Near the waterfall lagoon, Groupies were practicing the change, going in and out of their vampiric forms, challenging each other in hand-to-hand combat with blades. Their speed would blur the eye of a human, but to Sorin, the battles unwrapped with clarified grace. Under a screen, a close-knit band of Elites was studying a movie,
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
, imitating high-flying aerial fight moves and taking them one step further by attaching themselves to the walls, using the planes as platforms to fight. None had altered into their most dangerous forms yet, though Sorin knew that would be in the coming.
Master,
Sorin asked, seeing only the gray walls where his father waited,
where are you? I can come to represent you
—
I’m going to take care of this one.
His protective instincts stirred. The Master had been shapeshifting into solid mass more and more lately, ever since the threat to the Underground had reawakened him.
Suddenly, via the Awareness, Sorin heard a door open. The Master did not look to see who had entered the room. Instead he kept staring at the gray wall. His fury had been stoked by the presence of this killer—Sorin could feel this keenly.
Shortcuts,
the Master thought.
This idiot thought it’d be possible to take a shortcut to stardom, just like Lee Tomlinson ended up doing.
Sorin said what he knew his father wanted to hear.
Stardom is earned.
Stars are
born, the Master corrected, paying homage to his darling Elites.
In the background, a Servant private investigator greeted the Master in a deep, affable tone. “Look who we have for interrogation.”
The head vampire smiled again, and Sorin knew the wheels of their fate were about to be set into motion. The day help them, this was it, the beginning of the end for either Limpet or the Underground.
Nobody is going to take it away from us again,
the Master assured Sorin just before turning around to greet the murderer.
The Awareness scrambled, slicing colors and angles together until Sorin could not see.
“Who are you—?” began the garbled voice of the murderer.
Then the connection exploded into nothing, leaving Sorin staring at the Elite’s movie screen, two warriors rising, then flying at each other over the rooftops.
The Master’s reawakening was complete.
Yet, that is what Sorin had also believed over fifty years ago, back when a second Underground had seemed to be just the thing to resurrect Benedikte from his sorrows.