Undead for a Day (3 page)

Meanwhile, the dragon curled into a ball on her right side. But her soul stain?

It was like an undisturbed pool of blackness.

She sank all the way to the floor, closing her eyes, just as she used to. Touching herself, pressing her fingers to the center of her, stroking herself, trying to make herself feel something...

But even though Costin was making her body respond as he ran his buzzing essence through her, making the sensation echo through every inch, there was still the dead hopelessness that just wouldn’t go away.

Even as she bit her lip and gave a little cry, spiking to a climax, she still knew that he knew.

When he pulled out of her, it was with a rough sigh that made her hitch in a breath one more time.

“I wish I could make it go away,” he said softly, his voice like a shudder that raked over her skin.

“You do,” she said. “Every morning. You keep the dragon away from the stain.”

“It is obviously not enough.”

He gave her one last stroke of spiritual energy, like a man who was reluctant to leave her like this. But what else could he do?

After he vacated the room, Dawn put herself together again, then slowly went back to the desk to pour over those notes from Kiko. Costin’s attentions had relaxed her to the point that she could rest her head on her desk, her throat hurting with the tears she never allowed herself to cry.

Soon, a fitful sleep took her over, but, as Costin had said, it was never enough.

*

Dawn jerked in her chair, yanked out of drowsy-time by a sound.

As she stayed stock-still, she heard the clock downstairs begin ringing in the midnight hour.

One...two...three...four...

Something was off. Dawn could sense it just as easily as she used to be able to sense a vampire around.

She kept listening.

Five...six...seven...eight...

She shifted in her chair, uncomfortable, because the disturbance wasn’t out
there.

Her soul stain. Was it...moving? Stretching?

What the hell?

Nine...ten...eleven...

Now it was as if that dark spot in her was receding, just like a snake did before it struck—

Twelve—

The world seemed to implode inside of her, rocking so violently that she sucked in a breath and dropped out of her chair to the floor, grasping at the rug.

God—what was happening...?

She thought she heard Costin whoosh into the room, yet his voice seemed far-removed, as if it was coming from another place. But as the last of the clock’s chimes echoed, she...

She could
feel.

Her soul stain, where there’d been blankness before... It was clogged with so many emotions that it actually hurt with happiness and sadness and everything in between. At the same time, though, the right half of her body—the part that had been spotted by the dragon’s blood—seemed to pop, one patch of skin at a time, both over and under her flesh. It was as if the blood that had left red spots on her skin and deep, throbbing marks
under
it, was lurching to life.

Almost like it was taking excited breaths forward, stumbling in its own shock after being raised from the near dead.

As the last the of clock’s echoes faded, the surreal movements in her body did, too, leaving Dawn totally breathless and on her knees as Costin slid his essence against her, as if trying to help her up.

“
Dawn?
”

“I’m fine.” She started to crawl away from him, reaching for the desk, using it to stand back up. “I don’t know what just went on, but... I think I’m just fine.”

“What happened?”

Dawn shook her head. She was waiting to see what her body would do next. It was as if the dragon’s blood was waiting, too, somehow watching her soul stain from a near distance.

But that was crazy, wasn’t it?

Costin grazed her face, and she realized she was...smiling.

“Dawn...” Costin said again, clearly wary now.

But then Jonah barged into the room, and her smile disappeared.

“What’s going on?” he asked, his short dark hair curled up at the ends, his blue eyes wide with excitement. His body, which used to be wiry, was bulkier now, since he’d taken to working out in the gym, just to let off the steam that used to be tempered by the vampire hunts. Like Dawn, he also had a soul stain, seeing as he was an ex-vampire, too.

The antique ax he’d grabbed from a wall downstairs—the only kind of cozy house decorations ex-vampire hunters probably ever had—added to Dawn’s suspicion that Jonah hoped there’d been some kind of ghoulish attack. He wished. Jonah, more than anyone, was a fan of guts and glory. During the Underground hunts, he had thrown himself into a fight, and the blood, more than anyone.

“Stand down, Skippy,” Dawn said. “Things are cool.”

She took a testing breath, expecting the weight of her soul stain to bring her down, just like always. But...

That didn’t happen.

She still felt good. Real good.

Costin was circling her, as if inspecting her. And when she held a hand to her chest and smiled again, he seemed to catch on that something significant had occurred.

But what? Why?
How
?

“Midnight on Samhain,” Costin said, pronouncing the word like “
Sow-in.
” He came to a rest at her shoulder. “I have lived long enough not to believe in coincidences.”

Jonah was still holding that ax at the ready. “What’re you saying?”

“I fear magic has crept into this house, Jonah.”

But Dawn barely heard the rest of their conversation, because she was slowly getting used to the absence of numbness, of regret, of heaviness.

Alive
, she finally realized, her smile only growing. For the first time in a long time she didn’t feel like the half-dead creature she’d become.

The Lightness

Costin had merged into an all-too-willing Jonah’s body and told Dawn that he was going to the library downstairs, where Costin planned to comb through the tomes that held several lifetimes worth of information about the supernatural. He was especially hoping to find a connection between vampires and/or ex-vampires and Samhain.

As for Dawn, she got out her cell phone, opened the doors to the balcony wide, then went outside to watch the moonlight play on the restless waves below.

Kiko answered on the third ring. “What? What?”

“Sorry for waking you up, but we’ve got some excitement around here.” Dawn’s smile was so big that it was making her cheeks hurt, but in a good way.

“Cool excitement?” Kiko asked. “Not-cool excitement?
What?”

She could just picture his little person’s body jumping out of bed as he ran for his clothes, their hunting days still with him, even if they were long gone.

“It’s cool excitement,” she said, glee in her voice. And she’d never really
ever
done glee.

To think—she had an inner cheerleader and she’d never even known it, not even when she was growing up and doing her best to piss her life away with every rebellious act she could think of. Of course, that rebellion had led to a short career as a stunt woman, which had led to vampire fighting, but that wasn’t here or there.

She told Kiko about her stroke-of-midnight soul stain lifting. “I don’t know what’s going on, but how awesome is that?”

Like Costin, Kiko was on immediate alert. “I suppose it’s cool.” Then, “You don’t think there’s something fishy about your happy-happy-joy-joy thing? This is Samhain, for God’s sake. If it were any other night, I’d just think you accidently swallowed some Ecstasy.”

She stayed quiet, but, naturally, Kiko didn’t.

“Okay, what I mean is this—you know how there’re different versions of Cinderella? There’s the Disney take. The squeaky clean, Yay!, glass slipper, everything is weddings and chirping birds—you know, the whitewashing of  just about every other version of the stories that came before. And I’m talking about dark stories where the frakkin’ stepsisters cut off part of their feet so they’ll fit into the slippers, and where those sweet little birds aren’t so sweet at all and they punish those bitches by pecking out their eyes.”

“Your point is?”

“That there’s only one happy-Yay! Disney version of the story while the rest aren’t so nice. Odds are, Dawn, that you don’t have any kind of happy ending version of your soul stain going on during Samhain.”

Nothing like a good dose of Geek Kiko to put things into perspective. Even so, she couldn’t stop loving the absence of heaviness in her, couldn’t help but to lean on the balcony railing and smell the brine-laced air and think of how lucky she was to be alive after all the shit she’d gone through in life.

Maybe, after everything she and the team had endured, something
good
had finally happened and this had nothing to do with screwed-up magic, like Kiko and Costin thought. Maybe her therapy had kicked in—

Her ears picked up a sound from down the beach. Somewhere in the night, there was a cry, but these were the final hours of Halloween and the kids were out in full force, so she went back to listening to Kiko.

“Sure, we wiped out those Undergrounds,” he said. “But our vampires weren’t the only bloodsuckers out there. There’re different lines, and some of them could be into magic. We’d be stupid to dismiss the idea. And we know that there’re hundreds of other supernatural creatures that might be up to all kinds of mischief tonight.”

She laughed, but then stopped. Dawn’s mother was one of those creatures Kiko was talking about. Eva Claremont had come under the sway of what they thought might be a demon and they hadn’t heard from her since.

But now that Dawn’s soul stains had gone a little lighter, thoughts of Mommy Not-So-Dearest didn’t get to her as much as they had before. She had spent a long, long time trying to forget about that woman.

Now it seemed so easy.

“Besides,” Kiko said, “you know better than anyone that some of the cold cases Natalia and I deal with at the agency have a certain...stench...about them, too.”

“Not everything is supernatural, Kik.”

“I’m not saying that every old robbery or lost love case we deal with is otherworldly, but there’re some screwy things we’ve come across, and Natalia shoves those cases right out the door. She doesn’t want a thing to do with them.” He and Natalia were trying to be “normal,” now that they’d gotten married. “What if one of those cases left some magic behind and it had a ricochet effect on us or our friends on Samhain? Magic doesn’t always aim straight, you know.”

She could hear him moving around on the other end of the line. “You’re overreacting, Kik.”

“No matter what’s going on, I’m getting right on this.”

“Natalia’s not going to like it.”

“Let me worry about that.”

He hung up without another word. Typical Kiko. He was probably already dialing up this house’s landline so he and Costin could have a conversation.

She tucked her cell into the pocket of her jeans and kept leaning on the railing. Three, two, one...Yup, there went the phone.

The waves seemed to get louder, but maybe that was because she was really starting to listen to them. Meanwhile, she thought she felt the dragon’s blood swirling on her right side, restless.

Screw you
, she thought.
Did you really think you were going to get another chance at taking over the world?

She started to leave the balcony to see if Costin had come upon any paranormal news through the supernatural conspiracy chat boards that usually consumed Jonah’s attention.

But then she sensed, more than heard, something on the beach close by.

She wasn’t psychic like Kiko or Natalia, and she wasn’t a spirit like Costin, but Underground fights had sharpened her human senses. It was just that she hadn’t used them for a while.

Turning her ear toward the faint sound she thought she heard—
swish, swish
, like sand under a set of paws that were coming this way—she leaned over the balcony, straining to hear some more.

Just as she realized that she did hear something and they sounded a whole damn lot like running steps, she backed away from the railing—but not before a wire looped around her neck and her body was yanked over the edge.

She barely had time to scream as she grasped the railing, the wire gnawing into her neck as she hung there, clinging and paddling her feet, kicking at whatever had attacked her.

They were pulling on that wire while Dawn choked, trying to slip one hand into the noose while holding on with the other. Her vision got cloudy and, instinctively, she turned her head, baring her teeth, using the only weapon she had on her.

A bite.

But before she struck, she saw a face... An old man with sideburns, pale, puckered skin, and white eyes that looked like they’d rolled in to the back of his head. His mouth was in a pruned “O,” as if he was about to scream, too.

The messed-up sight of him made her forget all about biting, and he took advantage of that, putting more force on the wire, even as he reached with his other hand to Vulcan pinch her neck.

A memory flashed by, adrenaline-quick.

London, an attack on their headquarters, another pinch at her neck—

Gathering her guts, she bit his hand, sinking her teeth deep and letting go of the balcony at the same time.

A yelping sound was all Dawn heard from him just before her stunt woman training came back to her, powered by muscle memory. Midair, she twisted her body, flailing with a hand and catching on to one of the trellises that decorated the side of her home.

The wire whipped off her neck, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw it fall to the ground. But her attacker still held onto her, his hands wrapped around her waist.

For a reeling, moonlit second, she hung there, the trellis cracking, threatening as her attacker’s grip began to loosen. She kicked back at him, but a pair of teeth sank into her shoulder—human teeth—and she yelled.