Read The Path of Razors Online
Authors: Chris Marie Green
The Path of Razors (11 page)
Flicking it on, she glanced around the room while Breisi darted about, getting her own good look at every nook and cranny.
Dawn’s earpiece activated. Costin.
“Perfect reception,” he said.
She hadn’t been prepared to hear him, and her flesh seemed to roll with shivers that bled below her skin, too, burrowing down deep, low.
Nice timing.
“Kiko?” Dawn asked, mainly to bring herself out of it, but also genuinely wanting to know if he was getting a picture, too.
“Lovely in Technicolor,” he responded.
Breisi’s thready voice spun around Dawn.
“Here!”
At the urgency of her Friend’s tone, Dawn followed the sound to the wardrobe while ducking under the strap of her book bag, putting it back on.
“Open the wardrobe,”
Breisi said.
Breisi said.
“Wait a sec.” Dawn extracted her machete from the bag. “Team members are the ones who’re supposed to have the privilege of commanding you guys, not vice versa. Let’s have some respect for decorum here.”
“Cállate,
Dawn, I hear something. A breeze?”
Dawn, I hear something. A breeze?”
Holy creepies. “An opening.”
Pulse chopping, Dawn jerked open the wardrobe door, only to find a space occupied by a few sweaters and skirts that hung in the air like specters.
But when she looked closer, she saw loose threads from two cardigans stirring.
A breeze, all right. Now, if she could just find an opening ...
She’d read ghost stories before, so she pushed the clothes to the side in order to reach the back panel. She pressed on the wood, here, there, one corner, one side, the other—
It sprang and creaked open, the breeze huffing out of the resulting black rectangle. To Dawn, it sounded like something exhaling. Something hidden in the dark.
Costin,
she thought, her purpose agonizingly clear, even if nothing directly in front of her was.
she thought, her purpose agonizingly clear, even if nothing directly in front of her was.
Save him.
Now her pulse was really going as she waited for Breisi to gush through the pitch-black rectangle first. Then she stepped all the way into the wardrobe herself, closing the door behind her as she entered the gape at the back of the structure.
Greta would stay behind to patrol and, more importantly, to un-cloud the camera just as Dawn disappeared and before whoever might be watching it got worried about the reception.
As she stepped all the way through, one foot hitting what felt like wood planks on the other side, the darkness engulfed her, the cold so complete that Dawn couldn’t even see an inch in front of her.
But the darkness?
It didn’t feel so bad.
“Turn on your headlight,” she heard Kiko say over the earpiece as Breisi went to scout ahead.
Dawn did, then sucked in a breath.
She was standing at the top of a steep staircase, over what looked to be an abyss, and a sway of vertigo made her balance tilt.
She let go of her machete and it tumbled away.
But Breisi was already there, pushing against her, steadying her, even before the machete hit the bottom after what seemed like a few minutes.
“Thanks,” Dawn said as her Friend provided a crutch.
“Anytime. I didn’t see cameras yet, but I’ll keep you posted.”
Together, they descended.
Slowly. Very, very slowly. Each step like a heartbeat dragged through thick liquid.
At the bottom, Dawn’s shoes hit rock. Breisi went ahead again, then came back, reporting that she still didn’t see any cameras.
Dawn swept her headlight over the enclosing rock and the darkness that burrowed through it. Then she scanned her lamp back over the stairs while taking a few breaths that cleared her head. Her blood was pumping, jamming.
“A tunnel,” she said.
“A tunnel,” Kiko repeated. “Now those are some real powers of perception you’ve got going, Dawn. No wonder you’re ‘key.’ ”
He was talking about the prophecy he’d made over a year ago—a precognitive vision that had persuaded Costin to bring her onto the team in the first place. Kiko had seen her standing victorious and covered in the blood of a vampire.
She didn’t know how accurate it was, but it always seemed to give them hope when there wasn’t so much of it going around.
Dawn reached into her bag to grab the mini flamethrower. “I wonder if this tunnel leads to the big show.”
The Underground.
“Maybe,”
Breisi said,
“we should have brought Natalia here.”
Breisi said,
“we should have brought Natalia here.”
The new girl’s voice immediately came over the earpiece. “Yes, I would be able to feel if any vampires were near.”
Kiko interrupted. “We shot that idea down earlier, Curls. Dawn gave us a description of what she saw in Violet’s mind, so she knows what she’s looking for. Plus, Breisi can scout ahead some more.”
Was it Dawn’s imagination or did Kik sound a little too protective ?
“Dawn.” It was Costin now. “Perhaps we should send Frank and Kiko in since there seem to be possibilities.”
“Only if you want to take a chance on Greta clouding the housematron’s camera yet again. If it happens another time before I get out and someone besides the school is monitoring it, it’ll be a sure sign that something’s up.” She shrugged and added, “Besides, if I get caught down here, one hunter’s death is more acceptable than three, and you know that’s true.”
No one said a word. But, weirdly, the thought of dying was probably scaring them more than it did her. Hell was relative, and as far as she was concerned, she’d already been through it. Physical death might feel pretty good if that death had a purpose to it. Besides, she was—
“—key.” It was Natalia, and she’d been saying something that Dawn hadn’t been paying attention to.
Then she repeated it, as if reassuring everyone. “You said it before—Dawn is ‘key,’ so how can she die?”
“Especially,” Kiko added, “when she hasn’t even fulfilled my vision?”
And it was a prophecy he’d made before his broken back, his drug habit, and his slow recovery. It’d been a solid vision, unlike some of the ones he’d had as an addict.
But ... enough.
Dawn turned her headlight on higher power, the beam lighting over the walls, and—
Whoa-ho.
“Would you look at that?” Kiko said.
Dawn meandered closer, Breisi right next to her.
It seemed as if gnarled blades were coming out of the rock, but as Dawn closed the distance, she saw that they were only roots that had warped into thorny imposters.
She pointed the light down the tunnel, where the faux blades seemed to tighten into a thicket.
“Freakin’ figures I’d be wearing a skirt for this,” Dawn said, reaching into the bag to put the sweater back on.
Too bad she’d lost her machete, but destroying the property was a dumb idea anyway if she was just here to quietly scope things out.
“No flamethrowers,”
Breisi said, knowing how Dawn’s mind would be working.
Breisi said, knowing how Dawn’s mind would be working.
“No kidding.” She wrapped herself as best as she could, then forged ahead.
But when her Friend seemed to hug her, as if providing a cloak, Dawn missed a step.
Warmer,
she thought. Yet the feeling didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the sweater she was wearing.
she thought. Yet the feeling didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the sweater she was wearing.
She swallowed, began to walk again.
Let Breisi be. It wasn’t like a Friend could get sliced up, anyway, and maybe the layer of Breisi’s essence would even work to cushion any cuts.
Probably not, but whatever.
The earpiece went silent as Dawn tried to make her body smaller, but even with Breisi’s help, the roots snagged on Dawn’s sweater, then her shirt, ripping, leaving her with stinging souvenirs on her arms and legs.
Had the schoolgirls used this passage often? Or had it been here for the housematron only?
Either way, the vamps probably healed so quickly that scratches wouldn’t matter to them. Or maybe they were masochists who didn’t even care.
As a particularly mean root clawed at Dawn, she grunted. But, strangely, the pain made her want to go even farther as a “screw you” to the vampires.
Maybe to everyone.
Next thing she knew, the roots were stubbornly grabbing at her wig, pulling it and the cap off her head. She didn’t fuss, merely tore them off the sharp points and put them in her bag for now. Who cared, when she could see the end of the brambled passage just ahead?
When she got there, she took a hesitant step out, feeling around with her foot and hoping there’d be something to hold her.
Yup. Big, wide, welcome ground, and as Dawn emerged from the tunnel, the air got even crisper, like a slap that just kept giving.
Breisi swept around the perimeter, and when Dawn heard what sounded like beads clanking together, she sought out where it was coming from.
“Breisi?”
“Over here.”
Dawn’s headlight caught a swish of orange and red, a curtain of what really did look like beads.
She went to them, whisked them aside.
The oxygen left her for a second, but she got it back in the next heartbeat.
“It’s one of the places I saw in Violet’s mind,” Dawn said. “The room with the fairy lights and seventies upholstery and Orlando Bloom.”
It felt like her pulse was stabbing her now, leaving her perforated and a little weak.
Dawn wondered about the rest of Violet’s images—the girls running, gnashing their fangs, and swinging from bone-studded chandeliers.
But this discovery was a start. Were they on their way to a real Underground?
“Remember,” Dawn said, “Violet told me that the other place I saw, the more lively area, was a reward for the vamp girls. A place they went after they graduated?”
“Our own prize on this hunt,” Costin said, startling her.
She heard the rush of dark joy in his tone, and something inside her clung to it.
He’d told the team that, over the passage of years, the blood brothers had seemed to embrace their own pleasures rather than the will of the dragon. So the more decadent, the better, Dawn thought, because that meant a master had forgotten his true mission of serving the biggest vampire of all.
And if Violet’s images indicated an Underground, it looked like this master had totally forgotten his purpose in a nubile paradise.
Unless, she added while recalling how the Queenshill girls had fought, these vamps would be the best followers of them all.
As Breisi investigated on her own, Dawn began rooting around the room like a maniac—the zebra pillows, a beanbag, even the lava lamp—trying to find something.
But there was nothing. Not really. Just manga books, nail polish, an iPod.
The remnants of an area that didn’t seem to Dawn like any part of an Underground at all—and she should know since she’d been in one before.
She was out of the room before Breisi could catch up.
“Maybe there’s more.”
“We need to move on, remember?” Dawn reached the open space, closing her eyes and trying to listen for movement. For a sign. For hope that this wasn’t another damned dead end.
When she felt Breisi nudging at her, she loosened up, allowing her Friend to guide her. And she did, to another tunnel, this one thornless.
“Wait.”
Precautions. Dawn’s locator was attached to her skirt so the others could find her, and Breisi would be able to navigate her way around any maze you put in front of her, but Dawn still reached into her bag to bring out a fluorescent tube, which she bent in the middle to activate before tossing it to the ground.
“Just in case I find myself on my own,” she said to Breisi as they continued down the tunnel. She’d clean them up later.
“You won’t be alone,”
the Friend said.
the Friend said.
“Better safe than sorry, yeah?”
As they continued, Dawn dropped a few more rods before Breisi stopped her.
“What is it, Breez?”
“Odd.”
She seemed to be moving up and down the rock, brushing against it with her essence.
“A crack.”
She seemed to be moving up and down the rock, brushing against it with her essence.
“A crack.”
“You feel a crack? Like there’s an opening or door?”
Costin immediately came on. “Dawn, let Breisi lead you while you move closer with the camera so I can see.”
She went pliant, allowing Breisi to push her forward to where there really was a sliver of space. With nudging guidance from her Friend, Dawn was able to take off her gloves and follow the line with her fingertips, her heartbeat so sharp now that it felt like she was being flayed from the inside out.
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