The Path of Razors (12 page)

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Authors: Chris Marie Green

BOOK: The Path of Razors
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“What should I do?”
Costin paused, then said, “I would put my very existence on the idea that this door is charmed, as if to hide what is behind it from the schoolgirl vampires who lingered in the Orlando Bloom room.”
So there
was
some vampire mojo going on—they just hadn’t done any of it aboveground, where it might be more easily detected by rival blood brothers or educated hunters.
For the first time, Frank got on the earpiece. “Unless we can perform some magic I’m not aware of, I’m coming down to blast through. Have the Friends find an open window to the dorm, then cloud any cameras as I run by.”
“Dad, you’re fast, but this is real chancy....”
Yet about five minutes later, Frank was next to her, having used what he’d seen on her camera, the light rods, and his own senses to find them. He was bundled in protective, sun-shielding gear, not an inch of skin in sight. The clothes were so thick that the thorns hadn’t even cut all the way through.
He nodded to Dawn, his masked face freaking her out a little until he removed the covering.
“With your mind and my body,” he said, “we’ll have an entrance soon enough.”
Breisi swished by, and Frank cocked his head at the greeting.
In the meantime, Dawn was wondering if he really thought that she could punch that hard with her powers—enough to make up for what he was lacking during the day. She recalled back in L.A., when he and Kiko had tried to get through all the rock to help her and Costin in the other Underground. It’d taken a while.
But they might as well try, she thought, even if the charmed door put out some kind of signal that it was being breached.
She was used to the procedure now: all she had to do was access her darkest, deepest, ugliest thoughts, and that ball of fury shaped itself within her.
So she did it, thinking about how much she’d hated Eva while growing up. How much Frank had hurt her.
But even that didn’t seem to be enough anymore, so she tapped into her frustration with Costin and Jonah.
Her guilt—
Just as she slammed out with her mind, Frank ran at the wall, shards of rock exploding outward with their combined effort.
“Again,” Frank said.
She thought of how the Elite vampires had smacked her around and humiliated her just for fun during the final showdown in L.A.
And—
blast.
Thought of that night when she’d needed to turn Costin into a creature that he’d always despised.
Blast!
Thought of how much she hated herself sometimes.
Blaaaaaast!
There was enough of a hole now that Frank made the most of it, speedily hefting chunks of rock to widen the opening as he coughed for some reason.
“Faster,”
Breisi said.
“We’ve already used up a lot of time.”
Frank kicked enough in so that he fell through, landing on his hands and knees and springing right back to his feet.
But as Dawn and Breisi came through, he stood there, his expression a blank.
“Frank?” Dawn asked.
Alarmed by his stillness, she raised the flamethrower as she flashed her headlight over the room.
And when she saw the scalpels and knives and blades hanging from the ceiling like razored leaves, Dawn started coughing, too.
Or maybe “gagging” was a better word for it.
EIGHT
THE CONNECTIONS
AFTER dusck fell, Dawn sat in front of a gutted fireplace in a headquarters lounge, scribbling on a legal pad, trying to diagram her impressions of everything she’d found today.
Or at least she
had
been diagramming. Now she was just zoning out, hardly seeing the French sixteenth-century hunting tapestries on the walls staring back at her. Costin had said he’d chosen the artwork just because they pleased his aesthetic sensibilities, and that might’ve been the case for him, but for her, the men on horseback who were chasing creatures with long, dripping fangs had a real different significance.
Unimaginable beasts. Bloodthirsty monsters.
They were out there, all right, but what the hell kind of things had the team come upon
this
time at Queenshill?
And what did those blades in that underground room have to do with the images Violet had shared?
Dawn caught the sound of high-heeled footsteps on the wooden floor, and she tossed her legal pad facedown on the end table next to her.
Eva, who had taken it upon herself to become the hostess of headquarters while she was still around, arrived dressed in one of the outfits she’d quickly packed before being escorted here last night: some kind of designer glen plaid pencil skirt and sweater. That’s what she’d told Kiko when he’d asked, anyway, and God knew why Kiko would even be interested.
She watched her mom set a tray on another stand near the leather wing chair Dawn was sitting in.
“You need to eat,” Eva said, gesturing to the plate she’d prepared. “Egg and cress on soda bread. It’s good for you.”
Dawn was about to tell her mother that, thanks, she’d get around to eating in her own time, but like always, the sight of Eva tripped her tongue.
The surgically altered face, the melancholy lines of mortality that hadn’t been there before Dawn had killed Eva’s master and turned her mother human again ...
Just another reminder of what Dawn had taken from someone else.
“Thanks, Mom,” she said instead. To emphasize her gratefulness, she grabbed the sandwich, bit into it, then talked around the food. “Good timing, too-I’m waiting for the team to meet me back down here.”
“Where are the rest of them?”
Eva’s question was too casual, and Dawn knew her mom was more interested in Frank than anyone else. “Dad’s taking a slumber, but the rest of us split up to do research on the Internet, Costin’s database, and in his library, just to see if we could come up with some connections to what we found today. Links. Ideas.”
“Sounds logical.”
Eva tugged on Dawn’s ripped blouse, which she hadn’t stopped to change since they’d returned from Queenshill. The attention made Dawn more aware of the slightly pungent healing gel she’d dabbed over her injuries.
Her mom pointed to the puffiest, reddest scratch of them all on Dawn’s arm. “Don’t tell me—you barely got out alive. Again.”
“It looks worse than it really is.” After discovering that blade room, Frank and Dawn had explored the area while Breisi searched for any linked passages or trapdoors, charmed or not, that might lead to a bigger find.
A true Underground.
But they’d found nothing, so they’d called it a day. Yet Dawn was hoping they’d be able to return to Queenshill for a more comprehensive sweep.
If it’d do any good.
“Are you allowed to tell me what you found?” Eva asked.
Dawn had been about to take another bite of her sandwich, but she stopped to say, “There wasn’t much there.”
Denied.
But, jeez, even though it looked like Eva might be sticking around here for a while, just for safety’s sake, that didn’t mean she was a part of the team.
And when Kiko and Natalia walked into the room, side by side, he inadvertently backed Dawn up on that by clearing his throat when he saw Eva, obviously halting whatever he and Number Two Psychic had been chatting about.
Probably team stuff, and Eva seemed to know it.
Her smile was expertly forced, too understanding. Dawn could tell by now.
“There’s more food in the kitchen if anyone’s interested,” her mother said.
Kiko took a seat on a low green velvet couch near the fireplace. “How about I take you up on that later?”
Natalia nodded to Eva in greeting while primly sitting next to Kiko, her ever-ready notebook in her lap. She was wearing a tweed skirt set and thick white stockings—practical, far less stylish than Eva’s Rodeo Drive ensemble. Dawn liked that the psychic didn’t seem to mind her lack of fashion sense, either.
One of the Friends swooped over to Eva, and the blonde held up a hand.
“I know, I know. It’s time to go to a different room so I won’t hear any of the team talk.”
As the Friend escorted her out, Kiko turned in his seat, his gaze following her. “Hey, there’re a bunch of
EastEnders
episodes on the DVR, if you want.”
Before things had picked up with business, he and Eva had started watching the British soap together as just another way to fill her time. She’d been trying hard to get into the swing of life over here as a new person under a new name, “Mia Scott.” She had no career and, truthfully, no family who required her attention, and it’d been hard for her.
Eva maintained that family had been her big reason for becoming a vampire back in L.A., but ... Well, her plans hadn’t really worked out. Not unless you counted her voluntary blood donations to Frank as making her a part of the family now.
Her mom acknowledged Kiko’s TV suggestion then left the room.
No, you couldn’t say Eva was much a part of anything nowadays.
Dawn could feel Kiko gazing at her and wondering what was going through her mind, but he didn’t dare read her. He hadn’t done that to her, or anyone else on the team, since Hollywood, when she’d broken him of the rude habit.
Needing something to do, she took another bite of her sandwich, then held it out to Kiko and Natalia. They both declined.
Frank ambled in soon afterward, his wiry brown hair sticking up in back from his resting time. Dawn wondered if he’d seen Eva in passing and, if so, how they’d reacted to each other.
Like exes, no doubt. Even though Dawn wished it could be different. She adored Breisi—hell, as much as Dawn could “adore” anyone—but ...
She felt a rogue thrill tumbling down the back of her neck, indicating another presence.
Costin,
she thought, putting down her sandwich.
She took a drink of tea to coat her suddenly dry mouth, catching their boss out of the corner of her eye as he moved toward the fireplace. He leaned against the mantel in his black lounging suit, which was all rustling, silken material.
Unlike Frank, Costin’s every post-rest hair was in place, his midnight-hue locks curling slightly down his neck and bringing out the pale of his flesh, the topaz of his eyes, which were burning a little more than usual.
She could tell he hadn’t fed from a blood bag yet, but he would have to do it soon, and the notion made her put down her tea before she spilled any of it. He’d drink a bit from her, too, since her blood gave him more strength and contentment than any other.
A feeding. A bite. Sadly, it’d somehow become the most constant and fulfilling component of her life.
“Our Friends,” Costin said without preamble, “have relayed that Mrs. Jones has not yet returned to Queenshill or, more specifically, to her room. However, something else
did.”
Kiko said it first. “One of those pseudo-ninja figures? Like the kid we have downstairs in the freezer?”
“One of those,” Costin answered, low and smooth. “It seemed to be investigating her room.”
“So,” Kiko said, “I guess we can now be pretty sure that those shadow figures are related to the schoolgirl vamps.”
Breisi had entered the room, and as she swished in the door, her voice tunneled around them.
“The question is, do these vampires know about these shadow figures? Or are the figures after the vampires?”
Great—more questions, but they were valid ones.
At any rate, Dawn felt justified in what she’d suspected earlier. “These shadow things must’ve finally noticed a pattern of camera clouding—on Billiter Street, last night at Queenshill, today in Mrs. Jones’s room.... They’re not just onto the vampires, if that’s the case-they’re onto us, too.”
“But a few steps behind us,” Kiko added.
Frank sat in a chair next to Dawn, leaning his bulky forearms on his thighs as Breisi settled around him. “So whatever these shadow figures are, they’re using cameras to monitor. If we keep clouding the lenses, we’ll tip them off to where we are because they know what to look for now.”
“Then we don’t cloud anymore,” Kiko said. “We use disguises from this point on since I doubt the vamps—if they’re even aware of the shadows and the cameras—get smell-o-vision over their screens. Maybe I’ll have to go around dressed like a kid, and maybe it’s time to pull out a lot of wigs and disguises for the rest of you.”
“But,” Dawn said, “if we’re going to be creeping around vamp territory, we’ll need
some
sort of distraction for those cameras. If the vamps are using the shadow things to monitor us, they’ll catch on soon enough that we’re a threat. According to what Violet said, it sounded like they still weren’t sure about our status, and that’s why they haven’t risked hunting us down in public, where they could be identified by society at large. They’re only being cautious with us because we’re not exactly one of their ‘nightcrawl’ victims who disappear without much of a trace.”

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