Dawn Slayer

by Clara Coulson

  “Who said I was worried about anything?”

  “You had an anxiety attack in the car. I thought that was a pretty good indicator.”

  Warmth creeps up my neck. “Oh.”

  “Anyway,” he says, steering me away from more embarrassment, “I wouldn’t be too concerned about the restraints. Blood curses, from what I’ve learned, always have some kind of tell from birth. Either a physical manifestation, like a birthmark, or a spiritual one, like an aura inflection—that’s an unnatural bending of light around an aura. Those are the two most common tells, but there are several more.”

  He cracks open his own bottle of water and takes a sip to wash the breadstick down. “My guess would be that the ‘rusty edge’ is a variation of what’s known as a devil’s cicatrix. A rare manifestation, but there is some literature on it. It’s basically a spiritual scar that appears as a halo of light on the edge of an aura. The light is a different color than the person’s actual aura, indicating it’s not part of the person’s own magic but rather the result of external manipulation. I haven’t heard of a cicatrix that looks like rust, but since we’re theorizing that the blood curse was inflicted on the Children by an Eververse entity…Why are you smiling at me like that?”

  The reason I’m smiling is because Foley sounds like Cooper Lee right now, and I’m getting all nostalgic for the good old days where Coop would lecture me until I fell asleep at his kitchen table.

  “Oh, no reason.” I grab my pizza slice and take a huge bite so he can’t prod me further.

  Foley shoots me a skeptical look, but picks up where he left off. “My point, Cal, is that if you did have a blood curse lurking around in your soul, its effects would’ve either been obvious from birth, or obvious from the moment you gained access to your magic.”

  “What about the life seal? Could that suppress the effects of a curse?”

  He rests his chin on the lip of his bottle, contemplative. “I don’t think so. I can’t imagine someone, especially an Eververse power, would design a curse that could be circumvented by partitioning the subject’s magic with a seal. I think it’s far more likely you just don’t have the curse.”

  “But if I am the same brand of supernatural as the Children, then why don’t I have the curse?”

  “Could be a dozen reasons why. It’s pointless to dwell on it now, since we have so little information.” He grabs another breadstick. “I’m sure we’ll uncover the whole truth eventually, especially now that we’ve come into direct contact with the Children of Enoch. I don’t plan on letting them slip off my radar again. We’re going to dig our claws into these people, figure out who they are, why they’re here, what they want.”

  Something dark and dangerous flashes through his eyes, lightning quick. “And then we’re going to make sure they don’t get what they want. Not now. Not ever.”

  He’s hellbent on taking revenge for what they did to Lucian, I think, disconcerted. I need to hold him back, make sure he doesn’t go off the deep end. No one else in this suite, save the unconscious Lucian, is willing to stand up to Lord Tepes and…Dear god, I have to be Lucian’s replacement, don’t I?

  Pinning down a rueful smile, I try to break the tension by saying, “Well, I hope you don’t start your war march by taking your anger out on me, if it turns out I really am one of them.”

  Foley’s fury dissolves in an instant, and he blinks at me owlishly. “What? No. I didn’t mean to imply any sort of genocide or…” He fakes a cough. “Of course I won’t take anything out on you, Cal. I mean, alienating you would be the most moronic move I could possibly make. Considering your blood is the only thing that can save us all from being melted to death by that heinous golem poison.”

  “Ah, so is that my new job? Blood bank?”

  He realizes I’m teasing him, and the rest of his brooding mood crumbles away. “Pfft,” he says, “I’m paying you more per month than the most indispensable blood donors will receive in a lifetime. So in addition to being my personal source of poison antidote, you can also expect to act as my butler, secretary, sparring partner, magic test subject, and errand boy.”

  “Oh, is that all?” I point my pizza slice at him. “I thought you were more creative than that.”

  “You keep insulting me, I’ll show you just how creative I can be.”

  I almost choke on a mouthful of pizza, and wheeze out, “Wow, that sounded way too suggestive.”

  Foley’s eyes go wide, and his cheeks slowly turn beet red. He stammers out, “I, uh, need to get everyone back to work, so I’m going to leave now.” Then he snatches the entire box of cheesy breadsticks, hops out of his chair, and literally runs to the door. With my breathless laughter following him every step of the way.

  “Jesus Christ,” I mutter to myself when the door slams shut behind him. “And here I thought things were complicated when I was a DSI agent.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  I wake up in the state of perfect softness and warmth—cocooned in silken sheets, head resting on a fluffy pillow—that makes all people want to double down and sleep the rest of the day away. I almost do that too, but right as my half-lidded eyes begin to close again, my brain dumps an entire garbage can of memories into the middle of my consciousness. A highlight reel of every terrible thing that happened after I landed at Sheremetyevo starts to scroll through my head at high speed.

  Disturbed, I open my eyes and scan the vaguely familiar room whose bed I’m occupying. After a moment, I remember where I am—at the Hyatt suite, in Foley’s master bedroom. Judging by the faint light drifting through the curtains, it’s early morning. Which means I spent an entire night hogging Lord Tepes’ bed while he crashed on a couch, or the bed in the “armory” room surrounded by dangerous weapons. And while I don’t think I was undeserving of a good night’s sleep in a comfy bed, after everything that happened yesterday, I groan at the thought of all the salacious gossip the other vampires are going to dish out.

  Foley is throwing a great deal of nepotism at me, and it’s noticeable.

  Sitting up, I stretch each of my limbs and test them for dexterity. There’s a lot of lingering soreness from yesterday’s injuries and overexertion. But I managed to stuff enough food down my throat last night to make up for most of the energy I expended, and have avoided what I call a “healing hangover.”

  I peel back the sheets and comforter, swing my legs around, and slowly stand up, just to make sure I don’t have another fainting spell. All seems well, so I scoot past the table Foley left beside the bed, grab a fresh water bottle from the six-pack sitting next to the empty pizza boxes, and make my way over to the window.

  It’s another overcast day in Moscow. More snow fell overnight, and the handful of vehicles on the street are braving thick sheets of half-melted ice and white drifts that have piled up in the lanes. The clock on the nightstand claims it’s almost seven. The city should be wide awake, but there’s hardly any traffic, hardly any noise. After all the explosions that rocked the city yesterday, people are reluctant to leave their homes. They’re scared.

  They should be, with the Children of Enoch prowling around.

  I drain half the water bottle, then turn to look for the remains of my clothing. I shed my shoes, socks, shirt, and pants, all of them ruined, before I nodded off. But they’re not on the floor where I left them. Instead, there’s a set of brand-new clothes, tags still attached, folded neatly on the cushion of a plush chair in the corner.

  I snort at the thought Foley had someone go buy me expensive designer clothes, when all my regular clothing is sitting untouched in the bags I left back at the Marriott. I need to swing by and grab that stuff, if I’m going to spend most of my time in Moscow hanging around this suite.

  Since I can’t teleport over there and grab my bags, however, I “make do” with the stuff Foley purchased. Before I dress though, I take a long shower in the en suite bathroom, scrub away the thick coat of yesterday’s grime, dry off with a plush white towel, and brush my teeth with a complimen
tary toothbrush in monogrammed Hyatt packaging. By the time I emerge from the bathroom, with minty breath and hair that smells like flowers, wearing clothes that cost three times as much as my usual fare, I actually feel like the sort of person who can afford to buy out this suite for a week.

  What? I can dream, can’t I?

  I tiptoe to the bedroom door and open it a crack, peeking out. Most of the vampires have dispersed to other rooms in the hotel to get some rest, though a few are sprawled out on the various pieces of furniture in the suite’s main living area, including the feisty redhead and Trisha the not-doctor.

  I slip out of the bedroom and navigate the living area like it’s a minefield, wary of stepping on any of the scattered papers, folders, or supplies. Vampires have acute hearing, and while I’m not afraid that anyone in this room will attack me like a startled dog, I would strongly prefer not to wake them up while I don’t have Foley or Lucian to act as a mediator.

  After all, just a few months ago, I had a crippling phobia of vampires.

  I still need some time to warm up to any new fanged acquaintances.

  As I’m passing the coffee table in the middle of the room, I notice the messages Lucian and I recovered from the flophouse spread out across the tabletop. They’re badly stained from Lucian’s encounter with the golem poison, but the ink is still legible. The sheer number of crumpled note pages covered in scribbles that surround the messages indicate the group had a long night of trying and failing to decipher the code. I’m guessing that touted code breaker team Lucian mentioned didn’t pan out either.

  I can’t tell from a glance if anyone made headway, but I decide to collect the messages only and leave all the notes behind. A pair of fresh eyes can bring a new perspective to a puzzle. I’ll give the code my best shot before everyone wakes for breakfast. Even if I completely fail to chip away at the problem, at least no one will be able to accuse me of not “doing my part” as an official employee of House Tepes.

  Damn, that feels weird to acknowledge. Me working for the vampires.

  Papers in hand, I creep to the bedroom next to the master, the “armory,” and peek through the gap in the door. Someone cleared all the boxes off the bed and piled them up on the opposite side of the room, a leaning tower of weapons that looks like a cartel smuggler’s cache. Foley is fast asleep on the bed, nothing but the ends of his brown hair sticking out from the top edge of the comforter. I leave him be and continue around the suite.

  My next stop is the bedroom where Lucian was rotting the night before. While the smell of decomposition isn’t as strong as it was yesterday, I can’t help but hesitate before I push the unlatched door open. Blessedly, the air that flows out of the room isn’t rank enough to make me throw up. But my stomach still gurgles a bit as I spy the mound of clear plastic bags someone used to store the soiled towels Lucian was lying on last night. The original bed sheets are in a bag as well, permanently ruined by whatever fluids seeped through the towels.

  Lucian is lying in the same spot as before. Only this time he doesn’t look like a corpse. Most of his skin has regrown, a fresh raw pink, like he’s healing from burns. And he’s no longer weeping blood or fluids of alarming color from any of his orifices.

  The washcloth that was concealing his empty eye sockets is gone, and though I can’t see if his eyes have regenerated, his eyelids, at least, look relatively normal, along with the rest of his face. I lean into the room for a second and listen closely to his breathing—deep and even, no sign of yesterday’s death rattle.

  With the fresh sheets pulled up to his waist, you might almost think Lucian was sleeping normally. Almost. When and if he wakes up, I hope to all the gods in the Eververse he doesn’t remember much.

  Back in my borrowed bedroom, I clear the remains of last night’s dinner off the table and lay out the various messages. As I settle into a chair, I do a quick analysis of each message to get a basic grasp of the commonalities and differences. All the messages are short, one to three lines. They all consist of thickly inked calligraphic characters.

  There appear to be twenty-one base characters modified by a number of circular diacritical marks, and the characters utilize both curved and straight lines. Finally, the characters don’t resemble those of any language I’ve ever seen, even in passing, which implies that they’re part of a manufactured code, or that they’re from a language humans don’t speak.

  Now, if I was passing secretive messages to the shapeshifter I hired to steal a powerful sword, I would play it extra safe and use a double-layered technique. I’d write the message in a language few people on Earth understand, and then shift the message into a code to scramble the natural syntax of the language in order to make it almost impossible to decipher for anyone who doesn’t know both the code and the language itself. Assuming that Hays’ client was smart enough to do this, it could take us months to string together even the most general understanding of the messages.

  How can we speed the process up without the cheat sheet Hays used to decode these?

  I pore over the messages for half an hour, raking my gaze over the same characters again and again, trying to dig some level of comprehension out from beneath the diacritical dots, from between the looping curves, from within the interior angles of the intersecting lines. The more I look at the characters, chunked together in ways that resemble words, the more I feel like I’m on the cusp of grasping some level of meaning.

  But every time I feel a revelation roll toward the tip of my tongue, it shies away from passing my lips, falls back down into my throat. Around and around I go, a maddening mental exercise that makes me want to scream. Until at last, I admit defeat. I drop one elbow onto the table, drop my chin onto my palm, and drop my eyelids so my retinas can get some rest.

  Three seconds after I close my eyes, the symbols on the paper start to glow.

  I reel back and open my eyes again. Only to find the papers look the same as they have for the past half hour. Blinking the dots out of my vision, I tentatively reach out and pluck one of the papers from the tabletop, bringing it close to my face. I turn the paper this way and that, flap it around, tilt my head up and down, try to replicate whatever it was that triggered the glow I know was there.

  When nothing happens, I’m left with only one bizarre conclusion—that the messages didn’t actually glow. Rather, they lit up in my mind’s eye while I had my real eyes closed.

  “Oh boy,” I say, “this is going to be another wild ride, isn’t it?”

  Paper held aloft six inches from my face, I concentrate on the artfully drawn characters and slowly close my eyes. Again, nothing happens for three whole seconds—I count them under my breath this time to be exact. And then, like someone flips a switch, the symbols flare with a bright gold light against the black backdrop of my eyelids. I watch, transfixed, as the characters begin to move, rearranging themselves in an orderly fashion.

  My intuition tells me that the message is somehow decoding itself “before my eyes.” So I sit tight and wait for the characters to finish rising and falling, to stop shifting left and right. When the last character slides into place at the very end of the message, something audibly clicks inside my head, echoes between my ears. I feel as if someone has reached inside my skull and taken hold of an entire lobe of my brain.

  A voice that is neither male nor female, neither loud nor soft, neither here nor there, proclaims, “After you obtain the item, hold it at a secure location until the next morning. At ten thirty AM on the dot, at Krasny Pond in Izmailovsky Park, sit down on the bench marked with a circular symbol in red spray paint. Once I am sure you have come alone, I will sit beside you on the bench. You will hand me the item. I will hand you the agreed-upon payment. We will then leave the park via different routes. You will follow these instructions exactly, or I will not honor our contract.”

  The voice cuts out abruptly. In its place, a terrible pain strikes the top of my skull. I drop the paper and clutch my head, groaning loudly, afterimages of the glowing symbol
s imprinted in the blackness behind my eyes.

  My eyelids won’t respond to my commands. I have to manually peel them open with my fingers to flood my tortured brain with actual light in place of whatever metaphysical nonsense was illuminating those magical characters.

  My eyes water as they readjust to the light spilling in through the nearby window. As a result, when someone from the living room flings the bedroom door open without warning, the first thing they see is me leaning back in the chair with tears streaming down my face.

  That person is, of course, Foley Banks. He hurries toward me, eying the papers spread across the tabletop. “What happened?”

  Annette enters the room on Foley’s heels, moving so fast she’s a virtual ghost. She comes to a hard stop in front of the window and peeks past the curtains for any sign of an impending enemy raid, a wickedly curved dagger in her hand. “Are you well, Kinsey? It sounded like you were being attacked.”

  Several other vampires crowd the doorway, half of them armed, all of them on high alert.

  Oh, this is going to be a fun discussion, I think as I massage the top of my head.

  The initial jolt of agony has now faded into a dull, throbbing headache. I take this to mean that I didn’t trigger a fatal booby trap in the message but simply experienced a bad side effect of its unorthodox delivery method. If I had to guess, I’d say my brain revolted because it didn’t know how to properly process the stimuli it received from the symbols and the disembodied voice.

  Bothered by my silence, Foley grasps my shoulder. “Cal, hey. You all right?”

  “Fuck,” I say, “that was a trip and a half.”

  “What was?” he asks.

  In the simplest terms possible, I explain what just happened with the message.

  Foley and Annette glance at the papers warily, and the latter says, “I sense no magic signature, so how exactly did the paper convey that message to you?”