“As a big girl, you know how to use that crucifix you stuffed in your boot just in case any more of those fun-loving red-eyes show up. The only reason I’m leaving you here alone is that we’ve found that they don’t like to tangle in public. The boss says vamps value their secrecy too much to open a can of whoop-ass on a crowd. Still, be on your toes. You can’t ever be sure about anything.” He turned around. Then, shaking his head, he faced her again, skin red. “Damn it, forget it. I’m just going to wait in the car.”
With that, he pushed out the door, leaving her alone.
A whoosh of summer night air washed over her as she just stood there, wondering if she should go after him. But what good would that do? What would be the point? She was what she was, and she didn’t have to apologize for it.
Still…God, was he really going to wait outside as she picked someone up? What, was he going to follow her to a hotel or whatever, too?
Thoroughly annoyed, Dawn strode up to the bar, took a seat. It was midnight, and most of Frank’s buddies were either head-down on the table or so tanked that they couldn’t see straight. She knew that if he were here it’d be the same story.
The bartender, Maury, appeared before her. He was bald, his two front teeth capped in gold. “What’s your pleasure?”
“Just bottled water.”
“To flush out those toxins, eh, Dawnie? Comin’ up.”
As she laid a couple of dollar bills on the bar, Maury served her. She played with her cocktail napkin, tearing at the edges until it resembled the blade-saw in Breisi’s crossbow. Freaked, Dawn crumpled it up and sipped at her drink.
Vampires. On top of everything else, she’d met vampires tonight. Wow, when had she won the Queen-for-a-Day lottery?
No more than a few minutes had passed when she felt someone watching her on the left.
Tucking a stray hair behind her ear, she turned her head in the same motion, locking onto a man who hadn’t been there when she’d ordered. He had short dark brown hair, a heavy brow that was, at the moment, knitted in concentration in front of him, and a cleft in his chin. It was the face of a tough, a man who didn’t mind throwing punches or standing in the way of them. Under his dark shirt, she detected sinew and muscle, a body that wasn’t stocky so much as retracted in preparation for attack.
He wasn’t looking at her now, but Dawn knew he had been.
She played with the label of her drink, just for something to do. She wanted his attention again, longing for a distraction to improve her mood.
Waiting, waiting…she willed him to see her.
Nonchalantly, he did glance at her, then away. And in that one heartbeat of a second, her body crushed into itself, then burst back to form. The power of her reaction left her dizzy, discombobulated…
God, she needed to feel a man against her. Her demons really needed to be exorcised if she could be rocked this easy.
Maury delivered a shot glass full of amber liquid to the man, but the stranger merely wrapped his long fingers around it, spinning it around as he chanced another glimpse at Dawn.
He didn’t smile, didn’t flirt. He just measured. Pale blue eyes, full lower lip…Dawn’s pulse hammered away, chipping off the seconds of their silent introduction.
This drawn-out glance was miles from the carnal violence of his other, shorter gaze. Now, her body was gradually warming with sensual anticipation, heating with fantasies of what she shouldn’t do with a stranger.
She got out of her chair, slid into the one next to him. “You’re a new face around here.”
A beat passed between them, loaded with possibility. His gaze brushed over her hair, her face. He didn’t smile.
“I just started coming.” He turned to his drink, but didn’t indulge in it.
Voice low, graveled. Hunger squeezed her lower belly.
“My name’s Dawn.”
Now he did smile…at his drink. “I know.”
She sat up in her chair.
So did he, facing her, reaching into his back pocket to take out a wallet. He flicked it open to a license.
Matthew Lonigan.
Private Investigator.
A granite laugh seized Dawn. “Great. Another PI, huh? And here I thought…” She laughed again; it made her feel like less of an idiot. “Why do I get the impression that this meeting isn’t some chance encounter?”
“It’s not.” He tucked the license back into his pocket. “I heard that Frank Madison’s daughter and a friend were hanging around here tonight. I’ve been doing the same thing ever since getting this case, so I came running.”
She didn’t know what to say for a moment, but it wasn’t only because of this cruel surprise. It was because she was embarrassed to be rejected. He hadn’t been coyly checking her out at all—not in that way. If he was a PI, he no doubt had access to pictures of Frank’s life, his family. He’d known what she looked like, and he’d honed right in on her.
“Who hired you, Matthew?” she asked.
To save her ego, she stayed on her barstool, still hovering inches from his body, close enough to feel his skin prickle. Close enough to scent the soap he’d used.
Something clean and mysterious, she thought. And it smelled way too damned good.
He sent her a glance that said he was aware of her intentions. Even so, he didn’t move away. Uh-uh. In fact, his gaze drifted lower, over her chest, down, back up again.
“People call me Matt,” he said, “and it’s none of your business who hired me.”
“Frank’s my dad.”
“And I’m not at liberty to divulge anything except to the person who’s paying me.”
As if she didn’t have enough questions, a whole new meteor shower of them came raining down on her. Who else in this world cared enough about Frank to have him tracked? And why would they want to find him?
As the PI watched Dawn, everything pressed in on her, weighing against her brain. She fought to keep the world out, just as she’d been doing half the night with all the mysteries that had swallowed her whole. She pushed right back, keeping her mind in the here and now.
“Come on,” she said. “Tell me what you’ve found out.”
Hell, if he could interview her, she could interview him right back.
A laugh of disbelief forced a smile—a sidelong gesture of wry appreciation—out of him. “You’re a tenacious one.”
“I’m sick of not knowing. From dusk on, it’s been…” She huffed out a breath, gripped her drink. “Quite the adventure.”
“Welcome to detective work.”
When he bent closer to her, Dawn raised her eyebrows. Was he working her? Or had she miscalculated his true level of interest? Did it go beyond detecting?
He skimmed his fingertips near the bandages over her burns. The faint contact woke up her nerve endings.
“What happened?” he asked.
Sure. Like she was going to spill that story. “Just a stunt gone awry.”
“That’s it, huh?” Matt Lonigan leaned over on the bar, fixing her in his sights, hunter to prey. “I hear you tolerate pain pretty well.”
“Yup, my life’s one long demolition derby.”
She took a slow sip from her drink. A trickle of ice sweat caught her chin, slid down her throat, past her shirt and between her breasts. Deliberately, she wiped the lingering moisture away from her mouth, taking great pleasure in how his gaze stayed on her lips.
Boyfriend was intrigued, all right, even if he was fighting tooth and nail to stay professional. Girls knew this kind of thing. It was one of the advantages of femininity, and Dawn had no qualms about using any of the tools in her arsenal.
Just as a final tease, she licked the corner of her mouth with the tip of her tongue.
Matt Lonigan’s eyes went unfocused, but he turned his face away before Dawn could call him on it with a knowing grin.
“You were saying…?” His voice was more ragged than usual.
She rested her elbows on the bar in a pose that stretched her shirt ov
er her chest. “About what?”
“About tonight? An adventure? Those bandages…?”
“Is this the best interview you’ve got in you?”
He sighed, kept staring at his drink. “You’re not exactly the easiest subject, Ms. Madison. If you could just—”
“Oh, I see. You want me to share with you what you won’t share with me. That hardly seems like a professional courtesy, now, does it?”
He clenched his jaw.
Hmm. Would he be more talkative about Frank if she persuaded him just a little bit more?
She started to play with the strand of loose hair that had escaped her low ponytail. Winding, winding it around her finger, waiting for him to look back at her.
Which he soon did.
He’d collected himself, but only marginally. Now she was pretty damned sure he was attracted to her: it was in the set of his mouth, the angle of his body.
An old Neil Young song wafted out of the jukebox.
“The first good looking man who walks in here,” she said, “and you have to be difficult.”
He didn’t respond at all.
Naturally, that made Dawn turn the heat up—a challenge always did. Why was he making this so impossible? Or…
Wait, maybe he really wasn’t into her. Maybe he’d seen too many pictures of Eva Claremont and Dawn wasn’t measuring up. Was that it? It had to be. It’d happened so many times before.
Out of pure anger, she reached out, slid her hand onto his thigh. A craving so urgent, so dangerous, seized her that her breath quickened, sharp in her lungs.
Would Eva touch him like this? No—she couldn’t, not any more. Dawn was the one who was alive, not Eva. Dawn was the one who could stretch her body along the length of his; she was the one who could satisfy him tonight.
His hand clamped over hers, stopping her from traveling upward, to the center of his legs. When she caught the fire in his eyes, she thought for certain that he was about to give in.
But then something mysterious wavered there, like a flame that was struggling in the wind, rolling to a weak flicker, guttering, dying—
Dawn held her breath, watching him make some sort of decision.
And he did. The flame danced, grew stronger.
Twisted itself back up to a solid stand again.
“What’re you doing?” he rasped.
Embarrassed, she jerked her hand away.
A full minute of twanging guitars and Neil Young waxing eloquent about love provided a buffer. But then the PI went and decimated it.
“Let me drive you home,” he said more gently. “And maybe we can schedule an appointment to talk tomorrow, when you’re in a different mood.”
“Why? So you can taunt me with everything I don’t know about Frank? No thank you. I’ve already got a whole lifetime supply of that.” She started to leave.
“Dawn, wait.”
Standing, he was taller than she’d expected. She had to tilt her head back a little to look at him head-on.
“I…” He put his hands on his hips and laughed. “I’m just not sure how to handle you.”
Dawn took that in. A normal guy. She wasn’t sure how to handle one of those, either. She was used to a different breed of male, a fleeting somebody who was willing to take advantage of what she so easily offered.
Dawn didn’t know if she could be into normal.
“I’m serious about getting together tomorrow.” He gave her his card. It was nice and neat—not a blood mark on it. “And maybe we could also get together with your friend. The one who was with you tonight?”
Taking the card, she knew the right thing to do would be to offer him aid. She wanted to. But, damn it, it pissed her off that he could be privy to information that could help her to find Frank and he was withholding it.
She held up the card, turned to leave.
“Dawn.”
The tone of his voice halted her cold, but she knew it was only because The Voice had said her name so many times today, himself. The memory rang through her: soft caresses from the inside out, warm strokes of being loved. Sexual healing.
Exactly what she wanted.
Matt Lonigan had come closer, near her back and just over her shoulder. His breath was moist against her ear.
“I’m interested. But I’m not desperate.”
When he left, a cool patch of absence lingered against her back. A shiver wracked her, left her empty as she stared ahead, struggling not to look back. She walked out the door.
On post-midnight Hollywood Boulevard
, it was drizzling, leaving a sheen of neon to streak the pavement. Without comment, Dawn climbed into the car where Kiko was waiting.
As they drove back in silence, neither of them realized that they were being followed.
Nine
The Hunger
At 2:00 a.m., the team met in The Voice’s office, rain tapping at the window like it wanted to enter the insular safety of the room as well.
On Dawn’s left, Kiko reclined in a lounge chair, ice packs tucked against strategic locations of his body. On Dawn’s right, Breisi sat on an ottoman, straight-backed, one long leg crossed over the other, her foot bobbing with nervous energy.
Dawn adjusted her own ice packs, keenly aware of muscles she hadn’t known about before. All of them were whining, too.
And then there was the ache, the belly-deep nudge of a craving she hadn’t been able to satisfy back at the Cat’s Paw.
She tried to forget it as The Voice talked to Kiko. “In light of the attack, keep your eyes open for vampires hiding behind any corner, waiting for you to be alone.”
“So what do you think those tailed things were? They sure were ugly mo’fos. Strong, too.”
Outside, a branch moaned against the velvet-shrouded window, and Dawn started in her seat. The covering blocked what was going on out there, and she didn’t like that at all.
She just couldn’t lose the feeling of being a bug under a microscope, of being observed by a cold, practiced something…
Her gaze wandered up to the big TV. The Voice’s eye.
His disembodied tone moved across the room like seething fog. “I don’t know what breed of vampire we’re dealing with, Kiko. From your description—iron fangs, barbed tails—I can’t place the type. But until I do, we’ll step up security for the Pennybakers and keep trying to ease Marla into accepting that vampires exist. I’ll put Friends on watch, as well.”
“Friends?” Dawn asked.
“Friends.” The Voice wasn’t elaborating.
Again, something prodded her to recognize its existence: vamps outside Robby’s house, Robby’s image in the window…
She sliced off her thoughts, unwilling to face where they were leading right now. “And how do you propose we find out what those things are?”
Breisi held up her hands in a gesture that said, Isn’t it obvious? “We identify their lair.”
“But you don’t go in,” The Voice said. “I’ve taught you to never enter a hidden nest of vampires. I’ll take care of something that dangerous. Do you understand, Kiko? No more wandering into a copse of trees to track them.”
“Frank would’ve gone for it, too,” the psychic said.
Her dad’s name forced a wound of guilt to split open inside Dawn. “I’m with Kiko. If those vamps had anything to do with Frank’s disappearance, I’m not going to back off, either, even if they do run into their little holes to hide.”
Yeah, she sounded brave now.
“Listen to me.” The Voice’s tone grew in volume. “There are some forces I alone will have to deal with.”
“That’s rich. How can you bring me into this and then—”
“We’re all going to find Frank.” There was a catch of barbed wire in Breisi’s voice. “Never doubt that, Dawn.”
As Dawn gaped at her, the room went quiet. Breisi glared at the carpet, then started to jog her ankle again.
“And this,” The Voice said, back to his normal harsh hush, “brings me
to another subject.” He stopped, the speaker humming. “Dawn, I’m still not even comfortable with the thought of you being out there at the present time. Not without more training, especially after tonight.”
Breisi kept bobbing her foot. “Boss, she’ll do great, as long as we’re around. As I said before, she’s got the basics down—we just need to hone and educate her.”
“I’ll be fine,” Dawn said, “if I know what to expect.”
Kiko spoke up. “Everyone’s first time with a vamp encounter is a test, Boss. And I suspect you knew that Dawn would be real good at resisting. You should’ve seen her when that thing tried to get into her head. She kicked ass.”
Even though Dawn knew she hadn’t been quite that phenomenal, she shot Kiko a thankful look. He knew how much she needed to find Frank.
And she knew how much he believed that she was “key” to the investigation.
The Voice chuckled, but it wasn’t a warm, inviting sound. It was dark, low, the drag of slow footsteps in the night. “Dawn is already an expert at keeping anyone and everyone out.”
Was that a compliment? She didn’t think so.
“Dawn,” he added, “you’ll begin training tomorrow in mind blocking until it becomes second nature to you. Breisi, please outfit her with a revolver and an encrypted cell phone when we’re done here.”
“She can have my forty-five. I’ve got lots of extras.”
One of Kiko’s ice packs thunked to the floor as he shifted position in his chair. “There’s also the matter of where Dawn is staying. After those vamps just popped up out of nowhere, I’m thinking we need to watch each other more.”
In all the hubbub, Dawn had almost forgotten about a crash pad. She’d planned to check into a motel, seeing as she was a bit of a drifter, just like Frank, and hadn’t been renting anything in L.A. Normally, Dawn would shack up with a friend—male, of course—until she needed to move on.
“Were you planning to go to Frank’s?” Breisi asked softly.
Dawn flinched. “No.”
That house. A reminder of how life with Frank had been a constant seesaw. One day he’d be Number One father, buying her cotton candy at Six Flags Magic Mountain or attending parent conference night at school in a button-down and tie. The next, he’d be a weeping mess, a cheap bottle of whiskey drained and lying on its side next to him as he brought out her mom’s old movies and locked his daughter out of their home.
Night Rising Page 9
