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.
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.”
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.
“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 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.
“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.”
“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.
“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 ea
ting 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.
The Path of Razors Page 8
