A Drop of Red

by Chris Marie Green

  Even though the flower petals around her stayed still, her cottoned hair fluttered, so Dawn knew that the Friends were surrounding Mrs. O’Connell and offering invisible, jasmine-scented solace.

  As she went back to her seat, she wondered if the spirits knew just how bad Briana might be, and that’s why they were leaving the girl to the team. Once, before becoming a Friend herself, Breisi had told Dawn how spirits tended to “travel in their own realms,” so maybe they knew Briana was here, but they weren’t able to do much more than the team itself could do.

  Or maybe the team could even command Briana to talk whereas the Friends couldn’t. Heck, the Friends, themselves, could be ordered around by the team.

  Dawn sat down to the tune of the dish scraping circles over the cardboard. “What happened while I was gone?”

  “More cussing,” Kiko said. “Briana’s got a bunch of smut synonyms.”

  Well then, maybe they could do some communicating.

  Dawn focused on the board. “Briana, are you, at this time, a soul that was cast out during a vampire birth exchange?”

  The planchette picked up speed, then flew over the letters.

  I—W—A—N—T—B—L—O—O—D—A—G—A—I—N—

  “Good,” Natalia said, “but you didn’t quite answer.”

  You go, Nat, Dawn thought.

  Then Briana lashed back.

  D—A—W—N—I—S—D—A—R—K—

  Dawn’s sight went black for a shocked moment—a moment of truth?

  She sucked in a breath. And when her vision came back, it seemed to be tinted by red rage.

  “She’s screwing around,” she said between her teeth.

  “Briana’s screwing around?” Kiko asked, out of patience.

  He got up, then returned with his scarf that Mrs. O’Connell had hung with their coats on the entry rack.

  And when he wrapped it around Natalia’s head, covering her eyes, the plachette spiraled out from under Natalia’s fingertips as she reared back to pull the scarf off.

  “What’re you doing?” Dawn asked.

  “Briana hasn’t told us anything Natalia couldn’t say herself.”

  He came back around the couch, obviously intending to take over the board.

  “Kiko—” Dawn said.

  But Natalia interrupted. “It’s no matter.”

  As she calmly straightened her new blindfold, Dawn asked, “What’re you talking about?”

  “I’m not manipulating the planchette,” she said. “And Briana is eager to start again. I hear her murmurs, and they’re louder. She very much wishes to talk.”

  When Natalia felt around the board, determined to locate that planchette again, Dawn refrained from helping her. Kiko had called her out, and she was proving that she wasn’t any gypsy con artist.

  Natalia found the planchette and took up position again, but what she didn’t know was that Kiko had very, very quietly turned the board upside down.

  As he sat, resting his chin in a palm and clearly expecting to expose her, the planchette started to swirl again.

  “Briana?” Natalia asked.

  The dish swerved down to the “Yes” in its new location at the right-hand bottom of the board.

  Dawn did a mental “Yessssss.” Unless Natalia had somehow known that Kiko had turned the board, this was for real.

  Kiko even shrugged. For now.

  “Briana,” Natalia continued, “answer truthfully. Are you, or have you ever been, a vampire?”

  The lamp in the corner of the room flickered, and the planchette took up even more speed as it spelled out two words.

  W—I—C—K—E—D—

  Natalia could hardly keep up, her body jerking with the ferocity of the planchette.

  The light in the corner sizzled, then began to strobe—on, off, on, off.

  M—A—S—T—E—R—

  Then the lamp went out, and Natalia passed out, smacking her head on the table.

  SIXTEEN

  THE BLACK SPOT

  JUST think,” Kiko said as they sat at a table in the Hushed Woman pub. “Natalia might be the only member of a team to get her first injury during an interview and not a brawl.”

  The new girl didn’t look amused while holding an ice pack from Mrs. O’Connell’s freezer against her forehead, so Dawn pinched Kiko under the table before they could get into a squabbling match.

  But he was so pumped about their new leads that he didn’t seem to mind.

  Their server arrived to drop off beverages, and Dawn dumped a sugar cube and then some cream into her cuppa tea. She was starting to like the stuff.

  The pub, itself, was nearly as silent as “the hushed woman” holding a finger to her lips on the sign outside. It seemed to have once been an old house that’d been separated into different dining areas, and the team had chosen a table in a sub-street-level room, which was decorated like a village cottage with an antique butter churn, a spinning wheel, and a rickety hutch with china balancing on the shelves. Something rich—probably the aroma of chestnuts—lent a thickness to the atmosphere. Or maybe it was just the amber lighting.

  Whatever it was, Dawn had chosen a seat against the wall.

  Once their server disappeared around the corner to climb back upstairs, the team got comfortable.

  “Just you wait until real trouble comes down,” Kiko said to Natalia, who was sipping her own tea. “If you black out during a fight, you’re dust.”

  Dawn defended her. “She just got overstressed. Lay off.”

  “No way,” Kiko said. “A peppy interview is nothin’ compared to what we’ve got in store.”

  “What do you mean, nothin’?” Dawn took care to talk in their “normal code.”“Bridget O’Connell’s going to get her house cleaned of anything Briana might’ve left behind. Even though she doesn’t know half of what Briana said to us, I don’t want that girl hanging around there anymore.”

  Natalia set down her cup. “Briana was rather upset.”

  “Upset?” Kiko asked. “Briana . . . or whoever we talked to . . . seems to me like one of those people that likes to screw around with whoever gets in touch with them.”

  “You think,” Dawn said, “that we were talking to a different . . . person . . . who was just toying with us?”

  “No,” Natalia said, getting both of their attention.

  “I believe,” she continued, “it was Briana, and she had even more to say. I feel as if she were cut off before she finished her last comment.”

  Kiko stopped his teacup at his lips. “Who cut her off then? Was ‘someone’ around who didn’t want her to talk?”

  “I can’t be sure.” Natalia rested the ice bag on the rough wooden table, revealing the tender bump near her hairline. “There’s also a chance she might have been so upset that she abruptly left us because she couldn’t tolerate the strain. Mrs. O’Connell did say her cousin was quite emotional.”

  “Whatever it is,” Kiko said, “I doubt we’ll ever know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you need to get used to not knowing every answer, Narda. And on the same note, don’t think that the most important thing is getting Kate Lansing’s mystery tucked away nice and neat. The boss has his agenda, and if it leads away from Kate, that’s where we’ll go.”

  The new girl frowned while Kiko went back to his tea.

  Dawn stirred hers. Natalia would see that using anyone and everyone—dead or not—got them that much closer to justice.

  The good of the many outweighed the good of the few. . . .

  As she kept stirring, she watched her teammates. And when she noticed Kiko’s gaze lingering on the new girl an instant too long, Dawn hmmmed.

  But team dynamics took a distant second to sorting out what’d happened back at Mrs. O’Connell’s.

  With one hand, she dug around in her jacket, which was hanging on the back of the chair, then came up with her pen and notebook. She turned to a page where she’d written down key phrases after the Ouij
a had gone inactive, then shielded it with her cupped hand.

  Her gaze rested on the first disturbing phrase.

  WICKED MASTER.

  To her, the inclusion of “master” made the message pretty straightforward, but Kiko had started working with anagrams, so she and Natalia had rearranged some letters, too.

  But none of them had come up with anything significant, and Dawn hadn’t seen the point in making up new words when they had two perfectly good ones anyway. She just wished that the other phrase Briana had tossed out—DAWN IS DARK—wasn’t as clear.

  Why the hell had the spirit spelled it out? Because that’s what Briana had sensed and it’d struck her so much that she’d been forced to comment?

  Dawn folded the notebook paper over that second batch of words, leaving only the WICKED MASTER part visible.

  There. Better. Now she could actually think.

  And the questions came—too many of them . . . not enough of them.

  Had they misunderstood Briana? Had she actually been trying to warn Natalia about the ruler of her Underground because she’d perceived the new girl to be a sympathetic person who could right some wrongs?

  Because maybe, just maybe, Briana had been an unwilling vampire. Even if the L.A. Underground had been careful about drinking from and recruiting those who gave permission, Costin had told the team before that this hadn’t always been the case with every single community he’d faced and vanquished.

  But the most probable scenario hit Dawn again, just as it’d been hitting her all afternoon: maybe Briana had been trying to scare them away from an Underground.

  Dawn wouldn’t put that past a master—assigning one of his underlings to create mischief and confusion in any way possible. In her experience, vampires used any strategy to survive. . . .

  Her train of thought was interrupted by their server, who brought the meals they’d ordered: a “nutloaf,” which used chestnuts to give texture to an alternative meatloaf, for Dawn, and fish and chips for both Natalia and Kiko.

  The two of them looked at their identical dishes as the server left, but they didn’t comment as they stuck their forks into the fried cod. Their silverware clanked against the plates in the otherwise empty room.

  Dawn moved around in her seat. Kiko noticed.

  “I can see you doing the Impatience Hustle,” he said. “You want to get to the school, but even the Friends haven’t found diddly there yet.”

  They’d already sent a squad to Queenshill, but that didn’t lessen her restlessness. “Maybe every girl who dresses in Briana’s uniform is off campus right now, so that’s why our Friends aren’t finding them. Those girls could’ve gone ‘you know where’ straight after class.”

  Underground.

  She chewed on her nutloaf, barely tasting it. When they’d called the school right after the Ouija session, they’d been too late to make a tour appointment for the day. Still, Dawn had pretended to be interested in sending a family member to Queenshill, an institution that worked off of private funding, so the administration had been happy to accommodate a tour tomorrow. While on campus, the team hoped to locate Kiko’s vision girls so Natalia could “hear” if they were vampires.

  God, they seemed to finally be getting somewhere. Dawn was going to freakin’ explode if this was all another dead end.

  Kiko laughed evilly. “Wouldn’t it be fun for us to go to the school a little earlier?”

  “Oh, no,” Natalia said. “Assure me we won’t be risking the rancor of the staff by invading the property after hours. If they caught us trespassing, they would hardly be open to giving us a tour and allowing us to interact with the population.”

  Eating, Dawn held up her hand to Natalia, letting her know that they weren’t about to blow this opportunity by Nancy Drewing around in the dark. They needed to talk to people first, and then they could snoop.

  Patience, she told herself. She had to have it, no matter how much she wanted to sneak onto that campus tonight.

  “Hey, it was just a comment,” Kiko said to Natalia. “Do you really think I’d waste all my fine work just for a romp on a campus that we can explore tomorrow?”

  “Your work,” Natalia repeated.

  Kiko grinned, and Dawn knew that he wasn’t being an egomaniac so much as he was being a maniac who enjoyed goading the new girl.

  Natalia set down her fork. “Haven’t you realized yet that neither of our visions would have yielded anything timely without the other? That if I hadn’t led us to Mrs. O’Connell’s, you wouldn’t have identified Briana in a picture there?”

  He didn’t have much to say to that, so he took a bite of french fry. Or chip. Whatever the Brits wanted to call it.

  At Kiko’s lack of response, Natalia went back to eating, too, probably thinking this was over. If only.

  But while Dawn waited for the lull to pass, she wondered if Costin had sensed that in order to be at full force again, Kiko would need another half.

  He washed down his food with tea, and when he placed the cup back in its saucer a little too slowly, Dawn knew her dalliance in the fields of tranquillity was about to end.

  She put her notebook back in her jacket pocket.

  “Listen, Narda,” Kiko said, “if we’re going to start a pissing contest here, I should warn you that I can shoot some long and powerful yellow.”

  The new girl pursed her lips, as if working out the slang.

  Then she turned to Dawn. “Pissing contest?”

  Dawn explained: competition of egos. The male belief that everyone wanted to have a penis. Et cetera, et cetera.

  Meanwhile, Kiko was busy raising his all-powerful arguing finger, gearing up for a knock down drag out. But Natalia raised hers, too, robbing him of speech because he was obviously thinking she was making fun of him when she probably wasn’t.

  Dawn wondered if she should just propose a finger-wrestling contest to give them something physical to work out.

  “I can tolerate an impressive amount of hardship,” Natalia said. “I was raised in a strict household where any deviation from my parents’ law—such as innocently remarking upon a voice I might hear—was met with punishment. I learned to keep my tongue, Mr. Kiko, but I know also when to use it.

  “I was hired for good reason,” she continued, hushing her voice. “But imagine my surprise when on my first night, I found myself staring at bones and a head. Imagine how my dedication was tested when I saw a deceased person in a freezer. And, frankly, I have learned more than I ever wished to know about ‘clients.’ Yet most trying of all, I have withstood your arrogance and . . . pissing contests.” Her voice went back to regular volume. “All I ask is you recognize that if we don’t work together, you and I, we might not accomplish anything at all.”

  And, with that, she lowered her finger, picked up her ice bag with one hand and her fork with the other, then jammed the utensil into her fish.

  Footsteps on the floor above took the place of talk as Dawn battled an impressed smile while chowing down on nutloaf.

  Then Kiko started to chuckle.

  “Okay,” he said, going back to his meal. “Fair enough.”

  Natalia put the ice bag to her head, like she was hungover.

  But Kiko got a second wind. Just not in the way Dawn expected.

  “The meds,” he said, never looking up from his meal. “They affect my attitude. I want them bad, and it grates on me.”

  Dawn dabbed her mouth with a napkin, trying to find a referee-like way to say this. “It’s not just the pills, Kik. You were kind of cranky when I met you.”

  “But I warmed up,” he said, finally making eye contact.

  She smiled at him, her throat closing. “Yes, you did.”

  As Kiko went on to devour his peas, a draft entered the room, accompanying a man and a woman. They’d emerged from what looked to be a sub-street-level entrance from the other side of the hill on which the building rested. Both patrons wore leather jackets, and they shed them after they claimed a table.

&nb
sp; Natalia didn’t mark their presence. That meant they weren’t emanating vampy hollow vibes.

  “Kiko,” she asked, testing the waters, “why are you still on this medication?”

  Dawn decided to save him the explanation. “Remember when I told you about the ‘client’ who got rough and broke Kik’s back?”

  Across the room, the two new customers gave Dawn a casual look, then launched into a murmuring conversation while they scanned their menus.

  “As you can imagine,” Kiko said, “my back hurt, so I took pills for the pain. But I kept taking them. Then I started realizing there might be more to it.”

  “You wished to numb more than your body?” Natalia asked.

  “Who wouldn’t in this job?” Kiko swigged his tea. “But it wasn’t necessarily because of what we deal with. I love what I do. It gives me a fulfillment that I wasn’t finding in acting—even though I would’ve given my eyeteeth for a good part.”

  Dawn interjected, “You might’ve found some satisfaction as a lawyer.” She turned to Natalia. “Before Kik graduated from high school, he wanted to fight the bad guys with paper and words instead of . . . well, what we use now.”

  Natalia seemed to understand that Dawn was referring to the gadgets and weapons Breisi dreamed up.

  “And who doesn’t want to be Batman?” Kiko added. “Anyway, when I couldn’t do this job so well anymore, I used the drugs like a blanket—something to hide under while the sounds and sights were muffled around me. But that blanket felt good when it was on. When it was off? Not so good. So I kept going under it.”

  Dawn didn’t mention her latest concern: that Kiko had found a different colored blanket with his increasing reliance on the Friends’ lulling him.

  Later. They’d deal later.

  Natalia had been listening intently, just as she always did. Dawn didn’t know if the new girl would be able to physically fight vamps worth crap, but her gift seemed to be in something not many other people had mastered in life.