A Drop of Red

by Chris Marie Green

  She also saw Frank finally overcoming Della and gazing into her eyes. . . .

  But Dawn couldn’t concentrate on much else because Jonah was staring at the dripping carcasses in his hands as the battle continued around him. He dropped the bodies and stared at his reddened fingers.

  But then, as if overtaken by the blood, he leaned back his head, lifting his hands to his mouth.

  Tasting the temptation.

  Dawn’s stomach turned. Jonah had never been in charge during a feeding before—it’d always been Costin imbibing the blood, truly tasting the fulfillment—and when Jonah shuddered, she knew he’d finally been satisfied after all the watching, all the torture.

  Another dog attacked him and, just by lifting a hand, he caught this one, too.

  She had to do something before Jonah got Costin hurt.

  “Breisi!” Dawn yelled, already leaping from the roof.

  Her Friend swished over and caught her midway to the ground, where the spirit cradled her to a running start toward Jonah.

  At the same time, Della came alive to throw Frank off of her. They sparred while Kiko yelled for Breisi, too.

  He had to be out of bullets and darts.

  Even in the short time it took Dawn to reach Jonah, he’d terminated the rest of the dogs, one by fast one. She skidded to a halt in front of the discarded bodies while he inspected the blood on his hands again, his gaze blindingly ravenous.

  Feet away, one of the girl vampires screeched when she saw that their animal comrades were lying all around Jonah.

  Party over, she started running back toward the dorms.

  Dawn cocked a throwing blade, then cursed when she realized that the Friends could follow the girls to any Underground, because that’s where they might be going after getting their asses whopped.

  Jasmine stormed off as another vampire girl fled.

  Then another.

  When Frank gave a gurgling yell, Dawn whipped around just in time to see Della take off, too, leaving Frank, who was covering his neck with his hands.

  He collapsed to the ground as Della chased her group, then caught up to the last vampire galloping past the football field. There, she pounced on her, pinned her, glared at her until the one on the bottom wriggled out and raced off.

  Della pursued, disappearing into some trees and leaving the branches shivering in her wake.

  A gale of jasmine sped to Frank, and Breisi’s voice lulled over the suddenly quiet night as blood seeped through his fingers.

  “Frank?” Dawn said, fumbling the throwing blades into her pocket. She was thinking of Kiko’s back, Breisi’s death. . . .

  “Don’t worry—he’ll heal, it’s not so deep,” Breisi said. “But we need to get to the car. The ferals have all run off now since the vampire girls have let them loose.”

  She was so serene, so truly not worried.

  But Dawn . . . She wanted to cry like a damned baby, and she told herself to stop being weak. To soldier on.

  She took a fistful of Jonah’s coat, pulled him away from the dog and forced him to go with her to check on Frank.

  Her captive got to his feet, unresisting, only touching his mouth with a blank look, his perception clearly just catching up with his appetite.

  She wanted to ask him what the hell had made him come out here, why he thought it was a remotely good idea, but there was too much to deal with.

  “Dad?” she asked when they came to him.

  Frank made an okay sign, and she breathed easier. He was a vampire, damn it. It wasn’t the same as human hurt.

  Jonah had already gone to kneel by her dad’s side and, for a mind-muddled second, she thought he was going to feed from him. But then he put hands on top of Frank’s.

  Healing. Jonah had thought to heal him before anything else.

  Her dad tried to talk through it all.

  “Started to ask Della . . . about Kate and vampire home . . .” he rasped. “Only made it past . . . ‘Kate Lansing’ and ‘vampire’ . . . before she . . .”

  “Don’t talk, Dad,” Dawn said, guessing that he’d gotten at least some kind of reading from the other words before Della clawed his neck.

  Couldn’t he hurry up and heal?

  “Saw victims . . .” Frank added, just as if he were carrying on a regular conversation during a bout of laryngitis. “Kate . . . so many other Kates . . .”

  “Shhhh,” Breisi said. Then she sang to him again, and he focused his gaze on the air, as if he could see her. He smiled like he was just getting a freakin’ haircut.

  Dawn thought she heard sirens in the distance. “We’ve got to go, especially if those girls decide to come back.”

  “They won’t,” Jonah said.

  “And how the fuck do you know?” Dawn said. She wanted to kick his ass, his face. “What were you even doing out here to know?”

  “I literally ran right over because you sounded like you needed help. This body can go like the wind now, but Costin never lets it loose. He knows it can do so much more than he—”

  “Are you sure it’s not because you wanted to show that you could be free at any time, and you could endanger Costin while you’re at it?”

  He didn’t say anything, and she knew she’d hit a button.

  God damn it, if he wasn’t so busy healing Frank and if Costin wouldn’t feel any part of a beat down, she’d shove her fist down Jonah’s throat in an attempt to yank Costin back out right now. She wouldn’t even think about how Frank might not be healed this quickly if Jonah weren’t here.

  He didn’t deserve the benefit of any doubt.

  Frank started to get up, and Breisi and Dawn helped him while Jonah kept his hands on her dad’s neck. They began walking as fast as they could toward the wall, then the car.

  In the background, Kiko’s voice called out from the roof. “Hey! Someone want to get me down from here?”

  Dawn took the brunt of Frank’s weight as Breisi whizzed up to Kik, then lifted him down.

  When they got to the wall, Jonah helped her dad to climb it, keeping one hand over Frank’s wound the entire time.

  They arrived at the Sedona, which was marred with jagged scratches. Those, plus the disturbed dirt, testified to the recent ferals versus Friends battle.

  As Frank waved Jonah off and got into the back of the vehicle, Jonah turned to Dawn.

  “Why is his existence so much more important than mine?” he asked, just like the question had been eating at him this entire time. “Why is he more important than any of us?”

  The question struck her. “Because he’s saving the world while saving himself?”

  “And I can’t save the world just as well as he can?”

  She almost laughed at that. Jonah, the savior.

  But then she recalled that he had volunteered his body to Costin’s cause in the first place—that he was one of those justice seekers who populated the teams.

  Jonah had just taken a wrong turn somewhere.

  As Frank lay down, she saw that most of his neck wounds had already been closed, but he kept healing it while he closed his eyes.

  “Get your balls in there, Jonah,” she said, motioning toward the car while Breisi helped Kiko to tumble over the wall.

  Jonah only stared at her, those blue eyes deep and oddly emotional. “Have you ever considered that being buried inside my new body will shelter him just as well as hiding inside that house will? It’s crossed his mind, Dawn. But that’d just be another thing he hasn’t mentioned.”

  The words banged at her, trying to get in, but she wasn’t allowing them to.

  Still, the adrenaline ebbed and left her feeling ill. Costin had always likened his state to being caved in, and he’d told the team previously that buried earth tended to hide a vampire’s powers from anything outside.

  Was it the same for him?

  Could he go outside headquarters if he was sheltered by Jonah’s body?

  Then why would he hesitate?

  She knew. Costin’s situation was too dang
erous to dick around with.

  Jonah lowered his voice. “I liked it, Dawn.”

  He meant the blood and the fight and the freedom of it all. Dawn shook her head and started to walk away.

  “I’d just need a few hours to test the theory that he’s safer than you think,” he added. “I’ll prove he doesn’t need to stay behind walls, and we can strengthen all our attacks, speed them up, vanquish all the communities so he can be saved that much quicker. Because that’s what you want, isn’t it? To save him? Or would that mean letting too much go?”

  Before her mind even tapped into that, he took a step away, and she should’ve known that he meant to leave with or without her blessing.

  But then he smiled—an all-too-understanding gesture that took her off guard—and he zinged away in a blur that was gone before she could even react.

  “Get him, Breisi!” Kiko yelled from behind Dawn.

  Their Friend took off after Jonah.

  Costin . . . their ultimate weapon . . .

  Her ultimate . . . Something.

  As sirens called in the distance, Frank sat up in the backseat, still holding his throat. “FUBAR,” he rasped.

  She held back all fear, because saying that their situation was Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition was the biggest understatement ever.

  TWENTY - TWO

  LONDON BABYLON

  AS the girls tore through the trees where the intruders had been hiding earlier, Della leaped on Violet again, finally catching her for good.

  They spun over the dirt and leaves, roots jamming into them while they clawed at each other’s skin and bit at each other’s arms, rolling, rolling, until Della pinned Violet’s legs with her shins and planted her hands on her arms.

  Violet still tried to bite, but Della didn’t even flinch as she kept restraining the other girl.

  From behind the thick tree where Polly and Noreen were hiding, they whined.

  “Della, stop!”

  “Della!”

  They kept peering round the trunk with their cat-wolf mouths opened, their skin reddened from the flash of the bomb the little man had thrown. As Della glared at them, her own eyes stung because the explosion had almost felt like looking straight into the sun, which had contained the power to hurt them only when they exposed themselves for too long.

  “Quiet, you clots,” she said.

  The other girls clamped their thin lips together and retreated behind the trunk.

  Violet had gone motionless, her slanted gaze malicious as Della listened for sounds of pursuit from the football field.

  But there was nothing aside from the sirens that were approaching Queenshill.

  Had the intruders failed to give chase because Della had injured the vampire whom the little man had called “Frank”—the one who had trespassed into her mind?

  Or perhaps the violent second vampire, who had killed the dogs, was troubling the group now . . . ?

  Della didn’t know since the battlefield was too distant for her to catch scents or hear any clues.

  Polly spoke from behind the tree. “I think they’re gone.”

  “Cowards,” Della hissed. “Every one of you ran away from them.”

  “They had weapons!” Polly said. “No one on other nightcrawls has ever carried weapons. Right, Vi?”

  Violet snarled, growling until Della gripped her wrists tighter, making the other girl hiss because of the pressure on her burned skin.

  “We shouldn’t have begun our nightcrawl early at all,” Noreen added.

  “We didn’t realize those servants had vampires with them because we were concentrating on the humans’ scents,” Polly said. “It was all brilliant until the dog-killer vampire appeared.”

  “Not even the bullets scared me.” Noreen had ventured away from the trunk a tad. “Neither did Frank the vampire. And if we had got his little servant man back to our underground room, he would have been such a treat. Wolfie might have even liked the girl if she weren’t so old.”

  Della recalled the female with the braid winding down her back. How could she forget when the woman had put Della into a strange freeze merely with an intense stare? Did she have some manner of servant powers from her master vampire that allowed her to mentally captivate others?

  And was she the reason the dogs had been flying round—because her mind willed it?

  Perhaps Frank the vampire had somehow given her those powers, seeing as he’d come into Della’s own mind after saying the words “Kate Lansing” and “vampire.” Della didn’t know how he knew about Kate, but it had caused her to think about that particular nightcrawl, then others. And by the time Della had banished him from her thoughts and sprung at him, Noreen, then Polly, then Violet had fled, their playtime turned into a nightmare they’d never expected.

  “We should have never left the house,” Della said, remembering how she had made just such an error in judgment when she’d buried Kate Lansing’s head. She’d promised never to disappoint Wolfie again, yet the others hadn’t listened to her warnings. “Have we been so coddled by Wolfie that we don’t know how to make good decisions when we’re on our own?”

  Polly got saucy, coming out from behind the tree. “He’s always taught us to enjoy what we are, and that’s all we were trying to do.”

  Della bared her teeth at her, and Polly shrank back.

  “We’re too used to his protected nightcrawls,” Della said through those teeth. “We’re well versed in choosing recruits, yet we have no notion about how to handle anything beyond that. I know we have nearly a year of education left, and Wolfie will no doubt teach us how to fight for the dragon in the proper manner, but I sincerely doubt he’ll be proud of how we responded to our first test tonight.”

  As she thought of the punishment that would come their way, her burned skin flashed with more pain.

  It wasn’t fair. She alone had known of a possible blood brother in the area because Wolfie had never given her permission to share the information she had obtained by breaking into his mind. Yet she had done everything within her power to stop the group from this particular nightcrawl without breaking Wolfie’s confidence.

  Even so, punishment or not, he would have to be told that Frank the vampire could be a blood brother or even a scout for one. And she would have already contacted Wolfie or the cat if they hadn’t been out of range at the sub-Underground common room, waiting for them to report for the scheduled nightcrawl.

  As the sirens clamored even closer to the property, making them cringe, Della noticed that human students were gathered at all the glowing boarding houses’ windows.

  Violet took advantage of the distraction by rearing up and aiming her teeth at Della’s arm.

  Taken by surprise, Della did something she’d never, ever thought to do before.

  She spit on Violet.

  The other girl jerked back, her eyes saucering as the expectoration bubbled on her bare brow, then trickled down her hairless skull and past her wolflike ear.

  Della braced herself, but when Violet remained still—she was afraid? She was afraid!—Della’s pulse began to chug.

  She leaned closer to the other girl, done with the fear, done with always being the lowly one.

  “You should have paid mind to me when I told you I had identified the scent from those trees,” she said to Violet. Then she gazed at Polly and Noreen, who were hiding again. “Yet none of you thought this was significant. Not coming from me. And you even seemed to take pleasure in proving that I was wrong. What fun you would have with a little man like the one from school, you said. How delightful it would be to bat him round while we waited for Wolfie. Afterward, we could always charm the intruders into forgetfulness, no harm done.” Della’s tone had risen in pitch, competing with the sharpness of the sirens, but now her voice snarled in resentment. “We could charm them just as we did to Melinda Springfield after the raven attack.”

  None of the others responded, making it obvious that the sirens had abruptly stopped. Bobbies, who’d no doub
t been summoned by a report of gunfire near the far football field, were probably at the school’s gates.

  Polly and Noreen came out, sniffing at the air.

  Jasmine, Della thought. They had been detecting the scent since this morning, and it had caused them to wonder whether it was coming from flowers or too much new perfume on a student.

  It was stronger than ever now.

  As a matter of fact, it’d been stronger during the confrontation.

  Violet remained unmoving, and Della could feel how the other girl’s muscles were tensed, as if in retracted humiliation.

  Della gazed down at their fallen leader, and for the first time, confidence flooded her.

  I’m not afraid anymore, she thought, her mind open for all of them to hear. Not afraid of you, not afraid of answers.

  “Do you even care that you led us into danger tonight?” she asked Violet.

  The other girl laughed—a weak sound compared to all her other laughs—and Della dug in harder with her claws.

  “Before we sneak back inside, you’re going to tell me what you know about Blanche,” Della said. “And Sharon and Briana.”

  Before Violet could laugh more, Della choked her off by wrapping a claw round her throat.

  There was fear in Violet’s eyes . . . absolute fear, because she knew Della was beyond caring now, that she had taken the last of any abuse.

  Flash fast, Della used her other paw to whisk at Violet’s face. A warning.

  Blood beaded out of the gashes on the girl’s red-burned skin as she refused to speak.

  “One more opportunity, Vi,” Della said. “Something has been happening with our group, and I’ve had the sneaking suspicion you might be responsible.”

  Violet tried to shake her head, a last-ditch effort to cling to her dominance as her wounds began self-healing.

  But this was the “leader” who’d broken Della down, encouraged her to feed off Melinda, had made her feel like compost that only existed to allow the others to grow.

  All Della’s bottled resentment exploded, and she leaped to her feet while still gripping Violet by the neck. She swung the other girl round, released her, sent her flying toward a tree.