Midnight Reign

by Chris Marie Green

  A special delivery full of attitude. She’d been maintaining the package for twenty-four years, ever since she could first say, “Screw off.” Ever since she realized that she would never live up to the gorgeous promises her mother, the famous Eva Claremont, had woven.

  Mom. The name tasted bitter.

  Breisi spoke, voice flat. “Those are some clever moves, but I thought you’d left the stunt work by the wayside. Flashy show-off routines aren’t going to keep you alive with vamps.”

  Dawn negligently inspected the dull practice dart on the end of her whip chain. It’d be the real thing if she used it outside. “Sharp, silver, and tipped with holy water. And I can use it to attack a Guard or maybe even one of those Goth Groupies. Blessed articles have an effect on both vamps, and we know silver slowly poisons at least some of them. If I could ward off spit with the chain’s speed and slice the dart into a red-eye’s tail or an exposed place—”

  “It is just like one of those Guard’s tails, ain’t it?” Kiko said, making his way over.

  A pretty blond guy in his late twenties with a soul patch under his lower lip, he was a struggling actor of a certain stature, a “little person” who was proportioned just right—only smaller. Right now, he couldn’t audition because he was recovering from Robby’s beat down. With a still-healing back, he also couldn’t run, couldn’t lift heavy objects, and sure as hell couldn’t fight by Breisi and Dawn’s side if it came right down to it. But his brain was still running on all cylinders. His psychometric, telepathic, and precognitive senses would always be valuable, not that Kiko was happy about missing out on any expected calls to action. During this past month, during all the days of dried-up leads to her dad’s whereabouts and information about the Underground, Kiko had been in physical therapy, biting back the pain Dawn knew he wasn’t showing.

  He reached for the whip chain, wanting to inspect it, and she made a big deal of pausing, then running a challenging gaze over him. Afterward she grinned, handing it over, as if he’d passed muster. She hoped he felt like that, anyway.

  “Those Guard tails kept nagging at me,” she said. “I wanted to level the playing field with my own version of a barbed whip. Now, I know it’s nowhere near as powerful as theirs, but what else am I going to do? Become a mutant monkey and grow my own freakin’ tail?”

  “Not a far trip for a primate like you.”

  Kiko scanned the dart. It was the first time Dawn had brought out the martial arts weapon around her team, even though they knew she’d been practicing off property.

  “You can attack with this and protect yourself?” he asked.

  “When the red-eyes spit at you, it will go right through that steel,” Breisi said, referring to the Guards’ lovely habit of expectorating burning-hot fluids.

  “Your lab tests showed that the stuff isn’t composed of acid, right?” Dawn asked. “Remember how their spit just charred the silver arm bracelet I used to wear, and that was it? Maybe steel will go unaffected, too.”

  She knew Breisi wouldn’t refute her own scientific findings just to make Dawn put the whip chain away. Nope, not Miss Lab Rat, U.S.A., their appointed gadget wizard, the Bondian Q of their team. Which made Kiko their psychic Aragorn. Which made Dawn…what?

  Memory washed over her: lifting a machete, hacking off Robby’s head. Putting a silver bullet through his heart, just to be sure.

  Dawn was what her father, Frank Madison, had once been to this team. Muscle. And maybe even something else…

  Before she’d joined up with Limpet and Associates, a vision had come to Kiko. He’d seen her, Dawn Madison, covered in the blood of a vampire.

  “It was the end of our struggles,” he’d told her. “I felt that everything would be fine after that.”

  Supposedly, she was “key” to beating these vamps. That’s what Kiko and The Voice kept telling her anyway. Their reclusive, as-yet-unseen boss had even used his employee, Frank, as bait to get Dawn the Prophecy Girl involved with all this craziness. She’d rushed to L.A. to help find her father, of course, but they hadn’t met with success. Yet, according to the boss, whose agenda had more to do with the Underground than with Frank, the team was closer to both her dad and the vamps now more than ever.

  She rubbed her arms, suddenly going cold…and way too warm. The Voice. The man who communicated with them only through speakers. The only entity the formerly oversexed Dawn had allowed inside of her lately in a strange lust affair.

  When she held her hand out to Kiko for the whip chain, the psychic grudgingly gave it back.

  “Don’t even think about it, Kik,” Breisi said.

  He got a look on his face that Dawn had seen way too often lately. Hurt, resentment. “Why can’t I just give it a go?”

  “Because, honestly,” Dawn said, “I shouldn’t even be messing with the whip chain.”

  Kiko looked doubtful, like he knew she was just trying to make him feel better.

  “I’m serious,” she said. “I know full well I might hurt myself, even though I’ve had martial arts training for certain movies. But technically, I still don’t have enough experience to master this. I’m just lucky I found an instructor, thanks to The Voice.” He’d given her a lot of money to locate a teacher who would weigh her determination and knack for quick learning against common sense. And, lo and behold, it’d worked. Bribes could create wonders.

  All in all, there’d been a lot of training this past month. A lot of healing, too. Kiko hadn’t been the only one to sustain injuries from vamp fights but, aside from some stubborn aches, Dawn’s wounds had been pretty well taken care of by a gel Breisi had concocted in the lab, as well as some rest and medical attention. But that didn’t mean Dawn had sat on her butt, waiting to get better. Hell, no. She’d been working on perfecting her mind blocks—keeping others out of her head—as well as those mind pushes. She’d remained in shape, training physically according to her healing progress, and she’d caught up on studying her monster lore, poring over type-written case files housed in The Voice’s library.

  Obviously ticked, Kiko looked away from Breisi and Dawn, shutting them out. He fixed a gaze on the TV. To Dawn, the volume seemed to fill the room, emphasizing the awkwardness of having to leave Kiko in the dust when it came to fighting.

  Not knowing what else to say, she glanced at the screen, too. It featured FOX News, where the entire day’s coverage was devoted to Lee Tomlinson, a killer Dawn and the team knew all too well. They’d been keeping constant tabs on any updates: besides being a probable Servant to the Underground, Lee had murdered the woman who’d given them information about Robby, who was part of the Underground himself….

  On the TV, the reporter enthused about the career Lee could’ve had, how he might’ve been “the new Brandon Lee.”

  “Only on the surface,” Dawn muttered, tucking the whip chain into her pocket and crossing her arms over her chest. She glanced at Kiko, hoping to draw him out with a conversation guaranteed to turn his attitude around. “There’s a difference between people like Lee Tomlinson who just look like a famous celebrity and people like…” She swallowed, not wanting to mention the next name but, then again, sort of needing to if she was ever going to grow up and get over her neuroses. “…Jacqueline Ashley.”

  There.

  Kiko perked right up at the magic words.

  Dawn blew out a breath. Kiko’s crush, their new friend Jac, had gotten a makeover that had changed the faceless starlet into an Eva Claremont throwback, a bloodcurdling almost-double who was persistent about becoming Dawn’s buddy. She was continually calling with invitations to spar at the fencing studio where they’d met, but Dawn hadn’t taken her up on it yet. Someday she would, just to get past the fears Jac’s resemblance dredged up. Maybe.

  “I guess,” Dawn said, “there’s something different about Jac when it comes to the hype. You can tell she’s the real star and Lee’s a poseur.”

  Catching on to Dawn’s protective arm cross, Breisi rose to a stand and came over from the mirro
red wall to pat her coworker’s shoulder. The other woman had been in the room the day Jacqueline Ashley had revealed her Eva makeover. Just recalling the moment made Dawn dizzy, ill, longing for her mom to come back while, at the same time, hating her for leaving. Hating her for being so beautiful and perfect while Dawn was neither.

  “Have you talked to Jac?” Kiko asked, all puppylike. “Is she still doing that ‘buccaneer boot camp’ for her movie?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s my girl.” He performed his rendition of Happy Kiko, reveling in a geeky glow. “Her first big gig.”

  “She’s trying to get me a job on the set, but…”

  They all nodded. Even though Jac’s movie wouldn’t shoot for another month, Dawn had been forced to call all her industry contacts to tell them she’d be out of commission for a while. Did that finally make her an ex-stuntwoman?

  Once again, she felt the machete in her hand as she winged it down to terminate Robby.

  With one final squeeze to Dawn’s upper arm, Breisi handed her gun over, dug into her cargo pants pockets for beanbags, and gave them to Dawn. “What do you say you muchachos take a run at me now?”

  Kiko scrunched his nose. “I’ve gotten into a mental mood with this break, Breez. Unless you and Dawn want to go at it. I’d love to see a good catfight.”

  “Gross.” Dawn made as if to punch him, and he flinched, even though he knew she wouldn’t go there.

  “I’m just being honest about my all-American, red-blooded maleness.” He grinned.

  “Kik,” Breisi said, business in her tone as she moved to the opposite side of the gym. “You want to work or not?”

  “Okay, okay.”

  As he left, Dawn busied herself by loading a beanbag into Breisi’s gun. By chance, she glanced over, catching sight of Kiko by the far corner, turning away from her. He inspected his gun, slipping a hand to his back, holding it like it was paining him. But in the next second, he was loading a beanbag, acting as if everything was normal.

  Frowning, she took off the rubber-soled work boots she’d been wearing for the gym floor, then her socks. Kiko was a big boy and she wasn’t going to tell him to take a rest; she knew damned well that bringing up the subject would only encourage him to prove her wrong by playing that much harder. The best thing would be to keep an eye on him, and that was that.

  Waiting until Breisi closed her eyes and settled into a defensive hunch, Dawn changed position, ready to give the other woman a few karma bruises.

  But before the first shot could be fired, the TV blipped off, the room going quiet.

  Her body readied itself, pounding, heating, because she knew what was coming next.

  The Voice eased through the speakers, low and rough, still-of-the-night lethal.

  “I need all of you in my office,” he said. “We’ve finally got something.”

  THREE

  THE LEAD

  IF there was one way to describe the joint that housed Limpet and Associates, it was “Vincent Price on mescaline.”

  With its grand staircase edged with gargoyle-decorated balustrades, its creaky hardwood floors, its knight-in-creepy-armor sensibilities, the place floated in the twilight area between kitschy and truly haunted. Dawn wasn’t sure which was more accurate because, based on what she’d seen so far, anything was possible.

  As the team walked from the back of the house to the front, they passed under a massive iron chandelier that resembled a claw topped by melted candles. Then, while everyone climbed the stairs, she couldn’t help eyeing a painting that hung over the granite fireplace mantel and dominated the room.

  The Fire Woman, Dawn had started to call her. A seduction-postured temptress wrapped in a flame-red robe.

  Dawn felt watched, just like she always did around The Voice’s collection of portraits.

  There was a good reason for that, too.

  They made their way down the dark hall to The Voice’s office, where the door stood open in dubious welcome. Inside, velvet curtains blocked the windows, books stood sentinel on the floor-to-ceiling shelves, and a magnificent TV surrounded by speakers reigned. There were portraits here, too, but oddly, one of the baroque wood frames enclosed a permanently empty field of fire. The rest of the pictures held the images of females, each of them looking like they’d been caught sliding their clothes off while webbed in an erotic fantasy.

  Friends, Dawn thought. That’s what Breisi and Kiko called the women in the paintings. She’d discovered they were spirits, that the portraits were something like beds where they rested. Where they watched. Always watched.

  As Dawn took a seat in a velvet-lined chair, the faint scent of jasmine crept over her, the perfume of these ghosts who had fought Robby Pennybaker right along with Dawn and Breisi that horrible night.

  Skin alive with sensation, just as it always was in The Voice’s office, Dawn tried to relax. So many things confused her about being here: this new preternatural world, the raging impatience to find her missing dad, the strange ecstasy of what The Voice could do—and had done—to her body and mind.

  Who was this man? she asked herself for probably the one thousandth time.

  After the Robby incident, she’d done research, visiting an Internet café to bring up articles and images of Mr. Jonah Limpet—The Voice’s real name. She’d found rare photographs of a young guy who held a hand over his face to avoid being caught by the cameras. He had short, dark hair that curled slightly at the ends. His body looked tall and wiry under long, untucked shirts and khaki pants.

  Wanting more, Dawn had delved further, finding out that he was the reclusive heir to a medical supply fortune, that he never left any of his houses except to travel between them under a veil of secrecy. His aged parents had passed away years ago, but he’d held the funerals on Limpet property, being so wealthy that he’d never even needed to step foot into the actual world.

  How had Jonah Limpet gotten this way? And why had he closed himself off from everything but the Underground?

  Dawn crossed her arms over her chest, preparing to block out his well-established hypnotic powers before he could get the jump on her. He liked being inside her, liked solving her, too, bringing her to physical climaxes while lapping up her emotions.

  Thing was, she liked it. Hated it. Loved it.

  Realizing that she was getting all repressed again, Dawn sighed, resting her hands on her lap. All her life, she’d shoved her emotions into an inner box, but lately, she’d been trying hard to keep herself more open. She needed to face what The Voice was, and more important, what he’d become to her.

  Nearby, Kiko arranged himself on a settee, sitting bolt upright because of his brace. The sight pinched at her. She was used to seeing him plop into chairs, then collapse into a sprawled mess of comfort.

  He caught her sad gaze, his jaw going tight. Dawn glanced away, knowing the last thing he wanted was pity.

  “You said you had something?” she said to The Voice.

  Now that they’d settled, the TV screen bloomed with color. The Voice had started his meeting in the usual way: silently, arrogantly, efficiently, and with succinct visual aids.

  The screen sharpened to reveal a press conference, and a familiar one at that. Dawn had seen Marla Pennybaker’s announcement just days after Robby had encouraged his father to kill himself, then was finally exterminated himself. As the older woman stiltedly talked about her husband’s suicide—a true enough statement, except that it’d been brought on by the man’s refusal to join Robby in a vampire Underground that his son had never fully explained—Dawn evaluated Marla’s body language.

  Garbed in a white silk suit, she seemed more put together than Dawn had ever seen her. Back when she’d engaged Limpet and Associates to find Robby, her face had been lined by grief and fear. Yet now…there was acceptance, like she didn’t remember the hell they’d all gone through.

  Kiko grunted. “We’ve seen this, Boss. And it still looks like she’s reading from a script.”

  “That wou
ld make sense if she was mind wiped by a vampire,” The Voice said. “I’ve seen this type of reaction many times, though it’s not noticeable unless one is searching for it.”

  Breisi primly crossed her legs as she took notes. “We’ve already speculated that when the Guards kidnapped Marla that night, they made sure she wouldn’t come back with memories of anything relating to them.”

  Dawn could still picture the horror of Marla being whisked away by the red-eyes. The team hadn’t seen the older woman again until a few days later, during the press conference. There, she’d insisted that her son’s weird appearance in a film after he’d been dead for twenty-three years—the catalyst for Limpet and Associates to take her case—had been nothing more than a cruel joke perpetuated by a few special effects artists having fun at the Pennybakers’ expense.

  Without warning, the TV screen zoomed in on someone in the conference’s audience, a stately man with gray-tinged hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a natty suit. This was something they hadn’t noticed before; The Voice must’ve been scanning the images closely.

  “Who’s that?” Kiko asked.

  Dawn knew. “Milton Crockett. He’s a lawyer, a ‘fixer’ around town. Basically, if you’re a celebrity who murdered your mistress or an actor who’s been caught with your pants around your ankles in front of an elementary school, he’s your man. I recognize him because he took some meetings on the Blades of Spain set. He was helping Leland Richards when he got into trouble with some gigolo who was accusing our manly star of liking other manly men.”

  Kiko raised a brow. “Was it true?”

  Dawn shrugged. “I guess we’ll never know. Crockett did his job and the accuser never said another word in public.”

  Breisi’s pen stopped moving over her clipboard. “I wonder if Milton Crockett could be the reason Marla would not talk to us after she reappeared.”

  Interesting. Upon attempting to contact her, Limpet and Associates had been threatened with a restraining order from Marla’s new “personal assistant,” so they’d never been able to interview her. Once, when Breisi had attempted to wheedle her way around the red tape by intercepting Marla during a shopping trip at The Grove, the assistant/bodyguard had intervened. He definitely could’ve been hired by Milton Crockett’s firm.