Deep In the Woods

by Chris Marie Green

He shifted next to her on the bed, and she realized that they were alone, sitting on a mattress. It was the way he’d moved that had clued her in to it, as if their situation meant a lot more to him than it did to her. Then again, Jonah had set his sights on Dawn because Costin had her.

  Was that the only way he’d ever experienced intimacy? Through a Soul Traveler who shared his body as well as through his borrower’s relationship with another person?

  Jonah touched Dawn’s face, where the dragon red marks splotched her skin in what seemed right now to be permanent, hideous splashes.

  She tried to angle away from him, because she’d seen the medical professionals’ expressions when they’d inspected her skin at the emergency department. They’d tried to hide their curiosity, but Dawn still felt like she could’ve turned any one of them to stone with just a well-placed glare.

  Jonah wasn’t deterred. He kept his fingertips against the splashes.

  “Stop it,” Dawn said, and he took his hand away.

  He kept sitting next to her, hardly chased off. She wished he wouldn’t keep looking at her.

  “Does it hurt?” he asked.

  “On the surface, not really. Just a weird burning. I suppose that it felt so good attacking the dragon that I got the best beauty mark ever.”

  Not wanting this to go any further, she started to get up from the bed, but he grasped her good hand.

  “Damn it, Dawn, you’re really one for taking it all on you, aren’t you? Blame, shame, responsibility.”

  She pulled away, but she saw that openness in him again—a willingness to share everything, including what he’d learned as Costin’s host.

  “Even going back to when you were a girl,” he added, “you had to assume care of Frank. When you got older, you rebelled against taking any more of that kind of thing on, but when a bigger situation called for you, you stepped up and took care of it in the only way you knew how. But if you’re going to find any kind of satisfaction with yourself, you’ve got to start letting go.”

  He sounded like Costin in one of his psychiatry moments. No wonder Jonah had been chosen as a host.

  “Enough.” She went for the door. “There’s too much to do and—”

  “If he is gone, Dawn,” he said softly, “I’m not.”

  His naked statement waited there, just like a ghost hovering to be noticed and acknowledged.

  She wasn’t even quite sure he’d said it . . . or meant it. What was he thinking—that he’d step into the spot Costin had vacated if it came down to it?

  Dawn didn’t look back as she went through the door, limping as fast as her injuries allowed her to while navigating the rest of the hallway to the stairs. From there, she headed for the sitting room, where she heard Kiko and Natalia listening to a TV.

  She tried not to think of Jonah still back in that room, sitting on the bed, smarting from the callous way she’d left him. But he’d said the wrong thing. He had no right, even if she despaired of Costin ever coming back. Jonah had told her to let go, and he needed to, also. Now that he was human, he could go out into the world and find some nice, unscary girl who didn’t advertise her screwups so obviously. A girl with pretty skin and way fewer hang-ups who would give him a good reason to continue living.

  Dawn got to the sitting room, and the hellhounds on the wall tapestries seemed to leer at her as she approached Kiko and Natalia, who were together on a rose-upholstered settee, tuned in to a BBC news station.

  Or maybe it’d be more accurate to say that a slightly bandaged Natalia was diligently watching TV and taking notes while a more heavily Band-Aided Kiko was tapping his fingers on the settee, staring off into space.

  Then his gaze zeroed in on Dawn as if she’d just—pop!—appeared. The first thing he looked at was the splotches of red on her face, and Dawn stopped herself from wincing.

  It made her appreciate Jonah’s acceptance just a little, even if he was suspect.

  Kiko said, “There you are.”

  “What’re you up to?”

  “Oh, just thinking.”

  Natalia glanced at Dawn, blanching at the red marks and going back to the TV.

  It was enough to drive Dawn out of the room. “I’m going to temp headquarters to see Frank. It’s been a while since Eva checked in, and even though she said things are okay and he’s just resting, I want to make sure.”

  Kiko gave her a salute, but she could tell his mind was still elsewhere.

  After grabbing her cell phone and stuffing it into the pocket of a jacket she wore over just one side of her body, she took the same doorway off the foyer where the Friends had ushered the team the other night, just before whizzing them away to temporary headquarters. When Dawn descended to the tunnel, then got into one of the railed carts, she realized that her trip there wouldn’t be as quick as it’d been when the Friends had pushed the team along. But the spirits who weren’t looking for Costin outside needed to recharge from the Underground attack, and Dawn wasn’t about to rouse any of them just to make her trip faster, so she accessed the electric motor and sailed along at a decent enough clip.

  All the way there, she couldn’t shake off thoughts of Della laid out on the grass, that sweet smile on her face. Were the girls at least happier now?

  Dawn hoped to God they were.

  When she arrived at temp HQ, the shelter seemed filled with dead air.

  “Eva?” she called.

  All she heard was the ricochet of her voice off the concrete on its way down the length of the shelter.

  She passed the spot where she’d slain Claudius, taking care not to look at it too much, then came to Eva’s room.

  Which was empty.

  She had a bad feeling about this.

  When she opened Frank’s door, she expected to find him huddled under his blankets in the dimness, just like before when she’d first discovered he was sick. But, this time, she was pretty sure she’d find a humanized Frank because of the dragon’s death. She’d be lying if she didn’t admit that she wondered if his change would signal a return back to the “old Frank”—the drunk who’d never had his shit together.

  Then again, Breisi was with him, and she’d been a salvation to him.

  Dawn saw him in his bed, and she went to it. “Hey, I’m sure you already know this, but the dragon’s toast. That’s why you’re human again.”

  Under the wool, his breathing seemed to be labored, but she couldn’t tell for certain with the lights off.

  “Frank?”

  When he turned away from the wall, he seemed to be caught in Dawn’s pained haze . . . or in scary-movie slow motion, where the nightmare had second upon dreadful second to permeate your head.

  She stared at him—a freak from a painting called “The Scream.” A haunted being with a wide mouth, wide eyes in a skeleton of a face draped with wrinkled skin.

  Dawn screamed, too, long and hard, and it didn’t stop even when she smelled a wisp of jasmine from the floor, where something felt like a pool dragging at Dawn’s boots.

  Breisi?

  Eva’s voice came from behind them, in a corner.

  “Congratulations on your victory,” her mother said, just before Dawn turned around, another scream clogging her chest when she saw what Eva had become, too.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  THE WHITE LADY

  DAWN only knew it was her mother because Eva was sitting there in a rickety chair dressed in a long white nightgown, one leg crossed over the other, her hands folded in her lap with a sense of silver screen chic that a real star never surrendered, even with a change of identity.

  Then there was the rest of her.

  Even in the hallway-lit room, Dawn could see Eva’s snake-tangled blond hair, and her eyes. . . . God, it was her staring eyes that did it. She had the gaze of a wife who’d been locked away in an attic by her husband.

  But Eva was also smiling, looking happier than Dawn had ever seen her.

  It’s my state of mind—pain, exhaustion, Dawn thought, closing her eyes, fum
bling for something to hold on to for balance. She found a table near the head of Frank’s bed that took her weight. This had to be her nutso state of mind at work on her, because Eva was acting like everything was normal.

  But when Dawn opened her eyes, Eva was the same mess. Dawn didn’t even know how much time had passed as she grappled to accept that what she saw in front of her was real.

  Then she remembered Frank. After working her way around to actually talking, Dawn didn’t overreact. Instead, she spoke quietly, as if a loud word would rile Eva out of her corner and hell would break loose.

  “Mom, what happened here? Did Frank’s vamp sickness get worse before he went human again?” And what the hell happened to you? she wanted to shout.

  Eva sighed, as if this would be a real long story. “Frank will eventually be fine. I’ve made sure of it.”

  “He should be at a hospital.” Dawn didn’t care how many questions a doctor would ask. “Why didn’t you take him there?”

  “I tried my best to see that matters wouldn’t go that far. I’ve been taking care of him, Dawn.”

  There was something about Eva’s lullaby voice and constant smile that went beyond spooky. Went beyond basic shudders. This was a more primal fright that made the center of Dawn’s bones go ice-cold.

  Her mom continued. “He was healing, but then, out of nowhere, he seized up, then started altering, and I realized that something had to have happened in the Underground to affect him.”

  Dawn could explain the dragon’s death later. “Right—Frank went human again, so that means he won’t heal like he did when he was a vampire. This vamp sickness that he contracted obviously didn’t work itself off when—”

  Eva’s smile disappeared as her voice sliced out. “He isn’t sick.” Then she uncrossed her legs, crossing them the other way, another pleasant smile counteracting her sharpness. “I simply took too much from him.”

  What?

  Frank was wheezing in an attempt to breathe, and Dawn had to concentrate on him more than Eva.

  “We’re gonna get you to a hospital, Dad. Just hold on.” She reached for the cell phone in her jacket, not sure if it’d get reception, but she had to try.

  “Please don’t,” Eva said. “I told you, he doesn’t need medical aid. I’ll take care of him. He’ll want me to now.”

  With one hand, Dawn flipped open her phone to the bright LED screen.

  What happened next seemed like a flicker of time—here and gone before she could even react.

  Eva rose from the chair, her nightgown a mass of white as she repeated “no” in a voice that smacked of charm, but wasn’t quite the same as a vampire’s. Then she touched the phone and went back to her seat, her hands folded in her lap again as if she hadn’t moved.

  Dawn stared at Eva as her consciousness caught up. Just like déjà vu, she thought. A blur of reality mixed with the surreal.

  Thinking that she’d imagined the moment, Dawn accessed her phone, but it was dead, as if the battery had suddenly gone kaput.

  Ice wiggled up her spine as she slowly put the phone away. She didn’t like what she was thinking about her mom, who’d stowed herself away in her room for nights without anyone really paying attention to her. Dawn should’ve followed up after the wine bar, should’ve gotten her head out of saving the world and concentrated on what was right in front of her instead. Wasn’t that what a good daughter would’ve done?

  “Interesting,” Eva said. “You went ahead and tried to phone out, anyway. It seems my charm only works on men. Or maybe just on the people who really do want to be charmed.”

  “Mom,” Dawn said, even more softly now. “Just how have you been taking care of Frank?”

  Her mother smoothed her hands over her white nightgown. “I’m not sure how to explain.”

  “Try.”

  Frank kept wheezing, as if he was attempting to tell Dawn everything in his own way. She rested a hand on his frail shoulder to make him stop wasting his energy. At her feet, Breisi was making the same efforts to communicate, and Dawn had the feeling that Eva had done something to Dawn’s friend, too.

  “I needed him,” Eva said simply.

  “Needed him for what?”

  Her mother’s smile grew, and Dawn realized that she and her mom were in two different worlds. Dawn just wished she knew where Eva’s was.

  The heft of a revolver in Dawn’s jacket pocket seemed to pull her down. She didn’t like that Eva was making her realize the weapon was there.

  “Are you a vampire again?” Dawn’s voice betrayed a wisp of approaching dread. Damn it. She put more force behind her question. “Is that what happened at that wine bar when you were alone, without anyone watching you?”

  “Not a vampire,” Eva said.

  “Then what?”

  “I. Don’t. Know.” The responses were bladed, but they had the cool grace of butterfly knives.

  Frank’s fingers wrapped weakly around Dawn’s wrist. He was moving his pruned mouth, laboring to produce sounds, but nothing came out.

  Dawn was reaching her wits’ end. “Start talking, Eva.”

  Her mom didn’t even blink, just kept smiling. Happy, bursting smiling that seemed so out of place with what she ended up saying. “You, out of everyone, should know this was bound to happen. I lasted as long as I could after everyone else in the L.A. Underground took their lives or ran away, never to be heard from again. They’re probably all dead now, and that’s how I’ve felt for this past year, too. Dead. The only thing that’s kept me alive was how you tried to make us a family again.”

  Dawn gripped Frank’s thinned fingers, as if that would help her to withstand what Eva was saying. If she’d known her mom would end up like this, she might’ve done something. She wasn’t sure what, but look at them now. Look at what she’d brought on by not realizing Eva’s stain would turn out to be just as bad as her own.

  Her mother’s hands were still in her lap, her bare feet peeking out from beneath her nightgown, her hair a bristled cloud around her face from the stray hairs sneaking out from the coils. “I couldn’t go on, day after day, pretending things were okay with Frank living just a block away with Breisi. So I offered myself to him through my blood, and he rejected me. And I left, thinking there was no more left for me.”

  She’d gone to the wine bar.

  “Were you bitten by the time I got to you?” Dawn asked, recalling the giddy difference in Eva—a bliss that really had gone past drunkenness, now that she knew better.

  “I told you—I wasn’t bitten.”

  Frank groaned on the bed, and Eva got out of her chair as if he’d sent her an invitation to come to him.

  “If you don’t mind,” she said, motioning for Dawn to move aside. “I’ve recovered from taking care of him the last time, and I’m ready to do it again.”

  The only reason Dawn surrendered her place was that Frank was in trouble and Eva seemed to know a way of helping—at least until Dawn could get him out of here.

  Breisi clung to her ankles, as if warning Dawn. Then, in the subdued light from the hall, Dawn watched as Eva used her nail to open a wound on her wrist and hold it over Frank’s shriveled mouth.

  He turned his head away as the blood dripped to him, leaking from the sides of his lips as he refused Eva once again.

  Dawn went light-headed, the pain from her injuries still working its muddiness on her. “He’s not a vampire anymore. Why would he want your blood?”

  “Because of what I am. I think that my blood is the reason he survived going human again. He might not have been strong enough to take the change without me. But don’t worry—he won’t turn into anything nonhuman because he’s drinking from me. My blood doesn’t seem to have any power beyond a higher nutrition. I’m only nursing him back to the way he used to be.”

  Her mom was mostly talking about bringing him back to the days when he’d loved her.

  “What I want to know,” she said, moving toward Eva out of an instinctive need to protect her dad, “is
how the hell he got this way.”

  Her mother lightly pushed Dawn away, as if she was nothing but a pest. Dawn’s ire churned, the dragon’s blood heating in her, but she was so tired, so injured that there was only a pathetic spark that stung her. The spark didn’t even flare up the dragon’s blood as much as it made the marks pound, like a living thing that’d been prodded.

  Frank’s tongue licked at Eva’s blood, and he whimpered, as if he hated himself for knowing it would help him.

  Eva said, “There we go, baby,” and gave him more. He took in every bit, and there wasn’t a damned thing Dawn could do—not if this would make him better, like Eva claimed. Dawn wouldn’t deprive him of the only medicine at hand.

  “You tell me what went on in that wine bar,” Dawn said.

  Eva’s smile beamed in the near darkness. “A man. And he gave me just what I’d been hoping for.”

  Then she told Dawn of his enthralling eyes, his foreign accent, his way of talking a woman into trusting him. When she arrived at the part where she and the man had melded their blood, skin to skin, deal to deal, Dawn took a sudden step away from Eva.

  Sweet Jesus.

  Not again. This was a joke. Eva was trying to get attention. This was . . .

  This was actually happening.

  Dawn had read about things like this before—bargains with demons, advocates who took advantage of desperate, sad, or greedy humans—but she’d been so focused on vampires that she’d never imagined . . . never thought . . .

  “He took your soul,” Dawn said. Hadn’t the team suspected that London was a gathering ground for the paranormal? Shouldn’t she have been on watch for more than just vamps?

  Lost, Dawn thought. Eva was never coming back, was she? She’d slipped right through the cracks of Dawn’s life.

  Why couldn’t she have stopped this?

  “Yes, he took my soul,” Eva said. “And, in trade, he gave me a new chance with Frank.”

  Could’ve stopped this . . .

  Frank had finished drinking, and Eva was pressing her fingers to her wrist. With a grimace, he rolled his head to the side, breathing more evenly, in spite of his clear dismay at having given in to her.