But why wouldn’t he? He used to like Eva’s bagged blood more than any other because it did something for him, and it seemed that this craving had continued into a different era. Dawn wondered if he would always need Eva in some way.
Her mom was watching her former husband as if they were married again. “I would’ve given up my soul a thousand times over for him.”
“You mean you would’ve given it so Dad could be sick and dependent on you?”
When Eva merely gazed at him with warped affection Dawn had her answer.
“So this man in the wine bar . . .” Dawn said, still searching, still hoping there was a way out of this for all of them. If she just tried again. . . . “It sounds like he was a representative, a lower demon who goes around collecting souls for whatever you want to call it . . . the devil . . . the dark side . . .”
“And if he was?” Eva said.
“That doesn’t scare the ever-loving shit out of you?”
Dawn heard herself, recognizing that a woman who’d given up her soul to be a vampire one time probably wouldn’t be afraid of much.
Eva calmly swiveled her gaze over, doubling the fear in Dawn’s jumping pulse.
“I never really had my soul back,” her mother said. “Not as it was before I gave it up the first time when I exchanged blood and became a vampire. I think all our souls returned with the need for us to destroy ourselves, didn’t they? They’ve been raked through a place they weren’t meant to be, whether it was stored in one of Benedikte’s vials or wandering through the atmosphere not knowing where to go. It dirtied them. There was a price for us to keep on living after our humanity returned.” Eva lavished her attention on Frank again. “To tell you the truth, a tainted soul wasn’t all that valuable to me when I was asked to give it up this time.”
“Don’t say that.” This woman on the bed . . . she couldn’t be Eva . . . she hardly even looked like her.
Then Dawn thought of Della and the girls: how they’d been monsters, too, but had seemed so human in their last actions. Wasn’t there hope for Eva in the end if Dawn could save her?
She bunched her good hand into a fist. She couldn’t give up, especially not on her mother.
Eva tossed off another comment, but this one hit its target smack in the center of Dawn. “I was never going to be truly human again, and I accepted that. You should, too.”
Dawn had been thinking it all along. But Eva saying it verified all her worst nightmares.
Never human again . . .
Eva touched Frank’s shirt, and he cringed. Breisi went taut around Dawn’s ankles. She seemed to be a little stronger, but she wasn’t moving.
Was she saving herself for something . . . ?
“So you couldn’t be a vampire,” Dawn said, “and you settled for this. A creature I can’t even really identify.”
“I’m better than a vampire. I take what I need with a touch from anyone.”
Breisi rubbed against Dawn’s legs, as if trying to tell her something else, and Dawn took a guess at what it was.
As Eva had said, Frank wasn’t sick. Eva had touched him. Obviously, she sucked energy from her victim—maybe even emotion, too—and Frank was her unfortunate obsession.
Eva didn’t know it, but she was a vampire of sorts. A psychic one by way of a demon. And as Dawn coasted her gaze over her mother’s crazed appearance, she realized that she didn’t know how to fight this kind of danger.
“Is Frank the only one you’ve ‘touched,’ Eva?”
Her mom stroked down Frank’s clothed chest. He’d shut his eyes, acting like if he couldn’t see it, it didn’t exist. She was getting awfully close to his bare skin.
Dawn’s hand hovered near the revolver in her pocket.
“There was my first experiment, the other night,” Eva said. “I slipped out of headquarters because I was . . . hungry. I didn’t even have a hint of what I was capable of until I moved past the Friends without being noticed—probably, I suspect, because I didn’t want them to see me—and disabled your alarm with a touch.”
The alarm at one of the back entrances? That’d been Eva?
She added, “And when I realized just what I was hungry for, I touched the boy, just like I’d touched the laser tracker and camera. But he . . .” Eva laid her palm flat on Frank’s shirt- covered chest and said, “He fed me.”
“How?”
“With his desire. With his appreciation.”
“Where is he now?”
“In a grave.”
“Mom,” Dawn said, reeling.
Eva had killed someone, and she didn’t seem to have any remorse. Even the L.A. vampires had been careful about bloodletting by taking willing victims.
Dawn couldn’t look at Eva. But she had to hear the rest.
“Then,” her mother said, “I touched Breisi when she came here to ‘defend’ Frank from me.”
“You sapped Breisi?” Scenarios attacked Dawn: What would happen to a Friend if she lost all energy? Had Breisi reached that point? Was she just a sentient being that melted to the floor, unable to move but feeling everything anyway?
That had to be a certain circle of hell, and Dawn wasn’t about to let Breisi settle there for the rest of her time on earth.
Then a quieter thought slid in on the tail end of all the others. She hadn’t stopped to realize this before, but if Costin had really left, why hadn’t the Friends gone with him? They had a deal: they were supposed to help him with his mission, and when they all finished, the spirits could seek eternal peaceful rest.
The notion actually gave Dawn a positive lift when she’d had nothing but hopelessness before.
At Dawn’s feet, Breisi held on.
“You know she can’t even get back to her portrait now,” Dawn said. “Were you just going to leave her like this?”
“I didn’t think much about it.”
“You should have.”
“I . . . don’t believe I have it in me anymore.”
She said it as if she were just discovering she had this power, too—the freedom to not care.
Dawn was speechless.
“You really don’t understand, do you?” Eva asked. “You think you can bring me back. But I like the way I am. Hour after hour, I’ve erased all the truths in me and I’m finally content. Can’t you be happy for me?”
That was it. The end. Dawn didn’t hear her mother anywhere in there, didn’t really even see her in this white lady who didn’t care about anything but her own wants and needs. This killer who’d touched a boy the other night and taken his life. She’d do the same to Frank when she finally realized that he’d never love her again.
There really was no going back.
Dawn got ready to grab the revolver. What else was there to do? Eva wasn’t just acting soulless, she sounded that way, too, her tone as remote as the ten-mile distance in her gaze.
“There’s no humanity left in you?” Dawn asked. “None?”
Eva seemed to think about it. “I’m not sure. Not yet.”
“You’ll decide later or something?”
“Dawn.” Chiding. Disappointment. “Don’t be petulant.”
“This is beyond petulance.”
“This is how you’ve always been, even as a one- month-old baby. So focused on yourself.”
Ape-shit crazy—that’s what Eva was. Yet, even through it all, Dawn sensed that some kind of truth was about to roll down on her. But hadn’t she wanted to get to it for a while? She’d never quite believed all the excuses her mom had leaned on about her managers telling the young, naïve actress that she was helping her family by going Underground.
“Go for it,” Dawn said, just daring her mom to be as inhuman as she seemed. Polite humanity had obviously kept Eva from revealing anything hurtful to Dawn, probably for good reason. “Tell me how you really feel, Eva.”
She just offered an uncanny glance. “I took Benedikte’s blood into me and gave my own to him because I loved the way it felt when I was worshipped, and I want
ed that forever. You never looked at me the way the fans did, Dawn. Even as a baby, I could see you wouldn’t love me like they would.”
Breisi seemed to hug Dawn from where she was at her feet, but that only served to squeeze every last bit of rage from the bottom of Dawn’s body up, making the dragon’s blood stir even more, like it wanted to spring alive.
But she was too . . . done, especially after Costin’s disappearance. She had nothing left, especially for this woman she realized she didn’t know at all. She didn’t even have enough anger to lash out.
“So that’s how you’ve always felt, deep down,” Dawn said. “You just have the balls to say it now.”
“The truth hurts.”
Eva turned back to Frank, whose face was averted, just as it’d been throughout Dawn’s whole life.
“This isn’t to say that I really didn’t want you and Frank to be with me again,” she added.
“Because it completed you?” Dawn chuffed. “Is that what you told yourself?”
“I do love you.” Eva’s eerie, smiley voice didn’t entirely reflect it, but there was a hint that made Dawn think she wasn’t lying. Dawn just couldn’t compete with the love everyone else had given to Eva.
She limped toward a light switch and flipped it on, flooding the room with illumination. It was too easy for Eva to get through this in the near darkness. She wanted her mother to look at her while she rained these blows down.
Eva said, “You know I plan to leave, of course. With Frank.”
Breisi jerked against Dawn, who agonized for her friend. It was then she sincerely realized that Breisi had been more a part of Dawn and Frank’s family than Eva had ever been.
She’d had them all along, but what had she concentrated on instead? Eva. Always Eva.
With a sinking feeling, Dawn realized it was time to let go of her mother. “I can’t let Frank leave,” Dawn said.
On the bed, her father turned his face toward Dawn, his eyes brighter.
“Don’t bother putting up a fight,” Eva said. “I’ve been feeling that the man from the wine bar wants me to come to him. I think he was just waiting until I was ready.”
“Then go, just not with Frank.”
The second Dawn said it, she wanted to pull it back, even after everything. If her mom hadn’t said that she did love her—even a little—this would’ve been so much easier.
Eva held a hand out to Dawn. “You can come with us.”
Dawn had always wanted to hear that, but not in this way.
“Dawn, what else is left for you here?”
Breisi, she thought. Kiko. And the need for Dawn to find out, once and for all, where Costin really was before she gave up on him.
Eva meant nothing next to all of it, and Dawn felt a part of her die at that.
But she had a dilemma: if she stopped Eva from leaving with Frank, it would mean no more nourishing blood sustenance from Eva for her dad, and already, Dawn could see that her father looked a little improved because of what Eva had given him. Then again, letting him go with her . . .
No contest. Eva would just drain him of energy when he got better. The cycle would never stop.
“Eva,” she said, “you need to leave now.”
Her mother just kept her hand out, as if expecting Dawn to grab on to it. Dawn took out her revolver, letting it rest by her side.
Strangely, Eva laughed. Then, in another déjà vu moment, she got up, touched the gun, twisting it into a steel pretzel, and was back to sitting on the bed within the stutter of a heartbeat.
Dawn dropped her useless weapon to the floor. She didn’t have anything else to fight with. She was too beaten down, her emotions limping through her like a dying pulse, and she couldn’t conjure any anger beyond the tiny reminder of the dragon’s blood, which felt like it was struggling to come alive in its own way.
Could she use that instead? Clean Eva’s clock and keep her from ever hurting Frank and Breisi again?
The temptation made the splashes on her skin flare, heat traveling below her flesh, toward her soul stain, which seemed to expand, reaching out to the dragon.
As they almost touched, Dawn mentally separated them, ice jolting through her veins.
What the hell had just happened?
Shit. Shitshitshit.
As she calmed down, she kept herself frosty, beating her urges. The dragon’s smile . . .
Was he inside of her?
Dawn had no time to think when Eva reached toward Frank. If she touched him, he’d suffer the loss of more energy—
Just before Eva made contact with Frank, Breisi came to life—she’d obviously been saving energy in case Eva attacked—and she darted from Dawn’s feet to fly at the other woman, pushing her to the mattress.
Frank sat up, too, dragging his hand out from under the covers, where the flash of a blade glinted in the light.
He always carried a knife, but Eva obviously hadn’t checked him. Had she stunned Frank so thoroughly before that she believed her former husband wouldn’t be able to fight back now?
Maybe she even thought he wouldn’t want to fight back. . . .
He arced the knife at Eva’s chest, and as she gasped, the blade sank into her.
Frank fell back to the bed, wheezing, and Breisi slipped to him. Dawn merely stood by, frozen in mind and body as blood spread over Eva’s white nightgown.
She just lay there, her mouth twisted. Then her fingers crept up to touch her wound, as if she couldn’t believe it.
“Frank?” she asked.
He was clawing the sheets as he took in more breaths, but then Dawn realized that he was actually reaching for Breisi.
Eva realized it, too, and she trained her blank gaze on the ceiling, her hand over her heart, near the bloodstain.
“Mom?” Dawn asked, still immobile, on the edge of going to Eva, even after everything.
Eva seemed to cower from the name “Mom,” and Dawn stood rooted. This wasn’t her mother anymore.
Eva had died a long time ago.
The white lady rose from the bed, her body stiff, almost as if she was on a board and being lifted to a stand, and Dawn went for the knife Frank had dropped, not knowing if it would work on Eva since she hadn’t died yet from Frank’s strike.
Then her jaw unhinged to a startling length, and she screamed with such great fury that Dawn fell to the floor.
She shielded herself from that scream, which seemed to hold all Eva’s anger at being set aside. All her wounds bled into a sound that made hell seem as if it was right below them, opening up while the walls shook, the door swinging out into the hall.
Dawn pressed one ear to the side of the bed, her good hand over her other ear, blocking off the sound just like she’d had to do with Claudius. But Eva’s scream lasted longer, and it was as deep as a gouge that would never heal.
The seemingly endless scream brought down chairs, cabinets, almost like they were trees falling, clearing the area. Then the keening quickly trickled to a gurgle, and Dawn looked up at her mom to find that Eva’s face was a mask of almost human defeat and sadness.
She’d been stabbed near the heart by the only man she’d ever loved.
Then a blank Eva stiffly moved out of the room, sobbing, “But he promised me . . .” As she left Frank behind without another look, she almost seemed to float in that nightgown with the scarlet chest stain.
In the aftermath, Frank whispered Breisi’s name, and they huddled together as best they could, as if they were afraid the white lady would come back. But if she did, Dawn was going to use the knife on her, getting her in the heart this time.
She’d had to let go of her mother, all but burying her in a box that she could store away, where it couldn’t be opened again.
She crawled to the door, her own injuries protesting. But when she got there, there was no Eva.
Just as if there hadn’t ever been an Eva for Dawn.
TWENTY-SIX
THE ART OF PLAYING WITH FIRE
FLAMES.
Closer to the soul stain.
Closer.
As if it knew it was being tracked, it paused. Pounded. Throbbed. Then, rounding, it reared up, the pop of fangs in a mouth that smiled, just before it struck with those teeth—
Dawn startled and pressed her hand to her heart, which was beating so hard that she thought it would turn to steaming water and trickle out of her. She’d been halfway between sleep and consciousness, but the dream had shaken her to a wide-awake place where adrenaline blinded her until she looked around the room, grounding herself to the sheer curtains around the bed, the darkened window, the walls.
She finally leveled out her breathing. Two days since Costin had left and the dreams had started. Two days since Eva had gone MIA, too.
Dawn hung her legs off the bed, grabbing a bottle of water from the nightstand and drinking the remainder of its contents in a few gulps. Then she slipped to the floor, walking toward the side of the room, her wounded leg slightly better from all the healing gel she’d been rubbing on it.
When she got to Costin’s field of fire portrait, which Kiko had propped against the wall, she peered into the flames, hoping beyond hope that Costin would magically appear.
Once, back in L.A., she’d found him resting in the painting. He hadn’t revealed what he really was to her yet, and he was as mysterious as ever with a red cape covering his form, his face hidden by the long, dark hair he’d sported when he’d had a body, before it’d been destroyed and he’d moved on to an existence of borrowing the “vessels” of others.
But now, there was only the fire that had always flamed in the background.
She stared at it, her heartbeat gradually mellowing. Then she backed away from the portrait, frustrated that Costin hadn’t come to it.
But what had she expected?
Deep In the Woods Page 26
