New Dawn

by Sharon Stevenson

  I roll my eyes, taking out the activation word. I stare at the slip of paper. This has to be a joke. I snort and Rob frowns at me.

  “What?” He folds his arms.

  “Get ready,” I tell him. If this isn’t the word… “Penis.”

  Rob opens his mouth, and the swoosh of magic that washed over him blurs his features before his new form emerges.

  I hold back the first flush of laughter that threatens to erupt. Now Rob’s pouting features and thin body are transformed into those of a curvaceous woman with thick blonde hair. I suppose I should have been more specific about the gender I wanted for this spell.

  “What…” Rob’s gaze drops to his chest. His hands grab at his breasts. “What the hell are these… Oh, fuck no. I’m not a woman, Connor.”

  I can’t hold the laughter in any longer and if looks could kill he’d have at least maimed me by now. The witch had a sense of humour, that much was for sure. No wonder she’d smirked when she’d put the charm in the bag.

  “This isn’t funny!” He starts to take the charm off and I manage to control my hysterics for long enough to command him not to. He huffs as he leaves it in place. “I’m going nowhere looking like this.”

  “Want a bet?”

  He knows what that means. As his maker, I have the last word. He mutters under his breath about understanding why vampires want to stake their makers. His voice hasn’t altered with the glamour, but it isn’t particularly masculine in the first place. He’s a little softly spoken. This could work. It was probably less suspicious than two men walking around together.

  “Where are we going anyway?”

  I take a breath, before the decision comes out. There’d be no taking it back once we got started.

  “We’re going back to Hollow Grove. We’re going to find out what the family looks like these days, and we’re going to figure out how to take them down.”

  New Dawn: Part Seven

  Sleeper – Dawn

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Insomnia has never been a problem for me. Not when I was human, and not while I was a vampire. The restorative properties of a good night’s sleep weren’t quite as obvious when I was living through the torture of being a prisoner in my own body, but I’d never felt quite this restless before. The missing girl plays on my mind. It’s all I can think about.

  No such thing as coincidence, after all.

  What could have happened? I don’t know, and I wouldn’t know where to begin to work it out. Eventually I gave up staring at the ceiling, threw on clothes and shoes and went for a walk. I’d never seen the streets at one am when I wasn’t drunk and concentrating on getting from one club to the next without freezing my ass off, or rushing to grab a taxi before the queue for them at the rank got insanely long. The streets were quiet for the most part, lights out in most of the homes I passed. Occasional sounds pierced the silence, and some of them I knew I was only noticing because of my supernaturally enhanced hearing. One cat screeching at another before a scuffle, the tiny sounds of a TV screen in a house nearby, a car engine rumbling in the distance. The silence isn’t settling my restlessness. I don’t know what I was hoping for, at least not until I heard it.

  The soft singing voice with the haunting lilt makes the hairs on my neck stand on end. I run through the streets towards the sound, praying I’m not imagining it. When the girl comes into sight, sitting on a bench at the edge of the park, I slow to a walk. I don’t want to spook her. Whatever’s going on, whatever she’d run away from, I’d do anything I could to help. I owed her at least that much. Approaching slowly, I walk around to face her. She looks up at me, her song halting as she removes her headphones. Her red lips pull into a smile with a snide edge to it.

  “Hello, Dawn.”

  “Uh, hey…” How the hell does she know my name?

  “Did you miss me?”

  “Miss you?” What exactly am I not getting here? I’d barely spoken to the girl before the night Nisha decided she was taking her. Does she remember any of that? I frown at her.

  “You always were a little slow on the uptake.” She sighs as she gets to her feet, shaking her head and showing me exactly what had happened to her. The face of a monster stares back at me curiously. “Do you get it yet, Dawn?”

  “No fucking way.”

  The anger burning through me in that moment is so violent it makes my head pound. Nisha has taken the girl after all. She grins at me, showing her fangs.

  I punch her in the jaw and she barely flinches. Right, vampire. Shit. She lunges at me and I move quickly to avoid being thrown to the ground under her. Her sharp claws catch me across the chest, ripping my top and nicking my skin. No pain registers. I’m not human anymore. I have to remember that.

  I grab her by the throat when she comes at me a second time. She pushes away easily, laughing.

  “Oh, relax. I’m not here for a fight.” She dusts herself off.

  I dread to think what she’s here for, besides ruining the life of the teenager whose body she’d hijacked. That doesn’t feel like the end game. Nisha’s too twisted not to have some hidden agenda. Breaking my heart might be fun for her, but I doubt it’s all she’s looking to do here.

  “He left,” I tell her.

  She raises an eyebrow. “He?”

  “I’m guessing you’re looking for Tristian.” She has to be, doesn’t she? She must be wondering why the hell he’d done what he had. I can’t imagine her taking any kind brush off lying down, never mind something so final.

  “Oh, I’m sure he’ll show up,” she says, with a smile.

  I want to hurt her, I know that I could now. But there’s a girl trapped inside the vampire, one who doesn’t deserve to be turned to dust. A girl in the same position I’d been stuck in for months, afraid it would never end. I watch her turn and stalk off into the night, placing the headphones back over her ears and beginning to sing softly again. There has to be something I can do about this. I don’t know the deal Connor made to free me, I don’t know how he made it, or even if I could make the same trade work. I have to do something. There’s no way in hell Nisha is getting to ruin that girl’s life.

  “There has to be a way to kill a demon.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  My late-night walk went on until daylight broke. I didn’t run into Nisha again, and my thoughts were still tangled on what to do about her. Contacting Nadine would be dragging someone I barely knew into my own mess, someone who had already done so much to help me that I didn’t know how I could begin to repay her.

  I walk back to my flat and kick my shoes off in the hallway. I lock the door and head to the bathroom, hoping the shower will shake off the night and help me think clearer. No such luck. The only distraction it provided came in the form of vivid memories of the things Nisha and Tristan had done in this room. I really have to get a new place. Thinking about those things and feeling like they’d happened between Connor and me is getting supremely confusing. I turn off the shower and dry off quickly, dressing as I brush the lingering memories out of my thoughts.

  Connor is probably the answer, but I have no way to contact him. Which is inconvenient considering he knows how to save someone from a demon. He’s the one person who knows exactly how to break the vampire spell.

  I sigh. It’s probably exactly what Nisha wants. Might as well bring him straight to her on a plate. I have to think of another way to deal with this.

  Unfortunately, googling ‘how to kill a demon’ didn’t bring up any useful information. Clutching at straws was never going to work. I had one single path to answers, and it meant going back to White Oaks. Nadine’s place. Might as well get moving while daylight was burning. I got the feeling it was going to be a long day.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  I almost ran right into someone outside my flat door. Backing up, I start to apologise and then my thoughts begin to tangle. He’s a stranger, but there’s something oddly familiar about him. That jacket. It’s Tristian’s. I swallow a gasp
as he smiles at me. Frowning, I keep my voice low.

  “Connor?”

  He nods after a second. “Nice disguise, right?”

  I roll my eyes. “You might want to change your jacket if you don’t want people to recognise you.”

  It’s weird how different he looks, all dark and swarthy. His voice is the only thing unchanged. The light Irish lilt diluted from being raised for so long in a different country, the sharp edge to his words. I’d know his voice anywhere, at any volume. Every sultry whisper he’d ever uttered was still ingrained in my memory.

  “Shit. Should have thought of that.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “You sound… strange. What’s going on?”

  “Come inside.” I pull him into my flat.

  He takes his jacket off. “Can I leave this here then?”

  I nod. “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  “I gathered as much. What’s wrong?” He puts his jacket down as I lock the door and check out the peephole.

  I turn and take a deep breath, which is a weird thing to do when you don’t need to breathe at all, but old habits die hard I suppose.

  “You look good,” he tells me, his gaze drifting.

  I melt at the words, but his appearance stops me from folding to temptation. There is something I should be remembering right now, but his being here is short-circuiting my thoughts into a loop I can’t seem to break.

  “What are you doing here?”

  He smiles tightly. “I have to… catch some bad guys.”

  “Are you still a vampire?” I have to ask. How had he gotten to my flat in daylight? It’s at least two hours since daybreak. If he’d been in the landing for any length of time, I would have seen him when I got home at the crack of dawn.

  He nods. “No way around that one.”

  “How the hell did you…”

  “I got here a couple of hours ago. You walked right past me in the downstairs hall when you got home. I was waiting on the landing to speak to you. Looked like you were in a rush.”

  He shows me the charms around his neck. “This one keeps Tristian under control. This one makes me look like a different person.”

  I look at them. “How can you tell which is which?”

  “This one’s more red.”

  They both look jet-black to me.

  “How do you make yourself look normal again?”

  His lips twitch. “Is that really important right now?”

  It really shouldn’t have been. I move closer. “Do you want me to get used to this new body?”

  He tugs at one of the charms, snapping the leather. I gasp as he drops it and pulls me to him by my waist. The glamour breaks and he’s Connor again, his warm hazel eyes staring at me intently.

  “I missed you.” His words are so wrong on so many levels, but I feel them with as much conviction as he spoke them. His lips press against mine, moving slowly. His lingering kiss undoes me from the inside out. Everything so familiar, yet so different. He puts an arm under my ass and lifts me, my legs winding around his body as he moves us to the bedroom.

  The curtains aren’t quite shut tight. He stumbles a little as the sizzle of his hand catching daylight makes me jump down out of his grasp to cover the damned gap.

  “We shouldn’t do this,” he says, not sounding like he means it even a little bit.

  “We’re not doing anything wrong.”

  It seems to be all he really needs, to hear it from me. I pull him over to the bed and push him down. He stares at me as I take off my top. His intense gaze makes me shiver. He always looks like he wants to devour me whole. Always, Dawn? I ignore the voice of reason, burying her deep as I strip for the man I crave. He takes control the instant I’m naked, pulling me to him to attack my mouth.

  Everything is pure, sweet, torture until the moment he crushes me to the bed with his weight. Every touch is a teasing pre-lude to what I want more than anything; to feel him moving inside me. He teases me as much as he dares to, glorying in the moment he fills me up when I gasp beneath him. He knows exactly how to move to please me.

  It’s ecstasy. It’s messed up. It’s everything I’d been obsessing about.

  He kisses me just as passionately when it’s over as he did before we started. I never want to have to stop. I don’t want him to ever leave. I’m just waiting for something to ruin this, when he breaks the kiss, sighs softly and lays down next to me.

  “I have bad guys to catch later. Don’t let me forget.”

  He’s not leaving. He closes his eyes and I feel myself properly relax for the first time in the last twenty-four hours. Sleep isn’t going to be a problem today.

  New Dawn: Part Eight

  Complications – Connor

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Leaving Rob in White Oaks felt safer all round, but if I’m being honest with myself, there’s another reason, a better one, that’s lying next to me in bed right now. Dawn wants me as badly as I want her, and I can’t force myself to back off. Being alone together had allowed this to happen and I won’t regret that.

  Walking away will be hard, but I’d worry about that when the time came. Chances are slim that I’ll make it through a blood-war with the family.

  One last perfect day is more than I could have asked for. It’s more than I deserved.

  Maybe we could have worked out, in another life. I get up while Dawn’s sleeping, while night is falling. It’s time for me to find out what’s happening out there, to bloody my hands making sure Dawn, Nadine, and Rob will be safe when I’m gone. I don’t expect to get out of this alive. So, I’m going to have to be smart about it, get the job done right.

  I throw my clothes on, leaving the jacket. The charm needs to go back on. There’s no getting around it. I can’t risk the family knowing I’m back. The charm can’t have a lot of juice left in it, I can’t take it off again. I say the activation word and transform in a faint flash, everything blurring as I look down at my hands, then I’m changed. Unrecognisable.

  I leave Dawn’s place, wishing I didn’t have to. If only things were different. Unfortunately, I can’t change the situation as easily as I can change my looks. I think about leaving her a note, but there’s nothing I could tell her that she doesn’t already know.

  Chapter Thirty

  The checklist I run through includes the main haunts for the head of the family. The social club isn’t exactly exclusive, and it’s usually full of old men, but it’s one of his favourite places and has been since he was a kid, apparently. It takes all of ten minutes to figure out he’s not in tonight. None of his men are hanging around, either, a sure sign he isn’t due to show up.

  I wander a few different routes before I find out he’s at home. My stomach sinks. Taking him out doesn’t feel quite so easy now. His wife and daughters are probably home. Whether or not they know who or what he is, I can’t kill him in his house. He kept them out of his business. I’d heard whisperings that his wife knew, how could she not, but his daughters were in their early teens. To them he was just Dad. Not a monster with a ruthless streak. Not the kind of man who’d order death to a family not unlike his own, just to make a point.

  “Fuck,” I murmur, walking away.

  Taking out his men would be easier, but missing just one would risk alerting him. His back up plans for this kind of threat had back up plans with unknown levels of fire-power. The element of surprise would be muted if he caught wind that someone was targeting his muscle.

  Does he know vampires exist? I’d never heard him talk about it, but his long running feud with the Blackburns’ made me wonder. If he didn’t know, I might even be able to give the old bastard a heart attack. If he did, he’d have weapons at the ready to deal with supernatural threats. Spells, maybe.

  I kick at the kerb. I’d rushed to get back to town. Finding out Dawn had come back had messed with my head. Plans went out the window. I had to make sure she was okay. No, I had to see her. A selfish need that had ruine
d things.

  I should have thought about what I’d need to do this. Taking on The Family without a plan is just crazy. I need more than a disguise and the potential shock reveal of my true physical state. Spells would be a good start. An arsenal they couldn’t beat with a gun.

  I made my way back to White Oaks, to Nadine. The crystal shop would be a good back up plan, but I want to see my sister one last time before I pull the trigger on this suicidal mission. Now that I’d seen Dawn, the fog in my head had cleared. I’m not dumb enough to think I can escape, but I’m pretty sure I can drag The Family to Hell with me.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The door to Nadine’s flat is open when I get there. I push it open wider, wincing at the creak. The lights are out. My sister isn’t exactly the forgetful type so it doesn’t seem likely that she’d leave her apartment without locking the door. I slip inside, senses sharpening as I enter the darkness. It doesn’t sound like there’s anyone in the flat.

  Flipping the light switch, I look around. Nothing seems out of place. No signs of a struggle.

  I close the door over and go to her room. As usual, it’s spotless. Even as a kid, she’d had a unique talent for making her bedroom look like something out of a catalogue. I suppose her abilities helped. She always liked to use magic to tidy her things away into their drawers or boxes. Everything had a place and she liked to make sure it didn’t stray too far.

  So, where the hell is she? I had a quick wander from room to room, rummaging around for some kind of clue to where she might have gone. Not sure what to think, I pick up her landline and dial the number for her mobile phone. I should have called her before I’d come back to White Oaks. It would have made sense, had I been using any of that lately.

  A low buzzing noise nearby made me jump, until I realised what it was. Pushing the couch back, I lower the phone’s receiver from my ear and stare down at Nadine’s mobile vibrating on the floor.