By now, she was used to the sight that greeted her. Besides the long dark hair and brown eyes she’d always had, there were the black marks on the left side of her face that made it look like she had fallen asleep and a kid had gotten a hold of a Sharpie then decided to create a network of tattoos.
That’s what you got when you were an ex-vampire hunter with a temper, though. Near the end of her illustrious career, she’d developed some latent psychokinetic powers that had gone bad. Or, more to the point, anger had made them go bad, and that rage had started to come out as these lovely beauty spots.
Three cheers for that. Yet that was nothing when you took a look at her right side, where her face was littered with red spots. That was where the dragon’s blood had hit her when she’d attacked him during the London Underground battle. But the head vampire hadn’t just given her some pretty crimson spatterwear for her skin. Hell, no—his blood had seeped under her flesh, into the deepest parts of her.
Toward her soul stain.
Dawn tried not to think about the pit inside of her that had gone empty after she had once, during an earlier vampire showdown, made the choice to turn into a bloodsucker, herself, just so she could save her lover Costin.
How could she have known that, if you were so-called lucky enough to have your own vamp maker destroyed and you went back to being mortal, yourself, the soul came back different, as if it had been dirtied?
As if, maybe, you didn’t deserve to be human again?
She kept telling herself nowadays that the numbness she’d gradually started to feel this past year or so after fully retiring was for the best. It was self-medicating, and it kept her away from the anger. It kept her away from those psychokinetic powers that had destroyed and brought her that much closer to darkness with each push of anger. Most importantly, though, it kept the dragon on the right side of her body, away from the waiting, bitter black of her soul stain.
No one knew what might happen if she got too angry again, letting the dragon break free to make a run through her so he could reach the worst part of Dawn. No one wanted to find out.
Just as she was rubbing her eyes with her fists, she felt a presence enter the room, and she managed a smile.
Costin. He was the best thing she had going in life.
“And where’ve you been?” she asked.
When he spoke, all she heard was his voice, basically because he didn’t have a body. “You know that Halloween is not a night I enjoy celebrating, so I took to the beach.”
Costin’s essence used to rest in a painted landscape portrait when he “slept.” But that had changed after the dragon had been conquered. Now, Costin just went wherever ghosties did when they needed some R&R and, in his case, one of those places was by the rolling water.
All in all, being the girlfriend of a spirit was... interesting. Yeah, that was a good word for it. Until a few years ago, he’d been a Soul Traveler, an ethereal being who’d made a vow in the 1400s to hunt down all the vampires in the dragon’s bloodline. But then Dawn and he had taken care of the dragon in London, destroying its reign.
As if on cue, the dragon-soaked right half of her body pulsed, and she fought the urge to touch the red on her face.
Instead, she got out of the chair, and Costin wrapped his essence around her.
How did he always know when she needed that?
He calmed her, making the dragon stay away from her soul stain. Costin was the only one who could save her from the dragon and herself.
Costin’s voice buzzed through her. “You are very much on edge tonight.”
“It’s because I was ready to shoo away any Halloween rug rats who came knocking on our door, dressed like Tigger or Catwoman.”
He embraced her even more strongly with his invisible force. Part of him even eased into her, and her belly clenched, sending a thrill through her.
“I know, I know,” she said. “No kids ever come up this way.” Not with the gates at the bottom of their driveway providing a hint that the couple inside wasn’t all that festive.
“Do you need me to come into you early?” he asked.
“No. I can wait until morning.” That was usually when Costin did his comfort thing on her. Every sunrise, he used his essence to enter her and push the dragon away from her soul stain if it’d encroached.
Costin was her best medicine, all right—the only way they knew to fight off the pure evil that could explode in her if the big master was reenergized by her darkness.
“If I did not know better,” Costin said, a buzz in her ear, “I would say that your psychiatric appointment tomorrow is making you fretful.”
She shrugged away from him. “Fretful? Is that the word we should use to describe how I feel?”
“I know you hate going every week. But you do not have to, Dawn.”
“Yes, I do. And I should want to have my head examined on a regular basis because it’ll make me so much better if I have some sort of psychological breakthrough.”
Dr. Lucas, who was well-versed in the supernatural, tried to understand what she was going through, but unless you’d been where she’d been....
Well, how many normal people had?
As Dawn muffled a curse, then went back to Costin’s spirit embrace, she heard the clock ticking from the first floor, heard the waves murmur just outside the slightly gaped balcony window.
She also heard footsteps downstairs, but she knew who they belonged to, and it didn’t do much to mellow her out. Jonah was a permanent house guest since he had been Costin’s “body” for years now. He had been through the Underground battles with them, and Costin occasionally rooted in the guy when he needed to have a physical presence—to feel the sand under his feet or to taste a dinner that Dawn had cooked out of “trying a new, relaxing experience,” for example. Or to touch Dawn’s face with his fingertips, although they didn’t go beyond that, seeing as they were both keenly aware that it was actually Jonah’s body, not Costin’s, that they would be using.
It was a messed up situation, really, because while in Costin’s body, Jonah had...Well, “developed a liking” for Dawn was a mild way of putting it. Luckily, he respected the boundaries between all of them now, and he even got out of the house at night most times, doing Lord knows what with the women he met in beachside bars.
Dawn didn’t want to know the details. It was bad enough that she truly believed Costin needed Jonah just as much as Jonah loved to have Costin around, sprucing up his boring life.
“It is late,” Costin said, clearly sensing that her tension hadn’t gone anywhere. “Come with me to bed, Dawn.”
“I’m not tired.”
“I can feel that you are. Exhausted, as a matter of fact.”
Smiling, she caressed the living air where his voice had come from, thankful for his concern. Glad that someone felt this way about her, even if she couldn’t conjure up much concern about herself on nights like this.
“I’m good,” she said. “Really. You do your thing and I’ll be along pretty soon.”
From the way Costin lingered, she could tell that he knew she was distancing herself from him yet again. It’d been that way for a while. After the collapse of the vampire Undergrounds, she had found a sense of peace, but then...
Then one particular case she had helped Kiko with afterward had changed that.
They had tried to come to the dubious rescue of an ex-vampire who had made it out of the destroyed Hollywood Underground, but the woman’s own soul stain had driven her to suicide. Dawn had been there for every terrible second of it, too, and she had connected to the woman’s pain, just as if it were her own.
At the memory, darkness pulled at Dawn from the inside out, and she started to walk away from Costin.
But he wasn’t having it.
He eased all the way into her, and at the invisible force of him filling her up, she dropped to her knees. Even if she felt more alone than ever, she wanted to be a part of him again, just like she used to when she’d first come to him
as a hardened Hollywood stunt woman who thought she knew everything.
She couldn’t breathe for a moment—it was like that every time he entered her, his essence like sweet friction as he abraded her with electricity. A sizzling heat scraped through her, making her ache in her belly and between her legs.
Meanwhile, the dragon curled into a ball on her right side. But her soul stain?
It was like an undisturbed pool of blackness.
She sank all the way to the floor, closing her eyes, just as she used to. Touching herself, pressing her fingers to the center of her, stroking herself, trying to make herself feel something...
But even though Costin was making her body respond as he ran his buzzing essence through her, making the sensation echo through every inch, there was still the dead hopelessness that just wouldn’t go away.
Even as she bit her lip and gave a little cry, spiking to a climax, she still knew that he knew.
When he pulled out of her, it was with a rough sigh that made her hitch in a breath one more time.
“I wish I could make it go away,” he said softly, his voice like a shudder that raked over her skin.
“You do,” she said. “Every morning. You keep the dragon away from the stain.”
“It is obviously not enough.”
He gave her one last stroke of spiritual energy, like a man who was reluctant to leave her like this. But what else could he do?
After he vacated the room, Dawn put herself together again, then slowly went back to the desk to pour over those notes from Kiko. Costin’s attentions had relaxed her to the point that she could rest her head on her desk, her throat hurting with the tears she never allowed herself to cry.
Soon, a fitful sleep took her over, but, as Costin had said, it was never enough.
*
Dawn jerked in her chair, yanked out of drowsy-time by a sound.
As she stayed stock-still, she heard the clock downstairs begin ringing in the midnight hour.
One...two...three...four...
Something was off. Dawn could sense it just as easily as she used to be able to sense a vampire around.
She kept listening.
Five...six...seven...eight...
She shifted in her chair, uncomfortable, because the disturbance wasn’t out there.
Her soul stain. Was it...moving? Stretching?
What the hell?
Nine...ten...eleven...
Now it was as if that dark spot in her was receding, just like a snake did before it struck—
Twelve—
The world seemed to implode inside of her, rocking so violently that she sucked in a breath and dropped out of her chair to the floor, grasping at the rug.
God—what was happening...?
She thought she heard Costin whoosh into the room, yet his voice seemed far-removed, as if it was coming from another place. But as the last of the clock’s chimes echoed, she...
She could feel.
Her soul stain, where there’d been blankness before... It was clogged with so many emotions that it actually hurt with happiness and sadness and everything in between. At the same time, though, the right half of her body—the part that had been spotted by the dragon’s blood—seemed to pop, one patch of skin at a time, both over and under her flesh. It was as if the blood that had left red spots on her skin and deep, throbbing marks under it, was lurching to life.
Almost like it was taking excited breaths forward, stumbling in its own shock after being raised from the near dead.
As the last the of clock’s echoes faded, the surreal movements in her body did, too, leaving Dawn totally breathless and on her knees as Costin slid his essence against her, as if trying to help her up.
“Dawn?”
“I’m fine.” She started to crawl away from him, reaching for the desk, using it to stand back up. “I don’t know what just went on, but... I think I’m just fine.”
“What happened?”
Dawn shook her head. She was waiting to see what her body would do next. It was as if the dragon’s blood was waiting, too, somehow watching her soul stain from a near distance.
But that was crazy, wasn’t it?
Costin grazed her face, and she realized she was...smiling.
“Dawn...” Costin said again, clearly wary now.
But then Jonah barged into the room, and her smile disappeared.
“What’s going on?” he asked, his short dark hair curled up at the ends, his blue eyes wide with excitement. His body, which used to be wiry, was bulkier now, since he’d taken to working out in the gym, just to let off the steam that used to be tempered by the vampire hunts. Like Dawn, he also had a soul stain, seeing as he was an ex-vampire, too.
The antique ax he’d grabbed from a wall downstairs—the only kind of cozy house decorations ex-vampire hunters probably ever had—added to Dawn’s suspicion that Jonah hoped there’d been some kind of ghoulish attack. He wished. Jonah, more than anyone, was a fan of guts and glory. During the Underground hunts, he had thrown himself into a fight, and the blood, more than anyone.
“Stand down, Skippy,” Dawn said. “Things are cool.”
She took a testing breath, expecting the weight of her soul stain to bring her down, just like always. But...
That didn’t happen.
She still felt good. Real good.
Costin was circling her, as if inspecting her. And when she held a hand to her chest and smiled again, he seemed to catch on that something significant had occurred.
But what? Why? How?
“Midnight on Samhain,” Costin said, pronouncing the word like “Sow-in.” He came to a rest at her shoulder. “I have lived long enough not to believe in coincidences.”
Jonah was still holding that ax at the ready. “What’re you saying?”
“I fear magic has crept into this house, Jonah.”
But Dawn barely heard the rest of their conversation, because she was slowly getting used to the absence of numbness, of regret, of heaviness.
Alive, she finally realized, her smile only growing. For the first time in a long time she didn’t feel like the half-dead creature she’d become.
THREE
The Lightness
Costin had merged into an all-too-willing Jonah’s body and told Dawn that he was going to the library downstairs, where Costin planned to comb through the tomes that held several lifetimes worth of information about the supernatural. He was especially hoping to find a connection between vampires and/or ex-vampires and Samhain.
As for Dawn, she got out her cell phone, opened the doors to the balcony wide, then went outside to watch the moonlight play on the restless waves below.
Kiko answered on the third ring. “What? What?”
“Sorry for waking you up, but we’ve got some excitement around here.” Dawn’s smile was so big that it was making her cheeks hurt, but in a good way.
“Cool excitement?” Kiko asked. “Not-cool excitement? What?”
She could just picture his little person’s body jumping out of bed as he ran for his clothes, their hunting days still with him, even if they were long gone.
“It’s cool excitement,” she said, glee in her voice. And she’d never really ever done glee.
To think—she had an inner cheerleader and she’d never even known it, not even when she was growing up and doing her best to piss her life away with every rebellious act she could think of. Of course, that rebellion had led to a short career as a stunt woman, which had led to vampire fighting, but that wasn’t here or there.
She told Kiko about her stroke-of-midnight soul stain lifting. “I don’t know what’s going on, but how awesome is that?”
Like Costin, Kiko was on immediate alert. “I suppose it’s cool.” Then, “You don’t think there’s something fishy about your happy-happy-joy-joy thing? This is Samhain, for God’s sake. If it were any other night, I’d just think you accidently swallowed some Ecstasy.”
She stayed quiet, but, naturally, Kiko didn�
��t.
“Okay, what I mean is this—you know how there’re different versions of Cinderella? There’s the Disney take. The squeaky clean, Yay!, glass slipper, everything is weddings and chirping birds—you know, the whitewashing of just about every other version of the stories that came before. And I’m talking about dark stories where the frakkin’ stepsisters cut off part of their feet so they’ll fit into the slippers, and where those sweet little birds aren’t so sweet at all and they punish those bitches by pecking out their eyes.”
“Your point is?”
“That there’s only one happy-Yay! Disney version of the story while the rest aren’t so nice. Odds are, Dawn, that you don’t have any kind of happy ending version of your soul stain going on during Samhain.”
Nothing like a good dose of Geek Kiko to put things into perspective. Even so, she couldn’t stop loving the absence of heaviness in her, couldn’t help but to lean on the balcony railing and smell the brine-laced air and think of how lucky she was to be alive after all the shit she’d gone through in life.
Maybe, after everything she and the team had endured, something good had finally happened and this had nothing to do with screwed-up magic, like Kiko and Costin thought. Maybe her therapy had kicked in—
Her ears picked up a sound from down the beach. Somewhere in the night, there was a cry, but these were the final hours of Halloween and the kids were out in full force, so she went back to listening to Kiko.
“Sure, we wiped out those Undergrounds,” he said. “But our vampires weren’t the only bloodsuckers out there. There’re different lines, and some of them could be into magic. We’d be stupid to dismiss the idea. And we know that there’re hundreds of other supernatural creatures that might be up to all kinds of mischief tonight.”
She laughed, but then stopped. Dawn’s mother was one of those creatures Kiko was talking about. Eva Claremont had come under the sway of what they thought might be a demon and they hadn’t heard from her since.
But now that Dawn’s soul stains had gone a little lighter, thoughts of Mommy Not-So-Dearest didn’t get to her as much as they had before. She had spent a long, long time trying to forget about that woman.
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