Break of Dawn

by Chris Marie Green

  Dawn had to have stood there for a while, because when Kiko entered the room, she was deep in a trance of self-debate.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  Uncrossing her arms, she looked over her shoulder to find Kiko’s body language stilted because of his back brace. But she smiled because there was no sign of the cold-turkey shivers on him. Excellent.

  “You look good today,” she said.

  “Thanks to the Friends.” He nodded at the fire-field picture. “Tell me you’re not gonna do what I think you’re gonna do.”

  He must’ve heard about yesterday’s Nancy Drew shenanigans from Breisi or another Friend. “And what if I do do what you think I’m gonna do—are you gonna do me in?”

  The psychic rolled his eyes, establishing two things at once: that she was a dork and that he thought she would do it.

  “Oh, chillax,” she said, disappointed that he’d think so little of her will power. “I’m not going to cause a civil war between the Friends by making one of them transport me into a portrait again.” At least not right now.

  “Glad to hear it.” He wandered over and touched the hem of Frank’s T-shirt. Pure habit.

  But when he shook his head, Dawn didn’t pursue it. Kiko hadn’t gotten a vibe, a connection. Nothing more to say.

  Yet her coworker did bust out with this gem: “I’m bored. Want to play paper football?”

  Visions of sixth grade, triangular “footballs” made out of scrap paper, and field-goal posts constructed of thumbs and index fingers assaulted Dawn. She laughed.

  “Sure, I guess.” It’s not like they had any agendas, even though she’d probably be working out and training later, just to whittle off some energy.

  Kiko gave an excited hop and made a beeline for Jonah’s desk. He motioned for her to grab one of the anorexic wooden chairs situated nearby and to make it face Jonah’s huge leather seat. Then he opened up a desk drawer, grabbed a piece of creamy stationery paper, and plopped down in the quasi throne, where the king of geekdom belonged.

  While he tore and folded the paper accordingly, he said, “You’ve been on some big adventures lately. Who would’ve known you’d be getting into that kind of trouble during a lockdown?”

  “I think anyone could manage in this Bedlam.”

  “Not me. I’m sick of tooting around here doing nothing. After I woke up this morning, I started feeling real stir-crazy, like I couldn’t stand it for another hour. I wish we could go out and bust some vamp heads together, even just for the exercise.”

  He gestured for her to make a field goal out of her fingers. She sat, rested her elbows on the desk, and connected the tips of her thumbs while pointing her index fingers and folding down the rest of her digits.

  Before she was really ready, Kiko flicked the triangle across the desk, scoring an impressive field goal. It was only a bonus that he hit Dawn square in the nose.

  “Gooooooaaaaal!” he said, raising his hands as high as he could.

  “Wrong game, Wonderlic.”

  “I meant field goal, anal-retentive sports nazi. Now your turn. You’re gonna miss, though.”

  Competitive Kiko was in the building.

  Dawn took a shot and made it, even managing to nail his forehead.

  “Right back at you,” she said.

  Kiko set up for his try, but he’d slowed down the enthusiasm now, going serious on her.

  “So . . . about Kalin’s picture,” he said.

  Aha. This had been no random football challenge. Dawn should’ve known that in a house full of detectives, basic interrogation was as common as having to wait for a vapid older sister to get out of the bathroom.

  “What about Kalin?” she asked.

  Kiko’s eyes gleamed, as if he were just as curious as she was and couldn’t help admitting it now. “What did you see?”

  “Wait—let me just . . . You didn’t know who Kalin was before, right?” She wanted to set a few things straight.

  “No. Jeez, no. All this Friend stuff was never much of an issue before everything started heating up with the vamps. Sure, before you got back to L.A. and joined us, I generally knew of our spirits and the portraits and that they were gonna come into play at some point. But Friends didn’t start interacting with us much until Robby Pennybaker came around.”

  That’s right, Dawn thought. Kiko was a male, so Jonah wouldn’t have approached him about the choice to become a Friend or to rest in peace, as he’d done with Breisi sometime before she’d died.

  “You didn’t know you could order the Friends around?” Dawn asked.

  “I wish.” His face fell.

  “Breisi knew, though?”

  “Yeah. Something tells me she did. I’m sure she knew a lot more than I ever did.”

  Wow. Did this mean Jonah had taken only Breisi into his confidences and not Kiko? And had the psychic just been acting like he knew more than he did in reality? Poor Kik.

  Satisfied that her coworker was telling the truth, she went ahead and gave him the rundown about almost everything, revealing the vision with Kalin, Rose, and Will, then talking about how many female Friends tended to stick around the agency afterward.

  She didn’t really go into why they lingered. She didn’t want to hash out all the “feeding” issues between Jonah and Kalin . . . and between Jonah and herself.

  After they finished, they went back to football, but Kiko’s heart obviously wasn’t in it. Just as she was about to comment on that, a breeze whipped between them.

  Air-conditioning? Dawn crossed her arms over her chest again. The minty scent she always detected in this office had gotten stronger, or maybe she was just noticing it for the first time today. And that meant something besides air-conditioning might be in the room.

  Finally, Kiko said something that he’d clearly been mulling over. “Now I think I understand why all the portraits are of girls. Boy, the boss is a stallion.”

  Now it was Dawn’s turn to roll her eyes. He’d figured out the feeding part all on his own.

  “Then basically,” he continued, “the woman over the downstairs fireplace, Kalin, was one of the first of us? And then came . . .” He motioned toward the Elizabethan painting, then repeated the gesture portrait by portrait. “Her, then her, then her. And—”

  When he came to the field of fire, he stopped. Dawn’s heartbeat seemed to do the same.

  Because the painting wasn’t empty anymore.

  Nope—the anonymous cape-veiled shape was back, the subject’s long, dark hair covering any sign of a face.

  “Hmm,” Kiko said, returning to the football game.

  Dawn hadn’t set her fingers up yet, but it didn’t matter. The paper triangle went wide.

  She didn’t get up to grab it. “What, ‘hmm’?”

  As Kiko focused on a spot behind her, he seemed to be thinking of the right way to word whatever he had to say. Then his eyes went wide. Very, very wide.

  She heard a sliding-wood sound from the bookcase at the rear. Footsteps moving across the rug to the other side of the big room. Someone sitting down.

  Fingers of frost played her spine.

  Not really wanting to look, Dawn did anyway, turning around and knowing who she would find but not believing it.

  There he was—Jonah, sitting on a far couch just as normally as can be. Because of the distance, she couldn’t see much of him as far as details went, but the cuts on his face would’ve distracted her anyway. He must’ve come through a panel in the bookcase—one he’d probably used before, on that day he’d instructed Kalin to bind Dawn.

  Dressed in an untucked white silk shirt and black pants, he was splayed in his seat, just as if Dawn had fully worn him out during their last encounter. Odd for the usually soldier-straight Jonah. He drummed his fingertips on the velvet as he rested his head on the back of the couch and fixed his gaze on her.

  She shifted in her chair.

  Clearly ill at ease with this weird situation, Kiko tried to break the ice. “Hey, Boss. You hanging
out with us now?”

  “Just taking my daily breather, Kiko.”

  Dawn frowned. He didn’t sound like The Voice. No, his tone wasn’t as low, and there wasn’t an accent. In fact, he was back to speaking the same way he had on that day Kalin had bound her for Jonah’s strange attempt at foreplay.

  Not The Voice she was used to at all.

  Finally, Dawn found her voice. “I thought that’s what you were doing in your cell—taking the breather of all breathers.”

  She could detect a faint smile from him.

  “Boss?” Kiko asked.

  Jonah slumped even lower, now tapping his hands on the seat in a bored rhythm, his dark hair clinging to the velvet behind him. “Your third degree makes me think I can’t even rest in my own house. You like my seat at the desk, Kiko?”

  Jonah had said it with a sense of dry humor, but . . .

  “Sorry.” Kiko rose out of the chair, more formal than ever. “I didn’t realize—”

  “Nobody realizes. Nobody. Realizes.”

  Kiko looked at Dawn, probably to see how she was going to handle this. Hell. Like she knew?

  After hefting out a sigh, Jonah latched his gaze on the ceiling. “The conversation you two were just having . . .”

  Oh, oh. Was she about to get lambasted for telling Kiko about what’d happened in Kalin’s picture? Was she supposed to have kept that a secret? Dawn girded herself for a whooping.

  But it never came.

  “I’d be frustrated, too,” Jonah added.

  Dawn’s eyes almost popped out.

  “In fact,” their boss said, sitting up and leaning his elbows on his knees, “I’d be going crazy with not knowing anything about how we operate.”

  Totally thrown off her game, Dawn stood, prickling with such uncertainty that the thought of not being ready to defend herself was just wrong.

  “Don’t go anywhere.” His gaze was on her again, and there was something plaintive about it.

  She stayed. For now. Just to see where this was all going, in spite of her own better judgment.

  Jonah sneaked a look at the clock on a Chippendale table next to him, then glanced at her again. She’d automatically focused on his scars, and she lowered her eyes, caught.

  “You can’t really look at me without wondering what happened,” he said.

  She wanted to tell him that she’d accepted his face, actually finding his scars intriguing, not ugly. She’d never been much for perfect, anyway; a girl like her—one who’d always suffered by comparison to Eva—didn’t aim for pretty boys. Also, she had a couple of wounds on her own face.

  But, yeah, he was right. She wondered what the story was behind his injuries. “I assumed you got hurt from one of your show-downs, Jonah.”

  He touched his face, laughing shortly. “Oh, it was a confrontation of heroic proportions.” Then, in the oddest of all that was odd, he flushed, as if shame had settled over him.

  At this point, Kiko had taken a spot beside her. His warmth felt reassuring. But when she glanced down at him, she saw that he’d started to sweat.

  Before she could call a Friend to help him avert a cold-turkey moment, Jonah had spoken again.

  “What if you could see how I got these scars? With help from Kiko, of course.”

  Holy . . . What? Secretive Jonah inviting her to investigate? To get a straight answer? Something was very wrong. . . .

  “Don’t you want this, Dawn?” he asked.

  She nodded way too many times. “Hell, yeah.”

  “Then come over here.”

  She actually began to tremble. Answers. Taking a step forward, she couldn’t resist.

  But Kiko grabbed her hand and, in his restraining touch, she guessed what he might be thinking. This is too good to be true.

  Still, she couldn’t pass this up. “Please, Kik.”

  When he turned his gaze up at her, she saw the caution, blue as a hazy twilight room, in his eyes. He had to be thinking of what had happened with the dagger vision and what could be in store with this one. It wasn’t safe.

  My God, his loyalty wasn’t the reason he stuck by Jonah. Not entirely.

  “Dawn,” their boss said, and his voice held none of the vibrations she was used to getting when he said her name.

  But it didn’t matter.

  Ignoring Kiko’s clear feelings, she used all her strength to pull him to her greatest desire—Jonah and answers.

  “Hurry,” their boss said, checking the clock again.

  And she did, grabbing Kiko’s sweaty hand. Eyes wild, he tugged back, but she wouldn’t let him go. She was stronger, so she forced his touch toward Jonah.

  “We really shouldn’t. . . .” Kik said.

  “Please,” she said.

  Their boss reached out, seizing the psychic’s retracted fingers, forcing them to touch the scars on his face. Dawn’s hand rode the back of his.

  Too late, she saw that Jonah’s eyes weren’t topaz, but blue—

  An explosion came out of nowhere, blasting her into a memory.

  She stared from Jonah’s eyes at his image in the mirror of a sumptuous marble bathroom, his dark hair disheveled as he anchored his hands on each side of a sink.

  His face was clear and beautiful in the light, but his eyes were blue with something like depressed terror.

  “You were gone longer than normal,” he whispered.

  But there was no response from whomever he was talking to.

  Out of gloomy desperation, he yelled, “I didn’t think you were coming back!”

  A breeze ruffled his hair, and Jonah’s blue eyes focused on whatever was behind him in the mirror. An unknown companion.

  When the guest spoke, the room seemed to quake from a dangerous undertone. An old-world-accented darkness.

  “You know I always return, Jonah. I must.”

  “But I get afraid that you won’t.”

  “Calm down, please. Do not assume—”

  Jonah slapped the porcelain. “You’re looking for someone else, aren’t you? You aren’t happy with me anymore.”

  “Please, Jonah. Let me in and you will not be this upset.”

  The young man smiled shakily and leaned toward the mirror. “Why? Do you think I might strand you outside? Are you afraid of that?”

  “Let’s not play these games. . . .”

  “You think you have all the power, don’t you?” Jonah reached for something on the side of the sink. “You think you’ve got all the control here. Well, what if I . . . ?”

  A stab of silver flashed in the mirror as Jonah held up a straight razor.

  “No!” yelled The Voice.

  Faster than a pulse of light, the young man brought down the blade, yet he hadn’t been aiming for his throat. The weapon slashed across his cheek. Pain blinded him, but he slashed again, full of rage, full of vengeful panic.

  “Stop trying to get into my head to keep me from doing this,” Jonah said. “This is my body.”

  He angled forward, forcefully nudged by the essence from behind, but he kept going, undeterred. Slash. Slash. Slash.

  “Jonah . . .” It was The Voice, his tone steeped in sorrow.

  “Tell me”—Jonah slashed again, his face a mash of cuts—“you won’t leave.”

  “Oh, Jonah.”

  “I won’t go any lower with this razor if you promise.”

  The air went icy, and so did The Voice. Everything stilled.

  Jonah held up his wrist.

  “I will not leave you,” The Voice said quickly. Then his tone took on a dreadful, rueful edge. “I promise.”

  Through the blood, Jonah smiled again, sinking to the floor. . . .

  The memory ended gently, the red fading under Dawn’s vision as Jonah’s real face came back into focus. His beautiful, young, brutally scarred face.

  He had removed her and Kiko’s hands from his cuts, his blue eyes gauging her reaction.

  Dawn’s heart was beating so fast it was numb. She heard Kiko’s heavy breathing next to her
. Drenched with sweat and shivering, he lost his balance and Dawn caught him, getting to her knees so she could cradle his body on the floor.

  “Is that an answer for you?” Jonah asked. It was such a young question from a young soul.

  Jonah’s soul. Not The Voice’s.

  They were two different entities altogether.

  She dragged her gaze back to him, only to find him looking so intent for a response that it almost crushed her heart.

  “Please explain what just happened.” Her words barely got past the dryness in her mouth.

  He parted his lips to answer, but a bolt of cold air cut the space between Jonah and Dawn. His body lifted, slamming back against the couch, while his eyes closed. For a second, all Dawn could hear were Kiko’s labored breaths, her own heartbeat in her ears. Fear did a pinching dance on her skin as her gaze traveled to the field of fire painting.

  It was empty.

  Then, from his prone position, Jonah . . . whoever . . . slowly opened his eyes to reveal the topaz hue she’d come to know so well.

  But she hadn’t known this. Had never even imagined he could be so different than what she’d expected.

  Whoever it was sat up ramrod straight on the couch, once again the warrior.

  ELEVEN

  THE BREAK

  DAWN held the shaking Kiko to her chest as he grabbed on to her tank.

  “Who’s in Jonah’s body now?” she yelled at the stranger sitting on the couch so stiffly. “Who the hell are you?”

  When he answered, he seemed supremely unaffected by what had just happened. In fact, there was even a streak of cruelty rippling a low, harsh voice that nowhere resembled that of the real Jonah’s tone.

  “I am the same man you have known for over a month now, Dawn, and you should know that even I have my limits. Your meddling has finally gone too far.”

  She ignored that last part, ignored that Jonah had wandered in here for some random reason and offered himself to her, because she was stuck on something else he’d said. “Man? You call yourself a man?”

  “I have been called myriad things.” He forced a horrible smile, his eyes intensely golden. “And ‘man’ is what I prefer to most others.”

  Even through the shakes, Kiko spoke up. “The fire field . . .”