No. Hell no. Breisi had died the other night, and she would be up here with Frank.
Shit. Shit, Dawn had really done it.
“Costin!” Frank yelled. No answer.
Kiko sighed. “He ain’t gonna hear you unless he’s ready to come out of his voodoo funk.”
Driven by fear and anger at herself, Dawn stood, paced. They needed to go. But where? How? What could they initiate?
“Costin!” Frank yelled again.
Dawn followed up. “Costin, get out here!”
Oooh, she wanted to see him. Wanted to—
The host’s voice screwed out of the walls. At least that was what it sounded like. There were speakers all over this house.
“Welcome back to you both,” Costin said simply.
They all looked at one another, not knowing what to say now that they had the . . . creature . . . on the line. Frank got to his feet.
“Welcome back?” Even Dawn’s skin was vibrating now. “That’s all you have to say?”
“I assume you found the locator.” He sounded so smooth. “We received a partial read on your position before we lost the link, and Breisi followed the lead.”
She remembered first discovering the locator in “Eva’s house” when she’d actually been Underground. Then she’d destroyed the thing.
“Your plan to use me to find the Underground didn’t go as you’d hoped?” she asked, fury straining her tone. “I messed it up pretty good for you, I guess.”
“Actually, minutes ago, we found the Underground’s location.”
Silence again.
Then Kiko wandered away from the splintered door. “How did you manage that?”
The Voice paused. “Breisi was called there, and when she arrived, her escort left her at the entrance and returned here to report the location. Breisi continued inside . . . then went dark.”
“Fuck.” Dawn clamped her arms over her head, as if she could shield herself. “Fuck me.”
Frank merely closed his eyes, probably too wiped out to do anything else.
“We need to get her,” Kiko said. “Or is she another casualty of your war, Costin?”
“I understand your anger, Kiko. And I have been willing to endure it from you and Dawn since we began. But please believe me when I tell you that Breisi will be taken care of.”
“How’re you going to guarantee that?” Dawn whispered.
“Just hear me. We are burning the daylight I require—when the lower vampires’ powers are at an ebb. I do not need them interfering with my business Underground.”
“Costin.” The name was a low rumble from Frank, but it threatened to build into so much more.
Then the lab door moaned open.
“I’m ready for you now,” Costin said.
TWENTY-ONE
THE CONFESSIONAL
KIKO was the first one down the stairs to the lab, and when Dawn followed him, she thought she caught her coworker putting his hand over his mouth, as if slapping a pill inside.
But maybe her eyes were playing tricks on her again.
She heard Frank in back of her, walking like . . . Well, the undead. Plod, plod, plod. The skin on her nape rippled with the hateful, justified gaze he was probably staring into it.
The soulless electric hum from the steel fridge sawed right through to her bones as they entered the lab proper. An acrid smell stifled the atmosphere, something chemical and new. Among the equipment, bedroom furniture, and the nightstand clock with its arms angled just on the cusp of the sunrise hour, Dawn looked to the far wall, as if not believing what Costin had said about Breisi really being gone.
But her portrait was empty, and there wasn’t a trace of jasmine anywhere.
I’m going to hell, Dawn thought.
Costin’s voice edged out from the darkness adjacent to Breisi’s old bed. “Sit, please.”
No argument. Dawn, Kiko, and Frank all dragged metal-framed chairs near one another, like they were huddling together without wanting to admit it.
When she peered into the darkness, she thought she saw the flash of Costin’s topaz eyes. She’d been anticipating the moment she would see the monster again. And, this time, she was going to beat him.
But, strangely, she couldn’t summon much outraged energy. There was only a deep gash of sadness in the pit of her stomach that wouldn’t stop bleeding.
“We’re sitting,” Kiko snapped, obviously still in the pissed stage.
From out of the blackness, the topaz eyes gleamed stronger, as if Costin had ventured closer. “Thank you. For your cooperation, for your loyalty—”
“For our stupidity,” Kiko interrupted.
“Wait,” Frank said, barely fitting on his little chair. “Let the boss talk. I got to hear why we’re just sitting here while Breisi’s in the Underground.”
“She will be fine, Frank,” Costin said with more confidence than all his team probably had, put together. “Until then, I wish to . . . clear the air and make my peace.”
Now Dawn understood. His earlier actions, as terrible as they were, hadn’t been personal. He was a warrior going into battle, a knight seeking absolution. “Is this your attempt at a confessional? Now . . . after keeping everything from us?”
“You could call it that.” His low voice almost sounded too slow, like a man on his last leg of a journey, crawling home.
Fear pricked her. She didn’t know if she could take what was about to come. All this time searching for answers, and she was afraid of them.
Kiko let out an exasperated sigh. “Too little, too late. Do you remember what you did to Dawn earlier?”
“Very much so. And before I go, I would like to make amends . . . as much as I can, at least.”
“Good luck,” Kiko said. Was he slurring a little? No—he hadn’t taken a pill that long ago, if that was really what he’d been doing.
“If you wanted me to find the Underground,” Dawn said, “you should’ve trusted me to do it myself. You didn’t need to tag me with a locator and . . .”
The memory of his cruelty assaulted her, and she couldn’t go on.
“Had you not been turned away from where you felt safe, you might not have embraced the Underground, Dawn,” Costin said, clearly having eavesdropped on what she’d already told Kiko and Frank. “It shames me, what was necessary. Yet it was most effective in the end.”
“Then you don’t regret it.”
“I cannot.”
Frank stared straight ahead, the former bar bouncer taking it all in. Kiko looked mutinous. Dawn toughened herself up, knowing Costin was never going to fully apologize.
And she wasn’t going to arm him with any of the information she’d discovered about the Master. She still had no idea what Costin was about.
Yet . . . was that the right thing to do? Weird, but knowing more about the Underground vampires than she did about Costin made it hard to decide who she should be helping here.
In the darkness, Costin’s eyes grew even brighter as he came to the edge of the light. “I do not expect you to forgive me for what I have done. Just know that, when I leave this house, I will be fighting for a prize that is much more serious than you can imagine.”
“More serious than ‘saving the world’?” Dawn asked.
“Not in the big picture.” Costin blinked. “But it means everything to me.”
Dawn narrowed her eyes. “Is your prize this Underground? Are you going to add that to a collection, just like the Friend portraits or your war artifacts?”
It was vicious, but there was no punch behind her bluster.
“No, Dawn,” Costin said, stepping into the room, light bathing his scars. “I will be fighting to win back my soul.”
And, as he began to tell his story, the phrases wrapped around her like gauze, a thin veiling that covered while letting in a hint of illumination. His words separated her from Frank and Kiko until she wasn’t sure they even existed or were hearing the same thing she was.
His sentences took root in her;
his voice becoming image; his life becoming hers. . . .
WHENEVER Costin slept, he dreamed of fire.
It consumed him, replacing the soul he had forfeited for the promise of glory, of long-lasting life serving his sovereign. His dreams were lit by hell, tortured by the screams of the forsaken.
But as of late, when he awoke, it was always to darkness.
Eyes blasting open, Costin sucked in the fetid air of the pitch cell, his hands clawing dirt. A shrill cry echoed from somewhere—another prisoner in a far cell?—and he tried to sit up, to sustain himself against the stone wall.
Soon, his heightened vision parted the blackness around him, thanks also to an irregular spot on a wall where the stones had fallen to ruin. It allowed a gush of dull light—enough to make the young vampire cringe out of its path due to practice.
Fury welled within Costin, as natural as the blood he sucked from the rats that dared brave the corners of his cell.
As if summoned, the persistent scratch of little feet on dirt stirred his senses. Costin sniffed, then darted out a hand to grasp his meal. At the scent of blood beneath skin and fur, the change came upon him, his teeth lengthening, his form tingling as he pierced the rat’s hide, then drank.
Blood. Not enough to increase his strength to where it had been before, but enough to mock his cravings and keep him alive. If that was how one could describe Costin’s state.
The taste of it conjured memory: the crazed yells of a night battle. Cries of death from the foe, cries of joy from Costin and his fellow warriors as they tore out necks with their teeth and grew stronger with each swallow. After taking the blood vow, Costin had indeed followed his sovereign on their journey to eternity, yet . . .
He hurled the rat against the wall, its bones shattering as they hit stone. Horror consumed him as he dwelled upon what he was, what he had become.
Even though there had only been one battle for Costin, he was still accursed. He had been given over to the darkness of a cell, all but forgotten, yet he remained damned.
Just before he had been put here, he had joined his sovereign in defending against the sultan’s invasion of their land, killing his first man in the brutal style of a low creature. Amidst the moonlit chaos, the thunder of cannons, many of his companion soldiers had been doing the same, all like starving wolves let out of cages to feast.
Yet Costin’s enjoyment of his kill had been short-lived.
It was all so clear: his victim’s throat constricting as he attempted to scream. Costin lifting his head from the feeding and seeing how his prey’s dark eyes accused him of being the very devil himself.
Beast, he had thought at that moment, backing away from his victim on hands and knees. I am not . . . human. Not anymore.
Horror had pushed him away from the battle, that and the still-lingering taste in his mouth. His long teeth had contracted, his will draining from his beast body.
Not human . . .
Time blurred. He found himself wandering in a marsh, sinking to the ground as if being sucked into it by a higher grief. In his ears he still heard the far battle, the screams. In his eyes, he still saw his victim’s gaze . . . the beast reflected back at him. . . .
Before the light of day, Costin heard the thud of horse hooves on earth, and he attempted to raise his head. Yet the men—underlings of a noble who sided with the infidels—were upon him before Costin arose. When they stabbed him, he merely laughed. They watched in fascination as he began to heal.
Enthralled, they brought him to their superior’s castle, where Costin found himself in this dark cell, where, upon occasion, he heard men outside, attempting to summon the courage to enter and test him again.
He found himself too weak to escape, possibly due to the lack of the good blood his body craved. Or perhaps they had used a curse he was unaware of to keep him here.
Or, perhaps, he was not moved to return to what he was.
Nevertheless, Costin often used his Awareness to call out to Benedikte, but not to his sovereign. Yet it did no good. Perhaps his companion had been instructed not to answer due to Costin’s betrayal of the brotherhood. Perhaps Costin was even too weak to send a proper message.
He let out a tormented moan, his body heavy.
“Despair not,” came a thready voice from the next cell.
Costin glanced at the lone opening high in the wall. “Sleep more, old man. I will not suffer you this night.”
That was not true. The self-proclaimed “raving man” who was kept next to Costin could be quite diverting to a beast who did not wish to think too much.
“First I am tucked away here because I trouble those who have the loudest voices,” the old man said. “Yet, now, with you, I am nothing.”
The old man, or The Whisper, as Costin had come to call him, claimed to be so ancient that he had forgotten his own name. He also said he had been driven out of a village and held here because no one knew what else to do with him. He refused to tell Costin the particulars of his imprisonment—Why? How? When?—other than to announce that he was on a quest.
If Costin was not a beast, himself, he would fear for The Whisper’s health of mind.
“You are hardly ‘nothing,’ old man,” he said. “You are the only reminder that I am not in the true void.”
“Oh, my friend, but you are. You very much are.”
Through conversation after conversation—For how long? How many nights?—the old man had somehow sensed that Costin was not pure. In fact, The Whisper had attempted religious counsel, which felt to Costin like hot pokers shoved beneath his skin. Perhaps this was the reason Costin dreamed of hell: listening to tales from the old man seemed to conjure fire.
Tonight was no different.
“Once,” The Whisper said, “you could tell the void from the light, Costin. Once, you possessed a soul.”
“Another attempt to convert me, is this what I must endure?” There was no rancor in his tone. There was actually the hue of a plea.
“You abhor what you have become. Do not deny it.”
Costin stood, legs so weak that he stumbled toward the wall with the missing stone and slid until he was sitting. “There is naught to do. This is how I live; this is how I last.”
The Whisper came closer, as if he were at the wall, as well, reflecting Costin’s position: hand to hand with stone as the only thing separating them.
“What if this raving old man told you,” he said, “that he could offer redemption?”
Where the word should have caused agony, now it brought odd comfort. Costin looked to the faint light of the hole. “There is none of that for me. Or have you forgotten?”
“You are a soldier, ripe for the fight.” He paused, as if deciding a definite fact. “It is time.”
Before Costin could grasp what was happening, a breeze whispered through the hole in the wall, whistling down to circle his head. Terror bolted through him, and he cowered, arms barring his face.
“Harm is not my intent,” The Whisper said.
“What do you wish of me?”
“No, Costin, what do you wish? The answer is not impossible to guess.”
What did he desire? Blood? Costin instinctively choked. No, no. If he could have anything, anything at all, he would take back the moment he had become a beast.
“Yes,” said The Whisper. “It is yours.”
“My soul?”
The breeze soothed around Costin’s head, as if it had become the hands born to cradle him.
“Costin, your fight begins here. Yet, to win your soul, there would be conditions.”
He could not believe this. Was he in a fever dream?
The breeze rested on Costin’s shoulders. “This brotherhood you are joined with in blood . . . Every creature who took part in the ritual must be hunted down and destroyed.”
“Every . . . one.” His brothers.
“Especially the one who birthed you. The dragon. The wily creature who struck a deal with the devil himself.”
Costin’
s thoughts were still far behind this talk of his maker.
His brothers. Benedikte. They had all become something not of this world, not human. None of them had the soul that Costin might take back if he . . .
He willed himself to wake up. But there was no flash of fire in this dream. This was very real.
“If they all should die by my hand,” Costin whispered, testing, “would I be human again?”
“No, it is too late for that. When every last creature is vanquished, you will be granted a true and peaceful death, your soul whole and finally yours. You will not face fire if you succeed. However, there is a boundary to this hunt.”
A boundary? Costin’s mind was tattered.
The old man continued, as if offering terms such as these every night. “Someday, the dragon will sleep for years and years after he commands your brothers to create societies where they will build in number and power. Then the dragon will rise to dominate humanity just as he sought to in life. You, Costin, must destroy the dragon before this later rising.”
Yes, this was only a dream, after all. It could not be true in any shape or form. Yet Costin found himself carried along with the madness. He had nothing else.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“That is not a question that matters.”
What mattered was that Costin was a creature being offered back his soul, and there was something like a spirit in the room doing the deed.
“How long would I have, old man?”
“Centuries.” The Whisper sounded pleased that Costin was not denying him. “And though that sounds sufficient, it might not be. Winning back a soul that was willingly cast into darkness is a terrible matter, Costin. This might be all but impossible.”
“And if I fail?”
“Your soul will be forfeit to the place you cursed it to. For eternity.”
He would dream—feel—fire forever.
Images of his teeth slashing through skin, breaking through the bone that mixed with the blood he wished to consume . . .
“What else?” Costin asked. “What else must I do?”
Break of Dawn Page 22
