Break of Dawn

by Chris Marie Green

  Remember, she thought. Remember him using you as bait more times than you can count. Remember that he’s lied to you before. Remember that you can’t put any faith in him. . . .

  Harshly, she motioned toward Breisi’s portrait, where the background looked so dead without her Friend in it.

  “Come to think of it,” she said, “I remember that Dracula had a harem, too. Brides, right?”

  His jaw had clenched at the name “Dracula.” She’d finally crossed a line. She’d been banking on that.

  “They agreed to live on in these pictures.” Only a tiny fissure in his tone revealed a crack. “In those portraits, their worlds are intact, and they are happy.”

  “The worlds they shared with you. How sweet.” At this point, she realized she was also working off of a twisted jealousy. “When do their sentences end, Costin?”

  Tickticktick—

  “When I die peacefully,” he answered, a note of longing creeping into the words. “Then they come with me.”

  His answer echoed like the aftermath of a sonic boom, canceling out everything else.

  Death. When he died, he really wouldn’t be around anymore. No hocus-pocus, no more miracles. He would get his soul back, all right, but he was telling her that he would be going to a better place than hell. A place he had earned.

  And it would have nothing to do with her because she’d resisted joining him.

  “That is why I do not allow my Friends to kill while they remain in pure spirit form,” he said. “I take on the stain of blood in the state of what should have been their grace. It is part of my penance.”

  “Aren’t you in pretty much the same state? When you kill, doesn’t that mean you won’t go to heaven?”

  Much to her shock, he refused to answer, falling to the floor before her instead, bowing, lowering his head and putting his hand to his heart.

  Now it was her chance to apologize for everything, before he left, before he fought and maybe never came back.

  “Costin . . .”

  He peered up at her, his dark hair falling forward, his eyes burning, his face scored not only from wounds but from the hurt she’d visited on him.

  “If there ever was a woman for whom I would give up my soul,” he whispered, “you would have been the one.”

  She choked on her shock, on her grief. Say something, she thought. Do something, stop him—

  Tickticktickticktick

  At her indecision, he arose, then formally nodded to her as if to work around an obvious rejection. She tried to find something to say, anything, but . . .

  “Remember,” he said, cold and beyond reach now, “you will not come anywhere near the Underground. Breisi is in my hands now.”

  And Eva? What about her?

  God, why was she worried about that?

  “Costin—”

  “Dawn, our last argument has passed and I have no more time for waiting.” His eyes flared to sun gold. “You stay here with Kiko and your father, whose intentions are good, by the way—”

  “But Breisi—”

  The heat of his eyes rushed at her, and she rallied to block the incoming power. But a blast of buzzing color blinded her before she mentally chopped it away.

  In the chorusing aftermath, as she stood still, unable to move, all she saw was the gold of his gaze.

  The warm, beautiful hues of the daybreak Costin was venturing into for the first time since shutting himself in.

  TWENTY-THREE

  ... ACTION

  DAWN did get back her sight, although she didn’t know how long it took.

  Hell. She’d blocked one of Costin’s hypnotic attacks, hadn’t she? That was what’d happened? Of course, at the same time, he’d skimmed her mind for everything else she’d seen in the Underground, but she was fine with that part.

  Partially recovered, she stumbled up the stairs, yelling for Kiko. When he didn’t answer, she found out why. He—and reportedly Frank—had been plugging their ears with their fingers while the Friends had vacated the house. They’d done this just in case the spirits tried to lull them to sleep, and the simple solution had worked.

  After that explanation, Dawn stated the obvious. “He’s gone.” She was still blinking away the sunspots. “Costin tried to stall me with his mind, but . . .”

  But it hadn’t worked. Not this time.

  Kiko went on to explain how, after the Friends had left, Frank had made a run out the door so he could go and save Breisi. Of course, since it was daylight and Frank wasn’t a strong enough vampire to work well in the sun, he’d retreated inside. Dawn found him pacing near the back door, his skin reddened. He was almost in a frenzy to go Underground, no matter what Costin had forbid them to do.

  There wasn’t even a question about what would happen next.

  Dawn went up to her guest room and changed clothes, keeping to the tank top, jeans, and biker boots. She rubbed garlic over her skin out of habit, donned both a locator and a silver crucifix with pointed ends, then gathered weapons, mostly backup: a few throwing blades, a silver-tipped stake, more machetes, a .45 with silver bullets, her whip chain, and a mini-flamethrower. She stuffed most of those into a bag that she slung over her chest. The machetes and revolver had their own holsters.

  After binding her hair back into its practical low ponytail, she took out the upper earring in her right lobe, went to her suitcase, and unzipped her jewelry bag to stow the stud. In its place, she donned her blood-moon earring, taking up where she’d left off the night she killed Robby Pennybaker.

  Breisi, I’m coming, she thought all the while. And Eva . . . ?

  They weren’t topmost on Costin’s agenda, but Dawn had her own mission now.

  Yet had he taken any precautions besides the attempted hypnosis to keep them away? They would soon see.

  After a stop in the lab to pick up the saw-bow Breisi had given her, Dawn met Kiko and Frank in the connected, darkened garage. There, they bundled her dad under thick blankets in the backseat of a backup, Breisi-modified 4Runner, then blocked the already-tinted windows with tarp.

  When they finally blasted out of the garage and into sunlight, they were ready for any Servants who tried to stop them.

  But that wasn’t necessary.

  At the sight of the SUV roaring away, one Servant, a woman who worked at a private security firm in normal life, sat in her Jeep on the other side of the road and dialed her secure cell phone. On the other end of the line, another Servant, a lawyer named Enrico Harris, picked up.

  “They’re on their way somewhere,” the security woman said. “Don’t know if it’s the Underground, but you’d better get ready down there.”

  “Did you see who was in the car?” Enrico said.

  “Negative. The windows were blacked out.”

  The other two Servants lingering outside couldn’t have seen inside the 4Runner, either. At least, that was what the security woman thought. And there was something bothering her about an event that had occurred over thirty minutes ago. Before this SUV had blasted away, she thought she’d seen something else—maybe it was nothing at all—come out of the driveway, but her mind had gotten a tad muddled and she wasn’t sure it had actually happened. A check with the other Servant watchers revealed that they’d seen—or not seen—the same thing. . . .

  Meanwhile, Underground, Enrico Harris had already hung up and was heading for an all-purpose communicator that sat on the surface of an office desk. He was in a reception area, on volunteer watch duty.

  He pressed the button on the side of the communicator, and it beeped like an electronic trill. “Master?”

  Waiting for his leader to answer, he tapped his foot on the ground. Enrico had expected a quick response, especially under the high-alert circumstances.

  “Master?” he said into the speaker again.

  Finally, a beaten voice answered. “Yes?”

  Enrico paused in surprise, never having heard his master in such a state, but then he rushed on. “We need to prepare. . . .”
/>   On the other end of the line, Benedikte lay on his room’s cold floor, one hand on the handheld communicator, the other on Eva’s shoulder. He had been trying to help her heal, but something was wrong. Physically, she was recovering, but she wasn’t waking up. It was as if she didn’t want to.

  Through the maze of his mind, he barely heard the Servant on the other end of the communicator, but Benedikte got the gist of it.

  It was time.

  Slowly, he left Eva slumped against the wall, then shifted into Sorin’s body—the one most of the Underground was used to seeing as “the Master.” Benedikte made a great effort not to look at evidence of his son’s demise on the floor. Phantom bloodstains remained, resembling accusing eyes, burning into what the Master had always thought to be his heart.

  Then he numbly made his way out of his room and to the Guard’s cells so he could instruct them in Sorin’s place before they were let loose.

  Once there, all the grotesque centurions stared at him, their eyes red as they crept toward the bars of their cells.

  Without much verve—how could he muster it when Sorin was gone and Eva was not much better?—the Master gave them instructions to defend the Underground perimeter and tear apart anyone who tried to get in. He thought he saw a slight bewilderment in their gazes, in their gaped, iron-toothed mouths.

  A Groupie spoke into a microphone in the shielded control panel down the cell’s hall. “Master, we’ve noticed that the Guards seem . . . scattered . . . for some reason. They have even less focus than usual.”

  “Then you Groupies must back them up if anything goes wrong on the perimeter,” the Master barked. The lower vampire’s comments were reminding him of the way Sorin used to nag.

  “Us?” another control Groupie asked. “Master . . . we haven’t gone near the Guards lately, not after they’ve been calling for our blood. Didn’t you just say the other day that they might be showing signs of addiction to us in particular?”

  And more nagging. Not only were they quoting Sorin’s notes to him, but they were bringing on fresh pain. An image of Sorin’s head exploding with the punch of Benedikte’s fist blinded the Master. He held a hand to his temple and closed his eyes.

  “Do as you are told,” he said, turning to mist—not caring that the Groupies would see the odd change from whom they thought to be Sorin. Then he zoomed back to his room to be with Eva.

  He didn’t stop to think that, even though he had assumed the shape of Sorin’s body, it didn’t mean the Guards would obey anyone but their creator. He didn’t stop to think at all.

  Eager to try healing Eva again, Benedikte reached his room, shifted back into Sorin’s body since his son was still on his mind, then prepared to undo the secret lock. But his door opened before he could finish.

  In his grief, he merely slipped inside, going straight for Eva, sitting next to her, and taking her limp hand in his. Again, he tried to heal her, placing his fingers against her head, against any inch of skin that might still be wounded.

  The scent of jasmine came upon him before he could even identify its qualities. Then a voice sounded from a dark patch on the opposite side of the room.

  “Benedikte.”

  The Master’s head jerked up at the familiar tone, and he shrunk back toward Eva. Then realization suffused him like hemlock, bringing a measure of stultifying peace and welcome destiny.

  “Costin?” he whispered to the voice he recognized now that it was pure and undisguised. Then he smiled sadly, even though it felt like a scowl. “You’re finally here.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THE HUMANITY

  BECAUSE of some hiking adventures years ago, Dawn knew where the old quarry in Griffith Park was, even though Frank said the Underground entrance was well hidden and apart from the TV and film projects that had previously set up shop in the caves. From under his protective blankets, her dad was helping to guide them to the more out-of-the-way location, which Eva had shared with him.

  After encountering a locked gate inside the park, then coaxing it open with the aid of an acid gun Breisi kept stored in one of many added vehicle compartments, Dawn kept her eyes peeled for rangers. Didn’t matter if the officials confronted them, though: Dawn and the team were desperate enough to make a run for the Underground and lose any pursuers in the confusion if it came right down to it. Smokey could arrest them afterward.

  From there, she pushed pedal to metal and took the SUV on a fire road, cold energy stringing her together as the same things kept repeating through her head: Breisi, Eva . . . Costin.

  He kept saying he wouldn’t need a team’s help—not unless it were composed of command-ready Friends, obviously—but she wasn’t disobeying and going Underground for Costin’s sake anyway. Not at all . . .

  She drove on, surprised all over again that flying in the face of a creature as powerful as Costin was so easy. Maybe none of them had been susceptible to his hypnotic sway at this desperate point. Maybe she, in particular, had gotten too good at blocking, because she had the distinct feeling that his final mind blast at her might’ve been a method of wiping out most of the information he’d imparted to her before leaving.

  But something bugged her about that. Would he do a mind wipe on her when he’d been so upset about it being done by Paul Aspen? Of course. That way Costin could get his confessional and trust that Dawn wouldn’t be privy to too much information. Kiko and Frank hadn’t been there for the nitty-gritty conversation and, with a wipe, Dawn wouldn’t be able to tell them about any of what she’d heard.

  In any case, on the way over, Dawn had kept Costin’s personal information to herself. But the more she stayed silent, the more she realized what they were undertaking. And, too late, she’d started to wonder if a pill-popping Kiko was up to going Underground with her and Frank.

  Following her dad’s muffled directions to avoid a more well-known quarry entrance and head lower, they ultimately reached a deserted area off a fire road where daylight swallowed the craggy hills, rocks, and dirt. In spite of the rough terrain, she parked under a shaded overhang, near where Frank said there was a fake wall that could be operated by a knowing touch.

  She and Kiko got out of the 4Runner, but before they opened the rear door to help her blanket-swaddled dad out, Dawn stopped her coworker. “Maybe you should wait out here.”

  Hurting his feelings wasn’t a primary concern right now, yet when he grimaced, she couldn’t help feeling bad. He’d shucked off his back brace and donned a hip holster for his revolver, along with a smaller arsenal bag strapped over his chest, just like Dawn’s and Frank’s bigger ones.

  “I’ve been fighting these things longer than you have,” Kiko said, his words running together—but that could’ve been out of adrenaline, not necessarily a pill.

  She bent and took him by the bag strap. “This isn’t about your experience—which barely trumps mine now, by the way. This is about reality. I saw you put something into your mouth back at the house, Kik, and we’re going to be hauling ass all over the place. You can’t—”

  “Come on, it was only for one little flare-up of pain, okay? That’s all. Just a quarter of one Vicodin. And treating me like a kid isn’t going to keep me out.”

  She gave him a slight push away. “Don’t play that with me. I don’t have time for it.”

  For a moment, Kiko just stood behind her as she went to open the rear door so she could help Frank out. Damn, even a quarter of one of Kiko’s pills would set her reeling, yet the psychic didn’t seem totally stoned. Had he built up a tolerance for the medication?

  Then, his voice showing an effort to talk 100 percent soberly, Kiko said, “I’m gonna go with the rest of the team, Dawn. You know that I won’t just stand by while the shit’s going down.”

  She paused, hand on the door latch as she thought, again, of how Costin’s previous teams had died. They were probably as stupid, stubborn, and, yeah, loyal as this bunch was. And they probably hadn’t believed, either, that their boss could face a whole Underground w
ith just protective Friends as backup.

  Was Costin resigned to them dying? Is that why he needed new teams with every Underground?

  The shuffle of gravel told her that Kiko had taken a step nearer. “We’re all going down there, no matter what Costin says. Do you really think he gives a hoot about anyone else now? He’s concentrating on that master and, when everything is said and done, he won’t care. He just doesn’t want to have to keep an eye on us, I’ll bet. We’re over, as far as he’s concerned, and that’s why we’ve got to put Breisi first on the priority list. Costin ain’t gonna do it. Breisi’s an afterthought to him right now, but not for me. Not ever.”

  From inside the SUV, a thump knocked against the door. Frank, waiting for them.

  “Let’s go get ’em!” he yelled from behind the tarped and tinted window.

  “ ’Em,” which would mean “them” in Frank-speak. But was “’em” referring to Breisi and Eva?

  “Okay.” With the heel of her palm, Dawn knocked back against the window. The aggressive reaction helped to tamp down the pre-fight adrenaline collecting in her like explosives wired to blow. She turned to Kiko, who’d gotten out his revolver and was checking it over for the thousandth time.

  “I just wonder,” Kiko said as he shoved his silver-bullet-filled weapon into its holster, then took a wide-legged stance as if to steady himself, “if you and Frank are gonna retain any immunity. Maybe Eva negotiated it for her loved ones before she blew it with the Master, but is it still in play like it was when you saw those red-eyes with Cassie Tomlinson? I’m fair game, but what about you two?”

  He seemed fantastically cool in the asking, but Dawn could sense a buzz of anxiety in her friend.

  She shrugged, trying to make his important question seem inconsequential. “It all depends if Eva talked her way out of this last game she was playing with the Master. We’ll see.”

  But something told her she needed to fight for her life, to never depend on the Master’s whims to keep any of them safe.

  What she needed to depend on were things like the lower vamps being weaker during the day, because they would probably act as the infantry once the team got past the entrance.