Broken (10 page)

“It’s only that the timing is . . . nerve-wracking,” Natalia said. “We bring Claudius here and then there’s a security concern.”

“Costin didn’t mention any concern about it,” Dawn said. And she was sure he would’ve if it had been a problem.

But what if the alarm had failed to notify
anyone
during the flurry of activity before he’d left?

Frank grumbled. “Costin doesn’t mention much. We all know that.”

The only time Dawn had seen her dad question the boss was in L.A., when he’d gone on the Underground siege. But Frank had mellowed since then.

“Anyhow,” she said, “the time stamp on the tracker indicates it was tripped just before sunrise. If someone or something wiggled into headquarters and intended to get to Claudius, I imagine it would’ve already rescued him by now. Or that the Friends would’ve already noticed a presence.”

“Whatever the sitch, I’m walking around fully armed,” Kiko said, nodding toward a weapons cache near a map on the wall. Then he patted one of the bulging pockets of his pants. “I’ve been packin’ because of Claudius, anyway.”

Natalia just looked like a deer in the headlights, and when Dawn tried to send her a reassuring glance, she wasn’t sure it worked so well.

“Has anyone checked on Eva recently?” the new girl asked. “Maybe she tripped the tracker.”

“She’s been in her room nonstop,” Kiko said.

“And that camera would’ve caught her sneaking out,” Dawn said, glancing at Frank. He was staring at the ground, his jaw tight. Eva, his former wife, had tried to win him back with her blood before the Claudius situation even happened, and Breisi, his Friend lover, had gotten on his case because he’d almost given in to the temptation of a live feeding. He’d been taking sustenance from Eva’s bagged blood since it did something for him that other blood didn’t, but a live feeding was manna to a vampire.

“Aw, let’s just say what’s too awkward to say,” Frank muttered. “Eva’s holed up because she’s avoiding me. She’s embarrassed about our own little soap opera.”

Dawn felt herself blushing. Who wanted to think of their parents acting all hormonal? “I just can’t shake this feeling I’ve had that there’s something up with Eva, and her staying in that bedroom is just the half of it.”

Frank leaned forward. “And the other half would be . . . ?”

Jeez. Her dad should’ve picked up on everything else. They’d been married, in love, for God’s sake.

But maybe that was what love amounted to: a great big nothing. Destructive, bubble-brained antics that ended with a grown woman holed up in her bedroom for nights on end.

“You haven’t noticed any depression?” Dawn asked her dad.

“Well . . .”

“Well? Shit, Frank, I guess I’ll have to get the two of you together for a convo after the Underground is taken care of.” Maybe they could all use the same shrink. “You really haven’t seen Eva dragging around, trying to look happy when it’s obvious that she hasn’t been since L.A.?”

“Dawn, if this is another tirade because you feel guilty about turning her back human—”

“It’s not.” Fuck it. And screw it all, because she
wanted
Frank to be with Breisi, who fulfilled him in ways Eva had never done. Breisi was good for him. But Dawn also wanted to piece together the family she’d never had while growing up.

Hell, who knew what she wanted.

While Kiko and Natalia stood by, looking like they were wishing the computers would suck them into their screens, Dawn wrapped up family dirty laundry hour. It all seemed so idiotic when an attack could come at any time and when there’d been a tripped alarm.

“Kik, could you do me a favor with Eva when things calm down?”

“Name it.”

“Could you visit her? Try to get some kind of reading to see if there’s anything I can do to help?”

Kiko agreed, yet Dawn could see his puzzlement. But none of them had been with her on the night she’d brought Eva back from running away, after her mom had attempted to seduce Frank with her blood. They hadn’t seen how weird her mother was acting, all giddy and girlish, a one-eighty from sorrowful, wistful Eva.

What had happened in that wine bar she’d run to? What had caused her to turn around her attitude like that?

Dawn gestured toward the tape markings on the floor, knowing there was nothing much else she could do about anything until Friend Evangeline got back with news about the alarm. Or until they heard something from Costin. For all Dawn knew, he was on his way back from the Underground and there’d be a big party in store.

But just in case, she’d keep detecting.

“Want to tell us what you found out about Shadow Girl?” she asked Kiko.

He rubbed his hands together. He loved Sherlock Holmes-ing. “I think we reconstructed Shadow Girl’s attack on you. How’s that for a start?”

“Truthfully? It’s not that helpful. I already know how we fought.” Shadow Chick, looking like an evil Spider-Girl and sounding like a tangle-voiced assassin, had almost kicked all kinds of ass until Dawn had used her mind powers to level the playing field. Breisi had charged into Eva’s flat to chase Shadow Girl out, yet they hadn’t caught her.

“But,” Kiko said, raising a finger, “do you know
why
she fought you?”

Okay. Interested now. “Do
you
know?”

Kiko went from looking hugely superior to deflating a bit. “Kind of.” But then he puffed up again. “See, while I went around Eva’s flat touching things and receiving images and vibes, Natalia opened herself up for impressions, too.”

The other psychic held up her notebook. There were numbers as well as what looked to be a running commentary. “Every numeral that’s written on the tape matches an impression we received while concentrating on that particular location.”

Kiko moved to the left, where the number one was written on some tape that was strung from the top of one computer screen to another. “Let’s start right here. This is the window where Shadow Girl first looked in to get a peek at you.”

“I caught what was in her mind,” Natalia said.

Dawn waited, but the new girl hesitated.

Kiko rolled his eyes. “Nat’s too much of a lady to say it, but when the shadow thing saw you, she thought, ‘Well, fuck me!’ But it was a happy, excited ‘Well, fuck me!’ like what a hunter thinks when it spots its prey. Pure elation and anticipation.”

“Never thought of myself as prey,” Dawn said. Watched. Tracked. Shit.

“She’d been observing you way before you got into Eva’s flat,” Kiko said.

As Dawn held back a shiver, he moved to number two written on some tape on the floor.

“And here,” he said, pointing, “is where Shadow Girl landed after she crashed through the window. Now we find out that you were in for a real battle, Dawn.”

Natalia spoke up. “She wanted you to fight her with all you had. We felt that this shadow thing takes great satisfaction in stalking, in trapping. She was going to capture you, Dawn. Question you.”

Dawn had already known about the questioning part since Shadow Girl had taunted her with that bit, but she tried not to let the reminder creep her out, too.

“Let’s get to the nitty-gritty,” she said, thinking they could be here all night if she allowed Kiko free rein to show off everything he and Natalia had sensed. “Is this shadow girl on the side of the vamps or is she a rival hunter?”

“No confirmation either way,” Kiko said.

Natalia was shaking her head.

“What?” Dawn asked. “You disagree?”

“Somewhat. I felt a vague defensive instinct in her.
I
would interpret it as her wishing to protect the vampires.”

“Not the answer I was hoping for.”

Somewhere in the house, she thought she heard a door slam, and she spun toward the room’s entrance.

Costin? Had he already come back?

Then her blood turned cold. Costin wasn’t a slammer.

Frank had heard it, too, and he was already on his feet, his knit cap tossed to the ground as he headed toward the room’s exit. Dawn followed, a stake already drawn from its holster.

“Stay in here,” she said to Kiko, who already had a revolver loaded with silver bullets in hand. He was in front of Natalia like a bodyguard.

Dawn gave Frank the lead, since his vampire senses could pick out scents and sounds way beyond her reaches.

The tripped alarm,
she thought. Had an intruder decided that now was a good time to come out of hiding?

Or did the team have company of a different sort?

When Frank and she got to the foyer, they found the source of the sound.

It was a Friend, and from the inflection, Dawn could tell it was Evangeline.

“Do you know who might’ve tripped that laser alarm?” Dawn asked. Maybe the slamming door had been caused by Evangeline’s windy speed after she’d reentered the house through one of their activated entrances.

“It was due to none of the Friends,”
the spirit said, her voice spinning, ethereal.
“Dawn, we must—”

She was drowned out by the forceful trills of other Friends as they entered the room, their jasmine swirling around Dawn and Frank. One even knocked down a pewter vase balanced on a shelf.

“Lock down!”
she said as she passed Dawn.

“They’re coming!”
said another.
“And they’re not alone!”

“Who? Vamps?” Even though Dawn had half expected them, she still couldn’t believe that this relatively flagrant Underground would be moronic enough to attack in public, whether it was the dead of night or not.

“Charmed humans,”
Evangeline said.
“The vampires seem to be rounding them up!”

Charmed humans?

Dawn should’ve known. If the vampires were coming, smart ones wouldn’t be doing it so obviously at first—not until headquarters was broken down enough for them to easily enter, under quieter cover. The humans were probably going to do the dirty work for them.

So. How did a person fight other humans who were on the side of vamps? How did a hunter avoid killing innocent bystanders caught in the crap?

Frank strode to the weapons cache near the door, opened the safe, then extracted two machetes and a couple of earpieces, one of which he handed to Dawn.

“Those vamps’re here to get Claudius,” he said calmly. “And they’re gonna be spanked for it.”

Some of the Friends shot off to different areas, no doubt to guard Kiko and Natalia while the rest of them zoomed toward the walls, positioning themselves on high ground.

“Is my mom going to be covered in her room?” Dawn asked.

One of the Friends answered; Mary-Margaret, with her Georgia accent.
“We’ve been leaving Eva alone since she’s been bed-bound, but one of us has gone to her now, Dawn.”

“Good.” She knew what she had to do next, where to position herself.

Dawn fitted the earpiece into her ear, then headed toward the lab and the vampire Claudius.

A
lineup of Queenshill schoolgirls loitered in a dark alleyway, thirty meters from where they thought their target to be in a brick building across from the gated concrete slab known as the Cross Bones Graveyard.

Back in the Underground, the vampires had taken merely five minutes to come up with a plan that was sure to alleviate their problems. First, they would indeed utilize their animalistic vampire senses to track Mrs. Jones, thus obeying Wolfie. But when they found their former housematron, they would finish off what they hadn’t been able to accomplish last night: her death.

Wolfie would never know, for he and Mrs. Jones would have too much distance and earth between them to communicate with each other, mind-to-mind. And the schoolgirls would always keep her fate amongst themselves. They had vowed it to each other.

Since Mrs. Jones had been bleeding when she had been disgorged from the community, the hunt had been rather simple, the schoolgirls’ noses leading them from Highgate to an abandoned building in Dalston, to the edge of the building here in Southwark where the scents disappeared. Much to Della’s excitement, there was a bonus in this hunt, for what else did she and Noreen discern but the smell of those attackers who had trespassed on the Queenshill campus nights ago.

For some reason, they were with Mrs. Jones in the building.

Though Della was excited, she was also afraid. The mean vampire—the lean one with the dark hair who had killed the dogs at Queenshill, exhibiting such bloodlust—would surely be inside, too. But the girls numbered twenty-five, whereas there were far fewer of the others.

Yet, how would the girls go inside without being invited? This was the quandary. Their head girl, Stacy, had also noted the presence of well-camouflaged light sources near the door, and Della frightfully recalled the UV grenades that the attackers had used on them during the melee.

So the schoolgirls had stayed hidden at first, heeding Della’s warnings about these attackers and their possible motivations. Della had believed the group might even be from a rival Underground intent upon taking over Wolfie’s community. In any case, if they were entertaining Mrs. Jones, or keeping the old vampire against her will, they were to be treated as the enemy.

Stacy—smarter, wiser, savvier Stacy—had suspected that the girls probably wouldn’t be able to sashay into this building without a care. It was only a shame that they couldn’t shift into any other human shape, as Mrs. Jones clearly could; their blood was weaker and they had inherited merely the ability to take animal form.

But the head girl had come upon an idea certain to maintain their safety, as well as their identities, while gaining access.

Charmed humans, she had said. Though the older girls weren’t at the level of Mrs. Jones’s charm, they had honed this power far beyond the ability to keep prey quiet. Plus, in the dark of night, outside the closing pubs, at a time when most wiser men and women had already taken to their homes, it hadn’t required much effort to approach several plastered subjects who still hadn’t abandoned the streets.