Broken (33 page)

DAWN
only knew it was her mother because Eva was sitting there in a rickety chair dressed in a long white nightgown, one leg crossed over the other, her hands folded in her lap with a sense of silver screen chic that a real star never surrendered, even with a change of identity.

Then there was the rest of her.

Even in the hallway-lit room, Dawn could see Eva’s snake-tangled blond hair, and her eyes. . . . God, it was her staring eyes that did it. She had the gaze of a wife who’d been locked away in an attic by her husband.

But Eva was also smiling, looking happier than Dawn had ever seen her.

It’s my state of mind—pain, exhaustion,
Dawn thought, closing her eyes, fumbling for something to hold on to for balance. She found a table near the head of Frank’s bed that took her weight. This
had
to be her nutso state of mind at work on her, because Eva was acting like everything was normal.

But when Dawn opened her eyes, Eva was the same mess. Dawn didn’t even know how much time had passed as she grappled to accept that what she saw in front of her was real.

Then she remembered Frank. After working her way around to actually talking, Dawn didn’t overreact. Instead, she spoke quietly, as if a loud word would rile Eva out of her corner and hell would break loose.

“Mom, what happened here? Did Frank’s vamp sickness get worse before he went human again?”
And what the hell happened to you?
she wanted to shout.

Eva sighed, as if this would be a real long story. “Frank will eventually be fine. I’ve made sure of it.”

“He should be at a hospital.” Dawn didn’t care how many questions a doctor would ask. “Why didn’t you take him there?”

“I tried my best to see that matters wouldn’t go that far. I’ve been taking care of him, Dawn.”

There was something about Eva’s lullaby voice and constant smile that went beyond spooky. Went beyond basic shudders. This was a more primal fright that made the center of Dawn’s bones go ice-cold.

Her mom continued. “He was healing, but then, out of nowhere, he seized up, then started altering, and I realized that something had to have happened in the Underground to affect him.”

Dawn could explain the dragon’s death later. “Right—Frank went human again, so that means he won’t heal like he did when he was a vampire. This vamp sickness that he contracted obviously didn’t work itself off when—”

Eva’s smile disappeared as her voice sliced out. “He isn’t sick.” Then she uncrossed her legs, crossing them the other way, another pleasant smile counteracting her sharpness. “I simply took too much from him.”

What?

Frank was wheezing in an attempt to breathe, and Dawn had to concentrate on him more than Eva.

“We’re gonna get you to a hospital, Dad. Just hold on.” She reached for the cell phone in her jacket, not sure if it’d get reception, but she had to try.

“Please don’t,” Eva said. “I told you, he doesn’t need medical aid. I’ll take care of him. He’ll want me to now.”

With one hand, Dawn flipped open her phone to the bright LED screen.

What happened next seemed like a flicker of time—here and gone before she could even react.

Eva rose from the chair, her nightgown a mass of white as she repeated “
no
” in a voice that smacked of charm, but wasn’t quite the same as a vampire’s. Then she touched the phone and went back to her seat, her hands folded in her lap again as if she hadn’t moved.

Dawn stared at Eva as her consciousness caught up.
Just like déjà vu,
she thought. A blur of reality mixed with the surreal.

Thinking that she’d imagined the moment, Dawn accessed her phone, but it was dead, as if the battery had suddenly gone kaput.

Ice wiggled up her spine as she slowly put the phone away. She didn’t like what she was thinking about her mom, who’d stowed herself away in her room for nights without anyone really paying attention to her. Dawn should’ve followed up after the wine bar, should’ve gotten her head out of saving the world and concentrated on what was right in front of her instead. Wasn’t that what a good daughter would’ve done?

“Interesting,” Eva said. “You went ahead and tried to phone out, anyway. It seems my charm only works on men. Or maybe just on the people who really do want to be charmed.”

“Mom,” Dawn said, even more softly now. “Just how have you been taking care of Frank?”

Her mother smoothed her hands over her white nightgown. “I’m not sure how to explain.”

Frank kept wheezing, as if he was attempting to tell Dawn everything in his own way. She rested a hand on his frail shoulder to make him stop wasting his energy. At her feet, Breisi was making the same efforts to communicate, and Dawn had the feeling that Eva had done something to Dawn’s friend, too.

“I needed him,” Eva said simply.

“Needed him for what?”

Her mother’s smile grew, and Dawn realized that she and her mom were in two different worlds. Dawn just wished she knew where Eva’s was.

The heft of a revolver in Dawn’s jacket pocket seemed to pull her down. She didn’t like that Eva was making her realize the weapon was there.

“Are you a vampire again?” Dawn’s voice betrayed a wisp of approaching dread. Damn it. She put more force behind her question. “Is that what happened at that wine bar when you were alone, without anyone watching you?”

“Not a vampire,” Eva said.

“Then
what
?”

“I. Don’t. Know.” The responses were bladed, but they had the cool grace of butterfly knives.

Frank’s fingers wrapped weakly around Dawn’s wrist. He was moving his pruned mouth, laboring to produce sounds, but nothing came out.

Dawn was reaching her wits’ end. “Start talking, Eva.”

Her mom didn’t even blink, just kept smiling. Happy, bursting smiling that seemed so out of place with what she ended up saying. “You, out of everyone, should know this was bound to happen. I lasted as long as I could after everyone else in the L.A. Underground took their lives or ran away, never to be heard from again. They’re probably all dead now, and that’s how I’ve felt for this past year, too. Dead. The only thing that’s kept me alive was how you tried to make us a family again.”

Dawn gripped Frank’s thinned fingers, as if that would help her to withstand what Eva was saying. If she’d known her mom would end up like this, she might’ve done something. She wasn’t sure what, but look at them now. Look at what she’d brought on by not realizing Eva’s stain would turn out to be just as bad as her own.

Her mother’s hands were still in her lap, her bare feet peeking out from beneath her nightgown, her hair a bristled cloud around her face from the stray hairs sneaking out from the coils. “I couldn’t go on, day after day, pretending things were okay with Frank living just a block away with Breisi. So I offered myself to him through my blood, and he rejected me. And I left, thinking there was no more left for me.”

She’d gone to the wine bar.

“Were you bitten by the time I got to you?” Dawn asked, recalling the giddy difference in Eva—a bliss that really
had
gone past drunkenness, now that she knew better.

“I told you—I wasn’t bitten.”

Frank groaned on the bed, and Eva got out of her chair as if he’d sent her an invitation to come to him.

“If you don’t mind,” she said, motioning for Dawn to move aside. “I’ve recovered from taking care of him the last time, and I’m ready to do it again.”

The only reason Dawn surrendered her place was that Frank was in trouble and Eva seemed to know a way of helping—at least until Dawn could get him out of here.

Breisi clung to her ankles, as if warning Dawn. Then, in the subdued light from the hall, Dawn watched as Eva used her nail to open a wound on her wrist and hold it over Frank’s shriveled mouth.

He turned his head away as the blood dripped to him, leaking from the sides of his lips as he refused Eva once again.

Dawn went light-headed, the pain from her injuries still working its muddiness on her. “He’s not a vampire anymore. Why would he want your blood?”

“Because of what I am. I think that my blood is the reason he survived going human again. He might not have been strong enough to take the change without me. But don’t worry—he won’t turn into anything nonhuman because he’s drinking from me. My blood doesn’t seem to have any power beyond a higher nutrition. I’m only nursing him back to the way he used to be.”

Her mom was mostly talking about bringing him back to the days when he’d loved her.

“What I want to know,” she said, moving toward Eva out of an instinctive need to protect her dad, “is how the hell he
got
this way.”

Her mother lightly pushed Dawn away, as if she was nothing but a pest. Dawn’s ire churned, the dragon’s blood heating in her, but she was so tired, so injured that there was only a pathetic spark that stung her. The spark didn’t even flare up the dragon’s blood as much as it made the marks pound, like a living thing that’d been prodded.

Frank’s tongue licked at Eva’s blood, and he whimpered, as if he hated himself for knowing it would help him.

Eva said, “There we go, baby,” and gave him more. He took in every bit, and there wasn’t a damned thing Dawn could do—not if this would make him better, like Eva claimed. Dawn wouldn’t deprive him of the only medicine at hand.

“You tell me what went on in that wine bar,” Dawn said.

Eva’s smile beamed in the near darkness. “A man. And he gave me just what I’d been hoping for.”

Then she told Dawn of his enthralling eyes, his foreign accent, his way of talking a woman into trusting him. When she arrived at the part where she and the man had melded their blood, skin to skin, deal to deal, Dawn took a sudden step away from Eva.

Sweet Jesus.

Not again. This was a joke. Eva was trying to get attention. This was . . .

This was actually happening.

Dawn had read about things like this before—bargains with demons, advocates who took advantage of desperate, sad, or greedy humans—but she’d been so focused on vampires that she’d never imagined . . . never thought . . .

“He took your soul,” Dawn said. Hadn’t the team suspected that London was a gathering ground for the paranormal? Shouldn’t she have been on watch for more than just vamps?

Lost,
Dawn thought. Eva was never coming back, was she? She’d slipped right through the cracks of Dawn’s life.

Why couldn’t she have stopped this?

“Yes, he took my soul,” Eva said. “And, in trade, he gave me a new chance with Frank.”

Frank had finished drinking, and Eva was pressing her fingers to her wrist. With a grimace, he rolled his head to the side, breathing more evenly, in spite of his clear dismay at having given in to her.

But why wouldn’t he? He used to like Eva’s bagged blood more than any other because it did something for him, and it seemed that this craving had continued into a different era. Dawn wondered if he would always need Eva in some way.

Her mom was watching her former husband as if they were married again. “I would’ve given up my soul a thousand times over for him.”

“You mean you would’ve given it so Dad could be sick and dependent on you?”

When Eva merely gazed at him with warped affection Dawn had her answer.

“So this man in the wine bar . . .” Dawn said, still searching, still hoping there was a way out of this for all of them. If she just tried again. . . . “It sounds like he was a representative, a lower demon who goes around collecting souls for whatever you want to call it . . . the devil . . . the dark side . . .”

“And if he was?” Eva said.

“That doesn’t scare the ever-loving
shit
out of you?”

Dawn heard herself, recognizing that a woman who’d given up her soul to be a vampire one time probably wouldn’t be afraid of much.

Eva calmly swiveled her gaze over, doubling the fear in Dawn’s jumping pulse.

“I never really had my soul back,” her mother said. “Not as it was before I gave it up the first time when I exchanged blood and became a vampire. I think all our souls returned with the need for us to destroy ourselves, didn’t they? They’ve been raked through a place they weren’t meant to be, whether it was stored in one of Benedikte’s vials or wandering through the atmosphere not knowing where to go. It dirtied them. There was a price for us to keep on living after our humanity returned.” Eva lavished her attention on Frank again. “To tell you the truth, a tainted soul wasn’t all that valuable to me when I was asked to give it up this time.”

“Don’t say that.” This woman on the bed . . . she couldn’t be Eva . . . she hardly even looked like her.

Then Dawn thought of Della and the girls: how they’d been monsters, too, but had seemed so human in their last actions. Wasn’t there hope for Eva in the end if Dawn could save her?

She bunched her good hand into a fist. She couldn’t give up, especially not on her mother.

Eva tossed off another comment, but this one hit its target smack in the center of Dawn. “I was never going to be truly human again, and I accepted that. You should, too.”

Dawn had been thinking it all along. But Eva saying it verified all her worst nightmares.

Never human again . . .

Eva touched Frank’s shirt, and he cringed. Breisi went taut around Dawn’s ankles. She seemed to be a little stronger, but she wasn’t moving.

Was she saving herself for something . . . ?

“So you couldn’t be a vampire,” Dawn said, “and you settled for this. A creature I can’t even really identify.”

“I’m better than a vampire. I take what I need with a touch from anyone.”

Breisi rubbed against Dawn’s legs, as if trying to tell her something else, and Dawn took a guess at what it was.

As Eva had said, Frank wasn’t sick. Eva had touched him. Obviously, she sucked energy from her victim—maybe even emotion, too—and Frank was her unfortunate obsession.