Undead for a Day (2 page)

Her head still ringing from the slap, Lilly tried to speak to Amber, but her mouth could only chew on formless words. Sounds came out of her—helpless, wincing, mindless sounds.

Why? Why couldn’t she tell her to make the burning hurt inside of her stop?

When Amber held up a mind tuner and started to put it over Lilly’s head, Lilly bared her teeth at her.

A tuner—they were going to hurt her
again
.

But Amber had clearly been expecting this, and she used that commanding tone.

“Stop, Lilly.”

Lilly’s mind fought against the magic in those words and, for a moment, she almost broke through the thick power of it.

“
Lilly, you will obey
!”

It was as if an invisible hand slammed her down.

The magic...too strong.

But the anger remained. So did her enlivened mind, which was gaining more memory and clarity by the minute, even if it couldn’t override her body.

Freedom
, Lilly thought. That was all she wanted in this moment. Sweet freedom from this pain.

Next to her, the older retirees had submitted to the tuners quite easily, and Amber fixed her own to Lilly’s head, now that she had been tamed.

As more electricity—hot and sizzling—gnawed through Lilly, Amber whispered, “
Remember
.”

Just as if she’d been struck by lightning, Lilly’s eyes rolled back in to her head and she stiffened. Then she shook with the force of all the history, all the years of memories that the family had stored in the tuners...and all the information that had been erased from Lilly’s head when she had been retired.

Ancient warriors who protected the master. Two keepers at one time. Bodyguards. Blood. Nights as black as spilled ink as the Mertaloliage keepers crept round the cities, securing each location in which they tried to keep the master hidden
.

But there was also a plan that had been shoved into her head along with the memories—a plan that told her how they were going to raise the dragon tonight.

Slowly, her vision refined itself, becoming sharp and colorful, although her eyes felt as if they were still rolled back in her head.

“Do you see?” Amber asked. “Do you see, Lilly, what you cost us and what we’re attempting to recoup tonight?”

The anguish in Lilly boiled. All she had been doing was protecting the master. She had been doing her best.

Amber narrowed her gaze, assessing her, then stood. She spoke to all three of the retired keepers.

“
Lilly. Harry. Richard. You will obey my commands. Show me you understand
.”

As one, they nodded, and Lilly couldn’t stop herself, just as if she were on strings that could be pulled every which way.

From the tuner, she knew several things: They had until dawn to find the dragon. But first they were to track the vampire hunter who had absorbed his blood when she struck him down.

Amber walked around them, surveying her handiwork as she spoke. “Due to our magic, the master has risen in the vampire hunter you seek—she will be feeling...different...just as surely as you do. Be cautious even as you are ruthless.”

Lilly and her reanimated cohorts swayed back and forth.

The dragon. She was going to do right by her master this time.

He had never hurt her. He had never betrayed her and put this gnawing fire in her veins.

Amber’s helpers armed Lilly, Harry, and Richard with familiar weapons—tools they had been genetically primed to learn and trained to use when they were humans. Implements that could stun, a dark-arts spell box, a button fixed to their cuffs that could spray acid, a chain, nunchucks. A small GPS tracker.

Then Amber gave them one last command.

“
You will bring that vampire hunter back here to us, where we will take care of rescuing the dragon from her body and raising him to his proper place. Do not kill the body in which the dragon is residing. We reserve that honor after we perform the extraction on the vampire hunter. Is that clear?
”

The other two  nodded without pause, but Lilly fought it, merely to show Amber that she could not be controlled.

But, indeed, she could be, and she found herself nodding, as well.

Then, as if she were on those commanding strings, Lilly dropped to all fours, her back hunched, waiting just long enough for her other two partners to join her. She was all but panting to leave now, the magic firing through her.

“Go,” said Amber.

They all burst into a zoom of speed, away from the bonfire, loping over the grassy hill, bloodthirsty cries coming out of Lilly’s throat and cutting through the night as they all shot toward the master.

And toward Dawn Madison, the vampire hunter who carried him as her passenger.

Longer Before Midnight

Dawn didn’t sleep much these days.

Maybe she hadn’t ever gotten much shut-eye, but lately, it was like she was on a drug called NeverEverDoze—an invention karma had created just for her.

As the grandfather clock downstairs in the beach house she shared with Costin struck ten thirty, she leaned back in the desk chair in the ornate study where she’d been going over some notes from a cold case that Kiko Daniels, her former vamp hunting buddy, had given her.

A man looking for a high school sweetheart. Touching, but it wasn’t nearly as save-the-world as she was used to. Kiko, the psychic private dick, and his new wife Natalia, who had the same talents, were only trying to engage Dawn in the more normal life they’d found since their last brush with the paranormal. But why even bother?

Idly, she swung around in the swiveling chair, which was a mistake, because it put her in full view of the long mirror across the room—the one that tilted downward while stretching over the fireplace mantel like a sentinel, always reminding her of who she was.

By now, she was used to the sight that greeted her. Besides the long dark hair and brown eyes she’d always had, there were the black marks on the left side of her face that made it look like she had fallen asleep and a kid had gotten a hold of a Sharpie then decided to create a network of tattoos.

That’s what you got when you were an ex-vampire hunter with a temper, though. Near the end of her illustrious career, she’d developed some latent psychokinetic powers that had gone bad. Or, more to the point, anger had made them go bad, and that rage had started to come out as these lovely beauty spots.

Three cheers for that. Yet that was nothing when you took a look at her right side, where her face was littered with red spots. That was where the dragon’s blood had hit her when she’d attacked him during the London Underground battle. But the head vampire hadn’t just given her some pretty crimson spatterwear for her skin. Hell, no—his blood had seeped
under
her flesh, into the deepest parts of her.

Toward her soul stain.

Dawn tried not to think about the pit inside of her that had gone empty after she had once, during an earlier vampire showdown, made the choice to turn into a bloodsucker, herself, just so she could save her lover Costin.

How could she have known that, if you were so-called lucky enough to have your own vamp maker destroyed and you went back to being mortal, yourself, the soul came back different, as if it had been dirtied?

As if, maybe, you didn’t deserve to be human again?

She kept telling herself nowadays that the numbness she’d gradually started to feel this past year or so after fully retiring was for the best. It was self-medicating, and it kept her away from the anger. It kept her away from those psychokinetic powers that had destroyed and brought her that much closer to darkness with each push of anger. Most importantly, though, it kept the dragon on the right side of her body, away from the waiting, bitter black of her soul stain.

No one knew what might happen if she got too angry again, letting the dragon break free to make a run through her so he could reach the worst part of Dawn. No one wanted to find out.

Just as she was rubbing her eyes with her fists, she felt a presence enter the room, and she managed a smile.

Costin. He was the best thing she had going in life.

“And where’ve you been?” she asked.

When he spoke, all she heard was his voice, basically because he didn’t have a body. “You know that Halloween is not a night I enjoy celebrating, so I took to the beach.”

Costin’s essence used to rest in a painted landscape portrait when he “slept.” But that had changed after the dragon had been conquered. Now, Costin just went wherever ghosties did when they needed some R&R and, in his case, one of those places was by the rolling water.

All in all, being the girlfriend of a spirit was... interesting. Yeah, that was a good word for it. Until a few years ago, he’d been a Soul Traveler, an ethereal being who’d made a vow in the 1400s to hunt down all the vampires in the dragon’s bloodline. But then Dawn and he had taken care of the dragon in London, destroying its reign.

As if on cue, the dragon-soaked right half of her body pulsed, and she fought the urge to touch the red on her face.

Instead, she got out of the chair, and Costin wrapped his essence around her.

How did he always know when she needed that?

He calmed her, making the dragon stay away from her soul stain. Costin was the only one who could save her from the dragon and herself.

Costin’s voice buzzed through her. “You are very much on edge tonight.”

“It’s because I was ready to shoo away any Halloween rug rats who came knocking on our door, dressed like Tigger or Catwoman.”

He embraced her even more strongly with his invisible force. Part of him even eased into her, and her belly clenched, sending a thrill through her.

“I know, I know,” she said. “No kids ever come up this way.” Not with the gates at the bottom of their driveway providing a hint that the couple inside wasn’t all that festive.

“Do you need me to come into you early?” he asked.

“No. I can wait until morning.” That was usually when Costin did his comfort thing on her. Every sunrise, he used his essence to enter her and push the dragon away from her soul stain if it’d encroached.

Costin was her best medicine, all right—the only way they knew to fight off the pure evil that could explode in her if the big master was reenergized by her darkness.

“If I did not know better,” Costin said, a buzz in her ear, “I would say that your psychiatric appointment tomorrow is making you fretful.”

She shrugged away from him. “Fretful? Is that the word we should use to describe how I feel?”

“I know you hate going every week. But you do not have to, Dawn.”

“Yes, I do. And I should
want
to have my head examined on a regular basis because it’ll make me so much better if I have some sort of psychological breakthrough.”

Dr. Lucas, who was well-versed in the supernatural, tried to understand what she was going through, but unless you’d been where she’d been....

Well, how many normal people
had
?

As Dawn muffled a curse, then went back to Costin’s spirit embrace, she heard the clock ticking from the first floor, heard the waves murmur just outside the slightly gaped balcony window.

She also heard footsteps downstairs, but she knew who they belonged to, and it didn’t do much to mellow her out. Jonah was a permanent house guest since he had been Costin’s “body” for years now. He had been through the Underground battles with them, and Costin occasionally rooted in the guy when he needed to have a physical presence—to feel the sand under his feet or to taste a dinner that Dawn had cooked out of “trying a new, relaxing experience,” for example. Or to touch Dawn’s face with his fingertips, although they didn’t go beyond that, seeing as they were both keenly aware that it was actually Jonah’s body, not Costin’s, that they would be using.

It was a messed up situation, really, because while in Costin’s body, Jonah had...Well, “developed a liking” for Dawn was a mild way of putting it. Luckily, he respected the boundaries between all of them now, and he even got out of the house at night most times, doing Lord knows what with the women he met in beachside bars.

Dawn didn’t want to know the details. It was bad enough that she truly believed Costin needed Jonah just as much as Jonah loved to have Costin around, sprucing up his boring life.

“It is late,” Costin said, clearly sensing that her tension hadn’t gone anywhere. “Come with me to bed, Dawn.”

“I’m not tired.”

“I can feel that you are. Exhausted, as a matter of fact.”

Smiling, she caressed the living air where his voice had come from, thankful for his concern. Glad that someone felt this way about her, even if she couldn’t conjure up much concern about herself on nights like this.

“I’m good,” she said. “Really. You do your thing and I’ll be along pretty soon.”

From the way Costin lingered, she could tell that he knew she was distancing herself from him yet again. It’d been that way for a while. After the collapse of the vampire Undergrounds, she had found a sense of peace, but then...

Then one particular case she had helped Kiko with afterward had changed that.

They had tried to come to the dubious rescue of an ex-vampire who had made it out of the destroyed Hollywood Underground, but the woman’s own soul stain had driven her to suicide. Dawn had been there for every terrible second of it, too, and she had connected to the woman’s pain, just as if it were her own.

At the memory, darkness pulled at Dawn from the inside out, and she started to walk away from Costin.

But he wasn’t having it.

He eased all the way into her, and at the invisible force of him filling her up, she dropped to her knees. Even if she felt more alone than ever, she wanted to be a part of him again, just like she used to when she’d first come to him as a hardened Hollywood stunt woman who thought she knew everything.

She couldn’t breathe for a moment—it was like that every time he entered her, his essence like sweet friction as he abraded her with electricity. A sizzling heat scraped through her, making her ache in her belly and between her legs.