Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
ONE - ONCE UPON A SHADOW
TWO - LONDON BABYLON, INSIDE THE TEMPORARY HAVEN
THREE - THE VAMPIRE HUNTERS
FOUR - THE UGLY STEPSISTER
FIVE - ONCE UPON AN IMPLANTED TALE
SIX - LONDON BABYLON, STILL -TEMPORARY-HAVEN-BOUND
SEVEN - THE BLADED TUNNEL
EIGHT - THE CONNECTIONS
NINE - THE GOOD OF THE MANY
TEN - DRINK TIME WITH EVA, I
ELEVEN - ONCE UPON A BLOOD BATH
TWELVE - LONDON BABYLON, MAIN UNDERGROUND BELOW HIGHGATE
THIRTEEN - THE DEARLY DEPARTED
FOURTEEN - THE MEET AND GREET
FIFTEEN - DRINK TIME WITH EVA, II
SIXTEEN - ONCE UPON A BIG BAD
SEVENTEEN - LONDON BABYLON, MAIN UNDERGROUND KITCHENS
EIGHTEEN - THE DRUNK PATROL
NINETEEN - THE TEST
TWENTY - THE HIGHGATE CHRONICLES
TWENTY-ONE - LONDON BABYLON, MAIN UNDERGROUND KITCHENS
TWENTY-TWO - ONCE UPON AN OMISSION
TWENTY-THREE - THE LION AND THE LAMB
TWENTY-FOUR - THE WAITING GAME
TWENTY-FIVE - LONDON BABYLON, MAIN UNDERGROUND
TWENTY-SIX - HAPPILY NEVER AFTER
TWENTY-SEVEN - THE TROUBLE WITH BROTHERS
TWENTY-EIGHT - THE BEAUTY MARK
PRAISE FOR MIDNIGHT REIGN
“A dark, dramatic, and erotic tone ... Fans of Charlaine Harris and Jim Butcher may enjoy.”—Library Journal
“An exciting, high-tension horror thriller with enough unresolved trust and family issues to make it credible, a hint of romance for spice, and a bit of black humor to lighten up the often dark tone, this is a nicely conceived modern vampire tale that will keep readers guessing.”—Monsters and Critics
“Green writes a complex story featuring well-defined characters and more than enough noir mystery to keep readers enthralled.”
—School Library Journal
“An intriguing world that becomes more complex with every turn of the page ... kick-butt action.”—Huntress Book Reviews
“Green has given her fans an inside look at the Underground culture and social class system, from the powerful Elite, bitten by the Master, to the lowly Guards, bitten by the Groupies ... [a] fun urban fantasy mystery.”—Alternative Worlds
“A fast-moving urban fantasy filled with murder, mystery, and a large dose of the supernatural. The vivid characterization and danger at every turn will keep readers engaged.”—Darque Reviews
“A dark, edgy, and complex series.”—Romantic Times
“A dark and thrilling paranormal tale ... a gritty and suspenseful ride.”—Romance Reviews Today
PRAISE FOR NIGHT RISING
“A book to die for! Dark, mysterious, and edged with humor, this book rocks on every level!”
—Gena Showalter, author of The Vampire’s Bride
“If you like your fantasy with an edge, then you’ve struck gold. There is a ring of truth to the biting—no pun intended—allegory. This is a fantastic start to a new series.”—The Eternal Night
“Chris Marie Green does a wonderful job of bringing this gritty, dark novel to life ... I can’t wait to see where [she] takes the rest of the books.”—The Best Reviews
“An exciting, action-packed vampire thriller ... a fantastic tale that ... provides book lovers with plenty of adventure and a touch of romance.”—Midwest Book Review
“Dawn makes a spunky vampire slayer.”—Publishers Weekly
“An interesting take on the vampire world ... well written and exciting. I look forward to the next book.”
—The Romance Readers Connection
“A killer mystery ... Bring on book two!”
—Kelley Armstrong, author of Men of the Otherworld
Ace Books by Chris Marie Green
NIGHT RISING
MIDNIGHT REIGN
BREAK OF DAWN
A DROP OF RED
THE PATH OF RAZORS
Anthologies
FIRST BLOOD
(with Susan Sizemore, Erin McCarthy, and Meljean Brook)
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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This is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2009 by Chris Marie Green.
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PRINTING HISTORY
Ace trade paperback edition / August 2009
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Green, Chris Marie.
The path of razors / Chris Marie Green.—Ace trade pbk. ed.
p. cm.—(Vampire babylon ; bk. 5)
eISBN : 978-1-101-10460-6
1. Madison, Dawn (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Vampires—Fiction. 3. Americans—
England—Fiction. 4. London (England)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3607.R4326P38 2009
813’.6—dc22
2009015589
http://us.penguingroup.com
To Kaela and both Marias—
thank you, thank you, and thank you! In your own ways,
you’ve each pushed me onward.
Once more, thank you to everyone listed in A Drop of Red for the information that shaped the opening of this trilogy and influenced this installment. And again, a nod goes out to “C.S.” because Queenshill remains on what is probably your land.
Additional mentions also to Jack Zipes for editing The Trials & Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, and Ginjer Buchanan, Cam eron Dufty, and the wonderful staff at Ace. As always, everyone at the Knight Agency gets my thanks for all their support, as well as Judy Duarte and Sheree Whitefeather for their continued input and encouragement.
And, like last time, I’ve taken advantage of fictional license regarding some locations and historical details for the benefit of telling this story. All errors
are my own.
Enjoy the continuation of the London hunt....
ONE
ONCE UPON A SHADOW
THE London night was giving way to a hint of morning as the shadow eased open the seventh-story window of the hotel room just enough to slip inside, roll to the carpet, and come to a crouch.
After scanning the area, the shadow flipped up a pair of night-vision goggles and rose to a stand, revealing the streamlined figure of an Underground caretaker who aided in keeping the community of vampires secure.
This was the newest custode, just activated a week past, due to the death of a previous keeper.
Body and mind becoming more attuned to the job with each passing hour, the caretaker now blended with the angles of darkness in the modest hotel room while extracting a strange, black, weblike instrument from a belt compartment. Then the custode crept over to the sleeping schoolgirl lying on the bed next to another binge-resting female vampire.
Della, the keeper thought, attaching the instrument—the tuner—to the young female’s temples.
The caretaker donned the connecting end of the tuner, concentrating, eyes closed for the few moments it would take to transfer the information.
The vision/tales.
A flock of subconscious nightmares.
Minutes later, the custode disconnected, tucking both ends of the tuner back into the belt compartment.
Yet before departing, the caretaker leaned over to the still-resting Della and whispered into her ear, taking care not to disturb the other three schoolgirls who binge rested in the hotel room, which served as the vampires’ temporary haven.
“Do you know what’s in store for you, little girl?”
The custode lightly tweaked Della’s baby-fat cheek.
Then, quiet as a black spider, the keeper backed away from the bed, lowering the night goggles in preparation to depart.
Sliding out the window, the caretaker kept in mind that Mrs. Jones—or Claudia, as Mihas called her—had stationed her vampire self on the rooftop. Yet the keepers went through a lot of trouble to render themselves scentless, soundless.
The custode flicked on the night-vision goggles then, catching the air, grabbed the stone of a balcony on the way down, repeating the graceful process by swinging on more balconies, lower and lower, until reaching the ground.
Time to go back to tracking the attackers who had breached the Queenshill School for Girls last night.
The custode grinned before blending with the less dangerous, more natural shadows outside.
Time to get back to the relatively safer stuff.
TWO
LONDON BABYLON, INSIDE THE TEMPORARY HAVEN
DELLA started out of her binge rest to find the curtains stirring in a breeze from the opened window, and before her next disconcerted breath, she sprang off the bed to the restless drapery, which she shoved aside.
Someone had just been in the room. But who?
What?
Yet when she peered out the window, nothing was there. Nothing at all. Not even a smell to be detected by her sharpened senses.
Only a timid, chill breeze peeling away the layers of a mid-November morning. Only the slumberous city street below the business hotel in Islington where the girls’ superior, Mrs. Jones, had taken them a few hours ago for safekeeping after the attack on Queenshill by those ...
Della wasn’t so certain what they had been. Another vampire family headed by a preternatural named Frank?
Or something much worse, as Della feared?
As she let the curtain drop back into place, her skin prickled. She was only allowing her imagination to get the best of her, but she couldn’t help recalling one of last night’s attackers—a much meaner, leaner vampire who’d joined his violent chums in the middle of the Queenshill melee. The school had always kept the girls hidden and secure, until last night, when her and her classmates’ secret lifestyle had been challenged by those attackers, who had been minus the mean vampire at first. But when he had joined them, he had ripped apart the dogs Della had called to defend against the trespassers who had crept onto the school grounds for inexplicable reasons.
Her blood curdled as she remembered barely escaping the bad vampire and his clear thirst for destruction.
As a precaution, Mrs. Jones—or “Claudia,” as Wolfie, the master, had affectionately called her last night—had gathered the girls and relocated them here, in this hotel. She had also said that she would watch for any trouble from the hotel’s rooftop, guarding for signs of Frank and his band, should the group decide to pursue them beyond school grounds.
However, Mrs. Jones hadn’t seemed to believe that this scenario would come to fruition; she was even confident that Wolfie’s main Underground at Highgate, which housed his larger community of young female vampires, would stay secure. Naturally, Wolfie had stayed away from the Underground for the time being, just as Della and her friends had been removed from the site of the attack itself—the girls’ sub-Underground at Queenshill, where Della and her small class had been training to become a part of Wolfie’s community after promotion.
There was just something arrogant about Mrs. Jones’s faith, and it was an arrogance Della didn’t quite trust.
Still, she took a bit of comfort from their housematron’s insistence that last night’s odd intruders be identified as soon as possible by the contractors who worked for the Underground—even though the girls had to stay away from their beloved sub-Underground until all trouble was rectified.
Della wandered back to the bed, but didn’t have it in her to rest again.
Too anxious.
A niggle kept at her, but she tried not to dwell on how the girls had been so naughty last night in engaging—encouraging—those intruders on school grounds because it had amused the leader of Della’s pack, Violet.
Yet how could Della not think about it when, at any moment, their housematron might mete out punishment for their lack of common sense?
With a contained tremble, Della lowered herself into a chair by the curtains.
But then something like a whisper, buried in her head, struck at her.
Do you know what’s in store for you, little girl?
Shivers crackled over her skin as she wondered where the words had come from....
Glancing at the other three girls who were still deep at rest on the two beds, Della tried to swallow past the sudden choke in her throat.
She sniffed, inspected the rest of the darkened room with her keen eyesight.
No one.
Nothing.
Perhaps it was merely her instincts trying to warn her, as they had been doing all along, and they had only now been sharpened to a level she couldn’t ignore. Before last night—before she had taken a stand against the rest of the girls who had always treated her as the lowest of the low—Delia had left her instincts to rot.
But no longer, she thought. No more—
Out of nowhere, a vision attacked: A violent stain of red on a cottage wall. A strike of bloodied white ribbon trailing to the floor and resting on the fair hair of a young girl ...
Do you know what’s in store for you, little girl?
This time, Della didn’t merely shiver—she shuddered, just as if a thousand freezing blades were knifing her nerves.
Even the sound of gliding footsteps coming down the hallway didn’t shake her out of the vision, so she stayed in the chair and squeezed her hands against her temples, as if that would help to expel the jarring pictures.
By the time the housematron unlocked the door, Della had tamed her thoughts, but even so, she cleared her mind, her expression, lest Mrs. Jones think something amiss.
Do you know what’s in store ... ?
Della swallowed as Mrs. Jones breezed into the room.
The elder vampire was in humanlike form, and although she had taken care to dress in the clothing she usually wore in her guise as a Queenshill campus dorm overseer, there was something different. A new confidence that Della had only pinpointed be
cause of last night, when she had seen Mrs. Jones looking like a queen, her skin glowing with a breathtaking freshness that she normally didn’t possess while masquerading as a human aboveground.
The change was enthralling, and even now, Della could not keep her eyes off the elder vampire, even if she was hiding that excruciating beauty under her aboveground disguise.
When Mrs. Jones came to the foot of the beds, her presence seemed to rouse the three other vampire girls.
Polly and Noreen rubbed their eyes and sat up. Violet, who still carried the almost-healed scars from last night’s personal confrontation with Della after they’d escaped the attackers, only stared at the ceiling.
She was bitter about having been challenged and bested, and Della held back a satisfied smile.
However, guilt immediately set upon her, and she checked herself.
“Up and about already, Della?” Mrs. Jones asked in a husky voice that always seemed to be scraped by a cold.
Della thought it might be wise to offer something close to an honest answer. It might explain any remnants of fear.
“I heard a noise outside,” she said. “So I opened the window and checked.”
Mrs. Jones raised a brow. “From my rooftop view, the streets were all but empty, and I didn’t catch any alarming scents so close to your room—not at this hour.”
The Path of Razors Page 1