The Path of Razors

by Green, Chris Marie

  Her knife jarred out of her other hand and rattled to the floor, and her brain scrambled as the shadow thing braced itself on top of Dawn, pinning her to the ground.

  Dawn prepared for the worst, but when the shadow didn’t make another violent move, she realized that it wasn’t going to kill her. Not yet.

  Like it’d said before, it had a few questions, and Dawn wondered what kind of persuasion it might have in store if she didn’t feel like answering any of them.

  Rage—at being used, just like she’d been so often—balled up.

  As the shadow thing laughed again, Dawn ripped out with her mind to tear at its face, and the force caught its goggles and mask.

  The items flew through the air, clattering to a landing, but the thing kept laughing, this time in surprise.

  “Feisty,” it said in that same altered voice.

  Dawn just stared, because the thing wasn’t an “it.” It wasn’t even a boy like the shadow figure from Billiter.

  It was a young woman with light brown hair that came to her neck. A girl whose light green eyes were wide and thrilled with this playtime Dawn was providing.

  Channeling her shock, Dawn punched out again, this time launching the shadow figure high enough so that she stopped laughing just before thumping back down to Dawn’s stomach.

  As Dawn heaved out a pained breath, the female jammed an elbow down.

  Dawn ducked it, but the shadow was so fast that within a blink, she was already plastering Dawn to the floor again, her hands on Dawn’s arms, shins pressing down on Dawn’s legs.

  Both of them were panting now as Dawn tensed under the woman’s hold.

  Strong, she thought.

  Almost vampire strong.

  But the boy in the freezer hadn’t been a vamp. He’d had physical irregularities, like a heart on the wrong side of his chest....

  The female hovered over Dawn. “Now. Time for those questions.”

  No, she thought, on the edge of panic. She’d let every bone in her body be broken before she gave in to any kind of torture and gave up Costin’s secrets.

  Her anger was like a creature raising its own head to show a face so ugly that it was unbearable to look at.

  The female lowered herself closer, and Dawn noticed that she didn’t have a scent.

  With a lethal whisper, the shadow said, “Mind powers. You do have them, don’t you?”

  The young woman bent even nearer, her lips against Dawn’s own.

  A shock lit through Dawn and, instinctively, she tried to turn away.

  But the female kept her lips against the corner of Dawn’s mouth.

  “Just what sort of servant are you?” the shadow asked.

  Dawn’s heartbeat pistoned, punching against the dark spot, pounding....

  Then her mind shattered into a thousand pieces, forcing out more energy than she’d ever experienced—enough to push the woman off of her in a spinning arc.

  But the shadow managed to land on all fours, smiling, as if she’d been looking forward to a test like this and nobody had ever given it to her.

  Just as she looked ready to spring again, she froze, then righted herself and glanced toward the window.

  Then she went for her mask and goggles, scooping them up as she lunged toward the exit, easily tossing aside the chair with one hand before yanking open the door.

  Once she’d slipped through it, she slammed it hard enough so that it actually closed all the way.

  Dawn got to her hands and knees. What the hell had just happened ? Had the female gotten some kind of call or—?

  Not taking the time to figure it out, she dove for her flamethrower at the same time she heard something that resembled a scream of air.

  Jasmine, she thought, just as a flood of it entered through the broken window.

  “There!” Dawn pointed her flamethrower toward the door. “One of those shadows!”

  She heard the Friend bash against the wood, but there were no open spaces to get through.

  “Bleeping ...” Dawn heard the Friend say, and she knew it was Breisi from the thwarted attempt to cuss.

  She’d come, Dawn thought. It’d been too late, but she’d come, probably after Natalia had finally figured out that Dawn’s earpiece had been debilitated.

  Dawn ran toward the exit and braced her foot on the wall as she pulled at the door. It protested, then opened, and the moment there was a larger crack, Breisi darted through in hot pursuit.

  Dawn joined in, but before she’d even climbed down the stairs, through the pub—with its patrons standing up and wondering what the hell was happening—and gotten thirty meters into the cold streets, Breisi had already circled back.

  “Gone,” the spirit said, disbelief winding through her voice. “I never even picked it up to track the thing.”

  But Dawn had the feeling that they hadn’t lost the shadow girl at all.

  That, in fact, she was somewhere on a rooftop, watching them even now, still laughing.

  FIFTEEN

  DRINK TIME WITH EVA, II

  EVA folded shut the mobile she’d used to call Dawn and handed it back to the barman who was wiping glasses behind the mahogany counter.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  As he accepted the phone, he smiled, teeth white and a little crooked, but still, a charming gesture. “How’re you getting on then?”

  “I told my daughter to pick me up when she could.”

  “So she’s on her way?”

  Eva nodded, settling into the corner of the bar among a pile of daily newspapers and tabloids, where people couldn’t easily see that she was barefoot, having lost her pumps back at the Limpet team’s headquarters. She wouldn’t have been able to run in them, anyway, but the dirt and a few small cuts on her feet didn’t sell that point very well. She also didn’t care to show off her wounded hand, which was covered with the bandages the barman had given her after he’d seen the blood on her palm.

  He worked a cork out of a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and splashed some of the wine into a glass he’d been shining. Then he slid it over to her.

  “Don’t you worry yourself about anything, not even this,” he said.

  She could see it on his face: he knew she’d had a wildly rough night and was only being kind to her.

  Maybe his first clue had been when she’d opened the wine bar’s door, trying to look as dignified as possible, even in bare feet and hiding her hand behind her, as she’d entered. She’d only come inside because she’d realized that there wasn’t a Friend with her, and her survival instincts had told her to be around people, where danger was less likely.

  The barman had greeted her, probably judging her well-tailored clothing against the rest of her. And after she’d bandaged up, then asked to use his phone for an urgent call—she’d lost her cell, she’d explained—he’d handed his very own mobile right over.

  He’d probably thought she’d been attacked, and he wanted to play the good guy. When he’d seen that she didn’t require a call to any officials, Eva could also tell that he thought she was attractive, even with all the signs of age on her skin.

  Thanks to the reconstructive surgery she’d had after being turned back into a human, the barman wouldn’t be able to see that she was the Eva Claremont, or even Jacqueline Ashley—the name Eva had used during her cosmetically and vampirically altered comeback.

  Yet that didn’t seem to matter, because he had still smiled at her, seemed ... interested ... in her.

  But Eva had pushed all of that aside in favor of calling Dawn, and she’d felt bad for making her daughter run around outside of headquarters and for even causing a second of worry.

  Though at least someone had missed her, Eva had thought. Someone had cared enough to look for her.

  Now she picked up the wine and wryly toasted the barman, who winked back.

  To Dawn, she thought.

  Then she paused and added, To what I did to Frank.

  At the upsetting memory, she drank deeply, and the fruit-lade
n liquid slid down her throat, warming her. She drank more, until there was nothing left.

  The barman had gone to serve someone else—a man and a woman in thick sweaters and carefree attitudes, maybe tourists—and he returned to find Eva’s glass empty.

  He glanced around, as if to see if anyone noticed, then refilled it.

  Yes, he liked her, and as the wine spread through Eva, the knowledge lent her an anesthetic awareness of his every move, his every glance.

  She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Are you sure? I lost my wallet, too.”

  “I’ll pour just as long as you’re safe and sound here. You’re in my care now.”

  As he left to serve an elderly gentleman who was interested in some cognac, the warmth in Eva turned sharp.

  How long had it been since she’d been wanted?

  Not since she was Underground, back when men would’ve died for one night with her.

  Heavy-limbed, she toyed with the stem of her glass, in the mellow hold of the alcohol and attention now. Every time the barman checked on her, with his ginger hair and freckled hands busy on the glasses and counter, it became easier to forget the look on Frank’s face, the rage in Breisi’s reaction. Eva wondered if forgetfulness was what Dawn had found, too, years ago, when she would have sex with all those men Eva had heard about.

  She and Dawn never talked about that, though. There were some things they’d never be able to discuss.

  But here, now, Eva flirted with the idea that Dawn could’ve inherited all those needy sexual impulses from her mother, and Eva had only guided her own urges in a different way: she’d preferred to be admired by the masses instead of only a relative few.

  An untouchable goddess who got off on being adored.

  It might have been lonely if Eva hadn’t been kept company by the hope that Frank would be hers again one day, after she persuaded him to come Underground, too....

  She went for another sip of wine, then slowed herself down.

  How was she ever going to face Frank again after tonight?

  Someone sat a seat away from her, but she didn’t look up at whoever it was.

  Not until the person placed a linen handkerchief next to her cocktail napkin.

  Eva stared at the cloth for a moment, at the embroidered initials—“KN”—stitched in a corner.

  Then she realized that she’d been crying.

  Too embarrassed to acknowledge it, she ignored the handkerchief, using the paper napkin instead.

  When she finished dabbing near her eyes, she pushed the handkerchief back to its owner, then looked up to thank him, anyway.

  The warmth in her turned to heat as she found a man in a dark business suit, his chin-length black hair slicked away from a face with light brown eyes that angled in exotic appeal, his cheekbones high and defined.

  “I only thought to offer,” he said, his voice brushed by a British accent as well as another foreign quality.

  Asian, she thought. Chinese and British?

  Hong Kong?

  She thought that maybe finding out would make her feel better as she turned her body toward him and did her best to smile as Eva Claremont would have done, once upon a better time.

  SIXTEEN

  ONCE UPON A BIG BAD

  DID you program the alert system to isolate all Southwark cameras ?“ the new custode asked, mask off, voice modulator deactivated, hair stuck to her neck as the door to the monitor room whooshed shut behind her.

  Nigel turned the swivel chair toward his sibling, gesturing to a cluster of bigger screens that boasted footage from the borough where she’d been earlier. “Done.”

  The keeper surveyed the screens, which revealed no odd activity as she’d seen earlier when she’d been investigating Southwark, where the mind-power woman had been running through the streets as if her life, or someone else’s, depended on it.

  That’s how Lilly, who’d been let out for patrol, had first seen her—the female attacker who matched the schoolgirls’ descriptions from last night. Dark hair flying out behind her as she ran toward the Bull and Cock Pub, athletic in her speed and style ... She’d immediately caught Lilly’s notice from the roof where the custode had been scouting, hoping to find a reason for the fogged camera she’d discovered earlier.

  The keeper had then moved in, using her night-vision goggles to watch this young woman through the window of the flat above the pub. And when Lilly had seen her aiming an illegal gun—naughty, naughty—as the female scoped the empty room, her interest had been snagged indeed.

  Could this be one of the Queenshill attackers?

  Lilly had set out to discover an answer, only wishing to stun the woman with a flash grenade, disabling her until Lilly could get her restrained for a round of questioning. And, if the interrogation had not panned out, Lilly would have released the subject.

  Subtly, she touched her mouth, where she’d brushed her lips over the other woman’s.

  Maybe she would have released her.

  The woman was by no means striking. She wasn’t even pretty. But she was certainly intriguing. Lilly had underestimated her, and she liked that there were still some people in this world who could bring that about.

  Unfortunately, she had not done as well as she’d hoped in fighting off the mind blasts that the woman used. Although Lilly’s body had been adjusting nicely throughout activation and training, she’d found that engaging a true opponent was nothing like sparring. In real life, the blood boiled and the mind and body had to work in tandem, and that wasn’t what had happened tonight.

  But Lilly would improve.

  “I must say,” Nigel noted as she continued smiling to herself, “that you hit it on the head, the right place at the right time.”

  “I was peering at those screens all day long, remember? I just happened to notice a fogged lens near Cross Bones, and I thought it might prove worth my while to investigate.”

  “Even though I sent you to Queenshill for a follow-up.”

  “I was making my way over there. Eventually. I’ll get to the sub-Underground and Mrs. Jones’s tunnel later.”

  Her brother was wearing quite the expression—as if he wanted to chide her yet couldn’t justify it in the face of her small success tonight.

  Arrogance, his tight mouth nonetheless hollered.

  “Nigel,” she said. “Stop looking like such a prune. You do realize that I found one of the Queenshill attackers tonight, yeah? It has to be the female with the mind powers that Claudia described based on Della’s description. She matched the details in appearance and behavior, and she was in the area of a camera malfunction. That’s enough coincidence for me to go on. May we assume that she and her group reside somewhere in Southwark?”

  “We could,” Nigel said, turning back to the monitors. It chafed that he was doing everything within his power to avoid giving credit to the new custode.

  Yet it’d been much like this while growing up, too. Charles had been the sweet younger brother while Nigel was the elder who seemed to think a little sister was no more than a thorn in his side. One night, Nigel had left to “strike out in the world,” never to return. Then, years later, Charles, her favorite, had left school and departed home, as well.

  She should have noticed how odd it was when her parents didn’t grieve for Charles’s absence or his lack of a full education, which they’d always insisted on for their children. She had only attributed their stoicism to their usual stiff upper lips, and their uncaring attitude toward her to a repressed longing to see their sons again. After all, Lilly knew that, long ago, they’d lost four other sons due to the Meratoliage curse—the heart defects. So her parents had learned to cope accordingly.

  Then, all too soon, before any of her nephews had come of age, Lilly had been activated, the vision/tales put upon her.

  That’s when she had understood where Charles and Nigel had gone off to. She’d also realized the reason for her father’s remoteness and occasional bitterness—he was a never-called custode who had
been passed over for other keepers during his own prime.

  She leaned against the console. “What do you mean by ‘We could’ assume that our attackers are based in Southwark? Your answer sounds rather passive.”

  Nigel shook his head, as if having to deal with a developmentally challenged charge. “Do you have proof that these attackers have the Underground itself in their sights? Or is it possible, just in the slightest, that they told our schoolgirls the truth—that they were genuinely seeking the company of other vampires and they stumbled upon a few of ours? Naturally, with Violet’s and Della’s immaturity, matters escalated and then fell to pieces, but can you blame the ‘attackers’ for defending themselves from the dogs and animals the girls set upon them at Queenshill?” He went back to the screens. “Why poke at them if they’re only incidental?”

  Lilly crossed her arms over her chest. “So you’d rather just keep monitoring them.”

  “Lilly. The Underground has survived all these years because the custodes refrained from overreacting. You’ve seen the visions. You know.”

  “But custodes have never come upon a nuisance like this before.” She leaned toward him. “These attackers have help, Nigel. The jasmine you smelled in Mrs. Jones’s room—it’s somehow connected with an invisible entity who was out to chase me.”

  “You’re certain that this ‘invisible entity’ wasn’t part of that woman’s mind powers?”

  Lilly pushed away from the console. For all the good this was doing, she may as well have been talking to one of those grainy telly screens. If Nigel had been with her on patrol, he would have heard it—smelled it—screaming past her as she dodged into a building’s crevice while the entity passed.

  “Mark me,” Nigel said, his gaze boring into hers. “There’s a difference between what Underground vampires do and what we do. When they kill aboveground, it’s done with runaways and no-goods who have already dropped out of their families and society. But these attackers could be different, and even Claudia, as questionable as she is, knew this and refrained from going after them. Mihas even used a bit of discretion.”