“Nice place,” Dawn said. “We heard a lot of recommendations, so we had to stop in. We’re history nuts.”
The “we” seemed to bring the barmaid’s interest to another level, because it included Jonah. “The pub’s got quite a bit of business from word of mouth lately.” She took the pounds Dawn had laid out on the bar. “The owner refurbished last year, and everything conforms to the conservation society’s standards. If you walk around, you’ll see historical details like writings on the wall in the second back room”—she pointed to an area that the girls weren’t occupying—“as well as original furniture kept upstairs for private parties.”
Dawn was hoping she’d mention tunnels. No luck.
But Jonah finally turned around to smile at the barmaid, and that seemed to pave the way for better answers.
“Is it true about the highwaymen around here?” he asked. “We heard they smuggled loot from the main road using tunnels.”
Smooth, Dawn thought. Jonah was an okay detective as long as he wasn’t being an asshole.
The barmaid gave him a flirty look. “Now who’s telling you those tales?”
Jonah flirted right back with his grin.
Ugh. Dawn guessed that Costin’s influence had given Jonah this confidence. He might’ve been a shy recluse back in the day, but now he was living it up.
“We took a walking tour around Highgate with a guide,” he said, leaning his arms on the bar. “But they told us that those tunnels aren’t usually open for a look.”
“It’s not actually part of what we offer here.” The woman leaned on the bar, too, flashing some cleavage at Jonah.
Dawn almost barfed. She felt sort of territorial, not about Jonah, but about Costin, even though he wasn’t the one flirting.
“Too bad,” she said, getting closer to her partner, but only because she wanted to stick her elbow against his arm in a reminder that this was gross.
In the first back room, a burst of giggles spiked the air, and Dawn saw a girl standing on the pool table, using it like a catwalk while she teased an audience of guys wearing things like Super-bad sweatshirts.
The barmaid sighed and went over there with her hands planted on her wide hips, just as if she’d dealt with this behavior a thousand times before, while Dawn wondered how these vamps operated.
Did they take blood from their frat-boy victims and mind-wipe them?
Was erasing memories allowed in their community?
Dawn thought about Kate Lansing and what the team had found on Billiter Street, at the body dump. Bones. Kate’s head.
No, she thought. When the vamps that the team was targeting decided to eat, they ate well, so they probably chose prey more carefully. They wouldn’t want their victims to be easily missed.
She canted toward Jonah, taking care to talk softly enough to make it hard for any possible vamp to hear clearly. “We’ve got to get to those tunnels.”
“Our server invited us to look around this place, didn’t she?”
This time, when Jonah grinned, Dawn grinned back. If he was thinking what she was, maybe they could get under the ground. Then Jonah could let Costin out, just to see if he sensed a master down there.
But what would happen after that? If there was any indication of a master around, should they retreat or summon Kiko and the Friends to go for it right away?
Dawn didn’t know. In L.A., after they’d uncovered the location of the Underground, the team had gone into lockdown and Costin had taken his time in getting there. He’d had a methodical plan.
Unlike this time, it seemed.
Jonah was already walking toward the second back room, where the barmaid had said there were historical writings posted on the wall. Dawn left her cider behind to back him up.
But when she saw two different entrances on each side of the white-planked space, Dawn got Jonah’s attention and indicated that she was going to take one of them instead of scoping out the obvious.
He glanced around to see if they were being watched, but everyone seemed to be focusing on the pool table activity in the other room.
They slipped into a hallway lined with surplus straight-back chairs and closed doorways.
Jonah pulled down the sleeve of his coat, masking fingerprints while covering his hand in order to try the tarnished knob on one of the doors. It didn’t open.
“Locked,” he said.
They both laughed quietly. Locked wasn’t a problem for either of them.
Still, now wasn’t the time for a show of vampire strength or psychokinetic boogaloo.
While Jonah covered her, Dawn took out her lock picking tools and went to work, thinking that the loud pulses from the jukebox might be enough interference to mask these vampires’ hearing.
“So what do you think Gatenby has to do with all this?” she asked.
“No ideas yet. But he frequented a place where there’re tunnels and rooms underground, and Natalia felt something going on in here. I’d say it doesn’t look good for our boy.”
She took care of the lock, but when she opened the door, a bunch of old table linens fell out, and she and Jonah had to push the flood of them back in. He followed up with the door itself.
“Looks like we’re gonna have to play treasure hunt,” she said. “Or do you think there’s some trapdoor hidden in the floor?”
“I think—”
He whipped his head around, sensing something a fraction of a second before jasmine bolted into the hallway.
Kalin’s voice whirred around them. “Update!”
A cold thrust invaded Dawn with images of Natalia and Kiko. Were they in trouble, even though Kiko had driven the new girl back to headquarters to get her out of the way?
She backed off from the door and followed Kalin and Jonah down the hallway, toward the pub itself. But the Friend stopped them before they emerged into the open.
“We found one of ‘em on the heath nearby,” the spirit said, her tone high and excited, chopping up her speech. “We’re trackin’ ’r out of Highgate now—a cat woman lookin’ older than ‘em schoolgirls. She’s fast, but she seems to be wounded, so she’s not as fast as most.”
“She’s no schoolgirl?” Dawn asked. “Because we might have a few of those kind in here, Kalin.”
“Not a schoolgirl.” Although the Friend was invisible, she got in Dawn’s face. The jasmine was overwhelming. “Older than one of ‘em!”
At first Dawn hoped this new, older vamp might be a master—the master they were looking for—but Kalin had said the creature was a female.
She turned to Jonah. “A wounded and vulnerable vampire. Sounds like a prospect for questioning to me.”
“Much easier pickings than what we’ve got here.”
As she and Jonah rounded out of the hallway and into the back room, that point was only emphasized by a blockade of girls, their heads tilted as if they’d heard something and had come to investigate.
Dawn’s heartbeat seemed to crackle to pieces, all with their own rhythms, even without the pulser. She debated taking out the crucifix pendant from underneath her shirt, but then one of the girls sniffed the air, sensing Kalin.
Then they all sniffed.
Right. If these weren’t vampires, Dawn was going to eat her flamethrower.
Then, with a barely perceptible laugh, Kalin—damn her—nudged against a few of the girls, just to be the bitch that she was.
God, Dawn was going to get her when this was over.
But it was enough to draw the girls’ confused attention, and Dawn took the opportunity to calmly walk away from them, Jonah right behind her. Acknowledging that something was out of the ordinary would only give them away.
Then the girls started to giggle.
Dawn turned around in enough time to see Jonah making a subtle gesture that hinted at a reason they might’ve been back in that hallway.
A mile-high-club gesture.
In any other case, she would’ve gotten after him, but she had to admit that he’d thought fast, finding an excuse tha
t had the girls breaking apart and going back to the other areas of the pub as Dawn and he opened the door into the night, where Kalin sped ahead of them.
“Just so you know,” Dawn said as they began walking fast to where their Sedona was parked, “I saw that.”
Kalin reared up behind Dawn and pushed her ahead, jealous as hell.
“Go,” she said. “Just get yourselves ready for word on when you’re needed.”
“Okay, okay.” Dawn picked up their pace, her breathing quickening, too, as they passed through the square near the Figurehead, the first pub they’d visited tonight.
Kalin sucked, but she was right.
This could end up being the big one.
TWENTY-FOUR
THE WAITING GAME
WHY did history seem to repeat itself? Dawn wondered as she and Jonah sat in their vehicle, still parked down the hill from the Highgate Cemetery.
He was in the backseat and she was in the front, just like hours before. Except this time, they were waiting for word from a Friend as to where they could find this running vampire and wrangle it for questioning, or if the Friends would need help when they had the chance to circle back and inspect the heath where they’d first spotted the vampire. The spirits guarding headquarters in Southwark couldn’t be spared, so the team was the only backup available.
Meanwhile, Kiko had already used his driving modification equipment to take Natalia back to headquarters, where he would be leaving her, picking up Frank, and going to any new locations with him if needed. It was best to leave Natalia out of this, even though, as soon as she had gotten away from the Lion and the Lamb Pub, her profound discomfort had abated.
Still, they didn’t want to take the chance of having her lose it during this crucial time.
“The Friends said this vampire was a ‘she,’” Dawn said to Jonah as the time display on the dashboard stamped out each second. She absently played with the crucifix that was outlined under her shirt. “They said that the vamp’s also older in appearance than one of those schoolgirls. Do you think she’s something in between a top-level vampire and a lower one?”
“If it’s a ‘she,’ it can’t be a master,” Jonah answered, taking off those hip glasses from his disguise and stowing them in a coat pocket, “and it also can’t be a schoolgirl at its age. That’s all I know.”
He leaned back and watched a group of people laughing as they passed the Sedona on their way up the hill to the village.
Dawn watched them, too, her gaze stuck on a man and woman at the back of the small crowd. They were grinning at each other, and she could tell that they were in some sort of courtship stage.
Weird. She couldn’t even connect to the innocence of their shared smiles or the way they stayed just far enough apart so that, when their coats brushed, it was a big deal.
She took her hand away from the crucifix and glanced the other way. Adrenaline was scratching through her, into her, as if coring her out.
But it was only anticipation, Dawn thought. Anxiety for her to get her hands on that running vampire and coax some answers out of the enemy.
Yeah, that was it.
She felt Jonah skimming the edges of her consciousness, like he was curious about what she was turning over in her mind and he wanted in. Thinking that she could and would withstand anything now, she didn’t shove him away.
So he entered her, tentatively, then threw her a curveball by slipping out soon afterward.
But even more surprising was the extra-tingling haze he left—just like he’d infused her with a double shot of cool energy.
“So many things weighing on you,” Jonah said, his voice low and even mildly comforting.
She didn’t want comfort, though. She needed ice. Frostiness. A zone to prepare her for what was coming.
She wanted more of what she’d just felt from him, but there was no way she’d ask him for it.
Dawn fixed her gaze on a second-story window across the street, where the panes were covered with sheer red draping. “It’s nothing I can’t handle, Jonah.”
“I know that. But you still can’t stop wishing you could understand what the boss is doing—why he retreated earlier.”
He’d nailed it. She wasn’t anxious about encountering any vamps tonight. Her limbs and chest were heavy with running nerves because of Costin. She just hadn’t admitted it until now.
Dawn found herself saying things she never would’ve said before, maybe because it was so damned quiet in this car. Maybe because she couldn’t stand to keep it to herself anymore.
“I hate this,” she said, anchoring a hand on the bottom of the steering wheel. “I hate that I think he’s backing away from going banzai and fighting when there’s a way for him to get out and take care of business now.”
“What do they say?” She could hear Jonah moving forward in the backseat. “There’s a slight difference between stupidity and bravery. The boss is only being smart. Safe.”
“I know. It’s just ...”
How could she put it into words?
Jonah’s voice went even lower—not Costin low, but there was a definite change.
“You can’t possibly understand what he’s doing, Dawn. Not when you’re the opposite of him.”
She turned slightly, seeing Jonah’s profile, the false tranquillity of streetlights through the windshield providing only a little illumination. For a second, she could’ve sworn that he and Costin had joined more than they ever had—that Jonah had even become an intermediary.
Would it be easier to tell Costin how she felt by using a go-between? Even easier than going mind-to-mind with him when he was dominant?
God, something was wrong when Jonah had to be the middle-man.
“The opposite of him,” Dawn repeated. “What exactly does that mean?”
When Jonah looked at her, his eyes heated a low blue in the dimness. “You’re impulsive, rash—everything he can’t afford to be. But you’re also strong, and he needs you to stay that way while logic forces him to hold back for the time being.”
She paused, thinking she should stop dwelling on this now, but knowing she couldn’t. Costin—a former minion of the dragon. A once loyal follower who had exchanged with his ultimate master and come to despise himself for it. The vampire who’d almost wasted away in a dungeon cell until The Whisper—the one who’d given Costin the powers of a Soul Traveler—had offered a bargain for him to win back his soul.
Dawn couldn’t help but think that Costin had chosen to stay in just another cell right now, and she wondered if it’d always go back to that with him.
She was disappointed. That was the bottom line, because even though he’d screwed her over in Hollywood for the greater good, he’d seemed like so much more than she could ever be: Someone smarter than anyone she’d known. Someone she’d actually looked up to in a world where she hadn’t looked up to many others at all.
“Was he like this as a soldier?” she asked Jonah.
“Are you asking if he retreated back then?”
She nodded stiffly, fortifying herself for an honest answer.
“When strategy demanded it, yes.” Jonah sounded even closer to her now. “He always had an eye for the right move. Unlike some of his comrades, he never took a risk unless it was calculated. That’s why he killed so many men on the fields of battle—even before he became a vampire.”
“And that’s how he’s operating now.” She said it more to convince herself than to continue the conversation. “He’s the chess master.”
“The best. And you’re queen of the board.” He waited a beat for that to sink in. “You really do mean everything to him, Dawn, and you’re the one who’s out here now instead of him. He needs you.”
Her chest went tight at what Jonah was saying, mostly because Costin had never put it so simply. Where he was cryptic and as reserved as a soldier needed to be when everything was on the line, Jonah just put it all out there.
But she couldn’t believe that she meant more to Costin than ju
st a piece on a board, because first and foremost, that’s what she was, and she’d never fooled herself into thinking beyond it. Feeling beyond it.
“Yeah, you’re right,” she said. “I’m ‘key.’”
“Dawn.”
She looked away from him, because seeing that face only reminded her of Costin.
But that didn’t faze Jonah. “Someday you’re going to know your value.”
And what was that? she thought. Was she worth Costin’s soul?
Her own?
Even though Jonah wasn’t in her mind, her thoughts must’ve been written all over her posture, because he inched even closer.
In spite of herself, she glanced at him.
Mistake, because his gaze held hers. Jonah’s eyes.
But it was Costin’s face she saw, only because she wanted to.
Yet his gaze ... blue.
So blue.
She wasn’t sure she could separate them in her mind right now, and when he touched her neck, she knew he wanted a bite, not because he needed blood, but because he desired it. From her.
Just her.
As his fingertips traced her jugular, her skin came alive, tingling every nerve ending, and she tilted back her head, her eyelids going heavy.
A bite.
God, it sounded like such a good idea.
And her body, from bottom to top—each thud of her pulse pushing toward the center of her and threatening to meet in a dark explosion—agreed.
She could see his eyes lightening to silver—a color that meant either personality might be dominant—and the evidence of his appetite for her made her bang even more, melting her, weakening her.
As he stroked her neck, persuading her to lean her head back even more, her eyes began to close.
Costin, she told herself. Because, to her, it was Costin moving in for the bite, his breath on her flesh. It was Costin brushing his lips against her neck, priming her until she went damp and crazy with an inner heat that consumed everything—
Then, with a growled sound of frustration, he backed off.
Dawn’s eyes flew open, her heart jarring as if it’d been jolted into rhythm again.
It didn’t help when she heard the slam of two nearby car doors, then soon after, a quick knock at the front passenger side of their vehicle.
The Path of Razors Page 25