“Lee Tomlinson killed Klara, not Cassie—”
Dawn didn’t absorb Eva’s continuing effort to be forthcoming. She couldn’t even enjoy the answer to one of the questions that’d been dogging her about the Vampire Killer murders.
“Back to the point, Eva,” Dawn continued, raising her voice above her mother’s. “When Cassie killed women like Breisi, did you, as what amounts to an accomplice, feel the rush?”
“No, I felt . . .”
“Nothing, I’ll bet, even though you’re laden with guilt in the aftermath. I’ll bet you thought it all over and realized that remorse was an appropriate emotion to use.”
Eva wildly shook her head. “You’re wrong.”
“Why would I want to go around all empty like a vamp?”
Recovering, her mother pierced her with an astute glance. “Since you do such a good job of acting like nothing matters, I thought you might like the blankness, Dawn.”
Oh . . . snap.
Jaw clenched, Dawn stiffened before the truth could hit like shot from a gun, spraying more damage than she could endure.
“I’m sorry,” Eva said. “I didn’t mean—”
Dawn started walking. “Where is this emporium?”
In silence, her mother led her down the hallway, rock encasing them.
Soon they came to a massive door and, with a shy, peace-seeking grin, the vamp made a show of opening it for her daughter. This didn’t seem like an act on Eva’s part. Her mother was actually excited about sharing what was behind the barrier, just like someone wanting to see a movie they loved for a second time with a virgin viewer.
With a tumble of sight, sound, and scent, everything blazed at Dawn, assaulting her with color in a world that had only been a dull palate. It was like opening the doors to a sensual, archaic Oz.
Stepping inside, she was swallowed by the scent of smoky flowers, the tingle of sparkling laughter over the rustle of silk flying from the ceiling. High above, a golden dome reigned over the rock walls that boasted waterfalls and leviathan screens that flashed music videos. On the marbled floor, tented, diaphanous veils hushed over circular beds, some of which were surrounded by clear pools. And in those pools, naked figures swam, their hair spread out in flowing serenity. On a raised dais, a group of worldly looking vampires sat, languishing in the occasional robe or nothing at all as they applauded the performance of one of their own: she was trotting around with what looked like a sword, acting like Conanita the Barbarian.
“Looks like it’s break time from war practice,” Eva said.
When Dawn tore her gaze away from the rest of it to look at her mother, she saw that Eva’s eyes were gleaming. She loved it here, and the idea that she wanted her daughter to love it, too, did some harm to Dawn’s will.
For once, she was too swept away to brace against what Eva wanted. Dawn took in the gaiety, the contentment, the beauty.
But then alienation crept back up on her, reminding her that she didn’t belong.
Eva had started for the dais, where the playactress was having her fun with the sword. “Come on,” she said, becoming perky Jac all over again.
Dawn hesitated. Should she, could she . . . ?
She followed, keeping her distance.
When she and Eva got closer to the sword performance, Dawn realized the actress was Rea Carvahal, who’d recently become a pop-culture icon because of the antiheroine roles she played in hip, ultraviolent movies. Ironically, Dawn had come this close to getting a stunt gig in one of her flicks.
“Dare to best me, you limp Limpet?” Rea was saying, poking her sword at an invisible foe. Her curly auburn hair, upturned nose, lethal cheekbones, and dimpled chin made her striking in a quirky way. “I am well experienced in your manner of threats.”
A smattering of applause met the actress’s mocking demonstration of the disemboweling she was going to carry out when Limpet attacked.
Crap, what were these vamps going to do when they recognized Dawn? Were they going to take their movie swords and try to poke at her, too?
Eva leaned over to speak in Dawn’s ear, her soft perfume an unwelcome distraction. “Rea—or maybe you know her as Filipa Pratt from her old career—likes to kid around. It relieves tension.”
Dawn was still back on the Filipa Pratt part. Damn. Big, bad damn. Ironically, Filipa Pratt used to play sexy vampires in a string of gothic cult monster flicks from the seventies.
“She looks so young,” Dawn said.
“She’ll always be that way.” Eva laughed as the actress leaped in the air and twirled her sword, then pretended to cut off Limpet’s ears. “After an Elite is released and our next careers flourish, we sometimes have to use cosmetics to make the public think we’re aging gracefully. Then, when that doesn’t work anymore, we try for a second comeback by returning Underground and undergoing another surgery and release.”
Checking out the vampires surrounding Rea, Dawn recognized a lot of faces from posters in memorabilia shops. Eva had shared with her before, so Dawn had known what the Underground was up to, but seeing them in the flesh . . .
She felt drab, out of place, uglier than she’d ever imagined with her scars marking her skin and the bandages peeking through her torn jeans.
Then a familiar face in the crowd snagged her attention. Paul Aspen, the vampire who’d thrown the party where Dawn had been mind wiped. He was riveted to Rea, his always-a-boy-next-door looks shiny and bright.
“Ahhh!” It was Rea, pointing at Eva with a finger, her sword by her side. “Look, my friends! We are joined by a body from the heavens themselves!”
When the actress’s gaze traveled from Eva to Dawn, Rea did a double take. Then, within a heartbeat, she jumped down from the dais, making her ethereal robe flow around her. She came to a graceful landing in front of Dawn, smelling of precious oils that made her skin glitter.
“Why, hello, hunter,” Rea said.
The vampires on the dais remained seated. In fact, they were all watching Dawn with wide eyes. Was it because she was Eva’s daughter? Because she was wanted by Benedikte? Or had they heard about what she’d done to Robby Pennybaker?
Satisfaction took her over as she stood toe-to-toe with Rea, unfazed by her gorgeous mug. She even looked into her swirling eyes, daring her to try a mind screw, just as Robby had.
“Rea . . .” Eva warned.
The other actress kept facing off with Dawn, as if trying to intimidate her. But Dawn wasn’t about to let the vampire know that it might be working, that she felt like a mere speck of dirt in this lovely garden.
Then, without warning, Rea fell to her knees and spread her arms, dropping the sword. “The form of Diana the huntress!” she proclaimed. “The beauty of ages, right before mine eyes!”
Dawn wanted to kick her ass for pointing out to everyone that she was the plain, unspectacular pretender in their midst.
“Drop the act,” she said.
When Eva tried to intervene, a grinning Rea held up a hand. “I am only paying homage.”
Truly, Miss Carvahal was pretty much every reason Dawn hated the acting masses.
But then Rea fixed her gaze on Dawn again, tilting her head in assessment. In the actress’s swirling eyes, Dawn thought she detected an honest admiration.
No. She was seeing things.
“The hunter,” Rea repeated. Then she picked up her fake sword, which turned out to be not so fake after all. “Could you best me? I wonder.”
“This has gone beyond fun and straight to ridiculous,” Eva said, walking away.
But Dawn didn’t retreat. Maybe it was because of the challenge. Maybe it was because of the need to hurt something as thoroughly as she’d been hurt today. Or maybe it was because giving as good as she got was just in her nature.
Dawn smiled, and Rea liked what she saw. She swooped back her sword as if to come at her target lightly, not to fight, but to embarrass a real hunter through parody, showing everyone that Limpet’s forces weren’t anything to fear.
Ta
king advantage of playtime, Dawn jumped and kicked out, knocking back Rea’s sword arm before the vamp could bring it forward. Then, just for good measure, Dawn twirled around in a hurricane kick, bonking Rea gently in the head.
It was the spanking Rea had meant to give her.
As the actress put a hand to her skull—probably surprised but not even close to physically injured—the rest of the Elites on the dais tittered. But it sounded like it was out of not knowing how else to react more than anything.
That did it for Rea. As Eva cried out in warning from behind Dawn, the cult actress cocked back her sword, and from the look on her face, Dawn knew it was time to spar for real.
So the bloodsucker wanted to embarrass the visiting hunter? To play with the human yarn ball?
Anger surged, and Dawn blasted with her mind. Rea tumbled backward, feet over head, smacking against the dais steps.
Everything went silent. But after a splintered pause, the Elites began applauding.
When Dawn glanced up at them, she saw more than a pleased audience shouting, “Bravo! Encore!” She saw confusion and even a healthy respect because they weren’t sure what else she could do, if maybe she was even strong enough to take them on.
Dawn would just make sure they kept wondering.
Blood pounded through her and, out of a dumb, instinctive need to see what her mother thought, Dawn turned to Eva. But the vampire was speed walking out of the emporium.
As Dawn went to catch her, the Elites yelled for her to come back. She just sent them a shrug, then took off.
“What?” she asked, reaching Eva in the hallway.
Her mother kept moving at a rapid clip. “That was classy.”
“Hey, you wanted me to be a part of the Underground. Keeping someone from dominating me right away is a start, don’t you think? If she’s going to try to mark me with her piss, I’m going to deflect it right back at her.”
Eva kept zipping along.
“Wait!” When Dawn gripped her mother’s arm, swinging the vamp around to face her, she grunted a little, her neck and back reminding her that they were sore. She’d been too hyped up in the emporium to remember that.
Dawn was taken aback by the intensity in Eva’s gaze. Was it shame? No, not altogether. Was it . . . envy?
Wow. For once, Dawn had stepped out of Eva’s shadow. She’d been her own woman in the emporium, and maybe her mother couldn’t stand that.
“It was out of line,” Eva said. “Your lack of maturity is astounding sometimes.”
“Oh, lovely. Who’s talking about growing up?”
“No, you’re not getting it.” Her mother clasped her hands, put them, prayerlike, to her forehead, then calmed down. Music filled the hallway from about twenty feet down, coming from an ajar door that leaked stuttering blue light.
“Dawn, when I was your age, I had already been married with a child. I was responsible. I don’t know—maybe it’s because a lot of other people in our generations take their time growing up, but you’ve got to think things through around these older vampires. They’ll take your inexperience, chew it up, and spit out bone chips.”
Crazily enough, Dawn listened to what her mother was saying. Eva was right. At twenty-four, Dawn couldn’t even conceive of having a kid and settling down. She really wasn’t an adult in emotion.
“Okay,” she said, humbled. “Sounds like it’s time for me to go back to Matt’s.”
“No. What I mean is . . . you’re welcome here. Obviously.”
Sure, obviously.
“You know,” Eva continued, “deciding to bring you to the Underground reminded me of those days when I wondered if L.A. was a good place to raise you. So much temptation, so many things to teach you the rights and wrongs of.”
“I handled the city just fine.” There was a note of unmistakable pride in there.
“Yes,” her mother said. “You sure did.”
They stood, facing each other, but not meeting gazes. Finally, Eva began strolling toward the music, toward the slit-open door, and Dawn went, too.
“What’s this?” she asked.
Her mother made as if to walk on by. “A screening room. The Master loves to stage retrospectives of all our movies. Let’s keep on going.”
An extradeep flush had washed over Eva, and Dawn thought she knew why. She recognized the music from one of her mother’s films, a weepie in which she’d had a substantial role as the girlfriend of a small-town football player. Eva’s character had been the light of his life, his symbolic reason for staying faithful to the purity of the game.
Without a word, Dawn opened the door, then entered, knowing Eva would probably give in and follow.
It was a room of gigantic proportions, a yawn of a cave with a film screen and half-filled, plush seats. Asian trimmings flecked the outside of the screen, adding luster.
As Dawn slumped in the back row, Eva sat upright beside her. They’d walked in on the scene where the hero spots his girlfriend dancing on a bridge that leads out of town, right before one of those hayseed dances you could only find in Americana movies. He was about to leave for the big time, deserting all that was good in his life. But the sight of his girlfriend, so natural, so pure in the twilight, gave him pause.
Watching her mother on-screen, Dawn got lost in Eva’s way of moving: effortlessly, achingly unaware of being devoured by an audience. She was so young—younger than Dawn was now—but she had an eternal maturity that came with the mantle of a star.
Unable to help it, Dawn slid a glance to Eva. The expression on the vamp’s surgically altered, yet strangely similar, face almost killed her. Her mother had the look of a woman who’d lost a part of herself—more than a child or a husband, but something that had been robbed from the vault of her very being.
At that moment, Dawn realized just how much it meant to her mother to stay young, to always be Eva Claremont.
Instead of being angered by that, Dawn felt a tragic empathy that she couldn’t quell.
All of us want to be special, she thought, don’t we? Nobody wants to be set aside and forgotten.
Biting the inside of her bottom lip, Dawn tried not to lose it. But when she felt Eva’s hand resting over the top of her own on the shared arm of the chair, her eyes got wet anyway.
Yet she stared straight ahead until they went dry.
SEVENTEEN
THE WILD ONE
THE following incident could have been avoided if Dawn hadn’t allowed Eva to complete the Underground tour. It wouldn’t have happened if Dawn had told herself that accepting an invitation to go back to Eva’s chambers couldn’t do any harm.
But everything that led up to “the incident” played its part, and in Dawn’s rootlessness, she found herself giving in to every bit of it.
After seeing more Underground highlights such as the movie-remembrance pavilion and the spa, they’d returned to Eva’s quarters. There, she’d prepared some sort of tea and was setting out the porcelain collection on a low table by her living room couches. Dawn didn’t intend to drink any of it, but it seemed to make her mother feel good to be serving company.
Since there was no way Dawn was going back to “her room”—that overdecorated brothel where the Master had first met her—she figured puttering around Eva’s for a little while longer was a decent option until she could formulate an escape plan. And it would give her time to figure out how she could overcome her mother when the time called for it.
Secretively, Dawn glanced at her machetes, which Eva had bundled into a far corner. Her mother had done the same thing back when Dawn had first uncovered “Jacqueline Ashley” ’s masquerade, and keeping the weapons out in the open hadn’t mattered a lick. Eva had smacked her around easily anyway.
“What’s your favorite part of the Underground?” Eva asked while pouring a stream of brownish red liquid into Dawn’s cup.
Um, barf? “Don’t have a favorite.”
Her mother smiled, then slid the cup and saucer over.
“What’s
with the happy?” Dawn asked.
“It’s you.” Eva used delicate tongs to pick up a lump of sugar and offer it. When Dawn declined, her mother put two cubes into her own filled cup. “You act like none of it was the least bit impressive, but you liked it all.”
“Well, you vamps did put a lot of effort into things.”
Eva stirred her tea like she was Queen Duchess of Fangovia. “Just like you put effort into that showdown with Rea Carvahal.”
“You going to get after me about that again?” Throughout the tour, Eva had been dropping minor bombs about how to get along with everyone else. How to be niiiiice. Frank used to coach Dawn on that, too, not that it’d helped.
“Dawn, they’re already keen on you, thanks to the reputation you came with. You don’t have to labor for their interest.”
“Interest? They can all kiss my ass.” And that was why she’d felt so good about the applause after she’d put Rea in her place. Uh-huh.
As Eva lifted her cup and saucer, the steam from her tea wafted over her face, mysterious mist. She still hadn’t taken a sip. “Rea’s a Shakespearean clown—harmless. She wouldn’t have hurt you . . . especially not with me standing right there.”
Dawn shifted on the couch to accommodate her slight aches. “You know, Eva, I find it ridiculous that you’re lecturing me about schoolyard scuffles. You’re the one who mugged Darrin Ryder because the creep gave me a hard time on a movie set.”
“Just protecting you, honey.”
“No, no ‘honey.’ I can take care of myself.”
The testy comment made Dawn feel like crap, especially after having seen her mother looking so vulnerable during that movie screening.
Carefully, Eva set down her untouched beverage.
Almost against her will, Dawn offered a verbal olive branch. “I didn’t know vamps drank stuff like tea.”
“I have no taste for it, but I wanted you to feel relaxed.”
Ah. Eva had been acting!
Dawn realized she had no taste for ripping into Eva now. But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t do what had to be done soon.
“Since we’re on the subject of porcine actors like Darrin Rider,” Eva said, “I should tell you something else.”
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