Vampire Babylon - Break Of Dawn Part 25

Normally, he would've melted at her tone, her very presence. But now . . . ? Nothing. There was nothing.

Enter, he thought.

Yet when she did, he couldn't lie to himself any longer. The smell of her hair lured him from the floor to his feet, and when she came to stand before him, his form wavered.

Eva, his love. His heartbreak.

Again, the mental vision of her whisking Dawn away from him stabbed, mutilated all the deep feelings he'd nursed. A spark lit within him, then died. But it left some heat.

She folded her hands in front of her, a knowing martyr. Sorin circled her like an inquisitor of old.

"Are you here to explain," his son said, "or to offer yet another excuse?"

"I'm here to talk to Benedikte and Benedikte only."

Sorin gave the Master a challenging look. Will you permit this to continue?

Another spark gasped to life within Benedikte, burning a little longer before extinguishing. Do not say another word if you wish to remain in one piece, Sorin.

Then he turned his attention to Eva. Even though he knew that his n.o.body form didn't show the details of a face, he bet that she could read him just as well. She lifted her chin, as if unwilling to apologize for what she'd done.

A third spark flared, eating Benedikte whole.

Before he knew it, he was inside her head, ripping through everything she'd been hiding from him. Colors of life, bleeding together, images screeching as they crashed together . . .

He saw Eva's duplicity the night Ca.s.sie Tomlinson had killed Breisi Montoya. Saw how she'd allowed Frank to escape. Saw how she'd been sharing information with Dawn and exposing the Underground for attack. Every lie. Every betrayal.

With a cutting jolt, he fell out of her thoughts, hitting the floor. It brought him to a quaking, smoldering rage.

"Eva," he cried. "Oh, Eva."

In the aftermath of his invasion, she dropped to her knees, her eyes taking on what they called the Ten-Mile Stare. He'd ravished her . . . the woman he loved. He'd done what he'd promised never to do-taken her against her will, and that destroyed him almost as much as seeing what she'd done.

"It was . . . worth it," she whispered, tears falling down her face. Her lips remained agape, as if she'd been stripped of everything: dignity, privacy, trust.

"Worth it?" the Master repeated.

Then something even more powerful switched on inside of him. "No!" Sorin yelled, clearly antic.i.p.ating what would happen next.

But Benedikte's rage had already exploded into a deeper danger: hatred. Hatred for himself, hatred for the world. He felt himself gathering every evil intention that laced the air, felt his form weigh with the nightmares of every child-adult or not-that haunted a night's bloodcurdling attempt to sleep. Expanding, turning, becoming , he was the monster under the bed, in the closet, in the cave.

In everyone.

Rising, rising, fangs elongating like curved blades, the abyss took to his very body.

He was terror. He was fear itself.

Benedikte reared back his head, then let out a screech that would shatter heaven if he were anywhere near it.Then he sped to Eva, stopping just short of blasting against her. She'd gained power during her last infusion, but she would be no match for him. Or maybe she was only accepting what she deserved.

She closed her eyes so she wouldn't have to look into the thing above her and see all her worst thoughts. Then she bowed her head, opening her arms to welcome her reckoning.

Perversely pleased, the Master turned to Sorin, who was already looking away, eyes squeezed tightly shut against all the terrors he was seeing in the form of his father.

Wailing, Benedikte took off, out of control, banging from one side of the room to the other, chipping away rock from the walls, giving the Underground a demented heartbeat. But something on the other side of the room stopped him.

His ghastly, distorted image blurred over the reflection of a dead TV screen, and he screamed in utter horror at what he saw in himself: alienation, a stretched eternity of being alone and unloved.

With a yell of agony that shook the walls, he darted back to Eva, swiped at her with an ethereal claw. She flew in an arc, banging against the rock and crushing the surface of it to dust before slumping to the ground like a pile of discarded, flowered rags. There she remained, unmoving, her hair covering the face he'd so dearly loved.

Was she . . . gone?

A pulse of Awareness told him that she hadn't expired . . . not yet. Heal . . . ? How long would it take her to heal back to the woman he . . . ?

Hating his weakness in not being able to kill her-to kill his pain-the Master shrank back into his original, solid Benedikte body, weeping, stumbling forward until he fell over the top of his desk.

Sorin immediately came to his side. "Thank the day, Master! Finish her-it is the right thing, the only thing! And as for Dawn Madison . . . I see how mother and daughter sway you. They are lethal, and I would kill Dawn myself, truth be t-"

Benedikte punched his hand through Sorin's skull, yanking out his brains in one profane pull before taking his other hand and crush- popping his son's head from his spine.

Sorin's body plopped to the ground.

As blood and gray matter dripped to the tile, the Master stared at what he held.

"Sorin?" he whispered.

On the floor, his son's body bled out, his separated head a mash of unidentifiable red, spangled with shards of white. Then the whole of it disappeared, sucked into nothing.

Even Sorin's brain did the same. But Benedikte's fingers were still coated with blood, and he investigated them, trying to figure out what he'd just done.

"Son?" he asked.

He remembered Sorin's birth night, near the flames of a camp-fire. A beautiful sorcerer who had enthralled Benedikte with his magic. His blood had tasted of joy, as had his soul.

Then Benedikte remembered the child Tereza had borne him in life, the stiff, blue tragedy of a tiny body that had never even taken a breath.

The Master dropped to his knees, touching the bloodstains from his vampire progeny. Somewhere in this world, there were two vampire women-Sorin's missing preternatural daughters, his only children-who had just turned into wrinkled human old ladies, perhaps even in the midst of a sentence. That was how Benedikte's line worked, and that was how it should have gone with him and Sorin. The father was not meant to outlast the son, not in human life, not in a vampire's, either.

He cupped what was left of his child . . . the best part of him . . . in his palms, cradling his son's blood, looking up as if to ask why.

TWENTY.

THE HOMECOMING.

IN the meantime, seconds after Eva had deposited Dawn by the Limpet house's pool, the back door banged open.

"Get in here-quick!" It was Kiko.

Dawn scrambled, rushing the entry that led to an old kitchen that'd been converted into a stainless-steel haven. It was dreary, curtains blocking the night from looking inside.

The psychic banged the door shut behind Dawn as she got to her knees and hugged him until he pounded at her back.

"Breathe-" he gasped.

Backing away, she still held his arms, taking a good look at him. Last time she'd seen Kiko he'd been pa.s.sed out on a couch in that office. Now he seemed rested, but there was a hardness to him that went beyond a back brace.

"You okay?" she asked. "Did they-?"

"I'm fine. What's going on?"

Dawn shoved back the hair that had fallen into her face. Wait-before she started talking, there was something. . . .

Breisi. She'd called for Breisi in the Underground.

Hastily, Dawn whispered another command that would hopefully reverse the first, ill-advised summons, praying it wasn't too late.

Then she ran out of the kitchen and through the dark halls, coming to the thick door that guarded the lab.

She pulled at it, wanting to go downstairs, to check Breisi's picture, to see if she was down there. "Breisi!"

Kiko caught up, panting. "Don't even try. Most of the Friends have been resting in their portraits, and this door's been locked from the inside, so I have no idea what she's been up to since double d.i.c.king me around. But Frank's around here somewhere, safely avoiding me."

Dawn spun around. "Frank?"

"Yeah." Kiko made a weird face. "Your dad? Remember him? He's got this big escape story-"

"I know, I know."

Before she could ask more, Kiko ran a gaze over her disheveled state. "So what the h.e.l.l, Dawn?"

When she opened her mouth to ask her questions, her coworker said, "Na-uh, you tell me first."

She would work at getting the door open while she talked.

Dawn pulled at it some more. "Long story. The thimble version is that Eva took pity on me and got me out of the Underground, which I ended up in after Costin planted his metaphysical foot on my a.s.s." Her head swam, catching up to what had just gone on.

She hadn't even recovered from being with the Master yet and here she was trying to get to Breisi. Her perception was still a blindsided mash of surreal fragments, so she rested. Just for a minute. "Eva brought me back here, but I'm not sure I'll stay." "You're not going back outside. There're Servants watching the house, and we've seen them in midskulk ever since Frank made a run for our door. Don't know if any Groupies or Guards have also been sent up here by now-"

"I think they're all Underground, ready for a fight."

"So what? You're staying in here, where none of them has any chance of getting to you. Now, come on, more details."

Dawn shook her head, still not sure if this was the place for her to be. "I appreciate the hospitality, but do you remember what happened? I got kicked out in a major fashion. And . . ." Abruptly, she reached into her back jeans pocket, then brought out the gutted remains of the locator. "I found this on me. Costin set me up to get tracked. He wasn't finding the Underground through meditation or research, so he sent me out there to be his bomb robot."

Kiko took the dead device from her. "Way earlier, after I woke up, Breisi told me about what they did to you. I told her it was wrong, then she got all quiet and went back to the lab. I don't think they care about what they've done, though."

Wiping a hand over her face, Dawn tried to reconcile herself with that. This agency, which had seemed like a savior when she'd first tried to find Frank, had turned out not to be friendly at all.

Speaking of Frank . . . Where was he?

As she went back to door pulling-Breisi first-she groaned in discomfort, her body sore from all it'd been through.

"I'm glad you're back," Kiko said.

Aw. "Me, too, Kik. Trouble is, am I in more danger with Costin and the Friends than I am out there?"

"I wish I could tell you, but I'm in your boat. When I woke up, the boss-Costin-had locked himself away again, and Breisi got back to work in the lab soon after that. Haven't seen her since and, as I said, I can't get down there. I wanna know what's happening, because from the looks of things, I'm not sure who we've been working for. But Breisi still trusts him. . . ." He must've remembered that he hadn't known his other coworker quite as well as he'd thought, either, what with Breisi having been privy to more of the boss's secrets than he'd suspected. "I tell you, I've always been pretty easy about not getting in everyone's business, but I'm thinking those days are gone."

She reached down to squeeze his hand in understanding, but he shrugged away, shoving his hands into the pockets of his cargo pants instead. "I'm just frustrated." His voice was thick. "The crazier things get, the more useless I am. If you were so 'key,' like my vision told me you'd be, why did Costin throw you out? Maybe I was wrong. Maybe my brain has been dying day by day and I'm either getting false vibes or nothing at all." He was talking about what the pain pills had done to his powers-wiped them clean whenever he was stoned.

"Kik-"

"I never even saw it coming-what happened today. Shouldn't the boss's real ident.i.ty have been important enough for me to catch ahead of time?"

She'd witnessed her coworker go through some major highs and lows lately, but this was rock bottom. Kiko had always taken great pride in his talents. You could even say he was a c.o.c.ky son of a gun. But to see him brought down like this . . . ?

"The team wouldn't have gotten anywhere without you," she said softly. "You've been indispensable."

"To who?" His eyes got glossy. "To the vamps? To whatever Costin is?"

Dawn shut her mouth, first of all because she had no idea what to say. Second of all because Kiko was inconsolable and there wasn't a thing she could do to change that. She'd never been good at being a friend, and it made her sick that she sucked at it now. Minding her bruises and aches, she got back to heaving at the door. But Kiko wasn't done.

"Look at your jeans. Look at . . . you. Tell me the rest."

All right, as a friend who was trying real hard here, she'd tell Kik anything he wanted to- "Dawn?" said a deep voice from behind her in the hallway.

She turned to find her dad framed by the entrance, one arm reaching out to her.

For the longest heartbeat, she got used to him again. His rawhide skin, creased around a mouth that used to love smiling and eyes that had only recently cleared of a reddish drinking haze. His dark hair worn proudly in receding scruffiness. His bodyguard build accessorized with a dark T-shirt and jeans.

Frank didn't look like a vampire-not now anyway.

Wearily, Dawn walked over to him, then rested her cheek against his big chest as he enfolded her. She didn't say anything for a while, just allowed him to be a pillar until she needed to stand on her own again.

So what if there was a slight possibility that he and Eva had cooked something up and he was here only to mess with Limpet?

Yeah, she'd considered it. But she didn't want to deal right now. She just wanted to be with Dad.

Finally, Dawn backed away, pushing her hair from her face. "Jonah gave you permission to be in the house, huh?"

Frank jerked, as if a dart had gone astray in a bar and nailed him in the chest. "Go ahead then. Give me h.e.l.l."

"That's the last thing I want to do."