On what sounded like the pulse of a sob, Eva swirled her mist around him, maybe to comfort him, maybe to take him back.
Breisi’s irises had been taken over by her black pupils. She choked one more time, then stopped spasming.
Instead of a baffled tint of horror in her eyes, Dawn saw something else. An…answer?
Under the duct tape on her mouth, Breisi smiled, her head falling to the side.
No. Dawn shook her head, throat hot and tight. No, this wasn’t happening—
Sirens…
Then the smell of jasmine.
A blanket of mingled screams swept down from the trees, surrounding Dawn in protection, wrapping her in a womb.
Dawn tried to tell them, Keep the cops away so Eva can heal Breisi! but she couldn’t form words.
The sirens blasted, right outside the trees.
With a silvery blast, Eva barged up against the Friends to get to Dawn, but the vampire couldn’t get past their spirit shelter.
Then, wasting no more time, Eva’s form enveloped Breisi’s body, sweeping it into an embrace along with Frank, who pushed at the cloudy walls like a prisoner, mouth open in what Dawn thought was her name.
They zipped away, over the trees.
“Go, go…” It was the Friends, nudging Dawn away from the blood-soaked dirt where Breisi had just lain.
Hazily, Dawn stumbled away with their help, crashing through the trees just before the sirens wailed to a stop behind them.
Why had Eva taken Breisi? She couldn’t heal her. So why?
It was as if the Friends were holding her up, pushing her along as branches slapped her face, forcing her into seclusion and never letting her rest until she got to a main road where she found a convenience store. Before going inside, they pushed her toward a washroom where she barely remembered straightening herself up. Then, numbly, she used the ATM, then a pay phone, which allowed her to get a taxi.
All the while, something was embossing itself in Dawn’s vision, hissing over Eva’s old crime-scene photo.
Breisi’s own death pose, eyes staring up at Dawn and asking how this could have happened.
TWENTY-SIX
THE GO-TO
D AWN couldn’t do much. But vague instinct told her that she needed to do something before the Friends escorted her back to the Limpet house: she was pretty much a fugitive who’d flown a crime scene. She had to get as much done as possible now in case she was called in for questioning by the cops.
Maybe the Friends felt sorry for her, this deadened girl who was only just now beginning to operate normally as she shakily drove to Beachwood Drive. Or maybe Dawn had more power than she was aware of over the ghosts trailing her car and they had no choice but to follow her wishes.
After the carnage, she’d caught the taxi. Luckily, the driver had cared more about some gossip he’d picked up at the store than his passenger. Had she heard about the strange lights reported around the area by campers? Probably UFOs. There’d also been gunshots—no doubt rednecks who wanted to scare off those aliens—so the cops had gone out to the location, where they’d set up some sort of secret investigation already.
Dawn knew they’d found a real crime scene, too, filled with Cassie’s oatmealed body and a camera that’d recorded everything. Would a vampire video surface somewhere soon?
Then she recalled something about an interrupted transmission by Eva….
Yes, Eva, and all Dawn wanted to do was catch up with Breisi’s real killer. Eva. And then there was this Master….
Right. What was she going to do with him? Throw down with this even more powerful vampire? How?
That’s where plan B came in. After the taxi ride to Jac…Eva’s, where she’d picked up her car, Dawn had used another pay phone to call the man who’d suddenly moved down on her list of those to avoid.
Matt Lonigan.
Sounding very surprised and even relieved that she’d contacted him, he told her he was home if she needed him.
And she did need, but not in the usual way.
As Dawn walked up his drive, most of the Friends surrounded her. A few had already gone straight to Limpet’s.
“Daaaa-aawn?” one of them asked while she knocked on the door. “Too late…we were…too late…he didn’t know….”
They’d been telling her that off and on, apologizing, hinting that they’d been out searching for Dawn all over the county. Due to Eva’s impulsive activities, they’d been able to finally lock onto her location but hadn’t arrived in time.
No explanation mattered. All Dawn could see was Breisi choking on her own blood.
Matt answered the door on the second knock. The sight of his bruised everyman looks got to her, but she shut him out. If there was one thing she’d learned, it was that emotion was useless, that sex wasn’t going to solve anything.
“How much is your fee to hunt down vampires?” she asked, voice flatlined.