Breisi, so help me, I couldn’t do anything….
She held the picture to her chest, pressing so hard the metal frame cut into her.
When she heard footsteps, she didn’t even glance up.
Silence. Then more steps. Then The Voice, his unamplified words making it sound as if he were in the room. But it was him. She knew it.
“I wanted to help her.” His tone was like the aftermath of a decimated city: crumbled and haunted. “But we lost contact, and Hatsu, her Friend, disappeared. They’re all disappearing, one by one….”
Tautness strung the air together, linked only by the buzzing machine in the corner. Breisi had lived here. She’d made the Limpet house her home, made the team her family. Dawn wanted to cry even more.
“Can you tell me what happened?” The Voice asked.
Dawn tried to talk, couldn’t, but then gathered herself and tried again. It was rough but audible. “You really have no idea? You never saw the—”
She almost said “video,” but Eva had said the transmission hadn’t gone public.
Something tapped at her brain. Video. The broadcast. But she couldn’t hold on to it.
The Voice abolished the silence. “We only have her…” He stopped, then started again. “We found Breisi’s body set out in the backyard, and she’s being carefully seen to.”
“Thanks to Eva.” Dawn wasn’t going to give that vamp credit for carrying Breisi away from the cops, for giving her back to the people who cared about her. Eva could apologize in a thousand different ways and it wouldn’t make up for anything.
“The Friends have already told me many things about what happened.” A footstep echoed. “Can you tell me, Dawn?”
“Do I need to repeat it? You’ve set us all up.”
“What did you say?”
His voice blasted out with such wounded ire that Dawn dropped the picture. It shattered to the floor, jags of glass killing Breisi a second time. Dawn wouldn’t take her gaze off that, somehow knowing she could’ve stopped this, too.
But it gave her an odd strength, and she felt herself whipping around to face his darkness. “You knew about Eva. Why didn’t you warn me? She took me, Jonah. She has Frank, too. It makes me wonder if you knew something that could’ve saved Breisi, but maybe you weren’t telling her, either—”
“Frank is with her?” Relief, pure and simple, weighed his voice. “And Eva took you to be with both of them?”
Now he didn’t sound relieved so much as remorseful.
“Yes, I was kidnapped. Did you really think I ditched you and the team, even if Eva pretended she was me on the phone?”
The Voice didn’t say anything, which meant he’d had doubts about her, too. How? What had she done to burn him? Just because she wasn’t a natural do-gooder like Breisi or Kiko didn’t mean she lacked loyalty or more noble qualities. Did he think that little of her?
His laden sigh filled the room, seeping into her. But she was already too soaked with grief, saturated enough to hit rock bottom and stay there.
She sank down to Breisi’s bed.
More footsteps. But he still didn’t come out of the shadows.
“Kiko’s prophecy, where you’re victorious over the vampires…” Pause. “He also predicted that you’d have to make a choice, Dawn, and you’d have to arrive at that decision yourself. Just know that I kept you uninformed because I couldn’t afford to turn you against me until you were already invested in our cause. This meant you would eventually come to hate me….” His voice cracked. “But I was prepared. I am always prepared because that’s why I exist.”
“To serve your crusade?” she bit out. “That’s why you…” She primed herself to finally say it. “That’s why you used me as bait again—to see if Jac was an Underground vampire?”
“I need you, Dawn.”
No voice tricks, no hypnosis. He just sounded terribly human.
She stared straight ahead. “The good of the many outweighs the good of the few, right?”
“This is the most powerful vampire community I’ve ever met, and the best hidden. I’ve never needed more than my spirits and a few well-chosen humans to act as my eyes and ears outside. But we’ll be the victors, somehow, even if there’s always a price. I learned that early.”
“How?”
“Through other facades, just like Limpet and Associates, which exists only to find this Underground.”
She took that in. “So all our cases, like Robby’s and the Vampire Killer’s…We don’t take them on unless they’ll lead Underground. And when your team finds them, that’s when you step in.”
“As I always do.”
“So there’ve been other…Undergrounds?”
“Many.”
His voice seemed even closer and, only now, did it raise something up inside of her, something that had been slain when Breisi died. Raw feeling, even more than Matt had stirred. But his tone wasn’t hitting her in a physical way; it was at the core of her, soothing what needed to be soothed.