“But,” the ex-lover added, yanking his cap lower, “what do I care? Lee wasn’t the love of my life. Hell, when he hit the big time, like he always bragged about, I was going to leech off of his grand career anyway until it was time to move on. He took what he wanted from me, and I’ve done the same with him.”
Sasha tossed another charming grin to Dawn, making her wonder if he was full of shit or just the world’s most honest individual. Something told her he wasn’t kidding and wasn’t remotely ashamed of it.
Once again, his eyes burned into her. Automatically, she reverted to training, jamming him out with a mind block. But after a second, she realized she’d gone overboard.
God, she was on edge. All this waiting for something to attack them since Robby died was eating at her.
“Sasha—” she began.
“My real name’s Dave. Dave Nisro.”
He seemed to catch something over her shoulder, and his smile grew wider, revealing a set of beautiful white teeth as he spread out his arms and ambled away from his dressing station.
Dawn followed him, discovering a young man walking toward Sasha/Dave to be enveloped in his embrace. The other male was somewhat familiar to her: slender, pale, his long auburn hair teased out to…
Oh, crap. Sasha’s friend resembled Klara Monaghan.
Jaw tight, Breisi guided the team toward the back exit of the dressing room while Sasha nuzzled the new arrival. As the three of them passed, they thanked him, knowing they were anything but done.
“Give me a call if you need anything else,” he said, eyes still only on the Klara doppelganger.
Kiko was the last one headed for the door. “Count on it.”
The exit led to a back alley, where a Dumpster provided stale-trash cologne and a lone streetlight shone piss yellow.
Weirded out, Dawn stuck her hand in a pocket, fingers digging past some velvet to touch the reassuring, sharp tips of her silver, holy-water-tipped throwing stars: shuriken.
“That was disturbing,” Breisi said.
“Which part?” Kiko wrinkled his nose at the Dumpster. “Where the male Klara clone sauntered in or where Sasha kept crossing gender lines to hit on Dawn? It was all…”
“Something to go on.” Dawn couldn’t hold back a smile because it was a lead, a reason to think Sasha was more invested in Klara or Lee than was obvious. “And I keep wondering—is Sasha vampire material or just a leech?”
“Guys, we gotta come back,” Kiko said, hopped up. “I had a reading from him—mainly images of Lee, and I don’t want to linger on those, thank you—but nothing about the Underground. I can get more, I know I can!”
Breisi motioned toward the alley’s mouth and they all moved toward it. “Maybe he isn’t vampire-related at all, Kik.”
“Maybe he is and I need to dig deeper.” His voice cracked on the last word as they passed the Dumpster.
Dawn felt terrible for him. “Hey, Kiko, don’t…”
A shudder ripped through her, a warning that flinted against all the time she’d spent thinking that a vamp attack was just waiting around the corner for them—
She turned to find red eyes staring back at her, a dark shape huddled beside the Dumpster. Without pause, she extracted a throwing star, fired it at the looming threat.
“Dawn!” Breisi yelled.
But it was too late—she was already buzzing, glad to get back into action, to finally do something that would bring her that much closer to Frank.
The dark shape yelped, jumped away, red eyes dropping to the ground. Dawn’s pulse imploded as she used this distraction to reach for her revolver.
But before she could fire, Breisi was yelling at her to stop again.
Vision blurred by memory, by the running red blood of Eva’s crime-scene photos and Robby’s mind rape, Dawn barely held back. Then…
No. God, no.
Her eyes focused to reveal a bare-armed homeless woman with blood on her arm from where the blade had glanced off. She was quaking in her ragged clothes—not shrinking in Nosferatu, blood-poisoned injury. She was pinned in terror like a moth that only wanted escape—not clawing at Dawn with gnarled fingers.
As Dawn’s stomach turned, the woman’s rickety-toothed mouth gaped in a scream, her brown eyes holding nothing but horror.
Horror at seeing Dawn, who had suddenly, easily turned back into the hunter who’d savagely beheaded a little-boy vampire.
On the ground, a stuffed animal tilted on its side, toy eyes glowing red. Bile crept up the back of Dawn’s throat.
“It’s one of them!” Kiko yelled.
When Dawn turned around, she found Breisi restraining the small man from joining in with his usual monster-hunting verve.
“No, it’s…” She choked on disgust. “It’s not.”
She faced the homeless woman again, recoiling at her terrified gape while putting her revolver back in its holster. “She’s human.”
“How can you be sure?!”
“Kiko.” Breisi’s tone was forceful. “The holy water and silver are having no effect—”
“She could be one of those higher-level vamps! Let go of me, goddamnit!” Kiko grunted, trying to free himself.