She bent, positioning the knife blade near Dawn’s throat.
Fighting to focus, Dawn saw enough to know that Cassie, Lee’s sister and the woman they’d interviewed back at the Adventure Motel, was gone. What was left was a horror show.
No more hippie scarf or cornrowed hair. Wig, Dawn thought, seeing the camper lights gleam off the woman’s bald head. Generic jumpsuit, like a maintenance worker’s, covering her body. Latex gloves. Fangs.
At Dawn’s perusal, Cassie’s mouth stretched into a smile, fangs sparkling just like her threatening knife.
A thud on the roof shook the trailer. Then another. Another, another, another.
Guards.
From Dawn’s angle, she could barely see Frank because a table blocked his upper face but, next to him, the bound and duct-taped Breisi was in full view as she stared at Cassie, eyes wider now with something like growing dread. Frank had his hands in the air, his revolver on the floor.
“There’s my protection,” Cassie said. “All I have to do is tell them to come into my family’s RV if there’s trouble. And you guys are.”
“Inviting the Guards in would stop your broadcast,” Frank said, making Dawn wonder if Eva had prepared him for what the hell a Guard even was.
Breisi glanced at Frank. Her heart was in her eyes.
“Don’t invite them in,” Frank repeated.
Dawn could tell he was leveling Cassie with a steady gaze, but, from here, she couldn’t see his eyes directly.
For some reason, she had a bad feeling about this.
“You don’t have to prove anything to Lee,” Frank added.
At those words, Cassie startled, her knife a little less poised now. But that was nothing next to the shock Dawn felt. It was like she’d been Tasered again.
How would Frank know anything about Lee and Cassie?
Training, she thought. Jonah gave him training for months.
Or was he mind screwing, like a…?
The notion was too terrifying, too impossible.
Cassie stared back at Frank, as if enthralled. “My brother thinks I’m a nothing. He’s wrong, the—”
“The Lee is wrong,” Frank finished. When he continued, he wasn’t addressing Cassie; he was talking to Dawn and Breisi and, weirdly, he was using Cassie’s more educated speech cadence.
“That’s what all the kids called Lee. The Lee, because he thought he was special. And when he went off to Hollywood to prove it, Cassie was afraid he would succeed. She hated him more than ever because he would become a star and she would never have what it takes to make it.”
God, Frank was inside of Cassie’s head.
Shivers traveled under Dawn’s skin, bringing her to, reminding her to detach the Taser probes from her jacket. Carefully. One false move and Cassie might come out of it.
“Almost all of the family was starstruck,” Frank continued. “Cassie had dreams of acting, just like Marg and Lee. But Lane, their older brother, was too levelheaded. He took care of everything after Dad died, so he didn’t have time for movies and idle goals. But if there was one thing they all knew, it was that Lee was going to be famous one day. And that meant he’d lord it over them even more than usual.”
Footsteps pounded the roof. Red-eyes. Emphatic thumps made Dawn imagine their barbed tails, beating time in the night.
Screeeech!
Dawn braced herself for Cassie to snap to attention, but the Vampire Killer didn’t remove her gaze from Frank’s.
He paused. “I don’t know why Lee killed Klara Monaghan. The Tomlinsons just knew that he was heavily involved with something secret, but he wouldn’t tell them what it was. It could’ve been Sasha he was hiding.”
Shit, another dead end. The Underground did a hell of a job covering their tracks.
Dawn saw her revolver near Cassie’s feet, about a yard away. It seemed like a mile. Should she use that or a different weapon to take the killer out? Dawn had gotten her sharp silver necklace back from Eva—could she slip that off and plunge it into Cassie’s neck before the girl had a chance to call the Guards?
Deciding that she’d rather be safe than sorry, Dawn began to inch toward the revolver, knowing this was her best chance to silence the human Vampire Killer by shooting Cassie in the throat to damage her vocal cords, then quickly in the heart.
As Dawn crept her hand over the floor, her lighted headset slipped off, already loose from her fall.