Break of Dawn (11 page)

“Just taking my daily breather, Kiko.”

Dawn frowned. He didn’t sound like The Voice. No, his tone wasn’t as low, and there wasn’t an accent. In fact, he was back to speaking the same way he had on that day Kalin had bound her for Jonah’s strange attempt at foreplay.

Not The Voice she was used to at all.

Finally, Dawn found
her
voice. “I thought that’s what you were doing in your cell—taking the breather of all breathers.”

She could detect a faint smile from him.

“Boss?” Kiko asked.

Jonah slumped even lower, now tapping his hands on the seat in a bored rhythm, his dark hair clinging to the velvet behind him. “Your third degree makes me think I can’t even rest in my own house. You like my seat at the desk, Kiko?”

Jonah had said it with a sense of dry humor, but . . .

“Sorry.” Kiko rose out of the chair, more formal than ever. “I didn’t realize—”

“Nobody realizes.
Nobody. Realizes.
”

Kiko looked at Dawn, probably to see how she was going to handle this. Hell. Like she knew?

After hefting out a sigh, Jonah latched his gaze on the ceiling. “The conversation you two were just having . . .”

Oh, oh. Was she about to get lambasted for telling Kiko about what’d happened in Kalin’s picture? Was she supposed to have kept that a secret? Dawn girded herself for a whooping.

But it never came.

“I’d be frustrated, too,” Jonah added.

Dawn’s eyes almost popped out.

“In fact,” their boss said, sitting up and leaning his elbows on his knees, “I’d be going crazy with not knowing anything about how we operate.”

Totally thrown off her game, Dawn stood, prickling with such uncertainty that the thought of not being ready to defend herself was just wrong.

“Don’t go anywhere.” His gaze was on her again, and there was something plaintive about it.

She stayed. For now. Just to see where this was all going, in spite of her own better judgment.

Jonah sneaked a look at the clock on a Chippendale table next to him, then glanced at her again. She’d automatically focused on his scars, and she lowered her eyes, caught.

“You can’t really look at me without wondering what happened,” he said.

She wanted to tell him that she’d accepted his face, actually finding his scars intriguing, not ugly. She’d never been much for perfect, anyway; a girl like her—one who’d always suffered by comparison to Eva—didn’t aim for pretty boys. Also, she had a couple of wounds on her own face.

But, yeah, he was right. She wondered what the story was behind his injuries. “I assumed you got hurt from one of your show-downs, Jonah.”

He touched his face, laughing shortly. “Oh, it was a confrontation of heroic proportions.” Then, in the oddest of all that was odd, he flushed, as if shame had settled over him.

At this point, Kiko had taken a spot beside her. His warmth felt reassuring. But when she glanced down at him, she saw that he’d started to sweat.

Before she could call a Friend to help him avert a cold-turkey moment, Jonah had spoken again.

“What if you could see how I got these scars? With help from Kiko, of course.”

Holy . . .
What?
Secretive Jonah inviting her to investigate? To get a straight answer? Something was very wrong. . . .

“Don’t you want this, Dawn?” he asked.

She nodded way too many times. “Hell, yeah.”

“Then come over here.”

She actually began to tremble.
Answers.
Taking a step forward, she couldn’t resist.

But Kiko grabbed her hand and, in his restraining touch, she guessed what he might be thinking.
This is too good to be true.

Still, she couldn’t pass this up. “Please, Kik.”

When he turned his gaze up at her, she saw the caution, blue as a hazy twilight room, in his eyes. He had to be thinking of what had happened with the dagger vision and what could be in store with this one. It wasn’t safe.

My God, his loyalty
wasn’t
the reason he stuck by Jonah. Not entirely.

“Dawn,” their boss said, and his voice held none of the vibrations she was used to getting when he said her name.

But it didn’t matter.

Ignoring Kiko’s clear feelings, she used all her strength to pull him to her greatest desire—Jonah and answers.

“Hurry,” their boss said, checking the clock again.

And she did, grabbing Kiko’s sweaty hand. Eyes wild, he tugged back, but she wouldn’t let him go. She was stronger, so she forced his touch toward Jonah.

“We really shouldn’t. . . .” Kik said.

“Please,” she said.

Their boss reached out, seizing the psychic’s retracted fingers, forcing them to touch the scars on his face. Dawn’s hand rode the back of his.

Too late, she saw that Jonah’s eyes weren’t topaz, but
blue
—

An explosion came out of nowhere, blasting her into a memory.

She stared from Jonah’s eyes at his image in the mirror of a sumptuous marble bathroom, his dark hair disheveled as he anchored his hands on each side of a sink.

His face was clear and beautiful in the light, but his eyes were blue with something like depressed terror.

“You were gone longer than normal,” he whispered.

But there was no response from whomever he was talking to.

Out of gloomy desperation, he yelled, “I didn’t think you were coming back!”

A breeze ruffled his hair, and Jonah’s blue eyes focused on whatever was behind him in the mirror. An unknown companion.

When the guest spoke, the room seemed to quake from a dangerous undertone. An old-world-accented darkness.

“You know I always return, Jonah. I must.”

“But I get afraid that you won’t.”

“Calm down, please. Do not assume—”

Jonah slapped the porcelain. “You’re looking for someone else, aren’t you? You aren’t happy with me anymore.”

“Please, Jonah. Let me in and you will not be this upset.”

The young man smiled shakily and leaned toward the mirror. “Why? Do you think I might strand you outside? Are
you
afraid of that?”

“Let’s not play these games. . . .”

“You think you have all the power, don’t you?” Jonah reached for something on the side of the sink. “You think you’ve got all the control here. Well, what if I . . . ?”

A stab of silver flashed in the mirror as Jonah held up a straight razor.

“No!” yelled The Voice.

Faster than a pulse of light, the young man brought down the blade, yet he hadn’t been aiming for his throat. The weapon slashed across his cheek. Pain blinded him, but he slashed again, full of rage, full of vengeful panic.

“Stop trying to get into my head to keep me from doing this,” Jonah said. “This is
my
body.”

He angled forward, forcefully nudged by the essence from behind, but he kept going, undeterred. Slash. Slash. Slash.

“Jonah . . .” It was The Voice, his tone steeped in sorrow.

“Tell me”—Jonah slashed again, his face a mash of cuts—“you won’t leave.”

“Oh, Jonah.”

“I won’t go any lower with this razor if you promise.”

The air went icy, and so did The Voice. Everything stilled.

Jonah held up his wrist.

“I will not leave you,” The Voice said quickly. Then his tone took on a dreadful, rueful edge. “I promise.”

Through the blood, Jonah smiled again, sinking to the floor. . . .

The memory ended gently, the red fading under Dawn’s vision as Jonah’s real face came back into focus. His beautiful, young, brutally scarred face.

He had removed her and Kiko’s hands from his cuts, his blue eyes gauging her reaction.

Dawn’s heart was beating so fast it was numb. She heard Kiko’s heavy breathing next to her. Drenched with sweat and shivering, he lost his balance and Dawn caught him, getting to her knees so she could cradle his body on the floor.

“Is that an answer for you?” Jonah asked. It was such a young question from a young soul.

Jonah’s soul. Not The Voice’s.

They were two different entities altogether.

She dragged her gaze back to him, only to find him looking so intent for a response that it almost crushed her heart.

“Please explain what just happened.” Her words barely got past the dryness in her mouth.

He parted his lips to answer, but a bolt of cold air cut the space between Jonah and Dawn. His body lifted, slamming back against the couch, while his eyes closed. For a second, all Dawn could hear were Kiko’s labored breaths, her own heartbeat in her ears. Fear did a pinching dance on her skin as her gaze traveled to the field of fire painting.

It was empty.

Then, from his prone position, Jonah . . . whoever . . . slowly opened his eyes to reveal the topaz hue she’d come to know so well.

But she hadn’t known this. Had never even imagined he could be so different than what she’d expected.

Whoever it was sat up ramrod straight on the couch, once again the warrior.

ELEVEN

THE BREAK

DAWN
held the shaking Kiko to her chest as he grabbed on to her tank.

“Who’s in Jonah’s body now?” she yelled at the stranger sitting on the couch so stiffly.
“Who the hell are you?”

When he answered, he seemed supremely unaffected by what had just happened. In fact, there was even a streak of cruelty rippling a low, harsh voice that nowhere resembled that of the real Jonah’s tone.

“I am the same man you have known for over a month now, Dawn, and you should know that even I have my limits. Your meddling has finally gone too far.”

She ignored that last part, ignored that Jonah had wandered in here for some random reason and offered himself to her, because she was stuck on something else he’d said. “
Man?
You call yourself a man?”

“I have been called myriad things.” He forced a horrible smile, his eyes intensely golden. “And ‘man’ is what I prefer to most others.”

Even through the shakes, Kiko spoke up. “The fire field . . .”

Dawn glanced up at the empty painting, then back to the stranger. She didn’t want to keep him out of her sights. “Is that where you rest, just like any other Friend?”

“Yes, but I am not so much like them under it all. Not remotely.”

Maybe the pieces should’ve all fallen together at that point, but she didn’t get it. Didn’t get any of it.

This lack of control made her feel more helpless than ever, especially when she realized that the room had filled with the scent of jasmine. Friends. A whole jury of them.

One of their voices threaded through the air, feminine and song-like.
“Toss ’er out. . . .”
Dawn thought she heard the spirit say, even though she couldn’t be positive.

Kalin?

The stranger in the real Jonah’s body hadn’t moved a muscle, even when other Friendly voices chimed in to drown out the Fire Woman, to cover whatever poison she was trying to spew.

“I hope you’re planning to tell us your real name now,” Dawn said to The Voice—because that was all he was to her again. Just a thing. To have him mean any more would remove the last stitch holding her together.

Kiko fought to sit up, but didn’t move away from the arm she kept around his shoulders. She was pretty sure he hadn’t known about their boss. Hadn’t known any of it.

“I can tell you more than just my name,” the stranger said.

The Friends’ voices rose again, one emerging louder than the others. Kalin’s.
“She’s trouble . . . too much trouble—”

Cut off. It sounded like someone—maybe Breisi?—had shut Kalin up. Dawn took advantage of that.

“Stop stalling.”

The room seemed to go cold at the commanding tone she’d used.

She thought she saw something sad in the stranger’s eyes, but he hid whatever it was by lifting his—
Jonah’s
—hand in a careless gesture. “Mr. Limpet is my gracious host.”

She knew in her gut that he was referring to more than just living in this house. The Voice’s essence—the force that’d been inside her so often—lived in that fire-field portrait, and when he wasn’t there, he was in Jonah Limpet’s body.

“You’ve taken him over?” she confirmed. “And he’s the one who told Kalin to bind me that day, wasn’t he? That wasn’t you at all. You . . . you stopped him from going any further. I remember how it sounded like there was a struggle, and then your voice—
this
voice—told me not to turn on the light. . . .”

The stranger assessed her, narrowing his eyes. “Jonah tends to want whatever I have, so during one of his ‘breathers,’ he sought you out. It was inconvenient.”

Good God.

None of the agency’s other spirits—the Friends—had usurped a body. Not to Dawn’s knowledge. Then again, he’d already said he wasn’t like the Friends. So what did that make
him
?

She wanted to know. And she didn’t. She really, really didn’t.

He must’ve read the trepidation on her face, because he stopped watching her, as if finally seeing what he’d been expecting in her reaction all along. “Does that satisfy your curiosity, Dawn? Do you have a better idea of what you are dealing with now, and will it finally put a stop to your invasive activities?”

She held on to Kiko, just as he was holding on to her. The sweat from his body was making her arms slippery, dampening her shirt. Or maybe it was her own fear doing that.

This wasn’t happening. She hadn’t seen into Jonah’s head, hadn’t made this discovery. Damn it, why couldn’t she blank it all out?

“Don’t you wish to know more?” the stranger’s voice thundered. “Or have you had enough?”

She flinched, but she didn’t back off. She just wanted to attack, to take back her mind and put it the way it used to be.

“There’s more to tell?” She got to her knees, protectively maneuvering Kiko behind her.

You work for a monster,
Eva had told Dawn. Why hadn’t she listened, even to her mother?

Jasmine started to press in around her and Kiko, as if flanking them. Dawn’s blood began to race, her hearing going fuzzy in panic.

The stranger smiled that unfamiliar, vicious smile again. Where had her boss gone? Had he forgotten how he’d filled her last night? And didn’t he understand that Jonah, himself, had given her permission to see inside his head?

“You want to know how I came to take my host over, yes?” the stranger continued. “You and your endless nagging would perhaps cease to drive me mad if you knew my true name, my true self? Do you wish to see the darkest parts of me now? Will that make you happy?”

“What’s wrong with you?” Sure, they’d had their moments, but even in his worst hours, he was always respectful.

“Ah, avoidance.” The Voice nodded. “Now that it comes down to it, you wish to shut out reality, just as you did with your mom’s death. Yet after hearing the truth of that, Dawn, all has not turned out so well, has it?”

Bastard. “Why would you be so willing to blurt out the truth now instead of b—”

Before she could finish, something unseen hit her, bowling her backward until her spine flattened against the rug. Gold—all she saw was the topaz of his irises, and the color, the heat, was sizzling her eyes. His essence had come inside her head, taking advantage of the door she’d always left open for him. He was searching around her brain, violating. . . .

She screamed, pushing against him as he pummeled her memories of being kidnapped by Eva, of going to rescue Breisi, of seeing the woman who’d come to mean so much to her die—

Then, just like that, it was over.

Gagging, she rolled to her side, her shirt clammy, her skin filmy.

“What did you do to her?” Kiko yelled.

She heard his feet pounding the floor. He was charging the boss—the stranger.

Weakly pushing to her elbows, she tried to get up, but she was too late. Just before Kiko jumped at The Voice, the little man was picked up by a whoosh of air, then pinned to an adjacent couch. There, he stayed, punching at nothing.

“Breisi!” he yelled. “Let me go!”

Breisi’s essence flew away while other whispers shot toward him, whispers Dawn had heard earlier when the collected Friends had put Kiko, then her, to rest.

Within seconds, he closed his eyes, his head lolling to the side.

Wait—
Dawn
could command the Friends. She’d forgotten because it was such a new power.

She began to order them to leave Kiko alone, but the stranger quashed her hopes.

“My commands take precedence over yours, so do not bother.”

She almost preferred being put to sleep over this. Would the Friends be lulling her next? Then why was this stranger bothering to taunt her?
What was happening?

She got to her hands and knees, unable to stand because of her jelled legs. “What’s wrong with you?”

Her guard slipped and, for one moment—just one—she didn’t want to fight. She wanted her mentor, her guiding force, back.

She whispered the rest. “What are you doing?”

At that, he seemed to wilt a fraction. But then he went rigid. “I’m being the monster you should have expected. Did your mother not warn you? Were you not paying attention to what she was trying to tell you?”

“Shut up.” She almost put her hands over her ears but fought the urge. Blocking out her mother’s words from the outside wouldn’t do anything when they were already ingrained in her head. They were burning, scarring a message into her gut that she never should’ve ignored.

A monster. One of them.

Or maybe even worse?

“What I find interesting,” the stranger said, his tone like a slight retreat, “is that you still don’t want to believe what Eva said about me. I saw that in your mind, as clear as day.”

Confused by his change in voice, Dawn hardened herself, avoiding the stranger’s eyes now, vowing he wasn’t going to get inside her again. “I’m starting to believe what she told me.”

“That’s because you will never trust me.” He leaned forward. “No matter how much you learn about me, it will never be enough. In fact, it will be too much.”

It was already too much.

She tried to get to her feet, clawing at the rug in her effort.

The stranger shook his head. “No sense in standing unless you wish to walk out the door.”

She stopped at the return of his razored tone.

“Go on, Dawn. You are free to leave.”

Everything seemed to fall down around her. Wasn’t the team supposed to stay locked down? Wasn’t it dangerous for her to venture outside?

Or was it more dangerous in here?

“I . . .” she began.

“Invading my host was the last straw. You clearly have no respect for my privacy, though, last night, I thought you might have cultivated some. But you are unwilling to accept my protection here in the house without causing distress, and you will need to leave us.”

“But . . . I’m ‘key.’ ”

It’d come off as pathetic. Dawn even cringed, but she recovered quickly, pissed off that he had the power to make her feel so insignificant.

“Kiko has been wrong before.” The Voice leaned back against the couch, bending a leg so he could rest his ankle on the other knee.

Bullshit. Once The Voice had told her that he had a lot of faith in Kiko’s talents. That couldn’t have changed so drastically.

She stood her ground. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m not leaving. This is crazy.”

“This is necessary,” he whispered.

Dawn’s toughness slipped a little. A chink in his armor?

“Leave,” he said, “before you can never go back. Just leave, Dawn.”

Leave? And go where? And do
what
?

“Oh, how merciful,” she said, fighting oncoming tears. “Do you actually think I can ‘go back’ to walking around the streets without knowing what’s under them? Do you think I’ll ever be the same person again?” Her fingernails dug into her palms, clutching on to something since everything else was out of her grasp. Her nails broke skin but she still kept pressing.

Once, when she’d first come back to L.A., Kiko had told Dawn that she’d never return to her old job as a stunt double. She’d thought he was full of it, but he’d been right.

She’d always been wrong.

Dawn forgot about protecting herself, allowing her gaze to meet the stranger’s. What she saw there made her want to cry out in frustration. It was the old Voice, the one who’d taken her under his wing and educated her, even while keeping her at an intimate distance.

Then, as if he’d gotten caught, the stranger’s body seemed to steel itself, transforming before her very eyes into the thing she didn’t know anymore.

“I cannot afford to care how life will treat you from this point on,” he said.

But she’d seen that he still cared, somewhere in that body of his. She knew it, and this was all another one of his games.

She gave it right back to him. “Okay. So when the Underground comes to get me for the part I played in hunting them down, you’ll just shrug and chalk it up to life as a Limpet PI. Is that how all your team members end up—deserted if they don’t become Friends?”

He was clearly battling himself, like he wanted to argue but wasn’t going to.

Unable to tolerate it anymore, she made a dismissive motion. “You
are
a monster—just not one to be that afraid of.”

As she began to turn her back on him, her nape tingled. Chills.

What’s he doing? What’s he thinking . . . ?

Against her gut instinct, she looked back. He’d come to a slow stand, looming in a rage, his jaw and hands clenched.

“Would you
finally
leave if you knew the true definition of ‘monster’?” he asked. “Is that what this will take?”

She didn’t like the question, didn’t like his nightmare tone. And when he lowered his chin and offered a terrible smile, she regretted ever stepping into the Limpet house.

In his hands, something was gleaming. The dagger—the simple tool etched with a
C
that had shown her the stuff of hell with Kiko’s help.

No. No, he wasn’t saying what she thought he was saying—

“The mark on this dagger stands for ‘Costin,’ ” he growled. “
That
is my true name.”

Dawn’s blood hammered in her temples, her vision pulsing until her eyes hurt.

Costin.
C.
Bloodlust. Monster.

The seer in Kiko’s dagger vision.

A wet stream slithered out of one eye, trickling down her cheek. “Stop saying things like that. You’re going too far.”

He walked toward her, dagger outstretched, as if asking her to take it from him. On a different day, she might’ve thought he was begging her to remove a burden from his soul.

“I was introduced into this new life through blood,” he said. “I know what it is like to thirst for it, to murder for it, to drink it until my every fiber sings with it. As you have seen, I have the potential to be a
monster
, like the vampire Robby Pennybaker who raped your brain.” His eyes heated. “Like the mother you claim to hate.”

She tasted bile in the back of her throat. The stench of jasmine compounded her nausea. He’d been inside her, with her permission, caressing her, saturating unfilled holes where she hadn’t allowed anyone before.

Her legs itched to move, but she couldn’t. Damn her, she
did
trust him, because she couldn’t believe what he was saying, couldn’t truly believe he could be evil, too.