Broken (2 page)

That was when it hit him. He was
dying
.

He tried to move, to ask her to stop this from happening, to touch him and make him feel another anesthetic, blissful rush. But he couldn’t even open his mouth. He didn’t have the strength.

She stopped digging and came to him, just as he’d wanted. She stood above him, the flow of her light hair and darkened face covering his view of the sky. Then, as he tried to take in one last breath, she bent to press a tender kiss on his forehead. She lingered, her hair brushing his face, and he spasmed one last time, his hips lifting, wet warmth coating him.

As life seeped out of the rest of the body, he felt the white lady’s lips curling into a smile against his skin.

DEEP
within the lab of the vampire hunting team’s headquarters, Dawn Madison stood over one of the two London Underground masters as he sat propped in a chair.

At first glance, her stance in front of the staring, captivated vampire would’ve seemed casual to any observer—her hip cocked, one arm hanging loose at her side as she faced Claudius. But then came the most telling detail.

Her other hand was hidden behind her back, where her fingertips lightly rested on the weapon in her jeans pocket: a crucifix that she was ready to draw at a split second’s notice.

However, this master didn’t seem to be aware that she was even in the room. His eyes were fixed straight ahead, his gaze stupefied. Dawn didn’t know if he was resting, open-eyed, during the daylight, which only weakened the powers of these vampires, or if he was just acting like he was too out of it to respond to her entering the lab only moments ago.

Since he wasn’t giving her much of a clue as to where his head was at right now, she took an extra sec to assess him: a tattered, brain-fried former warrior, with his long brown hair falling over a face boasting strong, refined features; his pale, otherwise naked body bundled in a blanket. He hadn’t changed into the female or catlike forms that he could shift back and forth from at will. The glaze in his eyes was thanks to Dawn’s regrettably rough handling last night, after she’d tried to extract the Underground’s location from him. More recently, he’d also been subjected to a round of much gentler questioning from Costin, who’d eventually decided to rest before confronting Claudius again. It’d been after sunrise when the boss had retired to bed, leaving the master vampire alone, finally giving Dawn the opportunity to sneak out of their room while avoiding any of the other team members. She’d come here, not caring that she and the rest of the hunters had been banned from the lab.

Yup—screw it. She was tired of these games, waiting for Claudius to shuffle out the information that would lead to exterminating this newest Underground. There were so many other vampire communities to take care of besides just this one.

She waved her hand in front of him, but nothing changed.
Was
he faking her out by pretending to be hazy?

Willing him to move, she tugged at his blanket, which wasn’t the only thing binding him. Dawn’s coworkers, the invisible, deceased former-hunter spirits called “Friends,” were also wrapped around Claudius with their jasmine essences, making sure he wouldn’t be able to strike out physically if he was awake. The blanket was some sort of humane treatment that Costin had insisted on, something to show the master that, if he started spilling the beans about the Underground, there’d be other nice things in store for him.

If
he talked.

“Hello, in there,” Dawn said, giving one last wave in front of Claudius’s face.

Blank-o.

She didn’t let down her guard, because this vampire had some major charming abilities. If he was playing possum right now, hoping to lull Dawn and surprise her by lashing out with his controlling voice, he had another think coming.

She was hardly comforted by the fact that she’d kicked his ass last night, after he’d almost enchanted her. Actually, while she’d been going to town on him, doing what she thought a hunter should do to overcome a vampire who’d just as soon kill her as look at her, she’d broken something in Claudius.

Had she turned his brains to mush?

Just the thought of it got to her—a shaded, bladed delight, a sense of victory screwing through her. But, God, it was wrong. She shouldn’t feel any kind of triumph after what she’d done, so she shut it out. Costin would be appalled if he knew that she’d even entertained an instant of gratification.

She felt the dull pounding of the dark mark that had shown up on her face last night. A black crescent, the world’s ugliest beauty spot, on her left cheek. She’d noted a tender patch on her skin at the end of her encounter with Claudius—and it hadn’t been any kind of bruise or injury, either. Why or how it’d gotten on her, she didn’t know. It could’ve had something to do with what she’d become over a year ago when she’d saved Costin during the Underground siege in L.A., when she’d needed to succumb to the bite of another master vamp in order to become a vampire herself, exchanging blood with it and, in turn, preserving a dying Costin so he could exist to fight more Undergrounds—the only way he could gain back his soul.

For a short, incredible time, she’d been one of them. But she’d had to kill that master vamp to destroy the Hollywood Underground, turning herself human again in the process, although something had remained behind on her soul. A heaviness. A stain that she didn’t have to see to know it was there.

Was it coming out on her now, in a very real way?

Had she somehow earned this mark by whaling on Claudius last night?

She walked around the master vamp, still scanning him while the lab’s fridge/freezer hummed, sawing over her nerves as she touched that crucifix in her back pocket. Holy items didn’t get to all the vampires she’d ever confronted—the dragon’s line seemed to have different talents and weaknesses, based on the personality traits they’d brought with them into the afterlife. But she knew this piece would work on Claudius since he’d been a religious man before going vamp all those centuries ago.

“Claudius,” she whispered.

His head canted forward, and she could tell he was about to wake up, that he’d only been resting and that the sound of his name was finally nudging him back to consciousness.

“Morning, sunshine,” she said, coming to stand in front of him.

His muddled gaze struggled to lock onto her. When it did, he winced so violently that the blanket fell away from his neck, exposing the still-healing wounds there. Based on the intel that Costin had gotten from Claudius since they’d brought the master back here, Dawn knew this creature had earned his injuries from a fight with the lesser vampires in his Underground. But she only knew this because, after things had calmed down around headquarters and Costin had sequestered Claudius for a private questioning session, the boss had scribbled notes so the team would be in the loop. Then he’d settled down to rest without even talking to Dawn face-to face.

That’s right—notes had been the extent of their communication. He was that angry at her.

It’d been at sunrise, after she’d found the papers taped to the inside of their bedroom door, that Dawn had snuck down here to the lab, thinking she could take her interrogation skills down a notch and maybe get even more answers out of this master vampire, who had the ability to move about during the day, although his powers were at an ebb now, just like Costin’s.

As Claudius regally tried to compose himself in front of her, she saw the fear in him. Saw herself in the pitch-black of his pupils, which looked like hellholes she would have to claw her way out of.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” she said.

It took a minute for the master vamp to process this—she could practically see his thoughts clicking together in his eyes like he was a slow-moving machine that was recovering from a malfunction.

Dawn dug the nails of her free hand into her palm. She hadn’t
intended
to mess up Claudius so badly. In her desperation to help Costin, she’d just lost patience.

But she’d keep control from now on, she thought. Control would get her the answers to the biggest questions of all: Did this particular Underground house the dragon, who they suspected might be the most revered and feared monster of all? Was this the community that Vlad Tepes had chosen to keep himself hidden throughout the years? He’d turned Costin into a vampire centuries ago, along with Costin’s fellow blood brothers, including Claudius. But then Costin had made a mysterious deal with an ethereal, and nearly anonymous, entity to slay the dragon and his direct progeny in order to win back his soul. The vow had made the boss a Soul Traveler who borrowed bodies from willing hosts so that he could slay one Underground at a time with the aid of handpicked teams.

But during the final attack on the last Underground, much to Dawn’s horror, she’d been the one to turn him
back
into a vampire, trapping him in the undead body of his host, Jonah, who constantly fought Costin for dominance.

Now, as Dawn took a step toward Claudius, the master vamp stiffened beneath his blanket. One of the Friends pushed the flannel back up and over his shoulder, as if the spirit wanted to play good to Dawn’s bad.

“Claudius,” Dawn said. “It’s over. All you can do at this point is make the rest of it easy.”

The vamp was grimacing. He was trying to shift, thin cat hair bristling out of his skin. But that was as far as Claudius got with changing into his more lethal vamp form.

Beaten, his body relaxed into his common disguise—that of a woman named Mrs. Jones. It was the identity he’d assumed aboveground to fool everyone.

The fruitlessness of Claudius’s maneuvers was a little sad. Costin had told them that this master was a physically weaker one, and Dawn almost felt sorry that she was responsible for making him even more of a basket case. Then again, he would’ve slayed any one of them in a heartbeat. So why be so sympathetic about a master vampire?

As his more delicate female features warped back into stronger male ones—the more prominent nose, chin, mouth—Dawn took her hand off the crucifix in her back pocket, pretty sure she wasn’t going to need it for now.

But she wouldn’t forget it was there.

She dragged over a stool from a work counter strewn with nuts and bolts from several projects in progress. Hunting weapons. Then, sitting, she said, “You were with Costin for hours before he retired upstairs. I can see you’re tired.”

Finally, the vampire spoke, his voice hoarse from the still- healing damage to his throat. “Release me.”

The command was slightly imperious, the tone of a monarch whose words were threaded through with attempted charm. It was easy to block out right now, not only because of Claudius’s weakened state but because Dawn was prepared to use some fairly decent mind powers of her own; what she’d done to this master vamp last night, banging him back and forth with a psychokinetic verve that had only grown over this past year, testified to what she could do when she was at her best. Or worst.

The urge to do it again, the impatience to get answers, brutally flexed in her. She calmed herself.

After taking in a long breath, she felt a sting on her skin, near the jaw, and she scratched at it, almost as if the action gave her hands something to do.

In the meantime, Claudius seemed to realize that the charm held no sway. His eyes went wide.

“Come on now,” Dawn said, avoiding any escalation in tension.

“Work with me. That’s all I’m asking, here. And that also means you won’t call any animals to your aid so they can try to barge into this building and rescue you.” He’d tried to do that last night, but she doubted his strength was up to it now.

“If I don’t cooperate,” he asked, “will you slice my gut open again?”

She withstood the attack. Hell, she took full responsibility for what she’d done. And Claudius’s words were nothing compared to the terrified looks the rest of the team had given her after they’d taken the master vamp into custody. His barbs were zero next to the way they’d talked around her afterward, as if they didn’t know what to say to her anymore.

“Does it need to come down to slicing?” Dawn asked. “According to Costin, you shared more information with him. You gave him a few details about being pushed out of the Underground by those vamp girls, among other little details about the community itself.”

“I suppose you’d like me to convey the location then.”

Dawn knew she had a snowball’s chance of sweet-talking that out of him, but what the heck. “It’d save us all a lot of grief, wouldn’t it?”

The vampire gritted out a laugh. “I had little choice in sharing with Costin. He used our blood brother Awareness to chip his way into my head. Unless you can finesse your troglodyte mind tricks to match his much more civilized ones, I don’t believe you’ll get as far.”

So Costin had been breaking Claudius down bit by bit. The news was heartening, mostly because Dawn had been doubting Costin’s strength recently. Most of his raw powers had been dulled after he’d been trapped in Jonah’s coarse monster body, and the notion that he had mentally overcome Claudius was good news. If Claudius were a more powerful master, it would’ve been even better news, but she’d take this for what it was worth.

“So then,” Dawn continued calmly, “why don’t you save your own skin by sharing even more? You don’t really think you’re going to be rescued by your little vamp girls anytime soon. They tossed you out like three-day-old fish, remember?”

“They will follow Mihas’s orders. I’ve put in calls to him. He’ll respond once he checks his messages.”

Mihas—the beloved co- master of this Underground. “Hate to break it to you, Claudius, but unless Mihas has the guts to lead an attack in public—and I don’t think he’s dumb enough to expose what he is and risk discovery—you’re up merde creek. Those girls are glad you’re gone.”