Broken (20 page)

They slipped unnoticed by anyone out of the detached quarters, which seemed to have been converted from what had at one time been stables. Earlier, Greta had mentioned that a lot of servants lived downstairs in the main house itself, but the spirits thought it’d be easier to smuggle Dawn into and out of the outside structure, so they’d waited until this particular maid had taken a break there.

The noon sun disguised itself in a clouded haze as Dawn followed the jasmine down a short path to the main house, its grandeur still imposing, especially under such a dreary sky. She kept her hands under her apron to protect them from the cold.

When they got to a back entrance, Kalin bumped Dawn to the side, where a panel waited.

“Open it,”
the Friend said.

Dawn followed instructions, finding a keypad behind the panel. Since the Friends had seen other servants using the sequence, Trudy gave her a code to punch in with her stiff fingers.

A lock clicked at the door, and Kalin urged Dawn forward. “I can walk,” Dawn said.

The ghosty backed off.
“Just chuffed to be ’ere, is all.”

Dawn related. Kalin only wanted Jonah and Costin back, and Dawn knew that she would also barge into anyplace that would help them get that much closer to the missing guys.

She cut the chatter as they entered a stark hallway, Trudy zooming ahead, Kalin remaining behind as a silent escort. They moved quickly, Dawn keeping her head down, because the spirits had said there were security cameras around. Hence, the stolen uniform and the inclusion of two Friends right now; the spirits would be subtly manipulating cameras—especially the one they’d found in the study.

After going through the main hall, which was dominated by a grand curved staircase and a sprawling chandelier, they entered a long hallway, papered in a striped mahogany pattern so tasteful that Dawn even felt posh. It had that old house smell, too—closed-in air and must that hadn’t been quite polished off with all the housecleaning.

Then Trudy sped back to them.

“Hostile approaching,”
she said.

Kalin pushed Dawn to the wall, and Dawn knew that she needed to keep her head down, her hands folded in front of her. She was a servant.

As she assumed the position, she heard heavy footsteps on the carpeting. Someone passed, and she saw a pair of thick, stubby legs, perfectly creased trousers, and polished shoes.

Whoever it was sniffed as he went by.
The jasmine,
Dawn thought.

He paused, and her heart practically gouged its way out of her chest.

Hellfire. The shadow thing and the schoolgirl vamps had to have connected the jasmine with the team. Would they have communicated the information to the people here or did the Underground operate on its own to ensure as much secrecy as possible?

When the man spoke, he didn’t address Dawn as much as ruminate out loud.

“New polish?”

In a low, barely audible voice, Dawn said, “Yessir.”

The Friends had already told her that this family didn’t have titles—only a fortune they’d gained through smart land investments nearly a hundred years ago. This guy wasn’t a lord or duke or one of the million titles these English people carried around.

He didn’t even break his stride. Dawn peeked up from beneath the strands of her wig to see the retreat of a stiff-backed, balding man tight-assing his way down the hall. Dude was even wearing a fine jacket, like he was all dressed up for a day strolling around the country house.

“Keep better watch,”
Kalin said to Trudy after the man had turned a corner.
“That one was the father.”

“He popped out of a door,”
the other Friend said.
“I can’t be everywhere, sweetie.”

As Trudy took off again, Kalin pushed Dawn ahead.

A zing of belated adrenaline flooded her. Thank God the guy had barely noticed her. Luckily, to the rich, the house staff was meant to be invisible—like gremlins who magically kept their home functioning.

They reached the study without further incident, the massive doors like oaken gates in front of a fortress. Dawn accessed the keypad with the same code she’d used before.

“They’ll be dependin’ on the camera inside to see what kinda activity’s goin’ on ’ere,”
Kalin whispered by Dawn’s ear.
“Go on—open the door, just a touch, though. Me ’n Trudy’ll slip in for the camera and position it so that it shouldn’t light on you—but if it does, you’ll just look like that little maid yer imitatin’. Mind that you follow where we tell you to go though, so you basically stay out of its range, yeah? That way, our manipulatin’ won’t be as obvious. Also, there’s another Friend patrollin’ the ’ouse, and she’ll be right outside to warn us of danger if it comes our way.”

Once again, Dawn did as Kalin asked, and the Friends eked in through the crack.

She waited a few moments, then came in herself, putting all her trust in Trudy and Kalin to have done their camera work.

Closing the door behind her, she surveyed the dim, windowless room, which was lit only by another chandelier in the center. The place looked Victorian, with burgundy and pinstripe-black wallpaper, not that Dawn knew what Victorian decorating actually was. But it sounded right.

The rest of it, though, was more “evil library extreme” in Dawn’s terms. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with leathered tomes that made the room smell like . . . well, old books. A frieze presented a sweep of dark, bodiless wings. And as if that wasn’t creepy enough, there were grumpy-faced portraits on the far wall, lined up like the ranks of a small, nasty, in-sore-need-of-enemas army.

A shocking thought invaded her. What if these Meratoliages had living pictures, too, just like the Friends?

Nah, Dawn thought, getting a move on. Her spirits would’ve sensed that.

She heard Trudy’s voice from where a camera blended into a high corner, where both she and Kalin had combined forces to manipulate its scanning.

Dawn assumed the Friends were muting any sound devices on the mechanism.

Winding through the leather chairs and settees, she headed for an ornate wooden stand that held a ledger. Low shelves filled with similar books flanked it.

Trudy again.
“When I was in here before, I noticed that it looked like a register of some kind. Births, deaths. You know how families used to keep that stuff in their Bibles?”

“What good is that going to do us?” Dawn asked.

Kalin talked now.
“The books round it might be of great importance. Friends’ve already scanned the titles on the shelves—mostly books ’bout black arts. Those in front of you ’re untitled, and we couldn’t read none of ’em on the inside. That’s yer job.”

Dawn got right on it, not bothering to wear gloves this time. The team had already been made by the Underground, and fingerprints wouldn’t matter now.

First, she fetched the ledger on the stand, backed out of range, then skimmed it. The pages contained a complex network of family trees, using symbols next to each name that she couldn’t even begin to decipher. But she did notice that, with each grouping—about a century’s worth of them—there were two names.

Couples?
she thought, noticing that all the names were male, so it couldn’t be about reproduction. Not unless black arts or a very modern technique was involved.

Then she remembered the dead boy in the lab freezer. Shadow Girl.

Had
they
been partners?

On the last filled page of the book, Dawn found the branched names and birthdates of what looked to be the most recent
custode
s: “Nigel,” who was in his twenties. Next to him was “Charles,” a late-age teen. But his stricken name was capped off by the date of his death.

And that date was just over a week ago.

Was Charles the boy in the team’s lab freezer? When Kiko had done touch-readings on his clothing, they hadn’t gotten anything to know for sure.

Next to his name was the only female one Dawn recognized throughout the pages.

“Lilly,” who was near Charles’s age.

Dawn tried to place the flowered name with the face she’d seen that one night in Eva’s flat when she’d unmasked Shadow Girl during her attack. Light eye color, a wide smile accented by slightly bucky teeth, a heart-shaped face capped by light brown hair.

Even though she had a name now, Dawn still found it hard to think of Lilly as a person. She seemed to be more like a robot or . . .

A spine-rattling word came to Dawn.

A minion.

Driven by what she’d found so far, Dawn told the Friends she was going in, put the first book back, then squatted to a lower shelf and pulled out another resource, which seemed to be a very brief account of events. Dawn had never been a studier. She’d never even made it through college and had been pretty disinterested in everything but sports in school. But, now she retreated and settled on her ass to read for as long as she could.

She took out a penlight from a pocket on her uniform, scanning the first entry, which dated back to 1897.

Shit—she knew that date. The publication of
Dracula
, right?

Turning to the back of this book, she found the pages blank. Then she backtracked to the middle, where the last entry had been labeled with the present year.

It read: “Lilly Elisabeta, activated. (The powers help us all.)”

Immediately above was: “Charles Edward, missing, deceased.”

Hey, how would they know he was, in fact, dead?

Also, why was Lilly’s name—again the only female—the only one to have that demeaning note next to it?

Dawn scanned backward now. The book was just a record of how the keepers had died, and it looked like some of them had bitten the dust while on duty. But a few entries had a word next to them that had a more sinister ring to it than it should’ve.

Retired
.

What happened to those ninja-weird shadow things when they
retired
, for God’s sake? Was there some sort of home for them where they could run around playing tag-the-spy? Was there a pension plan?

She read on, discovering entries that read: “excused from duty—heart defect.” Actually, there were quite of a few of those. And they accounted for deaths, too, with really young males.

But this research wasn’t really getting Dawn anywhere. She needed proof that the dragon was in this Underground, and she needed to know where those keepers were stationed because, based on the psychics’ visions, the
custode
s should lead to the big master. She supposed that this house in Kent, which was too far from London for the keepers to be on the scene as much as Lilly was, wasn’t where the base would be located. Menlo Hall was obviously just a family estate—plus a cradle of records—and Dawn would put money down on the fact that there’d be no Underground or Costin here.

Her bet was still on Highgate, where the team had already found vampires gathered. It’d just been a question of what
sort
of vampires.

Find what you need,
she thought, scooting into camera range and putting this book back, reaching for another.
Find the dragon. Hurry.

Her next reading project looked like a regular Bible, but when she opened it to glance over the contents, she almost dropped it.

Once, when Dawn was in high school, she’d picked up a copy of
The Exorcist
from a used bookstore, of all places. It’d been summer, and Frank had barred her out of the house again in favor of communing with his bottle and memories of Eva’s “murder,” so she’d waited him out down the street at this new store, which also carried comic books. She’d been aimlessly wandering, pulling books, then losing interest and moving on to the next, when she’d opened the pages of the novel. And the pages had been . . . Damn, she could still smell them.

The pages had been unlike any other book Dawn had cracked. As she’d looked it over, she’d even gotten ill, and she’d ditched it, thinking that the evil in the book was coming off the paper.

Now, she detected the same page-stench with this item, but she couldn’t shelve it.

The book was in narrative form, written as if a member of the family had sat down and done some casual journaling, but without providing the dates. Dawn rushed over the script, her blood thudding, cold fingers seeming to pluck at the back of her neck.

Dawn paused. Servants of what? Mihas and Claudius’s Underground?

Or the dragon?

And “black-art bred”?

That would explain the strange body arrangement for the kid in the lab freezer. The heart, the not-quite-human blood . . .

Dawn sped on, trying not to let the smell of the pages get to her.

And she got sicker. Incest? Was this family like old royalty in Egypt? Brothers, sisters, together?

She continued, landing on an unfamiliar word.

She could barely breathe. Vision blurring with excitement, she slowed down and concentrated on this passage, her heartbeat blip-ping in her throat.

Every night, there is Relaquory. We thank him for this gift, the ability to draw from the power he emanates
.

Everything crashed together: the dragon. It had to be. And he had bodyguards.

Custode
s.

Either there was a third wicked master—one unlike any blood brother Costin had ever encountered—or this was all the proof Dawn needed that the dragon was in this damned Underground.

Just as she was about to see if it told where the Underground was located, Kalin shouted.