Looking at him, she felt as if he’d already left her behind.
But this was his soul they were fighting for. His eternal peace.
“Jonah,” she whispered, the harshness of her tone betraying her hurt. “Come out to protect him while we get past these guardians.”
She saw his body stiffen and guessed that Jonah had already taken over. Then she hopped back to her feet and darted around the corner, her flamethrower raised. She could feel her partner right behind her as they all rushed ahead, to where the
custode
s were still standing, the smoke clearing away from them.
The taller keeper—it had to be Nigel—began chanting again, and the Friends hung back, even though they were trying to push forward against whatever those words were doing to them. Dawn heard one moan, then another spirit do the same.
It would’ve been enough to dishearten Dawn if she hadn’t caught the gape in the rock wall behind the
custode
s.
But it seemed as if the keepers didn’t give much of a care about the hole as Lilly pointed at Dawn with one of her iron swords, which Dawn could see was tipped to a wicked sharpness.
In answer, Dawn let Lilly peer down the nozzle of her mini flamethrower as she started to squeeze the trigger.
The only thing that stopped her was a slight metallic clicking sound from above.
Being a vampire, Jonah had heard it before Dawn, and he tackled her, pummeling her far out of the way as two banks of long, gleaming blades swung down from opposite sides in front of the
custode
s.
The Friends moved so fast that they sounded like screams as they smashed into Dawn and Jonah, too, pushing them farther away from the blades that crashed into each other like jagged teeth, sparks flying at the friction.
As an out-of-breath Dawn glanced up at the composed keepers behind the barrier, she thought,
The dragon is
so
here
. Lilly and Nigel had lured them forward to a booby trap that not only could’ve killed the hunters—it now provided a sharp wall to the bit of grenade-blasted hole.
Swirling into Plan B, the Friends cried out with their lulling voices to the keepers, but behind the blades, Dawn could see Lilly and Nigel glancing at each other as if the sound was hilarious.
Lulling worked on the majority of humans. Then again, these guys weren’t quite that.
But
something
had to bring them down.
As the Friends switched to the banshee yells, in case that worked, Jonah whispered, “I can watch for more traps while you do your thing.”
He was telling her to use her mind powers for all they were worth, but it felt like Dawn was just about near empty on the inside after all the energy she’d pulled on already. Yet she still had adrenaline kicking through her.
She still had Costin to save.
Making sure her anger was juiced, just in case she needed it, she grabbed her second and last grenade from her bag, activating it, yelling another code word.
“FEVER!”
She heaved the explosive at the bladed trap, and the
custode
s ducked into the hole behind them.
Dawn and Jonah had already scrambled behind the corner when the grenade
ka-bamm
ed, sending blades flying into the wall opposite them like it was under attack by a Roman legion.
After the metal finished clattering to the ground, Kalin zoomed over.
“Tunnel’s still solid. Pursue?”
“Sic ’em,” Dawn said, hoping Kalin would be bitchier than ever when she caught up to the keepers.
As Kalin and her Friends shot ahead, Dawn and Jonah came out from the corner again and made toward the blade trap, which looked like a giant fist had punched it in the teeth and left some shattered dental work.
To clear the rest of the way for Dawn and Jonah, the Friends slipped behind the top of the trap, then pushed the framework aside, using every ounce of their essences to open up just enough space for their more solid teammates to squeeze through.
“Ears open?” Dawn said to Jonah, hoping he’d sense any booby traps ahead of time.
“They’re open.”
They negotiated their way through the sharpened entrance, through the hole in the wall.
Luckily, Jonah had been listening, because within a second, he cried, “Down!” and clamped his hand on Dawn’s head, pushing her to the ground, where her face hit dirt just as a cutting breeze swooped above her neck. Peeking up, she saw a large scythe passing to the other side.
Then Jonah picked her up, tossing her forward like a sack of feathers as a bank of knives came at their torsos. He dove over it as another scythe came down from the opposite side, and he grabbed her, flipping into the air with her pressed against him. Then spears barged out of the ground, one of them skimming the sole of Dawn’s boot, but he twisted her out of the way before it impaled her. As soon as Jonah gracefully hit the ground, he pushed her forward into a run.
She raised her flamethrower, off balance, not knowing where to target yet, and impressions of the room came at her, all coalescing into one thought.
A . . . temple?
That was how it seemed in its reverent austereness. A rock altar lit by low lamps that were buried in the walls like sleepy eyes. A long, wooden box on that altar—
She couldn’t see what was inside of the box, but the vibrating awfulness was a hundred times worse now, making the lining of her stomach shake, her limbs feel like weights were hanging from them.
It seemed like an hour since Jonah had manhandled her into this room, past those blades, but just like that, time snapped into fast motion as she spied the
custode
s stepping in front of that long box, both armed with swords now.
Even behind their masks, they were staring at Dawn and Jonah with those goggled red eyes, as if stunned that the attackers had gotten this far.
Dawn was a little stunned, too, as the taller keeper, Nigel, began chanting again. His words were rushed, as if maybe he was coming to the last tricks in his arsenal.
Jonah leveled his revolver, no doubt aiming for the neck where there’d hopefully be no body armor; he intended to shut Nigel up so the Friends could come forward and help.
Leaving her partner to his own devices, Dawn targeted the flamethrower at Lilly, but the keeper was too damned quick, and she was out of the way with a casual tuck, roll, and stand. But Dawn reacted fast, too, skinning her revolver from its holster with her other hand and faking Lilly out by shooting at one of the swords the keeper had already raised.
As it clanged out of the
custode
’s grasp and to the floor, Lilly flipped her other sword in her hand, bringing it back, then throwing it at Dawn.
The blade spun, and just as Dawn’s brain was registering its approach, she dodged, and it only struck her flamethrower away. The weapon clattered to the ground as Lilly jumped off the altar, crashing into Dawn and chopping at one of her arms, breaking it.
At the burst of pain, Dawn stumbled back, crying out; it’d happened so suddenly that she wasn’t processing the injury beyond the initial shock. But the aftermath of the attack itself . . . ?
It raged. It flamed all on its own.
Now she had all the energy in creation, and she used her mental powers like a boulder pounding down on Lilly, sending the keeper flat to the floor.
Lilly got right back up and kicked, sweeping Dawn’s legs out from under her with whip-fast speed.
Maneuvering her body so that she thudded onto the side with the healthy arm, Dawn flipped to her feet again, then crouched, her injury throbbing as vaguely as her mind and pulse.
In the background, she thought she heard Nigel’s
custode
chants going mum, and she knew Jonah had done something to him.
More fuel for the fire.
When she mentally punched out this time, it was like she was on the outside of her own body, watching Dawn Madison go to work. She was remote—a person controlling a video game that wouldn’t have any reset button.
She watched Dawn push out with cutting violence, just like her mind power had become two machetes whipping through the air on their way to slicing a victim to ribbons. And when her power hit Lilly’s mask, Dawn heard
whisk-whisk-whisk-whisk-whisk—
The
custode
’s facial covering flew off bit by bit as she stumbled away from the attacking Dawn. The keeper was clearly unprepared, even though she should’ve expected something like this to happen with Dawn’s history of using her mental blasts before.
And Dawn kept cutting, unstoppable now, even though her energy ebbed with every move. She left Lilly’s mask in strips that revealed a young girl’s face Dawn remembered from Eva’s flat, during their very first encounter.
A panicked face that looked all too human with her mouth agape, her eyes filled with what-the-fuck questions.
Out of control, Dawn kept going, cutting and cutting down Lilly’s body, leaving only slashes on the black uniform because the keeper had started to duck and dodge, groping on the ground for one of her swords.
When she clasped a weapon, she swung the blade willy-nilly, parrying Dawn’s invisible attack, which didn’t do shit. On Lilly’s body, blood trickled in stripes where her uniform had fallen away.
Then she pulled back her sword like a battering ram and lunged at Dawn, who was so caught up in her mental world that, in the physical, she didn’t react fast enough to move out of the way.
Lilly’s blade gouged her in the thigh, not enough to run her through, but enough to rattle Dawn’s consciousness back into her own body, to make her yell in agony.
Right away, a Friend wrapped her essence around Dawn’s thigh, putting pressure on it so she wouldn’t bleed out.
“Got you,”
said Kalin’s voice.
That was when Dawn realized that Nigel hadn’t gone back to chanting.
Time caught up to her. So did her surroundings. Kalin was here, and the Friends were flying around the room . . .
In fact, they’d taken it over, banging their essences against Lilly, keeping her away from Dawn as the
custode
fought to get free of them, her iron sword useless against one spirit who pinned the keeper’s hands to her sides.
Dawn’s arm and leg spiked with pain as more Friends arrived to contain Lilly.
But the keeper wasn’t done. “You won’t win!” she yelled at Dawn. “You can’t!”
She sounded like she was in denial, and she should’ve been, because when Dawn glanced at Jonah to see how he was doing, he and the Friends had Nigel at their mercy. They’d pressed the other
custode
against a wall, and Jonah was hissing, baring his fangs at the keeper, his bloodlust raging, just like that night at Queenshill when he’d gone nuts.
This time, with the stakes this high, was Costin inside Jonah, lending urgency and strength during this final attack?
As the spirits who were controlling Lilly forced the keeper to turn toward her partner, a berserking Jonah took Nigel by the masked head and tore it clean off, tossing it to the side.
Lilly screamed as Nigel’s arms flopped against his decapitated body, as if he were still trying to fight.
For a second, Jonah held his bloodied hands in the air, as if he couldn’t believe what he’d done. Then, just as rapidly, he took out his daggers and extracted Nigel’s heart, stilling the body for good, then stepping back, his shoulders rising and falling with his gasps.
Custode
s weren’t vampires, but you couldn’t be sure, and when a Friend pushed Dawn’s mini flamethrower over to Jonah on the ground, he used that to burn the rest of Nigel.
Lilly unsuccessfully tugged at the Friends’ restraints. “You can’t do this,” she said, her voice still electronic, disassociated. Dawn hadn’t gotten to her voice box. “We—”
“—couldn’t have known what me and the team were,” Dawn said. “Mihas is dead and your schoolgirls are humanized. You’re done.”
“Bugger off!” She didn’t sound moved by Mihas’s termination as much as by what she’d just witnessed Jonah doing to Nigel.
But why would Lilly have been surprised about the Mihas news when they probably had cameras to update them?
The remaining keeper stared at her, still fighting the binding Friend. Lilly was so young that Dawn felt as old and used as Claudius probably had, even though Dawn couldn’t have been too much older than the
custode
.
Her thigh was being pressurized so thoroughly by Kalin that she felt her pulse in it, spreading through the rest of her body like something infecting her. She tried not to think about her broken arm, hanging at her side, the screech of its pain.
As Jonah made his way over to Dawn, she felt another Friend carefully making herself into a sling to ease her arm’s anguishing position.
“You were never prepared for an attack like ours,” Dawn said to Lilly.
The girl shook her head. “We’ve
always
been prepared.”
This one wouldn’t admit defeat. “I know. Your kind protected the big master for over a century. But we couldn’t allow him to rise.”
Lilly stopped fighting the Friends. “You think the world is fine as it is? He will change it, just as he tried to make life better for many of his subjects when he was a prince.”
Dawn had read the accounts of Vlad Tepes, national hero. Over on his side of the world, they still celebrated his historic attempts to keep his lands free of “the enemies of the cross of Christ.” Ironically, he’d become pretty much one of those enemies when he’d made his deal with the devil.
“But good men don’t take pleasure in death like he did.” Dawn rubbed her neck with her healthy hand. The beauty marks were blazing on her skin. “No one should take that much pleasure.”
By now, Jonah was next to her, his mask back over his nose and mouth so the blood wouldn’t overcome him. But she saw that the silver was gone from his eyes. And they weren’t even blue.