He reached for the whip chain, wanting to inspect it, and she made a big deal of pausing, then running a challenging gaze over him. Afterward she grinned, handing it over, as if he’d passed muster. She hoped he felt like that, anyway.
“Those Guard tails kept nagging at me,” she said. “I wanted to level the playing field with my own version of a barbed whip. Now, I know it’s nowhere near as powerful as theirs, but what else am I going to do? Become a mutant monkey and grow my own freakin’ tail?”
“Not a far trip for a primate like you.”
Kiko scanned the dart. It was the first time Dawn had brought out the martial arts weapon around her team, even though they knew she’d been practicing off property.
“You can attack with this and protect yourself?” he asked.
“When the red-eyes spit at you, it will go right through that steel,” Breisi said, referring to the Guards’ lovely habit of expectorating burning-hot fluids.
“Your lab tests showed that the stuff isn’t composed of acid, right?” Dawn asked. “Remember how their spit just charred the silver arm bracelet I used to wear, and that was it? Maybe steel will go unaffected, too.”
She knew Breisi wouldn’t refute her own scientific findings just to make Dawn put the whip chain away. Nope, not Miss Lab Rat, U.S.A., their appointed gadget wizard, the Bondian Q of their team. Which made Kiko their psychic Aragorn. Which made Dawn…what?
Memory washed over her: lifting a machete, hacking off Robby’s head. Putting a silver bullet through his heart, just to be sure.
Dawn was what her father, Frank Madison, had once been to this team. Muscle. And maybe even something else…
Before she’d joined up with Limpet and Associates, a vision had come to Kiko. He’d seen her, Dawn Madison, covered in the blood of a vampire.
“It was the end of our struggles,” he’d told her. “I felt that everything would be fine after that.”
Supposedly, she was “key” to beating these vamps. That’s what Kiko and The Voice kept telling her anyway. Their reclusive, as-yet-unseen boss had even used his employee, Frank, as bait to get Dawn the Prophecy Girl involved with all this craziness. She’d rushed to L.A. to help find her father, of course, but they hadn’t met with success. Yet, according to the boss, whose agenda had more to do with the Underground than with Frank, the team was closer to both her dad and the vamps now more than ever.
She rubbed her arms, suddenly going cold…and way too warm. The Voice. The man who communicated with them only through speakers. The only entity the formerly oversexed Dawn had allowed inside of her lately in a strange lust affair.
When she held her hand out to Kiko for the whip chain, the psychic grudgingly gave it back.
“Don’t even think about it, Kik,” Breisi said.
He got a look on his face that Dawn had seen way too often lately. Hurt, resentment. “Why can’t I just give it a go?”
“Because, honestly,” Dawn said, “I shouldn’t even be messing with the whip chain.”
Kiko looked doubtful, like he knew she was just trying to make him feel better.
“I’m serious,” she said. “I know full well I might hurt myself, even though I’ve had martial arts training for certain movies. But technically, I still don’t have enough experience to master this. I’m just lucky I found an instructor, thanks to The Voice.” He’d given her a lot of money to locate a teacher who would weigh her determination and knack for quick learning against common sense. And, lo and behold, it’d worked. Bribes could create wonders.
All in all, there’d been a lot of training this past month. A lot of healing, too. Kiko hadn’t been the only one to sustain injuries from vamp fights but, aside from some stubborn aches, Dawn’s wounds had been pretty well taken care of by a gel Breisi had concocted in the lab, as well as some rest and medical attention. But that didn’t mean Dawn had sat on her butt, waiting to get better. Hell, no. She’d been working on perfecting her mind blocks—keeping others out of her head—as well as those mind pushes. She’d remained in shape, training physically according to her healing progress, and she’d caught up on studying her monster lore, poring over type-written case files housed in The Voice’s library.
Obviously ticked, Kiko looked away from Breisi and Dawn, shutting them out. He fixed a gaze on the TV. To Dawn, the volume seemed to fill the room, emphasizing the awkwardness of having to leave Kiko in the dust when it came to fighting.
Not knowing what else to say, she glanced at the screen, too. It featured FOX News, where the entire day’s coverage was devoted to Lee Tomlinson, a killer Dawn and the team knew all too well. They’d been keeping constant tabs on any updates: besides being a probable Servant to the Underground, Lee had murdered the woman who’d given them information about Robby, who was part of the Underground himself….