The Path of Razors by Chris Marie Green Page A

somewhere....
    Shaking it off, she headed past the classrooms, their leaded windows thick and fancy among the dark brick. Hell, ghosts of little, silk-clad kids would’ve seemed right at home peering out at this sky, with its gray clouds that looked like stuffing torn out of a clawed mattress.
    “I’m just past the football field, so I’m close,” Dawn added for Kiko’s sake. He’d wanted to go into the housematron’s room, too, just to see if he could get readings off of any clothing or objects. But they all knew that his psychometry didn’t work on a vamp’s items unless they were alive when they’d been wearing or handling them.
    Besides, was she going to smuggle him in by using her book bag or something? Right.
    Her wig fluttered as two Friends traveled by her side. Breisi and Greta, a spirit who’d been on campus this entire time.
    Kiko was just now responding. “Can’t wait until you get your camera on so we can see something.”
    A shushing sound followed, and Dawn guessed that Frank had already gotten tired of his teammate’s commentary. Her dad had accompanied them here even though he was weaker during sunlight hours than at night. He’d inherited the ability to move around during the day from Eva, who’d turned him into a vamp in the first place, and Dawn had to admit that the Hollywood Underground’s talents often came in handy for the team’s purposes.
    Ahead, the dorms loomed: all brick and modern gloom. But first, Dawn had to pass by the copse of trees where they’d encountered the demon dogs sent by the schoolgirls last night.
    Good times.
    Keeping her heartbeat steady, she blew out a breath, inhaled, then bypassed the trees by using a neat stone path. As she approached the dorm where the vamps lived, she noticed a dictionary propping open the card-key-accessible door.
    Of course. Greta had already said that, to ensure Dawn’s entrance, some of the Friends had pushed the book to the slit of the door after another student had exited.
    So far, it was all running like clockwork.
    “All right,” Dawn whispered, “I’m almost inside. I’ll get the camera on after I’m in the room, ‘kay?”
    “Cool,” Kiko said.
    Then he went silent, and Dawn imagined how Frank must’ve put his hand over the psychic’s mouth to make the quiet possible. Good thing, too, because with Costin and Natalia also monitoring from headquarters, they needed room for any one of them to talk at a moment’s notice.
    With a sly look around, Dawn opened the door, kicked the dictionary to the side—hah, what symbolic pleasure she took from that—then slipped through.
    Friends were patrolling the halls to make sure any cleaning personnel or supervisors wouldn’t cross paths with Dawn. They knew that security was light at Queenshill, even after last night, and all there was to worry about, really, were some cameras in the dorms and an elderly security guard who normally wandered the campus after the sun went down.
    Breisi’s voice was wind-tunnel thin as she spoke, just ahead of Dawn.
    “This way. Let’s go.”
    “Hold your horses,” Dawn whispered. “This idiotic skirt is confining.”
    “This, from a woman who’s been known to wear a cocktail dress during a brawl?”
    Dawn smiled sardonically at the jasmine air while they rounded a corner that led to the stairwell. If the time had been right for some chatter, she would’ve reminded Breisi that, hello, the brawl had been staged for a stunt during one of the movies she’d worked on during her “other life.”
    The one that seemed so irrelevant these days.
    Dawn took the stairs two at a time, thinking that at least those choreographed fights and the physical training that went with them had allowed her to jump right into vamp fighting. When she thought of what it might’ve been like to try to find her dad, who’d been missing at the time, without all the skills she’d had...
    She didn’t think about it.
    Near the top of the stairway, Breisi and Greta