Undead for a Day by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom Nancy Holder Chris Marie Green Page B

she could to catch up to Lilly and Costin.
    Compared to a superhuman revenant, she didn’t match up, but with a wounded undead creature?
    Dawn would make it a close race.
    She saw Lilly down the beach, limp-running, heading toward the village of Del Mar.
    Everything was a blur as Dawn passed: water, houses, kids hanging out on the beach before the cops told them to get home. Drunken screams egged her on, and she didn’t stop to think of what a sight she made pumping down the shoreline, chasing the girl who looked like she was wearing a ghoulish, white-eyed mask.
    Up ahead, when she got to the street, she saw where Lilly was heading, and she panted, standing in place to catch her breath.
    The keeper was climbing up the balcony of an upscale hotel with some kind of fancy French name Dawn couldn’t pronounce, and she was headed for the inverted V roof.
    Dawn’s acid-swiped neck kept burning, but not as much as her lungs as she watched Lilly reach the apex.
    She looked at the keeper and the keeper looked at her, perched on top of that angled roof.
    Dawn didn’t know if the Meratoliages had implanted this luring scheme in Lilly’s head or if the retired keeper was capable of thinking of it all on her own, but she had to have gotten that spirit box from somewhere. No telling what they’d do to Costin with dark magic.
    She had to get him back, even if she had to run all the way up the coast to get him.
    She targeted Lilly with the revolver she’d been grasping this entire time, but when the girl ducked the bullet, panic drove Dawn into a sprint. Even if she was about to fall down because her legs were quaking, she pushed herself, dashing up a small hill and hauling herself up a drainpipe until she reached a balcony. She didn’t look down as she crawled to the roof.
    Once again, Lilly was toying with her, already on the top of an adjacent building, straddling the V of it.
    Was she slowing down from the blood loss she’d suffered after taking that first bullet? Just how far could a magically enhanced thing go on that leg?
    Dawn took a running jump toward the next building, landed, feeling the roof slipping under her boots. But she grabbed at the apex with one hand, her revolver in the other, holding on, hauling herself up to it so she could stand.
    In the back of her mind, she thought she heard a voice in the background.
    “Hey! What’s going on?”
    Someone yelling from their window? They needed to get the hell back to their world and ignore what was going on in this one.
    Lilly was already on the next and final roof when Dawn got to where the keeper had been only a few minutes ago and...shit.
    Something caught Dawn’s eye as it rolled down the roof from Lilly and into the rain gutter. It looked like a small communications unit with a red light flashing. Another “shirt button.”
    She didn’t know how much farther she could go, so she desperately sucked in air, gathering herself while, on the last roof, the girl was balanced on the upside down V again, waiting like a gaping crow hoping to tear apart some prey.
    Dawn heard a car driving somewhere behind her—another sign of a totally different world—and she took one last run, flying through the air and landing stomach down on the last roof.
    Knocked loose, her revolver skittered down the roof.
    Lilly had scrambled to the edge of it. She was laughing at Dawn with that weird clicking sound as she lifted her hand in something like a revenant wave and prepared to jump, probably to surf the car that was now driving by down below.
    As the black SUV sped past in the parking lot, Dawn calculated where she would need to jump, then followed Lilly as she arced off the inn’s roof.
    The fall seemed to suspend Dawn in time—a long, drawn-out heartbeat, a push of blood through her veins—and when she hit the SUV’s roof, she grasped its rack.
    Lilly was near the front of the car, hanging on as it accelerated onto the road, past a chic little shopping center and a view of the