He wasn’t surprised to see black seeping through his fingers and swirling with red as it spread across the back of his hands to encompass his wrist. He’d heard what could happen to a pureblood when something threatened their mate, and Aida was more than threatened, someone had screwed with her mind.
With the pulsing color came more strength. The power swelled within him until he wasn’t sure he could contain it, but staring at Aida and feeling the distress racking her body, he realized he could do anything to save her.
Regaining control of himself, he focused all his attention and increasing power on her. “Aida, listen to me.” He probed carefully at the wall in her mind; if he shoved past it, he might cause permanent damage or break her completely. “Aida, it’s Julian. You don’t have to kill me.”
The tears spilling from her eyes soaked his hand, and sorrow filled him. Someone had used her to try to kill him, and because she loved him, it broke something inside her.
Who did this?
He had no answer, but he would find out… if he could get her to calm down.
“Don’t cry, love.” He wiped away some of her tears, but they were falling too fast for him to clear them all. “I’m going to be okay, and you don’t have to kill me. You can rest now.”
“I can’t,” she moaned.
He didn’t think she was responding to his last command, but restating another, I can’t like she had earlier.
“All you have to do is rest,” he assured her as the wall started to crumble. “You don’t have to listen to whatever was said to you earlier. You can sleep now, Aida.”
Her eyelids fluttered open, and for a second, he found himself gazing into dazed, golden-brown eyes. He didn’t detect any recognition in her stare; she was caught up in his power now and helpless to do anything but obey.
“Sleep, Aida,” he commanded.
When she relaxed beneath him, her eyelids closed as her head slumped to the side. The seconds ticked by before he dared to take his hand away. During her struggle, she bit her bottom lip, and a trail of blood streaked her chin. With the pad of his thumb, he wiped it tenderly away and bent to rest his forehead against hers.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered as he swung between holding back tears and trying not to destroy everything in this room. “When I find whoever did this to you, I’m going to make them pay.”
Unable to part with her, he kissed her forehead and rested his face against hers. However, he couldn’t stay with her forever, and he couldn’t keep her asleep for the rest of her life.
“I love you,” he whispered against her lips before rising from the bed.
Kyle released her legs and backed away as the second Julian parted from her, the full force of his rage returned. The red and black colors pulsed through his flesh, and his muscles swelled as he paced the small room. He flexed the fingers of his wounded arm as the feeling returned to them, and his shoulder finished healing.
“I’m going to kill whoever did this,” he growled.
“Who could have done this?” Cassidy asked. “Who would want you dead?”
Julian racked his brain for an answer to the question, but he couldn’t think of anyone he could have pissed off enough to want to kill him. And who would know about Aida?
Dropping his head into his hands, he tugged at his hair as he tried to think beyond his overwhelming compulsion to destroy. He’d tear out their throat and feast on the blood of whoever did this. He’d bathe in it as he leisurely tore the limbs from their bodies and savored their screams.
“Julian,” Kyle said. “You have to calm down. You’re not going to be any good to her if you lose it.”
Kyle was right, but now that this part of him had been set free, Julian couldn’t get it under control again. He returned to Aida’s side and clasped her hand as he knelt at her side. Touching her helped calm him, and he inhaled a shuddery breath. Tucked beneath the blanket and with her hair fanned out across the sheets and pillows, she reminded him of Snow White, but he certainly wasn’t a prince.
Someone had done this to her to get at him; he had no idea who, but he would find out.
“It must have happened at work,” he said. “We’ve been together the rest of the time. Something happened at the gallery.”
“That place has to have a ton of cameras,” Kyle said.
“Cassidy, can you get my computer?” Julian asked. “It’s on the dresser next to you.”
She lifted it from the dresser and brought it over to him. Kneeling beside him, she set it on the floor.
“Can you open it?” Julian asked.
With the way he felt right now, he might tear the screen off. Cassidy opened it, and the home screen appeared. He released Aida’s hand as he hunched over the keyboard, and his fingers flew across the keys.
“Can you get a cloth and some water so I can clean her up?” he asked.
“Of course,” Cassidy said.
When she left the room, he worked to break into the gallery’s camera system. It wouldn’t take much time as he’d broken into it the night he had sex with Aida in the storage room. No one was going to see a video of his mate.
He located the gallery’s security system as Cassidy returned. He pushed his computer away to take the cloth and bowl of water from her. He set the bowl on the floor before wetting the cloth and turning back to Aida.
He steadied his hands before he cleaned Aida’s wounds and tried not to wince at the damage she inflicted on herself. She stirred only once while he worked before settling down again. He was careful not to inflict any more pain on her while he wiped away the rest of her blood.
When he finished, he gave the cloth and bowl back to Cassidy before taking the towel she handed him. He gently dabbed Aida’s flesh dry before kissing her and forcing himself away. Cassidy placed the bloody water and cloth on the dresser before returning to sit beside him. Julian turned his attention back to the computer; he had to find out what happened today.
CHAPTER 39
“Is it okay if I touch her?” Cassidy asked him.
Julian lifted his head from the computer and blinked at her in confusion. She’d touched Aida plenty of times before. Then, he realized Cassidy was scared he would lose control if someone else touched Aida. Cassidy had grown up around mates, and she knew the rules; you did not fuck with a vampire’s mate.
“Yes,” he said.
She smiled as she rested her hand on Aida’s arm and squeezed it. The click of the keys was the only sound in the room as Julian’s fingers flew across the keyboard. In less than five minutes, he was staring at the shadowed main room of the gallery in real-time. With a few more strokes, he was in the video archives.
“I’m in,” he said.
“Holy shit,” Kyle said. “That was fast.”
“I forgot how good you are at that,” Cassidy said.
He didn’t bother to tell them he’d done this once before; they’d want to know why, and it was none of their business. He clicked through the footage of the main room and watched Aida speak with numerous people. Often, she would disappear from the camera’s focus as she led them into the hallways to give them a tour of the gallery.
He would look at the cameras in the halls next, but he remained focused on the main room until Aida locked the door and left for the night. She never showed any signs of distress throughout the day, but then, she’d been perfectly normal until he woke to find her sitting on his chest.
All the people in the footage looked normal, but he couldn’t detect another vampire through the camera as he could in person. “It’s most likely a man,” he muttered, but for the life of him, he still couldn’t figure out who.
He didn’t recognize anyone in the footage, but it was grainy, and most of the people were far from the camera. Someone could have come in through the storage room and got her there, but if they entered the main room, then they would be on camera.
He had footage of the storeroom too. There was an emergency exit in the back hall, but an alarm would have trigge
red if that door opened. Still, he would go through the video of the storage room and back hall next.
“Why do you say that?” Kyle asked. “Maybe one of the women from your travels got a little too attached and decided to follow you home.”
“There aren’t any women from my travels,” Julian said. “Aida has been it for me since I met her.”
“Damn,” Kyle muttered. “So, you mean you went over four years without sex?”
Julian glanced up to see the disbelief on Kyle’s face. “She’s the only one I’ve ever been with, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Kyle looked like Julian just told him Atlantis was rising from the sea.
“I crave death, not sex,” Julian said. “When you reach maturity, what you’re doing now will get worse. I buried myself in computers and hacking because I could lose myself in that world and push aside my growing need to kill. When Aida walked into my life, she gave me a sense of calm I’d never experienced before, and she did it during one of the worst times of my life. We’d just lost Doug, we had no idea if Jack was alive, and a good portion of our family was planning to return to that island.
“The whole drive to Canada, all I could think about was going to the island and unleashing this festering thing inside me. I wanted to let it maim and kill everything it came across. And then I saw her, and it all silenced. For the first time in a couple of years, I knew peace, and it was amazing. I love her so much, I left her behind because I believed that was best for her. When I did, all that peace went away.”
Kyle closed his mouth as he gazed between the two of them with a longing Julian understood well. It wasn’t Aida he wanted; it was the love and peace Julian mentioned.
“You’ll get through it,” Julian told him.
Kyle’s jaw clenched as he focused on the wall across from him. He acted carefree, but Julian knew the truth of the desperation propelling him from one woman to the next. Tears pooled in Cassidy’s eyes.
“It will be okay,” she whispered.
Kyle stared at the wall for a second more before tearing his gaze away to smile at her. “Of course, it will.”
Cassidy stared at him, but there was nothing she could say, and they all knew it. Finally, she turned her attention back to Julian. “When Aida wakes up—”
“I’m not sure I can let her wake up,” he interjected. “I don’t know what’s going on with her mind. The vampire who took control of her is strong. I don’t think it’s a pureblood, because it would most likely be older than me if it were, and I’m not sure I could have broken an older purebred’s grip on her.
“As it is, I don’t know if I’ve broken that thing’s control over her. If I let her wake up, she could be torn between what she’s compelled to do and her love for me again. You saw the reaction it caused.”
Cassidy breathed a small sigh as her hand tightened on Aida. “Her love for you must be powerful if she resisted a vampire’s compulsion even a little bit.”
Love swelled inside Julian as he gazed at her. “I know.”
“Maybe it’s not you this vamp is after; maybe she has a stalker,” Cassidy suggested.
“We’ll find out,” Julian muttered as he finished going through the video of the storage room, but no one other than Aida and Nicolette were back there all day.
He went through the camera in the back hall next, but there was nothing unusual there either. He discovered what he was searching for in the last hallway.
“Who is that?” Kyle asked as he leaned closer to the screen.
“I don’t know,” Julian grated through his teeth as the man fondled Aida’s hair.
A few more moments passed before Aida kicked him in the knee and sprinted down the hall. She didn’t get far before the man caught her and bashed her into the wall. The sound Julian emitted caused Cassidy to lean away from him, and Kyle edged protectively closer to his sister. Julian fisted his hands to keep himself from smashing the computer as the vampire worked his way into Aida’s mind.
Julian’s shoulders heaved as the red and black color returned to swirl up his fingers and across the backs of his hands. If he didn’t kill something soon, an innocent might pay the price for his pent-up fury.
On the bed, Aida stirred and murmured his name. Her hand twitched as if she were searching for him, and he clasped it. Touching her didn’t push away his rage, but he could breathe again without feeling as if every beat of his heart pounded shards of hate through him.
“She sensed you needed her,” Cassidy said. “I think you can wake her up.”
“And if her mind is still fractured?” he asked.
“Then put her back under.”
Julian brushed the hair away from her face and examined the scratch marks. “Not yet. I’m not willing to take the chance she’ll hurt herself again.”
Feeling a little bit more in control himself, he released Aida’s hand and turned back to the computer. Minutes ticked by as he sat and stared at it. Finally, confident he wouldn’t smash it to pieces, he worked to bring up a better view of the man’s face. Though it was blurry, when the picture filled his computer screen, he sensed something familiar about the man.
Memory niggled at the back of his mind, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. “There is something about him…”
“Who is it?” Kyle asked.
“Not sure,” Julian said. “But he does look familiar.”
He looked at Aida again. He didn’t have a choice anymore; he had to wake her up if they were going to learn anything more about this man.
CHAPTER 40
Aida held her head as her mind spun, and she tried not to vomit the bile in her stomach all over the floor. And it would end up on the floor because she didn’t trust her legs enough to get her to the bathroom.
She couldn't think straight as she was torn between needing to do something and striving to keep herself grounded. Julian’s soft words pierced through some of her confusion. When he caressed her face, she seized his hand like she was drowning in the ocean and he was her lifeline.
“It's okay,” he said. “Listen to me, and I'll help get you through this.”
She was supposed to kill him, but she couldn’t; she loved him too much for that. Still, her brain felt like somebody cracked an egg, tossed it into the frying pan, and scrambled it around. Everything was so foggy and wrong.
This was Julian. She loved him more than she’d ever believed possible, but he’d forsaken her.
She shook her head when that word popped into it again. She’d never used it before in her life, but it looped through her head like a destructive earworm screaming at her to pick up a stake and plunge it through Julian’s heart.
NO! She couldn’t kill him! No! No! No!
Unable to get her brain to function as it should, she slapped at it as she tried to get it to work right again. Hands clasped her wrists, and she bit her lip to keep from screaming as they pulled her hands away from her head.
“What is wrong with me?” she whimpered.
“Nothing is wrong with you,” Julian said in a calm voice so different than the riotous emotions pummeling him. “Someone took control of your mind, and I need you to help us figure out who it was.”
Had someone taken control of her mind? And they’d turned it into this mess? Or had it always been this much of a mess? Was she the mess?
“I don’t know what’s going on. Am I always like this?” she whispered.
The forlorn tone of her voice nearly broke him. What had this monster done to her?
“No, baby,” he assured her as he stroked her hair. “I’m going to find whoever did this to you, and I will destroy them. If you can help me, it might make locating them easier.”
She lifted her head and blinked as she brought him into focus, but when she looked at him, her fingers hooked into claws as she contemplated tearing his eyes out. “Why did you forsake me?”
There was that fucking word again, Julian thought. It wasn’t her word. Whoever did this to her put it in he
r mind, which was another sign he was dealing with a far older vampire. Julian didn’t care how old the bastard was; he’d tear his heart out and feed it to him.
“Aida, you have to listen to me,” he said.
He didn’t want to use his power on her, but he might not have a choice as she tugged at her wrists and tapped her foot. When she bit her bottom lip again, a fresh trail of blood trickled from it.
“You have to calm down,” he told her as his ability entwined with her mind. Gradually, some of the tension eased from her, but her eyes shimmered with turmoil. When he released her hands, she didn’t try to hit herself again. “I’m going to show you a picture, and I want you to tell me who it is.”
Kyle brought his computer over and turned the screen so she could see it. When she did, she closed her eyes again.
“He… He…” Her eyebrows knit together. When her hands fell to her thighs, she dug her fingers into her skin. “He was at the gallery.”
“Do you know who he is?” When her foot started tapping again, Julian rested his hand over hers. “It’s okay. He can’t hurt you again.”
“He didn’t hurt me!” she burst out.
Julian saw the footage, so he knew she was lying, but the vamp buried the memory. “Okay,” he soothed. “Do you remember what the two of you talked about?”
“We had a lovely time,” she said in a singsong tone he barely recognized.
Cassidy and Kyle exchanged a look while Julian gritted his teeth and focused on her while he asked his next question. “Do you remember his name?”
Aida pursed her lips together and tapped her foot. She should remember this with ease; she’d met him before, he purchased from the gallery, and they spent a lovely afternoon talking while he perused the paintings. Why couldn’t she remember his name?
When she lifted a hand toward her head, Julian caught it before she started slapping herself again. “It’s okay if you can’t,” he assured her.
Forsaken (Vampire Awakenings, Book 10) Page 21