by S. K. Ryder
Keeping his head right now was paramount.
“How?”
Natalia’s voice practically disappeared. “He was executed.”
Dominic got out of his chair. She took a step back.
“Considering he was over a century old and one of the most well-adjusted and honorable blood-drinkers ever to cross my path, that, madame, is sadly self-evident.” Somehow he kept his voice level despite the anger blazing in his heart.
Natalia shrank into herself a little more, and her eyes darkened with fear. “I should not have invited him to visit with us. I should have warned him about Adilla. I tried to stop them, but I’m young and new there, and—”
Dominic raised a hand to stop the flow of words. Her mouth snapped shut. Tremors raced through her small body. “What happened?”
She wrung her hands before her. “He spoke to me about you. He said you were our true lord and that he had found peace in your blood. I doubted such news would be welcomed by Adilla and Esteban, but I didn’t think . . . I didn’t—” She tried to swallow a sob, failed, lowered her head. “Forgive me. He was as you said, an honorable man.”
Dominic stared at her. The leashed anger emerged as a growl. “What. Happened.”
When she looked up, her eyes had gone almost full black, a vampire skirting the edge of mindless panic. Very deliberately she tilted her head aside, exposing her neck. She would not—or could not—speak the words. She would show him.
He struck with lightning swiftness, grabbing her and driving his teeth far deeper than necessary. Her sweet blood was full of turmoil and secrets, and one of the first that exploded at him was the human man, Ryan. He was in her mind with her, aware of her and everything she experienced and thought. They had a bond like Dominic had with Cassidy, rare and—in a world where humans were considered servants and food—dangerous.
Dominic saw the other blood-drinkers as she had, including the regal figure of Adilla as he welcomed Aubrey with gracious smiles. He still smiled when he surprised Aubrey and Natalia with his knowledge of Dominic. Aubrey had done his best to maintain the social nature of his visit, but Dominic could see in Natalia’s memories how his friend’s discomfort had mounted and the danger closed in around him with every word he uttered. He couldn’t deny what he knew of Dominic. He did not hide the truth.
“My lord Dominic wishes you no harm. In fact, I’m certain he would be pleased to have you with him.”
Adilla’s smile turned acidic. There was a cold, almost reptilian quality to his green eyes. “You must be joking. I have no equal. I bow to no one.”
“He is heir to Kambyses, the—”
“How dare you use that name to justify your delusions?”
Everyone else had gone as still as any prey sensing a threat. Aubrey only grew more steadfast. “Forgive me, but Kambyses is his sire. I have seen this—”
Adilla all but snarled into Aubrey’s face. “Kambyses chose me, a true prince of my realm, to sire and name his worthy heir when and if he so decrees.”
Aubrey fell silent. The moment had the dense feel of an explosion holding its breath.
Then Adilla took a single step back, his voice frozen in calm when he spoke again. “I don’t know who you are or what you think you know or how, but neither you nor your so-called lord are worthy to utter the name of the great Kambyses. You are not even worthy to think mine. Your lord is a pretender, a fake, and he is fortunate that he is a continent away. You, however . . .”
Aubrey had no means of defending himself against the four blood-drinkers who descended on him and confined him in silver-coated shackles. They chained him against a wall in a small room high up in the downtown high rise that housed Adilla’s business headquarters.
The window facing Aubrey looked east.
“We are building a great community here,” Adilla said as though his outburst had never happened. Aubrey stood straight and noble despite the chains, glaring his defiance.
“Surely you understand that this is only possible because we unfailingly abide by the doctrine and rules on which we have all agreed.” This with a gesture toward the assembled blood-drinkers who all nodded and murmured agreement except for Natalia, who looked on in unbridled horror. “A pity you violated these so dreadfully so quickly.”
“Perhaps if I knew what rules those might be, I would have avoided giving offense,” Aubrey countered. Dominic had never seen this gentle man so furious.
Adilla shook his head, a mass of dark, wavy hair, trimmed efficiently short. In his tailored suit he looked every inch the successful business tycoon except for the emerald glinting in his earlobe. “There is no lord but I. The words you spoke contradicting this cannot be erased by an apology.” He leaned closer and finished on a hiss, “They must be burned in the light of day.”
Natalia voiced her outrage. But of the twenty or so others in attendance, no one, least of all Adilla, gave her pleas the slightest consideration. Only one even cared to answer them, Esteban, Adilla’s chief enforcer. “Careful, pet,” he said under his breath. “Or we might think you would like to join him in meeting the dawn.”
Dominic’s legs buckled beneath him the way Natalia’s had buckled. He had stopped feeding from her, but still held her, still swam in her memories.
She had returned to the spot alone the following night. The chains hung empty on the walls. Aubrey’s fine clothes were piled beneath them. They were filled with glittering ashes.
A raw wail tore out of Dominic’s throat. He could have stopped them. He could have saved his loyal emissary and friend. If he had been there. If he had accompanied Aubrey the way he had asked. If he hadn’t been so caught up in the promise of seeing the sun again. If he hadn’t been so selfish . . . Aubrey would have lived.
Grief and guilt gripped him. And fear. But the fear wasn’t his. It was Natalia’s. She feared for her mortal lover.
The vampiress had been hiding the secret of their bond for weeks, passing him off as her favored slave to the others. Aubrey had mentioned to her the bond that existed between Dominic and Cassidy, which was her primary reason for volunteering to take Aubrey’s ashes to Dominic. She was fleeing the colony which would sooner kill her beloved than acknowledge him. She trusted Aubrey’s words with blind desperation, placing her life and her lover’s into the hands of Dominic, an unknown entity. For love.
Dominic released her and allowed her to recover as he crouched beside her. Then he said, “Aubrey shared with you how to find this peace.”
She wiped at her eyes with one small hand. “Yes. The re-siring. He offered this but . . . I was unsure. I thought Adilla might not be pleased. Now I know he would have killed me.” She met his eyes, her words echoing what he could feel in her mind. “I will never return to them. I can’t. It’s peace I want, and for this I submit to you, my lord, in whatever way you wish.”
Not that she really had a choice. Dominic always asked, and they always accepted, but the truth was that he would not tolerate blood-drinkers who continued to feed on terror.
Natalia felt so raw and alone sitting there before him, her hair disheveled, her face almost childishly young. Despite her bravado, her soul was fragile and had only recently been nurtured into something approaching resolve through Ryan.
He pressed a thumbnail into his palm and waited for the blood to pool there before offering it to her. “You are safe with me.”
Her touch was gentle as a butterfly’s feet when she took his wrist, though her fingers convulsed like claws once his blood ignited into the transformative fire in her veins. Gasping, she fell back.
“Natalia!” Ryan rushed forward to cradle her in his arms. Beside himself, the human glared daggers at Dominic. “What did you do to her?”
Dominic stood up and licked his hand clean. “She will be fine.”
“She better be.”
The outburst m
ade him smile. Ryan was as devoted to Natalia as Cassidy was to Dominic, and clearly just as willing to take on forces far beyond his abilities in her defense.
Natalia stirred with a small moan. When her eyes opened, they were fully dilated, and in their depths glowed the familiar golden light.
“Natalia? Sweet pea? Are you all right?”
“Yes. Oh, yes, my love.” She touched his face and looked up at him, her heart in her eyes. “It’s like Aubrey said. The fear is gone.”
The mention of Aubrey’s name made him glance at the urn, then at Serge who stared at Natalia with a thoughtful frown wrinkling his brow.
Dominic cocked his head in question.
The corners of Serge’s mouth turned down, but then he said, “This Adilla could be a great ally. If you can sway him.”
Dominic squashed the impulse to argue. Killing this blood-drinker monster was more in line with what he had in mind. But that was not the peaceful, loving way he preached.
“He is old,” Serge offered when Dominic remained silent. “Many would perish if you ended him.”
True. Adilla had seen over a thousand years of time. Any blood-drinker that old had the potential to have sired many others who would be bound to him and dependent on his survival. They and their youngling descendants. It was the dark web that bound them. Break one strand, and all the strands that grew from it unraveled. And as the center of the web, if Dominic was destroyed, they all would be.
“How do you know how many would die? Have you encountered him before?” Dominic asked.
“I may have heard of him.” Serge looked away. “Once or twice.”
As he often did around his friend, Dominic felt like he was missing something, a sensation that never bode well.
“Adilla is no one’s ally but his own,” Natalia said. She was back on her feet now. Ryan hovered close, one of his arms around her, providing the support she surely did not need.
“Once he tastes your blood, he will see reason,” Serge countered.
“Is that what your visions tell you?” Dominic asked.
Shrug. “They all do, don’t they?”
“That whole setup gave me the creeps,” Ryan broke in. “Adilla gives them anything and everything you can think of. Money, homes, security, entertainment, and all the blood they can guzzle. In return, he demands their blind devotion, and let me tell you, he’s getting that in spades. Those vampires are more than willing to bow down and agree to everything he says. Their loyalty is bought and paid for many times over.”
“And I would gladly have been one of them,” Natalia said. “Until the night I found Ryan.” She looked up to meet his eyes as he pulled her a little closer against his side. “He could hear my thoughts, and I was no longer alone. I saw things differently then.”
Cassidy sidled up to Dominic and slid her hand into his. He pressed a kiss to the top of her head as she leaned it against his shoulder. “I know the feeling.”
“I’m so glad we’re free of that mess,” Ryan said.
“And I am so very sorry that it took Aubrey’s death to make me see how very much we needed to get away,” Natalia added.
“You must persuade him to join you, my lord,” Serge insisted.
But doubts already eroded Dominic’s confidence. Adilla would be the first millennial blood-drinker he had encountered since claiming his kingdom.
Fake.
The word echoed in his bones.
Pretender.
True. He pretended to be something he could never be again for his mother.
Fake human.
He was supposed to be master of the world of night, but few of his subjects knew he existed, much less that he forbade them to kill or make others against their will. Yet he went through the motions of ruling—while distracted with every shiny possibility of regaining his humanity.
Pretender.
Cassidy squeezed his hand, disrupting the black spiral of his thoughts. Her silent voice was faint in her touch. Those who know you, know better. What you do for yourself you do for them all.
Aubrey died for me. I was too enamored of walking in the sun again to stand by him, and he died. Because of me.
No denying the truth. She managed to put a spin on it anyway. Aubrey died because he believed in what you are trying to do, Dominic. If you doubt yourself now, he will have died for nothing.
He turned his head to meet her eyes, cobalt blue pools of stubborn strength.
The others waited, worry clouding their faces.
“It appears I will need to meet this Adilla for myself,” Dominic said.
“He will destroy you,” Natalia burst out, then caught herself, lowered her eyes and added, “my lord.”
Jackson and Garrett should come, too, Cassidy said.
Serge’s hands fidgeted before him. “Adilla will certainly try, my lord. But you must make him an ally. Destroying one so old . . . no good will come of that.” He shook his head, and his bottom lip quivered. “No. No good at all.”
Chapter 12
Undone
Cassidy watched Dominic prepare the syringe and hold it out to her. She took it only because they were at thirty-thousand feet and her arguments were exhausted. It lay in her hand like an instrument of evil.
“I don’t like this.”
He took off his jacket and shirt and lay back on the bed in their jet’s private compartment. Though they had taken off well before dawn, they wouldn’t make it across the entire continent before the sun caught up with them. “I know. But you will do it anyway, non?”
“You don’t know that. Maybe I’ll stuff you in the lavatory. Maybe I’d rather spend the day guarding the door on this plane than dealing with him.”
“Give him all the latitude he wants,” Dominic said, closing his eyes. His face tensed as he fought the mounting urge to take shelter. “Make him remember.”
Cassidy glanced out the window. The tip of the wing strobed red light in the predawn gray above a solid blanket of clouds.
Taking his hand in hers, she reached for what remained of their telepathic link. Their plans to renew it tonight had been sidelined by the avalanche of events and activity. Also, now that Dominic would use the suppressant and render himself vulnerable the next night, he claimed a deep link with him could compromise her if anyone got his or her teeth into him. In fact, he wanted her to stay safe at home, but given his decision to hustle cross-country without regard for the sun, her presence was essential.
Someone had to push that damn plunger.
She would have preferred to send in the Strikers as an advance team, but thanks to a vampire named Abdul that wasn’t happening. A recent Middle Eastern transplant to Germany, Abdul was their first captive of the jihadi persuasion. Even bound in silver shackles, he put up a fight and surprised Garrett with a head-butt to his side that was violent enough to land the man in a hospital. He spent four hours in surgery getting his insides put back together. Jackson spent four minutes turning Abdul into ash. Now not even a thousand-year-old target was tempting enough to budge him from his uncle’s bedside.
The Strikers were going nowhere.
None of this stopped the Lord of Night. Not with a magic daylight shot in his pocket.
Cassidy looked at the syringe in her hand, at the large-bore needle, and felt ill. His fingers twitched against hers. “Embrasse-moi,” he whispered.
She tucked her hair behind one ear and leaned forward to bestow the requested kiss. It lingered as the sun gained on the plane. Over their faltering connection, past the drone of the engines, she thought she could hear its crackling roar the way he did. Could feel the fear skittering along his nerves. The kiss was a distraction, and to that end it worked well.
When he had gone corpse-still, eyes closed, lips parted, Cassidy sat up. “Damn you for
making me do this, Dominic.”
But do it she did, if only because she could never drag him into the lavatory on her own. She aimed the needle toward the heart the way she had seen Jackson do it, and felt the mighty organ beat against her hand. The plunger descended. The suppressant disappeared into his chest. The syringe disappeared into its case.
She waited.
The sun bathed the cloud blanket below in rosy pink, but there was no sign of its scorching touch on Dominic’s bare skin. A minute later, he inhaled and opened his eyes like a man waking up from a nap.
“Good morning,” she said.
He sat up. “Where am I?”
“On a plane.”
His hands moved over the bed to either side of him. His eyes found the large, round windows. “We are going to—”
“Vancouver. Canada.”
“Canada,” Dominic muttered. He scooted to the edge of the mattress, shoulders pulled up to his ears, and put his bare feet on the carpet. A shock of hair fell across his brooding scowl. “This is intolerable. What are you doing with me, madame?”
Cassidy leaned back on one hand and couldn’t help being charmed by his befuddlement. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
His brows gathered, then smoothed as he looked at her. “I remember you.” His voice dropped a notch, approaching husky. “We made love, non?”
“Oh, oui. We did. What else do you remember?”
The warmth blossoming in his eyes dimmed. “At the end . . .”
“Yes?”
He stared at the floor. “Nothing.”
He was lying. She knew he was, even to himself, but she let it go. Whatever he remembered of that moment when his vampire self re-asserted itself, his human self still wanted no part of it.
She took his phone from his discarded jacket. “Here. You should watch this.”
On the small screen, Dominic of an hour ago spoke for several minutes in concise, no-nonsense French. His eyes flashed confidence and resolve as he explained that they were going to Vancouver on business, and they were expecting trouble. Under no circumstance was he to leave Cassidy’s side. She was the only one he could trust.