by S. K. Ryder
“Outrageous,” Bhavanur hissed with bared fangs.
Markandeya raised a single brow and crossed his arms.
Adilla chuckled, a humorless, patronizing sound. A smattering of relieved laughter bubbled through the audience. “So you are a fool, then. You would have to be to believe this if you know anything at all about Kambyses.” He rose from his throne, a towering figure robed in purple and gold. The blood-drinkers near him all lowered their eyes as though trying to escape his notice. “I am Adilla Kahn, and I am the last the great Kambyses was able to sire before his younglings began to die or go insane because of the power in his blood. If he has any heir at all—as much as an immortal requires such a thing—that heir is I.”
“Then come see the truth for yourself,” Dominic said and bared his throat in invitation. If he could get Adilla to feed from him, he might be able to launch a re-siring by getting his own teeth into him and finish this madness. He fisted his shackled hands, forcing more blood from the expanding sores to season the air with its vulnerable youngling tang.
Adilla’s eyes turned into obsidian glass.
But it was Esteban who struck.
The Spaniard sprang up, forced Dominic back to the ground with a vicious kick to the back of his knees, and seized his head in both hands. A brutal assault on Dominic’s mental defenses ensued. Since Esteban had already fed from him, Adilla wouldn’t. Adilla would take what he wanted through his sire bond with Esteban.
So be it.
Before Esteban could overwhelm him and rampage through his mind, Dominic blasted him with his memories of Kambyses, his turning, their battles, and his final victory over the five-thousand-year-old blood-drinker. He took care to abstract the actual transfer of the ancient essence, lest Adilla be tempted to try the same with him. Then he slammed the mental gates shut and jerked out of Esteban’s relaxing grip.
Esteban hissed. Several others, probably his younglings, shifted in their seats as they bore witness to what Dominic showed their sire.
“He does know the great one,” Esteban said aloud for those without telepathic links to him. “But he was not forged of his blood.” He looked around. Their audience was wide-eyed and pale even for vampires. “He claims to have slayed Kambyses and taken within himself the essence of our kind.”
“As he wished,” Dominic said as sharply as he could manage. His head still rang with the assault, and the blistering pain in his wrists crawled up his forearms. The raw wounds didn’t try to heal anymore. They just bled.
He braced for an attack, but it didn’t come. Instead, Adilla’s eyes reverted to their shadowy emerald green. “Brazen pup,” he whispered.
Dominic’s mouth twisted with derision. “My most endearing trait, according to Kambyses.” Taking Adilla’s silence as a sign he might be getting somewhere, he pushed onward. “He gave me his kingdom to do with as I wished. And I wish it to be a kingdom of love and peace. I need blood-drinkers, old ones with great wisdom and experience like you, Adilla, to help me spread that news.” He turned to the others. “Your lives are already bound to mine, but you do not hear me yet. For that to happen, you need to be re-sired by me.” And, fuck, his arms were on fire. He had to convince someone to take the silver off him soon or he would go mad and act madder.
“Re-sire?” Adilla repeated. Calm. Glacially calm. “You wish to re-sire . . . me?”
Dominic got to his feet yet again. When Esteban reached for him, he snarled but couldn’t prevent being yanked back down. “I do. And I will,” he promised through a pained grunt.
“I’m a prince who has known eleven hundred years of night. And you are what? A delusional youngling held by a mere pair of silver shackles?” His face distorted into a contemptuous sneer. “You are not worthy to gaze upon me, much less to receive my blood. For any purpose.”
The hall dropped back into stillness.
Calm again, Adilla settled into his throne, wrapping royal dignity around himself along with his robe. “You seem convinced that you did this thing. This taking of the essence from Kambyses.”
“I did. Esteban saw it in my memories. You saw it through him.”
Dominic bit his tongue until he tasted blood. Not to keep from saying more, but to distract himself from the agony in his arms and now shoulder blades. He fought not to tremble with it.
Adilla stroked a fingertip across his lower lip in thought. “Fortunately for you, young fool, I have spent centuries with Kambyses and know his ways like no other. I know the true extent of his power. If he wants you to believe that you killed him—”
“I did,” Dominic hissed.
“—he can make it so. It is sadly obvious that you are his pawn, and your purpose is to test my loyalty to him.” Adilla gestured with his bejeweled hands. “Will I believe and bow to you? Or will I doubt and kill you? These are the asks he would want answered before he returns into my presence. And he is near,” he concluded with an ominous air that drew several gasps. “I have felt his presence these past few nights.”
For several seconds Dominic even doubted himself and his own memories of what had happened. Then he realized that Adilla was the first full child of Kambyses he had encountered since the transfer. It was possible that Adilla sensed Dominic—or no one at all.
The wild murmurings racing through the crowd seemed to please their lord for his smile grew a little wider, a little less venomous, and a little more smug. Looking at the awe shining in their beautiful faces, it was easy to see that one of Adilla’s charms for his followers was that he was sired by—and presumably had the favor of—the oldest and most powerful of them all. This was not an advantage Adilla would relinquish without a fight.
It was a privilege he would kill to preserve. Aubrey had died for merely suggesting that another—a mere youngling, no less—had been more favored by the great one. “Of course, my loyalty is above reproach,” Adilla said, when the commotion faded to a low simmer. “So I will most certainly not yield to you. But as we appear to be brothers of sorts,” he dismissively waved one hand, “I will grant you the opportunity to dispense with this charade and retract your claims. If you do, I will invite you to join my family.” This with an expansive gesture to include the hall and everyone in it.
Cheers erupted, and somewhere in the haze of pain Dominic understood why Adilla still suffered him to live—understood Adilla’s greatest fear.
Kambyses’s displeasure.
And what would displease the Lord of Night more than murdering his chosen emissary?
Too late, Dominic thought, displeased beyond measure.
Adilla continued speaking over the tumult. “I have made my colony the largest of its kind anywhere in the world. It is by far the most prosperous. All due to my wise guidance.” He paused. Adulation poured forth on cue. “My strategies and projects will bring us millennia of greatness. And you, dear young one, are welcome here. As is Kambyses himself should he decide to grace us with his presence.”
The cheering escalated. Only Markandeya did not appear to be a fan. There was no expression on his face whatsoever.
“So what do you say, brother?” The soft sneer was not lost on Dominic who suddenly saw his true predicament. Adilla would not kill Kambyses’s supposed messenger, not with hundreds of witnesses, and not without an excuse as solid as the rock walls. He was all but begging Dominic to give him that excuse by refusing his oh-so-benevolent offer. But if Dominic accepted, Adilla would count it as a victory in the eyes of his devotees—and find another way to dispose of him in short order.
It was a game. A deadly and sadly typical game in the world of night as it used to be. Dominic had played a few of his own.
But no more.
Again, he leapt to his feet, and this time spun away from Esteban’s lightning fast grab. Between the pain and outrage, his control had reached its limits. “I say that I kneel before no on
e,” he snarled. “Ever.”
Silence again, thick as quicksand. In Dominic’s expanding vision, a sea of white blood-drinker auras became visible.
Adilla stared at him, expressionless. Stared at the golden light blazing in Dominic’s eyes. “Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. I am giving you a rare opportunity to join more than a colony of blood-drinkers. We are a family.” He held out his hand in what appeared to be a random direction. “Your family.”
Something slammed onto his shoulders and pressed with the weight of a world. Esteban. Down he went. Add a cracked kneecap to his list of miseries. He couldn’t even feel his arms anymore.
A new aura bobbed amidst the blaze of white. It wasn’t Jackson. His aura was red, this one a vibrant blue. A stranger . . .
Realization punched his gut like a steam-powered fist. The blue bubble was a woman who should have been impossible in this place. She was a little more full-bodied than he remembered, but her scent shimmered with sage and herbs and the tropical sun, and her face with their father’s soft curves and mother’s distinctive widow’s peak was unmistakable.
Four years of time vanished in an instant.
A garbled snarl emerged from his throat. “Genevie.”
His last surviving sibling didn’t look at him, her attention for Adilla alone. Compelled. She might not even know there were others in the hall. Adilla held her under his spell as she took his hand and dropped to her knees. Her navy blue skirt flared out around her.
Dominic moaned. His entire body shook. With pain.
With rage.
With helplessness.
“Genevie, ma petite chérie. Look who has joined us,” Adilla said in flawless French.
She looked as ordered, and when she spotted Dominic, her face brightened. “Frère préféré!” She saw only him, her ‘favorite brother,’ not his circumstances, bleeding and on his knees, nothing of the horrific reality. “Have you come to visit? Or to stay?”
“He will stay,” Adilla assured. His smile didn’t touch his eyes. “Now that he sees you so happy here how can he not?”
Genevie beamed at Adilla.
“No. No, you cannot,” Dominic spluttered. This time when he bolted to his feet, he leveled a mighty kick at Esteban’s chest when the Spaniard tried to snatch at him. His not yet healed knee screamed and threatened to buckle.
Adilla pressed a kiss to Genevie’s knuckles before turning over her hand to expose the wrist. “We have gotten to know each other these past two nights, have we not, my dear?”
She continued to smile.
“Non.”
Ink wells bloomed in Adilla’s eyes as his fangs emerged.
“Do not touch her, you fucking piece of shit!” Dominic roared. But Adilla already had his teeth into her wrist—for perhaps the third time in as many nights. She was more than halfway turned.
Dominic’s flesh rippled and compacted as his beast exploded to the surface. With a mighty jerk, his shackles snapped and his hands came free, darting out to either side of him. Silver-coated bracelets slipped over his bony, bloodied wrists and clattered to the floor. Adilla, under the influence of blood fresh from the vein, paid him no heed.
But others did.
Before Dominic could take more than a step in Adilla’s direction, Esteban and three more were on him. He leapt into the air and kicked out with both feet. Esteban ducked out of the way, but two others fell back, howling, their noses smashed. His injured knee failed him on landing, pitching him sideways. Four more took advantage, grabbed him, and pinned him to the floor.
Dominic screamed to the limits of his lungs, which was a hoarse croak compared to what it should have been. Frustration and anger burned through him. This is where his dream of seeing the sun again had brought him. Here, to the brink of losing everything.
Everything.
And suddenly that was precisely what he wanted. Lose everything. Including his life. He would take them all with him, the world over. And Genevie would be free. Jackson would get her to the surface. Jackson would take care of Cassidy and her child. They would all survive. As mortals.
All he had to do was die.
“I will never submit to you. I am your lord, not a test from an ancient one who could not tolerate your company,” he thundered on an impulse he scarcely understood. Kambyses had never mentioned Adilla to him, but somewhere deep in Dominic’s psyche rested the immense accumulation of Kambyses’s memories that had come with all his sire’s blood. While Dominic made no particular effort to examine them, every now and then, like now, knowledge came to him out of nowhere. Knowledge about Adilla Kahn, an ambitious young prince in a long-vanished realm with no hope of ever gaining true power. He had manipulated Kambyses into bestowing the gift of immortality, and Kambyses, in turn, had abandoned him—after decades, not centuries.
“You disappointed him,” Dominic continued on a guttural snarl. “He regretted making you as he regretted nothing else in all his eternal life. If you had not been the last he could make, he would have put you down. Like I will!”
Amidst a chorus of appalled cries, Esteban backhanded Dominic so hard his jaw cracked. He spat a gob of blood into Esteban’s eyes. That earned him a claw hand reaching for his throat.
“Stop!” Adilla barked. The silence was instantaneous.
Those nails already piercing Dominic’s skin withdrew. Instead of ripping out Dominic’s throat, Esteban swiped at the blood on his own face.
Adilla appeared, towering above Dominic’s prone form, and placed his feet close to his head as though preparing to crush his skull with a single stomp. “I decide who lives and dies at my court.”
The four holding him down murmured their obedient agreement.
“Brazen,” Adilla said again and shifted his weight.
“You are a useless buffoon, drunk on your own imagined greatness,” Dominic hissed, using words that Kambyses had uttered verbatim. “You are not fit for immortality.” A thousand years ago, Adilla had charged at Kambyses in a shrieking fury. Now he only stared down at Dominic as though seeing a ghost.
Dominic had said too much.
These words Adilla would know to be true memories. And that Dominic knew them—regardless of how—was irrefutable evidence that his connection to Kambyses was profound.
“You will be mine,” Dominic promised. “You will be mine or you will be dead.”
Adilla shifted his weight back. The wheels spinning behind his unblinking eyes settled into place. “I could not have said it more eloquently myself.”
A tiny gesture to one side, then Dominic’s feet were jammed together and something wound around them tight enough to crush his ankles against each other. A rope flew toward the ceiling and looped around a thick crossbeam, descended on the other side and grew taut. His bound feet shot in the air, following the rope. Once free of the floor, his body swung to the far end of the hall, causing several blood-drinkers to dart out of the way. He glimpsed Jackson, still by the grand main entrance, watching, horror in his face.
When Dominic swung back, Esteban caught and stopped him. He stripped the vest and shirt off him, both tearing like tissues in his powerful hands, and then held his arms together straight down. Someone else wrapped another rope around his forearms and elbows so many times, it had the feel of a mummy casing.
“If you have had so much of the great one’s blood, by all means. I will gladly take you up on your offer,” Adilla said. “Bhavanur, bring a pitcher. A rare vintage must be shared with family.”
No, there would be no direct feeding.
They would drain him.
The way all those mortals back in the city had been drained.
The crowd’s mood turned appreciative. Dominic’s heart pounded in his ears, drowning out the cheerful music that started up again. Bhavanur appeared before him in a
blur, grabbed his bound arms, and pulled something thin and cold and hard between his still raw wrists. Dominic’s fingers felt wet. Then he heard his blood trickle into the belly of the ordered pitcher.
Screaming with rage and not a little fear, Dominic thrashed and flipped at the end of the rope. If he could reach his feet, maybe . . .
Hands grabbed for him, held him still and, once the blade re-opened his vein, directed the stream of blood into the receptacle.
Genevie, his sister and once his closest friend, sat on the dais by the empty throne and stared at the spectacle without a shred of recognition in her empty face. She looked dead already, a corpse that forgot to lie down.
Dominic’s body began to shake. Tears blurred his vision.
He had failed.
Failed to assert himself. Failed to protect those he cared for. Failed as a wannabe human and as a blood-drinker lord. And failed to convince Adilla of anything that mattered. Whether Adilla only tried to avoid giving offense to Kambyses or thought there might be some truth to Dominic’s story was irrelevant. The result was the same.
He would use Dominic, but he would not destroy him.
Not now.
Not ever.
Chapter 24
Cleaning Crew
It was Jackson’s general uselessness as a mere mortal that saved him from the worst of the night. Of this, he had no doubt. To vampires like Esteban, he was nothing but a docile food supply, a sheep, and he spent the interminable hours in the great hall of horrors doing all in his power to maintain the appearance of one.
He crouched in a back corner and focused on his breathing. The music played and the party rolled while his friend hung like a slab of meat, being bled until he became a skeletal, unrecognizable shadow of himself. To all of this, Jackson could afford no emotional reaction whatsoever. Any hint of fear spicing his scent or accelerating his heart was bound to attract the sort of attention that would get him killed.