Absolution: A Dominion Novel

by Lissa Kasey

  Shit! What the fuck had I been thinking?

  The bell chimed signaling the beginning of the fight. He took a swipe at me balancing on odd backward-bent legs. I darted around him, using my small size and speed to deliver several quick hints to his back and abdomen, only it was like hitting concrete. Crap this guy had really been eating his Wheaties, and probably Mikey too.

  I danced around him, avoiding his claws like I’d seen Luca do, then bounced low, sprung up and hit him hard with an uppercut to the jaw. The guy didn’t even stagger. The crowds jeering grew louder. Fucking ass-wipes. They wanted me to lose. And I wanted more than ever to win if just to prove them all a bunch of spineless wannabes.

  Ryerson slashed and caught me across the back before I could move away, opening me from shoulder to hip. The pain seared through me and blood poured down my back. All that tasty blood I’d gotten from Luca, wasted. Fuck but I was pitiful ‘cause I was pretty sure I could smell him. The volume of the crowd grew to a deafening white nose and I vaguely remembered Luca telling me to aim for the snout.

  I had to keep moving to keep out of reach of those damn claws, but my sight was starting to go red. Not so much with rage, but with pain. Fuck did I hurt. How bad was the wound? Probably worse than a paper cut, but since I wasn’t tripping on anything internal, I figured he hadn’t cut all the way to my guts. And the slice was more off to the side than along my spine. I was losing blood fast and sliding in the mess. This fight had to end soon. Could blood loss kill me? Probably not. Render me unconscious likely, which meant losing the fight.

  He sliced me twice more before I took a small opening to hammer his nasty face in. The swing tore something in my back and while I connected with his face and he actually staggered back a few feet, the weight of the pain slammed into me. The red haze completely obliterated my sight and I sank to my knees letting my other self go. He could win even without any bats in the belfry. If he didn’t, I’d be dead and that would end it all anyway, right? Not that it mattered as consciousness swirled me down into the red-tinted darkness.

  Chapter 10

  I awoke to screaming. A deafening cheering that made me aware of my surroundings as well as the unpleasant stickiness of blood that covered me like bad sex. The lycan lay at my feet, out cold and bleeding heavily from the neck. A nasty aftertaste flavored the back of my tongue. Had I fed on him?

  The cage door creaked open but the medics hesitated to enter. Max brushed by them and wrapped a thick towel around me, leading me out and down the stairs. The world shifted, and I wobbled on my feet, but he kept me upright.

  My feet made bloody footprints all the way to the locker room. Max had another medic follow him and I barely remember the man prodding me in several places that hurt bad enough to make me snarl at him. It wasn’t a sound I was used to making, and it startled me enough that I shook my head and cleared the last of the fog out of it.

  “He’ll need stitches, but he’ll have to hold still.”

  Max nodded. “Lay down on the bench, Sam. The good Doc here is going to stitch you up.”

  It was that bad? Just moving hurt. Hell, just breathing hurt. So I stopped. Not like I needed to anyway. I lay down and Max handed me a fresh towel that smelled laundered and slightly damp. It felt good against the heat of my skin. Heat. Wait. How was that possible? Crap was I on fire or what? My body just about burned.

  “Why am I so hot?”

  “Lycan blood,” Max answered as if that was all I really needed to know. “You should know pain meds don’t work on us, but you need about three dozen stitches down your back,” Max told me.

  “Fuck.”

  “Agreed. He’s fast though.” He nodded to the medic who began stitching me up. After the eighth or ninth prick and tug I tuned it out and focused instead on calming my head. The anger wasn’t there anymore, which was a good thing, but I felt kind of weird and spacey. “You drank a lot of lycan blood. It has a bit of a kick. More than human. Probably more than Luca. Though they don’t taste as good as most witches or most cibos.”

  Was that what the nasty taste in my mouth was?

  Riley appeared with a stack of cash in hand. Max took it, counted out a huge wad of Benjamins and put them in a plastic bag and handed them to me.

  “Did I win?”

  “You did. But you had to use a redout to do it. We’ll have to work on that if you’re going to continue fighting.” Hell yeah, I was going to continue. I hurt like a son of a bitch but it was an amazing high. I’d beat that scary ass MF. “Have you been having a lot of redouts?”

  “Not sure what you mean exactly by that. A lot how?” Luca had just told me what they were yesterday. Was I supposed to be timing them or something?

  “Blackouts. Though your vision goes red first. It’s the blood filling your eyes, and then the blood lust takes over. You almost killed him. I’m surprised you stopped. It’s very hard to stop a redout short of a kill, or even a dozen kills.”

  “I had one yesterday with Luca and he’s just fine. I didn’t kill anyone then either. But I’ve sort of had the weird vision for ages now. Some red, but not loss of consciousness like this time or yesterday. That’s new.”

  “Have you told Gabe?” The fact that Max didn’t seem to care that I could have killed his kid really irritated me. Maybe I still needed to get Luca’s answer. Or even to talk to him about why I’d been so upset at his outburst. I was just so unprepared for all this. Was anyone prepared to be undead? And yet it made me angry at Gabe too. He was supposed to be helping me, but instead complete strangers were telling me things I probably should have known months ago. The doctor finished and mumbled something about the stitches disintegrating on their own within forty-eight hours.

  “Why does it matter if Gabe knows? It’s a vampire thing, right? I just have to deal with it like all the other shit.”

  “If the redout was once a year maybe, or even once a month. But two in twenty-four hours means you need to go to ground. Death sleep in real dirt. Even having a cibo won’t stop the blood lust for you this time. Eventually you’ll just come undone and murder everyone within reach.”

  The thought chilled me to the bone. They were going to bury me? But I wasn’t dead. Not technically. Seiran had just told me I wasn’t dead. And Gabe would insist, wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t want me to endanger Sei, Kelly, Con and Jamie. Oh God. They were going to bury me alive.

  I got up on autopilot, retrieved my clothes and began stripping off the gear they’d given me.

  “You should shower. You’re covered in blood,” Max pointed out. “Anyone on the street will assume you just came from slaughtering a couple of families. The stitches won’t come out. It’s a blood laced thread that will fall apart after your body absorbs all the blood in it.”

  Whose blood, I wondered. And gross. I looked down to find my arms red, stains running over every inch of me and blood dripped forming puddles around me. The heaviness of my shorts and tank meant blood, not sweat. I sucked in a deep breath and made my way to the shower, dropping the soiled clothing as I went.

  My heart beat furiously, maybe because I’d had so much blood from the lycan, but I stayed under the spray longer that I probably needed to. When I returned to the bench in just a towel it was to find it had been wiped clean of all traces of blood and Riley waited there with my phone in hand. “Your master wants to speak to you.”

  I raised the phone to my ear expecting a lecture. “Hello?”

  “Are you okay?” Gabe sounded worried, but I had no idea what he’d been told.

  “I’m fine.” Shaky, tired, and aching slightly with a gash down my back, but mostly unhurt.

  “I’m on my way to get you.”

  “I can find my way home on my own. I don’t need a babysitter.”

  “Sam,” the quiet tone that said he was unhappy undid me, and suddenly I was sobbing again as I pulled on my clothes. What the hell was wrong with me? Did I have a time of the month now or something? Crap.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him.

/>   “You’ve had two redouts with full loss of consciousness. Any others you haven’t told me about? Hart’s assistant called with an update.”

  “I don’t want to go to ground. Max told me and I don’t want to be buried.”

  “Sam, you have to be afraid of the redout. You can really hurt people. You might think you can handle it, but waking up with the scattered remains of people you love around because you killed them in a fit of blood rage, will really fuck you up. Some never even come fully back from them. Nowadays vampires are often killed before the redout is finished to stop the bloodshed.”

  “You want to bury me. Alive. I’m alive, Gabe. Not a corpse. You can’t put me in the ground.”

  “It’s not as scary as you think. Wait for me. I’ll be there in five minutes. We’ll talk about this. It’s just a really good nap.”

  “Buried,” I repeated. “Like a fucking corpse.”

  “I promise that it’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  Only there was. Hadn’t Seiran given me the experience earlier this evening? An empty void filled with nothing but darkness. I couldn’t do it again, that chaos of nothingness. I gathered up my stuff, including the cash, and headed for the door not planning on waiting for him. I could run for a time on the cash. But what if Gabe was right and I went killer crazy?

  “Would it be easier to talk to one of the guys instead of me?” Gabe finally asked when the silence stretched too long.

  “Maybe.”

  “Okay. Hang up. I’m still coming to get you, but keep your phone out. I’ll have Sei call.” He clicked off. I was already out the door. No one tried to stop me. Thank God.

  Sei called a few seconds later. “You okay?”

  “I guess.” My heart thudded in my chest like I’d run a marathon, helping me decide that lycan blood was not good the whole way around. Vampires shouldn’t have anxiety and if eating a shifter meant feeling like I’d just downed a thousand espressos, I didn’t need that sort of trouble. “I don’t want to go to ground.”

  “Sam, you’re hyperventilating. Slow down. Breathe with me. I know you’re scared. We can work through this.”

  “They’re going to put me in the ground. Alive. I’m alive. You just told me I’m not dead.” I had no idea where I was headed as I wandered back to the streets of downtown. The cold had obviously driven everyone off because the streets were empty. I didn’t remember waking up from my first death, though Gabe said he’d put me in the ground so I would be reborn from it. If my lungs had been full of dirt and the world around me a black cage of darkness then I wouldn’t want the memory.

  “But if you need it to get better…”

  “How come I’ve never heard of Gabe having a redout?”

  “He said he hasn’t had one in decades. The older the vampire you are the longer in between them, I guess. Besides a vampire like Gabe having a redout would probably mean a major world war at this point just to stop him from killing half the population.”

  “All this ‘wait until you’re older shit’ is getting old. I’m a grown-up dammit.” I wove through alleys and avoided major roads that Gabe might take to get to me. It was one of those rare moments I was happy that vampires didn’t have the ability to shapeshift or fly. Gabe’s sense of smell was better than most, and he could levitate, but he couldn’t track me or get to me faster that way.

  “Where are you going?” Sei asked after a quiet minute. At least I’d gotten my breathing back under control.

  “Somewhere Gabe can’t find me.”

  “What if you have another redout and kill someone?”

  “So I’ll go somewhere there are no people.”

  “Where in the world is that, Sam? What will you do when the sun comes up?”

  “Would you let them bury you?”

  “I think you’re asleep when it happens.”

  “Pretty to think so. They’re never gonna put you in the ground while you’re still kicking.”

  He sighed heavily. “I can find you, you know. Gabe may not have that ability since you’re not actually his vamp, but I do. You’re a part of the earth just like every other being walking around out there. I can’t let you hurt anyone.”

  I stopped dead in my tracks a pulse of fear trailing down my spine. Of course he could find me. He was fucking Father Earth—tuned into the big network in the ground—and I was just a particle on the rock. “Please,” I begged him.

  “I will be with you. Until you sleep. I won’t let you do this alone.”

  “But you can’t go in the dirt with me.”

  He snorted, a weird sound for him, but it almost made me laugh. “Technically I could. Father Earth, remember? Gaea likes me. I could probably set up shop in the dirt for a few days and nap. I could use a nap.”

  “This is not some game,” I growled at him.

  “No, it’s not. You don’t get points for the number of civilians you hurt, and you’re not trying to find the castle before someone bigger and badder offs your ass,” Sei said. “I know sarcasm is your defense mechanism, but you aren’t safe right now, Sam.”

  “Fuck!”

  “There’s a special cemetery for vampires just east of downtown. Tiny little place with really high walls. Can you meet me there?”

  I didn’t want to, but he was right. Hell, I just wanted to sit down and cry like a baby. Why couldn’t life be more like a video game? At least then it was obvious who the good guys and the bad guys were. “Give me the address. I’ll map it on my phone,” I finally said. “You better fucking be there, Ronnie.” My gut churned, and I couldn’t get the taste of the lycan out of my mouth. Never again.

  “Meet you there in twenty. Don’t make me come looking for you, Sammie.”

  “I’ll be there.” I hung up the phone and programmed the address in. It wasn’t that far. I followed the directions having to stop twice to throw up—a new experience since I’d never done it as a vampire before—blood and chunks. Apparently I’d more than just sucked on that furry bastard. God, my stomach hurt. Was that part of the redout issue or the aftereffects of lycan blood?

  Someone patted me on the back. “You okay man? You don’t look so good.”

  I shook my head hoping the guy wasn’t going to try for my wallet, phone or the stack of cash in my jacket pocket. He didn’t smell like a homeless person but that didn’t mean he wasn’t trouble. “Too much to drink,” I gave him a lame excuse.

  “Yeah, shifters will do that to you.”

  WTF? I looked up. The guy was blond, willowy, longish hair pulled back in a ponytail and cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass on. He had to be a vampire since he didn’t smell human or even lycan. Or maybe I was just getting better at sorting that out. “You’re not one of Gabe’s.”

  He shrugged. “Technically neither are you since your true sire is dead.”

  Right, except Gabe and Jamie had said to stay away from vampires I didn’t know. “You’re not doing all that vampire shit around town are you?”

  He raised a brow. “Not sure what you mean.”

  “Okay then. Nice meeting you.” I turned to head back to the cemetery. If the guy followed me, at least Gabe could get him and turn him in to the cops. I couldn’t imagine any of Gabe’s vampires doing crap to get us all in trouble. He was really good at holding a tight leash as I’d experienced for myself.

  “Careful out there,” the vampire said and patted my arm. A flash of power surged through me like I’d been hit by lightning. Brightness flooded my sight and I was sure I was going to burst into flames any second. Then just as quickly as it had begun, it ended and I was standing alone.

  “What the fuck!” I screamed out at the empty street. No one answered, for which I was grateful. Now I ran. Eager to get away and find safety. Seiran was safe. He was probably the most powerful being on earth. And fuck if I didn’t need that right now.

  The cemetery came into view with towering white walls and bright lights. It looked a lot like a prison. The walls were twenty feet high, made of concrete, and topped w
ith barbed wire. Spotlights glared and circled with cameras watching their every move. Armed guards in heavy Kevlar stood outside the main gate and on the wall. I shivered.

  “Creepy, right? I was expecting some ritzy hotel setup or something. Not this.” Seiran said as he suddenly appeared right next to me.

  “Jesus!” I screamed at him. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

  “Nope. Just Father Earth. Sorry. Calculating distances is sort of hard.” His hair was green again with flowers growing in it as he spoke. I’d heard of this version of him, but never seen it up close. He was a living, breathing embodiment of the earth. No wonder everyone was scared to death of him. “The whole astral travel thing is pretty easy if I follow the lay lines of the earth. It’s just a little jarring when I stop.” He shook his head like he was trying to clear it but smiled at me. “So tell me about the date.”

  “It started okay, but ended in disaster.”

  “How so?”

  “He got pissed off when some bruiser was pushing us around the floor and went postal on him. Then yelled at me when I walked.” I sighed and looked away. “He reminded me of Matthew. Max said he got territorial because I shared blood with him. But all I saw were his fists beating on that guy…”

  “You shared blood with him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That was good?”

  It had been better than good. Almost hypnotizing. “Yeah.”

  “I see.” Seiran was silent for a moment. “It happens sometimes. Even Gabe will on occasion remind me of Matthew. The memories have faded, but they never really go away. Don’t blame that on him, it’s mostly in your head. Did he hit you?”

  “No. Just called me a kid, but he was really pissed.”

  “You are a kid.”

  “Fuck you, Ronnie.” He was only a few years older than me. What right did he have to call me a kid?