The Dominion Series Complete Collection

by Lund, S. E.

  Then I’m over the edge, pleasure ripping through me, my muscles tensing, my body shaking with each deep thrust. He’s not far behind me and I force my eyes open to watch him come the first time as a mortal. His first time in eight hundred years.

  His face is red, his eyes squeezed shut, teeth gritted as if he’s in pain, but then his face slackens into pure bliss as he ejaculates, again and again…

  “Oh, God!” he cries, his eyes almost rolling back into his head. Then he collapses against me, his face in the crook of my neck, his breath coming in quick gasps as he recovers. “Oh, God, that was good.”

  We rest for a moment, leaning together, me sitting on the counter with my legs wrapped around his waist, his face in my neck, my fingers running through his hair.

  He pulls back and cups my face with his hands.

  “I love you, Eve.” He kisses me, his mouth covering mine. Our tongues meet and caress each other. My heart feels like it will explode out of my chest, I love him so much.

  “Was it good for you?” I say, smiling coyly when he pulls away. I run my fingers through his short black hair, then stroke his chin with its perpetual three-day growth of beard.

  “Was it good for me? Are you kidding?” He smiles and leans closer, kissing me again forcefully. “God, Eve. It’s so different fucking without any connection. You’re totally into your own sensations. But as much as I liked it, it is better as a vampire. Especially as an ascended vampire. What do you think?”

  I nod and kiss him briefly. “Much better. A thousand times better. Almost too much, but not quite.”

  “I know,” he says. “But there’s something to say about being totally in your own body now and then. I guess it’s what I’m stuck with for a while at least.”

  “What do you mean, for a while at least? Will you become a vampire again? Do you want to?”

  He doesn’t meet my eyes and instead plays with a strand of my hair, twirling in between his finger and thumb. “Who knows what the future holds?”

  “You know,” I say. “Or at least you know what Michel plans. Tell me!” I demand, hitting his shoulder.

  “No can do,” he says and grins. “You know better than to ask, Eve. Do I have to spank you? I remember doing it once before and it didn’t turn out well, so don’t push me!”

  “Sorry,” I say, smiling. “I don’t remember you spanking me, but I do remember reading about it.”

  He pulls me tightly against his body and kisses me again. His kiss is so sweet, his lips so tender against mine, that I don’t push. I clear my mind of any thoughts of the future and enjoy him.

  After a long moment, we pull apart and I wash off before dressing once more. Julien follows me into the hallway and then goes to his own room to dress.

  “I’m going out to run an errand,” Julien says. “Michel’s got me doing some security thing. I’ll be back later.”

  I frown. “It’s not safe for you any longer, now that you’re mortal.”

  “I want to do it. I want to get out and enjoy the weather. Don’t worry about me. I’m with an Adept.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t like it.”

  He comes over to me and grabs my shoulders, kissing me playfully. “You are so cute when you worry about me. But remember, Eve, I was a knight before I was ever a vampire. I know my way around a sword and gun.” He grins and the look in his eye makes me smile.

  “Okay, but don’t be too long. Soren wants you to come back with us.”

  * * *

  While I’m packing up my things, I hear noise at the front door and think to myself that Julien must be back from whatever he was doing, but I hear a sound like a woman’s voice.

  I leave my bedroom and find someone standing in the doorway dressed all in black, wearing a long black coat with a hood. I don’t know who it is, but then a gloved hand pulls back the hood and I see a petite woman with long hair and vampire-pale skin.

  For a moment, I don’t understand who she is. Michel turns to look at me, his face expectant. She’s standing there beside him, two large men with weapons behind her. When her eyes come to rest on me, a jolt of recognition goes through me, sending my heart racing.

  I know who she is.

  My mother…

  Chapter 100

  “Who so loves believes the impossible.”

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  The room is silent for a moment and I shake my head, as if somehow I can shake away this crazy scene in front of me.

  “Mom?” I manage to say, my voice small, childlike. I cover my mouth with a hand for if it is her, and I’m certain it is, she stayed away from me for years.

  All those years…

  “But you’re dead,” I say, and even to me it sounds ridiculous—she’s standing here in front of me, as undead as undead can be. She did die, but was reborn as a vampire.

  The one secret Michel was able to hold on to all this time.

  “Where have you been?” I ask, my throat choking up.

  She walks closer, her brow creased. She tries to smile but I can see it’s forced. Tears fill her eyes. “I’m so sorry, Eve. It had to be this way.”

  “What do you mean, it had to be this way?” I say and shake my head, confused. “Why did you never come for me?”

  She reaches out to me as if she wants to embrace, but there is no way I’m letting her touch me. There’s only one conclusion to draw from her absence all these years.

  She abandoned me.

  “Don’t touch me,” I say, stepping back from her. I rush to my bedroom, slamming the door behind me; my emotions are overwhelming and I have to cover my mouth to stop from crying out loud.

  My mother’s alive? She’s been alive all this time and never once came to see me? To speak to me and explain what happened?

  All this time, I’ve thought I was motherless, my mother dying in her office at the university at the hands of a monster. Then I learn it was Michel who killed her on Soren’s compulsion. Now I have to accept that she’s alive and has been this whole time? She didn’t die when I was eleven? She’s a vampire?

  Michel comes into my bedroom alone, closing the door behind him. He stands in the entry, his expression dark.

  “Stay away,” I warn, covering my face with my hands. “I don’t want to talk to you. You’ve lied to me ever since you met me. Everything you’ve said to me has been a lie.”

  Michel sits beside me, taking me in his arms despite my protests, and after a moment I finally relent and let him hold me. I cry against his shoulder, unable to process it all.

  “I gave her some of my blood before she died,” he begins. “After they took you, I went to the hospital and brought her body back to my house. Soren couldn’t know she was alive, Eve. He couldn’t know where you were or he would have taken you. Your mother and I knew that the only way to save you was to hide you.” His expression is pained, his brow knit, his eyes pleading. “She didn’t want you to see her as a vampire.”

  “She wanted me to join the Council? Be an Adept?”

  He nods and takes my hand. “She realized that it was the only way to stop Dominion. You and Dylan—you’re key. That’s all I can say for now.”

  I try to accept it all, fighting with my heart, which hurts like I’ve been stabbed. All those years I mourned her… All those years I was a motherless child.

  “Why couldn’t you have told me? I could have kept it secret.”

  “We couldn’t risk it. If you ever fell into Soren’s hands, he’d know or find out.”

  It’s all too much to take in, so I just sit, my hand still in Michel’s. I need his warmth right now. My body feels like ice.

  “I don’t know if I can see her,” I say, biting back tears.

  “You’ll regret it if you don’t.” Michel moves closer to me, taking my face in his hands.

  I don’t want to look in his eyes, because I think I’ll break down in sobs if I do, so I close mine and listen to his voice.

  “Think how hard this must have been for her,�
� he says, his voice imploring. “She was a vampire, the one thing she taught you to hate more than anything. She was afraid you’d never accept her.”

  “She should have given me the option.”

  He pulls me into his warm embrace and I lay my head against his shoulder. I let it out, crying without control, and he rocks me softly back and forth.

  “Oh, Eve,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry that all of this had to happen to you.”

  “If my mother was alive, why didn’t she stay with my father?”

  Michel pulls away and brushes hair off my forehead. “You should talk to her about that.”

  “Tell me! You never explained why my father was put into an asylum when he was clearly sane.”

  “Eve, your father and mother didn’t agree on your future. Your father was pushing things and…”

  At that moment, my mother walks into the room. I glance away, turning my face towards Michel’s shoulder, not wanting to deal with her now.

  “Eve, I heard your question,” she says, her voice just like I remember, clear and melodic. “Let me tell you what happened.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut. I know it’s childish of me, but I can’t help it. My heart feels as if it will break any moment. I want it all to go away.

  “Eve,” she implores. “We have to make sacrifices for the greater good. Your father…he didn’t want to make the sacrifice that was required of him. He didn’t want to let you go to your fate.”

  I pull away from Michel, catching his eye when I do. He nods softly.

  “What she says is true,” he confirms. “Your father wanted to run away with you back to England. He insisted that you would be raised outside of the Council and trained as a pianist. But however well you play, you were meant for a much greater purpose than playing Chopin.”

  “That should have been my choice,” I remind them both.

  Michel frowns, so I glance away. My mother stands a few feet away. I look up at her slowly, worrying it will hurt to see her face. She’s beautiful, just as I remember her, with lustrous hair and large eyes with thick lashes. She holds her arms out to me.

  “Eve, won’t you come to me and let me hug you? I’ve wanted to so badly.” Her voice cracks. “My arms ache to hold you.”

  “You could have had me all this time.”

  “No,” she says, shaking her head. “I couldn’t have. I had to go into hiding. If you’d stayed with me, both of us would be dead now and Dominion fully in place.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  She pulls a chair over and sits directly across from the bed. She leans down, her elbows on her knees. “Eve, I believe Michel can see the future. I know he can.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He was waiting for me when I decided to rejoin the Council. He’d already seen it. It was him who brought me back in.”

  She reaches out and tentatively takes my hand. At first, I want to pull mine back, but I resist. I let her hold my hand. She strokes it, her fingers fine and delicate. She has a dancer’s body—lean but strong. I inherited the ability to dance from her, my musical talent from my father. But my mother also gave me the desire to understand the world around me, to find a way to destroy the very thing that she and I have become.

  “Mom,” I say, overcome once more with emotion.

  She sits on the bed beside me, putting her arm around me. Michel takes this as his cue and gets up from the bed. I let her pull me into her arms and stroke my hair the way she used to when I was a child, my head on her shoulder.

  “Oh, Evie,” she says, her own voice choked with emotion. “I’m so sorry. So sorry.”

  Michel stands in the bedroom doorway, his hands in his pockets. I glance at him and see an expression of understanding in his eyes. Empathy. I’m reminded once again of his own loss. He lost his mother as a young boy and was sent to live with his father, who had married properly and didn’t really want his bastards to live with him. The twins were treated terribly by the man and by his wife, their stepmother, who never accepted Michel and Julien as her sons.

  At least I had foster parents who genuinely cared for me and even loved me. After I left Franklin, I was cared for properly, and lived in a middle class neighborhood with middle class parents who raised me well. I went to a good school, and there was money and scholarships for college.

  Everything was going along well, with my plans to study medicine and become a research scientist studying vampirism for the Council—if I ever found it—then the university released my mother’s files, some snag in bureaucracy finally settled. That day changed my life. If I hadn’t received the file boxes…

  I turn to my mother and frown. “Did you have anything to do with me getting your research files?”

  She bites her lip and I can see it in her eyes—the truth. I turn to Michel.

  “And you? Were you in on this with her? Both of you deciding when it was time to bring me into the fold?”

  Michel glances away. “You had just turned twenty-one. We knew you wanted to find the Council. We knew you’d go stumbling around, trying to find someone with connections to your mother’s past work. We wanted to make sure it was us and not anyone else. Not Blackstone. Especially not Soren.”

  I frown at him. “Julien told me I was meant for him. Why did my mother work with you instead of Julien?”

  He gestures to my mother with his chin. “Your mother will tell you. It was her decision.” His expression is hard to describe—worried, like he knows what she tells me will upset me.

  “Eve,” my mother begins, “Michel and I were in agreement on how things should proceed because we knew that if we didn’t involve you, you’d die. Dominion would not be defeated.”

  “Why not Julien?”

  Michel glances away as if he feels guilty over it. My mother looks at the floor.

  “Tell me!”

  My mother glances at Michel.

  “Julien was going to help your father escape with you,” he says quietly. “He had to be stopped.”

  “What?” I frown, trying to figure out what he means. “How was he stopped?”

  “I compelled Julien to leave the Council and work for the Church instead. It was the only way we could move forward with our plans.”

  Michel compelled Julien?

  I take Michel by the arms, staring up into his blue eyes, which are hooded as if to protect himself.

  “I don’t understand. You compelled him to get him out of the way?”

  “There was no other way, Eve. Julien wasn’t going to cooperate. He would have helped your father. You would have died…”

  Exasperated, I turn to my mother. “Tell me. I won’t cooperate until you do.”

  My mother doesn’t meet my eyes. “Julien was…” she says and watches Michel where he stands with his back to us. “He was going to prevent the Council from accepting you as an Adept on the grounds that you hadn’t been properly trained and would be a liability rather than an asset. Most Adepts are trained at an early age, but your father and I kept you out.”

  I frown, making a face, anger welling up inside of me. “So you did what? Compelled him into submission to get him out of the way? And you sent my father—your husband—to an insane asylum where he was mistreated and neglected?”

  “Just until you could be trained, Eve,” my dear mother says. “He wasn’t technically insane, but he wouldn’t listen to reason. With me dead, Julien wanted you to live with your father and study music. Your father and he…they were going to prevent you from your destiny. Michel compelled Julien, made him give up his desire to save you, and he joined the monastery. It was the only way we could keep him out of the SCU and Council business.”

  I can barely believe what I’m hearing. No wonder there has been so much animosity between the brothers over me. I thought it was because they didn’t want to share me, but it was fundamentally an issue of how to use me—or whether to use me.

  Everything I thought I knew about the brothers is backwards. It was
Julien who wanted me to study music. It was Michel all along who wanted me to become an Adept.

  They actually compelled Julien to keep out of Council business. I thought he chose that because he was tired of fighting. I thought he had given up on fighting Dominion.

  “My father’s life has been a living hell all this time because of you both!” I explode. “Julien was compelled—forced!—out of the Council and SCU to shut him up?

  I get up from the couch and go to my room. All I want is to find Julien and slip my arms around him. My head is pounding, my heart is pounding. I need some time. I stop at the door to my bedroom and turn to them.

  “I want to be alone for a while. I need to think.”

  With that, I close the door, leaving them behind. I crawl under the covers, pulling the coverlet above my head, and cry my eyes out.

  Chapter 101

  “The first magic of love is our ignorance that it can ever end.”

  Benjamin Disraeli

  I stop crying after a while and my mind goes over everything I’ve just learned. In the end, I know I have to make a choice. But I have to speak with Julien before I decide anything.

  After washing my face off in the bathroom, I return to the living room, where my mother and Michel sit on the sofa. They turn when I enter the room, their expressions expectant.

  I sit on a chair across from them. “Where’s Julien?” I ask.

  “He’s still out. I knew your mother was coming and couldn’t risk him finding out she’s alive.”

  “He doesn’t know?”

  Michel shakes his head. “He’s compellable. If he knew, Soren would know. Blackstone would know.”

  “Michel, you have to tell me what’s going on. Tell me what you can about what’s going to happen.”

  Michel glances at my mother and she nods to him. He exhales and rubs his chin, as if it hurts to have to explain. “I know this is hard for you, but time is becoming extremely precious. We don’t have a lot of it. We have to help Soren so he’ll stop the plague as soon as possible. That’s all we can safely tell you. No more questions.”