Dark Awakening

by Ryder, S. K.

  All that vile strength left him in a rush as he remembered the taste of his father’s gushing blood—and the sound of his neck snapping like a carrot in Dominic’s own hands.

  The fine teak deck lurched up to meet his buckling knees.

  Kambyses and Silence hadn’t just failed to stop him.

  They had never even tried.

  “Why?” The question rode on a keening sound of pure anguish. “Why did you do this to me? Why did you let me kill my…why?”

  Silence looked away. Kambyses studied him for a moment, his face shadowed in a curtain of his hair. “My poor young one,” he finally said on a sigh and lowered into a crouch. “This confusion, too, will pass.”

  “Why?” Dominic cried again. Grief and rage slashed at his soul.

  “Your old life is insignificant compared to what you have become. None of it matters anymore.” Kambyses cupped a cold, hard hand to Dominic’s cheek. “You will understand. In time.”

  “Why did you let me…my father!” Impossible words for an incomprehensible thing. Tears filled his eyes, clogged his throat.

  “You left your old life behind. You have no more need of anyone in it. Father, brother, lover…I am now all these things to you, and more.”

  “Why?” Dominic shrieked, shooting to his feet. “I don’t want this! I don’t want you. I don’t want anything of yours.”

  Kambyses seemed to levitate upright, the cloak swaying around him. Softly, he said, “But I want you.”

  Dominic leaned into his face, snarling. “You will never have me, you filthy abomination. Not in any way.”

  “But I already do.”

  The words made him gasp with the sudden realization they drove home. It was true. This creature—this vampire—thrummed with power over others. He could seize minds and twist them to his will. It was what he must have done with the empty-eyed crewman who had silently left after securing the dinghy. It was what he must have done the night of the attack when his scent rode the air. It was what he had done with Dominic’s father. And it was what he had most definitely done with Dominic himself, his entire family. Every night he must have walked into Dominic’s home or lured him outside with no one seeing the beast, much less remembering him.

  The Silence was Kambyses’s creature. And now so was Dominic.

  “Never!”

  While he still had will left in his body, Dominic hurtled off the docking platform with every intention of using all that monstrous strength to swim straight out to sea and keep swimming until he exhausted himself and drowned. Anything was better than living as this monster’s slave—or with these memories.

  He kicked and stroked as fast as he could, but his progress was not what he would have expected. The water was thinner somehow, unable to buoy him. He felt like a stone battling the calm swells.

  So be it, he thought. He stopped trying to swim. If he had to drown, it might as well be here, close to the island he loved.

  He dropped to the seabed. Soft sand met his toes. The low-slung shadow of a reef stretched in the dark blue gloom. Small light bubbles darted around it. A larger one heaved itself off the ground and flapped away. Fish and a ray. He could see them clearly even in this low light.

  Did all living things glow like this, he wondered? Was this one of his powers now? To see this luminescence? Or this ability to see anything at all with his eyes wide open in the saltwater? He fell into a trance again, watching the milling ocean nightlife. There was a magical beauty to it, he had to admit, and part of him was happy this would be the last thing he saw before dying.

  Dying took its time, however. He waited for the air in his lungs to run out. It didn’t. He blew it out. Still, the urge to draw breath eluded him. No burning in his chest, no racing heart, no faintness in his head. Nothing. He felt as though he could sit here for hours, even days, swaying with the warm current, hypnotized by the sensation of his tattered clothes drifting around his body.

  The unexpected thrill faded, replaced by a sinking new horror.

  He had no need for air.

  Furious, Dominic opened his mouth and sucked at the ocean. Saltwater streamed into his lungs. A convulsive coughing fit was the result. This reflex, at least, still worked fine. But even that, after a minute of mute hacking, he could subdue.

  What he could not subdue was his ability to survive.

  On a silent scream, he expelled the water from his body. Then he lay on his side and let the despair claim him.

  After a while, something grabbed his shoulders and flipped him over. He didn’t protest. Maybe a shark would find him palatable.

  But it was another kind of creature that hauled him along like a bag of fresh catch. Silence had stripped down to her underwear, and her strong, pale limbs pistoned against the seafloor. A thin braid floated behind her.

  Dominic didn’t resist as she manhandled him toward an anchor lodged in a rocky outcropping and then climbed up the chain. Once at the surface, she flung him overhead with a mighty jerk of her arm and landed him in the middle of a circle of padded benches on Apokryphos’s bow.

  He lay still as he watched her climb over the rail. Korean, he guessed by the shape of her face. Maybe his age, maybe a little older. Maybe a great deal older. It had been her blood that had worked this insane transformation in him. Did that make Silence his blood donor or demonic parent or whatever these creatures called it? Dominic tried to recall what he remembered of vampire lore. He had never been much interested. He knew next to nothing beyond the standard clichés, though how much did the fictional versions really have in common with this unimaginable reality?

  Again, he saw regret flicker in her eyes when she settled her gaze on him.

  “Help me,” he said, drawing his first breath in many minutes just so he would have the air to speak. The words came out in a gurgling hiss. “Please.”

  Her face became stony again as she turned away. After opening a hidden compartment under a section of seat, she pulled out a towel and tossed it at him.

  It was all the help he would get until dawn.

  4

  Heartbeats

  Dominic didn’t move again for the rest of the night. Nor did he draw a single breath. He lay in absolute stillness, his mind a catatonic blank. For a time, he was aware of the gentle swaying of the deck, the sound of waves slapping the hull, but then, even that faded. It was a waking death of sorts that spun out before him, a nightmare he desperately wanted to wake from. Somehow.

  After a while, his skin prickled with something that might have been a chill or a premonition. There was a sound, too. Like a train rumbling far away, which could not possibly be on an island with no railway.

  He ignored it, but it continued to permeate his awareness. He tried to drown it out with memories of the last time he had skimmed these waters with Ana in their borrowed sailboat. When he closed his eyes, he could see again the sunlight glittering on the sapphire swells. Everything about that strange, glorious day had been tinted in technicolor brilliance and laced with rampant emotions. Every sound, every touch, had been a symphony of life. But had all that and his mysterious illness really been the beginning of his end as a mortal? Was he already changing even then?

  The chill coalesced along his spine and grew into painful jabs between his vertebrae. The train came closer. Flames snapped in its thunder, bearing down on him. He could feel its weight like an expanding, concussive shock wave.

  Reluctantly, he raised his head.

  “It is the sun.”

  Blinking, Dominic turned his face just enough to see Kambyses reclining across the cushions. He stared into the sky, hands folded over his stomach, and appeared to have been there for hours. His hair hung in a satin sheet that pooled on the teak. He had dispensed with the cloak, revealing simple black slacks and a tunic that showed a vee of white skin down the middle of his chest.

  Dominic shivered. His voice was like sand in his throat. “What is?”

  “The apprehension you feel. The pressure building around you. The soun
d you hear. It is the sun coming closer.” Kambyses’s soft staccato French was as eccentric as his attire.

  “The sun,” Dominic said, incredulous. “Why the fuck would I hear the sun?” But he already knew. He had felt the same thing every morning since becoming this monstrosity.

  “The sun will kill you,” Kambyses said flatly.

  “What a magnificent idea,” Dominic countered even as he had to brace himself to keep from running for cover. Panic simmered beneath his skin. Maybe if he resisted this instinct, maybe if he saw the sun rise over St. Barth again, he would wake up. The nightmare would end. One way or another.

  A trace of amusement curved Kambyses’s wide mouth. Standing, he beckoned Dominic to follow him before walking away.

  Dominic fought to stay where he was so he could see for himself what the sun might do for or to him. He lost the battle not even a minute later when he tried to face east where the sky was beginning to gray over shadowy hills dotted with the lights of scattered homes. Instead of the pleasure and anticipation of a new day, he felt vulnerable and exposed.

  “Merde,” he spat, deciding this was not a struggle he was prepared to have right now. Shoulders hunched around his ears, he joined Kambyses, who held open a door for him. The moment it clicked shut behind them, the panic ebbed to a tolerable level.

  Kambyses shepherded him through a tiny lobby area festooned with richly oiled cherry wood panels on the walls and a fine oriental rug on a gleaming parquet floor. Dim wall sconces lit the way down a stairway guarded by the alabaster busts of what looked to be young men of ancient times.

  As yachts went, this one was as opulent as they came, but also far more unusual. Dominic had visited a fair number of floating palaces. They tended to be outfitted in either nautical or hyper-modern themes, either lovingly worn or newly retrofitted. This vessel, however, seemed to exist in a world of its own in more ways than its black hull would suggest.

  Peering over his shoulder, Kambyses caught Dominic’s careful scrutiny. “The sea is my soul. And this vessel is my home.” He opened a door into a small but comfortably appointed cabin. “Now she is your home, too.”

  “Never,” Dominic muttered, but couldn’t deny the relief stealing over him at sight of this tiny, dark space with the blacked-out porthole. Without consciously deciding to, he slid onto the bunk, his limbs filling with lead.

  “Forever,” Kambyses whispered. But Dominic no longer had the strength to argue.

  Consciousness returned to him in stages as a yawning emptiness. His insides caved in with the hunger that gripped him before he remembered himself as an individual, to say nothing of his altered circumstances. They hadn’t changed, those circumstances. The nightmare still had him in its talons, but he refused to give in to it, refused to run out of the cabin and slash the first vein he saw. They wouldn’t let him anyway, he realized when he heard the crisp, alien heartbeat of Silence approach in the hall outside. Running out the door would send him straight into her arms.

  Dominic’s hand shook as he brushed the knuckles over his mouth. I am not this thing. I cannot be this thing. I will not be this thing.

  As he would any other normal morning after getting up, he made his way into the cabin’s bathroom, which was not elaborate but clean and practical. His attempts to use the head yielded no results. Not even a drop. His member was a pale sausage in his chalky hands.

  He stepped into the shower, then dialed the water to steam. Finally, the stinging heat felt familiar. Eyes closed, he could imagine himself back in his own shower, could almost see the sun stream through the window and sparkle in droplets sliding down the glass door.

  Could almost forget the emptiness churning in his gut.

  Many minutes later, he returned to the reality of a cramped crew bathroom, toweled off haphazardly, and pulled a comb through his hair. Earlier, he had avoided the mirror. Now it was fogged and only showed a blob of motion. Relief seized him before he understood why. One of the few things he recalled about vampires was that they didn’t reflect in mirrors.

  “This isn’t real.” He swiped at the glass, eager now. “This is not real!”

  What stared from the cleared spot made him recoil. These were not the warm, gold-flecked hazel eyes he had inherited from his father. These eyes were black with pupils dilated to astonishing proportions. Only a hint of white remained around the edges of the tar pits his eyeballs had become.

  And then, there was the rest…

  He had always been handsome, irresistibly so, according to most women and several men, including Jérôme, who claimed Dominic reminded him of a graceful panther more often than not.

  But this was something beyond that. Far beyond.

  The high cheekbones, straight nose, and full mouth now appeared to be carved with a fine chisel, all their edges acute and utterly, breathtakingly flawless. No softness remained in his face or anywhere else in his body. His chest and arms, hips and legs, they were all long and lean with bone and muscle—all of it covered in satin-smooth skin bleached of all traces of sunlight. The sprinkling of body hair covering his torso and belly appeared to be drawn on with black ink. In contrast, the recent tattoo on his left shoulder, a tribal style representation of the sun, had faded to a thin shadow.

  The recessed lighting in the room intensified. What color there was became neon bright, and all the contrasts sharpened to razor edges.

  Meeting his eyes in the mirror again, he saw they were now completely black. But that was nowhere near as shocking as the tightness in his mouth. Lifting his upper lip in a snarl, he watched his canine teeth elongate, sliding into prominence with an undeniably erotic pleasure.

  “No,” he whispered. “This can’t be. This isn’t real.” Vampires do not reflect in mirrors!

  Dominic tore open the door with every intention of storming through the cabin, into the hall, and off the boat—in a dinghy this time—when he came face to face with Silence and stopped short. She stood, barring his way, and glanced at a neat pile of folded clothes that had appeared on the bunk in which he had spent the day. And the day was over. That he knew in his bones.

  “Truly? My world has ended, and you want me to get dressed?” His speech was only slightly impeded by the unfamiliar new structure of his mouth.

  She held his gaze, never even glancing at the rest of him, her face impassive. Waiting. He would not get past her, her stance said, even with his enhanced strength.

  With quick, impatient movements, Dominic donned the clothes, feeling his—he cringed—fangs retract. The dark ensemble of slacks and long-sleeved shirt fit more snugly than he liked and reeked of cedar smoke. On the plus side, the clothes did cover most of his ghastly skin.

  Apparently satisfied, Silence opened the door. She waited in the hall until he joined her before leading the way upstairs. In the small, lavishly appointed lobby, Dominic saw her tense even before he noticed the silvery-blue figure leaving the salon. A crewman moved past them, blank-eyed and unconcerned with their presence, rivers of light flowing beneath his tanned skin. The wet sound of his heartbeat sloshed in Dominic’s ears.

  Human.

  The demonic teeth grew in his mouth again before he could shrink back with renewed horror. Bloodlust clawed at his throat.

  Gasping, he squeezed his eyes shut and turned away.

  Silence gripped his elbow, easily maneuvering him through a stately dining room and into an adjoining salon. Kambyses stood in the middle of the room, draped in his drab cloak. A pleased smile curved his mouth. “Excellent, Nico. Excellent.”

  Dominic stalked toward him, fists clenched by his side. “Nothing about any of this is ‘excellent’,” he snarled, almost frightening himself again with the sound of his own voice. Only a dream. A nightmare. He would find the way out. He had to. The alternative was inconceivable.

  “On the contrary. You have been with us so briefly, yet already you are aware. Already you do battle against the hunger. This bodes well.”

  “For what?” He didn’t want to know. Not reall
y. But neither could he afford to dismiss any information that might help him get out of this mind-boggling insanity.

  Kambyses’s smile melted a little wider, and his deep brown eyes narrowed in speculation. “Perhaps nothing. Perhaps…” He shrugged. “There is much time for you to discover these things. No need to rush.” The hand he placed on Dominic’s shoulder was by far too familiar. “For now, there is little you need to concern yourself with.”

  “Such as how to undo what you have done to me,” Dominic snapped, stepping away from the uninvited touch. “That is my only concern.”

  Kambyses dropped his hand and continued as though Dominic hadn’t spoken. “We have only one natural enemy, the sun. Staying out of its reach and that of its lesser child—fire—is the only inviolable law governing our existence. Beyond that, we have but one other mandate.”

  He pinned Dominic with his gaze, which was now blackening the way Dominic had witnessed his own blacken in the mirror. A chill reverberated through his flesh with the demon’s next words and took root in the marrow of his bones. “Those who are not like us must never know of us. To keep our secret, there is no price too high. No price at all.”

  With Silence at the helm, Kambyses took Dominic to shore where the creature watched Dominic with far more interest than he did the people who were not supposed to know about them. Dominic’s head spun with the sights and sounds and smells assailing his supernaturally heightened senses. So much life pulsed in the air, coalescing into brilliant, human-shaped beacons, each crying out for his attention. That new thing inside him writhed in a frenzy of need to consume that life. All of it.

  But that life was blood, and the horror of what he craved to do—what he had done!—allowed him the thinnest margin of control. He would not give in. He would not free this thing trapped in his rib cage. He would not be this thing.

  But he wanted to. More with every heartbeat drumming against his skull.

  Dominic doubled over, clutching his head. “Make it stop,” he hissed. “Make it stop.”