Dark Awakening

by Ryder, S. K.

  But he was. At least for tonight. A thorough search of the vessel turned up nothing. The compelled crew saw nothing, heard nothing, said even less than nothing. Yet, Kambyses had to be aboard. Had to! Either that or Dominic had imagined everything that had happened to him these past few weeks. Tempting as that explanation was, he knew better. This was another lesson for him to absorb. Silence may have been the catalyst of his changed circumstances, but she was not the architect. She had been the pawn of a creature far more powerful than he had guessed. From the beginning, she had understood where it would end.

  This way is easier.

  “Sale putain,” he cursed while he carried her head and most of her torso to the front as ordered, caring not at all where and how much gore he trailed on the spotless teak decks. After retrieving the legs as well, he aligned the three pieces to make her appear to be resting in the center of the helipad. “If you had told me, we could have had a chance together.”

  He sat by her and cleaned his swords, waiting for sunrise. Again, he tried to stay out in the open. Again, the beast denied him.

  The following evening, he woke back in his tiny cabin. He took his time in the shower, scrubbing away a crust of salt and blood while doing his best to ignore the hunger caving in his middle.

  He couldn’t do it. He had no choice. The beast demanded blood, and for that, Dominic needed Kambyses. He found him at the bow, standing over the spot where Silence had lain. Her black clothes were still there, half-buried in a shapeless pile of gray dust.

  No. Not dust.

  Dominic crouched and ran his fingers through the substance. Fine and glittery. Ash.

  A chill marched up his arms and met between his shoulder blades.

  “She was my companion for five years,” Kambyses said. “Now that honor belongs to you.”

  “Honor?” Dominic repeated, his tone as hollow as his insides. “Is it truly?”

  Kambyses made no reply. Dominic could feel the intense eyes drill holes into his skull, so he turned his head to meet them directly. “Tell me, old man, what honored privilege does her murder earn me? Will you finally tell me why you brought me into this world? And don’t deny it. I know better now,” he added quickly, rising to his full height. “I know this is all your doing. Every bit of it.”

  Amusement blossomed in the dark gaze, which Dominic now imagined to crackle with a live current of power.

  “Can you undo this? Is there a way? I will do anything. Pay any price.”

  “You should be more careful what you agree to, young one,” Kambyses murmured, pleasure warming his resonant voice. Softly, he added, “You are not ready. But perhaps…soon.”

  “What does that mean? Ready for what?”

  But Kambyses was done engaging. His face emptying, he made his way toward the stern and the waiting dinghy. Dominic was too hungry to resist following. Maybe after he had tapped a vein or four, he could think straight again, resume his arguments, make decisions.

  Or maybe, in the very act of following Kambyses, he had already made the only decision there was.

  7

  The Youngling

  Dominic followed Kambyses to shore that night and each one thereafter. Every night, he boiled with the same questions. Every night, they went unanswered.

  Kambyses took him to feed with the distracted dedication humans had in taking their dogs for a walk to relieve themselves. And Dominic did relieve himself. He relieved his guilt the moment he got his teeth into a neck and lost himself to the blood like a junkie to a high. While he fed, he was at peace, his mind blank of all but the euphoria. When Kambyses pulled him away, it was always too soon, always a moment of profound agony. But afterward, Dominic remembered the prey would live. In that, he took solace.

  Once he was sated, he asked his questions again. These earned him about as much reaction as a yapping dog at the end of a leash. Without fail, when they returned to the yacht, Kambyses shut him up by vanishing into thin air, leaving Dominic to stew.

  During one of their extended stays at an actual dock, he ventured ashore alone for the first time. He got as far as the marina gate. After vaulting over it, he straightened and found himself face to face with Kambyses.

  “Are you so eager to cause more carnage, Nico?”

  Dominic was too surprised to respond. Was this creature truly always near him? Invisible? Watching him? If so, then the distinctive odor was so pervasive Dominic had ceased to notice it.

  With a gesture as if beckoning his dog to follow, Kambyses started forward.

  “I need answers,” Dominic ground out as he complied.

  “You need patience.”

  “How long?”

  “We are immortal. Time has no meaning for us,” Kambyses countered.

  “I don’t want to be—”

  Kambyses spun and raised a hand so fast he appeared to flash in place, his face suddenly hard and thin and undeniably dangerous. “Do not force me to compel patience into you, young one. If you do that, you will be useless to me.”

  Dominic understood the unspoken implication as though he had been slapped in the face with it. He froze like terrified prey in the presence of a predator. There was no doubt that being ‘useless’ to Kambyses was a death sentence. While Dominic considered that reason enough to continue pushing, his damnable sense of self-preservation shut down that self-destructive impulse before it could even fully form.

  Apparently mollified by Dominic’s submissive silence, Kambyses relented. He put an arm around Dominic’s shoulders, exuding fatherly warmth when he steered them toward the town bustling at the end of the dock. “Come, Nico. You are ready to learn more about yourself.”

  For the rest of that night, Dominic learned the skill of compulsion. Kambyses took pains to instruct him on the fine control of his vocal chords needed to create the precise pitch that made mortals susceptible to carefully phrased suggestions. It wasn’t as simple as it sounded, but Dominic, recognizing a useful skill when he saw one, was a model student. His reward consisted of several more plump veins to tap. After each, he practiced his newfound ability to render them ignorant of what he had done. There was something about having been bitten that made them more receptive to his words.

  Even so, this strange ‘power’ needed a confidence he far from felt. When he did accomplish it, the effect startled, even frightened, him. Never had he wanted to persuade anyone with anything more sinister than his own charm. It didn’t take him long to reason that if his feeble attempts could have such effects, Kambyses would be capable of destroying minds with his voice alone. One glance into the crew’s empty eyes confirmed this. Would Dominic be the same if Kambyses ever compelled him into submission?

  No, he wouldn’t be, Dominic realized. He’d be ‘useless’ then. And dead.

  The nights melted into each other, one after the other. Dominic tried to keep track of their number even if he couldn’t keep track of where he was. Every few nights, by some silent whim or decree of her master, Apokryphos moved to another island—flat or volcanic, underdeveloped or a tourist mecca, some with marinas large enough to berth Apokryphos, others with only a beach on which to drop anchor. The only thing they all had in common was human inhabitants.

  None of the islands or the people he fed on held any clues about his situation, and only one brought a sliver of hope. One of his prey knew of a personal plane that would come and go that night, ferrying contraband goods. Seizing the opportunity to escape, Dominic made his way to the tiny jungle airstrip as stealthily as he could—only to find Kambyses waiting for him.

  “Do you read my fucking mind, too?” Dominic fumed as the Cessna heaved off the field without him.

  Kambyses’s sole response had been a distracted, “Should I?”

  Dominic took that to mean his tormentor stayed out of his head. Which made sense, since there was something about the actual act of taking blood that made it possible to read minds, though this was a temporary effect. As far as he recalled, Kambyses had not fed from him since Dominic became
a ‘blood-drinker’—he refused to think of himself as a ‘vampire’. His thoughts were private then, not that this gave him any advantage.

  The night Dominic exited his cabin to find Apokryphos tethered to the same dock it had inhabited for the past four nights, unease crawled over his skin. Except for the weeks spent at St. Barthélemy, the yacht had never remained anywhere this long since he had been conscripted into the ranks of the undead.

  “Becoming sedentary, old man?” Dominic taunted Kambyses when they went ashore. The lack of response did not surprise him. With a dismissive snort, Dominic let it drop and concentrated on not killing anyone. That he continued to be dependent on Kambyses for this irked him beyond measure, and his primary goal right now was to withdraw from a feed before his ornery keeper pried him off. As he had every other night, however, he failed.

  Two nights later, the yacht still hadn’t moved, and Kambyses encouraged him to imbibe more blood than usual. By the eighth or ninth vein, Dominic thought he might have been able to stop on his own if Kambyses had given him another second or two. Or thirty.

  Instead of returning to their lair, Kambyses led the way to the island’s interior. Apprehension mounting, Dominic followed him into a cemetery full of markers made crooked by time, storms, and shifting ground. In the middle of this, tucked into the moon shadow of a massive Poinciana, they stopped.

  “What are we doing here?” Dominic said, feeling obliged to whisper by the ghosts he imagined living among the whitewashed graves.

  Kambyses stared into the distance, gaze unfocused. Silent.

  Dominic cursed under his breath.

  Then he heard dragging steps as someone made their way up the road on unsteady feet. A tall male figure came into view. Only a thin undershirt and a pair of boxers covered his dark-skinned body, which was packed with muscle and glistened with sweat.

  Something about the way the newcomer’s glazed eyes swerved around, searching for and locking on Kambyses, made Dominic shiver with dark foreboding. Every fiber of his being wanted to be wrong about what was happening here. But he wasn’t.

  “You,” the man said, awed. He stumbled forward with renewed energy. When he halted before Kambyses, a frown pinched his broad brow. “I know you,” he said, the island accent thick as syrup.

  “Yes,” Kambyses confirmed, taking him into his arms. “You do.”

  The human sighed as the old monster burrowed into his neck. His face might have been intimidating if not for the raw helplessness in his fluttering chocolate eyes. “Help me,” he moaned. “Help me.”

  When Kambyses was done feeding, the human was barely conscious. Kambyses steadied him before helping the human find a seat on the nearest marker. Softly, he asked, “Are you ready to see the truth?”

  The man nodded, an action that almost made him tumble off his perch with a seeming wave of vertigo.

  Kambyses turned to Dominic. “He will need your blood, Nico.”

  Dominic hesitated, but morbid fascination got the better of him. Unsure, he lifted his wrist. When Kambyses nodded encouragement, he slashed a fang across a vein, and then became mesmerized by the sight of his own blood welling and dripping. Kambyses grabbed his wrist. Pressed it to the human’s mouth with such force Dominic had trouble staying on his feet.

  The man balked. Hard.

  Kambyses held him still with ease, using only one arm around the shoulders while his legs churned in the dirt. When the man stiffened with a wretched, bubbling gasp, Kambyses released Dominic. Though smeared with blood, his wrist was nearly healed.

  Dominic stared at the trembling, moaning male, remembering his own far-too-recent experience. That moment when the real world vanished along with all the pain and confusion—and reason. The unfocused pupils dilated bigger and bigger until they consumed the eyes. Then the man’s body collapsed as if all the muscle beneath his skin melted away. Fangs appeared between his lips.

  The growl that came with them was bestial, ravenous, and hit Dominic between the eyes like a physical blow. He staggered, overwhelmed by emotion and need.

  Blood. He needed blood. He needed it now. Hunger tore at his entrails, shredded them to ribbons, beat them to a pulp.

  Kambyses grabbed him by the forearm with enough force to grind his bones together. “You can master this, Nico,” he commanded.

  Dominic recognized the compulsion. He didn’t fight it. Yes, he desperately needed to master this…this…

  “What is this?” he croaked when he managed to dial down the shrieking desperation several notches.

  “Your blood has joined you to him. But his thoughts will be unschooled for a time. You can block him out.”

  Dominic stared in horror at the living skeleton that now writhed in the dirt between the gravestones, crying out for something it didn’t yet understand.

  A newborn blood-drinker.

  “Why did you do this? Again?”

  “I did not.” Kambyses gently patted Dominic’s face. “You did.”

  Sixteen nights came and went before the monster Dominic had helped create regained a smattering of reason. Sixteen nights of shepherding to shore a growling, snarling skeleton of a man with black marble eyes. Sixteen nights of watching Kambyses restrain him as he tore into the throats of the prey Dominic obtained with his growing skill at compulsion. Sixteen nights of feeling mindless chaos pummel him until he thought he might go mad.

  “Was I like this?” Dominic asked early on with no expectation of an answer.

  Kambyses finished securing the new monster in a special compartment in the yacht’s engine room, then gazed at Dominic thoughtfully. “We were all younglings once. It is the way of us.”

  Dominic, who leaned against a bulkhead with his arms crossed, took advantage of Kambyses’s rare chattiness. “You are stopping him from killing. But you couldn’t do the same for me?”

  “You have a way about you, Nico. Your will is strong.” Kambyses seemed like he might smile before placing his hand against the steel door he had just sealed. “This one…is more predictable.”

  “Meaning what?”

  But Kambyses, done with the night’s chores and with Dominic’s questions, had already vanished.

  “Bâtard!” he shouted, voice ringing off the steel walls.

  A sharp bang from the prison compartment was his only reply.

  If he weren’t so sure of the carnage that would result, he had half a mind to set the ‘youngling’ free. But although he remembered none of it, he was also sure he had been in that state himself. He had come through it.

  And so did this one.

  Dominic sensed the change during the seventeenth night they took the novice ashore to feed. They always went ashore to feed. The week before, he had wondered why they never brought humans to Apokryphos. With a thin grimace, Kambyses informed him that no human who set foot aboard his lair would ever be allowed to leave it, compulsion or not. “They can be far too much trouble if they ever do remember anything.”

  Not that it mattered. No one took any note of them as they prowled the edges of humanity. Whatever Kambyses did to make himself invisible at will obviously cloaked them all when he supervised the youngling’s and Dominic’s meals.

  Despite all his efforts, Dominic still couldn’t disengage on his own. The hunger wasn’t quite so ferocious anymore. He didn’t need quite so many veins to satisfy him. But once he started, the lure of the blood and the mind was too strong. It pulled him under. Every time.

  Emilio. That was his name, the youngling. It was the first glimmer of self-awareness Dominic sensed from him after the third feed of the night. Emilio no more understood his altered condition than Dominic had, but his reaction was quite different. He gazed upon Kambyses as though beholding a god. “You make me like you,” he rasped, his first coherent words in weeks.

  “Welcome, young one,” Kambyses murmured, his pale hand in stark contrast to Emilio’s dusky cheek.

  Dominic waited for the horror to dawn on the youngling, but it never came. Amidst the low, grindin
g hum of the bloodlust, there was only dazzled awe as Emilio explored his world with his heightened senses. “Incredible. This is incredible.”

  Unsure—and mesmerized by the man’s increasingly ordered thoughts streaming movie-like from his mind—Dominic held his tongue. Emilio only saw the wonder and magic, none of the terror.

  At Kambyses’s request when they returned to the yacht, Dominic showed Emilio to the cabin formerly occupied by Silence. The youngling explored critically, took in the neat stack of fresh, dark clothes on the bunk and the tidy built-in cabinets. “No much of a view, is it?” he said, rubbing the back of his short-cropped head with a broad palm.

  Dominic glanced at the blacked-out porthole. “You would not be awake to enjoy it,” he said.

  A frisson of puzzlement from Emilio passed across Dominic’s mind.

  Leaning against the doorframe, he tried to delve into the youngling’s thoughts. Emilio was new to the island where they had found him, having left his family and a troubled past behind in Grenada to take a position with the local police force…

  Dominic’s blood quickened with excitement. This large, capable-looking man was a police officer. Not Interpol perhaps, but someone who would have resources. Someone who could help them escape.

  Emilio turned to him sharply. “Escape?”

  Dominic blinked.

  “You say somethin’ about escape?”

  You can read my mind?

  Emilio’s eyes bugged. “Oh, that crazy.”

  “Very,” Dominic said blandly and visualized putting his head into a lead-lined box, a mental trick that had allowed him to keep the worst of Emilio’s violent emotions at bay. He berated himself for not realizing that if he could read this man’s mind, the reverse might also be true.

  Emilio frowned. “But I don’ hear him. The big guy. Kambyses.”

  “Our jailer keeps his own counsel.”

  “Jailer? You crazy? Look at this place.” He spread his arms wide. His once-pristine white shirt was little more than a stained rag on his massive frame. “This is no like any jail I seen.”