Eternal Reign

by Melody Johnson

  “That’s exactly what I’m asking you to do now. If you fail, Jillian won’t come after just me. New York City as we know it will be devastated. Vampires will be exposed. People will need someone who knows what the hell’s going on and who can anchor them in the truth. I can be that person.”

  Dominic was quiet for a long moment.

  I bit my lip.

  “Allowing you to keep your memory puts you at risk, but it also puts me and my coven at risk,” Dominic finally said.

  “That’s typical!” I snapped, exasperated. “As usual, your coven comes first, even before common sense. This was never my choice at all, was it?”

  “Cassidy, please—”

  “No! If you think I’m going to agree to let you wipe my memory for the benefit of the coven, you’ve lost your mind. I’m not letting you off the hook so you can feel better about mind-raping me. I’m not agreeing to this. I’m not your martyr!”

  Dominic’s face tightened. “If you would shut up and listen—”

  “Screw you,” I snapped.

  Dominic was suddenly on top of me, his hands gripping my shoulders, his body pressing across my body, his face in my face. “I’m not going to wipe your memory!”

  I blinked up at him. Squished into the hammock from the crushing weight of his body, I could barely breathe, let alone think. “Oh,” I murmured. “But you said—”

  “I said for you to shut up and listen.” His voice was a growl, and I could feel the hard proof of his anger and excitement against my hip. He was a vampire, and he was dangerous—there was no denying the facts of his existence—but in many ways he was still very much a man. Lately, he seemed determined to remind me of that fact, too.

  I shut my mouth.

  “Are you listening now?”

  I nodded.

  “Allowing you to keep your memory compromises the security of me and my coven, so I need you to promise me that you will keep our secret. Promise me that you will not expose our existence before Jillian does, that you will only acknowledge our existence after I’m gone, after she makes vampires a known threat to humanity.”

  I glared at him. It was impossible to press an advantage from my prone position beneath him, but I glared anyway. “I don’t want to expose your existence,” I said, “but if your existence is going to be exposed anyway, why can’t I—”

  He put up a hand. “You don’t want to be out-scooped. I understand, but this isn’t your career on the line. It’s your life.”

  “My career is my life,” I grumbled.

  “Not anymore. To survive, you need Jillian to take the fall for exposing us.”

  “Why? What’s the harm in writing my article if she’s going to expose you anyway?”

  “It matters; when the Day Reapers come, and believe me they will come, they will come for her and not you.”

  I closed my mouth. I hadn’t considered the Day Reapers. Dominic spoke of them like boogeymen in the shadows, wielding justice and order like swords, but I’d never experienced their wrath. Based on what I’d heard about the horror of Dominic’s personal experiences with them, I wanted to keep it that way. The Day Reapers were members of the Council, the governing body who ruled the Masters ruling their covens. Their law was final and breaking that law a death sentence. According to my conversations with Walker when he was still willing to share the vast depths of his vampire knowledge and experience, a night blood transforms into a vampire in three days, but on rare occasions when the transformation takes longer, a Day Reaper is born. They are more powerful, more adept at mind control, and have heightened senses and more abilities than other vampires—including the ability to tolerate sunlight—making them the perfect judges, juries and executioners of vampire-kind.

  “Promise me,” he insisted.

  I sighed. “I promise.”

  He opened his mouth.

  “I promise by the certainty of time that I will not expose the existence of vampires before Jillian,” I clarified. “I promise to keep your secret unless it’s already exposed.”

  Dominic smiled.

  “What’s another bond here and there when we’re already linked for life, right?”

  “Right.” He eased his grip on my shoulders and lay next to me the way he’d intended from the start. “Kiss me before I leave.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Is that a request or a command?”

  “If I’d commanded you, your lips would already be pressed against mine instead of arguing with me, would they not?”

  I pursed my lips.

  “Almost, but not quite. You need more of a pucker.”

  I smacked his shoulder. “And why in the world would I do that?”

  “I want to say good-bye. I need to make other arrangements to secure my standing in the coven since my original plan has failed me, and I need a token of courage to give me strength.”

  “That’s a reason why you should kiss me, not why I should kiss you.”

  Dominic raised an eyebrow. “I should kiss you because I ache for you.” He pressed against me again, as if I wasn’t already perfectly clear on the part of his anatomy that was aching.

  I nudged him away with my shoulder. “If it’s just physical satisfaction you’re looking for, I’ll pass.”

  Dominic groaned and flopped back on the hammock to gaze at the sky. “You’re insufferable. What about allowing you to keep your memory is just physical satisfaction?”

  I rolled my eyes. “If you’re looking for a thank-you for allowing me to keep something I already have the right to keep, then fine. Thank you,” I said snottily.

  “Wiping your memory was never truly an option. I just needed to ensure that you’d considered all possibilities. That we were, as you say, on the same damn page.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. He really did listen to me when I spoke. “And why is wiping my memory not an option? Not that I want to encourage you, but it’s the option I’d thought you’d prefer.”

  “If I wiped your memory of vampires, I’d be wiping your memory of my existence. Of everything I can and can’t bear, everything I’d do for the bigger picture and for my coven, I could never do that.”

  I stared at him, trying to determine the truth in his words.

  He gave me a long look. “I can’t bear that you forget my name on command. I can’t imagine you forgetting me entirely.” He made a strange noise in the back of his throat that clogged my own. “It’s unthinkable.”

  I touched the scar on his chin and urged his face toward mine. He looked at me, wary now that I’d pissed him off, but still willing.

  “I’m sorry that I can’t help you on the Leveling. I really am. And I’m grateful that you’re allowing me to keep my memory, that you’re choosing me over your coven. I understand how big that is.”

  He nodded.

  “But you and I, whatever this is between us, is wrong. I’m human, and you’re—”

  “And I’m a monster,” he interrupted bitterly.

  “And you’re a vampire,” I said firmly.

  “It’s just a kiss.”

  I laughed. “With you, it’s never just anything.”

  His focus honed on my lips, and my laugh died at the seriousness of his expression. I wanted him. God help me—vampire or not, monster or not—I wanted to kiss him.

  “Tell me you don’t want to kiss me,” he demanded.

  “Stop reading my thoughts,” I snapped.

  “I’m not. I’m reading your expression. Say it,” he urged.

  I shook my head. “I want to kiss you, damn it. But that’s not the point—”

  “That’s exactly the point,” he growled. Taking my acknowledgment as permission, he kissed me.

  And damn me, I kissed him back.

  His lips pressed hard against mine—longing, searching, needing—and I moved my lips over his, matching his need and passion with my own. I licked a smooth line over his bottom lip, over the jagged pull of his scar. Like a shark drawn to the source of a blood trail, he growled at that sen
sitive lick and feasted on my mouth. He stroked my tongue with his tongue, sucked my bottom lip into his mouth, and bit it between his flat front teeth.

  I could tell he was being careful. His fangs were lethal, and if he wasn’t careful, he could tear my mouth apart as easily as kiss it. But I didn’t want careful. I wanted him as lost and drowning as I felt.

  I bit him back.

  I slanted my mouth over his, scraped his lip between my teeth, and pulled him closer. Without his heightened vampire senses clouding my perception, I could feel Dominic’s kiss for exactly what it was, not the snapping warmth of a hearth or the bursting orange glow of our colliding auras or the millions of other indescribable sights, scents, tastes, textures, and sounds of a kiss while on his blood. That kiss had been like a dream: I remembered it happening, but even in the moment while it happened, nothing about it seemed real. Nothing about kissing Dominic or the feelings he made me feel had made tangible, lucid sense.

  Without the heightened senses, as his hand cupped the back of my neck, as he tilted my head to gain better access, and as he growled into my mouth, I knew the truth: the reality of his kiss was better than the dream. I wanted more.

  I wanted him.

  He moved away from my lips to nip a line down the side of my neck. I tried to breathe, to think, to speak, but the chill of his breath against the hollow of my shoulder shot goose bumps down my side, and all I could do was feel. I scraped my nails down his back.

  He growled again, like the revving purr of a ’69 Cobra Jet. He was the perfect combination of power and muscle and badass design that even someone like me, who knew next to nothing about cars beyond their look and feel, knew on sight that I wanted to drive. This close, with nothing, not even air, between us, I felt the vibration of his growl from my neck to jawline to the roots of my teeth.

  His hand still cupped the back of my neck, controlling and dominant as always, but his other hand shifted gears, stealing slowly under my shirt. I felt his long fingers and the calluses on his palm scrape a long, hot line along my side and over my stomach. I knew where that hand was navigating as it drove fractionally higher. I tried to ignore the rush of my heart as it pounded panic in a cold wash over Dominic’s heat, but the panic was undeniable.

  Dominic was not Adam, I reminded myself. In every way possible for two men to be dissimilar, Dominic and my ex-boyfriend were two completely different people. Dominic was more animal than man. Where he was wild and dangerous, Adam had been sensitive, sweet, caring, and harmless, yet Adam had hurt me in ways I’d never thought possible. The deepest wounds never heal—you just learn to live with them—but this one wound, the hole Adam had left in my heart with his absence, was the one I still hadn’t learned to live with.

  Dominic’s hand cupped my breast.

  I tore my lips from his mouth, panting.

  “Never just a kiss,” I murmured lightly.

  Dominic wasn’t fooled. I could see by the disappointment and concern battling in his eyes that he knew my stopping him again was more pain than modesty, but unlike Adam, he didn’t pin me down with accusations like knives.

  “Did I hurt you?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  I opened my mouth to automatically deny there was anything to talk about, but the penetrating steadiness in his stare stopped me. He wasn’t turning away from me. When I was ready, we could face the pain together.

  I shook my head again. “Not yet.”

  “All right,” he said. He touched a lock of hair that had sprung wildly out of place in our frenzy and smoothed it down behind my ear. His thumb grazed the side of my cheek, and the Adam-shaped hole in my heart, the promises and hopes and future I’d let die along with my parents, ached.

  “Then before I bid you good night, Cassidy DiRocco . . .” he murmured, but the soft comfort of his tone couldn’t mask the command in his words. My mind sang like a tuning fork in response to his voice, and I groaned.

  “No, just this once, just for tonight, let it go. Please,” I pleaded. “We were having a moment. Why ruin a perfectly good moment?”

  “You will forget my name,” he commanded.

  And just like that, immediately and unforgivably, his name disappeared from my mind.

  I turned away from him, feeling useless and weak and angry—wildly, burningly angry—and, if I was honest, disappointed in myself.

  He let me roll out of the hammock. I was under no illusion that I’d escaped him. He let me leave.

  “Well?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Nothing. Once again, it’s like empty space in my mind where your name used to be.”

  He sighed. The pain he exuded from that expulsion of breath was almost enough to let me forgive him. Almost.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and in one graceful move, he stood from the hammock to face me.

  I crossed my arms. “Me too.”

  “Good night, Cassidy.”

  “Good night,” I said shortly, my voice pinched. My mind struggled and failed to find his name in the gray matter of my brain.

  And as part of the smoke-and-mirror games he could play on my mind, I blinked, and Dominic vanished into the night. The only proof of his presence from one moment to the next was the slight swing of the hammock and the tingling formation of a hickey on the side of my neck.

  Chapter 3

  Apparently, my conversation hadn’t classified as a “quickie.” Meredith was gone when I returned to the kitchen, the only proof of her presence the empty sushi container on the counter.

  I picked up my phone to check the time—our conversation had only been twenty minutes, thirty tops considering the kissing—and stared at the six missed calls and four voice mails from Carter.

  “Crap, crap, crap,” I said in a panicked litany. “What the hell’s going on?”

  I pounded the voice mail icon and listened to Carter’s impatient voice blast me from the office. “You’d better not be picking up your phone, DiRocco, because you are already at this crime scene. Meredith assures me, as she always does, that you are with her, but I know from her previous assurances that isn’t always the case. I need you at the corner of East 56th Street and Avenue D in Brooklyn at Harry Maze Playground, and I need you there yesterday. The police are being tight-lipped on this scene, but you and I both know who can squeeze out a sentence or two even if they aren’t releasing an official statement. Get it done, DiRocco. I fell back in love with you after that piece on crime fluctuation, but ignoring my calls on the first major murder we’ve had this week is not going to keep you in my good graces. Not at all!”

  I rolled my eyes at Carter’s melodramatic tone and swiped my leather satchel off the counter on my way out.

  Why hadn’t Meredith interrupted my conversation with the Master vampire? I thought, angry with Meredith for ditching me on a case and with myself for having to refer to him as “Master vampire” even in my own thoughts.

  I could still feel the churning ache and fireworks of kissing him, but I couldn’t for the life of me find the consonants and vowels to form his name. I ground my teeth in frustration.

  “I’m going out to a crime scene. Duty calls,” I shouted through the closed bathroom door in Nathan’s direction.

  He didn’t respond, but I hadn’t expected him to.

  If a certain Master vampire could find the patience to wait out my wounds, I could find the patience to wait out Nathan’s. Although, to be fair, patience had never been my strong suit.

  Just as I reached the front door, someone knocked.

  Relief washed over me, and I grinned as I turned the knob. “I knew you wouldn’t leave without me, Meredith. If you’re trying to teach me a lesson on quickies, it worked.”

  I swung the door open, but the skeletal, fanged, twitchy woman standing outside the threshold of my apartment was decidedly not Meredith.

  “Ronnie?” I asked, carefully. Hopefully, I didn’t look as horrified as I felt.

  The first
time I’d made Ronnie Carmichael’s acquaintance, I’d felt a twinge of jealousy. She’d welcomed Walker home after he’d picked me up from the bus terminal, and the gesture had been mostly platonic—she’d waited for us on the porch in an oversized, green sweatshirt, boot-cut jeans, and fuzzy green socks—but it wasn’t the casual clothes, warm hazel eyes, or wide, bright smile that had made my heart hurt. It was the warmth in Walker’s responding smile that had churned my stomach.

  Despite the smile, Walker had never noticed how much Ronnie cared for him; he’d missed a lot of things. In the fifteen years they’d lived together, she hadn’t left the house for fear of vampires. She was pale from hiding in the house, and thin, either naturally or from depression—too thin considering the amount of banana nut pancakes she’d made every day for everyone else. She’d been scared of her own shadow, even tucked safe and sound inside Walker’s house, and, just looking at her, I’d been torn between smacking her and feeding her. I remember thinking that evening on Walker’s porch, when she’d been healthy and human, that her pale skin and sharp features reminded me of fine china, something of high value but easily broken.

  Now she was in pieces.

  Her auburn hair, which once fell thick and shiny in soft waves, was thin and hung from her scalp like tinsel. I’d thought her thin before, but now she was skeletal. Her features were no longer sharp; they were gaunt. Her protruding bones formed hollows beneath her cheeks, and her thin, purple lips pulled tight against teeth that looked too big for her mouth. Her eyeteeth were pointed into delicate fangs, but they couldn’t with any true comparison compete with Dominic’s fangs. They were pointed and sharp enough to break skin, but I didn’t tremble at the sight of her. She was the one trembling. Even as a predator, Ronnie was still a victim, and God help me, I still wanted to feed her.

  Unfortunately, I’d learned my lesson the hard way when it came to letting Ronnie drink from me. I wouldn’t be making that mistake again anytime soon.

  Ronnie Carmichael was a vampire.

  That sentence still didn’t make sense to me. Even staring at her physically in front of me, emaciated and fanged and trembling, it didn’t make sense. She’d lived with Walker, a vampire hunter, and somehow, even hiding inside Walker’s anti-vampire fortress, she’d been attacked and transformed into the very creature she feared most.