Dark Child of Forever
Page 1
Table of Contents
DARK CHILD OF FOREVER
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
DARK CHILD OF FOREVER
Dark Destinies, Book Three
S.K. RYDER
SOUL MATE PUBLISHING
New York
DARK CHILD OF FOREVER
Copyright©2018
S.K. RYDER
Cover Design by Fiona Jayde
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, business establishments, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
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Published in the United States of America by
Soul Mate Publishing
P.O. Box 24
Macedon, New York, 14502
ISBN: 978-1-68291-684-1
www.SoulMatePublishing.com
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Books by S.K. Ryder
Dark Destinies Series
Dark Heart of the Sun
Dark Lord of the Night
Dark Child of Forever
To Toni.
Soul sister and master of the unexpected.
Acknowledgments
As always, a big, big thank you to my family for their continued support and encouragement. Without you, there would be no me.
Heaps of thanks also go to:
Editor Caroline Tolley, who saved this book from its author’s more dubious whims and in the process made it so much better.
First reader Máirín Fisher-Fleming, who was honest enough to say “No!” after reading the first draft.
Queens among fans, Lorraine and Toni, who have provided insights into these characters even I didn’t see coming.
All the writers who have encouraged and inspired me over the years, and all the readers who are now venturing into my world. You are the reason this book exists.
Bill and Rosie for providing the inspiration for Brinkley and being some of the best neighbors anyone could ask for.
Prologue
Two years ago . . .
Most nights and most places those who met the Lord of Night never saw him. To those who knew him, the ability to erase himself from the awareness of the people around him was Dominic Marchant’s most disquieting talent. Even after three months, this skill disoriented him because it was so instinctive that he often rendered himself virtually invisible by accident. All it took was a thought of solitude and it was done.
Only Cassidy was immune. Being bound to her human soul as he was, she was always aware of him, which was as it should be. She was his conscience and his humanity.
At the moment she was also more than fifty miles away. Yet, Dominic still heard her whisper encouragement through the intimate telepathic bond they shared despite the hum thrumming along his nerves. Though he had learned to tune it out, that sensation had been with him since the night he became the center of the dark web that bound together all the blood-drinkers in existence. But these legions of vampires were an enormous amorphous whole to him, like a whirling swarm of ghosts. They didn’t become concrete individuals in his awareness until Cassidy helped him track them down or he re-sired them in a ritual exchange of blood.
Presently, one of these ghosts slipped over the locked entry gate at the mouth of the pier on which Dominic stood. He saw the ghost, too, a single bright white blood-drinker aura standing there just out of cover. The visitor looked around, unsure.
“I am here,” Dominic said, letting the salty wind carry his words to the supernatural ears.
The other’s head swiveled toward him.
Dominic shifted his attitude from stealth to welcome. On the pier’s far end, his guest froze, staring, no doubt questioning his own eyes. Or fearing for his immortal life. Dominic couldn’t blame him. If someone had barged into his thoughts and talked to him from out of nowhere, he, too, would have run blindly into the night. But when even his supernatural legs gave out, the strange blood-drinker began asking questions, and Dominic suggested that they meet. That had been two nights ago.
Two nights for a solitary vampire to question his sanity, to wonder if he would find anything or anyone at all at the end of the Lake Worth pier at one in the morning. And now, not only had he found someone, that someone appeared to melt out of the ocean mist.
Dominic turned to gaze over the sea heaving with wind-driven swells. A bright patch in the thin cloud cover showed where the moon hid. The faint light shimmered on the rippling water.
Emboldened, the other vampire approached, his footfall on the wood planks soft and measured. He didn’t speak until his steps had fallen silent for well over a minute.
“Are you the one I heard?” A cultured male voice. British. Dubious.
Dominic peered over his shoulder. “Oui. I am that one.”
The blood-drinker stood about thirty feet away, out of immediate reach, hands out by his side, ready to run and disappear in an instant. Dominic heard him inhale to take his measure, and he waited for his visitor to draw a conclusion from the crisp scent that marked him as a youngling vampire and the golden glow deep in his dark eyes that marked him as something else entirely.
At length, there was an apologetic clearing of the throat. “You . . . are not what I expected.”
“What did you expect?” Dominic turned to face him and did his best to appear as non-threatening as possible in his ominous black motorcycle leathers and heavy boots. The wind fingered his hair, and he casually gathered most of the jet-black mane in his nape and confined it with the leath
er string that circled his wrist. The unruly wave that forever fell across his forehead, however, refused to be tamed.
The other vampire was dressed in jeans and a tucked-in, dark button-down shirt. He was tall, but slender, almost delicate, his own ash-blond hair neatly groomed and only slightly disheveled in the breeze. Except for his pale skin, he could have passed as a gangly young man of any era. But what Dominic could discern of his scent told him that this one’s birth to darkness was well over a century in the past.
“Not a Frenchman, I don’t think.”
Dominic laughed with delight. Instead of terror or attack, this blood-drinker opted for diplomacy and humor. “I like you, Englishman. What is your name?”
“Aubrey Wainwright.” His shoulders lost some of their tension.
“And I am Dominic Marchant.” With a small tilt of his head, he added “Lord of Night.” The title still felt pretentious falling off his tongue to a stranger.
“Indeed.”
“I was sired by Kambyses. You may know the name?”
“I have heard legends surrounding that name, yes. They say he is the first vampire.”
“Was,” Dominic corrected. “After five-thousand years he was weary of the darkness.” And what darkness there had been in that soul. The ancient Greek had teetered on the brink of madness, and all his children along with him. “Three months ago he chose me as his heir. When he died, the essence of what animates us was transferred to me.”
Aubrey stared at Dominic, at the ethereal luminosity in the hyper-dilated pupils like the reflected light in the eyes of an animal. His own were wide, bottomless wells of darkness. “Interesting. So this gives you the power to intrude into the heads of the unsuspecting?”
“Under the right circumstances.” Dominic sobered and separated himself from the railing. Aubrey did not retreat. “Every blood-drinker life is bound to mine the way every youngling’s life is bound to his or her sire. On some level I am aware of them all, but they are not aware of me.”
“Oh. I’m most definitely aware of you,” Aubrey said faintly.
“Do you believe what I say?”
Small hesitation. Nod.
Dominic waited. Were he a breathing creature, he might have held his breath. It was one thing to have Serge, his closest blood-drinker friend accept him as the Lord of Night and submit to him, quite another for a complete stranger to do the same. And what if he didn’t? Would Dominic have it in him to do what was required?
“So. What is it you wish of me?” Aubrey said. His hands traveled to the pockets of his jeans. “Why have you asked me here?”
“To answer your questions, of course. As for what I wish of you . . . I wish for you to submit to me.”
Amusement tucked at Aubrey’s mouth. “If you are the lord of us all, have I not done so already?”
“No, not yet. Your life may be linked to mine, but your vampire beast does not know me yet.” He let this truth sink in. “The hunger you have to be known and feared, to step out of the shadows when you feed—the thing that drives you to kill—that is Kambyses in your heart. That is his legacy. His madness.”
“I have resisted the urge to take lives for decades.”
Dominic leaned forward. “But it never leaves you, does it?”
“No,” Aubrey whispered. “Has it left you?”
“I hunger for love,” Dominic replied just as quietly. “When I feed, I am loved. And I can have so much of this that the need to take it all diminishes to nothing.”
The expression in the narrow face hovered somewhere between wonder and incredulity. The twin flames in Dominic’s eyes mirrored in Aubrey’s obsidian stare. “And . . . if I submit to you?”
“The darkness will leave your heart.” And if he didn’t submit . . .
“Then I submit.” A mere breath of a statement. Slowly he tilted his head to one side, exposing his jugular in an invitation he may well never have issued before. More than an offer of blood and submission, it was the offer of his mind, his memories, his very life, a surrender of all control. It was not something done lightly, and Dominic took care to accept with all the respect due his new subject as he gathered him in his arms and pierced the artery.
Aubrey’s blood was robust and vibrant with the sweetness of spring, full of warm grass and dewy blooms. When the serum in Dominic’s bite found Aubrey’s brain, his mind was just as resonant with a century and a half of memories. He was a man of the Victorian age, a gentleman and a trained barrister in his queen’s service, renowned for his diplomatic skill, and taken by a vampire while on a mission to the continent. After a century of guilt and torment, he had turned his back on his sire, convinced that he was fit for no company but his own.
You are fit for me, Dominic spoke into his mind, compassion swelling his heart.
Aubrey’s arms shook as they came around him, and his hands fisted into Dominic’s leather jacket.
Long after he had stopped feeding on the blood, Dominic still held him, feeding on Aubrey’s roiling emotions, his own thoughts in turmoil. How many like Aubrey were out there? How many skulking the shadows, fighting to live by a moral code when everything in their being railed against it? How many were as strong as Aubrey and waited for Dominic to save them?
And could he save the ones who had succumbed completely?
“I have a gift for you,” Dominic murmured when Aubrey at last loosened his grip on him. Baring his left wrist, he ran the nail of his right thumb deep into his flesh. Blood welled, dark and glistening as he held the wound out to Aubrey. This was where the magic happened. Or at least he hoped it would. He had re-sired only one other, Serge.
Aubrey gripped Dominic’s hand and ran his tongue over the injury just before it sealed again. The blood wasn’t much and nowhere near as volatile as Kambyses’s had been, but it was enough. It found the serum in Aubrey’s veins and ignited into a genetic recoding that brought him in tune with the new Lord of Night.
He gasped at the sensation of fire flashing through his body. He held on to Dominic’s hand, struggling to keep his feet, eyes screwed shut. A long moan slipped past the bloodstained lips, and Dominic knew that Aubrey Wainwright would never again be part of an amorphous gathering of ghosts. The Victorian gentleman blood-drinker was becoming a distinct entity of light in Dominic’s heart.
“I feel it leaving,” Aubrey said, awed. “The darkness. It’s leaving.” When he opened his eyes, small flames of gold flickered in their depths. Moment to moment they grew until they blazed in the night.
Dominic didn’t trust his own voice. So he only grinned and planted a kiss on Aubrey’s forehead. Welcome, mon ami. Welcome to my kingdom.
Chapter 1
The Gift
Present day . . .
The house’s landline rang so rarely that Cassidy Chandler associated the sound with nothing good. Mrs. Havashand, she guessed, sitting back in her leather executive chair and stretching stiff shoulders. No doubt Brinkley had left more corpses in her backyard. It was tempting to let the call go to voicemail, but a glance at the caller ID made her grab the extension.
“Good afternoon, ma’am,” said the efficient male voice on the other end. “This is the front gate. There’s a Jackson Striker here to see you, but we don’t have him on our list.”
She didn’t respond right away, her thoughts paused. Her eyes turned to the view beyond the second-floor window, which overlooked an expansive backyard sloping down to the Intracoastal. She couldn’t decide if it was being called ‘ma’am’ that threw her off or just the fact she even lived in a neighborhood that had a security gate staffed with round-the-clock armed guards. The maintenance crew and maid service had a permanent pass. So few others visited during the day, she tended to forget. And at night . . . well, at night none of that mattered.
“Ma’am?”
She sucked in
a breath. “Yes, I’m here.”
“Shall we let him through?”
Cassidy swiveled the chair in the direction of the storm bunker tucked away downstairs at the center of the house. Windowless, made of steel-reinforced, poured concrete, and secured with a door worthy of a bank vault, nothing short of dynamite would dent it.
“Is he alone?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Okay. Let him through.”
“Very well, ma’am.”
She returned the receiver to its cradle. The clock on the computer monitor had the time an hour before sunset. If Jackson had reverted to his nefarious ways, he was cutting it damn close. That his asshole uncle wasn’t with him, however, did rule out the possibility of dynamite.
Also, this was as good an excuse as any to log off the V-zette’s admin page. Four hours of moderating and organizing the hyper-fast postings of a chatty international vampire community was about all she could take for one day anyway.
After changing out of her frumpy leisure outfit into something more suitable for company, she headed for the foyer. Her low heels clacked and echoed in the vast space as she moved down the stairs. Enormous glass walls bracketed the two-story foyer at both ends, one side overlooking the infinity pool and dock out back, the other surrounding the massive double-door entry which had been hammered in a starburst design. The sun was low enough to pour through the front windows and flood the entire area in a warm glow. In the beams, dust motes danced on the breeze swirling in through the open sliders.
At the foot of the stairs, she paused to absorb the peaceful moment and mentally record it for later when she would share it with the love of her life. This was her favorite room in the house at her favorite time of day and year. Not long now, and Florida’s sticky summer would seize hold again, relegating open doors and fresh air to distant memories.