by S. K. Ryder
A polite bonging drew her to the door.
Jackson Striker, vampire hunter, stood on the paved stoop, hands in pockets, looking tall and casual in khaki slacks, a polo shirt, and mirrored sunglasses. He pulled them off his nose and folded them. “Hi, Cass.”
“Hi,” she said, and then considered the strange smile he wore. It wasn’t smug, nor anxious. Just normal. There was a new depth to his rugged face and a warmth in the steel-gray eyes that hadn’t been there the last time she saw him two years ago. Gone was the young firebrand hunter brimming with impatience, replaced by the confident strength of a man of almost twenty-seven with nothing to prove to anyone.
“I’m guessing he lives here?” Jackson prompted.
“What? Oh. Yes.” Grateful for the distraction, Cassidy reached down to scratch the little red-and-white cat behind an ear as he stalked through the open door. There was a smear of blood on the side of his furry face. This was probably all that remained of one of Mrs. Havashand’s prize finches. “Brinkley came with the house. Just showed up the day we moved in.”
With the front door open, a steady breeze swept through the foyer, carrying with it Jackson’s familiar citrus aftershave and shards of memories she thought to have forgotten long ago.
Cassidy straightened and wrapped her arms around herself. “It’s a little early for Dominic to be up.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“And Sam is out teaching and has dinner plans.”
Jackson shook his head. “I can talk to my sister any time. The person I was really hoping to talk to before sundown, though, is you.” She couldn’t keep the shock from her face, and he laughed, raising both hands, one of which held a small black case. “No, don’t worry. I won’t try to talk you into leaving him again.” He looked her over, taking in the gold, kitten-heeled sandals, peacock blue patterned tunic, and the thick mass of her chestnut hair falling around her shoulders. No doubt, her suspicious glare as well. He sobered. “You’re looking good, Cassidy.”
Her cheeks warmed in a way she didn’t appreciate. “Flattery will get you nowhere. But since you’re here, fine. I’ll listen.”
Jackson followed her through the living room where last night’s blankets and empty popcorn bowl still decorated the sofa. The adjoining kitchen was an ocean of jade granite counters, maple wood cabinets, and stainless steel appliances.
“Cozy place you’ve got here,” he said.
She snorted and opened the fridge. “Only you could describe a seven million dollar mansion as ‘cozy.’” His own home, the Striker family compound, was three times the size—and price. “I swear I still lose stuff in just this kitchen on a weekly basis. It’s way too much house for me.” But bomb-grade storm shelters and twenty-four seven armed security tended to come with substantial real estate attached. “What would you like? Beer, wine, water, or juice?”
“Juice.”
Cassidy set out two glasses, careful how hard she placed them on the unforgiving granite surface.
“You know you’re supposed to have staff for a kitchen like this,” Jackson pointed out as she poured the apple juice.
“Kind of a waste for just one person. I don’t need much.” What meals she did need, Dominic enjoyed preparing for her. Samantha who lived out in the pool house, kept her own, strictly vegan kitchen.
He settled himself on a cast iron barstool and placed the little black case on the counter beside him. His hand lay on it for a moment as though reluctant to let it go. Curiosity made Cassidy’s eyes cling to it. “You’re in here all alone? All day?”
Shrug. “I get caught up on stuff.” Like sleep. “My nights can be busy.”
“Yes, I would imagine they are.”
Cassidy eyed him over the rim of her glass and waited.
He cleared his throat. “So. I have some news. Two bits of news actually. Well, three if you count the news I have for Dominic.” He patted the case.
She waited some more.
“I’m getting married.”
Three pieces of news, and that’s what he was leading with? Unsure she wanted to know the rest, Cassidy swallowed the last of her juice along with an impulse to express condolences for the bride-to-be. His expression hovered just a notch below pained.
“So your uncle finally broke down your resistance with his parade of ‘suitable brides’ to choose from?” None of which had captured Jackson’s interest in the past as far as she knew.
“No.” Wry grin. “Actually, my mom set me up with this one. Ollie’s the daughter of a friend of hers.”
“Ollie?”
“Olivia. Henning-Toliver.”
“Oh. One of the Henning-Tolivers?” This was a name with weight in local banking and financial circles. Socially, then—unlike middle-class Midwest Cassidy—this Ollie was a good match for the heir to the Striker fortune.
“Youngest daughter, yes.”
“Okay. And you’re marrying this one because . . .?”
Jackson sat back and hunched his shoulders. “Turns out we have a lot in common. She’s got an MBA and a future at her father’s firm, and neither one of us wanted to be forced into a marriage.” He laughed a little. “After we got done bitching about the manipulation, we actually had a lot of fun on our first date. She’s got a lot of spirit.” He sobered and dropped his gaze into his glass. “And she’s pregnant.”
Cassidy watched him toss back the juice as though wishing it was something stronger and wondered if she had heard correctly. More than that, she wondered what that peculiar niggle was doing at the bottom of her heart. Children had never been a priority for her, nor were they even possible for her and Dominic. The end.
“I see.” Cassidy leaned on her forearms, studying him. “You must really be besotted if you forgot how to use condoms.”
He still didn’t look at her, but his face pulled into a don’t-I-know-it grimace as he nodded. “She’s okay, considering—” He caught himself before adding the ‘she isn’t you’ Cassidy heard anyway.
“We may have vodka around here somewhere,” she murmured and turned away to cover her own discomfort.
“No. Thank you, but no. I need a clear head when I talk to Dominic. Juice is fine.”
“Okay.” She tipped the juice box for him. Her own head was a muddle. He was moving on with his life despite still loving her. And while she felt a grudging respect and a hard-earned but cool friendship for her former fiancé, she had loved him once back before she knew he would walk over bodies in the name of revenge.
“Don’t you usually talk to Dominic on Skype?” she said to break the awkward silence that had settled among the quiet hums of the kitchen appliances. The daylight outside had dimmed. Night would fall like a dropped shroud within minutes. She wanted to count the seconds.
Again he placed his hand on the case. “This is something he and I need to discuss in person.”
“What is it?”
The discomfort evaporated in a broad smile. “A gift.”
She arched a brow, relaxing as well. “Now what sort of gift would a vampire hunter give the lord of the vampires?”
“Enforcer,” he corrected. Daytime enforcer, to be exact. He and his uncle Garrett both held that position. Not everyone agreed with the Lord of Night’s new directives, especially the younger ones and those in far-flung places who imagined themselves immune from his influence. With Dominic’s blessing, the Striker Foundation, once dedicated to exterminating vampires as a whole, now used its considerable resources to locate and bring to heel—or destroy—these rebels. The arrangement freed him to concentrate on bigger goals and gave the hunters an outlet for their well-honed skills.
“Which brings me to what I wanted to talk to you about,” he continued.
“Oh?”
“I need to figure out how to tell Ollie what I’m really do
ing when I go on all those ‘business trips.’”
Like you were never going to tell me? But she bit back the words and instead said, “I wouldn’t think that’d be so hard. Just introduce her to a real vampire. We’ve got two living right here.” She indicated the cast iron gate at the back of the kitchen that fronted the vestibule to the storm shelter, which doubled as a wine cellar.
Which doubled as a vampire lair.
“People don’t usually react well to that sort of news.”
“They could compel her to accept the truth without fuss.”
“No. Absolutely not. No compulsion.” He made a slashing motion with the edge of his hand before running it through his short-cropped blond hair. “I want to be honest with her, but I don’t want her exposed if she doesn’t want to be.”
“Ah.” Cassidy chewed on her bottom lip. “So what exactly is it you’re asking?”
“Well. I was hoping you might talk to her with me?”
Her jaw dropped.
“You know, a neutral third party.”
“Oh, I’m hardly neutral.”
“You know what I mean.”
“You want someone to help you sound less like you’ve lost your mind. Right.”
He gave a sheepish shrug. “Will you consider it at least?”
“Does Garrett know you’re planning to tell her?”
“He does, and I’m not asking him for permission.”
“Wow. I guess you really do like her.” Traditionally, no one not born and raised in the Striker household was ever told about the family’s clandestine operations.
“She will be my future. The mother of my kids. I owe her the truth.”
“Who are you, and what have you done with the bastard who was hell-bent on keeping me oblivious?”
“Cass—”
Cassidy held up a hand. “It’s okay, Jackson. If not for you being such an ass, I would have never met Dominic. And he is my life now,” she added with a pointed look and watched his eyes dart to the sapphire and diamond ring on her finger. A gift from Dominic, it was the only piece of jewelry she wore, as close to a wedding ring as she ever wanted to get. “I really am happy for you, Jack. I mean it. This Ollie sounds like a girl I’d like to meet. And—yes—talk to.”
“Thank you, Cassidy.” He splayed a hand over his heart. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. I have all kinds of dirt on you I might want to share.”
The look of mock-innocence made her laugh. “So when do you want to do this?”
Jackson had a plan. He always did. They discussed the details at length and had finalized their plot to drag one Olivia Henning-Toliver into their supernatural reality when a decidedly supernatural sensation stole over Cassidy. Every night it started like this, with a sense of an expanding awareness, like doors opening in her mind. Like quiet energy surging from a well deep in her soul. She closed her eyes and welcomed it with a sigh.
“Sunset?” Jackson wondered.
“Sunset,” she confirmed.
Right on cue a small, furious growl sounded. Brinkley crept to take up position behind a cabinet corner, his green eyes narrowed on the gate to the wine cellar–storm shelter–vampire lair. The cat considered the vampires invading predators, and he wasn’t having it no matter how hard Dominic tried to persuade him otherwise.
Cassidy picked up Brinkley by the rising scruff and turned to the kitchen door. “None of that tonight.”
By the time she deposited the unhappy cat in the side yard, Dominic had become fully conscious. With their bond renewed only the night before, their minds functioned like two adjoining puzzle pieces clicking into place, becoming one. He contemplated the last hour of her memories. The mysterious gift Jackson brought intrigued him. But what really captured his interest was the news of Jackson’s impending fatherhood.
They had never discussed it. There was no point. Offspring between a vampire and a mortal was impossible. But while Cassidy accepted this with little sentiment in either direction, Dominic ranked his inability to have a family high on the list of immortality’s shortcomings. He never said so. He never even thought it. Not consciously anyway. But Cassidy sensed it just the same.
The vault door in the vestibule unsealed. A vampire appeared and stood with his arms draped over the decorative gate, his unshaven face split by a lecherous grin that made Jackson rise from his chair in alarm.
“Cassidy.” Serge’s baritone voice purred with appreciation. “You ordered takeout.” Unlike his lord and master who still digested the events of the day, Serge had no idea what the human was doing there.
“Be nice,” she said. “He comes bearing gifts.”
“Oh, yes, he does.” Serge unlatched the gate and sauntered across the kitchen, barefoot and rumpled, his curly caramel hair sticking out in every direction, the vampire equivalent of a man in search of coffee.
Jackson glared at him. “Sleeping with the boss now? You’ve come up in the world.”
“Sleeping? No. Not I.” Serge puffed out his barrel chest with pride. “I stand guard over my lord.”
His lordship materialized beside Serge and delivered a gentle slap to the back of his head. “More like lie guard flat on your back,” he said in his lyrical French accent.
Serge growled much as the cat had earlier. “But I am always with you.”
“I know,” Dominic concurred with a dramatic sigh. “There is no getting rid of you.”
“And you are glad for it, blood-child. Admit it.”
Cassidy smiled at their antics. Tall, lean and grace incarnate, Dominic was the polar opposite of both the stocky Serge and muscle-bound Jackson. Even dressed in his usual exercise pants and T-shirt, both black, few would mistake him for the ordinary man of twenty-seven he had been when he was turned into a blood-drinker. Carved cheekbones and a knife-blade nose dominated his profile, and his expressive mouth could instill terror as easily as convey gentle humor. Not to mention bestow mind-blowing kisses.
But it was the eyes that were the most striking thing about him. Their quiet depths missed nothing and could flash from warm and beguiling to full black and disturbing in the space of a heartbeat. Gold flecks danced in the hazel irises now as he looked at her.
“Bonjour, mon amour,” he murmured and held out his hand.
“Bonjour,” she said, moving into his embrace.
The world around them fell away, and they stood together in the sunlight streaming through the foyer just as she remembered it. He rubbed the back of her neck with his thumb while she nuzzled into his thick hair, inhaling his heady youngling scent of winter on the cusp of spring, clean and earthy and full of warm promise.
“Indeed. He brings gifts,” Serge said, pulling them back to the moment.
Uh oh, she thought.
His tone had lost its swagger and turned dreamy. It meant he saw ‘shadows’ in the aura of whoever he was looking at, or impressions of the future. When Serge had his visions, disjointed and insubstantial as they were, something always changed.
Often not for the better.
Though Dominic appeared unconcerned, Cassidy felt the tension skitter through him, too. Neither of them dared to interrupt Serge as he studied Jackson with an intense interest that no longer had anything to do with his warm blood. The human man returned the stare, his hands wrapped over the back of the bar stool as though preparing to pick it up and use it as a weapon.
Serge turned to look at Dominic with a wide, gap-toothed grin of wonder. Then he chuckled. The gleeful sound was entirely worthy of the pirate he had been in life.
“Oui?” Dominic prompted. “Did he bring a good gift?”
Serge laughed.
Jackson offered a tentative smile. “I suspect you’ll like it.”
And just like that Serge stopped laughing
.
In a flash he was by Jackson’s side, his eyes bugging out of their sockets. “Beware the fire,” he whispered on a hiss that made Cassidy’s skin crawl.
Jackson took a hasty step back.
“Beware the fire,” Serge repeated, now looking at Dominic. Then he laughed uproariously and disappeared.
Dominic closed his eyes and struggled for patience.
“What . . . was that?” Jackson said.
Cassidy rubbed the chill out of her arms. “That was Serge. You remember him, don’t you? Vampire you tried so hard to kill?”
Discomfort tightened his mouth as he looked away.
Dominic moved forward and placed his hands on the edge of the green granite counter top as he faced Jackson. “So did you bring me fire, Jackson?” His gaze darkened as he let the vampire rise and his senses expand.
Looking through his eyes, Cassidy saw that Jackson had changed more than she realized. His aura, once muddy red with anger, had brightened into the powerful crimson of a man whose mind and purpose were clear.
Jackson took a deep breath and pressed a fingertip onto the little black case. “In a way.”
Dominic tilted his head, brows drawing together. “This is from the lab?”
“Yes, it is.”
The lab. The Striker Foundation’s clandestine research facility, staffed with bright scientific minds compelled by Dominic to maintain absolute secrecy. The lab existed for one reason, and one reason only, and it was this now that caused Dominic and Cassidy to become stone-still with anticipation.
“They did it, Dominic. They found a way. You can have the sun again.”
Chapter 2
Beware the Fire
Dominic’s mind went as still as his body. He could only stare at Jackson, incapable of speech, of reaction. Cassidy leaned against him, seeking support, providing comfort. Her mind, too, was silent.