by S. K. Ryder
He didn’t answer, sitting still, listening to the heartbeats and voices of the hotel guests thundering around him. Two were closer than the others. Jackson’s and . . . Dominic turned his head to the closed bedroom door as he reached into Jackson’s mind for the information he sought.
“That’s not Garrett,” Jackson said unnecessarily, then jumped up when Dominic got to his feet. “But it’s not the guy who stabbed her, either.”
Chapter 28
Truth
Dominic was into the bedroom and followed the errant heartbeat into the adjacent bathroom before the warning had fully left Jackson’s lips. In the Jacuzzi tub, trussed up and gagged with duct tape, was a large human male dressed in a stained blue coverall. His longish, dull blond hair tangled around his head, and a dried crust of blood covered part of his face. The eyes were open but flat, showing no interest in his situation.
Jackson came up behind Dominic. “The other two were conscious enough to run, but this one was still out cold. So I dragged him over here and secured him before the police got here. I thought you might want to talk to him.”
“That I do.” Dominic let his fangs emerge. “Merci beaucoup.”
There was no time for tenderness. This man had been ruthlessly compelled. Only an equally ruthless counter-compulsion would break through. Shoving the head aside, he went for the blood. Within seconds, Dominic found what he needed. An image and a voice of the vampire who had cast the compulsion, a female he had seen before—behind the wheel of a Ford Mustang he had chased across town to a booby-trapped warehouse. Her victim knew her as Annabel and had done her bidding for months as her daytime eyes and ears and hands.
He even knew her lair.
Dominic absorbed it all. Then he blasted it out of the human’s mind. By the time he was done, the man knew only that he needed to clean himself up, go home and sleep off a hangover, then look for a new job in the morning.
“Let him go,” Dominic said as he splashed water in his face to remove the last of the blood. “He will be no more trouble.”
Jackson, who stood with arms crossed over his chest just outside the bathroom door, watched him dry his face. “And the vampire who compelled him?”
“Will be no more trouble by dawn.” He reached for Isao, sending him an image of where he was going and who he was after. “I will contact you when I get back.”
He didn’t wait for Jackson’s response. The moment Dominic was out the door, he shifted into high-speed mode, disappearing down the nearest stairwell and into the parkade where he had left the borrowed Ducati SuperSport. He sensed Isao and the others just outside, and knew a moment’s surprise when he emerged and saw them astride motorcycles as well. But they were not alone. There was another bike, carrying two more blood-drinkers, mere ghosts in the dark web.
As Dominic gunned his bike down the street and heard the roar of four others giving chase, he felt the web tremble with his rage, sensed the vibration smash against the entities caught up in it and reflect back to him.
We felt your need to act, Isao said, responding to his half-formed questions. So we made ready to join you.
Did others around the world experience this as well? Did Serge? And what of the two behind him who were not sired to him?
They are under my protection and will submit tonight, Isao promised.
Dominic refocused on reaching Annabel as fast as possible. That she was Esteban’s operative was a given. Where she had struck once, she could strike again. And where there was one like her, there could be more.
In Surrey, they roared past the burned-out warehouse and continued for several more blocks before turning into the parking lot for a row of townhouses. Dominic led the way, retracing the path Annabel’s slave had taken countless times. He broke down the front door with a single kick, sending it flying across the room. Then he stood. And listened.
A cool wind gusted past him, ruffled a discarded magazine, and swirled back, redolent with a young blood-drinker’s fresh scent. Upstairs a TV was on, and a faucet ran. But there was no heartbeat.
She was gone.
Douglas pushed past him and swept through the sparsely furnished rooms. As a mortal, the unassuming man with the kind face had been a police detective and the only human ever to unravel the mystery of Isao Kiyomori. Impressed with his skills, the samurai had befriended him and eventually offered him immortality.
The detective now wielded his skills at hyper-speed, scanning every inch, absorbing details Dominic would not have known to notice—such as the corner of a curtain caught in an upstairs balcony door. Douglas snapped the curtain aside, and Dominic looked through the glass door just in time to watch the telltale glow of a blood-drinker aura disappear into a stand of trees at the edge of the development. He threw the door open with a crash and flowed over the rail.
The soft rain turned into a million stinging needles against his face as he moved too fast for even most supernatural eyes to track. His entourage followed suite, but they soon fell behind, none of them having any hope of keeping up with a well-rested and well-fed Lord of Night. Annabel was moving at a comparative jog when he appeared before her. With a surprised yelp, she leapt straight into the air. Her bare feet slipped in the leafy mud when she landed, sending her sprawling, but she was up again in an instant.
“Stop,” Dominic commanded with compulsion in his voice. She remained rooted to the spot and stared at him with undisguised hostility. She wore only undergarments, dirt splattered her legs, and wet hair clung to her shoulders. “You have one and only one opportunity to explain yourself. Speak.”
Her eyes turned black and huge, consuming her face, and her mouth opened in a fanged grimace of defiance.
“So be it.” He grabbed a fistful of hair and put his teeth to her neck without ceremony. Her mind boiled with fury. A spawn of Esteban’s, she was just over a decade in age. Her devotion to her sire and lord was complete, and if there were others in the city like her, she neither knew of them nor cared. Getting leverage over Dominic was her sole mission at the moment, and to that end nothing was off limits. Not even . . .
A strangled cry brought Dominic back to the moment. He stepped back and watched her sway before dropping to her knees. Five others surrounded him now. The eyes of three of them glowed in the misty darkness. It was one of the other two, a young female with heavy makeup and black hair with yellow roots, who had made the shocked sound. An equally young male held her close, the two of them looking like a pair of lost-soul street urchins sheltering against more than the intensifying rain. Neither one had been more than teenaged when they were made not all that long ago.
Dominic watched them as he filtered through all the information he had just learned. Merde. Just when he thought he had found the bottom of this miserable treachery.
Turning back to the more immediate issue cowering at his feet, he let his anger vibrate in his voice. “Annabel. Do you submit to me?”
Pointless to ask. He knew what her answer would be, could feel it throb in her heart, saw it in her beast-black eyes when she lifted her face into the rain. “Never!”
He watched her gather herself to leap at him, and the impulse to end her shot through him, but he didn’t move.
He didn’t have to.
His wish had already become another’s command.
Isao’s katana flashed in a silent arc.
Annabel’s body dropped in a sprawling heap long before her head stopped bouncing on the uneven ground.
~ ~ ~
“We need to move up our departure,” Dominic said without preamble as he stepped into the Strikers’ hotel suite just past eleven.
Garrett, who had opened the door in a paisley silk robe, didn’t hesitate. “Okay. When?”
“Tonight. I want us to be underway and clear of this city as soon as possible.”
“W
hat happened?” Jackson asked, rubbing his eyes as he staggered out of the suite’s bedroom in boxers and a T-shirt.
“The blood-drinker who sent the attackers is dead. But she had a spy in Isao’s camp. Adilla and Esteban know I plan to return during the day with reinforcements.”
“Fuck,” Jackson muttered. “I thought Isao was such a pro?”
“He is,” Garrett argued. “He was tricked, I take it?”
“He was. He took in a youngling pair of twins who could no longer stomach the colony’s rules. One of them, Carly, had a history with the woman we killed tonight. And that woman took full advantage of this to manipulate the girl into revealing everything she learned about Isao’s family and, by extension, us.”
“And took it straight to Esteban,” Jackson concluded, shaking his head. “Fuck.”
“We now must move before they realize we have discovered this and send other operatives. We also need to take added precautions.” Dominic laid these out as he saw them, and the hunters added a few of their own until a workable plan had solidified.
“So they’re all coming now?” Garrett asked at one point.
“They all want to come. And with none of us remaining here, there is no need to maintain security here.”
Garrett and Jackson exchanged a dubious look.
“They are sired to me now. I know their minds.” Though Isao had been willing to execute Carly on the spot for her hapless treachery, Dominic offered the girl a re-siring with the understanding that if he found deceit in her heart, she would still die. She submitted, sobbing, at her brother’s urging—and lived. Her brother, Lyle, submitted eagerly, his heart pure and possessed of a great deal more common sense than his twin.
“I can trust them all,” Dominic confirmed. Isao and his younglings were formidable, but how useful a pair of teenage blood-drinkers could be in this situation was debatable. Lyle was eager enough, but Carly had given herself over to boundless despair over Annabel’s deception.
Their discussions completed, Dominic reinforced his human army of two by pouring a measure of blood for each, and then left them to their preparations.
His next stop was Vancouver General. But before meeting the emotional cataclysm awaiting him there, he made a call. Samantha picked up on the second ring, and as he had hoped, Serge was nearby. The old pirate had yet to embrace the magic of his own mobile phone.
“All is quiet here, blood-child,” Serge reported. “Morbid quiet,” he added and filled Dominic in on the suicide of Natalia’s companion. “There was no future cast in his light at the end,” he concluded. “Without her, his life didn’t exist.”
Dominic’s limbs felt weighed down by lead, and he leaned against a wall under a dripping awning. The rain and wind had followed him into the city. “What do you see for Cassidy?”
This brought a snort. “You know I need to see someone’s light with my own eyes to know what shadows it casts in time.”
“Bien. What did you see for her? The last time you saw her?”
“What I always see. She is the key to you, blood-child. She sets you free.”
“Did you ever see a child for us?”
“A child? No. No child.” Only surprise in that gruff voice. No hedging or hesitation, nothing to hide or obscure. “Not possible, that.”
“It was possible, Serge,” he said softly. “But she lost the child today.” Dominic braced for the inevitable declaration of all things being as they must be, but for once the oracle stayed his tongue. “What did you see for me in what is to come?”
The reply was swift and sure. “You will face Adilla alone.”
“But I am bringing others.”
“Are you?” A rising note of worry in that tone. Serge caught himself a moment later. “No matter. You must deal with him alone. And you must consider all the lives tied to his.”
“All the lives tied to his are close at hand. He destroys his companions rather than allowing them to leave him. Including his younglings.”
“Not all,” Serge blurted. “Not all are with him.”
“I know. One of his most powerful has joined forces with me. I have no doubt he will keep Adilla from serious harm as surely as he will keep me.” Or try to. For all his strength and skill, Isao was no match for either Adilla or Dominic.
The relief in Serge’s voice was obvious. “This is most fortunate.”
“Oh? And why is that?”
“All those blood-drinker lives that will be saved when Adilla lives.”
Dominic rubbed at his forehead, trying to massage bits and pieces of information together in his brain. “Including yours?”
Another weighty silence. He could almost see his friend pick at one of the Hawaiian shirts he favored.
“Adilla is your sire, is he not?”
The answer was long in coming. “Yes.”
“I can see why you would try to kill him.”
“Tried. And failed. Good thing, that. I didn’t know what it would mean for me if he died. But he left me alone after that. Tiresome idiot, that one. Mad with greed and a glutton for power. Always was. Easy for him to make bodies over nothing.”
“He almost made a body of me. Still, I will do all I can to not make a body of him. I will not bring harm to you or Isao. But did you not already see that outcome in my light?”
“I saw only that you will confront him.” Serge’s voice dropped to an anxious whisper. “Beyond that . . . I saw nothing.”
Chapter 29
Choices
A shower of sparks in the darkness. She watched them, mesmerized, a million tiny suns, falling into an infinite void. More came. More fell.
Drink, mon amour. Drink.
Was she drinking? Drinking the light? It tasted of rain falling on snow. Of nights frozen in time. Of love, and of tears.
She tuned into her body in stages. Her mouth and throat worked in a halting rhythm. Her chest filled with the pounding of her heart. Her limbs lay still, heavy and glued in place. And her belly . . .
With a gasp, Cassidy came awake.
It took a moment for her eyes to focus, several more to recognize her dim surroundings as a hospital room. She had no trouble recognizing the man in black leathers sitting on the side of her bed. His light-shower blood coated her mouth.
“What—”
Dominic placed a finger against her lips. Shhh. Let her sleep. He glanced at the recliner in the corner of the room. Stretched out in it, covered in a blanket, was Francesca.
Cassidy lifted her arm to take hold of his wrist at her lips, only to find tubes and wires running from her body into a wilderness of bags and carted equipment. So familiar, all this. She’d been here before, been near death before.
Her right thigh and hip buzzed with strange electricity, and her mid-section twinged and churned. What’s happening to me?
I gave you my blood. It is healing you and burning all the drugs out of your system.
Healing me? From what?
Dominic wove his fingers with hers, squeezing gently. Colossal emotions moved in the shadows of his eyes. What do you remember?
She dredged through her reluctant memory banks. When Francesca stirred in her sleep, she recalled being with her at the hotel. It was morning. Jackson came. And then . . . and then . . .
It all came rushing in at once. The attack. The fight. The blood. So much blood. Jackson told her not to move. She’d rolled her eyes down. Saw something protrude from her gut. Then nothing.
Until now.
Beneath the covers, her free hand crept toward her middle. Bumps and lumps beneath the hospital gown. Bandages.
Dominic lowered his forehead to hers. During the fight, you were stabbed several times with a screwdriver. You lost a great deal of blood.
She let that sink in, remembe
red the moments she’d been hit, the moments she, in her frenzy, had registered as punches, not stabs. More. There was more. More loomed just beyond the grasp of her understanding. That’s not all I lost. Is it?
Non. Not all.
Her fingers went limp in his hand. Heat stung her eyes. I lost the child.
Dominic cradled her face the way he cradled her quaking mind. She made not a sound as her tears flowed and she held on to him, but her heart wailed into the emptiness that radiated out from her belly. So much more than a new life had been destroyed there. Hope had been murdered in its cradle. Hope for even a sliver of light in Dominic’s eternal darkness.
You are my light, Cassidy, he thought at her fervently. I need no more. I never did.
But you wanted this. You wanted this so badly. And I wanted to give it to you so much more than I even realized.
But I cannot have it, chérie. Fathering mortal children is not to be for me. Not anymore. Just like the light of day can never be mine again. Just like every other human thing is lost to me.
The fatalistic tone rallied her. “No,” she whispered. “No.” Not true. We did this once. We can do it again.
No. We will not. We cannot, he said with unnerving quiet.
When this is over, you’ll take another shot. We’ll . . .
We cannot. At her mounting confusion, he added, Your body was damaged in ways my blood can never repair.
Only then did it occur to her to consider the details of her injury and the implications. She had been stabbed in the abdomen by a blunt instrument hard enough to lose a pregnancy. Her uterus would have been punctured. Likely hemorrhaged. Probably removed.