by HELEN HARDT
Logan turned to me, his pupils dilated.
“What if you’re right, Erin? What if you’re fucking right?”
Chapter Thirteen
Dante
Sometimes, I wished the unthinkable.
I wished for death.
It never lasted long, and I erased the thought as quickly as I could, but sometimes…
Mostly during torture. I refused to cry out, and I kept the promise to myself. But inside the deepest recesses of my brain, I sometimes let go.
I wished to cease existing.
What might death feel like? The process could be painful, but I’d endured horrific pain already.
And once the process was complete?
No pain.
Only peace.
How do you know that? Death might be eternal hellfire.
Her again. In my head. I’d begun noticing it during her feedings. Somehow, she got into my head.
Unless it was my imagination.
Not your imagination, Dante. I’m part of you now. As you are part of me.
I winced, though I was not in pain at the moment. I’d long since gotten used to her feedings, but while they were not exactly painful, they were far from enjoyable.
She took.
She took without my consent.
Then she forced me to take from her.
Those were the worst times. I needed blood. Without it, I would die. Hers was my only choice.
She detached her teeth from my body, licking the puncture wounds closed.
Then—
What? She stood and began removing my leather bindings. I held back a gasp. Would she let me go?
No. Of course not. She had an ulterior motive.
In came her two human goons.
I inhaled despite myself. Their stench had become unbearable. I’d never imagined a human being could smell heinous to a vampire, but these two did.
They stood over me, their pupils dilated as they always were. She had them in some kind of trance. Were they truly sadists? Or had she made them so?
Didn’t fucking matter.
They were here to torture me.
“How strong are you, Dante?” she said. “How truly strong are you, son of Julian? Are your teeth as sharp as your father’s?”
Were my father’s teeth abnormally sharp? Were mine? I didn’t know. We were peaceful vampires. We didn’t use our teeth.
“You tell me,” I said. “You’re the only one I’ve bitten.”
“Touché.” She smiled her evil smile, her eyes blue and icy behind her mask. “I don’t know, then, for your father has never bitten me.”
Of course he hadn’t. He was home, probably trying to find me.
Had he given up?
Had Uncle Brae, Bill, Em, Riv…all of them given up?
I’d been here for so long. Days had morphed into weeks, into months, into years. Possibly decades. All I knew was hell.
Pure hell.
“They’ve forgotten about you, Dante.”
No. Never. They’d never forget.
“They’ve stopped looking. They think you’re dead.”
No! Not dead! Never dead!
“They have forsaken you. They no longer care. They’ve gone on with their lives.”
My wrists were now free. I rubbed at them furiously, trying but failing to ease the ache.
“How strong are you?” she asked again.
“I don’t know.”
“We will find out.” She unbound one of my feet. “Only the strongest survive.”
I had survived so far. I’d resisted the urge to cry out during torture.
What more was expected of me?
She unbound my other foot. “Stand, Dante. Stand straight and tall. Proud and tall.”
I was released several times daily to eat and go to the bathroom. But the goons hovering over me were the ones who released me.
Never had she released me.
Why today?
Why?
“In Rome, the gladiators fought for survival. Fight or die in the arena.”
The two goons oozed disgust. Treacherousness. Did she mean for me to fight them? With my arms and legs free, I could destroy them in minutes. My muscles were big and strong, not atrophied from my time in captivity.
“That’s from my blood. My blood keeps you strong.”
Get out of my head!
“You won’t fight them.” She eyed the goons. “Wouldn’t be a fair fight, after all. You’ll have a more worthy opponent.”
I shot up into a sitting position on the couch.
I’d fallen asleep, or so I thought.
Then I’d flashed back. A new memory of those abhorrent years with her.
I’d fought. She’d trained me. No. Not her. Someone had trained me. Someone I couldn’t remember.
I flashed back to the day in the alley with the two Claiborne vampires, Decker and Giles. I’d taken them both down easily.
A roundhouse. An upper cut. An inside crescent kick. A knife hand. Martial arts moves.
I’d never studied martial arts, but my muscles had rushed straight into the movements, had remembered the movements.
Yet I had…
The first fight, before training. She dropped me in a dirty pit with…
With whom? I didn’t know then. Still didn’t know now.
I’d nearly gotten the shit kicked out of me, until…
Until…
Something had unleashed inside me.
Something feral and wild.
I lay back down, closing my eyes.
Come on. Take me back there. What happened? What did I do?
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Damn it! Come back! Show me what I did! How I did it!
You knew I wouldn’t stay away forever. You knew you wouldn’t want me to.
Her again.
The reprieve had been restful. Those few hours on the couch, no her. Sleep. Pure sleep.
Then the flashback dream.
That had been me. All me. She hadn’t been there. Hadn’t shown me.
I can show you more.
No. No. No. Out of my head. Give me peace again!
Dante, dear Dante. I didn’t come back of my own accord. I came back because you wished it so.
You brought me back, Dante. You. You. You.
Chapter Fourteen
Erin
“River,” I said timidly, “what’s going on?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t release him.”
His pupils were so dilated, his entire iris looked black. He looked…
No. The word I was thinking. Couldn’t go there.
“Logan?” I said tentatively.
He snapped back into his glamour, his eyes glassy.
“What the hell was that?” River said.
“I have no idea. Let’s get the rest of what we need from him and get back.” A shiver raced through me. “This is freaky.”
“Logan,” River said, waving his hand in front of the doctor’s face, “are you okay?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Okay. Good. While you were gone, do you remember seeing any of the missing women? The ones who were taken from the hospital?”
“No. I just remember… Yeah, a baby. A baby was there.”
My stomach dropped. Patty’s baby. Isabelle. From my dream. I’d felt sure that Logan had operated on her. “Was it a girl?”
“The baby? Maybe. Either a boy or a girl.”
River rolled his eyes. “That’s helpful.”
“Did you recognize the baby?” I asked.
“No.”
Stupid question. Logan had already disappeared by the time Patty and her baby came into the ER. I silently berated myself. I needed to get it together.
“What about anyone else? Did you recognize anyone else?”
Logan squeezed his eyes shut. “It was… There was another doctor there. A woman. Her name was… Damn!” He opened his eyes. “I can’t remember, but
she definitely told me her name.”
“Okay, good,” River said. “A female doctor.”
“What about your blood?” I asked. “Did they take any of your blood for testing?”
“I don’t know.”
River huffed. “This is going nowhere. Look, Logan, let’s attack this from a different angle. Did you ever have an issue with manic rage?”
“Sometimes.”
“Is that why you’re on lithium?”
“Yes. That and other reasons.”
“What other reasons?”
“Mood disorder. And…sometimes I hear voices.”
“Schizophrenia,” I said. “Lithium is sometimes used to treat it, but it’s not as useful as it is for bipolar.”
“Are you hearing voices now?” River asked.
“No.”
“What about when you turned and looked at Erin? When you said ‘What if you’re right, Erin? What if you’re fucking right?’”
“I…don’t know.”
“All right.” River turned to me. “I think we’ve gotten all we can out of him.”
I sighed. “Logan, can you tell us anything else about your great-grandfather, Lucien Crown?”
“No. I didn’t ever know him. He’s dead.”
“Dead is the word, all right,” I said. “Big dead end.”
“Not necessarily,” River said. “I think this information will turn out to be very valuable.”
After River glamoured Logan into forgetting our entire conversation and he’d gone into the ER to begin his shift, we drove home.
“Has anyone been able to break out of your glamour like that?” I asked.
River shook his head. “But like I said, I’m not all that experienced at glamouring. I know how to do it, but we seriously don’t use it unless we have to. Our abilities are innate, but the skill must be learned. They grow as we age, which is why Bill was able to do what he did in the courtroom.”
“And then Dante…”
“Yeah. That’s pretty unheard of.”
“Anyway, what do you think Logan said that could be useful?”
“It’s not what he said so much as how he responded. He’s resistant to glamouring.”
I gasped softly. “Will he report this to someone?”
“He might, but no one will believe him. More important, though, is how he smelled.”
I scrunched my nose in disgust. “He smelled like cheap men’s cologne to me.”
River chuckled. “Yeah, I got that too. But I’m talking about the scent you can’t smell. The scent that comes from his blood, just like yours does. He’s definitely descended from a vampire. His scent tells the tale. Or rather, it wants to.”
“What do you mean?”
“His scent is masked.”
“You mean like mine is?”
“No. Yours is naturally masked by a potion. His is… Something has been layered over his scent, and it’s not good.”
“Okay…”
“He has the scent. That irresistible scent that you and Jay have, but it’s been tainted. He almost smells like… This is going to sound gross—it is gross—but he almost smells like raw sewage.”
Chapter Fifteen
Dante
Fuck you! I did not bring you back!
I sat rigid on the couch, clamping my hands over my ears in an attempt to drown her out. Foolish, I knew. She wasn’t something external that stimulated my auditory nerves. She was in my head, my mind.
Get. The. Fuck. Out.
I stood and paced around the small living room, my gaze constantly drawn to the Texts on the coffee table.
“Easy, Dante. You are stronger than whatever is trying to take power over you.”
My father.
I turned. His ghost was standing in the doorway.
The door opened with a whoosh, and River raced in—straight through my father.
“Shit!” He turned. “Sorry, Uncle Jules. That was…heavy.”
“That’s a word from my day.” My father chuckled.
“No. I didn’t mean heavy as in serious. I meant it felt heavy. Like I was going through something. Not something solid, but something that was definitely there.”
“I am definitely here. I’m a concentrated source of energy. That’s what you felt.”
Erin rushed into my arms. Time to gather my strength. Erin needed me to be strong. I could not show weakness around her. She’d witnessed me in her clutches twice before. I was determined that would never happen again.
“What is it, baby?”
“Logan. He’s apparently…” She sighed. “I’ll let River explain it.”
I led Erin to the couch and sat down next to her.
River sat down in a chair adjacent to us. “Logan is not a vampire, not that we ever seriously thought he was. But he is descended from one. He has the scent.”
“Like Erin and Jay?”
“Sort of. But it’s been tainted. I’m not sure how or why. Something has been layered over his natural odor. It’s…” River wrinkled his nose. “He smells like shit. Literally.”
A human that smelled like shit. Sounded familiar to me. The goons who tortured me while I was in captivity. They’d started out smelling normal, but their scents had become increasingly putrid the more they tortured me. The more evil they became.
Had one smelled like a human descended from a vampire? Like Jay? Like Erin?
No one smelled like Erin. Her scent was special. But was it special only to me? Other vampires were attracted to it, clearly, but did it smell different, even more pleasurable, to me? With a blood bond?
But Jay… His scent was irresistible. Had Logan…?
No. Couldn’t have been. I’d remember the scent.
Wouldn’t I?
God. No, I probably wouldn’t. Even now, I could only remember bits and pieces of what I’d been through. The more I remembered, the more I let her into my mind.
If I wanted to keep her at bay, I had to make peace with not remembering.
“I lived for nearly seventy years,” my father said, “and I don’t ever remember a human smelling bad.”
“This was a first for me too, Uncle Jules,” River said.
“Only two have ever smelled bad to me,” I said solemnly. “The two who tortured me while I was captive.”
Erin held on to me tightly. “Dante…”
“It’s okay, baby. It’s over.”
In my head, it was far from over, but I didn’t want her to worry.
“We have a lot we still need to discuss,” my father said.
His words were meant solely for me. In fact, I wasn’t sure if Erin and River had even heard them, for neither of them reacted.
“All right,” my father said. “Did you learn anything else?”
“Yeah,” River said. “If it means anything. He was quite resistant to glamouring, but he claims to have had a great-grandfather named Lucien Crown. He never met him and thinks he’s dead, as he’d be over a hundred by now. His parents and all his grandparents are dead.”
“My father is over a hundred. If Lucien Crown is a vampire, he could still be alive. Of course, we don’t know if our Lucien Crown is a vampire.”
“Isn’t it probable that he is, though?” Erin said. “He claims to have a translation of the entire Vampyre Texts, and he ran a site called Nocturnal Truth.”
“It would be probable if there were as many vampires as there are humans in the world,” my father said. “However, there are only a fraction.”
“Here are the facts,” River said. “Logan Crown is descended from a vampire, and he has a putrid odor that most humans descended from vamps don’t have. That is what we know. Everything else is supposition because of the way he reacted to the glamour.”
“We also know,” Erin said, “that he’s on lithium for bipolar disorder, manic rage, and schizophrenia.”
I nearly shot off the couch. “What?”
“It’s true,” she said. “The lithium is in his medical records, and he a
dmitted to suffering from manic rage and ‘hearing voices.’”
“We only know he’s on the medication,” River said. “We don’t know why. We can’t take anything he said as fact. He seemed to pull out of my glamour for a few seconds. It was really strange. But then he went right back in, or at least he wanted us to think he did.”
“Could be the schizophrenia,” my father said. “I’ve heard of such things, though I’ve never witnessed anything like it myself.”
“He had to be glamoured,” Erin said. “He wouldn’t have come with us otherwise.”
“Unless he had an ulterior motive,” River said. “He wanted us to think we were getting information out of him.”
“But he—” Erin stopped midsentence. “I see. Of course. The whole thing has been nuts. He came back, couldn’t remember anything other than maybe he performed some surgery. Then today he remembers a baby, which just happens to tie in with the dream I had. Even though he couldn’t have known about the dream, it does seem very convenient.”
“Exactly,” River said. “He could be playing us.”
“But if he’s not a vampire, wouldn’t he be susceptible to a glamour no matter what?” I asked.
“Not necessarily,” my father said. “A minute percentage of humans can’t be glamoured. But I never came across one in my life.”
“I haven’t either,” River agreed. “But Logan is an enigma in more than one way.”
“He’s a good doctor, if that means anything,” Erin said.
“It means a lot, actually,” River said. “It means he’s smart and he cares about his work. It doesn’t mean he’s not capable of manipulating or being manipulated.”
“Which one?” I asked.
“Could be either,” River said. “But one or the other is happening, I feel sure of it. What Logan said to Erin and me today was either what he wanted us to hear, or what someone else wanted us to hear.”
Your cousin is a good detective. He’s intelligent and shrewd. But he’s no match for me.