Dark Awakening (Dark Destinies Prequel)

by S. K. Ryder

  DARK AWAKENING

  A Dark Destinies Novella

  S. K. Ryder

  Dominic Marchant’s charmed life on an island paradise takes a sharp turn into the realm of nightmares when he finds himself turned into a vampire. But the horrors of his lethal new powers and cravings pale beside the torment doled out by his mad sire.

  DARK AWAKENING

  Copyright© 2019 by 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. Neither this book nor any portion thereof may be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  www.skryder.com

  Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  1: The End of Paradise

  2: Smoke Whispers

  3: Hunger

  4: Heartbeats

  5: The Scent of Fear

  6: The Easy Way

  7: The Youngling

  8: A Way Out

  9: The Searcher

  10: Midnight Folly

  A Note from S. K. Ryder

  The Dark Destinies Series

  Acknowledgements

  About S. K. Ryder

  1

  The End of Paradise

  Dominic Marchant sat on the employee break bench, staring at the empty spot where his electric car should have been. His gut tightened. The thing was down to battery fumes because he had been in too much of a hurry to plug it in earlier.

  And now, on his first break of the night, it was too late.

  His sister had brazenly begged the vehicle off him while he was too distracted to warn her.

  “Merde,” he muttered, scrubbing both hands over his face.

  If his car ran out of juice and stranded Anastasie on the steep, winding roads of the island’s interior, she would miss her boyfriend’s impromptu party. Dominic would never hear the end of it. Ever.

  Then there was the whole issue of her walking those same streets alone in the middle of the night, but he put that niggling thought out of his head before it could even fully form. St. Barthélemy was the safest island in all the French Caribbean. A young woman stuck on the side of a road would be in danger of little more than losing a heel on her shoe.

  She’d just be inconvenienced enough to give her brother hell.

  Cursing again, he pulled out his phone and dialed. His baby sister wasn’t known for being all that conscientious—like, for instance, checking the charge on a car she borrowed—but she did, as a rule, answer her phone. Not this time, though. Instead of leaving a message, he thumbed a text. The boyfriend lived in Marigot, clear on the other side of the island, but St. Barth was tiny. She should have arrived there by now.

  Assuming the car made it that far.

  Assuming the dying battery hadn’t gotten her into an accident with some inebriated tourist.

  He was still waiting for a reply when the back door burst open and a torrent of noise spilled into the sultry night. The kitchen of Maison de la Mer, the Marchant family’s beachside restaurant, was running at full throttle, and the pastry chef, Jérôme, appeared with a sigh of relief. His gleaming face matched the bright red hair flattened under his hairnet.

  “What a circus this place is tonight,” he declared as he dropped onto the bench beside Dominic. When he produced a pack of cigarettes from beneath his apron, Dominic turned his nose into the soft sea breeze as his friend lit up.

  Jérôme expelled a lengthy stream of smoke while eyeing the phone in Dominic’s hand. Both twenty-seven, the two men had been the best of friends since earliest childhood. They read each other’s faces and moods as easily as words on a page. “So you heard from your Italian paramour.”

  A smile tugged at Dominic’s mouth. No point denying it. The entire kitchen had born witness to Chef Jean-Paul’s famous ire when he caught his son and protégé neglecting the sauce over a text message. Only Jérôme, however, realized who it was from.

  “She’s coming again?”

  “In three weeks.”

  The brooding look his friend gave him communicated the depth of his displeasure. It was one of the unsaid truths between them that Jérôme, who had no interest in women beyond the platonic, harbored feelings of a vastly different sort for Dominic. While Jérôme was for the most part unfazed by his friend’s torrid liaisons with some of the rich and gorgeous women who visited the island, Dominic’s relationship with Jeovana Sebastini, an Italian actress on the verge of mega-stardom, seemed to rankle. Probably because he knew Dominic well enough to see the real feelings he was developing for the woman.

  “She’s using you, you know,” Jérôme told him, not for the first time.

  “It’s not like that. I keep it real for her.” He also listened to her, let her be herself, made no demands, and held no expectations. With him, she was vulnerable. With him, she ceased being the always-on-display celebrity. With him, she was real. And Dominic loved her for it.

  “Uhm-hm.” Jérôme sounded dubious. He drew on his cigarette, blue eyes narrowing. “I hope she pays you well.”

  As far as Dominic was concerned, all his bed partners paid him handsomely. With love—of a sort, anyway—even if only for a night. But he had long ago given up trying to explain this to Jérôme.

  With a dismissive snort, Dominic let the comment slide and checked his phone. Still nothing from his sister. He dialed again, filling Jérôme in as he waited. “Ana’s car is in the shop, so she took mine to go to this party her boyfriend told her about.”

  Some big-name artist Ana hoped would help her with her own photography career was going to be there. Nothing would have kept her away, certainly not her hostessing shift, which their mother had agreed to take over.

  “So?” Jérôme prompted.

  Dominic listened to the unanswered ringing. “My car didn’t have a full charge. Now I can’t reach her.”

  Ana’s cheerful voice mail greeting came on.

  He disconnected, his insides tying themselves into a knot. “I don’t like this.”

  With a resigned sigh, Jérôme parked the cigarette between his lips and dug around in his pockets until he produced a jingling set of keys. “Here. Take my scooter and go find her before you scatter your wits completely.”

  Dominic pulled off his hairnet and apron, then traded them for the keys. “You know me so well.”

  Nowhere near well enough, Jérôme’s look said, but he remained silent.

  “Merci, mon ami.” Dominic pulled the helmet over his wild mop of raven hair. “Tell my father where I went.”

  His friend stubbed out the cigarette before moving to the door with a noncommittal grunt.

  The scooter sputtered beneath Dominic as he took it away from Flamands Beach and toward Gustavia, the island’s capital. The town was a red-roofed jewel embracing a bay where some of the most expensive yachts in the world gently bobbed at anchor. Most of the sleek vessels were familiar visitors to these waters.

  As he motored into town, he automatically sought the stranger anchored farther out. She had caught his eye the day before with her mysterious coloring—solid black from bow to stern and waterline to radar dome. If not for the minimum of required navigation lights she used, her behemoth bulk would have been an invisible phantom in the night. At this thought, a shudder bounced up his vertebrae.

  Stopping at Ana’s tiny flat just long enough to confirm
she hadn’t somehow ended up there, Dominic sped off. He hurtled along the narrow streets, but the scooter struggled once he hit the hills to the southeast of town. The capital’s evening bustle fell away, replaced by the island’s arid wilderness.

  Shadows crowded around him and the scooter’s narrow, bobbing beam. Scattered cacti towered over rambling brush that shivered in the wind. They resembled skinny men standing still, watching his progress. His sense of disquiet grew heavier.

  Traffic was sparse this time of night, but none of the vehicles he met was his little white electric two-seater. As he neared Marigot, he began to relax. Ana must have gotten caught up in the party, her phone drowned out by the noise. He was about to make a fool of himself bursting in with his temper riled. Ana might not speak to him for a week, and his father would be on his case about leaving his post during the busiest hours of the evening. No matter. He had to know she was okay.

  When he reached an extended stretch of deserted roadway, his spirits lifted further. Almost there. She would have made it.

  A dark, boxy lump appeared in the far reaches of the headlight. The closer he came, the more familiar it appeared—until he had to acknowledge that it was, in fact, his car.

  He pulled up behind it. Taking off the helmet, he called, “Ana?”

  Only the quiet insect sounds of an island night reached him. Not only had the battery died, but she had also abandoned the car. Seeing as how the boyfriend was closer than her brother, it made sense she would call her boyfriend first. He’d probably come and gotten her. Apparently, she had been put out enough to not even tell Dominic what happened.

  “Merde.” He fumed as he stalked around the car, teeth clenched, confirming it was otherwise undamaged. Opening the driver’s door, he leaned in to check if she had left the key fob.

  What he found instead made him pause in confusion before icy dread shot through his veins.

  There, on the passenger seat, sat Ana’s well-worn purse. Beside it, her cell phone glowed with a screen full of missed calls and text messages.

  “Ana.” Dominic straightened, glancing around. “Anastasie!”

  Nothing but the crickets and the wind rustling around the cactus men. Some almost appeared as if they were moving. The night suddenly smelled ripe with foreboding—including an exotic hint of smoke.

  Snatching up Ana’s phone, he activated the flashlight and circled the car again, this time searching for clues. But there was nothing. It was as if she had just walked away. She wouldn’t have gone anywhere without her bag and phone, though. Lifting his head, he scanned the darkness again.

  Not far away, a dim light flickered between the shifting vegetation.

  “Ana?” he called again, trying to remember what was out there. A construction site maybe, either current or abandoned? What would Ana be doing there? That made no sense. But it was all he had to go on.

  Starting up the scooter, he pelted down the street until he found the gravel turnoff, which he followed to the winking light. The vegetation cleared to reveal an area that had been prepped for future construction. At the far end sat a Range Rover, light leaking through the open rear doors.

  As he approached, a tall, wide-shouldered silhouette separated from the shadows and stepped into his path, forcing him to halt. The figure—a man—spoke English with a pronounced Spanish accent. “Everything is okay here,” he announced. “Mi amigo not feeling well.”

  “That is my car back on the road. My sister was driving it,” Dominic said in his equally pronounced French-accented English. “Did you see her?”

  “We see no one.”

  Something about the flat, dismissive tone and the way his hands settled on his hips suggested Dominic would be wise to also see ‘no one.’ The first frisson of something wrong skittered up his spine. Very carefully, he asked, “Where is she?”

  “Maybe she walked away.” This with a casual tilt of the head that made his neck pop audibly.

  Dominic glanced at the Rover. There was some commotion in the backseat. The unease whispering at the edges of his awareness folded tight around his heart. St. Barth was so devoid of crime that people rarely locked their cars or homes. But St. Barth also drew countless visitors whose scruples were not always dictated by the size of their hefty bank accounts.

  “You should look for her down the road,” the man suggested. There was unmistakable threat in both his voice and his hands as he flexed them, cracking the knuckles. He was easily twice Dominic’s weight. Judging by his bulging biceps, he was also three times as strong.

  Years of training in the martial arts spiked all Dominic’s instincts up to high alert. His situational awareness skyrocketed. He counted three potential adversaries, a fair match for an Aikido black belt if he kept his wits about him—assuming these men did not have a similar skill set. And there weren’t more of them.

  Dominic released the scooter’s kickstand, dismounted, and pulled off the helmet. As expected, a hand slammed down on his shoulder when he tried to step around the mountain of a man.

  “You no hear me? We no need—” The irate command ended in an almost girly shriek when Dominic grabbed the offending hand. With a sharp twist and tight spin on his heel, he sent the mountain crashing to the ground.

  At the Range Rover, a head popped from an open rear door. “Tomás? ¿Qué tú haciendo?”

  “El está ocupado,” Dominic snapped. Of the three languages he spoke, Spanish was not his best, but he knew enough to get his point across. For the moment at least, Tomás was indeed ‘busy’.

  The other man suddenly doubled over and cursed, then swung at something in the seat. A woman’s shrill scream followed.

  “Ana,” Dominic shouted and ran forward, his carefully tended wits teetering. Two men were struggling with something in the back of that car. That something couldn’t possibly be his sweet baby sister, could it?

  As he rounded the nearest open door, Dominic was greeted by an incomprehensible scene of bare male buttocks and flailing female legs. Ana’s legs. She was trapped between the two men, kicking at one and clawing at the other, fighting for her life. Desperation made her fast and difficult to pin down.

  The man with his back to Dominic had just grabbed her by the throat when Dominic grabbed him by the hair and yanked. He reeled away, holding nothing but a toupee. The now-bald man choking Ana gaped over his shoulder, eyes round with surprise. Dominic tossed the hair aside, took hold of the assailant’s shirt, and hauled him off his sister. “You filthy animal!”

  From somewhere behind him, a Spanish shout announced him as the ‘bitch’s brother,’ kicking Dominic’s rage up another notch. The filthy animal, hobbled by loose trousers, tried to shake him off. Dominic snatched at the exposed underarm, giving a fistful of delicate skin a brutal twist. The brute yowled like a kicked dog. With a merciless strike to the underside of the knees, Dominic hurled the man to the ground. The crack of bone against jagged volcanic rock was as unmistakable as it was satisfying.

  Another noise behind Dominic made him twist aside just in time to avoid a direct hit from the tire iron swinging at his head. Though his vision doubled from the glancing blow, a split-second impulse made him duck and whirl, delivering a low, blind punch at the same time. It slammed home in soft tissue.

  The tire iron clattered to the ground. A mighty whoosh of air exploded out of the third man, the slightest of the three who had held Ana down by her shoulders. He staggered sideways, clutching his groin. Seconds later, he lost his footing in the loose rocks and fell, gasping, into a large stand of prickly pear.

  Running feet pounded the ground behind him. Tomás, his injured arm tucked close to his body, barreled down on him like a wild boar. Dominic waited until the last moment before pivoting and dispensed a high-speed double-whammy of fury-fueled kicks, first to the solar plexus, then, as Tomás doubled over, straight to the face. The nose shattered beneath Dominic’s heel like an eggshell. With a hoarse, wet shout and both hands clamped over his face, the boar crashed to his knees.

&nbs
p; A sharp impulse to strike him again, flatten him in the dirt like a worm, shot through Dominic, but before he could act on it, the shadows tilted around him. His vision tunneled. His heart thundered in his ears. Or was that more footsteps he heard? Someone just out of sight? Reaching for him?

  He spun around only to see Ana staggering out of the car. The tattered remnants of her dress fluttered around her hips. Her breasts and feet were bare.

  “Ana. Mon Dieu.” He rushed to her side. “I’ve got you, ma petite. I’ve got you. You’re safe.”

  But when he caught her up in his arms, she became hysterical, clawing, screaming, and fighting him as she had the rapists. “Let go of me! Let go of me!”

  “It’s me, Dominic.” Her nails raked his cheek before he could confine her wrists in his hands, which only made her wilder. “Anastasie Marchant, look at me! Look at me.”

  She did, squirming in place, trembling, her eyes wide and glassy behind her tangled hair. Blood covered half her face, dripping off her chin.

  Dominic’s heart hitched. “It’s me, Nicky, your brother. You’re safe. They’re gone. They will never touch you again. Do you hear me?”

  She stared, her breath coming in short, sharp puffs.

  “Listen to me, Anastasie. I’m here. I’ve got you. I’ll keep you safe. No one else will touch you. I promise.”

  It took what felt like hours—but was just minutes or seconds—before recognition finally filtered into her eyes. He released her hands. They lowered and came together in tight fists over her breasts as her bloodied face distorted. With a raw, shuddering sob, she rolled up tight as a snail in its house and collapsed against him. When her knees buckled, he sank with her to the dusty ground.

  “You’re safe. I promise,” he repeated as he gently rocked her. “You’re safe.” He held her tight to comfort her, but also to keep himself from shaking. The inside of his chest ached, sandblasted by adrenaline, shock, and rage.