Dark Desires_A Novel of the Dark Ones

by Aja James

  “I’m taking you home,” Inanna said, taking one of her father’s brittle hands in both of hers.

  “We’re going home.”

  *** *** *** ***

  Ava sat between a still unconscious Ryu, whose head rested on her shoulder, and a man who was apparently Inanna’s father in the backseat of Gabriel’s SUV as they drove toward Tokyo City.

  Neither Inanna nor Gabriel spoke as they rode in the front, but Ava could hear their grief nonetheless. If Ava’s father looked like the man Gabriel called “the General,” the barely breathing victim of prolonged, ravaging torture, Ava would have been bawling her eyes out.

  She squeezed herself as far toward Ryu’s side of the vehicle as she could, afraid to touch the man sitting next to her.

  He seemed so fragile she was afraid he would shatter if she accidentally rubbed against him. Or God forbid, elbowed him in the ribs or something. He was barely more than a skeleton with long, tangled silvery hair. The bone structure of his face was so prominent, given there was little flesh to fill it, that his opaque turquoise eyes seemed over-large.

  Gabriel had put his own jacket over the man, returning Inanna’s to her, and Inanna draped a blanket she took out from the trunk of the car on his lower body. Her mate had carried him like a babe in his arms the whole time, taking over from Inanna, who had carried him down the tower steps, for he had no strength to walk on his own.

  Before they left, Gabriel had set explosives throughout the light tower and detonated the charges when they were a safe distance away. Everything inside, the research, the deceased Sōsuke, were obliterated in the explosion and fire.

  Everything except a sample of Evergreen, which they took with them.

  But before they had exited the basement, Ava had seen a shadow move along the wall where no object had cast it. The shadow took the shape of a man beside the door before it flowed downwards and out through the narrow seam at the bottom.

  The man had looked like the vampire shinobi.

  Ryu’s father.

  Chapter Eighteen

  One month later…

  “Ava, honey, why don’t you call that nice man of yours? That Ryu Takamura?” Ana Lucia Monroe cajoled for the umpteenth time since Ava returned from Japan.

  “As I recall, he lives here in the City,” Ava’s mother continued, “Why don’t you reach out? Didn’t I teach you not to be narrow minded when it comes to relationships? It’s okay for the girl to be proactive. The feminist revolution has happened after all.”

  Ava sighed.

  No matter what she said to her mother, Ana Lucia couldn’t seem to get out of her head that Ryu was The One for her.

  Ava had traveled with Gabriel and Inanna, Ryu and Inanna’s father, to Boston first from Tokyo. She’d stayed with them for a whole day and a half at a compound called the Shield located in one of the highest towers in central Boston. It was the base for the Pure Ones, Ava learned.

  There she met many eternally youthful, outrageously gorgeous creatures who reminded her of badass elves—tall, graceful, but full of power and strength. She also learned that her erstwhile med student, Rain Ambrosius, was one of them.

  Well, with a name like that, an intellect and wealth of experience that boggled the mind, and hair clear and brilliant like diamonds, Ava kind of wondered whether there was something more to her precocious student. Turned out Rain had lived two and a half thousand years already and was “married” to an ancient Roman warrior named Valerius Marcus Ambrosius.

  Inanna and Gabriel currently called the Shield their home, because they themselves had Pure souls despite being vampires, and their adopted human son Benjamin also had a Pure soul.

  Lots to learn and digest, Ava realized as she was welcomed into the Pure Ones’ fold.

  Rain had spent the better part of twenty-four hours conducting thorough exams and lab work on Ava, after she summarized for the Pure Ones her research and the injection to the heart.

  After twelve hours of observation, Rain told Ava she was good to go, all vitals stable, her cells showed no issues at the molecular level, and she appeared to have absorbed and adapted the healing factor into her own DNA. She was still very much human, just with a mutation in her genetic material that allowed her to heal like the Pure and Dark Ones.

  Ava didn’t particularly enjoy the test Rain did to show Ava how well she healed. The sight of blood, however small, always made Ava queasy, especially when it was her own. Not to mention the pain the procedure wrought.

  But heal she sure did. Almost instantaneously given that the incision Rain made in the palm of her hand was quite small.

  Pretty awesome, Ava thought, but only time would tell if her newfound powers would allow her to stay forever young, and whether those powers were here to stay or only temporary. As such, she and Rain agreed to stay in daily contact for at least the first few months. Rain had even given her a wrist band communication device to wear, similar to the one Ava had seen Ryu use.

  Ava didn’t know how she felt about the prospect of living close to forever. It didn’t seem to matter when the male she wanted to spend eternity with hadn’t come for her in One Whole Month!

  Granted, she’d left the Shield for NYC while Ryu had still been unconscious. But after she witnessed the tragedy that was Inanna’s father, she felt a desperate need to see her own parents. She’d assumed that when Ryu was better, he’d come to her. He lived in the City, after all, as her mother rightly pointed out. He obviously knew ways to find her since he always popped up when she least expected him, as if he always knew where she was at all times.

  But almost forty-five thousand minutes after her departure, she’d not caught even a whiff of him.

  “Ava, are you listening to me? The boy is probably shy. You need to give him some encouragement,” Ava’s mother persisted on her favorite topic.

  It never ceased to amuse Ava to hear her mother refer to Ryu as “the boy.” He was more than ten times the age of her parents, and a vampire besides.

  “Mom,” Ava finally said, frustrated, “he knows where to find me. If he wants to see me, he will. I’ve given him all the encouragement a girl can give a man, trust me. If he wants to be with me, he needs to show up and own it.”

  Ana Lucia finished wiping the moisture off the last dish with a terry towel and put it away in the cupboard over the kitchen counter.

  “Well, I think—”

  “And besides,” Ava cut in before her mother could elaborate, “I don’t know how to reach him even if I wanted to, which I don’t.”

  Well, that wasn’t entirely true. She was in daily contact with Rain, who lived with Inanna and Gabriel, who were Ryu’s ex-comrades in arms and not to mention friends, who likely knew how to reach him.

  And Ava really, really, really wanted to reach him. She wished for him to show up at her door every day, every hour. She wondered if he’d fully recovered from his injuries. Whether he’d had to take blood to heal. And if so, whose blood. And then she promptly went into a downward spiral of jealousy and depression. Because she wasn’t with him to give him what he needed.

  Pushing all that aside, Ava plunged on, “He’s always been the one to find me. And if he hasn’t come yet, he has a reason.”

  Most likely that reason was that he didn’t want to be with her. Even though she was sort of one of them now. Maybe it was one of those “what happened in Japan stayed in Japan” type of scenarios. What did he really know about her? What did she really know about him?

  The only thing she was one-hundred-per-cent confident in was that she loved him unconditionally. She couldn’t stop feeling this way even if she tried. It was just her luck that she was stuck in unrequited love for eternity.

  Her father’s rumbles could be heard in the living room, and Ava’s mother called out, “What’s that, Gavin? You have a hankering for barbacoa from the corner shop?”

  “I’ll go get it,” Ava volunteered. “I’ll pick up the stuff on the grocery list too while I’m out.”

  “Well
, all right, baby girl,” Ana Lucia said, “Be sure to come back by supper.”

  Ava waved good-bye and headed out the door with her wallet and beat up cell phone. Maybe she should get a new one. This one reminded her too much of her time in Japan. Sometimes, she wished she could just tune it all out. It just made her miss him more.

  On the other hand, the couple of weeks with Ryu she wouldn’t trade for all the time in the world with anyone else.

  Ava stopped at a Duane Reade to pick up some small pack toiletries. She was heading back to Boston tomorrow morning for an extended visit with the Pure Ones, and with Rain in particular.

  One, they needed to do another thorough exam on Ava to see how she was progressing at a molecular level.

  Two, Ava wanted to work with Rain on the Evergreen sample they brought with them from Japan. Rain had tried to identify whether the sample was Pure or Dark, and discovered that it was both and it was neither. She requested Ava’s help to further research the genetic materials.

  Three, Ava wanted to use the Pure Ones’ facilities to continue working on a cure for her father’s Parkinson’s, among other degenerative diseases. She’d use her own blood as a starting point. Because of the secrecy of the Pure and Dark races, she’d have to use secure facilities that didn’t risk their exposure to humans. The one place that she knew of that offered such an environment was the Pure Ones’ Shield.

  On the surface, her life hadn’t really changed that much. She was still doing work she was passionate about. She’d re-acclimated herself to the research center at Columbia the Monday after her return. She had her family, and their everyday banter grounded her in wholesomeness and familiarity.

  But fundamentally, she knew that everything had changed. She still had professorships with both Harvard Medical School and Columbia University, but she didn’t know how long she could keep those. At some point, her colleagues would notice that she didn’t age. Good genes could only go so far as an explanation.

  She’d have to tell her parents too. She hadn’t thought it through yet, but it was on her list of to do’s.

  She had new acquaintances who lived in a surreal world of intrigue and violence that had lasted tens of thousands of years. From what they’d shared with her, she gathered that the Pure and Dark Ones and humans as well were embroiled in an ongoing, escalating conflict that was quickly exploding into all-out war. The increasing murder count in Tokyo, for example, was just one tip of the iceberg.

  Ava bought the groceries, the cow neck barbacoa, and headed home. It would be close to seven when she arrived. Just in time for supper.

  “I’m home,” she called out as she entered, putting the bags of groceries and shopping items on the narrow table in the foyer right beside the front door to her parents’ townhouse.

  Despite being thirty, she’d never considered getting a place of her own, apart from the few times she’d been in steady relationships and lived with her boyfriend. Those were short periods and she’d never felt at home with them. Yet another indication why those relationships didn’t work out in the end.

  “Wash your hands and come sit down, Ava,” her mother replied from the kitchen, where the three of them always ate their meals, in the bay window nook that overlooked the small back garden.

  “Did you bring the baguette I texted you about?”

  “Yes ma,” Ava answered from the half bath by the stairs. “I’ll be right there.”

  Ava finished wiping her hands and carried her long baguette and bag of barbacoa to the kitchen, where a quick glance told her that Gavin Monroe was already seated at the small round table facing her as she entered.

  Ana Lucia was serving up their supper—spaghetti and meatballs—from the kitchen counter, putting all the ingredients into large bowls on top of server dishes. The barbacoa was meant to be a side dish, along with some grilled greens and roasted corn.

  Ava paused as she set her things down on the counter.

  Her mother was serving out four sets of spaghetti, not three. Were they expecting a visitor?

  “Ava, don’t be rude,” Ana Lucia said just as Ava was about to ask the question. “You haven’t even greeted your sweetheart yet. How you can ignore such a beautiful man when you haven’t seen him in ages and he’s sitting right there in front of you is beyond me.”

  As if in a bizarre dream, Ava turned slowly toward the bay window where her father sat, smiling at her cheekily, as if he and her mother shared a good joke at her expense. Opposite him, with his back facing Ava, sat Ryu Takamura.

  She’d recognize those shoulders, neck and back of the head anywhere.

  He turned slightly so that she could see his profile, reminding her of the first night she’d chased after him for a kiss.

  “Hello, Ava.”

  That voice! That deep, resonating, liquid-sex voice!

  Ava walked over to stand in front of him. He looked up at her from his seat, his expression neutral and unsmiling.

  “What are you doing here?” she blurted, staring at him intently as a barrage of emotions bounced all around inside of her.

  He was dressed impeccably in a tailored gray Henley shirt that emphasized his lean yet powerful build, soft, worn blue jeans that were probably over $500 from a designer shop and casual loafers that screamed high-end Italian leather. His hair was styled just so, well-behaving waves that framed his sculpted features to perfection.

  A potent sexuality and animalism poured off him in a rolling heatwave. Ava resisted the urge to fan herself as her temperature hit the roof just looking at him. Her mother was right. She couldn’t believe she’d managed to ignore such devastating beauty and charisma when she first came into the kitchen. How could anyone?

  Well, now he had her full attention.

  “Ava,” Ana Lucia admonished as she brought over two bowls of food, one for Ava’s father and one for Ryu, “is that any way to talk to your guest? Of course he’s here to see you, honey, and to meet us too.”

  To Ryu she gave her sweetest grin and said, “You just let me know when you want seconds, honey, I hope you like lots of parmesan on top. Salt and pepper are on the ledge there.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Monroe, it smells and looks delicious,” he said, smiling gorgeously back at her like an innocent little boy in a scrumptious adult male body.

  Her mother tittered happily, “You call me Ma, sweetie pie, I told you already.”

  Ryu didn’t reply, but his smile grew more indulging, and Ava’s mother all but swooned at the sight of it.

  “Oh for goodness sakes,” Ava muttered, disgusted with both her mother and herself for getting sucked in by his charm. She wasn’t done being mad at him. He couldn’t just erase one whole month of ignoring her with a smile, irresistible though it was.

  To Ryu she said, “You. Back garden. Now.”

  “Ava!” Ana Lucia exclaimed, taking offense on Ryu’s behalf at Ava’s abruptness.

  Even Gavin Monroe started grumbling a bit, the precursor to a lecture on how to behave that always made Ava feel four feet tall.

  But Ava didn’t wait for anyone’s permission. She turned and marched out the kitchen back door to the small vegetable garden behind the townhouse.

  With murmured apologies, Ryu got up and followed her outside.

  Ava took the few seconds lead she had on him to gather her emotions and thoughts and reassert control of herself.

  He was finally here!

  God, he looked so wonderful, smelled more delicious than her mother’s cooking, and sounded…it was better if she didn’t focus on how he sounded. Her mind would slide deeper into the gutter than where it had sunk already and she’d lose all sense and logic.

  She needed to put her foot down where he was concerned.

  It might be a little too soon to ask for eternal commitment after a little over two weeks of knowing each other, but she deserved to know how he felt about her. She wanted to understand where they went from here. And if he didn’t want her, she’d rather get that stake through the heart right no
w rather than slowly pine away over days, weeks, months and years.

  She didn’t turn to face him when she felt him come outside and stop a few feet behind her. Well, there went her fantasy that he would sweep her into his arms and kiss her senseless like any besotted lover would do.

  Note to self, he was probably not that besotted, Ava thought as her heart plummeted.

  “Why are you here?” she asked, her back still facing him.

  A brief silence.

  “Inanna asked me to escort you to the Shield tomorrow. Given that our enemies are still at large, it wouldn’t be safe for you to travel alone. You are the only link to a viable serum from GTI’s genetic engineering research. They might figure that out soon, if they don’t know already. They will try to come after you again.”

  So much for simply wanting to see her, Ava thought.

  “I’ve been home for a month and nothing out of the ordinary has happened. You guys worry too much. It’s not as if I’ve had a 24/7 bodyguard thus far.” Ava said.

  Silence.

  Had she? Had a bodyguard, that was?

  She knew enough about Ryu’s pauses and silences by now to know that when he chose not to answer or refute, it was often because he wanted her to believe her own version of the truth. In other words, he didn’t want to out-right lie.

  She turned finally to face him, bracing herself first for the impact of seeing him. It didn’t help all that much. She still reeled from a wave of lust and longing when she regarded him, standing so close, yet seemed so far away.

  “Have you been guarding me all this time?”

  He didn’t answer, gazing back at her neutrally, which was as much as admitting that he had.

  “Why haven’t you made yourself known?” Ava asked, frowning. “Why haven’t you appeared before me until now?”

  Ava considered further. “In fact, why show up now? Why not just keep guarding me anonymously? Without my knowledge as you apparently have been doing?”

  A long silence.

  Ava waited. She hoped he would speak soon because she was holding her breath until he did. She couldn’t seem to help it.