Dark Child of Forever (Dark Destinies Book 3)

by S. K. Ryder

  The bucket clanged to the ground. Not so the mop. The moment Jackson turned around, he spotted the handle coming for his head in a wide arc. Jackson grabbed it and yanked hard. Terry jerked forward. His feet tripped against Dominic’s side as Jackson’s fist rammed home into Terry’s gut. With a loud oomph, the redhead doubled over and came down on top of Dominic who jerked up, his wasted arms flailing, mouth gaping, and blood-caked hair standing on end.

  “Welcome back,” Jackson said as he shook out his hand. Pointing to the man squirming by his side, he added, “Lunch is served.”

  Dominic stared. At him. At Carl stirring in the debris. At Terry groaning beside him. Then he saw his blood-covered hands. He held up the bony claws in front of his emaciated face. A dry hiss rattled in his throat.

  Jackson was grateful there wasn’t a mirror handy, and he congratulated himself for remaining so calm. He studiously ignored the death-head grin and kept his gaze locked to Dominic’s eyes, which remained human and very much confused. “You’ve been bled out all night. You need to—”

  A small sound made him spin on a heel in time to see the shadowy figure of Tim wielding a large tray in two hands. “You touch my brother, you die, you shit-for-brains asshole!”

  The moment Jackson snapped up his arm to block the blow, he spotted Terry staggering to his feet and reaching for the discarded Bowie knife. Jackson spun to kick it out of reach past the bewildered Dominic. Something hard crunched into his fingers and sent spikes of pain shooting from the two stumps on his right hand. With a furious cry, he ripped the tray out of Tim’s hands, flung it away, and struck him with a sharp blow to the jaw. Then he leveled a kick at Terry’s chest that sent him hurtling into a group of chairs, which scattered on impact like bowling pins. Both brothers groaned but stayed where they landed.

  Dominic crept backwards on the trembling spindles of his arms and legs. The pants flapping around his bony hips threatened to slide off and hobble him. He continued to hiss, his vocal cords sounding like they had withered away to the consistency of dental floss. Raw panic lit his enormous eyes.

  “Easy,” Jackson cooed and made quieting motions with his hands. “Easy. You’re going to be okay. Relax.”

  Dominic halted his retreat, but it was hard to tell if that was because of Jackson’s words or his strength giving out.

  “You’ll feel better in a moment. I promise.” Jackson retrieved the knife from under the sofa. Seeing it, Dominic hissed again, but this time the sound shifted, darkened, and morphed into a guttural growl.

  The small hairs all over Jackson’s body rose in primal alarm. “Easy,” he whispered, backing away. “Easy.” Without letting Dominic out of his sight, he crouched beside the still-unconscious bulk of Carl and brought the knife edge to the man’s wrist. He made a shallow scratch, barely enough to draw a line of blood.

  Dominic’s eyes riveted to the injury. The growling stopped.

  Jackson eased out of the way. “This is what you’re hungry for,” he murmured, his voice just this side of unsteady. A part of him recoiled at what he was doing. But it was only a small part and growing fainter by the moment. “You know you want it. Go and get it.”

  The vampire’s gaze flickered to him, and his mouth opened a little wider. Then the fresh wound captured his attention again. He crawled forward as though fighting the pull of an invisible string.

  Jackson wiped the back of his hand over his mouth, ignoring the soft tremor in his fingers. If this didn’t work . . .

  Dominic was still undecided when Carl came to with a groan. He blinked at the surrounding shapes in the reflected half-light. When he realized what hovered over him, he yelped and tried to roll way.

  The starving vampire pounced with a speed that belied his withered body. Pinned to the ground, Carl thrashed and screamed with unmitigated fear. The whites in Dominic’s eyes disappeared. For another small eternity he hesitated, and Jackson rode a razor’s edge between naked terror and roaring anticipation.

  Then indecision poured out of Dominic the way his blood had poured out of him all night. He shoved the terrified face aside, drove his teeth into the fleshy neck, and fed.

  Chapter 25

  The Space Between

  “Are you back yet?”

  The words slithered between his thoughts like eels. He understood them, but their meaning eluded him. As did the identity of the man who spoke them. He thought he knew him, this bronzed, muscled creature with the cutting bright eyes. He thought he could trust him. Which is why he tried so hard to understand.

  “Guess not,” said the man and glanced at his watch again. “Just relax. It’ll come.” But the worry in the pinched face told Dominic that maybe it—whatever it was—might not.

  Dominic looked around for ‘it.’ Evergreens towered like fragrant walls holding back a flood of shadows. They were alone here. The man sat on a picnic table. Dominic stood before him. Every few seconds, the sound of a car passing somewhere out of sight overpowered the wind soughing in the branches.

  His companion muttered below his breath and Dominic turned back to him.

  “The sun’s been down five minutes. Talk to me. Do you know who I am?”

  “A friend.” The words rolled like pebbles in his mouth.

  “Right.” The friend rubbed his face with one hand, pulling at his chin, frustrated. “And you are?”

  “Dominic.”

  “What are you?”

  The pebbles turned to concrete. His mind emptied.

  “Fuck.” He slid off the table. “Fine. Let me remind you.” Before Dominic could fathom what he was about, the friend produced a pocket knife, unfolded it, and ran the edge over the pad of his thumb. The welling blood sparkled with luminous beauty, and the meaty metallic smell of it hit Dominic with tangible force.

  “Anything?”

  He swallowed hard and hunched his shoulders against a sudden chill. But he didn’t move as the friend pressed the injured thumb to Dominic’s mouth. Blood seeped between his lips. The concrete in his mind crumbled. The blockage disappeared.

  And the darkness spewed forth.

  Dominic reared back and gasped. Reality crystallized around him in all its terror and fury.

  The blood-drinkers he had been too weak to fight.

  His sister in their grasp.

  The half-sleep state he had awakened to.

  The darkness he escaped—and was still trying to escape.

  The darkness that defined him.

  “Je m’souviens,” he said. “I’m back.”

  Jackson retreated several steps and sucked the blood off his thumb. “About fucking time.”

  Dominic doubled over, but his stomach only rolled for a second or two before settling down. He had consumed no solid food this day. His hands looked thin as they clasped his knees, and his whole body felt fragile as glass.

  Hunger gnawed at him . . . even though he had fed.

  He looked up. “Did I take their lives? The men you brought?”

  “You remember what happened?”

  “Maybe.” He straightened. His leather jacket flapped open over his bare chest, and a pair of cargo pants rode far too low on his skinny hips. His heart pushed sand through his veins. He would need more. Much, much more. “Like fading dreams. Nightmares,” he amended. “You came for me.”

  “I wanted to get Genevie. I kinda needed you.”

  Renewed despair hit him. He tried to sift through Jackson’s memories of the day, but couldn’t quite muster the necessary focus. Still, on some level, he already knew. “We did not find her.”

  Jackson shook his head. “No. You were a useless zombie today. I tried to get you to break down those doors, but you didn’t have the strength. It was better for us to get as far away from there as possible before we got anywhere close to sunset.”

&nb
sp; “Did you try to stop me taking lives, too?”

  “Yes.”

  Dominic remembered the blood’s scalding heat in his belly. So much blood. “You did not succeed.”

  Jackson’s jaw tightened. “Not with the first one, no. The other two ran when they figured out what was going on.” He paused. “I don’t know if you heard me or not when you tracked them down, but you stopped before they were too far gone.”

  “I heard you,” Dominic said softly. Jackson’s cursed demands had been desperate enough to reach him even as the blood filled him. He had taken too many lives before becoming Lord of Night, but none since. Any life sacrificed to sustain him was a life too many. “Merci.”

  “You listened to me when I told you to compel them to think their friend died of an accident. They carried him to the surface with us and then let us drive away. And here we are.” He waved a hand at the wilderness and picnic tables.

  “Which is where?”

  “We’re about halfway back to Vancouver. Far enough from them for the moment, I think.”

  Halfway. In the middle. Like him. Balancing on an invisible edge. Not just between geographic locations, but between his sister to the east and Cassidy to the west, and more than that even—he balanced between his past and his future. Between day and night.

  Between humanity and . . . not.

  “You have to recover,” Jackson said as though reading his mind. “Don’t even think about going back for her while you’re like this. She has a couple more days.”

  “Do you know how she got here?”

  Jackson filled him in on Cassidy’s news that morning. It was unthinkable. A compelled spy right there in his lair. Natalia’s and Ryan’s ‘escape’ from the colony hadn’t been good fortune so much as it had been Esteban’s plot. The fragile little Russian blood-drinker was nothing but a tool used and disposed on a whim, and given what she and Ryan saw during their brief stay at Dominic’s house, it would have been simple to find vulnerable mortals with whom to coerce and torment him.

  He scrubbed both hands over his face and let the frustration wash over him and away. His need to charge to his sister’s rescue bordered on overwhelming, but in his current condition, he would end up right back where he had been, hung up and drained. And this time Jackson would not be suffered to live.

  There were other consequences as well. Through Natalia, Esteban had been a step ahead of Dominic almost from the moment she crossed Aubrey’s path. He must have felt very sure of his victory to order his unwitting spies compromised now. And he had been in Dominic’s muddled head. There was no telling what all else he had learned, including Cassidy’s importance and location.

  Reaching out to her, Dominic sensed that she was safe. At least for now.

  “Does Cassidy know what happened to us?” he wondered.

  “Yes. You compelled them to give our phones back before we left. I called her as soon as I could get mine charged enough to turn on and find a signal. All is quiet in the city, but she’s beside herself with worry. Garrett said she even tried to badger Isao into coming after us.”

  Dominic smiled wistfully. He almost felt sorry for the proud samurai, but was grateful for his steadfast vigilance.

  Jackson pulled the keys from his vest pocket. “We need to keep moving. And I need to get some food.”

  “As do I,” Dominic murmured.

  “Yes,” Jackson said on a long exhale. “I imagine you do. I’ll find us a fast food joint with lots of customers. But . . .” He drifted off and Dominic met his eyes. “If you need something right now, well . . .”

  “Are you offering me—”

  “Yes. My blood.” He cleared his throat awkwardly. “If you need it. Like a snack, I guess.”

  Before he knew he was doing it, Dominic embraced Jackson, his once-enemy who had risked his life to save him and risked it again now by offering himself to a starving vampire. For long seconds, Jackson’s pulse thundered in his ears, and the heat of his skin burned against his lips. But what Dominic savored most of all was the genuine affection behind this unexpected offer. Which is why, even though his belly cramped with hunger, he kept his lethal teeth firmly sheathed.

  “Merci, mon ami,” he murmured and stepped back. “But you have given me enough for one day. And I will need far more than a snack.”

  ~ ~ ~

  After Dominic had tapped enough veins to pass for a merely ailing human rather than one at death’s door, he drove the rental fast and sure along the winding highway back to Vancouver and Cassidy. Jackson succumbed to his exhaustion in the passenger seat, but Dominic’s mind spun faster than the wheels.

  The Lord of Night was not invincible. What a fool he had been to think otherwise and toy with the suppressant, a fire more dangerous than the sun. He had risked not only his life and Jackson’s, but the lives of every blood-drinker in existence. Even his human family was now in peril. All because he had been too bewitched by the promise of daylight to pay attention. He had underestimated Adilla and Esteban, and given them all the time they needed to uncover his weaknesses, even handed himself over to them at his most vulnerable.

  His fault, all of it.

  He cursed under his breath. Indecision. He wallowed in it. Ambivalence kept him suspended between worlds. It was a luxury he could ill afford.

  And yet he wallowed.

  The sun still called to him.

  Perhaps more than ever.

  A little after one in the morning, he pulled into the Pan Pacific’s parkade and woke Jackson. Then he tuned into the dark web to locate Isao. There were three others who appeared to him as bright beacons now instead of ghosts, Isao’s younglings. They were located in various parts of the hotel complex, patrolling for threats.

  My lord.

  Isao’s silent greeting felt tense, putting Dominic instantly on guard. What happened?

  Nothing here. Pause. A great many things with you, as I understand it.

  I survived, Dominic countered as he set a brisk pace out of the parkade. And what do you think you understand?

  Garrett has told me what you tried to do. And the result.

  Taken aback, Dominic’s long stride faltered. An alliance had been forged, Isao informed him, between himself and the wily old vampire hunter. Information sharing was part of that agreement. All in the name of security, of course.

  “Merde,” he said faintly.

  “What?” Jackson wondered.

  Another bright presence approached, causing Dominic to curse again. He raked the fingers of both hands through his sticky hair and plowed through the door into the hotel’s staid and air-conditioned inner sanctum.

  “What the—oh,” Jackson said when he spotted the female blood-drinker at the far end of the hall. She was small and Asian and looked runway-model-fragile in her stylish coat and thigh-high boots. But her eyes gleamed as hard and dark as black steel. Surprise made her delicate features go slack.

  “Friend or foe?” Jackson queried out of the side of his mouth.

  “Spy of a friend,” Dominic growled. The starved prisoner look he currently sported wasn’t lost on Makoto, nor the stench of blood still clinging to his skin. Both she and her sire, Isao, were now very much aware of just how close to death he had come. How close they had all come.

  I have failed you, my lord, Isao said on a wave of profound shock.

  On the contrary, Dominic countered, choosing to misunderstand. You have kept my family safe. For that you will forever have my gratitude.

  But I failed to prepare you adequately for Adilla. You underestimated him and put us all at risk.

  “Not a mistake I will make again. Of that you can be very sure,” Dominic muttered as he swept past Makoto. She was little more than a century old, but at the moment she was easily his better. He was vulnerable, which made them all vu
lnerable, a state of affairs that did not sit well with Isao and his spawn.

  Not a mistake I will make again, either, Isao promised solemnly and proceeded to lay out the situation in more detail than Dominic cared to contemplate right now. With your sister, Adilla has gained a grave advantage over you. He will use her to provoke you until he breaks you to his will or one or both of you and many or all of us have turned to ash. Nor can you turn your back on him now. He will not let your challenge go unanswered. Not in a thousand years of night.

  An excellent argument for Adilla’s destruction, Dominic thought, but swallowed the impulse before it could reach anyone who would object to that course of action. Adilla will submit. Even if I have to keep him in chains for the rest of time.

  This appeared to mollify the blood-drinkers in the hotel, for no further chastising was forthcoming. He counted himself fortunate that they needed him to live as much as Adilla.

  “What just happened?” Jackson wondered when they stepped into the lift and the doors sealed them into a steel cocoon.

  Dominic leaned his head against the wall behind him. “Politics.”

  “Oh. Nice.” Picking up on the weary tone, he let that answer lie. He gestured with his phone. “Garrett texted. They’re all waiting in your suite.”

  Dominic didn’t reply. He knew. Cassidy’s presence in his mind had grown steadily stronger for hours, instilling him with new determination. But while she knew of his turmoil, she was also preoccupied with keeping Francesca from despairing over her missing daughter and absent son, or worse, calling the authorities.

  Looking down at himself, he realized he was far from the picture of confidence his mother would expect. More of a battlefield survivor. The wounds had healed and most of the blood was wiped away, but it still caked his hair and edged his fingernails. “May I borrow your bathroom? And your closet?”