by S. K. Ryder
“You just gonna sit there like a lump and let me do all the work around here?” Garrett said, pulling Jackson out of his speculations. The fragrant smells of bacon and coffee started to overpower the whiff of old onion. “There’s a bathroom that needs clearing out before one of us needs to take a crap.”
Jackson got up and shook the questions out of his head. “Right. Where do you think we should put them?”
Garrett looked around and gestured with the spatula. “Let’s keep the sofa and the bunk over the cockpit for us later. Stick them in the booth. We’ll eat at the picnic table outside.”
~ ~ ~
He was back.
Dominic knew it even before he opened his eyes. That strange world was about to claim him again. The one that had nothing to do with reality. The dream state populated by people he never met claiming to be his closest friends or lovers. People claiming to be monsters.
People claiming he was a monster.
One of these individuals hovered over him now in a twilight fog, blurred and indistinct. He turned his face away from the bees that drove their stingers into his eyeballs.
“Dominic, wake up. We need you. The real you.”
The real him? Something shifted around inside him, like two transparent pictures aligning in space, struggling to line up and come into focus, both as real as they were alien. The enormity of what was taking shape made him pant for air. And the memories that seeped in from everywhere made him shake. Darkness beckoned. Blessed oblivion.
“Don’t you dare,” Jackson snarled and grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket. “Stay with me. I used the last shot on you, and if you don’t get with the program right now, you’re never waking up again. You hear me?”
That didn’t sound like a bad thing, not at all—the things he had done deserved a death sentence—but the desperation in his friend’s voice seized him. Something was very, very wrong. And it was more than just the fact that he was a vampire. Or even a vampire conscious during the day. Much more.
“Would you miss me, Jackson?” The words rolled around his reluctant tongue and fell out of his mouth like random marbles.
“Not as much as Cassidy. Now, please. Get the fuck up,” Jackson hissed under his breath.
Keeping his eyes to tiny slits, Dominic twisted away from the thin shade covering the rear wall of the tiny bedroom and bumped up against another body, this one still as death and secured in a body bag. A third bag lay on the other side.
“You brought friends,” Jackson whispered as he hurried to unzip Dominic’s bag all the way to his feet. “We’re almost back to the cavern, but we got intercepted. I was taking a piss, so they don’t know I’m back here. They’re armed and trigger-happy, and there are more of them than I want to risk taking on.”
Dominic’s heart pounded against his ribs, and he couldn’t stop sucking at the air as though he needed it again. His legs felt like they belonged to someone else as he found the floor with his feet. “There are too many for you even with my blood?”
“That won’t save me from a bullet to the head, and—” Jackson froze. “You remember.”
“Oui. I remember everything. From both of me.” He tried to look at Jackson, but the bees were back at his eyes again and he covered them with one hand. “But I am blind and useless.” And would stay useless well into the night if experience was anything to go by. He’d be at a disadvantage again. Genevie was all but turned. “What made you do this?” The angry growl he aimed for turned into a whine. And trying to read the situation from Jackson’s mind was like flipping pages in a mud-covered book.
Jackson shoved something at him. Dominic grasped it, felt sunglasses, and pushed them onto his face as Jackson spoke in hushed tones. “The moment we turned off the main road, we got pulled over by one cop that turned into four before I could zip my fly back up, all of them armed to the teeth. They got one look at the bags in the booth and—”
“Goddamn it! I said leave that where it is,” Garrett bellowed from the other side of the door.
A male voice calmly told him to step aside. Sounds of a scuffle ensued. A hard thump and a low grunt of pain finished it. “Son of a bitch!”
Jackson leaned over the bed and moved the shade up just enough to see the scene outside. Dominic craned his neck. The light blazing in felt like the blast from an oven. Painful tears burst from his eyes, but with the sunglasses he could just make out two uniformed figures standing over a long dark smudge lying on the side of the road. Two others joined them, another smudge swinging between them. A body bag.
“Ah, non.”
The door burst open and filled with a disheveled Garrett cradling his arm against his chest. “Are you just going to hide back here while they drag out our entire cargo at gunpoint?” Spotting Dominic hunched on the bed, he added, “And what the hell did you do?”
“I got us help,” Jackson said.
“Oh, this ought to be good. What fraction of his head do we get this time?”
“All of it,” Dominic said.
Garrett stepped into the space between the bathroom and bunk beds, clearing the doorway. “Then get your all-of-it out there before they kill another one of your flock.”
Another one? Dominic maneuvered his string-puppet body to the front of the RV, stubbing his toes twice, once half-falling on top of a still, bagged body, holding on to various bulkheads as he went. Never had his arms and legs been less cooperative, and when he got to the open door, they declared an all-out strike. It was as if something inside him with a mind of its own refused to step out there into all that sunlight. That something, his true vampire self, found itself half-awake and trapped in a nightmare. The edges of his vision darkened. Oblivion reached for him. Just pass out like he did before, like every fiber of his being screamed to do when the sun was up. Run, hide, seek the darkness.
“Ça va,” he reassured himself and forced his gaze to the scene outside, to the officer bending over, reaching for the zipper on the second bag. Two others turned back to the RV for the next bag. “Ç’est d’accord.” This was okay. This worked. He knew it did. He had walked in this inferno without so much as a blister before, without even thinking about it. He could do it again.
The moment his vision cleared, Dominic leapt out into the pool of fire and grabbed the wrist of the man unzipping the second bag. “Arrêtez! Stop!”
The officer looked up in open-mouthed surprise. “Step back immediately,” he said and tried to jerk his hand free only to drop to his knees with a strangled shriek when his bones cracked in Dominic’s grip.
His partner drew his sidearm. “Hands up and get on your knees,” he barked. The two officers who had been on their way to retrieve another bag turned back, hands going to their weapons as well.
Dominic zipped the bag back up and forced compulsion into his voice. “Put your guns away and listen carefully.” The weapons lowered slowly. “You have found nothing here. You stopped no one. You are having an uneventful day and must continue on your way.” They exchanged puzzled glances. Another compulsion had a hold of them, a powerful one, and Dominic was nowhere near strong enough right now to counter it. He had seconds before they forgot he ever spoke and would hear nothing else he had to say.
At which point, he would have to kill them.
Dominic closed his burning eyes and lowered his head. Sunlight beat against him in white-hot waves. But he wasn’t burning. The pain wasn’t real. It was what he imagined he should feel, what his vampire self dreaded the most. Grinding his teeth in concentration, he crushed the panic in his chest and pulled his most powerful self out of the very marrow of his bones.
Then he cast a psychic cloak around himself.
Around the body bags.
Around the RV.
“What the—” one of the officers said.
“Where did he go?”
Several seconds later, “Where did who go, Josh?”
“What? I—nobody. What are you talking about?”
“Shit. My wrist is killing me.”
“What did you have to go punching a tree for then?” the only woman of the group chided. “If you boys are done with your pissing contest, I have a patrol to finish.”
Within a minute, all four of them had retreated to their various vehicles and pulled out. Only when they were out of sight did Dominic release the cloak.
A blanket settled over him. “Here. Looks like you could use this.”
Dominic gathered the fabric around his shoulders, hiding his hands and cowling his head in shadow. The illusion of pain faded and his thoughts cleared. He touched the body bag before him, relieved to feel the round lump of a solid head. The occupant would survive.
The same could not be said for the blood-drinker in the first bag which had been unzipped and spread open top to bottom. Tendrils of dark gray skittered across Carly’s blistered skin. Tracks of ash erupted all over her bare arms, chest, throat and sweetly childish face. Even her bi-colored hair wilted away to sooty dust. There was no trace of this morning’s terror. She was dead.
“Jesus,” Garrett muttered as he joined Dominic and Jackson. “Poor kid.”
Dominic held out his hand to cast a shadow over the disintegrating body. His skin prickled but stayed pristine, blazing white at the end of his black sleeve. He was immune, at least for this day. He walked in the sun to bear witness to the fate he cheated.
“Sorry,” Jackson said. “I know this was the last thing you wanted today.”
“Au contraire. This is the one thing I have always wanted.” Even when he decided he would never have this again, he had still craved it. Even when he tried to drown his hunger for the sun in the same abyss into which he had plunged his hunger for terror, he knew it would never leave him.
Not until now.
He could see the heat shimmer in the late afternoon sunlight that slanted through the woods and across the road. He could hear the sun thunder in the sky. It beat against his body with tangible force.
No, this wasn’t the world he remembered. Or the sun he once loved. He no longer belonged here. In body, mind and heart, he truly was a creature of the night.
“How do you feel?” Garrett asked.
Dominic pulled his hand back beneath the blanket. “Like an impostor.”
“We should pack these up and keep going before we run out of day,” Jackson said. He leaned down to zip up Carly’s remains.
“Are you certain this is what you want, Garrett?” Dominic said quietly. “To be this vulnerable?”
Jackson stopped the zipper halfway up. The breeze caught a wisp of ash escaping by his hand.
Garrett didn’t respond until Dominic turned to him. “I’m being eaten alive by something even your blood can’t fix. I’m so fragile, the bastards broke my arm just shoving me into a freaking table. How much more vulnerable can I possibly get?”
“Look at her.”
He did, but avoided his nephew’s questioning stare. The muscles in his jaw bunched.
“The same sunlight that warms you now will do that to you if you proceed.”
Garrett’s mouth pinched to the size of a pea. “Well. If that’s how I go, it’s a damn sight better than what’s waiting for me now.”
“Wait,” Jackson said. He closed the bag and straightened. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying? You . . . want to be turned?”
“Nothing gets by you, does it?” Garrett groused.
“What the fuck. Why?”
“Why not?”
“But—”
“We don’t have time for this. Pack these kids up and let’s get back on the road. I’ll tell you all about it while you drive.”
Chapter 31
Certainty
With a good deal less emotion than when he had first appealed to Dominic, Garrett, his arm now secured in a makeshift sling, told his nephew about his diagnosis and the treatment path he could not abide. “It is what it is,” he concluded matter-of-factly. “We all die some time. I’m just not ready to die now. Or any time soon.” With a glance at Dominic who sat curled in the booth behind them, he added, “If the night will have me, I’ll welcome it.”
Jackson looked as stunned as Dominic had ever seen him. He drove the RV with one hand, a can of caffeine in the other. The rattle of the engine was the only sound.
“Well. I see you’ve got this,” Garrett said, sounding awkward. “Think I’ll go see about getting this sling to fit better.” He gave Dominic a long look as he passed. A look that said now his decision felt real.
Once Garrett rummaged in the back, Jackson pitched his voice so only Dominic could hear him. “Are you really going to do this?”
“His request is genuine,” Dominic murmured. “If not for the blood I gave him this week, he would be bed-bound and tethered to machines already.”
“So you’re going to do a compassion turning?”
“Would you prefer he dies a miserable death in the clutches of your so-called health-care system?”
“Shit, no. The bastard is more of a father to me than my father is.”
“But you cannot imagine him as a blood-drinker.”
“Be honest. Neither can you. Not after your history with him.”
Dominic sighed and was momentarily distracted by the sensation of his chest expanding with a need for air he hadn’t felt in years.
“You haven’t answered my question,” Jackson muttered. His knuckles went white around the wheel. “Are you going to do this?”
“I don’t know, Jackson. I truly don’t.”
They had almost an hour to sunset and were on target to reach their destination a comfortable twenty-five minutes before that. Dominic used the time to make a phone call. Service was spotty, but after several attempts, he heard Cassidy’s voice wobble through the connection.
“Dominic?” Surprise and concern in that one word.
“Mon amour,” he greeted.
“What happened? Why did Jackson wake you up?” The words came tense and full of restraint.
“Cassidy. It is I. All of me. Awake.”
The connection went silent. He looked at the phone to confirm the call was still active. It was. “Cassidy?”
“Oh my God. You’re awake. Fully awake?” Hard to say if that tremble in her voice was emotional or technical.
“Oui. At last.” He had shed the blanket, though not the sunglasses as he watched the walls of green pass the window beside him. The light still prickled over his skin and made his eyes water, but his vampire’s panic had subsided.
“It’s not what you hoped, is it?” she asked, sensitive to his every mood even now when she couldn’t possibly be aware of his muddled thoughts.
Dominic closed his eyes. “Non.”
“Well. At least now you know for sure.”
That he did. But at what price? This madness could yet cost countless lives tonight when he faced Adilla once more at a disadvantage. Including the lives of those who slept around him now and had placed their fate in him.
“So if you weren’t awake right now, they would all be dead already,” Cassidy reasoned after he summarized events for her.
“But if I had never dabbled with this folly in the first place, none of us would have to be here now. Genevie would not be here now,” he clarified. So strange to have these discussions with her aloud and trying to convey the depths of his feelings in words and tone.
“Are you going to wait another day then?” she asked, tentative hope in her voice.
He considered this. Dismissed it. “The risk of being discovered again is too great. Garrett is too fragile. Jackson is only one. There are no more shots to w
ake me up. And . . . Genevie will not last that long. It doesn’t matter how weak I will be. I cannot afford not to end this. Somehow.”
A short time later, Jackson eased their boxy vehicle into the campground and slipped into a vacant spot next to a party in high gear. Several families had gathered around a set of grills that smoked and sizzled with their dinner. Children darted underfoot. Pop music streamed from a wireless speaker.
Garrett eyed them suspiciously. “Could be sentries. Probably compelled.”
Dominic snorted. “What they are is fresh blood, you fool. Why else do you think Adilla encourages a campground this close to his lair?”
“Jeez,” Jackson said.
Garrett gave Dominic a look that hovered somewhere between horrified and resigned.
When they emerged from the RV, several greetings floated their way. “You look like you had a long day on the road,” one woman called, all smiles. “Want to join us for dinner? We’ve brought way too much.”
While Jackson and Garrett looked at each other as though trying to decide if they should bring weapons, Dominic turned his most beguiling smile on the woman. “We would love to, chère. Merci.”
She chuckled throatily. “Well, c’mon over. You’re in for a treat. Bryce here makes the best burgers for a mile around.” At the grill, a man in a cheerful Kiss the Cook apron waved a pair of tongs in acknowledgment.
“Wait. What are you doing?” Jackson’s tone said he suspected him of being up to the very worst.
Dominic laughed, feeling freer than he had in years. “I am going to have my last solid food ever. And I intend to enjoy every bite.”
~ ~ ~
