by SK Ryder
A cursory inspection of the rest of the place turned up several empty green bottles, towels wadded up in the downstairs bathroom, and a locked door to the back bedroom. The master suite upstairs was dusty but otherwise in good order.
Beachside Havens apologized when she called, promised maid service first thing in the morning, and would reimburse two weeks’ worth of rent for the inconvenience. The air conditioner would have to wait until the owners could be tracked down overseas.
“I’m going to boil in here,” she muttered. Rivulets of sweat already trickled between her shoulder blades. With a clip from her bag, she bunched her hair on top of her head. Then she got to work opening curtains and windows and locating cleaning supplies. No way would she wait until tomorrow to make this dump livable.
But, at least for the next two weeks, the dump in question was free.
Dominic Marchant returned to consciousness with a start. Music drifted through his house. American Country music, no less. His eyes snapped open and he inhaled, tasting the air for the familiar brooding heat, but found only the unfamiliar stink of cleaning solutions—and the bone-deep temptation of warm-blooded life.
He sat up, the small hairs all over his body rising in alarm. Expanding his vision, he scanned the darkness in infrared shades of gray. His meager belongings lay scattered among the juvenile furnishings, and the samurai swords hung together in their usual place on the wall beside the locked door. Nothing had been disturbed. He stretched his senses outward. No movements, no sounds beyond the music. Outside, the sighing rhythm of the ocean accompanied the lazy chirp of insects. He cocked his head and focused.
There. Light and fast. A heartbeat.
Dominic unlocked the door and cracked it open. Light blazed in the kitchen down the hall. Eyes narrowed, he moved into the living room where he found the source of the heartbeat curled up on the sofa. It was the largest domesticated cat he had ever encountered. When it spotted him, the animal sprang up, arched its back, and puffed out its black fur in a hissing display of flat-eared, wild-eyed, bare-fanged aggression. On instinct, he responded in kind, extending his far more impressive canines and issuing a guttural growl.
The cat wisely reconsidered its folly. Ceding the territory to the superior predator, it bolted for the far corner of the room and the perceived safety of a love seat. But instead of sliding beneath the furniture, the animal thumped into the too low base with a surprised screech. Frantic, it hurtled into another direction, paws skidding on the tiles before finding traction, and galloped up the stairs.
Dominic swayed as it passed, lured by the rush of its agitated blood, but he let it go. The cat wasn’t the problem. Whoever had brought it was.
While he lay in oblivion during the day, someone had come and scrubbed years of neglect off the floors and furnishings. And while they weren’t here now, they would be back and intended to stay. His own sense of panic rose as he scanned the familiar space and its unwelcome additions—litter box, pet dishes, blaring radio, laptop bag, camera, papers . . .
He shuffled the small pile on the kitchen table. To-do lists, cryptic notes, phone numbers, doodles. And a contract.
The tight print hit him like a train roaring over him. In the weeks he’d been here, it never occurred to him that the cottage—legally owned by his mother on St. Barth—might be managed and available for rent. The place was too much of a wreck to be viable as an income property. Yet, here it was, written. For very generous terms—he stared at the line labeled ‘tenant’s name’—one Cassidy Chandler had taken possession on a month-to-month basis.
He dropped the contract on the table and rubbed a hand down his face. Mon Dieu, non.
What would he do with a human in his lair? He couldn’t even remember his last conversation with one that didn’t end with a corpse in his arms. The very thought of it drove his fangs out again. His belly cramped with hunger. This Cassidy Chandler could not—would not—survive meeting him. Not here. Not now. Not like this.
And then what?
Then it was all over. Someone would come looking for her, and they would find him instead. He would have to leave. One way or another, either before or after he made a corpse of her, he would have to leave.
“Non,” he whispered. Leaving was out of the question. Of his stolen life in the sun, this place was all he had left. It was his final tether to humanity, his past, his present, his future. He would exist here—and he would die here.
And he would do it alone.
Chapter 2
Justice
Hunched low over the bike, Dominic blew across the causeway bridge to the mainland and through the intersection into town at just shy of one hundred miles per hour. An SUV lurched toward him from the right. He twisted the throttle, increasing his speed, screaming past the front bumper so close he felt it brush past his knee. He ignored the shrieking tires and blasting horn and continued darting among vehicles and across the occasional parking lot and sidewalk. Only a tiny portion of his vampire mind noted, processed, anticipated, and reacted to the shifting traffic patterns as he made his way out to I-95.
The majority of his thoughts belonged to one Cassidy Chandler.
“Merde, merde, merde . . .”
He was now starving. Every fiber in his being demanded that he remain and take advantage of the meal guaranteed to walk through the door at any moment. He had almost faltered when, on his way out, a little yellow car turned off onto Seagrape Lane, a lone woman at the wheel. It had to be her, returning home. To his home. His lair.
No. She was not the type of prey he preferred—or so he told himself. It didn’t matter to the beast that lived in his depraved heart. If it had a pulse, it was prey. There was little he could do about it. This he knew from bitter experience, and the echo of the human he had been not that long ago still battled the violent instinct for blood, any blood, with a bargain—all the blood he wanted, but on very specific terms. Mademoiselle Chandler did not meet these terms. For now she was safe. As was what remained of his conscience.
Then again, the night was young.
“Fuck.”
The machine between his thighs quivered as he leaned into the curve of the highway on-ramp. The BMW bike had been modified by its previous owner to a point where no mere mortal rider could hope to maintain control at maximum speed, but Dominic often pushed its limits until the engine screamed. Within seconds, he accelerated well past two hundred, becoming little more than a blur among the snails comprising normal traffic flow. He was one with the bike. He was one with the night.
He was the night.
And day had moved into his house.
“Mon Dieu, aidez-moi.”
But God could not help him, not now, if he ever had. Dominic was on his own.
Fort Lauderdale was closer to his lair than he liked, but his hunger was too potent. If he waited much longer, he risked becoming careless. He didn’t have to cruise the neighborhoods around Port Everglades for long before opportunity presented itself in the form of two thugs plying their trade in narcotics. As Dominic stashed the bike and let the beast rise, thoughts of the girl faded.
From a distance, they mistook him at first, as they always did, for a potential customer, a rival, or an easy mark. His tall, athletic form beguiled with casual grace, and the tousled dark waves of his hair spoke of naïve youth. The silver-studded black leather outfit might have been their only warning of a darker side.
“Bonsoir,” he greeted with a dazzling grin. “I have something for you.”
They frowned, puzzling over him, but one reached behind him, producing a handgun. “It better be your wallet, punk.”
“Much better,” Dominic countered on an inhuman growl of anticipation and savored their dawning unease. “Your death.”
He dropped the leash that held the beast, and his reason all but vanished, swallowed whole by t
he primal need to feed.
It was more than the blood. That would have been simple and crude. No, much as Dominic had prepared a prime cut of beef in his previous life, the beast liked to season its prey with measured doses of horror and hope before marinating it in the terror of certain death. They cursed him and they ran. They struggled and begged. They lost their bowels and cried for God. All to no avail. In the end, he sank the powerful fangs hard and fast and tore with savage abandon.
The hot, coppery blood hit the roof of his mouth in orgasmic pulses. He went faint with ecstasy, pushed deeper, pulled harder. There was poison in his saliva, in his bite, entering the bloodstream. When it seeped into the brain, the mind of the prey fell open to him, showing him in vivid detail precisely what he was destroying. In this case, the lives he ended were ruled by ego and greed. One had committed gruesome murders. The other had delivered his own sister to those he sought to impress and stood by as they raped her to death.
They were the lords of the street. They were above the law.
Until tonight.
Tonight justice had found them.
By the time Dominic drank the second life whole, his face was wet with emotion, both his own and his victims’. He sat alone between the broken corpses in the dark. The sound of traffic hummed nearby. A siren howled farther away. The beast lay coiled, drowsy with satisfaction. He almost felt human again. He didn’t like what he saw.
“When will justice come for me?” Try as he might, he had yet to find it.
He wiped his face and raked his fingers through his hair, pushing the melancholy out of his mind. Then he got up to retrieve the machete he kept strapped to the bike. There was work to be done.
The sky already paled in the east by the time Dominic neared his lair. His body grew sluggish under the sun’s growing weight. Or so it felt to him. He had no true knowledge of what plunged him into oblivion every morning. This was only one of many mysteries bestowed on him without benefit of explanation by the deranged creature that had sired him into this hell. He had no doubt, however, about what the sun would do to him should it catch him in the open. In the confused and horrific months he spent with Kambyses, his sire, he had numerous opportunities to see what remained of a blood-drinker body left in the sun for a day. Which was only one reason he had fled Kambyses and now hid from him.
Once off A1A, Dominic silenced the bike and pushed it the rest of the way. Whatever he would find, he was in no mood to deal with it this close to sunrise. The house lay not quite dark and not quite silent in the predawn hush. The yellow VW Beetle with Colorado plates squatted in the carport, and the windows upstairs had been flung open to catch the sea breeze. The sheer curtains behind them glowed with a soft light. She slept up there, his unwelcome houseguest. He heard the rhythm of her breath with little effort.
He stashed the bike and helmet in the shed behind the cottage, clicked the lock shut, and detoured to the beach. There was still a little time to draw some solace from the sea, to remember the way he had once felt an ocean sunrise like a lover’s intimate embrace. The drowsy shush of the surf greeted him. Wind soughed in the branches of an Australian pine and ruffled his hair. Welcoming. Comforting. Yet his heart lay in his chest like a winter-cold cinder, aching for the tingling heat of the summer sun to light it.
An anxious shiver rippled up his spine, forcing him to turn back toward the cottage. Never again would he know the warmth of a sunrise. And perhaps that was all the justice he would ever know, the only punishment for all the lives he had taken.
The houseguest, the intruder, had locked the front door. “Merde.” He never locked the door when he went out at night. Dominic stepped back far enough to survey his options, and his gaze fell on the open windows of the upstairs bedroom. He hesitated, considering that room . . . where his father once slept.
Crushing the memories away before they could unhinge him, Dominic leapt onto the porch roof. Shadow-silent he slipped through the window and past the sheer curtains keeping the mosquitos at bay—if not other blood drinking creatures—in lieu of the shredded insect screen. His sinister musings fled when he caught her pure, healthy scent of honeyed fruit and warm musk. The beast stirred with sluggish interest, and Dominic stopped breathing the air and the ambrosia it carried.
He intended to speed through the room, but he stopped short when his eyes caught the woman in his parents’ old bed. Bathed in the warm glow of a nightlight and clad in only a tank top and a pair of floral-patterned panties, she lay across the rumpled sheets with her arms and legs flung out, offering herself to the breezes swirling from the overhead fan.
Dominic stood transfixed, letting his gaze wander with unexpected pleasure. In his twenty-seven years before this curse befell him, he had known his fair share of women, but none quite like this. An active life had shaped that smooth, strong body, not starvation dieting and medical procedures. Her face, too, was exquisite in a natural, almost bucolic way, full of stubborn lines and gentle grace. A lock of hair had fallen across her freckled nose and shivered with her breath. On her right hand, an impressive diamond struck an odd contrast with the abused nails and even her presence in a place like this. Alone.
A framed picture sat on the nightstand. It depicted her together with a woman in a bright pink ski-cap, a close, older relative, judging by the similar cut of their deep blue eyes. The woman’s smile had an air of resignation. The girl’s—Cassidy, he recalled—was broad, almost fierce.
Dominic cocked his head, considering. She didn’t look like she smiled much lately. In fact, she looked exhausted from more than a day spent cleaning his house. The corners of her eyes crinkled with tension even now.
Another pair of eyes caught his across the soft curve of her belly. A huge black mass of fur lay there, coiled like a spring. Unlike its mistress, the cat was wide-awake and aware of him. Knowing itself discovered, it scrambled backwards and promptly fell off the side of the bed with a thump. Growling, it hustled underneath.
Cassidy stirred at the commotion, turning away to mumble into the pillow. When her hair fell away from her neck, the slow throb of her vein there caught his attention. In his enhanced vision, he saw it as a flowing ribbon of golden light. A siren call to his basest needs.
He closed his eyes and forced the beast back into its cage. When he opened them again, dread gripped him like an icy vise. No longer distracted by his supernatural awareness of her life force, he saw instead the dark, crescent bruise marring the fine skin on her neck. Dominic dropped into a crouch, the lethargy growing in his bones forgotten.
Another blood-drinker was near.
But not here. Not now. He would have sensed another immortal presence. The injury wasn’t fresh—he estimated a day, maybe two since being inflicted—but it was ugly. The bite had been hard, indicating loss of control or intent to kill. Yet she had survived, the attack aborted. Not only that, she was here, in his lair. The odds of this being a coincidence were nonexistent. She must have been compelled, sent here, to him, by another blood-drinker. But to what end? And by who?
He could think of several possibilities, all of them justifying her immediate disposal, even if it meant he would have to abandon his lair. If one blood-drinker had found him, it was only a matter of time before his mad sire did as well.
If he hadn’t already.
The sun was coming, and his thoughts turned slippery inside his skull. At best, he had seconds of consciousness left to decide . . . what? His gaze flew to the girl with the bruise. No blood-drinker could touch him during the day, but she could. If he killed her now, or if he let her live, the result would be the same—someone, something would find him today or tonight and would do with him as it pleased. If she stayed, he could not. He had to find shelter elsewhere. Now.
Dominic got as far as the window. A sky already bright with reflected sunfire scalded his face, forcing him back inside, throwing him to the floor. He
lay flat and stared up at the shadows whirling around the ceiling fan. To his eyes, sparks flew from the blades. A droning hum built in his ears, blotting out all else, the roar of the sun barreling across the horizon.
Stairs. He was crawling down the stairs, heavy limbs moving as if of their own accord, dragging him to safety. As it always did, the beast took over his body to save itself, taking the decision out of his hands. Tears streamed down his face as the light inside the house built ever faster, burning his eyes, squeezing around him with physical force, wringing all his strength from his bones and emptying his mind. He bit his tongue hard to stifle the agonized howl burning in his throat, to conceal his presence from her, the intruder, the spy.
When the door to his sanctuary closed, smothering him in blackness, his body went limp against it and slid to the floor. He reached for the deadbolt, but couldn’t feel it, couldn’t feel his arm flopping by his side. He didn’t know if he had turned the lock, if he was truly safe. With his last coherent thought, he realized it didn’t matter. If she was here to kill him, she would have done it yesterday.
And if she wanted to kill him today . . . justice had found him at last.
Chapter 3
Man on a Mission
Jackson braced himself at the base of the polished oak staircase. He wouldn’t take no for an answer this time. He couldn’t afford to. Neither could Cassidy.
