by SK Ryder
Chapter 30
Memories of the Sun
Always she surprised him. Always she touched him in ways he didn’t think possible. She knew him. She knew him better than he knew himself, and Dominic no longer cared how. He wallowed in the enchantment of Cassidy.
When he rose and helped her to her feet, his refined senses told him what she was about to do a full two seconds before she stepped close and wrapped her arms around him. He let her, too hungry for her touch. He braced for the sting of that infernal silver ring against his back, but it didn’t come. She no longer wore it. Though he wondered at its absence, he only felt relief as her cheek burned against his shoulder. He closed his eyes to savor the pulsing heat of her body pressed to his own. Of their own volition, his fingers found their way into her hair, caressing the soft waves.
“I’m mastering the sneaky,” she said, laughter in her voice.
His arms tightened around her, drawing her into him like a golden breath of life—and redemption. “Touché, ma belle.”
Much as he knew he should, he could not refuse her compassion. He only hoped that he would not repay her by taking more than she could give. He needed her. He needed her more than he would have believed possible. He existed tonight because of her. What’s more, he wanted to exist because of her. She was the sole voice of reason in his senseless world.
She was his world.
And she could never be his.
There was no future with him he would wish for her, nothing that wasn’t filled with peril and desires which could never be fulfilled. But for this night, she was with him, and he basked in the gift of her acceptance.
Serge loitered in the shrubs, cackling, but thankfully stayed clear of them as Dominic guided Cassidy by the hand through the darkness. For the sake of his hypersensitive eyes, she kept the flashlight off.
He threw himself into the task of making dinner with all the enthusiasm of the newly saved. She quizzed him about the preparations, and he showed her how to dice, mix, and measure. He used the last of the ill-gotten fish fillets for the entrée with a special lemon pepper cream sauce he improvised from available ingredients. Her interest and unfettered appreciation of his efforts suffused him with pleasure.
“You could open a restaurant,” she suggested, gesturing with her fork. “Open only for dinner. It’s perfect.”
Dominic couldn’t help himself. He tossed back his head and laughed as he hadn’t laughed since before the sun was lost to him. He laughed until he cried, slumped over the kitchen counter in a blissful heap. Though perplexed and hesitant, she laughed with him.
“Let me in on the joke now?” she said, wiping her face when he finally quieted.
“Ah, chérie. How should my guests pay for their meals? Shall I ask them to donate a pint of blood on the way out? Or perhaps meet the chef in the pantry for a swift embrace?”
Cassidy fell victim to another paroxysm of hilarity.
Mon Dieu! She laughs at my perversity, he thought, losing the last of his heart to her then and there.
She calmed enough to sip at her glass, then was struck anew and ended up snorting wine out her nose. Dominic watched, fascinated by her hapless attempts to regain her dignity.
“That’s so not right,” she declared at last.
“It would be the only appealing aspect about such a venture.”
“And here I thought you enjoyed cooking.”
“Food no longer holds any interest for me, so I don’t enjoy working with it. My pleasure lies in your enjoyment of what I make. Anyone else—” He shrugged. “I truly don’t care.”
Cassidy pushed a piece of fish through the creamy sauce. “Well, if this is what you can do when you don’t like what you do, I’m sorry I never got to try your cooking before.” She looked up. “Dominic, if it’s really so unpleasant, please don’t do it anymore. I don’t think I can enjoy it knowing that.”
He tilted his head and smiled. “You missed the part where I told you that you are my pleasure.” Color bloomed in her cheeks. And my salvation, he thought, leaning across the counter. “Cassidy, ma belle amie. When you first came here, not much about me was human. You made me remember who I was. You make me want to be that man again. Sometimes when I’m with you . . . I forget. For such a gift I will gladly work a kitchen.” And he would never get tired of watching her freckles glow against that furious blush.
“I don’t know what’s worse,” she murmured. “Dominic the flirt or Dominic the sincere vampire.”
He beamed at her and used his most seductive French voice. “We are both equally devastating, non?”
They laughed for most of the rest of her meal, about this and countless other nonsensical matters. Not until they both tackled kitchen cleanup together did he see an opening to ask one of his more burning questions.
“What happened to the ring?”
Her voice went flat. “It’s over. Enough said.”
Nowhere near enough, Dominic thought, but the determined set of her shoulders made it clear the discussion would end there. Maybe.
“He knows about you, you know,” she said, hanging up the towels.
“I know. We had a brief alliance in Key West.”
“Well, he made a complete recovery from that misadventure. He put two and two together all over the place.” She sighed. “But he doesn’t understand a thing.”
“Maybe you are not giving him enough credit.” Dominic cringed at his own words. Little credit as he gave Jackson himself—though recovering so swiftly from a compulsion of that magnitude was impressive all by itself—the human man felt deeply for Cassidy and had to be her future. At this point, no one else would be able to understand what she knew or have any hope of persuading her away from the seductive magic Dominic wielded without even trying. “Jackson knew what he was going up against when he tried to rescue you from the Roman. He risked his life as surely as I risked mine.”
Cassidy turned to him, one hand on her hip, the other gesturing. “And now he’s convinced that you’re not to be trusted, all this evidence to the contrary.”
Dominic stifled his amusement. No, she definitely wasn’t giving Jackson enough credit. Distracted as he was with first saving her and then ending himself, he hadn’t given the man or his mysterious knowledge much thought. But now it occurred to him just what an aberration Jackson Striker was. Humans who knew about vampires but were not enslaved to one were unheard of—at least in his limited understanding. Serge, who didn’t seem much bothered by Jackson, might know differently. On the other hand, most nights Serge flirted with madness.
Dominic sank into the sofa and booted his laptop, his curiosity piqued. “How much do you think he knows about us?”
“They,” she corrected, settling beside him. “The Striker family. He said they’ve known about vampires since . . . the sixteenth century, I think.”
“Promising,” he murmured and launched some of his more nefarious apps.
“Promising? Promising for what?”
Dominic typed for a minute, searching, issuing commands.
Cassidy scooted closer, hanging by his shoulder, her intoxicating proximity all but evaporating his thought process. Feeling the heat of her body radiate into his bare arm almost made him wish he had opted for a long-sleeved shirt instead of the T-shirt he grabbed before starting to cook.
“Oh, my God. Is that . . . ? Striker Capital? You’re hacking their network?”
“Every networked device they own. Oui.” The attack geared up now, originating from co-opted systems around the globe, bouncing across continents and satellites, converging on all things Striker anywhere, public, private, or secret. He put the laptop aside. This would take a while.
Cassidy looked between the scrolling screen and him. “Why?”
“Information, chère. About my condition.” He ind
icated the laptop. “I have spent months searching for any scrap of knowledge about what was done to me and why. Where it began. What it means. Anything to give me a reason to go on. Maybe even hope for a cure.”
Her eyes rounded. “A cure? You think there might be a cure, and you wanted me to kill you? What is wrong with you?”
“You still need to ask?” He smiled, rueful. “You were an opportunity I could not refuse. Or thought I could not. In any case, I have found nothing credible about my kind, much less a cure.”
“Did your sire tell you nothing at all?”
“Tell me? He told me nothing, no. He showed me,” Dominic scoffed. Memories rose like muck from the bottom of a troubled river. Things he had never spoken of, and could not now contain. “He showed me how we are made because he sired new younglings over and over again. He chose his targets because they impressed him in some way, the way I impressed him with my ability to kill with my bare hands. He fed from them every night until they were near death with his poison burning in their veins. Then he made me give them my blood to turn them into what we are.” He paused, feeling again the iron grip on his body and the nails slashing into his wrist. “The blood forges a bond between a sire and a youngling, a connection that allows the two to communicate telepathically. I believe he didn’t give us his blood in order to remain hidden from us. Keep us from uncovering whatever truth only he knew.”
“Sounds like a real peach of a guy.”
“A nightmare, even by our standards. He creates a perpetual army of two. The new youngling gets manipulated into trying to kill the existing one, the one who was forced to give his or her blood to make them. One always dies. That is how I killed the woman who gave me her blood . . . and every one of the spawn he forced me to make. I blocked their minds from mine the same way she blocked me. I didn’t want to know them. I knew eventually I would have to kill them. Or be killed by them.”
Cassidy stared at him, open-mouthed. “That’s insane. Why?”
Dominic scrubbed both hands over his face and shoved his fingers through his hair. “I asked that every night I was with him. Maybe he has reasons. Maybe he is simply, as you say, insane. Either way, he had no interest in explaining himself to me. I was little more than his current champion fighting cock, bound to him not by blood but by an unspoken promise that one night . . . one night all would be revealed.” He spread his hands in a dramatic gesture before him.
“Let me guess. That night never came.”
“No. He shared next to nothing.” Dominic leaned on his thighs, his mind speeding back to those months traveling from island to island on a yacht with a human crew compelled to within an inch of automatons. Nights of empty monotony and growing desperation. “When I pushed the issue, I ended up getting pinned to a tree with my own swords for my ‘impatience.’ I had already passed out from the coming sunrise by the time he retrieved me and carried me to safety. I did know the horrific certainty of death, though, and I welcomed it.”
A shiver ran through Cassidy, drawing his awareness back to her luscious warmth.
“I was his. He would not kill me, he would not answer my questions, and when I attempted to escape, he tracked me down. I thought of letting the next youngling kill me, but I never could. Whether it was the beast refusing to be bested or that I could not condemn another to take my place, I do not know.”
“Do you think . . . could he have compelled you?”
“Oui. Certainly. He could have commanded anything of me. Or anyone,” he said, thoughtful. His voice dropped to a whisper, almost feeling like he were summoning the creature by speaking of it. “I believe . . . Kambyses was ancient even when Aurelius still walked the sun.”
Cassidy paled, well aware of the degree of supernatural power this implied. “But you got away from him.”
“Through deception. But now I wonder if even that was part of the game he played with me. Or still plays.” The thought grew in his gut like a banked coal. Kambyses would hunt him until the end of time. Aurelius had all but confirmed this. The word had gone out about Dominic among the ancients. Aurelius had even known his sire’s pet name for him—Nico.
Dominic closed his eyes until the anxiety abated, drowned out by Cassidy’s quiet, understanding presence. He could feel her heartbeat whisper in his own blood, lending him strength. Somehow his existence was less horrific in her company, almost bearable even.
“One day, at sunrise, I took refuge in a shipping container that was loaded onto a freighter during the day,” he went on. “By nightfall there was no trace of me for him to follow. By the grace of a thriving rat population, I managed not to kill the crew in the four days it took to get to the next port. A week after that I was back on St. Barth and staged my own death for my mother and sister so they could go on with their lives.
“After that I traveled to find others like me. Of course, they all wanted to kill me sooner than answer any questions, so I came here.” He indicated the house around them. “My mother inherited this place from an aunt, and while we were children, my parents would bring us here almost every year to spend time as a family, away from the restaurant.” Dominic grew pensive. “This is the closest thing to home I will ever have again. Here I have peace.”
“Until the human moved in and you decided it was time to check out,” Cassidy said wryly. “What if I had done what you wanted today? And maybe tonight, you’ll find that cure on the Striker network?” She gestured at the laptop on the glass tabletop.
He could see that the intrusion had been detected and whole sections of the network had gone dark in defense. That there was something to find was no longer in doubt. It would take more than one night to uncover, though.
Even Cassidy recognized the meaning of all the red X’s. “Or maybe you could try asking them.”
“I could,” he murmured, holding out little hope for that approach and finding his attention take a sharp turn back to the quickening pulse in her throat. Perhaps a ride on the bike was in order before it got too much later. “I will try harder to find the answers I need. Somehow.”
“You better,” she said with such indignation he felt his mood lift in spite of himself.
“Or what? Would you miss me if I could sit in the sun?”
“Hell, no. I just don’t want to have to sweep your ashes off the porch.” She dealt him a light jab in the arm. “Idiot. What do you think?”
“That you might miss me. A little.” He snaked the assaulted arm around her shoulders, pulled her close and wedged her neck into the crook of his elbow. It was a move intended to be threatening, though he was more interested in relishing her closeness until she untangled herself with the appropriate maneuver. But she didn’t protest. In fact, she lay complacent against his side.
“One sneak attack deserves another, non?”
She settled her head against his shoulder. “I’m not going to fight. I’m not in the mood.”
He loosened his hold. Hair fell across her face, and he gently brushed it aside. “Will you tell that to an attacker when he takes you unaware? You must be prepared at all times.”
“Oh, Dominic, just . . . do it already. It’s not like I could stop you.”
“Do what?”
She turned her face up to him, speculating. “I see how you look at me. I can guess what it means.”
“Do you?” he said carefully.
“You’re hungry. Aren’t you?”
He leaned his head back on the sofa cushions and stared at the whirling ceiling fan. “I’m not hungry, ma petite. Not like that.” Again she had surprised him.
Again she wasn’t done.
She shifted around under his arm to sit upright with her legs tucked beneath her. “But you do want to . . . bite me. Right?”
Dazed by the sheer thrill of the thought alone, he closed his eyes.
“I’d have to
be blind not to see it.”
“I’m sorry, Cassidy.”
“Don’t be. I . . . I want you to.”
Dominic’s eyes snapped open. “Why?”
She tucked her hair behind her ears. “Because I want to pay for dinner?”
“Try again. This is no trivial thing you suggest.”
“You did it before.”
“By accident. Serge stopped me from . . .”
“He’s still here, isn’t he?”
There was no sound from the porch or anywhere around the house that would indicate her guardian angel’s presence. There hadn’t been for some time. “You would put your life into that madman’s hands?”
“No, Dominic. I’m putting my life in your hands. And not for trivial reasons, either.” She hesitated. Her heartbeat thumped like a furious drum in his ears. “I need to feel that connection again. That moment when . . . when you were part of me. And . . . can you see what’s in my mind when you . . . ?” She raised a querying brow.
He could only manage an abbreviated nod.
“In that case I thought maybe you’d like to see this place during the daytime again. And the beach. And the bridges in the Keys—”
Dominic scrubbed a hand over his face to try and restart his thoughts, which had crashed and burned against the inside of his skull. He had scarcely begun feeding like this—sipping really—while flooding his oblivious prey with fantasies instead of terror. What she suggested was beyond anything he could conceive of, and the possibilities staggered him. Her total awareness of him, and her shared memories. Memories of the day, no less. Memories of the sun! A helpless little sound strangled in his throat. The sharp tips of his canines emerged in eagerness.
Serge! he bellowed silently. By giving the old one his blood, he had permitted him into his mind for a while, allowing him to know his thoughts and emotions and location. The reverse was not true, however, and he had no idea where the little fiend lurked. Dominic would have to take it on faith that he continued to hover—because they were well past the point of no return.
