by Ines Johnson
He encouraged me to move on over the centuries. To find someone new. But he never spoke ill of the love she and I shared.
“Domitia needed to keep poking at you to get what she needed. Harder and harder each time. That's why she always came back to you, you know. You gave her what she needed most.” He looks me square in the eye as he drops a grenade on my vision on the past. “Misery.”
“Domitia loved me,” I insist. But my pronouncement isn’t as vehement as it would’ve been a few days ago.
“I don’t doubt that. But it was a sick kind of love, Hadrian. Surely, you can see that now. She’d break your heart and disappear for years. I swear you are the first case of Stockholm Syndrome.”
I turn back to the door where Carignan left me. I don’t want to hear any more about Domitia. Her pale skin and white-blonde hair are a distant memory. What’s in its place now is Carignan’s sun-kissed skin and spirited gaze. I won’t be forgetting her face anytime soon.
“Sometimes I feel a cold breeze and I wonder if she's still here,” says Gaius. “But that's impossible. You saw her walk into the sun.”
It’s Carignan’s body I see walk into the sun now. Only she didn’t scream as the rays touched her. She didn’t disappear as soon as she walked out.
“You did see her go?"
I turn and glare at Gaius. "You see that I am down, on the ground, on my ass. And you're going to kick me?"
Gaius flattens his lips. “What happened between you two?”
“We argued and she walked into the sun."
"Are we talking about you and Domitia? Or you and Cari?"
I bang my head against the wall again, but the impact isn’t the same now that there’s a hole there. Plaster crumbles down around my shoulders.
"You need to go after Carignan,” says Gaius.
"She left." I motion to the closed door.
"But she didn't slam the door. Cari's human. She can walk into the sun without burning to a crisp. The sun is down now. What are you waiting for?"
“She didn't choose me.” My empty hands ball into fists. I bang them against my legs. “She wants to be with others."
"There's another man?” Gaius runs a hand through his hair and then tugs at his lower lip. “She didn't seem like the type. But I guess you never know to look at them. And they say it’s always the good girls you need to watch out for.”
"No, not another man. Her family; her brother and her sister."
Gaius opens his mouth. Then closes it. Then tries again. “She went home to her family and you’re having a meltdown?”
My patience has gone. Gaius can see it in my eyes because he holds up his hands as though to ward off an impending attack.
“Hadrian, they're her family. You don’t need to compete with them. The love of a family is different than the love between a man and a woman. I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. There needs to be a vampire birds and bees talk.”
“I told her not to go,” I insist.
“What if she told you to choose between her and us?"
“I don't understand the question.”
"Wow. Okay. Kick in the nuts for the bromance. But you can have Carignan, and her family, and your family too. You bring us all together to be one big happy, dysfunctional family."
Maybe. Could I have overreacted? She did say she would call me later, and she’s never gone back on her word in the three days that I’ve known her.
But there’s still my suspicions of her brother. Cari was so sure Arneis would never hurt her, but I’ve seen too many humans turn on one another to not be cautious.
"Are we having an orgy?" Viri stands in the door in a pair of swim trunks and combat boots. He holds a blood bag in one hand and a phone in the other.
"You missed it," says Gaius. "We're done."
“So, Carignan’s the type to like the double-tap?”
I sigh, but I’m too weary to correct Viri. Gaius snorts his laughter. Viri does not sound excited about the prospect.
Like me, Viri isn’t fond of sharing women. Not even when Domitia liked to share him with other women. She’d always brag about the size of Viri’s member. Donkey Man, she used to call him and put him on display for other females. Sometimes she put his wares on sale when she needed cash quick.
“You what?” The shrill voice comes from the phone in Viri’s hand. “What have you done with my sister? I will call the cops. I will call the FBI.”
Viri holds the phone out in front of him. The screeching voice amplifies, as do the threats. “Someone called Mary is on the telephone for Carignan.”
I scramble to my feet and grab the phone from Viri. “Marechal,” I say calmly into the phone. “That was a misunderstanding.”
“Just guys being guys,” Gaius offers unhelpfully.
“I defended you to Arneis,” Marechal is shouting. “He told me you were bad. And now-”
“No one has touched Cari but me,” I say. “No one ever will. You can ask her yourself.”
And then Marechal says the only thing that scares me more than the sun.
“She’s not here. She’s more than an hour late. So is Arneis. Neither of them are answering their phones.”
Chapter 32
Cari
I am bound. My hands are tied behind my back. The ropes bite into my flesh, coming away with pieces of my skin. The metallic smell of my blood is in the air.
I open my eyes but all is dark, save a sliver of light. No, not light. It shimmers in a way that light cannot.
The shimmer comes closer. It moves like waves, but it's not liquid. It’s hair.
My mind reels back. The car. The woman on the road. Her pale skin and even paler hair. That’s her.
“Who are you?” I ask.
“Don’t act as though he hasn’t talked about me,” she says. Her voice is heavily accented. Spanish? No, she doesn’t roll her R’s. She barely sounds out her consonants. The English language on her tongue sounds clunky, untried, like she’s come out of the Dark Ages and this is the first time she’s ever spoken it.
I try to focus on what she’s saying to me. She thinks I’ve been talking about her with somebody. “Who?”
My face is slammed to the side. The force is so strong, my whole body tries to turn. But my torso doesn’t get far because of the binds.
I have experienced whiplash many times in my life. From braking hard and sudden in a speeding car. To the jerk and pull of the harness when I jump out of a plane. But I have never once in my life been slapped.
Long after the shock of the deed processes through my brain, long after the distress of the pain along my cheek, nose, and chin subsides, the ringing continues in my ear. The roaring echo acts like a silencer, or one of those ear canceling headphones that plays white noise while others around chat away. But it’s like someone turns the volume down on the ringing in my ear because the shouting in the cafe breaks through.
“You are a home-wrecker,” the white-haired woman screams at me. “Do you know what they did to whores like you in my time, women who lay with another’s husband?”
Home wrecker? Husband? Her time?
It’s hard for my brain to process what’s happening. Too many new experiences are happening to me. I’ve been kidnapped, for real this time. I’ve been bound, and not in the good way. I’ve been assaulted physically, and now verbally.
“Well, nothing would happen to the man,” she says in her heavy accent, which is hard to make out as she babbles. “But did you know the authorities would allow a husband who believed he was wronged to kill his wife?”
Wherever this chick is from, they are a backward culture. I’m hoping, wishing, and praying that she goes back there now and leaves me alone. I haven’t touched her husband. I have only been with one man in my life.
The prickles of awareness start up my spine. Impossibility is dawning on me, along with her identity.
“Since he thinks I’m already dead, I suppose there is no problem with me killing you.”
; My entire body goes numb at her threat. Because I don’t think it’s a threat. I’m certain it’s a promise.
“Domitia,” I say. “You’re Domitia.”
When I was a girl, I got nightmares after watching The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. There’s a scene in that movie when the Grinch is hatching his plan to steal all the presents from Whoville. As his heartless idea comes into focus, he smiles. The smile stretches across his face, all the way up to his eyes. His eyes squint upwards, along with his brows. And his ears curl into what look like horns. To this day the memory of the Grinch smiling makes me shudder.
That’s how Domitia looks at me now.
“So he has spoken of me to you,” she says through her grinchy grin.
Before I can answer, the room is flooded with lights. The bright light blinds me and I blink to adjust my vision. When I open my eyes again, Domitia is no longer there.
A second later I know that I’m wrong. She makes her presence known when I feel the binds pull.
The skin where I am cuffed tears. My joints protest and then give in. At the first pop of bone from joint, I scream.
Hadrian said she liked to see people in pain. He also said she was dead. Maybe I’m dead? Maybe I’m in hell and this is my punishment?
“I was so certain he loved me so much that he’d walk into the sun for me. But he didn’t,” Domitia says as she rounds me. “I was very close to forgiving him when you ruined it all.”
I know I should lift my head, to see where my enemy is. But I can’t. The pain is too much. Terror fills me when I realize she’s just getting started.
“He’s been in such pain,” she says. “Such perfect agony for centuries.”
Even through my whimpering, I make out the madness in her voice. She says the words as though they bring her ecstasy. Like she is getting high off of simply knowing that Hadrian was suffering.
This bitch is crazy. How had Hadrian ever loved her?
“Decades upon decades of shame and guilt, all my hard work, now all gone because of you.”
“You say you love him? That’s not love. Pain is not love.”
Domitia laughs. The sound hurts my ears. But not as much as the cane she takes to my back.
I can’t bow my back to relieve any of the agony. The small inch that I move to absorb her strike sends even more pain through my dislocated bones.
“You childish human. You have no idea what love is. You have no idea what pain is. You play with your life, falling from the sky, walking up in the sky. You want to die.”
The sick realization grasps hold of me. “You, you cut my harness. You ran us off the road last night.”
“Of course I did.” Domitia digs her nails into my scalp and wrenches my hair back. Her eyes are lifeless. Her fangs glisten in the overhead lights. “Is no one paying attention to me?”
“But Hadrian,” I say. “Hadrian was in that car. He nearly died.”
She tsks, making an annoyed sound, and then shoves my head down. “He’s immortal, you imbecile.”
“He was nearly staked alive.”
She brushes the notion away with her hand. “I would stake him for fun all the time when we were together. And we will be together again. Your death will crush him, and then he’ll come back into my arms, more miserable than when I left him.”
My death? I feel the adrenaline rush through me. But I am not up high ready to jump. I am not bound by Hadrian awaiting the pleasure he brings.
This is a harness I can not get out of. This is a plane that’s not going my way. This is a plank walk that I will fall from.
“You’re going to feel a lot of pain before I’m done,” Domitia says, her voice pleasant in its promise. “You’ll beg for death. I guarantee it.”
Chapter 33
Hadrian
I inhale the night’s air. The wind is punctuated with the smell of ripe grapes, chemicals, and manure. I ignore them all and focus on the singular scent that has turned my world right-side up.
The smell of Cari is strong in my nose. The taste of her is still on my lips. The only thing missing is the actual feel of her in my hands.
Letting her walk out that door earlier this evening was the biggest mistake of my life. Not because I thought she was walking into danger. Because I was too wrapped up in my past pain to hear what she was saying to me. What she was asking of me.
She wasn’t trying to leave me. I understand that now.
I’m going to make a lot more mistakes in this relationship. It’s inevitable, since my only prior relationship was with a homicidal maniac. There’s going to be a lot of deprogramming in my future. But I need to find Cari first.
There’s still the possibility that Arneis is trying to kill her. But that possibility grows smaller with each passing moment.
Gaius is on the phone with Frangelico now. The vampire king tells us that Arneis was behind the raid last night. But the night before that, when Carignan was on her plank walk in the sky, Arneis had been in another meeting with Frangelico’s human business partners all day. He couldn’t have learned about the plank walk in time to sabotage it.
After I’m able to talk Marechal down from calling in the US Army to my home, she tells us that the night before, the night that Cari fell from the sky and into my arms, Marechal and Arneis were at home all day. They’d been arguing over the future of the vineyard while Cari was MIA. So once again, neither of them knew what Cari was up to, or had the time to interfere with her plans.
But I know that strap was cut before she was in the sky. I know there was no other vehicle last night, just a bright light. And now she and her brother are missing. When I find who’s behind this, I will take them back to the dungeons of Spain and show them what I am truly capable of.
Gaius and I follow Cari’s scent down the lane from our house. She didn't get far. Her essence is still in the air.
It doesn't matter where her captor took her, I will find her. I will track them down. Then I will torture him slowly, over days, over years. Bringing him back to life just so I can take his life even more slowly.
How could I have let her walk out this morning? After promising I'd go into the sun for her.
Just as I did with Domitia.
I’ve lived long enough that I should learn from my past. But I suppose I didn’t learn any valuable lessons when I was with Domitia. I let her turn me inside out and call it love.
Cari crawled inside my barren heart cavity and became my heartbeat. The only pain I feel is the emptiness of not having her safe in my arms. Carignan taught me what love truly is. Or rather, I’m learning through her.
Love is actually caring about what the person thinks and feels. I’m not good at that outside of the bedroom. But I’ll work hard to improve.
Love is putting someone else’s happiness before my own. Again, another failing grade when I step outside the bedroom. But I’m willing to practice until perfection.
Love is trusting that when someone walks away it doesn’t mean they’re gone forever. This will be my hardest lesson. But I’ll begin my mastery as soon as I have Carignan back in my arms.
I will find her. I will save her. And then I will shower her with my love.
Cari's scent grows stronger as we get further down the lane. In the distance, I spot a town car. The license plate is a government issue. Could that be Arneis’ car?
It must be. I remember she called him for a ride. I can’t see her, but I can smell her sweet scent in the air.
My pulse races as I speed up. Then I nearly trip over my feet with my next inhale. There's also the smell of blood in the air. Her blood.
The car is stopped on the side of the road. It is not damaged. There was no crash.
I push myself faster until I am at the car. There is a body slumped over in the front seat. I see a dark head and know that I am alive because my heart stops. The blood, her blood, that is in my veins goes cold.
But it isn't her.
It's a man. It's her brother. Arneis is alive, but only barely.
Blood is coming from his neck. Then I see it; puncture wounds.
A vampire attack.
But who?
"Do you smell that?"
Gaius' voice sounds strange. It's tinged with fear. It’s strange because Gaius is never afraid.
I inhale again. Then I smell it, too. Instead of desire, instead of passion, true terror crawls up my spine.
"Tell me I'm imagining this Hadrian,” Gaius says. “Tell me it can't be her."
Shifters aren’t the only paranormals who know scent. Vampires have enhanced senses of smell as well. There are smells you never forget. The smell of your mother. The smell of your favorite dish. The smell of your maker.
Domitia. The scent of her is clear, unmistakable, alive.
Her scent intermingles with Cari's. It's all over Arneis. The car is where Cari's scent ends.
Wherever they went they didn’t walk. Or perhaps she blurred. Trying to follow the scent of a vampire moving at top speed is near impossible.
"How?" demands Gaius. "How could this be?”
"I don't know." My voice is barely a whisper.
"You said she walked into the sun."
"She did. I saw her."
"Are you sure? You saw her burn?"
No. I didn't see her burn. She stepped out. She screamed. And then she was gone.
I turned away. I didn't want to go. She told me if I loved her I'd walk into the sun with her. But I hesitated. And I've paid for my hesitation with guilt and shame for hundreds of years. Until...
"It's exactly the long, suffering game she loves to play with you."
She wouldn't. I don’t say that out loud. It sounds juvenile just in my head.
She would. She did. Here was her scent on the side of my vineyard. My new love, my true love, Cari is gone. And I stand in more pain than I’ve ever withstood in my long life.
Inside the car, Arneis is coming to. His wounds are significant, but he’ll live. I need him conscious now, so I take my wrist between my teeth and tear. I wrench his head back and force my blood into his mouth.
