“But I—”
“You have called to me with your mind again, bade me to surrender to you. Precisely what I feared would happen.”
“Sorry.” There was that word again; one that I was growing tired of having to use all the time. I also felt idiotic for talking to a person I couldn’t see. “I’m still trying to figure out the whole being-a-demon thing. It might not kill you to cut me a little slack.”
“Indeed. For that is what many of my kind pleaded for when the Incubi began to invade our dreams,” he hit back. “They turned vampire against vampire in their greedy lust to dominate, to fashion us into pleasure slaves. Cut you some slack, you say?”
“Hey, don’t blame me for what happened back in the Stone Age.”
“Moments ago you would have had me succumb to your infatuation.” Dimitri’s voice boomed in the darkness. “Knowing that I do not share your same…sentiments. Forgive me if I fail to see the disparity.”
Infatuation? “Not so long ago, I wouldn’t have felt what I’m feeling right now for another man. Regardless of what once was, my feelings for you are real. I don’t want to own you, Dimitri. I only want you to care about me. Is that such a horrible thing?”
“That I harbor affection for you should be obvious,” he countered. “If I did not, you’d have ceased to exist long ago. Now, shield your eyes.”
“What?”
“Cover your eyes, Austin.”
No sooner did I bring hands up than a brilliant light filled their outer edges. Peering around splayed fingers, Dimitri’s form appeared in fuzzy halos that danced around my retinas like electric hula-hoops on acid.
Once my eyes began to adjust, I was astounded to find that the source of all that brightness came from a single dusty bulb attached to a cracked porcelain socket jutting out from the rough-hewn wall. With a squinting glance up, I retraced our multi-story descent. Not quite the Nine Circles of Hell I’d envisioned, we were nonetheless standing in what appeared to be a large, deep stone and mortar silo, the air dryer and dustier than in the room above.
“What troubles you now?”
I turned around at the center of the room and shook my head. “The big plan’s to seal the incubus up in an airless tomb and hope that the bad guys don’t find him?”
“Have you a better one?” His gaze was growing heated.
“Yeah, I do. Screw hiding!” Dimitri regarded me as though I’d just said I wanted to blow up the world. “I have powers. I can help you fight Haemon and your sister.”
Dimitri offered me a scoffing laugh. “And die trying.”
“So better I shut up, sit tight, and go crazy from lack of food and water?”
“Your abilities are maturing at an astonishing rate, this I cannot refute.” He held up a hand in a bid for silence when I started to speak again. “Their ripening may stem merely from the infusion of my blood. Like your other gifts, this newfound strength could prove fleeting. It might fail you when you most require it.”
“You’re wrong.”
“How can you be certain?”
“Because I don’t feel you inside me anymore.” Dimitri’s shocked expression clearly indicated that he’d misunderstood my meaning. “When I drank from you last night, your blood merged with mine. It connected us. That connection’s fading. Fast.” I couldn’t tell if this pleased him or not. “The power I’d gained in the exchange was borrowed.” I walked over and sat down on one of the earthen steps. “What’s left belongs to me. I can feel it.”
“Ancestral memory.”
I stared blankly at him as he moved to the center of the tower, his expression pensive.
“It is a philosophy from the East, whereby an individual’s blood is thought to hold the memories of their ancestors. In your case, memories linked to your incubi brethren.”
The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. What were any of us on earth but a series of DNA strings—supernatural or otherwise? And if he was right about this, then the DNA of my demon ancestors was calling to me even now, reaching out across time and space.
The million-dollar question was: What did it want?
“Indeed.” Dimitri folded arms across his exposed chest, his linen shirt worse for wear thanks to me. “Have you not sensed this influence, this connection, throughout your life?”
I shook my head. “Not until after my thirtieth birthday.”
His eyes widened. “The Awakening!”
I shrugged, not yet comprehending his meaning.
“It is the age when the males and females of your species come into their true power. Surely your mother…” His gaze hardened and he took a step closer. “Where is your mother?”
So much had transpired since Laura’s death, and yet the terrible pain of her loss lived on. So did the guilt and old wounds I could feel reopening. “She passed away, from cancer.”
“Impossible.”
I stood up, the air around me crackling with energy. “She died in my goddamned arms. I watched them zip her body up in a bag. So don’t fucking tell me impossible!”
He reached out for me, but let his hand drop. “I meant no disrespect. Only that a succubus could not be stricken by such a disease. Human maladies do not afflict supernaturals. If cancer took her from you, then she—”
“Wasn’t my real mother, I know.”
Heartache sought to overwhelm me, but I pushed it back. Haemon and Kassandra wouldn’t care that I still grieved for Laura, or that I missed her every single day.
“She adopted me. I don’t know who my real mother is.”
A memory of Psychic Joy resurfaced. The entity that had possessed her instructed me to search for my birth mother, that only she could bring me into my true nature.
Well, Mamma Succubus didn’t want to be found, and I was doing just fine without the bitch who’d abandoned me.
Dimitri bridged the gap between us, his expression driving the hairs on the back of my neck to stand on end. “A succubus could not give birth to one so powerful unless impregnated by an incubus. Where is your father?”
The same surge of power I’d experienced twice today, once with Vardoulakis and again with those young Greek men outside, exploded to the surface in hot, pulsating waves. Dimitri’s threatening demeanor had roused my own supernatural beast. It strained against its tether, eager to break free. To attack.
“Dead, or so I was told.”
“You are wise to distrust me, Austin. However, my promise not to harm you remains intact. Come,” he said, offering me his hand. “I fear we have little time to squander.”
I regarded him with suspicion. “Where are we going?”
What might be a moment of hurt (or regret) flickered in his eyes. Then Dimitri dropped his hand and walked to the far side of the chamber to depress yet another stone in the wall. The space instantly filled with a deep rumbling.
When a section of wall opened, what lay beyond it was so spectacular that I ignored my better judgment and let Dimitri usher me across its threshold, but without touching. Every time we did, it sparked a hope in me that something more might exist between us. Although in my heart, I knew that day would probably never come.
“My home meets with your approval?”
His home was equal parts hip boutique hotel and Zen monastery, where my footsteps echoed softly on polished red oxide floors stretching along a corridor lined with ancient marble pillars. Frescoes bordered the walls on either side, some so faded I could scarcely make out their images. “How do you have all this?”
“I grew tired of living in crypts.”
Did Dimitri Ravello just make a funny? Whether or not he intended his response to be humorous, I laughed anyway. “As old as you are, I’m not surprised.”
“Sometimes I forget how it must appear to an outsider,” he said reflectively.
He lowered a metal lever just inside the opening and the monolithic wall slid back into place. “In this position, the mechanism will not grant access to anyone on the other side.”
My se
nse of security just ratcheted up a couple of notches.
“My sister and her companion would require more help than they could marshal to breach this sanctuary, if only they knew of its existence, which they do not.”
I was still trying to take it all in—my bizarre circumstances, this remarkable place and, for whatever reason, the incredible kindness being shown to me by a sworn enemy.
“Thank you,” I said and meant every word of it, “for not killing me in Los Angeles. For saving me when you could’ve let me die yesterday, and for keeping me safe from the bad guys.”
We experienced an awkward moment where neither of us knew what to say or do next.
Dimitri broke it by ushering me farther along the corridor, where I noticed how much fresher the air had become. Blackened scorch marks stained the outer rock walls between frescoes, where torches had presumably once burned, but which now held contemporary wall sconces. Modern touches aside, the place resonated with the ancient and inexplicable.
“Austin?” Dimitri’s voice came at a distance. “Are you coming?”
I hadn’t realized that I’d fallen behind and hurried to catch up with him at the end of the passage. He waited for me in a large, circular atrium, a series of spotlights positioned above to create a dramatic contrast of shadow and rich golden light that gave the space a wonderfully theatrical atmosphere. “And it just keeps getting better.”
Dimitri rested hands on my shoulders, encouraging me to move forward.
His touch generated a spark of energy that shot down my arms and into places low in my body and I gave a little shiver.
He instantly let go. “Come. There will be time for discovery later.”
Was he referring to us, or this sanctuary? Also, did he expect me to ignore what continued to happen between us, to believe that it was just incubus enchantment at work, or some not-so-subtle manipulation on my part? Hell, it was hard enough for me to wrap my mind around the concept that I’d developed genuine romantic feelings for another man. So I suppose I should perfectly understand how he must be feeling and stop acting like a brat.
Easier said than done. Because I was getting hungrier by the minute; and not for food.
“You must be exhausted. Let’s find Niko. He will show you to your quarters where you can wash up and get some well-deserved rest. Later, we can discuss a strategy for keeping my sister and Haemon at bay.”
“You don’t have to keep doing that, you know. Touch me and move away.”
Dimitri lowered his head and exhaled. “We haven’t time for this.”
That this man, this vampire, was keeping me safe should’ve been enough. So much for tempering my inner brat. “But sending me mixed signals, like back in the cave, that’s okay?”
“Incubus enchantment,” he said with a shake of his head. “Nothing more.”
“You are such a fucking hypocrite.”
Dimitri was on me in an instant. He gripped my arms with tremendous force, his voice booming over the atrium’s domed ceiling and frightening poor Niko who’d only just arrived. “We shall speak of this no further!”
This time, his touch didn’t rouse the Hunger. It produced a shuddering jolt of pure incubus fury that was accompanied by a low rumble over the atrium’s ceiling. Spirals of dust and small pebbles began to rain down on us.
“Do not do this, Austin!”
Dimitri went from holding my arms to assailing me. He wrapped his own around me and squeezed tight, while poor Niko braced himself against a marble column.
“Control yourself, or you will end us all.”
I couldn’t breathe. The bones in my chest were breaking under the force he exerted on them. Blackness was creeping in at the edges of my vision.
As I succumbed to it, I heard Dimitri’s voice echo down a long corridor. “Our friend must learn to bridle his power, Niko. He uses too much too quickly, leaving himself vulnerable.”
“What is he, Master?”
“A god.”
CHAPTER 27
I opened my eyes to find Dimitri Ravello staring back at me, his expression anything but welcoming. We were seated opposite one another on the other side of the atrium within a grand space of whitewashed walls, where panels of translucent fabric hung from the tall, rough-hewn ceiling to offer the illusion of windows where none existed. To my left, a fire blazed in a massive limestone hearth, its heat almost too warm. Straightening in the leather chair, a sharp sting radiated through my chest.
“What the hell did you do to me?”
“Prevented our being crushed by the acropolis above.”
“By breaking all of my ribs?”
“Not all of them.”
I wasn’t loving the intense pain or his cavalier attitude. If it hadn’t hurt so damn much to move, let alone breathe, I’d have gotten up and walked away.
“Look. I’m the one who nearly got burned alive. I’m also the chump who scaled a mountain to be here with you. Something tells me I shouldn’t have bothered.”
“Why did you?”
I exhaled deeply and paid the price. “Because you damn well want me to be here!”
“What I want is to be free of you!” His words registered like the sting of a whip. “And yet,” he said, his jaw muscles clenching, “I find myself unwilling to seek such freedom.”
I was about to pursue the emotional bomb he’d just dropped, when Dimitri got up and strode over to the fireplace. I could see the tension in the set of his shoulders, in the intensity of his focus on the orange and red flames. “What do you know of your kind?”
“Not much,” I responded, hoping for an entirely different conversation. But this one would do…for now. “Some Internet research. Why?”
“And what did this research reveal?”
“That I’m a short, ugly demon with a big iceberg for a dick.”
Dimitri threw his head back and laughed, but there was nothing joyful in the sound of it.
“Christians! What they fail to understand they invent.” He tuned to regard me intently. “What else?”
“Minor stuff, really. Storm spirits from thousands of years ago who liked to party, crap like that.”
My brooding vampire moved to the coffee table separating our two chairs and picked up an old, leather-bound book I’d noticed earlier but paid little attention to until now.
“Many of the answers you seek are in this.” He tossed the volume into my lap and returned to his own chair, where he fell silent and pensive as he watched the dancing flames within the massive fireplace.
“You want me to read all of this?” It was as thick as a dictionary. It smelled bad, too.
“Did you not scale a mountain in search of answers?”
The book, it turned out, was written entirely in Latin. Not a major obstacle for me, thanks to a Catholic school education and having been the tenth-grade Latin Club president.
I actually managed to bump along nicely.
An entire chapter was devoted to what the entity at Psychic Joy’s had revealed: that incubi and succubi were the descendants of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who demanded equality and failed to get it and who, in turn, fled the Garden with a promise to plague mankind.
Another equally intriguing discovery was that my kind were also linked to the origins of Greek Mythology. They had employed their supernatural strength and gift of mind control and seduction to influence humans who chose to worship them as gods and goddesses.
The book also mentioned extraordinary regenerative powers of which I was living proof. I could already feel the prickly re-knitting of my broken ribs as I sat reading, feel the inflammation of the muscle and tissue surrounding them diminish with every chapter I completed.
Too bad this same gift couldn’t dull the sting of rejection from a stubborn, twenty-four-hundred-year-old vampire who refused to own up to his feelings for me.
Believe me, I got the whole heterosexuality thing. I’d been happily living it for thirty years. Nevertheless, I’d also discovered that it no longer defined who
I was. Women were no less attractive to me since my transformation. Quite the contrary. There was simply a new side to me now that happened to include appreciating of men and being open to fulfilling sexual encounters with them. This didn’t make me bisexual or gay. I wasn’t a convenient label for society. I was just me—albeit a newer, more realized version.
Also, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it, nor did I want to. Dimitri Ravello sure surprised me, though.
He’d had centuries to explore and experience life. Shouldn’t he be more evolved, more open-minded? After all, if I could get over it, why couldn’t he?
I glanced up from reading to see that my solemn vampire was still lost to the crackling flames, reflexively twisting the onyx band on his right-hand middle finger.
“Haemon has one just like it,” I told him, putting down the book.
Dimitri roused from his reverie. “Pardon?”
“Your ring.”
“Ah. A reward from the High Council for the extermination of your kind,” he said. “And a tribute to our fallen brethren. Of course Haemon has an identical ring. Every vampire who fought and survived the Great War possesses one.”
I waited for him to elaborate, but in typical Dimitri fashion he fell silent again.
If I wanted to learn more about the war—hell, about anything pertaining to his long life—I’d have to seduce it out of him. Not the wisest course of action to take at the moment. So I went back to reading. I hadn’t gotten far when Niko reemerged.
“The guest quarters are ready,” he said, without so much as a glance in my direction.
A young woman carrying a tray of fruit, cheese, and delicious smelling bread arrived soon after. The fabric of her long, mauve gauzy dress rode the curves of her lithe body as she moved toward us, her honey-blonde hair caressing sun-kissed shoulders.
She possessed many of Niko’s appealing facial features and generated a tug of desire in me upon approach. Unlike her brother, for the similarities were too great for them to be anything but siblings, she had no qualms about making direct eye contact with me.
Dimitri smiled up at her and she positioned the tray in front of me. “Thank you, Eva.”
Incubus Moon Page 18
