by V M Black
Time After Time
Cora’s Bond – Book 5
by V. M. Black
Aethereal Bonds
AetherealBonds.com
Swift River Media Group
Washington, D.C.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 V. M. Black
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.
Book Description
When Cora agreed to marry the billionaire vampire Dorian Thorne, she believed that her biggest challenge would be dealing with him. But her world is shattered when the key to the victory of their allies is snatched from them by those who wish to enslave humanity. When Dorian breaks her trust to set things right, will she be able to forgive him? Or will events greater than she could have ever imagined overtake them both?
AetherealBonds.com
Visit aetherealbonds.com to sign up for the Aethereal Bonds Insider newsletter, where you will get exclusive access to sneak peeks, first notification when a new book is released, series announcements, and more.
At least one installment will be published every month, so don’t miss out!
Aethereal Bonds Series
Vampire Serials
Cora’s Choice (100 to 200-page novellas)
Start with Life Blood – FREE
Cora’s Bond (100 to 200-page novellas)
Start with For All Time
Shifter Serials
The Alpha’s Captive (60 to 85-page novelettes and novellas)
Start with Taken – FREE
Taken by the Panther (100 to 200-page novellas)
Start with Out of the Darkness
Chapter One
Traitor.
As the room exploded into activity around me, I sat frozen at the dining table, trying to make sense of what we’d just learned—trying to understand how quickly everything I knew could have been turned upside down.
“I’m so sorry, Dorian,” I blurted.
He spared me the briefest of glances as he tapped through his phone at blinding speed. “So am I, Cora. So am I.”
Our worst fears had been proven true. In spite of all the precautions, all the extra screenings and the new video monitoring, there was a traitor in the lab, someone who had stolen the research that was supposed to give Dorian’s vampire allies supremacy over the anti-human Kyrioi.
I watched numbly as Jane Worth scooped all her things off the table and scuttled out of the room. Moments ago, my greatest concern had been choosing the music I wanted at my wedding from among the selections she’d been presenting me. Now such concerns seemed beyond trivial, almost contemptible.
This wasn’t even a matter of life and death. It was bigger than that. It was something that could destroy the world. And it wasn’t my fault. For once, for the first time in a long time, it seemed, something terrible had happened and it wasn’t—couldn’t have been—my fault.
That realization didn’t make me feel any better. Even an hour ago, I’d have thought that it would. But as I sat there, feeling useless as everyone else hurried off to perform some critical task, I realized that whose fault it was hardly mattered.
This could be it, the end of everything. Just moments before, my head had been full of plans for a wedding that was meant to celebrate a victory that was now meaningless. Hollow.
Gone.
Next to me, Dorian issued orders through his phone as servants appeared to whisk away our dinner from the dining table and move all the chairs except for mine against the back wall. Dr. Sanderson, too, was at work on his phone, and moments later, the members of the research facility staff began to trickle in under heavy shifter guard.
They were all talking in high, nervous voices. They knew that one of them had betrayed them all, just as I did, and the traitor was about to be revealed.
There were many faces I knew in that group, many researchers I’d been introduced to by Hattie and others who were familiar but nameless. I didn’t think of them as my friends. I didn’t know any of them that well. But they were faces that I knew, faces that had become a comfortable background to my work on Dorian’s research, and the thought that one of them had given the research to our enemies made me sick to my stomach.
The thought that the betrayal had been forced made me even sicker.
I picked Perry out of the crowd, his face like a thundercloud as he shifted from foot to foot. It had to have been him. Hadn’t it?
He’d blamed me for the contamination of the cell cultures—but obviously, that couldn’t have been me. That was proven now beyond a shadow of a doubt. And he had full access to the cultures, after all. He’d even been the one to teach me how to make them. Did he look guiltier than the small lab tech next to him? It was impossible for me to tell.
He met my gaze for a moment, and I tried to read some clue in his eyes before he turned away again.
More servants hurried in with supplies. I knew what was going on this time—I’d seen a proving before. A drop of Dorian’s blood would be mixed with a drop of the human’s blood on the surface of a sugar pill. Then the human would swallow it, and in seconds, they would be under Dorian’s thrall.
Once enthralled, the humans would have to do as Dorian wished. But more importantly, any existing thrall to another vampire would be broken. If they’d been forced to betray Dorian, they’d now be forced to confess it. That was the reason that all agnates like Dorian required their staff and servants to be enthralled. It wasn’t only to ensure absolute loyalty. Just as importantly, they couldn’t be forced to serve their masters’ enemies for any longer than the time between two provings.
But Dorian had ordered a proving as soon as the cell culture contamination had been discovered. If a traitor had been responsible, then that could only mean that his proving had been somehow circumvented or compromised.
The servants laid out the supplies quickly: lances, pill bottles, cotton swabs. The milling mass of humans formed into a rough line, and Dorian took a position in front of the table, facing them.
Dr. Sanderson, the second-in-command of the lab under the cognate Will, came up to Dorian and spoke in a hushed voice. “All others who have access to the lab are being gathered from their homes. They will be here in under an hour.”
“Good,” Dorian said. He waved away a supply of blood that a maid began to set on the table—his blood, I realized, taken earlier for the purpose of provings. “We’re going to do this the slow way this time,” he said grimly. “The certain way. We’ve gotten sloppy with our systems. Cocky. Someone exploited it. Let’s not give them anything they can exploit.”
“Of course,” Dr. Sanderson said. “We should have done it this way when the cultures were contaminated.”
“Yes, we should have,” Dorian agreed.
A trickle of realization went through me, and the obviousness of it stole my breath. I’d wanted it to be Perry so badly because Perry had suspected me. But who would have been in a position to make absolutely sure that a proving was compromised? Certainly not a minor researcher whose sole responsibility was to manage cell media and culture incubations. Who was the only one among all the humans who would have that power, once Hattie was dead?
Dorian wasn’t looking at Dr. Sanderson, his eyes scanning the room restlessly instead, as if he, too, were trying to pick out the traitor among the laboratory staff. And the staff members were all looking at each other or at their master, not the human who was in charge of them.
So I was probably the only one in the room who saw it happen, the
look of desperation that flickered in Dr. Sanderson’s eyes for an instant before he casually reached into the pocket of his lab coat and popped something into his mouth.
“No!” I shouted from sheer instinct, my voice silencing the other conversations in the room and echoing against the dark paneled walls. Dorian turned toward me with inhuman speed. But it wasn’t me he should be turning towards but Dr. Sanderson.
“Stop him,” I managed, pointing.
Dorian whirled, but it was too late. Already, the doctor’s eyes were rolling back into his head, and a moment later, he fell to the ground, seizing, as the staff gasped and murmured. Dorian snatched a lancing device from the table and dropped to his side as the shifters kept the others back.
I stood so I could see over the edge of the table as Dorian lanced first the doctor’s hand and then his own, mixing the blood and pressing it to the man’s mouth—and so ending the thrall that Dr. Sanderson had been forced into by reasserting his own.
“Who did this to you?” Dorian demanded of the doctor’s convulsing form. “Who did it?”
But the man was too far gone, and though his foam-flecked lips moved, no sound emerged. Seconds later, he went limp.
I didn’t need Dorian to tell me that he was dead.
I gripped the edge of the table to steady myself as the room seemed to move around me. I stared down at the doctor’s body, with his rolled-back eyes and foamy mouth, and I wanted to cry or scream or vomit—or all three, all at once.
But I didn’t. There were other people in the room, people looking at me. People looking to me for guidance, just as they looked to Dorian. So I straightened instead, very carefully letting go of the edge of the table, and I lifted my chin slightly.
Dorian stood up in the sudden silence, and his bleak expression made my stomach lurch again, but I schooled my own face into stillness.
“He’s gone,” Dorian said to the two closest shifters. “Please remove him. I’ll notify his family tonight.” He surveyed the rest of the lab staff, and his body almost crackled with power. “I want all hands at your sides. If anyone makes a move toward a pocket or your mouth, the guards will take you down. Is that understood?”
There was a shifting among the group, but there were nods, too.
“Right,” he said. “You’re to line up against the wall. One person deep, so that you can easily be seen. And then you must close your eyes. You may not, under any circumstances, peek. Do I make myself clear?”
More nods.
“Then go,” he ordered, and they did, shuffling with varied expressions of fear and horror until they were arranged around the perimeter of the room. The body of the doctor was removed, and then Dorian whispered softly to two of the shifter guards, who left the room.
I wanted to ask what was going to happen, but a glance from Dorian quelled me. I’d find out soon enough, and I didn’t want to do anything that might endanger either a member of the staff or Dorian and his allies the Adelphoi.
After several minutes of eerie silence, the shifter guards reappeared, bearing a number of lengths of rope between then.
Dorian walked up to the staff member nearest the door. “Maureen,” he said without glancing at her nametag. “Step forward, please, while keeping your eyes closed.”
She did, almost hesitantly, fear written starkly on her face. Swiftly, one of the shifters took a length of the rope and bound her wrists together behind her back.
I realized then what he was doing. If others had been compromised, they might have been instructed to act as if they were still under Dorian’s thrall whenever they weren’t required to do their new master’s bidding. So they would close their eyes when ordered, and only when they were already being tied up by the guards would they realize that they had been found out. And by that time, it would be too late, and whatever poison pill they’d been meant to take would be out of their reach.
Dorian repeated the procedure for each of the staff members, calling them by name to step out and be bound. And then, when they were all secure, he returned to the table for his lancing device and his supply of pills. My hair rose on the back of my neck at the row of complacent people who stood, sheep-like, waiting for their fates as Dorian moved methodically down the line, mixing their blood on the surface of the pill and giving it to them each in turn.
He could have ordered all of them to take poison, and they would have swallowed it as willingly as Dr. Sanderson had. Though he might swear to use his sway over them only when necessary and only for good, they were still owned by him—though, even more frighteningly, not as completely as I was.
As soon as he dosed a staff member, the guards would follow behind and unbind that person, and Dorian would permit him to open his eyes and leave. But it wasn’t long before Dorian got to a lab tech who didn’t open her mouth to obediently receive the pill. Instead, as soon as her blood was drawn, she began to fight like a demon, and it took three guards to subdue her and pry open her mouth despite her small size and bound hands.
Dispassionately, Dorian popped the pill into her mouth, and she went limp in the guards’ arms. Then, after a moment, she looked up at Dorian with huge, liquid eyes.
“I’ve failed you,” she said. “Oh, sir, I am so sorry.”
“Sit,” Dorian ordered, nodding at the chairs that had been pushed to the wall on the opposite side of the table.
Silently, she circled the table, her gaze glued to the ground. She passed so close to me that I could have touched her, but I recoiled from her instinctively, instead. As the small lab tech sat alone against the wall, Dorian finished clearing the rest of the staff and dismissed them, including the ones who had been brought in after the others already bound, roused from their homes for the proofing by the guards.
Then there was no one left in the room but Dorian, the guards, the woman, and me. Dorian circled the table, offering me his hand as he passed in a silent request for me to come with him. I took it and came, squeezing perhaps a little too hard—whether to reassure him or me, I didn’t know.
A knock on the door announced Will. He was a vampire’s cognate, like I was, and now, after the death of Hattie, he was in charge Dorian’s lab. He’d organized the roundup of the human staff members from their homes.
“I heard about Dr. Sanderson,” he said as he stepped inside. “We lost another one as we were going house-to-house.”
“That’s unfortunate,” Dorian said, his mouth a flat line.
“Yes,” Will agreed somberly. “It was Dr. Orrin.”
Dorian compressed his lips together briefly and nodded. “Well, we saved one. Iris Cho.”
“I see,” Will said, his gaze flickering over to the woman who sat head-down and trembling.
“I’ll update you on what we discover.” It was a clear dismissal.
Will nodded. “I’m late going home. Elizabeth will worry.”
“Later,” Dorian said.
Will gave a crisp nod and left.
Dorian pulled two chairs around to face Iris, one for each of us. I sat down next to him and examined the woman. Just a few minutes before, she would have died for her secret master. Now, however, she was a shaking wreck because she had betrayed Dorian.
I tried very hard not to see myself in her. Not to wonder how much I was like her.
Instead, I let myself say the question that had been in my mind since the start of all this. “Was it Cosimo? Was he the one who got to you?”
“I don’t know, sir, madam,” Iris said in a tiny voice. “I don’t know who it was. It must have been two provings ago. My pill must have been switched with another, one with a different vampire’s blood on it, and that night, someone in a robe and a hood and a veil visited with instructions. I wouldn’t recognize the voice again. It sounded fake, like it was being changed.”
“Was it a man or a woman?” Dorian asked.
Iris shook her head. “I don’t know. I couldn’t tell. The person said I was to take some of the cell cultures and make up and contaminate some others, and so
I did.”
“Was Dr. Sanderson in charge then? Did he switch the pills so that you took one with the wrong blood?” Dorian pressed.
Iris shrugged helplessly. “He must have. Usually, Hattie—Dr. Buchanan was in charge of the provings, and she ran them with Dr. Sanderson together. But the week that she was killed, Dr. Sanderson ran them alone.”
Dorian looked at me. “That was why Jean had to die. So that Hattie would be dead or incapacitated. She was a cognate and so immune, and killing her directly would be the grossest violation of agnatic customs. But killing Jean was just as good for their purposes. With her out of the way and the rest of the cognates in hiding, Dr. Sanderson could be enthralled, and he could arrange for the blood in Iris’ pill to be switched out.”
Everything fell into place then in perfect, sickening order. Jean’s death was neither arbitrary nor isolated. It was the first step in a scheme that ended with a theft—which had gone undetected for over a week, until Will had returned and discovered the discrepancies. Time enough for the thieves to go anywhere in the world and cover their tracks behind them.
“What did you do with the cell cultures you took?” Dorian asked, turning back to Iris again. “Whom did you give them to?”
She shook her head. “I left them there, in the incubator to the side. Someone else must have taken them.”
“This Dr. Orrin?” I suggested.
“I don’t know,” she repeated.
I glanced at Dorian. “Did you know that Dr. Sanderson was also...compromised?” I tried instead.
“No,” she said, her voice even softer as tears rolled down her face. “I don’t know anything more. All I know is what I was told to do.”
“It is not your fault,” Dorian said, his voice dry and mechanical, as if he were reading a script. “You did nothing wrong. You shouldn’t feel bad about it.”
She lifted her head and nodded vigorously, her eyes instantly dry. “Yes, sir. You’re right, sir.”
“I always am,” Dorian said, and the sarcasm in his voice appeared to be entirely lost on her. “Go home. Get a good night’s sleep. And come in refreshed. No one will blame you, and you must not blame yourself.”
