Dark Destiny (Principatus)

by Couper, Lexxie

  And that had been the way of things for many years. Ven soon discovered the joys of his newfound physical prowess and made full use of them, feeding only from Sydney’s many women eager to become a vampire’s feed source, enjoying the other “perks” that came with the willingly offered dinner. One night he’d met Amy Mathieson at a particularly rowdy game of beach volleyball and three years later, he was pretty much a monogamous feeder.

  He’d never questioned the “rules”, those unexplained, completely annoying rules dictated to him by Hollywood. Don’t go out in the daylight—there went the day job. Don’t go near garlic—even though garlic prawns had been his favorite meal. Don’t try to imbibe human food—again with the garlic prawns. Avoid crucifixes and holy water—okay, no real problem there. Don’t get yourself stabbed in the heart by a wooden stake—splinters on steroids to be avoided at all cost. Gotcha. He just accepted those rules as he had his new existence. With a wry grin and dry sarcasm.

  Fortunately, being staked to dust had never been a problem. The city’s small number of, quite frankly, laughable demon hunters never bothered with him. And as for the rest of the “rules”, well, he kept to them, crucifixes and holy water the least of his concerns. His family had never been much for religion and they weren’t likely to start any day soon. He didn’t think his folks even kept a Bible in the house.

  But the images of his transformation refused to leave him, haunting him when he “slept”, forcing him to relive the moment over and over again. The fear, the pain, the fury, the bliss of Death’s icy touch…and an empty longing for the life stolen from him. A life of light and warmth and sun—surfing or jogging with Pat, fishing from the rocks at North Bondi, sitting on the beach watching the waves make love to the sand.

  A life he thought lost to him forever. Until an hour ago.

  He studied the sunlight spilling into Patrick’s living room through the open window and stepped forward. Directly into it, feeling its warmth paint his body.

  He sighed. For some reason he could not explain, he felt disconnected. What did it mean that he could withstand sunlight? He knew it wasn’t normal. The way Death had stared at him back on the beach, as if she’d seen a ghost, told him what he could do was not right. So what did it mean?

  He raked his hands through his hair, a distant part of his mind reveling in the sun-kissed strands. Luxuriating in the warm flush heating his perpetually cool flesh. “Ah, fuck. What the hell is going on?”

  “Enjoying it?”

  Patrick’s casual question jerked Ven’s head around. He stepped away from the window, back into the cool shadows of the living room.

  Patrick shook his head. “Don’t, Ven. You deserve to stand in the light.”

  The bitter note in his brother’s words made Ven frown. They’d walked home from the beach in silence, both lost to their own thoughts. Patrick had called Bluey and told him he was taking the day off before heading for the shower, leaving Ven to ponder the surreal events of the morning.

  Now, his brother stood before him, a towel slung around his bare shoulders, eyes clouded with torment.

  “Not the usual start to the day, was it?” Ven smiled, trying to break the tension in the room. He felt odd. Like some vital turning point had passed that he should have been prepared for.

  Patrick didn’t answer.

  Ven let his attention drop to his brother’s torso. Numerous gashes and puncture wounds scarred Patrick’s chest, some still seeping blood. Ven flinched, the jarring sight filling him with the very familiar wave of protective anger. He welcomed the emotion. It was normalcy, a state that seemed to be rapidly slipping away from them both at the moment. “I’ll find the fucker who sent that thing after you, brother. I promise.” The vow felt right on his lips. And he would. That was what he was meant to do.

  Wasn’t it?

  Patrick looked at him and shook his head. “I’m done with this, Ven. I’ve had enough.”

  Ven frowned. He didn’t like the tone in his brother’s voice. It was flat. Emotionless. “What do you mean, ‘done with’?”

  Tossing his towel onto the sofa, Patrick crossed to the window. “All I’ve ever wanted in my life was to be normal, to help people, to surf and to swim. Four simple requests of whatever supreme force pulls the strings of my existence.”

  Ven narrowed his eyes. “We cannot choose our fate, brother. Mum and Dad didn’t choose to die wrapped around a telegraph pole in a twisted hunk of metal. I didn’t choose to become a vampire.”

  Patrick rounded on him, his face etched in dark anger. “You don’t think I know that? Jesus, Steven. I live every day thinking about that. Wondering if their car accident really was that? An accident? Wondering if you’d be a Pulitzer Prize winner now, rather than a freelance journalist if it wasn’t for me? I spend every bloody minute of every bloody day, deep in my subconscious where I can’t block it out, wondering if the people the most important to me have suffered for what I am?” He turned back to the window, his jaw bunching, his stare locked on the glaring light beyond. “I’ve had enough.”

  Ven studied his profile, his throat tight. “What are you, Patrick?” he asked quietly.

  Patrick stared at the day outside.

  A surge of hot anger ripped through Ven. “Y’know, we’ve been over this time and again. I don’t have the answer, just a gut feeling. If there’s something you should be telling me, something I should know…”

  Patrick didn’t say a word.

  The demon deep with Ven growled. Impatient frustration roared through him. He rubbed at his face, struggling to keep his fangs sheathed. That he struggled at all in the presence of his brother worried and annoyed him. “I need answers, Pat. I need to know what is going on. I’ve been pretty laidback about things since becoming a vampire. I think I’ve taken the whole lifestyle change pretty well, but I’m not going to just keep letting you ignore whatever reason you are here for. For some reason, something wants you dead and it’s time you accepted it.”

  “And that something is Fred? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  Patrick’s softly spoken question punched into Ven’s gut like a fist. He sucked in a silent, completely redundant breath, fear and anger flooding through him. He stared at his brother. Stared hard. “Don’t fall for her, Patrick. Don’t. She’s not what you think she is.”

  Patrick’s laugh was short. Harsh. Humorless. “I am getting sick of hearing that. I’m not what I think I am. Fred’s not what I think she is. Shit, even you’re not what I thought you were.”

  Hot irritation made Ven clench his fists. His demon growled again, stronger, closer to the surface. “You asked me on the beach how Death had been keeping me occupied? Maybe the question you should have asked is why she was keeping me occupied?” He looked at his brother, wanting to shake him. Wanting him to wake up and smell the proverbial goddamn coffee. “While you were being attacked by a demon, good ol’ Fred was doing her damndest to keep me away from you.”

  A light Ven had never seen before flared in Patrick’s eyes, and for a split moment fear sliced through him and he flinched, sure his brother was going to hit him.

  But Patrick didn’t. He turned away, back to the window and the strengthening day. “And her damndest was sticking her tongue down your throat? Did you put up much of a fight?”

  Ven flinched again. Both at Patrick’s icy words and the knowledge behind them.

  “I smelt her on you, Ven.”

  Ven didn’t miss the resentment in Patrick’s voice. Or the jealousy. Fuck, things were worse than he thought and he had no idea how to fix it. Save remove Death from the picture.

  But you don’t want to do that either, do you, Steven? You don’t trust her. You don’t believe her, but that doesn’t stop you wanting her. Wanting her on every goddamn level and then some.

  “Don’t fall for her, Pat,” he repeated, gut churning, chest tight, not knowing what else to say. “Please.”

  “I’m sick of it, Steven,” Patrick said in reply, and Ven could tell by
the closed resonance in his voice that Patrick had shut him out. “I’ve had enough of you paranormal lot today to last me a lifetime.”

  Cold grief stabbed into him, but from his brother’s dismissal or his own simmering jealousy, Ven could not tell.

  And at that very moment in time, he pretty much didn’t care.

  “I love you, Pat,” he said, giving his brother’s profile a level stare. “But you’re being a right bloody wanker.”

  His demon roared, feeding on the dark emotion behind the insult, surging to the surface. He snatched back control—just—before turning from Patrick. He crossed the living room, stopping briefly at the hallway door. “I’m outta here. I’ve spent the last eighteen years living in the shadows for you. Until you’re ready to acknowledge what’s in those shadows, I’m going to live in the sun.” He turned and walked down the hallway to the front door, yanking it open with such force he heard the nails fixing it to the doorjamb tear from the wood.

  He didn’t care about that either.

  He stepped through the door, out into the sunlight. He was hungry.

  He needed to feed.

  It was time to visit Amy.

  Before his demon took over and he fed from the only other living blood source near him.

  Patrick.

  Pestilence sat on his throne, furious. He drummed his fingernails against the gnarled humerus bone fashioned into an armrest. Things were not going to plan. Not at all.

  Death was sniffing about where she did not belong. She’d flexed her demon muscle and rubbed his nose in it. The cursed nikor had failed to drown the lifeguard. The human had not only escaped its clutches, but decimated it as well. How in the name of all the Powers did a human escape a third-order demon?

  He drummed his nails harder against the bone, feeling it splinter a little with each strike. By the Powers, how had it gone so wrong?

  According to the last Fate, everything should be different now. Death should have been a sick, diseased shell of her former self, groveling at his feet for his mercy and the lifeguard should be dead, and yet nothing had changed. Nothing! How the aqueous demon had let the lifeguard slip away from him, he’d never know. Because the stupid, pathetic thing had let the mortal kill it! Kill it, of all things.

  Incredulous rage ripped through him, turning the saliva in his mouth to sour bile. He curled his nose and spat, the wad of phlegm sizzling and hissing on the cold marble floor like fat on molten steel. He watched the spittle eat into the black rock until there was nothing but a small hole in the floor.

  “Fuck.” His curse shattered the air, bounced off the walls and came back to him. Empty and hollow. He dragged his hands through his hair, trying to calm himself. So the nikor failed. All plans of greatness had hurdles to cross.

  And you have had so many.

  The thought made Pestilence scowl and he dug his nails, growing longer and more hooked with each passing second, into the humerus bone. He had spent thirty-six years trying to end the lifeguard’s life.

  Thirty-six years of failure.

  It irked him. Considerably.

  The problem was he was trapped here in the Realm, while Patrick Watkins was free to move around in the world of man. Until the dawn of the Apocalypse, he was confined to the Realm. The Powers had decreed it so and that was the way of the Order of Actuality. Any attempt he made to end the lifeguard’s life was determined entirely on rare, brief windows of opportunity when the veil between the Realm and the human world thinned. So far, during those moments, he had sent a fatal wave of typhoid to the region the boy lived, he had arranged a succubus to infiltrate the lifeguard’s school and seduce the adolescent, he had commanded a vampire to end the young male’s life on the verge of adulthood, and he had ordered a swarm of locusts to attack the cursed boy’s parents’ car, forcing it off the road, among other things. All attempts had failed. All. Even the one moment three human years ago, when the veil had been at its thinnest and he had managed to all but transubstantiate to the world of man, finding the lifeguard alone and unprotected by his cursed vampire brother, the chance to kill him had failed. Somehow, somehow, the human had taken him by surprise and he had been flung back into the bowels of the Realm before he could prevent it happening. It was as if the Powers watched over the lifeguard and protected him.

  They did not, though. Pestilence knew that for a fact. The lifeguard’s existence and importance in the upcoming end battle was known only to him. Sheer luck had brought him such knowledge. Sheer luck he had been screwing the last Fate during one of her increasingly rare moments of insight during which she had screamed out the lifeguard’s name and destiny.

  Pestilence grinned, the action both bitter and cold. The last Fate had been a pathetic fuck—she had known all his moves before he had the chance to use them, but she had been fantastic at pillow talk. The words had just spewed from her mouth, unstoppable and feverish, a mouth that only seconds earlier had been wrapped around his dick.

  She screamed of the one who would be the Cure. Who would challenge the First Horseman. She had moaned and gibbered about the weakness of Death coming when the Disease finds the Cure. Of Death’s end at the hands of the First. It was all gobbledegook, and yet it all made perfect sense. Most of it, at least. The sun walker will feed of his own and live still left him confused, but that mattered little when everything else said so much.

  He had listened to her carry on, taking it all in. Watching her as the spittle on her lips turned to frantic foam, studying her without a sound as the foam became drool. The words continued, faster, faster, until, with a final scream—The Cure will rethread the Fabric—she’d collapsed in a shaking heap on his bed, eyes closed, face flushed.

  It was during that brief moment of silence, he formulated his plan.

  He slid up beside her, the last Fate, placed his fingertips to her throat and waited.

  What felt like hours but was really a fraction of a second later, she opened her eyes, giving Pestilence a small, shy smile. “Did I zone out?”

  He had nodded.

  The last Fate’s eyes grew worried. “I’m sorry. It’s been an eon since that happened. Did I say anything important?”

  Pestilence had nodded again. “You could say that.”

  The last Fate smiled. “I’m glad you were here to hear it. My memory’s not the best these days. It’ll make it easier for me to report to the…”

  The rest of the old hag’s sentence had turned into an ear-piercing screech of pain and terror as Pestilence had plunged his fingers into her mouth and poured every disease and pest in his arsenal into her being at the same time. Essentially, filling her up to the suddenly bulging, bleeding eyeballs with more sickness and, well, pestilence than the entire human world had ever experienced.

  Disposing her body had been fun. Creative, even.

  He chuckled at the thought and tapped the armrest once again, this time with less rancor. The last Fate made a great addition to his throne. In fact, she was more comfortable to plant his backside on now than alive.

  Alive.

  At the single word, Pestilence’s humor vanished. His chuckle turned to a sneer. The lifeguard was still alive. No matter his efforts to the contrary, the cursed human was alive and had achieved the impossible—killing a third-order demon.

  A cold thread of fear twisted into Pestilence’s chest. Curled tightly around his heart. How had Patrick Watkins killed an aqueous demon? According to his source in the world of man, the lifeguard’s interfering, irritating, overprotective, impossible-to-get-past vampire brother had finally been otherwise occupied. Nothing should have prevented the mature male nikor from tearing the man apart below the surface of the very water he so pitifully and pathetically loved. Nothing.

  And yet he still lived. In one piece.

  Not only that, Death, the supercilious bitch, had not succumbed when he had attacked her. According to the last Fate, Death would be weak when he found the lifeguard. Well, he had found him. Had a metaphysical lock on him, so why was Death not c
oughing up a rat-filled lung right at this moment?

  Tapping his nails, now dagger-tipped claws dripping disease, against the armrest of his throne, Pestilence stared without interest at his bed and the naked succubus chained to it.

  He could not, would not believe the last Fate had been wrong. She had never been wrong in her four millennia of existence. It was not possible she had been this time.

  No. Everything she had said was true. He knew it.

  But time was running out. Within the next moon cycle the thinning of the veil between his world and the human world would reverse and his opportunity would be lost. He needed to eradicate the problem of the lifeguard soon. Very soon. Otherwise he would be in danger of failing and he would not let that happen. He was not going to let some pathetic, weak, feeble mortal take from him that which he had lusted for, planned for, for the last millennium

  He needed to tap his source. Hard.

  He needed answers. He needed to know Patrick Watkins’ weakness.

  Now.

  Before his only window of opportunity closed.

  He remembered the chill of the wind and the cold, white light of the sun. That was always the first memory Patrick had of the moment in time he’d come to think of as the “event”.

  The early morning wind gusted across Bondi Beach, uncommonly cold, even for mid-winter, its icy breath cutting into his face, whipping up grains of sand and tearing at the ragged peaks of the crashing waves. The stark, heatless sun bleached the angry surf and empty beach to a washed-out grey, leeching the color from the world, turning it into a monotone of chilly stillness.