[Dark Destinies 01.0] Dark Heart of the Sun

by SK Ryder

  “Why did you not take me out into the sun?”

  Her mouth dropped open. Was it possible the thought had never even crossed her mind? He wished he could will himself to die right there on the spot.

  “Why would I do that? That would have killed you, wouldn’t it?”

  He couldn’t look at her anymore. Leaning on his thighs he slumped into himself. “As would one of the swords through my neck. You know this. I told you.”

  Silence stretched as she began to understand what he said, what he wanted of her—what he had always wanted of her. The heat of her hand brushed against his naked back, then vanished as she changed her mind about touching him.

  “No,” she said, her voice almost steady. “If you seriously want to off yourself, you’re going to have to do it without my help.”

  “After all you have seen? All I have told you? What else can I do to persuade you that a thing such as I does not deserve to exist?”

  “The only way I would ever want to hurt you is if I thought you wanted to do me harm.”

  “Just knowing about me is doing you harm. That knowledge alone separates you from the rest of humanity. You are aware of things you should never have considered. Every thought, every decision you make from here on out will be determined by what you learned this weekend.”

  “It’ll take some getting used to, I’ll give you that. But how is this different from other life-changing events?”

  “I could kill you. By accident or on a whim. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers to illustrate. “Whether you stay here or leave, as long as I exist—and crave you—your life is in danger.”

  Cassidy was quiet for a while, thinking, holding his gaze with a stubborn courage that defied all reason. How very different from his much briefer discussion with Anastasie. His sister’s terror at his revelations had drawn the beast and killed her. But with Cassidy, he wallowed in the welcoming depths of her velvet-blue eyes.

  “Why does that not trouble you?”

  “It doesn’t.” She shook her head. “I know you won’t hurt me. And you need me.”

  “Merde,” he murmured, dark suspicion tingling between his shoulder blades. “What would make you think that?”

  “Serge told me when I tried to help him and he told me to run. No, wait . . .” A small frown marred her brow before recognition smoothed it. “Oh. Wow. He didn’t just tell me, did he? He did that weird voice thing.”

  “He compelled you,” Dominic clarified, a whole new kind of aggravation bubbling through his innards. He had abandoned Serge in the Keys to buy himself some precious hours of privacy and still that idiot’s meddling got in the way.

  Cassidy chuckled. “Good thing he did. Otherwise I might have had a different reaction to that stunt you pulled last night.” Sobering, she continued, “Which was what, by the way? Your sordid attempt to get me to hate you?”

  “It would be better for you if you did,” he said tightly.

  “I’m sorry. I can’t do that. I’ve seen your heart too often, my friend. I know you too well.”

  “Then grant my request as a friend. Drag me into the light of day and watch me burn.” Soon he’d be begging on his knees.

  She shook her head. “Never, mon ami.”

  On a furious growl, Dominic sprang to his feet and moved so fast she glanced around startled before spotting him by the door.

  “Be sure to thank that filthy old blood-drinker for saving you from me twice now,” he sneered. “And for leaving that bruise on your throat.”

  Chapter 29

  Wretched Hearts

  The front door slammed in Dominic’s wake, rattling the windows. Cassidy stared at it, dumbfounded, his words meaningless noise in a storm of misery. She’d seen the misery last night. She’d felt it today while puzzling over his corpse-still body. She heard it in his voice now.

  “Dominic, wait!”

  She hurried for the door and burst onto the porch—where she came to a sudden and gasping halt. “Serge?”

  Bug-eyed, the vampire scrambled backwards and promptly tumbled off the stairs.

  Cassidy leaned over the rail. There was just enough light from the front window to see him clearly. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  He sat up and looked over his shoulder toward the encroaching wilderness. Hesitating, he got to his grimy bare feet and looked up at her. “Where you are, I am, sweet one.”

  “And how long have you been stalking me?” she said, unable to muster more than mild irritation. Twice, Dominic claimed, this ragged apparition had saved her life, and his innocent, hapless manner made him difficult to take serious. Likely this was a fatal mistake many of his victims had made.

  A mistake she had made.

  Cassidy took a step back, her hand going to the place on her neck where the bruise had been. Dominic’s parting words registered only now. Serge had put it there. He had attacked her. It was like unraveling a shroud by pulling a string. Hidden memories tumbled out. That night she and Jackson had walked the beach to reconnect away from his family. This is who had materialized before them out of nowhere. He’d had a beard then and a crazy light in his eyes. ‘Wait here and see nothing,’ he ordered Jackson who did as told. Serge grabbed her then, forced her head back, and . . .

  Her back bumped up flat against the door now. She stared at this dubious version of the nightmare that had crushed her neck with his jaws to drink her blood. The terror had lasted only a moment before she fell into a strange euphoria and wondered why Jackson looked so angry.

  “You remember,” Serge said, eyes round as an owl’s. “I don’t usually meet them again, you see. They never remember.”

  “Why?” she said, bewildered. “Why would you do this to me? Why me? Jackson was there. He must have at least a gallon more blood than I do.”

  Serge sidled up the steps with ghost-like silence. “But he is not made of light. Not like you. You . . . you are like the sun at midnight. I have never seen the like of it. I had to know you. I had to see all the shadows you cast through time. And I may have been not as gentle as I could have been,” he concluded with a contrite shrug.

  “Shadows?” Was this vampire-speak or lunacy?

  He nodded and giggled, warming to the conversation. “I see, you see. I see the future in the shadows people cast in time.”

  “Uh huh. So you think you’ve seen my future, is that it?”

  Serge gave her an affronted look. “I have had your blood, sweet one. I know your future.”

  Lunacy, she decided. But as long as he believed she needed to be protected for this future, she wouldn’t dream of arguing. “How nice. Is it something good?”

  To her mild alarm, he didn’t answer right away. Tilting his head to the side, he stared at her—or rather, through her—before drifting closer still. “I have had Dominic’s blood, too,” he said, his voice lowering to a whisper almost drowned by the rustling breeze. “It is his future that is written in your blood.”

  Her skin crawled violently. She hugged herself.

  “You feel it, I know you do. The connection,” Serge murmured.

  He was so near now his mossy forest scent enveloped her, swirling in the tangy ocean air. She wanted to get away from him. And she hung on his every word. Just words. She knew the sound of a compulsion by now, and this wasn’t it. It was the truth she heard that shackled her to the spot.

  He shook his head. “So rare, that harmony, even among humans. Rarer still among our kind. Between the two . . . unimaginable.” Clutching his hands together, he continued in fervent tones, “The blood-child has a destiny. And you are its key.”

  Cassidy shivered. Closing her eyes, she forced herself to step back to reality, such as it was these days. “He seems to think that his destiny involves me dragging him out into the sun.”

  Se
rge hunched his shoulders. “I know.”

  “You do? And you leave it to a human to try and talk him out of that? He said you were his friend for crying out loud.”

  “He did, yes,” he agreed, brightening. “But that is not his destiny. You will not betray him. Even when he begs you to.”

  “Destiny,” she cried, throwing up her hands in frustration. “I don’t give a rat’s ass about his destiny. He’s in pain, you flaming idiot. Tormented to the point of wanting to die. That is what I care about right now. Or did you put that in my head, too?”

  Serge scurried back to the edge of the steps. Sand trickled out of his clothes. Dry seaweed hung in his hair. “No. That is your destiny.”

  With that, he vanished.

  Cassidy looked around and listened. Breezes clattered in the palms behind the house. Surf rolled beyond the dune. Crickets.

  She blew out a long breath and went to retrieve her flip-flops and flashlight. Walking back out into the moonless night was like walking into empty space where only the bobbing circle of her light existed. She followed it down the narrow path across the dune, past the looming shadow of the Australian pine. Several crabs reared up along the way, waving their pinchers and skittering for cover.

  From the beach, the cottage and its glowing windows were no longer visible, but she could make out the horizon where the tiny beacons of passing ships stood out from the fainter lights of the stars. Her beam swept around, finding only empty sand and churning waves.

  “I know you’re out here, Dominic.” Was he watching her even now? Serge probably was. “Talk to me, Dominic,” she called. “Dominic?”

  Nothing.

  Cassidy shut off the flashlight and settled cross-legged in the sand, waiting for her eyes to adjust. Oddly, the idea that one of those ornery crabs might sneak up on her worried her more than the fact that vampires could also. She felt invisible sitting there. After a while she felt light, too, insubstantial, dissolving into the darkness. Like vampires, she thought, a powerful sense of quiet despair invading her. Voices drift in this void, begging for help. French voices.

  Aidez-moi, mon amour. Je vous prie.

  Cassidy blinked, not sure if she’d heard the words or only imagined them. “Dominic?”

  “Oui.”

  He sat beside her—right beside her—knees drawn up before him, his upper body a bright silhouette, glistening with wetness in the faint light. To her surprise, she found his sudden appearance more expected than alarming. What she didn’t expect and greatly appreciated was that he wore his sweatpants, apparently having gone through the trouble of retrieving them from the cottage before joining her. Also two bottles of Perrier, one of which he handed to her.

  She cracked open her bottle. “You went swimming? In complete darkness?”

  “I no longer swim. I can only sit on the bottom.”

  “Ah. Like . . . smoking in the sun.”

  “Like so. But since I do not need air, not fatal.” He shrugged. “At least not for me.”

  “I see,” she murmured, thinking of those mysterious mangled sharks that washed up on this beach sometimes. Somehow she knew there would be another one in the morning. Apex predators, Jim had called them. Clearly not quite apex enough.

  She took several refreshing swallows of the sparkling water and solidified her resolve. Now or never then. “Aren’t people easier to catch than sharks?”

  She felt his eyes on her. “Maybe I am lazy tonight,” he told her, the French accent clipped. “And in no mood to travel or dispose of bodies.”

  “Hmm. I don’t see why you’d bother with that.”

  “Don’t you?” he whispered.

  The tension in his voice alone could have drawn blood, and she sent a silent thanks to the madman who had compelled her to have no fear in Dominic’s presence. While she trusted him to keep her safe even from himself, her faith in her abilities to curb her instinctual reactions was considerably less.

  “Think about it. There’s a resort five miles down the street from here, offering a wide variety of international . . . dishes to choose from.” She indicated the direction with her bottle. “Go drink your fill and leave the bodies where they drop.”

  An uncanny stillness settled over him. Cassidy didn’t care whether this was because of shock or lurid fantasies, or both. Keeping her tone reasonable, she gunned the engine and went for impact. “No, really. What better way to get yourself killed than pissing off a bunch of humans and letting them find you during the day? Why be so damn careful about not leaving any traces of yourself anywhere near here? Leave a trail of bodies to your doorstep, I say. They’ll come and find you, think you’re dead, carry you out. On the way into the coroner’s van—poof!—there you go. No, wait, stop. Would you survive that inside a body bag? Oh, that would suck, waking up in a morgue. Okay. I see where that might not work. Scratch that thought.” She erased it with her free hand. “But otherwise doesn’t that sound simple? I can’t believe you haven’t thought of that, brilliant as you are.”

  “You. Are. Mad.” He choked out the words one at a time.

  “How so? Isn’t that what you want? Someone to do you in? Because obviously you can’t do it on your own. I mean, what could be simpler than sitting out here at sunrise? Do you know how many suicidal humans would envy you that option? What the hell is stopping you?”

  No reaction.

  She leaned close and lowered her voice. “Unless, of course . . . you don’t really want to die.”

  The little green bottle shattered in his hand. Glass shards thudded into the sand between his feet.

  Cassidy straightened. “I know. Truth can be a bitch.”

  Part of her expected him to disappear now—from the spot as well as her life. Instead he turned toward the sea, his face a beautiful, empty mask.

  “It is not that simple,” he began. “The beast . . . the parasite that claims us . . . it will not permit us to harm ourselves. Its will to survive is stronger than any logic, any sense of decency or honor we might still cling to. In the end, it always wins.”

  “So . . . you have no choice?”

  “None at all.”

  “And you had no choice about . . . the deaths you caused in the beginning?”

  She felt him tense more than saw him do it. It was the answer she had demanded the night before—and which he had so creatively avoided giving.

  He hung his head in an unmistakable gesture of surrender that squeezed her heart.

  “They taught me the realities of my new existence, those deaths,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “When I was first made, the beast claimed me for many nights. I didn’t know that my father was . . . my first until much later, when the madman who made me told me what I had done. ‘You belong to me,’ he said. ‘Father, brother, lover. I am all to you and more. No one else will ever matter again.’” He shook his head. “But they did. Jeovana still mattered. When she came to the island soon after my transformation, I escaped from my keepers to see her. I was convinced that in her arms I would wake up from this horror and touch the sun again. Instead—” He hesitated before finishing quickly. “Instead I discovered that no human lover can survive me.”

  “Oh, my God,” Cassidy whispered, unable to suppress a shudder.

  “Oui. Mon Dieu.” He scoffed with a meaningful tilt of his head. How many times had she, under the influence of wine, high spirits, or outright delusion—almost tempted him across lines of no return she didn’t even know existed? Too many. Yes, keeping things platonic would be more than all right.

  “That morning I waited for the sun to take me, only to learn that the thing I had become would not allow it. I woke up the next night buried deep in the sand with no clear memory of how I got there. Obviously if I was to end myself, I would need help. I don’t know why, but I asked Anastasie. When I told her what I
was—what I had done . . .” He closed his eyes and fell silent.

  “She was terrified,” Cassidy murmured.

  “Oui. And I learned how very much the beast loves terror.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Sorry? You are sorry?” Dominic spat under his breath. He leaned towards her, crowding her. “Keep your pity. I have enough of it for myself. What I want—what I need—is your outrage. I lust for your contempt more than I do for your blood. Do you understand?”

  Cassidy didn’t move until he retreated with a disgusted snort.

  “I understand, Dominic. I understand that you had no choice.”

  This brought a low, decidedly inhuman growl she chose to ignore.

  “You didn’t know what was happening to you. You were out of control, a victim of forces you didn’t understand. I’m not saying that makes any of it right, but it also doesn’t make it as evil as it probably feels to you. It’s tragic beyond words, but it doesn’t deserve the death penalty.”

  He considered this. “You sound very sure of yourself.”

  “Maybe as an outsider I see things more clearly than you?” She imagined that a human in somewhat similar circumstances would get locked up in a psych ward, but he wouldn’t get sent to death row regardless of how badly he might want to go there. No one would lock up Dominic. His penance was to live with what he’d done—what he was still doing. The fact that he agonized about it at all meant that he was no true monster. His human soul was alive and fighting to be heard.

  In the end that’s all that mattered.

  “Perhaps,” he allowed. The corner of his mouth twitched up.

  Cassidy emptied her Perrier, satisfied. They sat for a while in silent companionship, watching the ocean stir beneath a diamond dust blanket of stars. Finally she gave him a gentle nudge. “C’mon, friend. I’m starving.”