Beyond the Night

by Thea Devine

  “And yet this moment, the lust for blood is in my soul and I would kill any one of us to feed.”

  “You haven’t,” Dominick pointed out. “You won’t. Neither will I. We’ll feed on the road to London. But our babies need you right now. And we’re not done. We have things to do, babies to care for, England to save.”

  “Oh, that,” Senna muttered as she climbed into the carriage, where Mirya had already fixed up two little cloth nests for the babies on the opposite side.

  “That.” And enemies to defeat. They’d been gone too long from town. It didn’t take hours to mobilize a vampire army.

  Charles could be up to anything. He could be massing the Keepers around the Palace even as they were on the road. Dnitra could be pregnant by now.

  They were still hours away. And now he must drive with care because of the babies. Renk and Rula. He tested their names out loud to tamp down his worry.

  Renk and Rula. He would take them to Mirya’s hovel. They would be safe there. Until he killed Charles.

  The space felt tight and airless. The twins slept in makeshift cradles at the foot of Mirya’s bed, where Senna lay dozing. Dominick sat at the table, drumming his fingers while Mirya stirred her pot of gruel over the fire and slanted curious glances his way.

  “I have no answers,” he said flatly. “Do you?”

  “Oh, they are here,” Mirya said to her rhythmic stirring. “They wait, they watch, they are unified in all ways.”

  Dominick made a sound. They were together, Charles and Dnitra. That meant Iosefescu approved, and it was possible he’d always intended to gain power through the Tepes, and that he’d seen Dominick as the way to do it. That he’d lied about rebuking the ancient feuds.

  All that clan vengeance had just been lying dormant, waiting for the right instrument, and the right moment, to take control.

  Dominick had to find them.

  “I have to leave,” he said finally.

  Mirya nodded. “You will find them.”

  “And you know this?”

  “I know.”

  “But you can’t tell me where.”

  “I can only tell what I know,” she said cryptically.

  Which was the problem, he thought, as he transhaped his way out of the alley. What she knew and how much she told of what she knew did not equate.

  He wondered how much of an ally she really was.

  He veered off suddenly as he saw the green glow of the Keepers patrolling the outer boroughs. Immediately, his instinct was to view the burned wreckage of his town house.

  Maybe that would be a mistake. Too many memories were still spiraling in the smoky air. The life he’d built as a merchant to cover his vampiric activities had been as evanescent as smoke. And his plan to avenge himself on the Countess had all gone wrong when Senna appeared on the scene, an unexpected prospective mate for his half brother, Charles, because the Countess so badly wanted an heir.

  He’d been so ready to oblige—to get Senna pregnant instead and present the Countess with an heir with tainted blood—

  It hadn’t quite worked out that way.

  He’d bound Senna to him by virtue of taking blood from her earlobe, drop by drop, until she was fully his.

  Memories . . .

  With his wing, he swept a layer of ash from the stoop where he perched and watched curiously as they floated back down to the surface.

  Devil’s bones. He had lived a man’s life in this house. He had seduced Senna in this house, given his twins life in this house.

  And now he had a son who would soon scour the streets to feed his own bloodlust. And a daughter who must be protected at all costs. A daughter for whom he’d give his life to save from the knowledge of what her parents were.

  He shouldn’t have come here. The pain of the consequences of his decisions was too acute. He caught the faintest ripple of a breeze just as he heard a sound from somewhere deep in the recesses of the burn and ash.

  A voice? A purr? A laugh? He checked his loft and angled back down to the stoop. Perched. Listened. He heard a voice, blurred and low.

  He flew into the debris to get closer, wading through the dust, grit, dirt, smoke-larded ash. He surmised he was in the parlor, though every detail had burned away, the staircase was gone, and the floor had pancaked into the one below.

  He heard faint, muffled sounds and followed them into the inky-dark devastation of the lower floor.

  Charles had obviously decided that opportunity was at hand, and he’d brought Dnitra to this hellhole to roll around naked in the ash and dirt as he unleashed orgasm after orgasm into her accommodating body.

  Dominick watched, his fury quickly inching into bloodred rage.

  The son of a bitch. He felt his body unfolding, transforming, and shifting into a kill stance. He felt like attacking and ripping both of their bodies to shreds. But he waited as Charles kept banging away and Dnitra’s screams echoed into the night.

  The bitch. Betraying Iosefescu for the possibility of carrying a child of commingled blood. To be the vessel who bore the Eternal Ruler.

  Or had Iosefescu planned it that way?

  It was time Dnitra paid for her sins. He hadn’t thought to kill them both tonight, but they were vulnerable in their nudity and their brazen coupling. And their certainty no one would ever discover them.

  That deserved some acknowledgment. He would attack them at their most susceptible points, the places where blood would drain profusely and the body could not easily heal.

  All he needed was a length of charred wood. He burrowed into the debris until he found one the size of a dagger that didn’t crumble in his hand.

  Not totally burned through. Enough heft to do some damage.

  If he aimed at Charles’s gutless heart.

  He perched just above them, carefully calculating the right angle, just the right moment to launch the makeshift dagger.

  He aimed it to pierce right to the small of Charles’s back, to graze his spine, to stop his pumping. He aimed it to damage Charles to the point where he could never have sex again.

  Dominick wanted blood, and blood he would have.

  Charles howled, cursing to the night sky as he rolled off Dnitra’s still undulating body and reached for the object impaled in his back, which he could not, as Dominick intended, reach.

  Dnitra never saw Dominick with the burn-scuffed plank as he swung it hard and heavy at her head.

  Blood and brain matter flew, and she collapsed into the muck of soot and ash, a naked rag doll.

  Charles lifted himself on one elbow. “She’s dead.” He was beginning to grasp just what had happened.

  “That was my intention,” Dominick said flatly.

  “Get this thing out of me . . . ,” Charles managed to say, before he slumped over trying to grasp the wooden dagger still impaled at the base of his spine. He was unconscious and dying and could not summon any kind of healing power to make a difference.

  But just to make certain, Dominick swung the plank at Charles’s head. Harder this time; the bastard deserved it. Dominick stoically swung twice more, drawing blood, guts, gore. There couldn’t be enough blood. He wouldn’t rest until Charles was dead.

  Something stopped him. Something said it was enough.

  He stared at Charles’s inert body for a long moment. His half brother, heedless, feckless, narcissistic, irresponsible, grandiose, enamored of bloodshed, killing, and death long before he’d been turned into a monster, and on a rampage to gain power ever since. He had no feelings for Charles at all, in death or in life. No qualms about leaving him to melt into the scorched dust and ash of what had been Dominick’s own fantasy life.

  It was done. It was over.

  He felt nothing as he transhaped once again and flew away from the fetid ruins of what had been his home.

  It was done, forever over
. No one would rise in Charles’s place. No one who had died like that could regenerate. Dominick’s children were safe and were now his first priority, while there was still some fatherly feeling in his gut.

  He headed toward the green aura streaming through the outer roads, and the prospect of food for his son.

  Dominick had lived like a man among them, aristocratic, self-made, wealthy. He had moved in their circles, attended their parties, their musicales, their theaters, contributed to their charities.

  None of them knew of his secret life, his blood-saturated past. He had been respected, feared, and sought after.

  And now everything was gone. That life was gone, his town house was gone. Vengeance was done. Nothing was left but a long slide into eternity.

  They should go back, he thought suddenly as they sat around the bare wooden table in Mirya’s hovel. They should go back to Lady Augustine’s town house.

  No one would question it. Everybody still believed Senna was her beloved ward.

  And he’d have a new base, a place to return to, to suppress and hide the murderous ghoul he really was.

  The plan came to him whole and complete.

  They’d start by burying Peter in a public ceremony so it was clear that no one else could claim Lady Augustine’s estate. And he’d consult the lawyers to make it ironclad.

  Then when they took possession of the town house, he would have another chance to return to the life he’d known for the past twenty years.

  With differences, of course. A helpmate, well-known to the stratum of society in which he and Lady Augustine had traveled. And the twins. It would be easy enough to compel their circle to remember that all of that had happened already in the normal course of events.

  But first—he must see the state of Peter’s body and if there was even enough of him left to bury. Then he’d arrange for the rooms to be cleaned and everything freshened for his family.

  His family. It sounded odd on the tongue.

  Blood and bone—boy and girl.

  What would they do about the girl?

  In the wake of the pregnancy and births, he hadn’t considered the ramifications of having a child who was not a vampire.

  A normal child who couldn’t possibly be expected to keep their secret.

  A child who would be revolted by what went on behind closed doors. Or by having a mother who slept in a shroud in a bed of rotted burial dirt. How could she know these things and not be utterly repelled?

  Not quite the happy family he’d envisioned.

  What to do about Rula?

  He stalked through the town house taking note of bloodstains, of dust, of dirt, of which room might suit Renk, which room to designate for Mirya. If Mirya would come. Mirya must come—she knew too much, but she was controllable whenever there was a subtle threat on her life.

  She was also expendable.

  Rula was another matter. They would need to provide food, clothes, schooling . . . they’d have to hire a cook, find a nanny, educate her, marry her off someday.

  He couldn’t conceive of a life that involved all those aspects of normalcy. Nor could he picture how they would keep her vampiric heritage from her, or how Rula would operate in the real world once she knew everything.

  She couldn’t possibly comprehend their life. For a time it would appear normal to her, but once she was beyond a certain age, revulsion would set in. He couldn’t let that happen. He didn’t want to see it. He didn’t want Rula to ever see it. For her own good, and for her to live a normal life, the conclusion was inescapable. Rula couldn’t ever know, couldn’t ever be with them.

  Even if she inherited inexplicable-to-her vampire traits.

  For them to survive, Rula must leave.

  It was a simple, rational, pragmatic, cold-blooded decision.

  His next thought seemed inevitable: Rula could live with Mirya.

  Or could she? Mirya wouldn’t lie for them, but Senna trusted her; she had been Senna’s protector and mother figure, she’d helped her survive. Wouldn’t she do the same for Senna’s daughter?

  Did Mirya even feel any loyalty to Senna? Or was she just trying to endure, as he was?

  He paced the parlor trying to resolve the inconsistency.

  But that shred of humanity that still existed within him hated that he felt that cavalier about his daughter. He loved her. He would have given anything not to have to make this decision.

  He had to do what was best for Senna and Renk.

  Since they hadn’t expected a second child,, and certainly not a girl with no clan scar, it came down to their survival with a member of their family an abject danger to their existence.

  Maybe not immediately. But the way vampire babies grew, that was problematic.

  Rula must leave.

  Or Rula would die.

  Senna hadn’t yet come to that conclusion. She sat stiffly, her expression implacable. She sat in a rocking chair beside the fireplace, Rula nestled in her arms, and Mirya in a corner tending Renk in his cradle.

  “Rula lives with us,” Senna said stonily.

  “It’s too dangerous.”

  “She’s barely a week old. I can see how dangerous she is.”

  “And when she realizes what this family is about?”

  “She’d never betray us,” Senna said staunchly. “I know it in my heart.”

  Dominick lost patience. “What you don’t know is how fast a vampire baby grows. What we don’t know is whether Rula will replicate that accelerated rate. In a year, it will be like they’re two or three. In five years, fifteen. Furthermore, you can’t predict how Rula will take the revelation that her parents, and her brother, are bloodsucking murderers.”

  Senna flinched at his bluntness. “She’d never betray us. Never. I’ll teach her, I’ll tell her. It won’t be so devastating coming from me.”

  “When will you do that, Senna? While you’re sucking up a corpse’s blood?”

  Senna blinked. He was obviously determined to be as crude as possible to jolt her out of her fairy-tale ideas. “That isn’t fair.”

  “It is too fair. That will happen sometime, and then what? How do you explain that? And the shroud and dirt bed hidden in the armoire? And the sickening bloodlust of her parents that will leave a trail of deaths all up and down the Thames? How do you explain all that?”

  “She’ll understand. She’s ours.”

  “It doesn’t mean she was bloodborn with understanding.”

  “I won’t give her up. Not to anyone, and you’re talking about strangers. What if she does have otherworldly traits?”

  “Unlikely, and if so, very minimal. Maybe enough to give her advantages here and there, but nothing like what Renk will have—or you and I do.”

  “I don’t care.” Senna looked down at Rula, so peacefully sleeping. “I really don’t care.”

  “And there will be the need for outsiders to care for her—she must be fed, clothed, taught,” Dominick went on relentlessly. “We’d need a cook, a nanny, a teacher. We’d have to fake our life while strangers are in our house—and how long will it be, do you think, before the cracks show? A slip-up. A spatter of blood. A body somewhere it shouldn’t be.”

  That wasn’t quite how Senna had pictured their life, but the stark recitation of what would be necessary for Rula’s well-being gave his argument the edge. Only she wasn’t ready to capitulate.

  “I still think we can manage it.”

  Dominick ran his hand over his face in frustration. He looked down at Rula, and he thought abstractedly, She’s changed already, and not in the typical baby way. Rather, she seemed bigger, more aware, and those blue eyes looked at him as though she had understood every point of their argument.

  “She’s grown,” he said quietly. “Look at her carefully—her limbs, her eyes . . .”

  “I don’t see that,”
Senna said instantly. But—maybe she did. Rula’s body already felt longer, more substantial, and, yes, the eyes—the eyes had a knowledge in them that seemed beyond babyhood.

  She offered another solution. “We’ll send her to boarding school. That way she’ll have all she needs and we can still—”

  “Her growth spurt will cause problems. Raise questions. Make everything more complicated.”

  “You have an answer for everything,” Senna grumbled.

  “No, actually, I didn’t have any answers for an unexpected daughter with no clan imprint on her. I only know what I fear now, that our survival is at stake if we take on the task of raising a child who isn’t of the blood.”

  Senna went silent. The problem was real, perhaps insurmountable, but—to give up Rula? Forever?

  “Senna—”

  “I can’t.”

  Dominick pounded the table impatiently.

  “You must,” said Mirya, who had until then been stolid and silent. “He is right. There is no other choice.”

  Senna turned her head away to hide her tears. “Tell me why.”

  “For all the reasons he said.”

  “And the things you can’t anticipate,” Dominick added. “The anger, the questions . . . a list of things you won’t want to explain. And eventually you’ll—we’ll,” he amended quickly, “lose her anyway.”

  Mirya nodded in agreement.

  Senna could not control her tears. “And do you have someone in mind to take our child?”

  Dominick grimaced. He wasn’t about to offer up Mirya. “Not yet.”

  Senna turned to Mirya. “Would you?” It was an impulsive question, born of Senna’s need to keep Rula as close as possible so she might see her sometimes, even if she couldn’t reveal herself.

  Mirya stared at her as if she were peering into the future and seeing beyond the night.

  Finally she nodded. “I will take the girl.”

  Senna felt a sudden shudder of apprehension. She should have thought this through before asking—Mirya was too old, too infirm, too poor.

  But now the die was cast. She and Dominick would live in Lady Augustine’s town house with their son, and their daughter would be raised by a Gypsy who would probably send her out in the streets to scam money for them to live.