Day Reaper

by Melody Johnson

  Day Reaper

  Also by Melody Johnson

  Eternal Reign

  Sweet Last Drop

  The City Beneath

  Day Reaper

  A Night Blood Novel

  Melody Johnson

  LYRICAL PRESS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  LYRICAL PRESS BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2018 by Melody Johnson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  All Kensington titles, imprints, and distributed lines are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotion, premiums, fund-raising, educational, or institutional use.

  Special book excerpts or customized printings can also be created to fit specific needs. For details, write or phone the office of the Kensington Sales Manager: Kensington Publishing Corp., 119 West 40th Street, New York, NY 10018. Attn. Sales Department. Phone: 1-800-221-2647.

  Lyrical Press and Lyrical Press logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  First Electronic Edition: April 2018

  eISBN-13: 978-1-60183-427-0

  eISBN-10: 1-60183-427-6

  First Print Edition: April 2018

  ISBN-13: 978-1-60183-428-7

  ISBN-10: 1-60183-428-4

  Printed in the United States of America

  Acknowledgments

  I’ve been writing Cassidy DiRocco and Dominic Lysander’s story for over five years. They’ve become an integral part of my life, and it’s with a bittersweet excitement that I’ve reached the fourth and final installment in the Night Blood series. Day Reaper is especially dear to me as it’s my first series finale, and as I write Cassidy and Dominic’s last pages, I’m reminded that every journey’s end is really just a new beginning.

  Acknowledging everyone who impacted my life and my writing during this five year journey would be impossible, but I’d like to give a special thank you to the people who put their time, effort, and talent into my work and whose generous contributions helped shape my story, the one I was writing as well as the one I was living:

  My fellow members of First Coast Romance Writers, for sharing your experience, encouragement, advice, and enthusiasm. Our guest speakers are invaluable, but they are nothing compared to the bond of our community, which I appreciate more deeply than words can describe.

  Nicole Klungle and Margaret Johnston, for reading it rough and giving it to me straight. Your feedback was, as always, on point and priceless.

  Carl Drake, for your creativity and continued friendship. Your fabulous bookmark and postcard designs are only rivaled in my affections by your Netflix account.

  Nancy and Leonard Johnson, for your unwavering support, constant love, and the uncountable hours you’ve listened to me blab on the phone about everything and nothing.

  Derek Bradley, for filling my heart with laughter and love.

  Prologue

  Transform me into a vampire.

  The words had just left my lips, more shape than sound since I still couldn’t speak without vocal cords, and Dominic Lysander, Master vampire of New York City—who had supposedly seen all, knew all, and wasn’t impressed by any of it in his four hundred and seventy-seven-year-long-life—stared at me like I was an alien, like I was an otherworldly creature he’d always known probably existed, but was wholly unprepared to confront. I knew that horror-filled, struck-dumb look all too well; I’d been wearing it pretty consistently over the past several weeks, ever since Dominic had shoved me against the brick exterior of my apartment building and commanded me to look into his eyes, and my body had unwillingly obeyed. I knew that sometimes events were so devastating, both physically and mentally, that all you could do was stare blankly at the destruction and hope to God you didn’t lose your shit.

  But in all his four hundred and seventy-seven years, this was not the time nor the place to lose his shit.

  Use my necklace, I mouthed, both encouraging him and reminding him not to use the blood in his veins, weakened by the Leveling. I would have ripped the pendant from my necklace and raised the precious drops of his formerly powerful blood to my lips myself, but I’d lost the use of my arms. My body was numb, my awareness drifting, my vision a starburst blanket of blackness covering my face, and still, Dominic just stared.

  What are you waiting for? I snapped, as much as I could snap under the circumstances.

  “Another solution to present itself,” he finally admitted, looking over my injuries, the movement of his eyes darting and frantic.

  I raised my eyebrows, or at least, I tried to. Cold feet?

  Dominic let loose a long-suffering sigh. Some of the horror left his expression, but not all of it, and what little did leave was replaced by weary resignation. I didn’t understand his reaction—I didn’t understand him and maybe never really would, not as a human anyway. After weeks of attempting to seduce me, not only into his bed but into his coven, this should be his golden, shining moment, the pot of gold at the end of this violent, blood-soaked rainbow, but by the sick, nearly choked expression on his face, instead of bathing in his good fortune, he was drowning in it.

  “The temperature of my feet has little to do with this decision,” he said blandly.

  I opened my mouth to correct his misunderstanding, to explain that “cold feet” was just an expression, not a literal physical discomfort, when I noticed the tilt to the scarred half of his lips. He was teasing. I was exsanguinating in an alley between East Fifty-Seventh Street and 432 Park Avenue, my vocal cords in shreds, breathing more blood than air into my lungs, and fading fast. And he was teasing.

  I laughed and blood sprayed like a geyser from my esophagus.

  Dominic choked, coughing up physical blood from his metaphysical injuries. My injuries.

  The blanket over my vision thickened, filling the gaps between starbursts. I didn’t have time to doubt my decision and consider why Dominic would hesitate—which wasn’t so much a decision as it was a last resort, and perhaps therein lay Dominic’s hesitation. I didn’t have time to convince him that my decision was more choice than he’d been given for his transformation, and if my decision was more about living than it was about a life with him, he’d have to suck up his pride and be grateful I was making this choice at all: the right choice, according to him, under different circumstances. I didn’t even have time to catch my breath.

  One moment, blood was spraying from my torn throat, soaking Dominic’s shirt front and mixing with his own blood spray, and the next, I was opening my eyes without even having realized I’d ever closed them.

  I wasn’t in the gore-spattered alley anymore. I wasn’t sure where I was, but I wasn’t on the corner of Fifty-Seventh and Park Avenue—I wasn’t even outside—and my body wasn’t numb.

  My body was on fire.

  I bucked up off the bed and screamed. Or at least, I opened my mouth. Blood expelled from my mouth instead of screams, from my mouth instead of my ravaged esophagus.

  I lifted my hand and touched my throat. My smooth, untorn esophagus.

  With the rush and thunder of the flames engulfing my body, combined with the shock and disorientation of waking in an unfamiliar ro
om on an unfamiliar bed, my brain was slow to absorb anything else. I tore at my clothes, screamed up more blood, and thrashed against the burning, but a crushing weight was holding me down, bracing me on the bed and preventing me from extinguishing the flames.

  It may have only been seconds, but being burned alive had a way of elongating time into excruciating increments. In what felt like hours later—years, maybe—I became aware of a voice in my ear—something besides the thunder and fire and blood of my screams—and a hand in my hand, anchoring me to the present.

  “You must accept it. Embrace the transformation, Cassidy.”

  Dominic. His lips were moving against my ear, and his hand was the hand in mine. His body was the weight over me, bracing my body back against the bed.

  “I’m on fire,” I croaked. My voice, though hoarse, still spoke through a gurgle of blood. My vocal cords were miraculously intact, although considering the blood my throat was choking on, perhaps not as miraculously as I’d first thought, unless you considered the healing qualities in Dominic’s blood a miracle.

  At the moment, it felt more like an execution.

  His hand tightened. “No, you’re not. You’re just rejecting my blood, as usual.”

  I’m not on fire, I thought, but my next thought was as devastating as if I were. The fire is inside me and can’t be put out.

  Not for three days, at least, according to Walker.

  “We’ve been here before,” Dominic said, his voice calm and soothing, and I wanted to tear his eyes out. I was on fire, damn it; there was nothing that could soothe that.

  I shook my head. I’d never burned like this before, not from Dominic’s blood.

  I must have said as much, because Dominic answered, although I didn’t recall anything intelligible passing through my lips, only blood-garbled screams.

  “You have more of my blood within you than you’ve ever had before. Last time, I was only healing you. Now, you’ve lost enough of your blood that I’m transforming you. But you must embrace the transformation, Cassidy.”

  “It’s killing me,” I gritted between clenched teeth.

  Dominic’s grip on my hand tightened painfully. “It’s saving you. My blood is life. Feel the gift of its strength coursing through you, healing you, empowering you. Feel beyond the burn to the power that stokes its flames, the power that lives inside you now.”

  I tried to listen to Dominic, I really did, but the memory of Walker’s voice inside my head was louder.

  They say night bloods feel intense, focused burning over their entire body, Walker had explained, back when we’d first met, when he’d been more than willing to share his knowledge and weapons with me against the vampires, before the possibility of something more than friendship wasn’t a canyon between us. And they feel that sensation during the entire three-day transformation.

  I would be on fire for three whole days.

  My fear turned to resistance, and the burning inside me raged.

  “Cassidy, no! Don’t you dare do this to me, not after everything we’ve survived, not after the lengths we’ve traveled to come this far and this close.”

  His grip on my hand was painful now, crushing the small, fragile bones in my fingers. He was desperate; I could hear it in the tone of his voice and in his last-ditch effort to force my will to his command.

  “Cassidy DiRocco, you will accept the blood I’ve given you as your own,” Dominic intoned, but the Leveling had depleted all his strength and abilities and given them to the very woman who had betrayed him. I didn’t feel the answering spark, like a tuning fork inside my mind at his command. I didn’t feel anything except the unrelenting, consuming sensation of my body being incinerated.

  “Not. Working,” I panted between screams.

  “Not trying!” Dominic accused.

  He talked about the infusion of strength and healing and new life from his blood, but Walker’s scientific explanation for the transformation resonated with me more. The regenerative properties in vampire blood had healed my throat and wouldn’t necessarily transform me, except for the fact that I had suffered such catastrophic blood loss. With more vampire blood than human blood in my body, the rapidly regenerating vampire cells would spread through my circulatory system, into my organs and muscles to regenerate those cells, and eventually, into my brain until vampire blood regenerated every cell in my body and became my blood.

  I didn’t want to change. I liked exactly who I was—bum hip, fragile body, dulled senses and all—and I wanted to stay that way. I didn’t want to be more entrenched in Dominic’s world, in a world of darkness and shadows, blood and hierarchy and power. I didn’t want more from life than my career, Nathan—and hell, even Dominic—but he could leave all his damn baggage at the door before he entered.

  More than anything else I wanted, however, I wanted to live, and no matter how unfathomable the cost, that meant letting go of all the rest.

  In the end, it wasn’t Dominic’s words of encouragement, his hand holding mine, nor the promise of enhanced strength, abilities, and senses that saved me. The choice was never whether or not I wanted to remain a night blood with my human ailments and Dominic’s eternal frustration or allow all my supposed potential to come to fruition and transform into a vampire. No matter the pros and cons of such a decision—of which there were many, and they were as catastrophic as the injuries that had brought me here—the choice was a matter of life or death, and that was no choice at all.

  I’m going to live, I thought, and unlike anything else that Dominic could say, the knowledge that I would live anchored me in purpose and determination. I couldn’t necessarily find comfort in the knowledge that I’d survived worse, because the hell of being burned from the inside out was the worst sensation I’d ever experienced, but I’d be damned if I wouldn’t survive it.

  Life as I’d always known it extinguished, leaving me in darkness.

  “The face she sees in the mirror might be new to her, but I saw the potential in her human form long before her physical transformation. To me, nothing about her has changed besides the overdue assurance that I can hold her in my embrace with my full strength, and she will not shatter.”

  —Dominic Lysander

  Chapter 1

  Seven days later

  A bird was squawking, and after several minutes of attempting to ignore its repetitive, shrill bleating, I came to grips with the fact that it didn’t seem inclined to stop on its own. I snapped open my eyes, prepared to reach out the window and stop it myself, with my bare hands if necessary—I’d never heard such an obnoxious bird in my life, not in the city, not on the West Coast, not even on my one excursion to visit Walker upstate—and froze. There was no window. And if the vents Bex used to filter fresh air into her underground coven were any indication, there was no bird. Although the vents here resembled the ones in Bex’s coven, I didn’t recognize the room as the inviting, well-decorated step back in time that Bex had created either: no extra furniture for lounging, no scented candles, no gerbera daisies, and no kerosene lamps pulsing in a hypnotic, romantic beat.

  This room contained only sparse necessities: vents for underground-air filtration, a bare bulb for light, a door for privacy, and, of course, a bed. I was in a strange room in a stranger’s bed, its dimensions and décor familiar only by its unfamiliarity, and suddenly, the last moments of my memory smashed into my brain like a semi.

  Jillian tearing out my throat. Dominic healing me. The blood and burning. The transformation.

  Someone was speaking in the room outside this bedroom’s door, and even through the scarred door and the cement wall, I could hear every word being said and recognize the voice speaking: Ronnie Carmichael.

  “Lysander said he would. There’s no reason to think he won’t, so I don’t think—”

  And following Ronnie’s voice was the squawking of that damn bird.

  “Exactly.
You don’t think,” Jeremy snapped.

  “Lysander said that he would try,” Keagan said patiently, his voice nearly drowned out by the bleat of that insufferable bird. “His priority is Cassidy and our safety. He won’t take unnecessary risks, like remaining aboveground, away from Cassidy longer than absolutely necessary.”

  “Yes, he said he would try,” Ronnie insisted, but her voice was faint now. “Lysander doesn’t say anything lightly.”

  The bird squawked even louder, in time with Jeremy’s audible groan, triggering a memory of Ronnie’s little-girl voice and something she had confided in me: I never even knew he thought of my voice as grating. I never knew someone’s annoyance had a sound, let alone that it sounded like a squawking bird.

  I was right about the bird not being underground, but unlike anything I’d ever heard, the sound wasn’t a bird at all. The squawking was the sound of Keagan’s annoyance at the grate of Ronnie’s whining voice. Unlike Jeremy, Keagan was too well-mannered to audibly express his frustration with Ronnie, but among other vampires, he could no longer hide his true feelings. His unspoken annoyance had a sound—as loud, obnoxious, and obvious as Jeremy’s audible hostility—and Ronnie could no doubt hear it, too, over the calm, reasonable tone of his words.

  I could hear it.

  I could hear the sound of Keagan’s annoyance.

  The weight of the sheets covering my body was suddenly suffocating. I raised my hand to tear them from my body, but someone else’s hand whipped into the air. I gasped at the skeleton-skinny joints of each finger, the knobby protrusion of its wrist and the elongated talons sprouting from each fingertip instead of nails. I ducked under the hand, trying to avoid its attack and swallow the scream that tore up my throat, but the hand moved with me, moving with my intentions, attached to my body. I froze again, for the second time in as many seconds, and raised the hand in front of my face. It looked lethal. With one wrong move, it could eviscerate me. As I ticked each finger, the long talons swept the air as I counted—one, two, three, four, five—and each moved on my command. Like the inevitability of a rising sun, I realized that the hand was mine. Fear of that hand turned to horror and then to a kind of giddy resignation. Hysteria, more likely.