by S. K. Ryder
Francesca paced, her heels clicking on the linoleum floor. “What is taking so long?”
The second unit of saline had disappeared into Dominic’s arm, leaving icy trails in his veins, when another doctor appeared. “Why are you still here?”
“Where else would he be?” Francesca said tersely. “Are you going to examine my son or not?”
Appearing a bit startled, the doctor approached Dominic. While he performed a cursory examination, he asked questions.
How was Dominic feeling?
Better, almost normal.
Pain anywhere?
No.
“Très bon, Monsieur. Go home, keep up the fluid intake, and get some rest.”
Dominic’s nose twitched as the doctor turned away. Was that smoke he smelled clinging to the man’s smock? Before he could puzzle out why that would make his flesh crawl, Francesca exploded.
“Go home? My son fainted. My son has never fainted. Why is he anemic? Why aren’t you trying to find out what’s wrong with him?”
“Anemic? No, no. You’re misinformed. He was dehydrated, madame. Nothing more. Now please, all of you, go home.” He wished them a good night and left.
The women exchanged perplexed glances before looking at Dominic. He raised his brows in mute question.
“Well. I can’t say much for his bedside manner, but I suppose you’ve regained some of your color,” Genevie said.
He thought he had regained his strength as well, but after a nurse detached him from the IV bag and he got to his feet, he wasn’t all that sure. It wasn’t dizziness exactly, but something was still off-balance. Something he couldn’t put into words. Something that medical science clearly didn’t think was cause for concern. For the benefit of his mother and sisters, he pasted on a grin and let them shepherd him to the car.
By the time he got home, he was exhausted and welcomed his bed like a long-lost friend. As he sank into his pillow, closed his eyes, and allowed sleep to claim him, his thoughts were back on the sailboat with the sun hot on his face and the wind streaming through his hair.
It seemed only seconds had passed before he was awake again, even though the clock read two hours later. Four-thirty in the morning. The house was dark and silent around him, heavy with sleeping souls and troubled expectation. A scattered dream of being hunted and cornered still had its hooks into him.
He could still hear echoes of someone calling his name.
Sweat trickled between his ribs and down his face, making his hair stick to his neck. His limbs trembled with waves of heat and cold. Getting his legs under him was a clumsy challenge. Only after he passed the bathroom without going in did he question why he was up at all.
Come.
He stopped, shocked. That voice. It was strange and familiar all at once. Both a part of him and far removed. Like a dream overlapping reality.
It was also utterly irresistible.
Dominic went to the doors leading to the deck. Slid them open. A quarter moon hung low in the east. In its silvery shadows, he made out two figures at the base of a rocky hill. One was still as a stone pillar while the other was a mass of cloth and long hair undulating in the wind. Definitely not cacti.
It is time, young one.
One of them had spoken, Dominic was sure of it. It sounded like the wind whispering in the stars.
A dream, he thought. This was another dream of dark ghosts.
Are you ready to wake up?
“Yes,” he said on an unsteady exhale. He was ready to wake up and chase the shadows out of his life, back into the nightmare from which they came.
The fluttering shape extended a hand. Its face gleamed in the moonlight.
Then come to me.
Not human.
The peculiar idea fled across his brain, but disappeared as quickly as it surfaced. It didn’t matter. This was a dream.
And Dominic was about to wake up.
With his eyes fixed on the figure, he stepped off the deck. Sharp stones and thorny brambles cut into his bare feet. He ignored the pain. It didn’t matter. Just a dream.
As he drew near, the biting smell of smoke intensified until it had the consistency of ash in the air. Cedar wood. An entire forest in flames. His eyes stung. He ignored that, too.
The figures were a man and a woman, the latter in dark, tight-fitting clothing, the former swathed in an equally dark cloak that snapped in the wind along with his black hair, which reached far past his broad shoulders. Though the woman was the taller of the two, her companion’s presence easily eclipsed hers. The authority Dominic had sensed in the silent voice was nothing compared to the primal power that now rippled off this quiet, incongruous figure. His pale face was made of coarse but not unattractive middle-aged features, including a forceful mouth, strong nose, and a prominent brow over large, deep-set eyes.
Dominic took the offered hand. No thought of resistance crossed his mind as he was drawn closer into an embrace that made his ribs creak. This was simply how it was between them—how it had been since the night of the attack when he first caught the scent of smoke. The sting and pressure against Dominic’s neck was familiar, too, as was the mighty pull in his veins that reached all the way into his toes and every place between.
The first time he felt this was while he still sat in the dirt, comforting his sister—when he first smelled this smoke, sensed this otherness. He had forgotten that until now. Just like he had forgotten all the other nights since, when this man had found him in his house, in his bed, and touched him, held him, drank him.
Fed from him.
The realization was as erotically thrilling as it was terrifying.
“Dieu, what are you?” He barely had the strength to mouth these words.
The alien voice came from everywhere and nowhere.
Eternal.
Inevitable. Something inevitable was coming for him. Time ground to a halt. Destiny shifted in the earth.
When the stranger drew back, the darkest eyes Dominic had ever beheld peered down at him. There was no hint of white in them. They were inkblots in the luminous face, portals to an abyss without end. Moaning, he tried to struggle, but his body hung boneless in the powerful arms.
The woman appeared, her oriental features blank as she pressed something to Dominic’s mouth. Fluid trickled over his parched tongue and dripped into his throat.
On reflex, he swallowed, tasted metal. He gagged and sputtered, but more of it came. When he turned his face away, she dug her fingers into his jaw, forcing his mouth open around her wrist.
Blood.
She was feeding him her blood.
The revulsion lasted only until his stomach caught fire. Dominic tried to scream, but the sound he made was more of a tormented croak. An inferno spread through his gut. From there, it raced along every nerve and blood vessel in his body. He writhed, spine arching, uncoordinated limbs flailing as he was placed on the ground among the rocks and brambles.
It will be over soon, the voice promised.
Then what? Would he be dead? Dominic prayed this was so.
Moments later, his prayer was answered when the crawling fire spiraled up his neck and exploded in his skull.
3
Hunger
Hunger.
The world was made of it. Emptiness gnawing at his innards, sucking at his bones.
Shadows came and went. Sounds, voices, cries, silence. All insignificant compared to this hammering, shrieking, relentless…need.
Consuming a world would not have been enough.
There was no room in his mind for anything else, not even his name. The hunger more than filled him—it erased him.
The first flash of self-awareness that returned to him was the worry his belly might burst. He drew back his head, mouth gaping, and stared into a sky in which the stars were all wrong. There were too many of them. Clouds of stars, like a glittering psychedelic fog veiling the velvet blackness.
There was also something warm and effervescent coating his tongue. It t
asted like life itself. No, it was life itself. Someone else’s life. He gazed at the man in his arms who stared at nothing, apparently oblivious to the blood oozing down his neck. The air was thick with the coppery smell, and the impulse to put his mouth to the glistening rivulets and lap them up seized Dominic hard.
But not as hard as the horror that went with it.
With a gasp, Dominic released his burden. He tried to jerk away only to realize arms were wrapped around him, holding him as close to another body as he had just held this man. This…this…
“Prey.”
Dominic recognized the voice, though it was only a whisper. He recognized, too, the overpowering odor of sweet smoke.
A mouth moved at his ear. “Lick the wounds you made. They will seal, and he will live.”
Someone else grabbed the man—the prey—and shoved his unresisting body toward Dominic, who began to tremble with an astonishing clash of revulsion and lust. A thin shroud of luminous blue clung to the prey. Under his skin, ribbons of light shimmered and pulsed like headlights flowing through highway interchanges. Blood vessels. He could actually see the blood moving through the veins. A staggering need seized him, an urge to drink that blood—that life—glorious gulp after glorious gulp.
As he had been.
As he had to.
A hand fisted in his hair. “Just taste,” the voice murmured. Low, male, and resonant with power.
Dominic could move only enough to extend his tongue and let it slide over the wound. The bright taste made him weep with wanting, but after he had lapped up every last bit, there was no more. The gash closed, vanishing beneath his tongue as though it had never been.
The prey was removed from his reach. The woman, who straightened the man’s rumpled clothes, was the same one who had forced her blood into Dominic’s mouth. She glowed now as the prey had, except far brighter and brilliant white.
“Good,” the voice purred into his ear. The arms released him.
Dominic stared after the blue shimmer staggering away, tensing with the need to leap after it and take more blood. Take all of it.
He screwed his eyes shut. This was insane!
“Very, very good.” The voice again, sounding exceedingly pleased.
Dominic turned, not surprised to see the man in the cloak. He, too, radiated a strange white light.
Not human.
With suddenly clarity, Dominic remembered the last time this thought flashed across his mind. He had dismissed it then as irrelevant. Not now.
He took a step back, touching his mouth. His fingers trembled and came away tipped with blood. They also glowed white.
Not human.
“What have you done?” he croaked. “What have you done to me?”
The creature’s twisting smile did not penetrate the depths of the bottomless eyes. A swirl of wind ruffled his straight hair that gleamed like a raven’s wing in the moonlight. “I have made you perfect, Nico.” Even more softly, he added, “And I have made you mine.” He came closer.
Dominic went numb with burgeoning horror. Cool, silky fingertips touched his face. “Such beauty. Such spirit. They should live forever.”
“What…what have you done?” Dominic asked again.
“Don’t you know? In this enlightened age where all tales are known to all people at all times?”
Vampire, Dominic thought, incapable of uttering the impossible word.
“Vampire,” the creature whispered. “Drinker of life. Beautiful. Powerful. Immortal. In the beginning, a little clumsy perhaps,” he added, all expression draining from his face. “But you are learning quickly.”
“No.” Dominic shook his head. “No!” Spinning around, he took several steps away only to discover that the house he had just stumbled out of was nowhere in sight. Instead, there was an old ruin of a mansion he recognized as the long-abandoned Rockefeller estate, a place as remote and desolate as one could get on an island as small as St. Barthélemy.
How had he gotten here? When? Just how much time was he missing? The hunger still prowled his gut, threatening to pull him under again.
The taillights of the prey’s car vanished around a bend.
No, not prey.
Monsieur Gagnon. Dominic recognized him from his shop in Corossol. He was driving away, abandoning Dominic to these strangers, this nightmare.
Seized by a sudden panic, he broke into a mad run down the winding, crumbling road. The dense vegetation blurred around him. The wind roared in his ears. He reached the bend within seconds, but the man-creature was already there, catching him easily in a bone-crushing hold that pinned Dominic’s arms to his sides. The woman also appeared in a smear of movement.
Dominic gasped, disoriented, his senses filling with the smoky sweet stench that oozed from this being. Nothing human moved this fast.
He had moved this fast.
“Let go of me,” he said, startled at the animalistic growl in his own voice. The moment the arms released him, he tried to run. He didn’t even get two steps in before he was caught again. This time, he growled without words, the otherworldly sound vibrating in his throat.
“Shh, young one,” the man whispered as he stroked the back of Dominic’s head and neck. “You are still learning your own strength. There is no need to hurry to make sense of it all.”
“I don’t want to make sense of this. None of this is real. You are not real!” Dominic shoved with all his might, but failed to break free.
The woman met his eyes over the creature’s shoulder. A hint of emotion flickered across her face. Sadness. Profound, hopeless, soul-destroying sadness. She turned away to gaze at the sea, but her despair seeped into Dominic. It leached away his fury—along with his doubt.
“Who are you?” He remembered the searing flavor of her blood. “Why have you done this to me?”
She didn’t respond, but the man loosened his grip to hold him by the shoulders as a parent would a wayward child. “I am Kambyses. And you now belong to me.”
A strange comfort came with the words. The sense that in this impossible situation, there was no place Dominic would rather be. No one who could shelter him better. No way he could be safer.
Dominic didn’t run again, or at least not away from them. They moved incredibly fast, but he had no trouble keeping up. His body didn’t protest. In fact, the sensation of easy strength—of flying across the rocky ground between the bristly shrubs and sharp cacti as effortlessly as a breeze—would have been intoxicating if it weren’t so alien. Moving this fast was as simple as thinking. He didn’t even need to catch his breath.
Gustavia harbor lay quiet beneath the strange night sky, except for Bagatelle, which was full of merriment that spilled out onto the quay. The bright lights pierced Dominic’s eyes like hot needles, and the smell of food, alcohol, and perfume wafting in the air all but clubbed him over the head. He stood transfixed by the cacophony of music, clattering utensils, and a hundred conversations. Kambyses took him by the elbow and ushered him toward one of the dinghies tied up in a neat row.
“You will learn to tune it out,” he said, the distinctive cedar smoke smell overwhelming Dominic again, adding to his disorientation.
They climbed into the bobbing boat. As they crowded onto a bench seat together, the woman, who had yet to utter so much as a word, untied the line and started the outboard engine. When the wind brushed sensuous fingers against his face, Dominic fell into another daze. His nose flared with the rich marine stew of the sea. He closed his eyes to savor it, trying to shut out all the other sensations.
He also tried to think past the sludge in his brain. The last thing he clearly remembered was walking out of his house on wobbling legs while burning with fever in the middle of the night. After that, his recollections became…chaotic.
His eyes snapped open, and he peered down his front. He still wore the same clothes, but the shorts and T-shirt were now torn in places and sported dark stains. His bare legs and bony feet glowed as bright white as his arms. “How long hav
e I been…like this?”
“Eleven nights.” After a brief glance, Kambyses added, “Usually, it takes several more.”
“For what?”
But Kambyses was done talking, the glint of curiosity fading from his black eyes. Wrapped in his cloak, he stared straight ahead, as though Dominic hadn’t spoken at all. The woman, too, said nothing.
For the first time, Dominic realized where they were going. He had been here before—eleven days ago apparently—sailing past this vessel. In sunlight, Apokryphos was an idiosyncrasy. In moonlight, the yacht came alive with an aura as ominous as its obsidian hull.
A crewman waited for them on the aft platform. It was the same guy Dominic had greeted that glorious day. The same man who had returned nothing but a blank stare. There was still no expression on his face, or voice in his mouth. But this time, there were no sunglasses to obscure his eyes. Seeing them gave Dominic a shock. They were as empty as a zombie’s.
A sense of déjà vu swept over him. He had stepped onto this yacht before. Many times before, in fact, and he’d wanted to tear open the zombie’s throat every time. He still did. Only now he was as horrified by the idea as he was enthralled by it.
Kambyses observed his reaction. The woman stood behind Dominic like a deepening pool of silence. They were both ready to bodily wrestle him into submission to prevent him from committing murder—the way they had done for eleven nights now.
Dominic’s horror intensified. They had not always succeeded.
Fragments of lurid memories flashed through his mind, violent and bloody. Kambyses and his silent sidekick were strong and far faster than Dominic, but he understood how to use their momentum against them in countless well-practiced moves. He had broken free several times. A split second was all it took for his new strength and ravenous hunger to end a life.
Including the very first one.
Dominic trembled with the power of his welling memories. “No.”
That night, after his body stopped burning, a figure shrouded in a mint-green bubble of light exited the house and made its way toward them. Dominic could hear its sloshing heart and see the web of veins under the skin. He could even smell the blood. What he did not hear was the worried voice calling to him. What he did not see was that the figure was a portly man with a beloved face.
