hand toward Jackson and Garrett, inviting them to approach. They did, unhurried, their faces stoic masks, though their eyes still contained clarity and reason, watchful for any opening. Dominique felt a pang of unexpected pity for them. Their fates as dispensable humans present at a siring was a foregone conclusion. Cassidy’s newborn beast would tear them apart. Their deaths would be her eternal burden to bear.
“Her time draws near, Nico. I would see her made this night. With or without you,” Kambyses added with a pointed look at Serge.
Serge stilled against the wall.
It took Dominique a moment longer to comprehend the warning and its implications. Serge still lived because, terrorized as the old pirate was, there was no question he would follow Kambyses’s every command—including giving Cassidy his blood if Dominique continued to refuse. Once linked to Serge’s unhinged reality, her mind would be as closed to Dominique as it had ever been, and her personality undoubtedly changed.
Perhaps Serge would be allowed to live for his cooperation. Perhaps not. Maybe Dominique would want to kill him to free Cassidy from his madness. Maybe she would want to free herself. As Serge would not be her serum sire, his fate would not dictate hers.
Only one thing was certain—Dominique would lose someone dear to him. And just how dear his mentor and only blood-drinker friend had become occurred to him only now.
Kambyses turned to the motionless, wrapped body draped in Jackson’s arms. “She is a creature of rare spirit. Worthy of our kind.” He stroked the tip of one finger over her brow. She stirred a little, but didn’t open her eyes. Kambyses tilted his head and grew pensive. “Much like the one you took from me tonight.”
Suddenly Jackson burst out, “Get your filthy hands off her!”
In the same instant, Garrett acted with near-superhuman speed. In a single motion, he pulled the pistol from the back of Jackson’s waistband, unlocked it, swung it up, and fired the instant the muzzle cleared his nephew’s shoulder.
The bullet popped Kambyses in the throat, exited the back of his neck, and zipped past Dominique’s shoulder. He felt it rip at his jacket, felt the ageless blood spray his face, smelled the smoky stench of it explode in the air.
Kambyses flickered away and reappeared behind his assailant. The blast still echoed in the foyer when the weapon itself flew off in one direction while Garrett jerked into another. He catapulted up and back, arcing across the room like a misshapen cannonball and, with the wet crack of bone, smashed into the wall of the second floor landing. He bounced off and tumbled to the floor right in front of Monica as she limped out of the hall.
Jackson and his burden bolted for the door.
Or tried to.
Three steps into his flight, he hit that invisible wall again. His shoulders hunched, and panic etched his face as he turned back. The indignant anger he cultivated with such care drained out of him faster than wine from a broken bottle.
Kambyses stood before Dominique, bristling with displeasure. Dark blood smeared the ashen neck, but the wound itself had finished knitting back together. Garrett had fired too early. Half a second later and the bullet would have struck Kambyses’s brain and disabled him long enough to gain a true advantage. As it was, all the hunter accomplished was to stoke the powerful blood-drinker’s twisted temper.
Useless. Everything they did to save Cassidy had been useless. Wasted efforts that risked her life over and over again. Bijou had advised him to stop fighting and find peace in accepting the inevitable. He glanced at her body. Had she taken her own advice, she might still live.
And nothing else would have changed.
Nothing at all.
Dominique’s fate settled on him with the weight of a world. Slowly, he sank to his knees.
Cassidy would be made tonight as Kambyses commanded. The only choice that remained to Dominique was whether this would happen with his blood or Serge’s. From the corner of his eye, he caught sight of his mad friend, who stared at him as though watching a ghost.
It was no choice at all.
It never had been.
Dominique stared at his sire’s spotless leather loafers and waited. The shoes moved aside, momentarily replaced by Jackson’s combat boots. Then Cassidy floated into view, unconscious and swathed in a blanket. Jackson took care to settle her head, which looked as fragile as an egg in his strong, tanned hands. Hands that belonged to a man who loved her still. A dead man walking. A man who had nothing to lose—and knew it.
He made only a passing note of the little device he saw hidden in Jackson’s grip, but his gut tightened with both anticipation and apprehension. He met Jackson’s blank look. Whatever the human was thinking of doing, he didn’t think about it much at all. He felt it, moved by instinct, kept the idea away from the menace controlling his mind. But that instinct would also tell him he couldn’t survive such a gambit. Not without help.
Dominique inclined his head in unspoken agreement. “Merci.”
After that, everything happened both very fast and in slow-motion. His heart drummed in his veins, providing the rhythm, beat by frantic beat, for the macabre dance that followed.
Jackson got up…stepped back…raised his hand.
Dominique reached over his shoulders…found the handles of his swords.
Jackson pointed the full-spectrum pocket light…activated it.
Kambyses roared.
Dominique hooked his fingers under the guard of the katana and, with a flick of his wrist, shot the blade straight up toward the ceiling.
His other hand curled around the wakizashi’s hilt and freed it from its sheath. He could almost feel the embedded dragon rise to meet him.
Kambyses rushed blindly toward the light, toward Jackson, eagle talon hands outstretched.
Dominique launched forward over Cassidy’s prone body, twisted in mid-air beneath Kambyses, and swung the razor-sharp blade up and around, hard.
The impact of honed steel against primeval bone vibrated through his hand and elbow and into his shoulder.
Shimmering sheets of blood fanned into space.
An explosive kick to Kambyses’s midsection sent him flying away from Jackson.
As the thump of Kambyses’s impact reverberated in the walls, Dominique reached for the whistling sound of the katana returning. He caught the hilt without looking at it, instead watching Kambyses drop to the floor, nearly on top of Serge, who darted away with a yelp.
When the ancient blood-drinker hit the floor, he tried to get up, but…his legs were gone, reduced to stumps squelching blood.
Jackson sucked in a ragged breath and turned off his tiny light.
Silence.
Then Monica realized what had happened and screamed.
Kambyses put his hands to the tile, raised his body up on his arms, and sped toward Dominique. Or rather, toward his severed legs. Dominique leapt to kick the limbs away from Cassidy. With a bestial growl, Kambyses scurried after them. But walking on his hands was far from natural for him. While he still moved superhumanly fast, Dominique had no trouble keeping track of him.
The katana hummed as it slid through Kambyses’s left shoulder and sent him crashing to the floor. Dominique kicked the arm away. Without missing a beat, Kambyses rolled across the floor in a flurry of motion and tangled hair. This time Dominique waited until he reached for one of his legs before he struck, taking the other arm as well.
With the toe of his boot, he rolled the dismembered body onto its back. Then he slammed his foot on the torso and set the long sword’s razor edge against Kambyses’s throat. Through the shroud of hair covering his sire’s face, he saw the glint of the beast’s tar-black eyes and the ferocious fangs that had ended countless lives.
One flick of his wrist. That was all it would take to destroy five-thousand years of misery. That was all it would take to destroy potentially hundreds of thousands of blood-drinkers—and himself.
A shudder rippled his flesh. Dominique removed the blade and swallowed hard. The spilled blood’s cedar smoke smell choked the air, his lungs, his mind. All around him, an invisible forest stood engulfed in flame.
The beast craved to live, and just like it wouldn’t let Dominique remain exposed in the light of day, it would not allow him to end the source of them all.
“Let go of me, you waste of space!” shrieked an outraged female.
Dominique became aware of the room and its inhabitants again. Garrett Striker had captured one of Monica Sol’s wrists behind her back and kept her pinned against himself with an arm locked across her shoulders. In her free hand, she clutched one of Kambyses’s severed arms. Burgundy splatters covered the tiles at her feet. Fat streaks of burgundy also crisscrossed the room—and Cassidy.
He froze, terrified that the potent blood could have hit her just right—as his own hit Jackson earlier—to cause her to ingest it and finish her. She wouldn’t be strong enough to survive the fire-blood, but she didn’t writhe in agony as she surely would have if that were the case. She moved only a little with the encouragement of Jackson, who bent over her.
“I’ve got this,” Garrett announced and then gasped as Monica elbowed his no doubt injured ribs. He cringed and doubled over, releasing her. Off she went, hobbling away to retrieve the dropped arm and return it to Kambyses. She paid no attention to Dominique until he snapped up the katana in front of her, and she stopped just short of running herself through.
Her eyes shimmered with impotent rage. “You unspeakable monster. How could you do this?”
This, Dominique could not argue. It was monstrous. But it was hardly the most monstrous thing he had done on account of this ancient beast that had stolen his life, caused him to murder his family and lover, hunted him, and manipulated him at every turn.
“Step away,” he commanded in a soft growl. If any of the limbs strewn about found their way back to their rightful place, they would reattach in moments, gaining Kambyses an advantage Dominique could ill afford.
Monica took a step back, her sense of self-preservation at last overriding the hold Kambyses had on her, but she wasn’t done.
Dominique saw the move coming a second before she tossed the arm in Kambyses’s direction. He sent it flying with the side of his sword. Beneath his foot, Kambyses arched his back and trembled, fighting to free himself and move a body which could do neither.
“Release me!” he roared. “Restore me! Now!”
The compulsion surged in the air. Dominique took his boot off Kambyses before he knew what he was doing. Monica scurried for one arm, Garrett stumbled toward the other, coughing and holding his side. Jackson climbed to his feet and turned toward the legs.
“Restore him and you all die,” Dominique shouted, letting his rising panic fly like an arrow in a compulsion of his own. He had no desire to kill these mortals—except perhaps Garrett—but if that was what it would take to prevent Kambyses from being made whole again, that was what he would do. Jackson’s step faltered as his head swiveled toward Dominique. Then he ran again, but with a different purpose. He tackled Monica and pinned both her wrists behind her back. She shrieked tear-soaked venom at the top of her lungs.
Garrett shook his head as though trying to shake loose from a sticky spider web.
“Some fucking help here?” Jackson called as Monica, fueled by her master’s blood, thrashed like an enraged leopard, pulling them both to the floor. One of her hands got free and went straight for Jackson’s eyes. With a yelp, he released her.
Garrett ripped open the small utility pack on his nephew’s back and pulled out the roll of duct tape.
“No,” Kambyses said, and a fresh wave of vertigo rippled through the room. Before he could utter another word, Dominique ground his boot heel into his sire’s voice box, silencing him. That wouldn’t stop Kambyses from casting psychic webs of compulsion, but at least he couldn’t reinforce them with his resonant voice.
Monica slipped in a smear of blood, and stumbled back to her feet when the vampire hunters caught up with her, each grabbing one arm and duct-taping them together behind her back. They did the same for her ankles. Her screams were worthy of gruesome torture, but they fell silent when Garrett slapped one last strip of tape across her mouth.
“Victorious at last,” Dominique said. “I was wondering what it might take for you two to accomplish anything other than disaster.”
They turned to face him, and something about what they saw gave them pause. He couldn’t blame them. A blood-drinker armed with bloodied swords standing over a dismembered body would have made even Dominique reevaluate his odds of survival.
“That thing’s still alive, isn’t it,” Garrett said when he rediscovered his voice.
“And will remain so until Cassidy has recovered,” Dominique countered with more certainty than he felt.
“Cassidy,” Jackson said, jogging back to where she lay.
Garrett propped both hands on his hips. “In the meantime, you’ll be keeping watch, will you?”
“We can argue about it, if you like.” Dominique’s lips pulled back in a toothy grimace intended to stop a heart with fright. Garrett shook his head in disgust.
Jackson scooped Cassidy off the floor. “We don’t have time for a pissing contest. We need to get her help. Now.”
“Yeah, right. We all know how this is going to end, but here. You might need this.” Garrett lobbed the duct tape at Dominique, who speared it in mid-flight with the tip of the katana. Grabbing Monica by an arm, Garrett hauled her upright and slung her over his shoulder. “C’mon, Red. The humans are clearing out of this hellhole.” She made a series of strangled noises. “I don’t give a shit if you ever thank me for this. Really, I don’t.”
“I’ll let you know how it goes, Nick.” Renewed distrust hardened Jackson’s eyes before turning to the door.
“Jackson,” Dominique called, causing the man to stop and glance over one shoulder. “I made you a promise. I intend to keep it. You have until midnight to keep yours.”
The muscles in Jackson’s jaw twitched. He nodded once and left.
Dominique stood and listened to their retreating steps. He didn’t move until he heard doors slam and an engine start, rev, and race away. Only then did he allow himself to release some of the tension knotting his body. For now, there was nothing more he could do. He might still have to turn her before the night was through, but not now. Now he stood over his sire’s desecrated body, in a creeping lake of blood. There was a great deal of work to be done to clean up this house and remove all evidence of the supernatural.
Not just physical evidence would have to be erased. The security team would need their memories altered. He could hear them in the depths of the house, their frantic, uncertain whispers as they attempted to escape notice. After witnessing Bijou’s death, they feared for their lives, but their compulsion not to leave the property was stronger.
Serge had emerged from hiding, as had his nerve. The barefoot pirate vampire bent over the scattered limbs, poking at them, as if assuring himself that they truly wouldn’t move on their own. “Clever, blood-child. Very clever.”
Dominique let the duct tape slide off the katana and land on Kambyses’s chest. Putting the blades aside, he peeled off several strips and plastered them across Kambyses’s mouth before moving his foot off the neck. There was no reaction. No struggle. Only that hellish stare skewering him.
Dominique straightened. “No, I cannot end you,” he told the ancient beast, the source of them all. “But the hunters can. And if Cassidy survives the day, tomorrow night you belong to them.”
Serge approached the edge of the blood pool and peered down at the grisly scene. His head bobbled to the side. His eyes lost their focus. “Ah, blood-child,” he said, tone solemn as a preacher’s, “that is one promise you will not keep.”