midnight was both a hope and a fear for Cassidy’s life. To distract himself, Dominique tackled the cleanup operation with vigor.
Most of the blood and chaos to be cleared was in the entry, so that is where he stayed, working around the cracks and bullet pockmarks with buckets of soap and a hose running from the yard through the front door. Serge, he tasked with disposing of Bijou’s body some place hidden where the sun would find it. After that, the pirate was put to work dealing with the humans—the security staff and Apokryphos’s crew—clearing their minds, replacing their memories.
Kambyses, they rolled up in a rug.
That rug, shoved against a far wall, stuck in his awareness like a barbed thorn. Dominique hadn’t replied to Serge’s presumably informed opinion of what he would or wouldn’t do with the contents, but dread about the possibilities loomed ever larger. There was no hope of Kambyses regaining his compulsive voice or becoming whole again on his own. His limbs sat in a trash bag on the other side of the room, beside the headless Aphrodite statue. Come dawn, their re-attaching to his body would be impossible.
Regardless, as long as he lived, Kambyses would have his mind—and the power to influence perceptions with his thoughts alone. This was a prospect Dominique remained on guard for as he rinsed and polished the glassy tiles and scrubbed at the walls, but there was no sense of strangeness, no evidence of Kambyses wielding his silent influence. Which left Dominique stewing over how he might break his promise to Jackson. The only way that would happen was if Cassidy became a blood-drinker before dawn.
He glared at the rug. If that happened, would he make that beast whole again? Or would he just leave Kambyses like this, stashed in a crypt somewhere, providing him with just enough blood to keep him going for—what?—decades? Centuries? Forever? As an eternal vegetable? What would that mean for the blood-drinkers of the world? Would they be free? Or just zombies?
Dominique cursed under his breath and pulled his phone from his pocket. Eleven-oh-four. Close enough. Done waiting, he called up Jackson’s number.
The hunter answered in two rings. “Nick.” No joy in that greeting. Only exhaustion.
Fear crawled up Dominique’s chest. He strangled it. “How is she?”
“Stable.”
“But?”
“But…I don’t know for how long.”
“Explain.”
Jackson hesitated. Dominique imagined him slumping forward in a waiting room chair somewhere, massaging the back of his no-doubt tight neck, choosing his quiet words with care. “She’s burning through the blood almost as fast as they can get it into her, and—”
“They’re running out of blood,” Dominique finished. He could feel his own blood drain from his face. “It is a rare type.”
“Yes,” Jackson confirmed with a sigh. “They can only give her O-negative, and she’s currently getting the last pint they have.”
Blood being a critical part of their relationship, Cassidy had shared her blood type with Dominique long ago—as well as how she came to have it. “Her father.”
“What?”
“Her father has the same blood type. Get him there.”
“Yeah, I know. We tried. Sam called him, but he’s not answering his phone.”
Dominique opened his mouth to berate Jackson when he recalled that Gil Chandler no longer conveniently resided in Dominique’s lair.
“We have no idea where he is,” Jackson elaborated into the silence.
Dominique didn’t so much lean on the stair railing as he deflated over it.
A chlorinated haze wafted from the hall below. The rest of the house still waited for him to scour it for supernatural evidence.
The rolled rug lay motionless. Waiting.
“Putain,” he murmured, then said it louder, and finally, straightening, screamed it. His voice echoed off the curved black walls. Several light bulbs shattered in their sconces with plaintiff pops and tinkles, thickening the shadows.
Jackson said nothing.
Serge sped in from the back of the house, his human projects abandoned. His eyes bulged in his round face, mouth hanging open.
Regaining a measure of control, Dominique said, “Always when she needs him most, that man abandons her. And this time it will cost Cassidy her life.”
“We don’t know that yet,” Jackson said. “There’s still a chance she’ll pull through.”
“That is not a chance I’m willing to take.” He pressed a hand to his forehead and thought hard, riffling through his near-perfect memory for any shred of information he had on Cassidy’s father, why he had come and where he might have gone.
The answer was not in his memories but in Cassidy’s, or rather the bits and pieces that had come his way the night Gil Chandler first arrived. He came to assist the wife of a friend with a business. The friend had died suddenly—Dominique’s head snapped up—because he, Dominique, had scared him to death in a sleazy motel room the night he had met Bijou. The night his life began its latest downward spiral.
The night that wasn’t done with him yet.
“Merde.”
Jackson was speaking, but Dominique paid no attention. “I will find him,” he promised, and disconnected the call.
Not quite an hour later, he rocketed his bike down the quiet, neatly manicured street of a gated community in Boca Raton, home of the widow Iris Horner. According to a quick search of online obituaries, it had been her husband, Horatio Horner, who, wearing nothing but a hat and boots, dropped dead at Dominique’s feet.
Discovering his widow’s residential address and personal contact information was simple. But she, too, didn’t answer her phone, which left Dominique to compel his way past the guard gate to her neighborhood and appear in person. If anyone would know where to find the man who had rushed to her side in a time of need, it should be the widow Horner. And maybe, just maybe, that otherwise useless man was still in the area.
The house, one of a long row of cookie-cutter mansions, lay in near-darkness. Only a soft glow from a back room was visible through the etched glass surrounding the front door. Dominique rang the bell three times in short order. A polite bing-bong reminiscent of church bells resonated inside.
Seconds ticked by with no other sound and no motion. Dominique punched the button again—continually—until angry shouting inside overpowered what sounded like a church steeple gone mad. Footsteps raced, accompanied by terse voices. He stopped ringing the bell when shadows moved toward the door and another light came on.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” bellowed a bearish male voice just before the door tore open and the muzzle of a shotgun emerged.
The weapon pointing at him didn’t surprise Dominique nearly so much as who was holding it. Unshaven and red-faced, Gil Chandler looked a furious mess in his boxers. He also reeked of sex. As did the blonde forty-something woman—presumably the widow Horner—standing behind him in an askew silk robe.
“You,” Gil said, deep blue eyes narrowing. Cassidy’s eyes. Cassidy who was fighting for her life and desperately needed her father’s blood while he was busy screwing his next conquest. Every time his family needed him, whether on purpose or by accident, Gil Chandler checked out. The man was a plague.
Impatient anger shot through Dominique’s veins, rousing the beast. His fangs thrust out, and his vision shifted, turning the humans into figures of aural light and webs of glimmering blood. “Your daughter—”
At the sight of Dominique’s transformation, the widow blanched and screamed.
Gil jerked in surprise and pulled the trigger.