Most nights and most places, those who met the Lord of Night never saw him. To those who knew him, the ability to slide past the awareness of anyone near him was Dominique Marchant’s most disquieting talent. To Dominique, this skill was still disorienting, even after three months. It was instinctive and often rendered him invisible by accident. All it took was a wish for solitude and it was done.
Only Cassidy was immune. Being bound to her human soul as he was, she was always aware of him, which was as it should be. She was his conscience and his humanity.
At the moment, she was also over fifty miles away. Yet, Dominique still heard her whisper encouragement in their telepathic bond, overshadowing his nerves, which thrummed like an antenna. He had learned to dial it down, but the low-grade hum had suffused him ever since he became the center of the dark web. All the blood drinkers in existence were tethered to him, legions of vampires just beyond his reach, like a swarm of ghosts. They didn’t become concrete individuals in his awareness until Cassidy helped him track them down, or he re-sired them in a ritual exchange of blood.
Presently, he sensed one of these ghosts slipping over the locked entry gate at the mouth of the pier on which Dominique stood. He saw it, too, as a single bright white blood-drinker aura standing there just out of cover. The visitor looked around, unsure.
“I am here,” Dominique said, letting the salty wind carry his words to the supernatural ears.
The blood-drinker’s head swiveled toward him.
Dominique shifted his attitude from solitude to welcome. On the pier’s far end, his guest froze, staring, no doubt questioning his own eyes. Or fearing for his immortal life. Dominique couldn’t blame him. If someone had barged into his thoughts and talked to him from out of nowhere, he, too, would have run blindly into the night. When the strange blood-drinker had realized that he couldn’t outrun the bizarre voice in his head, he started asking questions, and Dominique suggested they meet. That had been two nights ago.
Two nights for a solitary vampire to question his sanity, to wonder if he would find anything or anyone at all at the end of the Lake Worth pier at one in the morning. Now, not only had he found someone, that someone appeared to melt out of the ocean mist.
Dominique turned to gaze over the sea, which heaved with wind-driven swells. A bright patch in the thin cloud cover pointed at a hidden moon, the faint light shimmering on the rippling water.
Emboldened, the other vampire approached, his footfall on the wood planks soft and measured. He didn’t speak until his steps had fallen silent for well over a minute.
“Are you the one I heard?” A cultured male voice. British. Dubious.
Dominique peered over his shoulder. “Oui. I am that one.”
The blood-drinker stood about thirty feet away, out of immediate reach, hands out by his sides, ready to run and disappear in an instant. Dominique listened to him inhale, taking his measure, and waited for his visitor to draw a conclusion from the crisp scent that marked him as a youngling vampire—and the golden glow deep in his dark eyes that marked him as something else entirely.
It took a solid fifteen seconds. Then there was an apologetic little cough. “You…are not what I expected.”
“What did you expect?” Dominique turned to face him and did his best to appear as non-threatening as possible in his ominous black motorcycle leathers and heavy boots. Wind ruffled his hair, and he casually gathered most of the jet-black mass in his nape and confined it with the leather string that circled his wrist. The unruly wave that forever fell across his forehead, however, refused to be tamed.
The other vampire was dressed in jeans and a tucked-in navy blue button-down shirt. He was tall, but slender, almost delicate, his own ash-blond hair neatly groomed and only slightly disheveled in the breeze. Except for his pale skin, he could have passed as a gangly young man of any era, but what Dominique could discern about his scent told him that this one’s birth to darkness was well over a century in the past.
“Not a Frenchman, I don’t think.”
Dominique laughed with delight. Instead of terror or attack, this blood-drinker opted for diplomacy and humor. “I like you, Englishman. What is your name?”
“Aubrey Wainwright.” His shoulders lost some of their tension.
“I am Dominique Marchant.” With a small tilt of his head, he added, “Lord of Night.” The title still felt pretentious falling off his tongue to a stranger.
“Indeed.”
“I was sired by Kambyses. You may know the name?”
“I have heard legends surrounding that name, yes. They say he is the first vampire.”
“He was the root of what we are,” Dominique corrected. Even Kambyses hadn’t considered himself the first of their kind. “After five-thousand years, he was weary of the darkness.” And what darkness there had been in that ancient one. He had teetered on the brink of madness, and all his children along with him. “Three months ago, he chose me as his heir. When he died, the essence of what animates us was transferred to me.”
Aubrey stared at Dominique, at the ethereal luminosity in the hyper-dilated pupils, like the reflected light in the eyes of an animal. His own were wide, bottomless wells of darkness. “Interesting. So this gives you the power to intrude into the heads of the unsuspecting?”
“Under the right circumstances.” Dominique sobered and separated from the railing. Aubrey did not retreat. “Every blood-drinker’s life is bound to mine the way every youngling’s life is bound to his or her sire. On some level, I am aware of them all, but they are not aware of me.”
“Oh. I’m most definitely aware of you,” Aubrey said faintly.
“Do you believe what I told you?”
Small hesitation. Nod.
Dominique waited. Were he a breathing creature, he might have held his breath. It was one thing to have Serge, his closest blood-drinker friend, accept him as the Lord of Night and submit to him, quite another for a complete stranger to do the same. What if he didn’t? Would Dominique have it in him to do what was required?
“So. What is it you wish of me?” Aubrey said. His hands slowly tucked into the pockets of his jeans. “Why have you asked me here?”
“To answer your questions, of course. As for what I wish of you…I wish for you to submit to me.”
Amusement tucked at Aubrey’s mouth. “If you are the lord of us all, have I not done so already?”
“No, not yet. Your life may be linked to mine, but your vampire beast does not know me yet.” He let this truth sink in. “The hunger you have to be known and feared, to step out of the shadows when you feed—the thing that drives you to kill—that is Kambyses in your heart. That is his legacy, his madness.”
“I have resisted the urge to take lives for decades.”
Dominique leaned forward. “But it never leaves you, does it?”
“No,” Aubrey whispered. “Has it left you?”
“I hunger for love,” Dominique replied just as quietly. “When I feed, I am loved. And I can have so much of this that the need to take it all diminishes to nothing.”
The expression on the narrow face hovered somewhere between wonder and incredulity. The twin flames in Dominique’s eyes mirrored in Aubrey’s obsidian stare. “And…if I submit to you?”
“The dark hunger will leave you.” And if he didn’t…
“Then I submit.” The words were a mere breath in the wind. Slowly, he tilted his head to one side, exposing his jugular in an invitation he may well never have issued before. More than an offer of blood and submission, it was the offer of his mind, his memories, his very life, a surrender of his body and his soul. It was not an offer made lightly, and Dominique took care to accept with all the respect due his new subject. As though welcoming a beloved friend, he embraced him and pierced the artery.
Aubrey’s blood was vibrant with the sweetness of spring, full of warm grass and dewy blossoms. When the serum in Dominique’s bite found Aubrey’s brain, he dropped into a mind resonant with a century and a half of memories. A man of the Victorian age emerged, a gentleman and a trained barrister in his queen’s service. Renowned for his diplomatic skill, Aubrey had been sent on missions around the world. It was in Rome where a vampire found him and invited him into the night without fully explaining what that would entail. Aubrey had sought to wield his new powers of persuasion in service to his queen. Instead, he wielded it to appease a hunger that horrified him. After a century of guilt and torment and the resulting ridicule from his sire and other blood-drinkers, he had turned his back on them all. Now he maintained a solitary existence, convinced that he was fit for no company but his own.
You are fit for me, Dominique spoke into his mind, compassion swelling his heart.
Aubrey’s arms shook as they came around him, and his hands fisted into the leather jacket.
Long after he had stopped feeding on the blood, Dominique still held him, feeding on Aubrey’s roiling uncertainty and hope, his own thoughts in turmoil. How many like Aubrey were out there? How many skulking in the shadows, fighting to live by a moral code opposed to everything they craved?
“I have a gift for you,” Dominique murmured when Aubrey at last loosened his grip. Baring his left wrist, he ran the nail of his right thumb deep into his flesh. Blood welled, dark and glistening as he held the wound out to Aubrey. This was where the magic happened. Or at least he hoped it would. He had re-sired only one other, Serge.
Aubrey gripped Dominique’s hand and ran his tongue over the injury just before it sealed again. The blood was only a few drops and nowhere near as volatile as Kambyses’s had been, but it was enough. It found the serum in Aubrey’s veins and ignited, tuning him into the new Lord of Night.
He gasped at the sensation of fire flashing through his flesh, and held on to Dominique’s hand, eyes screwed shut, swaying. A long moan slipped past the bloodstained lips, and Dominique knew that Aubrey Wainwright would never again be part of an amorphous gathering of ghosts. The Victorian gentleman blood-drinker was becoming a distinct entity of light in Dominique’s awareness.
“I feel it leaving,” Aubrey said, awed. “The darkness. It’s leaving.” When he opened his eyes, small flames of gold flickered in their depths. Moment to moment they grew until they blazed in the night.
Dominique didn’t trust his own voice. So he only grinned and planted a kiss on Aubrey’s forehead. Welcome, mon ami. Welcome to my kingdom.
Present day…
The house’s landline rang so rarely that Cassidy Chandler associated the sound with nothing good. Mrs. Havashand, she guessed, sitting back in her leather executive chair and stretching stiff shoulders. No doubt Brinkley had left more corpses in her backyard. It was tempting to let the call go to voicemail, but a glance at the caller ID made her grab the extension.
“Good afternoon, ma’am,” said the brisk male voice on the other end. “This is the front gate. There’s a Jackson Striker here to see you, but we don’t have him on our list.”
Her thoughts skittering to a startled halt. She stared out the second-floor window, which overlooked an expansive backyard sloping down to the Intracoastal. Hard to decide if it was being called “ma’am” that threw her off or just the fact she even lived in a neighborhood that had a security gate staffed with round-the-clock armed guards. The maintenance crew and maid service had permanent passes. So few others visited during the day, she tended to forget. And at night…well, at night, none of that mattered.
“Ma’am?”
She sucked in a breath. “Yes, I’m here.”
“Shall we let him through?”
Cassidy swiveled the chair toward the storm bunker tucked away downstairs at the center of the house. Windowless, made of steel-reinforced, poured concrete, and secured with a door worthy of a bank vault, nothing short of dynamite would dent it.
“Is he alone?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Okay. Let him through.”
“Very well, ma’am.”
She returned the handset to its charging station. The clock on the monitor had the time an hour before sunset. If Jackson had reverted to his nefarious ways, he was cutting it damn close. That his asshole uncle wasn’t with him, however, ruled out the possibility of dynamite, not to mention random bullets to her head.
Also, this was as good an excuse as any to log off the V-zette’s Discord server. Four hours of moderating and organizing the hyper-fast postings of a chatty international vampire community was about all she could take for one day anyway.
After changing out of her frumpy yoga pants and sweatshirt into something more suitable for company, she headed for the foyer. Her low heels clacked and echoed in the vast space as she moved down the stairs. Enormous glass walls bracketed the two-story space at both ends, one side overlooking the infinity pool and dock out back, the other surrounding the massive double-door entry which had been hammered in a starburst design. The sun was low enough to pour through the front windows and flood the entire area in a warm glow. In the beams, dust motes danced on the breeze swirling in through the open sliders.
At the foot of the stairs, she paused to absorb the peaceful moment and mentally record it for later when she would share it with the love of her life. This was her favorite room in the house at her favorite time of day and year. Not long now, and Florida’s sticky summer would seize hold again, relegating open doors and fresh air to distant memories.
A polite bing-bong drew her to the door.
Jackson Striker, vampire hunter, stood on the paved stoop, hands in pockets, looking tall and casual in khaki slacks, a polo shirt, and mirrored sunglasses. He pulled them off his nose and folded them. “Hi, Cass.”
“Hi,” she said, and then considered the strange smile he wore. It wasn’t smug, nor anxious. Just normal. There was a new depth to his rugged face and a warmth in the steel-gray eyes that hadn’t been there the last time she saw him two years ago. Gone was the young hunter brimming with impatience, replaced by the confident strength of a man of almost twenty-seven with nothing to prove to anyone.
“I’m guessing he lives here?” Jackson prompted.
“What? Oh. Yes.” Grateful for the distraction, Cassidy reached down to scratch the little red-and-white cat behind an ear as he stalked through the open door. There was a smear of blood on the side of his furry face, which was probably all that remained of one of Mrs. Havashand’s prize finches. “Brinkley came with the house. Just showed up the day we moved in.”
With the front door open, a steady breeze swept through the foyer. Swirling in it was Jackson’s familiar citrus aftershave and shards of memories she thought to have forgotten long ago.
Cassidy straightened and wrapped her arms around herself. “It’s a little early for Dominique to be up.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“And Sam is out teaching and has dinner plans.”
Jackson shook his head. “I can talk to my sister any time. The person I was really hoping to talk to before sundown, though, is you.” She couldn’t keep the shock from her face, and he laughed, raising both hands, one of which held a small black case. “No, don’t worry. I won’t try to talk you into leaving him again.” He looked her over, taking in the gold, kitten-heeled sandals, white palazzo pants, peacock blue patterned tunic, and the thick mass of her chestnut hair falling around her shoulders. Noticing her suspicious glare, he sobered. “You’re looking good, Cassidy.”
Her cheeks warmed in a way she didn’t appreciate. “Flattery will get you nowhere. But since you’re here, fine. I’ll listen.”
Jackson followed her through the living room. Last night’s blankets and empty popcorn bowl still decorated the sofa. The adjoining kitchen was a lake of jade granite counters, maple wood cabinets, and stainless steel appliances.
“Cozy place you’ve got here,” he said.
She snorted and opened the fridge. “Only you could describe this multi-million-dollar palace as ‘cozy.’” His own home, the Striker family compound, was three times the size—and price. “I swear I still lose stuff in just this kitchen on a weekly basis. It’s way too much house for me.” But bomb-grade storm shelters and twenty-four-seven armed security generally came with substantial real estate attached. “What would you like? Beer, wine, water, or juice?”
“Juice.”
Cassidy set out two glasses, careful how hard she placed them on the unforgiving granite surface.
“You know you’re supposed to have staff for a kitchen like this,” Jackson pointed out as she poured the apple juice.
“Kind of a waste for just one person. I don’t need much.” What meals she did need, Dominique enjoyed preparing for her. Samantha, who lived out in the pool house, kept her own, strictly vegan kitchen.
He settled himself on a cast iron barstool and placed the little black case on the counter beside him. His hand lay on it for a moment, as though reluctant to let it go. Curiosity made Cassidy’s eyes cling to it. “You’re in here all alone? All day?”
She shrugged. “I get caught up on stuff.” Like sleep. “My nights can be busy.”
“Yes, I would imagine they are.”
Cassidy eyed him over the rim of her glass and waited.
He cleared his throat. “So. I have some news. Two bits of news, actually. Well, three if you count the news I have for Dominique.” He patted the case.
She waited some more.
“I’m getting married.”
Three pieces of news, and that’s what he was leading with? Unsure she wanted to know the rest, Cassidy swallowed the last of her juice along with an impulse to express condolences for the bride-to-be. His expression hovered just a notch below pained.
“So your uncle finally broke down your resistance with his parade of ‘suitable brides’ to choose from?” None of which had captured Jackson’s interest in the past, as far as she knew.
“No.” Wry grin. “Actually, my mom set me up with this one. Ollie’s the daughter of a friend of hers.”
“Ollie?”
“Olivia. Henning-Toliver.”
“Oh. One of the Henning-Tolivers?” This was a name with weight in local banking and financial circles. Socially then—unlike middle-class Midwest Cassidy—this Ollie was a good match for the heir to the Striker fortune.
“The youngest daughter, yes.”
“Okay. And you’re marrying this one because…?”
Jackson sat back. “Turns out we have a lot in common. She’s got an MBA and a future at her father’s firm, and neither one of us wanted to be forced into a marriage.” He laughed a little. “After we got done bitching about the manipulation, we actually had a lot of fun on our first date. She’s got spirit.” He sobered and dropped his gaze into his glass. “And she’s pregnant.”
Cassidy watched him toss back the juice as though wishing it was something stronger and wondered if she had heard correctly. More than that, she wondered what that peculiar niggle was doing at the bottom of her heart. Children had never been a priority for her, nor were they even possible for her and Dominique. Full stop. The end.
“I see.” She leaned on her forearms, studying him. “You must really have it bad for her if you forgot how to use condoms.”
He still didn’t look at her, but he nodded, and his face pulled into a don’t-I-know-it grimace. “She’s okay, considering—” He caught himself before adding the “she isn’t you” Cassidy heard anyway.
“We may have vodka around here somewhere,” she murmured and turned away to cover her own discomfort.
“No. Thank you, but no. I need a clear head when I talk to Dominique. Juice is fine.”
“Okay.” She refilled his glass. Her own head was a muddle. He was moving on with his life despite still loving her. While she felt a grudging respect and a hard-earned but cool friendship for her former fiancé now, she had loved him once—back before she knew he would walk over bodies in the name of revenge.
An awkward silence settled beside the quiet hum of the refrigerator. Outside, the daylight had dimmed. Night would fall like a dropped shroud within minutes. She wanted to count the seconds. Instead, she said, “Don’t you usually talk to Dominique on video?”
Again, he placed his hand on the case. “This is something he and I need to discuss in person.”
“What is it?”
The discomfort evaporated in a broad smile. “A gift.”
She arched a brow, relaxing as well. “Now what sort of gift would a vampire hunter give the lord of the vampires?”
“Enforcer,” he corrected. Daytime enforcer, to be exact. He and his uncle Garrett both were enforcers. Not everyone agreed with the Lord of Night’s new directives, especially the younger ones and those in far-flung places who imagined themselves immune from his influence. With Dominique’s blessing, the Striker Foundation, once dedicated to exterminating all vampires, now used its considerable resources to locate and bring under control—or destroy—these rebels. The arrangement freed him to concentrate on bigger goals and gave the hunters an outlet for their well-honed skills.
“Which brings me to what I wanted to talk to you about,” he continued.
“Oh?”
“I need to figure out how to tell Ollie what I’m really doing when I go on all those ‘business trips.’”
Like you were never going to tell me? She bit back the words and instead said, “I wouldn’t think that’d be so hard. Just introduce her to an actual vampire. We’ve got two living right here.” She waved at the cast iron gate at the back of the kitchen that fronted the vestibule to the storm shelter, which doubled as a wine cellar.
Which doubled as a vampire lair.
“People rarely react well to that sort of news.”
“They could compel her to accept the truth without fuss.”
“No. Absolutely not. No compulsion.” He made a slashing motion with the edge of his hand before running it through his short-cropped, dark blond hair. “I want to be honest with her, but I don’t want her exposed if she doesn’t want to be.”
“Ah.” Cassidy chewed on her bottom lip. “So what exactly is it you’re asking?”
“Well. I was hoping you might talk to her with me?”
Her jaw dropped.
“You know, a neutral third party.”
“Oh, I’m hardly neutral.”
“You know what I mean.”
“You want someone to help you sound less like you’ve lost your mind. Right.”
He gave a sheepish shrug. “Will you consider it at least?”
“Does Garrett know you’re planning to tell her?”
“He does, and I’m not asking him for permission.”
“Wow. I guess you really do like her.” Traditionally, no one not born and raised in the Striker household was ever told about the family’s clandestine operations.
“She will be my future. The mother of my kids. I owe her the truth.”
“Who are you, and what have you done with the bastard who was hell-bent on keeping me oblivious?”
“Cass—”
Cassidy held up a hand. “It’s okay, Jackson. If not for you being such an ass, I would have never met Dominique. And he is my life now,” she added with a pointed look and watched his eyes dart to the sapphire and diamond ring on her finger. It was a gift from Dominique and the only piece of jewelry she wore, as close to a wedding ring as she ever wanted to get. “I really am happy for you, Jack. I mean it. This Ollie sounds like a girl I’d like to meet and—yes—talk to.”
“Thank you, Cassidy.” He splayed a hand over his sternum. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. I have all kinds of dirt on you I might want to share.”
The look of mock-innocence made her laugh. “So, when do you want to do this?”
Jackson had a plan. He always did. They discussed the details at length and had finalized their plot to shepherd one Olivia Henning-Toliver into their supernatural reality when a decidedly supernatural sensation stole over Cassidy. Every night it started like this, with a sense of an expanding awareness, like doors opening in her mind. Like quiet energy surging from a deep well. She closed her eyes and welcomed it with a sigh.
“Sunset?” Jackson wondered.
“Sunset,” she confirmed.
Right on cue, a small, furious growl sounded. Brinkley crept into position behind a cabinet corner, his green eyes narrowed on the gate to the wine cellar/storm shelter/vampire lair. The cat considered the vampires invading predators, and he wasn’t having it, no matter how hard Dominique tried to persuade him otherwise.
Cassidy picked up Brinkley by the rising scruff and turned to the kitchen door. “None of that tonight.”
By the time she deposited the unhappy cat in the side yard, Dominique had become fully conscious. With their bond renewed only the night before, their minds functioned like two adjoining puzzle pieces clicking into place. He contemplated the last hour of her memories. The mysterious gift Jackson brought intrigued him. But what really captured his interest was the news of Jackson’s impending fatherhood.
They had never discussed it. There was no point. Offspring between a vampire and a mortal was impossible. While Cassidy accepted this with little sentiment in either direction, Dominique ranked his inability to have a family high on the list of immortality’s shortcomings. He never said so. He never even thought about it, not consciously anyway, but Cassidy sensed it just the same.
The vault door in the vestibule unsealed. A vampire appeared and stood with his arms draped over the decorative gate, his unshaven face split by a lecherous grin that made Jackson rise from his chair in alarm.
“Cassidy.” Serge’s baritone voice purred with appreciation. “You ordered takeout.” Unlike his lord and master, who still digested the events of Cassidy’s day, Serge didn’t know what the human was doing there.
“Be nice,” she said. “He comes bearing gifts.”
“Oh, yes, he does.” Serge unlatched the gate and sauntered across the kitchen, barefoot and rumpled, his curly caramel hair sticking out in every direction, the vampire equivalent of a man in search of coffee.
Jackson glared at him. “Sleeping with the boss now? You’ve come up in the world.”
“Sleeping? No. Not I.” Serge puffed out his barrel chest with pride. “I stand guard over my lord.”
His lordship materialized beside Serge and delivered a brotherly slap to the back of his head. “More like lie guard flat on your back,” he said in his lyrical French accent.
Serge growled, much as the cat had earlier. “But I am always with you.”
“I know,” Dominique concurred with a dramatic sigh. “There is no getting rid of you.”
“And you are glad for it, blood-child. Admit it.”
Cassidy smiled at their antics. Tall, lean and grace incarnate, Dominique was the polar opposite of both the stocky Serge and muscle-bound Jackson. Even dressed in his usual exercise pants and T-shirt, both black, few would mistake him for the ordinary man of twenty-seven he had been when he was turned into a blood-drinker. Carved cheekbones and a knife-blade nose dominated his profile, and his expressive mouth could instill terror as easily as convey gentle humor—not to mention bestow mind-blowing kisses.
But it was the eyes that were the most striking thing about him. Their quiet depths missed nothing and could flash from warm and beguiling to full black and disturbing in the space of a heartbeat. Gold flecks danced in the hazel irises as he looked at her.
“Bonjour, mon amour,” he murmured and held out his hand.
“Bonjour,” she said, moving into his embrace.
The world around them fell away, and they stood together in her memories of the sunlight streaming through the foyer. He rubbed the back of her neck with his thumb while she nuzzled into his thick hair, inhaling his heady clean scent that reminded her of an early spring day.
“Indeed. He brings gifts,” Serge said, pulling them back to the moment.
Uh oh, she thought.
His tone had lost its swagger and turned dreamy. It meant he saw “shadows” in the aura of whoever he was looking at, or impressions of the future. When Serge had his visions, disjointed and insubstantial as they were, changes were coming—usually not for the better.
Though Dominique appeared unconcerned, Cassidy felt the tension skitter through him. Neither of them dared to interrupt Serge as he studied Jackson with an intense interest that no longer had anything to do with his warm blood. The human man returned the stare, his hands wrapped over the back of the bar stool as though preparing to pick it up and use it as a weapon.
Serge turned to look at Dominique with a wide, gap-toothed grin of wonder. Then he chuckled with obvious glee.
“Oui?” Dominique prompted. “Did he bring a good gift?”
Serge laughed.
Jackson offered a tentative smile. “I suspect you’ll like it.”
Just like that, Serge stopped laughing.
In a flash, he was by Jackson’s side, his eyes bugging out of their sockets. “Beware the fire,” he whispered in a hiss that made Cassidy’s skin crawl.
Jackson took a hasty step back.
“Beware the fire,” Serge repeated, now looking at Dominique. Then he laughed uproariously and disappeared.
Dominique closed his eyes and struggled for patience.
“What…was that?” Jackson said.
Cassidy rubbed the chill out of her arms. “That was Serge. You remember him, don’t you? The vampire you tried so hard to kill?”
Discomfort tightened his mouth as he looked away.
Dominique placed his hands on the edge of the granite countertop as he faced Jackson. “So, did you bring me fire, Jackson?” His gaze darkened as he let the vampire rise and his senses expand.
Looking through his eyes, Cassidy saw Jackson had changed more than she realized. His aura, once muddy red with anger, had brightened into the powerful crimson of a man whose mind and purpose were clear.
Jackson took a deep breath and pressed a fingertip onto the little black case. “In a way.”
Dominique tilted his head, brows drawing together. “This is from the lab?”
“Yes, it is.”
The lab was the Striker Foundation’s clandestine research facility, staffed with bright scientific minds compelled to maintain absolute secrecy. The lab existed for one reason, and one reason only, and it was that reason that caused Dominique and Cassidy to become stone-still with anticipation.
“They did it, Dominique. They found a way. You can have the sun again.”