Beyond the Night

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For John, as always, in this year of momentous change.

R
esurrection.

The Countess had saved him once more, giving him the gift of the hell-on-earth life he'd been seeking to avenge for the last twenty years. He'd been that close to death, and against his wishes, his fury, his need, and his unholy courting of death every which way he could think of, his mother had saved him.

Again.

She'd watched, with her waning life force, as he drained her body of the life-nourishing blood that would heal him and sustain him forever—and destroy her.

And then, with the last of her indomitable will, she'd clamped her fangs into Senna's chest, keeping her promise to give his lover life for eternity.

Because there might be a child—the only thing that could bring him back from the dead.

His child.

If there was a child . . .

The only question was the blood.

Another had gotten to Senna first, and there was no knowing how deeply that one had punctured and penetrated, or how fully her body had embraced his blood.

So he lay, too sapped to make decisions or even move, in the smoldering ashes of Drom, where he'd fallen after he had consigned his mother's husk of a body to the flames.

It was nearly sunrise, and Senna lay nearly dead in her own bloodbath, her body fighting the flow from the ragged X-shaped incisions his mother's fangs had inflicted. There was blood everywhere, soaking deep into the ashes, into the ground, into the consciousness, into the soul.

The price one paid for eternal life in Clan Iscariot was everlasting bloodlust, the undying hunger whipping the body into a frenzy, and a legacy of death and detachment.

The Iscariots' representation of thirty pieces of silver, the X-shaped bites incised on their victims' chests, were a mere reminder that, at last, on the heels of his massive betrayal, Judas had sought to atone for his sin by trying to return the silver before he died.

The last shred of Dominick's humanity feasted on that, sought comfort and surcease from the endless blood craving that ate at his vitals.

Find your people,
his mother had whispered on her dying breath.
Find your clan.

He had no idea where to start, what to do. And he couldn't leave Senna blood-soaked, and in the netherworld of death, alone, perhaps with his child, and with no protection.

The thought galvanized him. He willed himself to rise from the ashes, resurrected again, just as a shadow loomed over him.

A woman hovered, tall, pale, dressed in a robe, her neck ringed with obsidian stones that sparked off the sun.

She held out her hand.

He brushed it away as he raised himself unsteadily to his feet. The rising sunlight crackled dangerously all over his body as he got his bearings in a landscape that seemed as bleak and barren as death.

The woman broke off one of the stones from her necklace and thrust it at him.

His first thought was to protect Senna.

He had just enough energy to will his body to move to where she lay. The woman followed, floating just behind him, watching as he knelt in a pool of Senna's blood and pressed the piece of obsidian into her hand.

She lay unnaturally still, the ugly, ragged bites on her chest still bleeding. And on her neck, two telltale puncture marks—the story of a different blood that might even now be mingling with hers.

He could do nothing to help her now. He couldn't stanch her wounds; he couldn't even touch her. Or, he realized in a panic, catch her scent in the still-hovering dense cloud of smoke.

He could only leave her that meager handful of obsidian to protect her from the sun.

He got to his feet and looked around. There was nothing else here.

“Now,” the woman murmured, breaking off a still-bigger chunk of the necklace and handing it to him. “They're coming. We have to go. Dominick—now!”

“Who are you?”

“I'm called Dnitra. Please.”

He took her hand, not knowing quite what else to do, and he felt a vortex of wind surrounding them, whirling faster, blurring the landscape, lifting them inexorably away from the desecration.

Rebirth in the wind. The moment of new beginnings. Everything wiped away, all enemies vanquished.

Except Senna. Senna, who could be his enemy—or his life.

And then everything fell away, even the devastating thought that he might never know.

P
ain—hot, raw, red—suffused her body from the inside out, obscuring her vision, burning through her veins. The scent of dirt, decay, and desiccation permeated her senses, the feral compulsion to bite, a persistent, torturous drumbeat in her head . . .

Red . . . she couldn't shake the pain lodged deep in her chest, clawing at her heart and biting into her soul.

She remembering dying. She remembered being reborn.

She awakened now, slowly, warily, the redness distracting her, clouding her mind, her perception, her world.

She'd had a bad dream. It had to have been. People had drunk blood. People had died. Someone had been saved. Someone had been turned.

She'd witnessed it all.

She'd experienced . . .

Death.

Drom Manor had burned. But she wasn't at Drom.

. . . How . . . ?

She felt a tightening in her chest, at the yawling center of the pain. The blood pounded in her ears. Red washed over her. A sudden, horrible, overpowering urge welled up. . . .

No!

She grasped the edges of the shroud and pulled it tight around her, as if it were a shield. Pain knifed into her chest with terrifying precision as she realized . . .

Shroud?

She whipped it off with a mewl of horror, her heart pounding wildly.

She knew where she was—Dominick's town house—but she didn't know what she was doing here, only that it was imperative she get out.

She scrabbled to the edge of what was a coffin-shaped cavity under a bed and painfully pulled herself onto the floor. She lay there, stunned at her screaming need to crawl right back into the foul-smelling muck.

Then she rolled over and sank into it again, breathing deep the fetid smell of death that now was life to her.

Red enveloped her senses and carried her away again so she didn't have to think about the fire, the deaths, the blood—

She sank deeper into oblivion.

Dominick was dead. The Countess couldn't save him. She couldn't save him.

They'd all died and had been swallowed by the barren landscape of the ruins of Drom as if they'd never been. Death to dust. Dust and death, and resurrection in eternity.

And she—burned out, hollowed out, bitten, blood-soaked—was now bound to a new reality made up of dark dreams and unholy desires.

She couldn't escape it, recant it, undo it, or make it go away.

She felt as if she were on the edge of an abyss, a terrifying step away from a darkness that could consume her forever.

She pulled the shroud tighter around her. Dominick had slept in this cavity, wrapped in this shroud. The thought comforted her even as the pain overwhelmed her.

He couldn't have died. Despite what she'd witnessed. She had to believe he still lived, because he'd never leave her like that.

He would come. Soon. She had no doubt of it. And then the pain would go away.

And so she lived, even in death. The thing Dominick had sought to save her from turned out to be the thing that had saved him, the Countess, his mother, bribing her to rescue Dominick by offering her eternal life.

This was not the ending she'd envisioned when she'd devised a plan to worm her way into the care of a wealthy family by claiming to be an indigent relative. It had been an ill-conceived ruse at best, and worse, a plan that had spun utterly out of her control when the Countess had answered her “solicitor's” letter with an eagerness that should have made her wary, and invited her to come live at her country estate, Drom.

She couldn't bear the pain of the bites. But the painful memories of the way the Countess had outwitted her was another thing altogether. Her chest felt as if it were on fire. She felt the slashed skin around the wounds constricting as if it'd been burned and felt the flow of blood like a balm as she lay there in unbearable agony.

She could die from the pain. She started panting. She
was
dead.

She had to get out of here. The fetid air choked her as she inched her way out of the cavity, pain crippling her every movement, until she fell onto the floor.

Think.

The torturous throbbing sliced through her every coherent thought.

If Dominick didn't come . . . ?

She'd be alone again, as she'd always been, an orphan, with no family, friends, acquaintances, a street urchin who'd lived by her wits and a couple of magic tricks to scrounge up a couple of pence to pay for a meal, a place to sleep.

She'd concocted a lot of schemes on the street, but until she'd come up with her indigent-relative scam, she'd never been that careless about what came next. Worse, she'd played the deception heedlessly and without planning a way out, and this was where she'd wound up—on the edge of another dark hole: eternity.

All she saw was a black, bottomless pit, and herself falling into it. No end, no relief from the violent urges that had started pounding in her blood, and a life in which she transformed into a monster constantly surrendering to those impulses.

Dominick warned me. I didn't know. I couldn't conceive. I have to move.

She forced herself up on her knees, then sat back on her haunches. Even that was too much of an effort. She felt nauseous. So unlike the hours after the carnage when she'd been in such shock, when she'd felt nothing but the raging need to find Dominick.

Now, in her blood-drenched clothes and her chest bare with the festering wounds from the Countess's mauling her, she comprehended only one thing: she'd wanted to save Dominick.

Even that was cold comfort. Dominick wasn't here and nothing made sense, except . . .

She heard noise downstairs. Someone violently pounding at the door. Voices.

Knoll, the butler, grudgingly said, “All right then, come in.”

A voice, rough, angry: “Where is she? I know she's here.”

Charles. By the damned—now what?

She took a deep breath and the pain knifed into her again. She couldn't cope with Dominick's newly turned half brother, not after he'd compelled Lady Augustine, who had been her benefactress, to believe he was her son, Peter.

Because Peter was dead, he had to be.

She couldn't move. She didn't see how she could avoid Charles.

Let me disappear.

She felt an odd sensation as she heard Charles rushing up the stairs, another of those uncontrollable impulses, this time her body was disintegrating, melting into the carpet, becoming a scattering of dust and dreams.

Charles burst in the door. “Goddamn. Where is she?”

Senna held her breath, her fear superseding her pain, aware that she had somehow transmogrified into a collection of dust motes tumbling randomly across the bedroom floor.

“Son of a bitch.” Charles flung open the closet, tipped over the bed. “Son of a . . .” He raced out of the room and back downstairs.

She remained still, sentient. She felt no pain in this state, and the relief was incalculable. She could stay this way forever.

No.

She heard Charles berating Knoll.

I have to get out of here.

She heard a bone-chilling howl, followed by dead silence.

Breathe.

She inhaled.

Too quiet. Fear gripped her again, and she took a deep breath. Immediately she was enveloped in a vortex of dust that swirled around her until her whole body reconstituted.

As she willed herself upright, pain scorched through her, but she ignored it, ignored the blood. The silence from below made it imperative that she get away.

But—wait. The obsidian. She'd had it clutched in hand when she'd awakened at Drom. Frantically, she dove back into the cavity, groping for it. Her fingers swiped heavy clumps of dirt, nothing that felt like a stone. She started to panic. Obsidian deflected the sun. It had been how Dominick had walked among them, and she couldn't survive daylight without it.

There! Her fingers brushed against something hard and oddly shaped. She grabbed it, pulled herself to a sitting position to examine it. Yes. And for all the pressure she felt of time wasting, she slowly eased herself upright and got out to the landing without mishap.

So quiet. Charles could be anywhere. She had to get away.

She crept down the steps, feather light, because it was so quiet down there. Too quiet.

She stopped suddenly, grasping the banister in horror. Knoll lay sprawled in the entrance hallway, his throat ripped out, blood spewing everywhere.

I want—

The roaring in her head drowned out everything else, even the pain. Every vampiric urge swamped her senses.

I need—

By the damned— NO!

She felt her body seize up, her hands form into claws, her jaw shift, and her palate move as her fangs became visible and prominent.

Senna flew down the steps, pushed her face into the wellspring of bloody life that poured from the wounds, and tasted, drank, devoured with the thirst of a monster.

An hour later—a minute later—she lay across the butler's corpse, panting. More more more more. Nourishment. Lifeblood. More. Blood spurted onto her face as she ravaged the butler's neck. More. She drank like a greedy child. She couldn't get enough. She wanted to bathe in it, absorb it into her skin, into her soul.

By the damned.
She wiped her hand across her mouth. Blood. Everywhere. All over the hallway, her clothes, her skin, dripping from her mouth, smeared all over her bared chest. As if she'd been wallowing in it.

She licked her bloodstained lips. She had been wallowing.

She swallowed hard. She wanted more. There was so much of it. The pooling at the juncture of his shoulder and neck. The veins. The heart.

She caught her breath at the thought of it, an endless feast on his lifeless corpse.

Alone, in this big, old house—she could maneuver the body into that cold, closed-up formal parlor and just give in to the orgasmic bloodlust until she sucked the last drop of luscious blood from his desiccated body.

What?

She started shaking.
No, no.

Her body was washed with cold and she pushed herself violently away from the corpse.

No, I didn't do that—I didn't, I couldn't, I—

She couldn't stop the tremors that coursed through her. She willed herself into the adjacent small parlor and collapsed on the sofa that fronted the bow window.

She felt her body contract, the fangs retract, the tension in her hands ease even though the yearning for blood still gnawed at her. The thing she'd become in the maw of that lust terrified her.

But she still wanted more.

I can't let this thing take over my life.

But the bloody body beckoned . . . just beyond the door. Where no one could see . . . just a little more—

Stop!

She grabbed on to the sofa arm, as if she could forcibly restrain herself from flying from the parlor.

Think.

She needed clothes. There was a wardrobeful at the home of Lady Augustine, whose ward she had been in that other life, the one Dominick had created for her before they'd all died.

She could transport there, but the thought of making the effort sent a pain piercing through her. She'd rather feast than forage. She'd rather drink and drown. She'd rather—

She heard the rattle of keys as someone came down the hallway, probably that young maid who was the only other servant Dominick had hired. For appearances, she remembered him saying.

She heard a prolonged shriek as the maid beheld the gory remains of Senna's meal, followed by the maid's footsteps running back down the hallway.

The pain was excruciating now. Time to go. She still wasn't quite certain how it worked. Before, she'd closed her eyes and whispered Lady Augustine's name. Now, just as heavier footsteps pounded toward the small parlor, she breathed Lady Augustine's name again, and by the time the door was thrust open, she was somewhere above and gone.