Dark Heart of the Sun (Dark Destinies Book 1) (13 page)

“You conceited French pain in the ass.”

“Please do not take this so personally. This is my problem, not yours.”

“But it
is
my problem,” she fumed. “Do you know what that filthy stench reminds me of? My father.”

Unlike her, Dominic had no trouble hiding his true thoughts behind a blank expression, which in and of itself was annoying enough. Added to the smoke, every friendly notion she may have entertained evaporated.

“My father smoked for years, but he’s still healthy as a bull and busy screwing a woman half his age while my mother died of the cancer she caught from his second-hand smoke. And, oh, yeah, he moved in with his mistress when my mom got sick, because he couldn’t
deal
with it. So, no. Not a happy smell. Thank you very much.”

Dominic watched her, completely transformed from easygoing computer hacker and ‘research assistant’ to the poster boy for French aloofness. After a brief hesitation, he pulled another drag from the cigarette.

“Jerk.” Gathering her laptop, she made for the stairs, but stopped and turned three steps up when he called her name.

“If you feel so strongly, I won’t do it in the house anymore.” He dropped the cigarette into the Perrier bottle.

“Thanks. I guess.” Not much of an apology, but she’d take it.

He got up and collected his things with impatient movements. What other laws would he break tonight? The speed limit was an obvious one. What or who was he running from? Or to? She couldn’t help feeling like she was part of the problem and knew true resentment at that thought. It was true—there was no one left in her life she could trust to give her a straight story.

His face empty as a doll’s, Dominic disappeared down the hall.

“Good night,” she called, but received no reply.

Ten minutes later, curled in her bed with Eddie, she listened to the sound of the shed behind the house being unlocked and the motorcycle starting up. It was only a revving engine, but it sounded angry to her, furious even. It raced away into the night.

Screaming.

Chapter 13

Nothing to See Here

Serge lay in wait for him by the shed. “You play a dangerous game, blood-child.”

Dominic ignored him. He didn’t need the filthy old blood-drinker to chastise him over how close he’d come to ending her life tonight. She’d taken him by surprise with her touch, brief as it was. The heat of her body searing into his skin all but shredded what was left of his reason, especially after her insistence on honesty. He had almost shown her the truth. Almost.

He swung onto the bike, pulled the helmet over his head, and started the motor. Then he waited. When Serge hesitated, he revved the engine, and the pest leapt onto the back. Dominic sped out of the yard, down the lane and onto A1A as though launched from a slingshot, hurtling away from the ever more irresistible temptation of Cassidy.

She shouldn’t be there. He should have found a way to send her away when she first arrived. Now it was too late. Much too late. Her innocent acceptance of him, allowing him to forget for a time what he had become, was a drug he could not refuse. It was more now than allowing her to live for an ulterior purpose. Now he wanted her to live because he enjoyed her company, because her laughter chipped at the black ice in his heart. Because she trusted him, even needed him. Because he could help her, and she wanted to help him in return.

Because in her eyes he was human.

He jammed the brakes. The bike skidded sideways toward the shoulder, tires shrieking. Serge sailed off in a long, flailing arc and disappeared into the brush.

Dominic sat stunned by the realization that he needed Cassidy as he had never needed anyone—and so did the beast. Even now, his hunger for her vibrated in the marrow of his bones. Inescapable. It would happen. He would find himself at her lifeless throat with no idea how he got there. It was only a matter of time.

Serge emerged from the shrubbery, a bewildered expression on his scruffy face. Several cars that had slowed to see the scene, continued, satisfied—or perhaps disappointed—that no one lay dying on the side of the road. He stopped in front of the bike, opened his mouth, closed it again, speechless at last. One of his shirtsleeves was gone and both pant legs hung in tatters.

Dominic pushed up his visor. “Did you not see that coming, old fool?”

Serge shook his head emphatically.

“But you know what I will ask of you next?”

He nodded, a grin splitting the beard. “You need me,” he purred. His eyes glinted with a sudden, mad light as he gripped the handlebars and leaned across. His cool forest breath washed over Dominic’s face. “Say it, blood-child. Tell me.”

Dominic thought he might choke on the words, but speaking them was as inevitable as what would happen if he didn’t. “I need you . . . to teach me . . . how to keep her safe. From me.”

Satisfied, Serge nodded and hopped onto the back of the bike. “Finally. I was beginning to think she would be half-dead before you understood.”

“You might have explained it better.”

The idea hadn’t even crossed his mind until last night when he saw Serge hunt. The bloodthirsty pirate left no corpses. While he helped himself to a measure of his prey’s blood, he played with its mind, twisting it to turn away from whatever evil it contemplated and pursue instead an opposite course. There were at least three former dealers in Miami who now felt themselves called to a life of service to the church. The amount of control over the beast this implied was staggering.

“You weren’t ready.” Serge slapped a jaunty rhythm on Dominic’s shoulders. “You are now. We proceed. Go.”

Dominic fought the temptation to fling the nuisance off his bike again, but as he had relegated himself to the position of student, he would have to endure the instructor.

Though only to a point. While the lesson belonged to Serge, the rest of the night would remain in Dominic’s control. Which is why five minutes later he pulled into the parking lot of the Orange Blossom Manor, Orchard Beach’s poshest resort.

“No, no, no, no, no.” Serge moaned, thumping Dominic’s back. “You’re not ready. Not ready. No.”

“Make up your mind,” Dominic grumbled. “Wait here.”

He left Serge to orbit the parked bike, whining his distress, and strolled into the lobby, just another tourist in want of a room. Determination focused his compulsions to a fine point, and it took only one try for the desk clerk to hand over a key card with a welcoming smile. After another quick stop in the sundries shop, he located the suite, got the water running in the Jacuzzi tub, and returned to the bike via a back stairway.

“Come with me.”

“No.” Even Serge’s voice trembled. “This is bad. This is very, very bad.”

Dominic smiled, displaying his fangs. In regards to his own future, the fool was correct. Serge’s world was about to tilt on its filthy axis. Grabbing a bare, grimy elbow, Dominic propelled him to the back stairway. Serge whimpered every step of the way but gave up all pretense at resistance once they were in the plush fourth floor hallway. Eyes rolling, head bobbling, he cleaved to Dominic as though terrified by the unfamiliar interior space.

Two teenage boys stopped in their tracks at the spectacle, and Dominic let the compulsion fly. “There is nothing to see here.” Their faces neutralized and they walking away.

He felt Serge’s curious gaze on him as he opened the door to the suite, pushed him inside, and maneuvered him across the room.

“What are . . . what are you doing?”

“Making you invisible.”

When Serge spotted the steaming tub, his arms and legs shot out to catch the bathroom doorway like steel grappling hooks. “NO!”

Dominic shoved. “
Oui!
”

Serge shrieked in protest, and Dominic clamped his hand over the gaping mouth. “Listen to me,
imbécile
. We are not hunting the streets tonight. More than human eyes will see us, and cameras cannot be compelled into ignorance.” He sniffed at the matted hair. Dirt. Garbage. Rancid blood. “And
nobody
can be compelled to forget your foul stench.”

Serge shook violently, his eyes locked on the tub swirling with suds. He made a sad, humming noise and Dominic removed his hand. “But . . . does it have to be water?”

“
Oui
. Water. It cannot hurt you. You know this,
non
?”

Serge gave him a mournful look. “You have never been keelhauled, young one.”

Dominic stared at him.

“It’s horrible. You either get cut up by the barnacles or you dro—” He let out a high-pitched yelp as Dominic, taking advantage of his momentary distraction, shouldered him across the bathroom and hard into the wall behind the tub. Serge flailed, sloshing half the water from the tub before settling into an anxious seat and eyeing the suds as though they might conspire to smother him. Already the ragged clothes and hair leeched grime into the hot water.

Dominic stood over the scene, hands on hips, drenched. “Did you find any barnacles in there?”

Serge looked up, a dog trapped in a downpour. “You are cruel, blood-child.”

“We are only getting started.” Dominic pulled off his jacket, tossed it out into the room, and took a large bottle from the shopping bag. “Wait until you see what shampoo can do.”

It took well over an hour, but by the time Dominic was done scrubbing, rinsing, trimming, and shaving, the blood-drinker who stood before him, swathed in a towel, was unrecognizable. Even Serge seemed transfixed by his reflection. His face, excavated from years’ worth of beard and filth, had the typical lean blood-drinker lines but also a softness natural to the age at which he was made. And the hair, once a dull tangle, turned out to be a riot of caramel curls. Only the eyes were the same—owlish brown and not entirely focused.

Serge touched his bare chin. “I haven’t seen this since . . . before.” Then, on a low growl, his eyes pooled into black caves and the canines extended between his lips. His skin rippled as his flesh tightened around his bones until he had the gruesome look of an animated skeleton.

Dominic tensed, his own primal instincts rising to answer the challenge. Amidst all the bungling idiocy, he had forgotten how much older—and stronger—Serge was, a potentially fatal mistake. But the moment passed, and Serge returned to a benign human form that could no longer be mistaken for a vagabond.

“Effective.”

Dominic forced a casualness he far from felt. “There are some new clothes on the bed. Go find something that agrees with you.”

Once Serge was out of the bathroom, he studied his own reflection. The two-day’s growth of beard shadowing his cheeks had taken a year to appear. A year of rampant feeding. He picked up the razor and scraped it over his jaw. Glistening black stubble rained onto the wooly mop polluting the basin. A clean-shaven face of innocent male beauty soon gazed from the mirror.

“Effective,” he agreed.

Serge looked a paradox. In the navy board shorts and teal shirt and with his apparently sun-bleached locks half obscuring his face, he presented the image of a seasoned surfer—who had never seen the sun. Dominic sighed. “If anyone asks, you are from Canada.” Glancing at his own pale arms, he added, “We both are.”

Nobody asked. They received little more than curious glances as they made their way to the resort’s beachside pavilion. A live band strummed off to one side and a cheerful crowd buzzed around the tiki bar. Young couples and retirees. Families. Children. Their warm, living essence drenched the air.

“You are not ready for this, blood-child.”

Dominic glanced at the surveillance cameras mounted in the area. His canines ached with the eagerness to feed. “That is why you are here. Teach me.”

The old one continued to look uncertain.

“You have made another,
non
? Trained another?”

The fluffy curls shook. “Never.”

Dominic didn’t know whether to be furious or dismayed. He settled on somewhere in between. “Then you and I shall both learn tonight. For Cassidy.”

He found a seat at the bar and ordered a bottle of Corona he didn’t touch. All his senses keyed on the maelstrom of life flowing around him. Not reaching out and taking it at will required tremendous effort, and he felt himself coming undone when a pair of chattering women settled beside him. Before they could attempt conversation with him, he dug for the cigarettes. He hadn’t yet lit one when Serge sidled up to his other side, fidgeting, and pressed his face against Dominic’s shoulder. “For the sweet one,” he whispered.

Serge spoke in tones so low only Dominic would hear them over the thumping music and gay laughter. He told of intention and action, of pacts with the beast and focus of the mind, of battles with the self and a truce bargained in blood. Some concepts were not unlike those he had long practiced for martial arts. Control was all. Control over the self. Lose it and lose the battle.

But the beast—the hunger—often had a mind of its own. It claimed control when it pleased, and even now he felt it scoff, impatient to feed. The thought of keeping it leashed much longer felt as hopeless as confining fire in a cage made of straw.

He studied the lighter and cigarette in his hands. “Have you ever heard of a cure? For us? An end to this torment?”

“The sun.” Serge shrugged. “Why would you want that?”

“Why would anyone want to sit here on a beautiful evening wanting only to tear open every throat he sees?”

Serge clasped Dominic’s shoulder. “Understand this. You are . . .
young
,” he said with grave emphasis. “Remember yourself as a mortal youngster with his first bottle of drink.” He leaned closer, leering. “Your first kiss with a promise of more? It is like that, you see. A fever. That powerful.”

Not wanting to get any closer to the woman sitting on his other side, Dominic fought the urge to lean away from Serge. “This I know.”

“Well, then, there you are. As you grow up, you learn to pace the drink and savor the women. But in our case—” He sat back and shrugged. “Well, growing up is lengthy business, yes?”

“How lengthy?”

Serge watched him light up and waved at the resulting smoke. “You poor child. Your sire was of no help to you at all, was he?” He sighed. “Too old, that one, to remember anything of before.”

Dominic almost dropped the cigarette. “What do you know of him?” If Serge was another spawn of that creature, possibly a loyal one . . .

“Easy, blood-child. I know only what I see in your future.” Before Dominic could bristle with contempt, Serge added, “I can smell his strength in you. Use it to do this. You can. I have seen it.”

Dominic pulled on the cigarette, fighting for calm. “In my future?”

“Yes.”

He muttered a choice French curse. Did he really believe this nonsense now? No, of course not. But regardless of how Serge chose to phrase it, this was more to go on than he had in a year of nights. “How?”

“Simple. You always remember what matters more than the blood.”

Which he could taste in the back of his throat and felt oozing in his lungs. “Survival,” he said, glancing at the all-seeing surveillance cameras. “The beast cherishes survival most.”

“Good. What else?”

The woman who had almost faded from his awareness laughed, capturing his full attention. The pulse in her neck thumped with life. Her hair was almost the same color as . . .

“Cassidy,” he whispered.

Serge nodded, pleased. “You care about something more than yourself, and the hunger will obey you. And her you care about. You have to. She is everything to you.”

Dominic swallowed the blood in his mouth and crushed the cigarette in an ashtray. “
Oui.
She is.”

The woman radiated heat like a furnace. He imagined he could feel her heart pulsing against his bare arm where he had earlier felt Cassidy’s touch. “What do you see when you see this . . . future?”