Lara Adrian's Midnight Breed 8-Book Bundle (119 page)

CHAPTER
Twenty-Two

D
ylan stood outside the windowed door of her mother’s room on the hospital’s tenth floor, trying to rally her courage to go inside. The cancer ward was so quiet up here at night, only the hushed chatter from the nurses on duty at their station and the occasional shuffle of a patient’s slippered feet as they made a brief circuit around the wing, fingers clasped around the wheeled IV pole that rolled along beside them. Her mom had been one of those tenacious, but weary-eyed patients not so long ago.

Dylan hated to think there was more of that pain and struggle ahead of her mother now. The biopsy the doctors had ordered wouldn’t be in for a couple of days, according to the nurse at the desk. They were hopeful that in the likelihood it did come back positive, they might have caught the relapse early enough to begin a new, more aggressive round of chemotherapy. Dylan was praying for a miracle, despite the heaviness in her chest as she steeled herself for bad news.

She hit the hand sanitizer dispenser mounted next to the door, squirted a blob of isopropyl gel into her palms and rubbed it in. As she pulled a pair of latex gloves from the box on the counter and put them on, everything she’d been through in the past several days—even the past few hours—fell away, forgotten. Her own problems just evaporated as she pushed open the door, because nothing mattered right now except the woman curled up on the bed, tethered to monitoring wires and intravenous lines.

God, her mother looked so tiny and frail lying there. She’d always been petite, smaller than Dylan by a good four inches, her hair a richer shade of red, even with the handful of grays that had crept in since the first battle with cancer. Now Sharon’s hair was kept short, a spiky, spunky cut that made her look at least a decade younger than her true age of sixty-four. Dylan felt a pang of irrational, but jabbing anger for the fact that a renewed round of chemo was going to ravage that glorious crown of thick copper hair.

She walked softly toward the bed, trying not to make any noise. But Sharon wasn’t sleeping. She rolled over as Dylan came close, her green eyes bright and warm.

“Oh…Dylan…hi, baby.” Her voice was feathery, the only real physical giveaway in her that she was ill. She reached out and took Dylan’s gloved hand in a tight hold.

“How was the trip, sweetheart? When did you get back?”

Shit. That’s right—she’d supposedly extended her stay in Europe. It seemed like a year had passed in the few days she’d been with Rio.

“Um, I just came home a little while ago,” Dylan answered, a partial lie.

She took a seat on the edge of the thin hospital room mattress, her hand still caught in her mother’s clutching grasp.

“I got a little concerned when you changed your plans so abruptly. Your e-mail that you were staying a bit longer by yourself was so short and cryptic. Why didn’t you call me?”

“I’m sorry,” Dylan said. The lie she had to keep hurt even worse knowing that she’d made her mom worry. “I would have called you if I could have. Oh, Mom…I’m sorry you don’t feel well.”

“I feel all right. Better, now that you’re here.” Sharon’s gaze was steady, level with a calm resolve. “But I’m dying, baby. You do understand that, don’t you?”

“Don’t say that.” Dylan squeezed her mom’s hand, then brought the cool fingers up to her lips and kissed them. “You’ll get through this, just like you did before. You’re going to be fine.”

The silence—the tender indulgence—was a palpable force in the room. Her mother wasn’t going to push the subject, but it was there, like a ghost lurking in the corner.

“Well, let’s talk about you instead. I want to hear all about what you’ve been doing, where you’ve been…tell me about everything you’ve seen while you were gone.”

Dylan glanced down, unable to hold her mother’s eyes if she couldn’t tell her the truth. And she couldn’t tell her the truth. Most of it would be unbelievable anyway, especially the part where Dylan confessed that she feared she was developing feelings for a dangerous, secretive man. A vampire for crissake. It sounded crazy just to think the words.

“Tell me more about that demon’s lair story you’re working on, baby. Those pictures you sent me were really something. When is your story going to run?”

“There is no story, Mom.” Dylan shook her head. She was sorry she ever mentioned it to her mother—or to anyone, for that matter. “Turns out that cave was just a cave,” she said, hoping to convince her. “Nothing strange about it.”

Sharon looked skeptical. “Really? But that tomb you found—and the incredible markings on the walls. What was all of that doing in there? It must have meant something.”

“Just a tomb. Probably a very old, tribal burial chamber of some kind.”

“And the picture you took of that man—”

“A vagrant, that’s all,” Dylan lied, hating every syllable that passed her lips. “The pictures made everything seem more important than it was. But there is no story, not even one suitable for a rag like Coleman Hogg’s paper. In fact, he let me go.”

“What? He didn’t!”

Dylan shrugged. “Yeah, he did. And it’s fine, really. I’ll find something else.”

“Well, that’s his loss. You were too good for that place, anyway. If it’s any consolation, I thought you did a great job on that story. Mr. Fasso thought so too. In fact, he mentioned he had contacts with some big news outlets in the city. He could probably find you something if I asked him to look into it.”

Oh, shit. A job interview was the last thing she needed to worry about. Not when the rest of what she’d just heard had put a knot of dread in her throat. “Mom—you didn’t tell him about that story, did you?”

“You’re darn right I did. I showed off your pictures too. I’m sorry, but I can’t help bragging about you. You’re my little star.”

“Who did you…Ah, God, Mom, please tell me you didn’t talk about it with a lot of people…did you?”

Sharon patted her hand. “Don’t be so shy. You’re very talented, Dylan, and you should be working on bigger, more hard-hitting stories. Mr. Fasso agrees with me. Gordon and I talked all about you on the river cruise a couple of nights ago.”

Dylan’s stomach was clenched over the thought of more people being privy to what she’d seen in that cave, but she couldn’t help noticing the little glint of joy in her mother’s eyes when she mentioned the man who founded the runaway shelter. “So, you’re on a first-name basis with Mr. Fasso now, are you?”

Sharon giggled, a sound so youthful and impish that Dylan forgot for a moment that she was sitting beside her mom in a hospital room in the cancer ward. “He’s very handsome, Dylan. And utterly charming. I’d always thought him to be so aloof, almost chilly, but he’s actually a very intriguing man.”

Dylan smiled. “You like him.”

“I do,” her mother confessed. “Just my luck I should find a real gentleman—who knows, maybe my true prince?—when it’s too late for me to fall in love.”

Dylan shook her head, hating to hear that kind of talk from her. “It’s never too late, Mom. You’re still young. You have a lot of living left to do.”

Shadows crossed her mother’s eyes as she looked up at Dylan from her recline on the bed. “You’ve always made me so very proud. You know that, don’t you, baby?”

Dylan nodded, throat constricted. “Yeah, I know. I could always count on you, Mom. You were the only one in my life that I could count on. Still are. Two musketeers, right?”

Sharon smiled at the mention of their long-running reference to themselves, but there were tears glistening in her eyes. “I want you to be all right, Dylan. With this, I mean. With my leaving you soon…with the fact that I’m going to die.”

“Mom—”

“Hear me out, please. I worry about you, sweetheart. I don’t want you to be alone.”

Dylan wiped at a hot tear that ran down the side of her face. “You shouldn’t be thinking about me now. Just focus on you, on getting better. You need to think positively. The biopsy might not—”

“Dylan. Stop, and listen to me.” Her mother sat up, a stubborn look that Dylan recognized very well coming over her pretty but fatigued features. “The cancer is back, worse than before. I know it. I feel it. And I’ve come to terms with it. I need to know that you will be able to come to terms with this too.”

Dylan looked down at their clasped hands, hers masked in yellow latex, her mother’s nearly translucent, the bones and tendons stark beneath the cool, too-pale skin.

“How long have you been looking after me, baby? And I don’t mean just since I’ve been sick. From the time you were a little girl, you were always worrying about me and trying your best to take care of me.”

Dylan shook her head. “We look out for each other. That’s how it’s always been—”

Gentle fingers came up under her chin, lifting her gaze. “You’re my child. I’ve lived for you, and for your brothers too, but you were always my constant. You shouldn’t have had to live for me, Dylan. You shouldn’t have had to be the adult in this relationship. You should have someone to take care of you.”

“I can take care of myself,” she murmured, not very convincingly when the tears were streaming down her cheeks now.

“Yes, you can. And you have. But you deserve something more out of life. I don’t want you to be afraid to live, or to love, Dylan. Can you promise me that?”

Before Dylan could say anything, the door swung open and one of the attending nurses came in with a couple new bags of fluids. “How we doing, Sharon? How’s your pain right now?”

“I could use a little something,” she said, her eyes sliding to Dylan as if she’d been hiding her discomfort until now.

Which, of course, she had been. Everything was much worse than Dylan wanted to accept. She got up from the bed and let the nurse do her thing. After she was gone, Dylan came back over to her mother’s side. It was so hard not to break down, to be the strong one as she looked down into the soft green eyes and saw that the spark in them—the fight that needed to be there—was gone.

“Come here and give me a hug, baby.”

Dylan leaned down and wrapped her arms around the delicate shoulders, unable to dismiss the fragility of her mother’s entire being. “I love you, Mom.”

“And I love you.” Sharon sighed as she settled back against the pillow. “I’m tired, sweetheart. I need to rest now.”

“Okay,” Dylan answered, her voice thick. “I’ll just stay here with you while you sleep.”

“No, you won’t.” Her mother shook her head. “I won’t have you sitting here worrying about me. I’m not going to leave you tonight, or the next day, or even next week—I promise. But you need to go home now, Dylan. I want that for you.”

Home,
Dylan thought, as her mother drifted off to a drug-induced sleep. The word felt oddly empty to her when she pictured her apartment and the few possessions she had there. That wasn’t home to her. If she had to go somewhere now, somewhere she felt safe and protected, that pitiful hole in the wall wasn’t it. Never really had been.

Dylan rose from the bed and turned to leave the room. As she wiped at her teary eyes, her gaze lit on a shadowed face and broad shoulders silhouetted by the hallway lights outside.

Rio.

He’d found her, followed her there.

Where her every instinct should have been to run away from him, Dylan went to him instead. She pulled open the door and met him outside her mother’s room, incapable of speaking as she wrapped her arms around his solid warmth and wept softly into his chest.

CHAPTER
Twenty-Three

H
e hadn’t expected her to run to him when she saw him standing there.

Now that Dylan was in his arms, her body trembling as she cried, Rio found himself at a complete loss. He’d worked up a healthy amount of anger and suspicion in the time it took him to track her across the city. His head was ringing from all the noise, and from the endless, overcrowded presence of humans everywhere he looked. His temples were screaming from the bright lights, all of his senses battering him from within.

But none of that mattered in the long moments he stood there, holding Dylan, feeling her shake with bone-deep fear and anguish. She was hurting, and Rio felt an overwhelming need to protect her. He didn’t want to see her in pain like this.

Madre de Dios,
but he hated seeing her this way.

He caressed her delicate back, pressed his mouth to the top of her head where it nestled beneath his chin, murmuring quiet words of reassurance. Feeble gestures, but all he could think to do for her.

“I’m so afraid I’m going to lose her,” she whispered. “Oh, God, Rio…I’m terrified.”

He didn’t have to guess at who Dylan was talking about. The patient sleeping in the adjacent room had the same creamy coloring, the same fiery-hued hair as the younger version Rio was holding in his embrace.

Dylan tilted her tear-streaked face up at him. “Will you take me out of here, please?”

“I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.” Rio smoothed his thumbs over her cheeks, erasing the wet tracks. “Do you want to go home?”

Her sad little laugh sounded so broken, lost, somehow. “Can we just…walk for a little while?”

“Yeah. Sure.” He nodded, tucking her under his arm. “Let’s get out of here.”

They walked in silence, down to the elevator and then out of the hospital to the warm night outside. He didn’t know where to take her, so he just walked with her. A few blocks up from the hospital was a footbridge that led to the East River promenade. They crossed it, and as they strolled along the water’s edge, Rio felt people staring at him as they passed on the walkway.

There were furtive glances at his scars, and more than one wondering look that seemed to question what he was doing with a beauty like Dylan. A damn good question, and one he didn’t have a sensible answer for at the moment. He’d brought her into the city on a mission—one that sure as hell didn’t allow for detours like this.

Dylan slowed at last, pausing at the iron rail to look over the water. “My mom got really sick last fall. She thought it was bronchitis. It wasn’t. The verdict was lung cancer, even though she never smoked a day in her life.” Dylan went quiet for a long moment. “She’s dying. That’s what she just told me tonight.”

“I’m sorry,” Rio said, drawing up next to her.

He wanted to touch her, but he wasn’t sure she needed his consolation—wasn’t sure she’d accept it. Instead he settled for touching a strand of her loose red hair, easier to pretend he was catching the errant tendril from blowing into her face on the light summer breeze.

“I wasn’t supposed to be on that trip to Europe. It was going to be her big adventure with her friends, but she wasn’t well enough to go so I took her place. I wasn’t supposed to be there. I never would have set foot in that damn cave. I never would have met you.”

“Now you wish you could undo it.” He didn’t ask the question, merely stated what had to be simple fact.

“I do wish I could undo it, for her. I wish she could have had her adventure. I wish she wasn’t sick.” Dylan turned her head and looked at him. “But I don’t wish I could undo meeting you.”

Rio was stunned silent by her admission. He brought his hand up to the soft line of her jaw, looking down into a face so fair and beautiful it stole his breath. And the way she was gazing up at him—as if he were a man worthy of her, a man she could love…

She exhaled a quiet, unsteady breath. “I would take it all back in a second, Rio. But not this. Not you.”

Ah, Cristo.

Before he could tell himself it was a bad idea, Rio bent his head down and kissed her. It was a gentle meeting of their mouths, a tender brush of lips that shouldn’t have made him burn like it did. He reveled in the sweet taste of her, in the way she felt so right in his arms.

He shouldn’t want this so badly. He shouldn’t feel this need, this tender affection that was kindling inside him every time he thought about Dylan.

He shouldn’t be pulling her closer to him, splaying his fingers into the warm silk of her hair as he brought her deeper into his embrace, lost in her kiss.

It took him a long time to break it. But even after he lifted his head, he couldn’t stop caressing her face. He couldn’t let go of her.

A group of teenagers shuffled past them on the promenade, rowdy human boys in clothes several sizes too big for them, talking loudly and shoving at one another as they went. Rio kept his eyes on the youths, suspicion spiking as he watched the gang pause near the railing and take turns spitting over the edge. They didn’t seem overtly dangerous, but they did appear to be the types perpetually ready for trouble.

“Demetrio?”

Rio glanced down at Dylan, confused. “Hmm?”

“Am I getting close? Your real name, I mean…is it Demetrio?”

He smiled, and couldn’t resist kissing the freckled tip of her nose. “No, that’s not it.”

“Okay. Well, then, is it…Arrio?” she guessed, beaming up at him in the moonlight as she stepped slightly out of his arms. “Oliverio? Denny Terrio?”

“Eleuterio,” he said.

Her eyes widened. “Ay-lay-oo-what?”

“My full name is Eleuterio de la Noche Atanacio.”

“Wow. I guess that does make ‘Dylan’ seem a bit mundane, huh?”

Rio chuckled. “Nothing about you is mundane, I assure you.”

Her smile was surprisingly shy. “So, what does it mean—a gorgeous name like that?”

“A loose translation would be ‘he who is free and of the night everlasting.’”

Dylan sighed. “That’s beautiful, Rio. My God, your mother must have adored you to give you an amazing name like that.”

“It wasn’t my mother’s doing. She was killed when I was very young. The name came later, from a Breed family living in a Darkhaven in my homeland. They found me, and took me in as one of their own.”

“What happened to your mother? I mean, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t—I know, I ask too many questions,” she said, shrugging apologetically.

“No, I don’t mind telling you,” he said, finding it remarkable that he really meant that.

As a rule, he hated talking about his past. No one in the Order knew the details surrounding his awful beginnings, not even Nikolai, whom he considered his closest friend. There’d been no need to talk about it with Eva, since they’d met in the Spanish Darkhaven where Rio was raised and she knew his ignoble history.

Eva had politely chosen to ignore the ugly facts surrounding his birth and the years he’d spent as a foundling, killing because he had to, because he didn’t know any better. The young savage he’d been before he was brought into the Darkhaven and shown how to live like something better than the animal he’d had to become in order to survive on his own.

Rio didn’t want to see Dylan look upon him in fear or disgust, but a bigger part of him wanted to give her the truth. If she could look at his outward scars and not despise him, maybe she would be strong enough to see the ones that ruined him on the inside too.

“My mother lived on the outskirts of a very small, rural village in Spain. She was just a girl—perhaps sixteen—when she was raped by a vampire who’d gone Rogue.” Rio kept his voice low to avoid being overheard, but the nearest humans—the group of adolescent thugs still amusing themselves several yards down the promenade—were paying no attention anyway. “The Rogue fed on her as he violated her, but my mother fought back. She bit him, apparently. Enough of his blood entered her mouth, and, subsequently, her body. Since she was a Breedmate, the combination of blood and seed resulted in a pregnancy.”

“You,” Dylan whispered. “Oh, God, Rio. How terrible for her to go through that. But at least she had you in the end.”

“It was a wonder she didn’t rout me out of her womb,” he said, looking out at the black, glistening river and remembering his mother’s anguish over the abomination she’d given birth to. “My mother was a simple country girl. She wasn’t educated, not in the traditional sense, or in life matters. She lived alone in a cottage in the forest, cast out by her kin years before I came along.”

“What for?”

“Manos del diablo,”
Rio replied. “They feared her devil’s hands. You remember how I told you that all females born with the Breedmate mark also have special gifts…psychic abilities of some sort?”

Dylan nodded. “Yes.”

“Well, my mother’s gift was dark. With a touch and a focused thought, she could deliver death.” Rio scoffed under his breath and held up his own lethal hands.
“Manos del diablo.”

Dylan was quiet for a moment, studying him in silence. “You have that ability as well?”

“A Breedmate mother passes down many traits to her sons: hair, skin, and eye color…as well as her psychic gifts. I think if my mother had known exactly what was growing in her belly, she would have killed me long before I was born. She did try at least once, after the fact.”

Dylan’s brow creased, and she gently placed her hand over his where it rested on the iron grate. “What happened?”

“It’s one of my first vivid memories,” Rio confessed. “You see, Breed offspring are born with small, sharp fangs. Right out of the womb, they need blood to survive. And darkness. My mother must have figured all of this out on her own, and tolerated it, because somehow I made it out of infancy. To me, it was perfectly natural to avoid the sun and to take my mother’s wrist for nourishment. I think I must have been about four years old when I first noticed that she cried every time she had to feed me. She despised me—despised what I was—yet I was all she had.”

Dylan stroked the back of his hand. “I can’t even imagine how it must have been for you. For both of you.”

Rio shrugged. “I knew no other way to live. But my mother did. On this particular day, with our cottage shutters bolted tight to ward off daylight, my mother offered me her wrist. When I took it, I felt her other hand come up around the back of my head. She held it there, and the pain jolted me like a bolt of lightning arrowing into my skull. I cried out and opened my eyes. She was weeping, great, terrible sobs as she fed me and held my head in her hand.”

“Jesus Christ,” Dylan whispered, her shock evident.

“She meant to kill you with her touch?”

Rio recalled his own marrow-deep shock when he made that same realization for himself—a child watching in terror as the person he trusted above all others tried to end his life. “She couldn’t go through with it,” he murmured flatly. “Whatever her reasons, she drew her hand away and ran out of the cottage. I didn’t see her again for two days. By the time she came back, I was starving and terrified. I thought she’d abandoned me for good.”

“She was afraid too,” Dylan pointed out, and Rio was glad not to hear any trace of pity for him in her voice. Her fingers were warm and reassuring as she took his hand in her grasp. The hand he’d just told her could wield death with a touch. “The both of you must have felt so isolated and alone.”

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose we did. It all ended about a year later. Some of the village men saw my mother and took an interest in her, apparently. They showed up one day at the cottage while we were sleeping. There were three of them. They kicked in the door and went after her. They must have heard the rumors about her because the first thing they did was bind her hands so she couldn’t touch them.”

Dylan’s breath caught in her throat. “Oh, Rio…”

“They dragged her outside. I ran after them, trying to help her, but the sunlight was intense. It blinded me for a few seconds that felt like an eternity while my mother was screaming, begging them not to harm her or her son.”

Rio could still picture the trees—everything so green and lush, the sky so blue overhead…an explosion of colors he’d only seen in darker, muted shades when he was out in the safety of night. And he could still see the men, three large human men, taking turns on a defenseless female while her son watched, frozen by terror and the limitations of his five-year-old body.

“They beat her, calling her ugly things:
Maldecido. Manos del diablo. La puta de infierno.
Something snapped in me when I saw her blood run red on the ground. I leaped on one of the men. I was so furious I wanted him to die in agony…and he did. Once I understood what I’d done, I went after the next man. I bit him in the throat and fed on him as my touch slowly killed him.”

Dylan was staring at him now, saying nothing. Standing there, so very still.

“The last one looked up and saw what I’d done. He called me the same things he called my mother, then added two more names I’d never heard before:
Comedor de la sangre. Monstruo.
Blood-eater. Monster.” Rio exhaled a brittle laugh. “Until that moment, I didn’t know what I was. But as I killed the last of my mother’s attackers and watched as she lay dying in the sunlit grass, some knowledge buried deep within me seemed to come awake and rise up. I finally understood that I was different, and what that meant.”