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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.”
