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“Enculé! Then help me.”
“Not me. I am only the witness.”
Dominique growled and took a menacing step. Serge held up a hand. “You know, blood-child. You know what you need to do. You always do.”
Something in this earnest pronouncement gave him pause. Did he? True, he had no hope of finding—much less rescuing—Cassidy on his own, but if he couldn’t, then no one else could either. No one, except maybe—
Dominique straightened with shock. “Non.”
Serge plastered his wet hair back against his skull with both hands and lifted one shoulder in a there-you-have-it shrug. “You see? You know.”
“Never,” Dominique hissed.
“You know what you need to do. You will find a way.”
“And you know what you need to do with this useless thing, right?” He kicked the side of the little sailboat hard enough for the whole thing to bounce a foot off the ground. “Find a way, vieux fou,” he commanded and darted away.
Dominique left the drenched leathers and sand-clogged boots on the front porch and entered his home. Lights blazed. The TV blared. The air stank of Chinese takeout. For a moment, he didn’t know who the large man on the sofa was. So much had happened since he invited Cassidy’s father to move in—to be there for his daughter when the inevitable happened to Dominique. Now that the unthinkable had transpired instead, the last thing he wanted to deal with was an ignorant human in his lair.
A piece of food slipped off Gil’s chopsticks and plopped onto the faded automotive logo emblazoned on his white T-shirt. He swiped at it with a paper napkin as he got up, uncertainly eyeing Dominique’s nakedness. To his credit, however, that was not his primary concern. “Where’s my daughter?”
Dominique opened his mouth, but the impulse to compel the nuisance to leave evaporated. Sending away her father would have been an admission that Cassidy was truly gone. “She is traveling for work,” he said. “She will be back as soon as she can.”
“Will she now? Well, then. She might have mentioned—”
“You are alone in this house,” Dominique continued, this time lacing his voice with compulsion. “No one else is here with you.”
Gil blinked and looked around as if he heard a noise he couldn’t place. He shook his head and sat back down, took a swig of beer from a bottle, and returned to stabbing his food with the chopsticks.
Standing there, naked and raw, Dominique sensed himself becoming invisible to more than just this one man. All he had ever treasured, the entire mortal world, seemed to move on without him. Before the emptiness could overwhelm him, he moved up the stairs into the main bedroom.
The cherry-wood bed was drenched in her honeyed-fruit smell and the memories they had made there. Her personal items—the carryall on a chair, the picture of herself with her mother on the dresser, the clothes discarded on the foot of the bed, a pair of worn sandals on the floor—all awaited her imminent return.
In the bathroom, he stepped into the roomy shower of turquoise tile, and turned on the water. They had made some memories here too, he and Cassidy.
The spray turned scalding hot against his face and scalp. He ignored it, shaking all over again with the memory of her wilted body hanging in the arms of an eternal hunger, a beast like no other. Where had it all gone so wrong? The first night he encountered Bijou? Did he still have a choice then? What was it that stopped him from confiding in Cassidy when he wanted nothing more than to be one with her? Some vague fear of something completely unjustified? A lack of trust in her?
Or in himself?
“Fool, fool, fool!” He pounded the heel of his hand at the slick wall and heard several tiles crack. Crack the way his world cracked—even shattered—because of his own blind stubbornness.
No, not stubbornness.
Fear, he thought and turned off the water. He lived in fear since the moment he had been turned. Fear of the sun, of his sire, of those stronger than him. Fear of losing himself. Fear of losing Cassidy.
Fear.
It dictated everything he did.
Toweling off, he returned to the bedroom and stared at the empty bed. What did all this fear get him? Kambyses had him all but chained again, and Cassidy was beyond reach. Fear had brought him precisely what he feared most.
His body heavy with grief, Dominique sat at the edge of the mattress the way he often did to watch her sleep. He caressed the comforter and found a pillow. Pressing it to his face, he closed his eyes and inhaled her fragrance. The loss of her hit him with a physical blow to the gut that doubled him over, curling him into a fetal ball around the pillow.
He put her in this situation, and he had no hope of getting her out of it, fire-blood or not. Even if he could track down Apokryphos, he would have to find the yacht at night. The second he set foot aboard, he was as good as captive, and Cassidy, having outlived her obvious purpose of luring him, would be as good as dead.
That he needed help was beyond dispute. Where to get it was less clear. Serge wouldn’t interfere, nor could he help, not against a blood-drinker as strong as Kambyses. And Bijou claimed not to be his enemy, but she certainly wasn’t his ally either. That left—
Humans.
