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Kambyses flickered away and reappeared behind his assailant. The blast still echoed in the foyer when the weapon itself flew off in one direction while Garrett jerked into another. He catapulted up and back, arcing across the room like a misshapen cannonball and, with the wet crack of bone, smashed into the wall of the second floor landing. He bounced off and tumbled to the floor right in front of Monica as she limped out of the hall.
Jackson and his burden bolted for the door.
Or tried to.
Three steps into his flight, he hit that invisible wall again. His shoulders hunched, and panic etched his face as he turned back. The indignant anger he cultivated with such care drained out of him faster than wine from a broken bottle.
Kambyses stood before Dominique, bristling with displeasure. Dark blood smeared the ashen neck, but the wound itself had finished knitting back together. Garrett had fired too early. Half a second later and the bullet would have struck Kambyses’s brain and disabled him long enough to gain a true advantage. As it was, all the hunter accomplished was to stoke the powerful blood-drinker’s twisted temper.
Useless. Everything they did to save Cassidy had been useless. Wasted efforts that risked her life over and over again. Bijou had advised him to stop fighting and find peace in accepting the inevitable. He glanced at her body. Had she taken her own advice, she might still live.
And nothing else would have changed.
Nothing at all.
Dominique’s fate settled on him with the weight of a world. Slowly, he sank to his knees.
Cassidy would be made tonight as Kambyses commanded. The only choice that remained to Dominique was whether this would happen with his blood or Serge’s. From the corner of his eye, he caught sight of his mad friend, who stared at him as though watching a ghost.
It was no choice at all.
It never had been.
Dominique stared at his sire’s spotless leather loafers and waited. The shoes moved aside, momentarily replaced by Jackson’s combat boots. Then Cassidy floated into view, unconscious and swathed in a blanket. Jackson took care to settle her head, which looked as fragile as an egg in his strong, tanned hands. Hands that belonged to a man who loved her still. A dead man walking. A man who had nothing to lose—and knew it.
He made only a passing note of the little device he saw hidden in Jackson’s grip, but his gut tightened with both anticipation and apprehension. He met Jackson’s blank look. Whatever the human was thinking of doing, he didn’t think about it much at all. He felt it, moved by instinct, kept the idea away from the menace controlling his mind. But that instinct would also tell him he couldn’t survive such a gambit. Not without help.
Dominique inclined his head in unspoken agreement. “Merci.”
After that, everything happened both very fast and in slow-motion. His heart drummed in his veins, providing the rhythm, beat by frantic beat, for the macabre dance that followed.
Jackson got up…stepped back…raised his hand.
Dominique reached over his shoulders…found the handles of his swords.
Jackson pointed the full-spectrum pocket light…activated it.
Kambyses roared.
Dominique hooked his fingers under the guard of the katana and, with a flick of his wrist, shot the blade straight up toward the ceiling.
His other hand curled around the wakizashi’s hilt and freed it from its sheath. He could almost feel the embedded dragon rise to meet him.
Kambyses rushed blindly toward the light, toward Jackson, eagle talon hands outstretched.
Dominique launched forward over Cassidy’s prone body, twisted in mid-air beneath Kambyses, and swung the razor-sharp blade up and around, hard.
The impact of honed steel against primeval bone vibrated through his hand and elbow and into his shoulder.
Shimmering sheets of blood fanned into space.
An explosive kick to Kambyses’s midsection sent him flying away from Jackson.
As the thump of Kambyses’s impact reverberated in the walls, Dominique reached for the whistling sound of the katana returning. He caught the hilt without looking at it, instead watching Kambyses drop to the floor, nearly on top of Serge, who darted away with a yelp.
When the ancient blood-drinker hit the floor, he tried to get up, but…his legs were gone, reduced to stumps squelching blood.
Jackson sucked in a ragged breath and turned off his tiny light.
