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Silence.
Then Monica realized what had happened and screamed.
Kambyses put his hands to the tile, raised his body up on his arms, and sped toward Dominique. Or rather, toward his severed legs. Dominique leapt to kick the limbs away from Cassidy. With a bestial growl, Kambyses scurried after them. But walking on his hands was far from natural for him. While he still moved superhumanly fast, Dominique had no trouble keeping track of him.
The katana hummed as it slid through Kambyses’s left shoulder and sent him crashing to the floor. Dominique kicked the arm away. Without missing a beat, Kambyses rolled across the floor in a flurry of motion and tangled hair. This time Dominique waited until he reached for one of his legs before he struck, taking the other arm as well.
With the toe of his boot, he rolled the dismembered body onto its back. Then he slammed his foot on the torso and set the long sword’s razor edge against Kambyses’s throat. Through the shroud of hair covering his sire’s face, he saw the glint of the beast’s tar-black eyes and the ferocious fangs that had ended countless lives.
One flick of his wrist. That was all it would take to destroy five-thousand years of misery. That was all it would take to destroy potentially hundreds of thousands of blood-drinkers—and himself.
A shudder rippled his flesh. Dominique removed the blade and swallowed hard. The spilled blood’s cedar smoke smell choked the air, his lungs, his mind. All around him, an invisible forest stood engulfed in flame.
The beast craved to live, and just like it wouldn’t let Dominique remain exposed in the light of day, it would not allow him to end the source of them all.
“Let go of me, you waste of space!” shrieked an outraged female.
Dominique became aware of the room and its inhabitants again. Garrett Striker had captured one of Monica Sol’s wrists behind her back and kept her pinned against himself with an arm locked across her shoulders. In her free hand, she clutched one of Kambyses’s severed arms. Burgundy splatters covered the tiles at her feet. Fat streaks of burgundy also crisscrossed the room—and Cassidy.
He froze, terrified that the potent blood could have hit her just right—as his own hit Jackson earlier—to cause her to ingest it and finish her. She wouldn’t be strong enough to survive the fire-blood, but she didn’t writhe in agony as she surely would have if that were the case. She moved only a little with the encouragement of Jackson, who bent over her.
“I’ve got this,” Garrett announced and then gasped as Monica elbowed his no doubt injured ribs. He cringed and doubled over, releasing her. Off she went, hobbling away to retrieve the dropped arm and return it to Kambyses. She paid no attention to Dominique until he snapped up the katana in front of her, and she stopped just short of running herself through.
Her eyes shimmered with impotent rage. “You unspeakable monster. How could you do this?”
This, Dominique could not argue. It was monstrous. But it was hardly the most monstrous thing he had done on account of this ancient beast that had stolen his life, caused him to murder his family and lover, hunted him, and manipulated him at every turn.
“Step away,” he commanded in a soft growl. If any of the limbs strewn about found their way back to their rightful place, they would reattach in moments, gaining Kambyses an advantage Dominique could ill afford.
Monica took a step back, her sense of self-preservation at last overriding the hold Kambyses had on her, but she wasn’t done.
Dominique saw the move coming a second before she tossed the arm in Kambyses’s direction. He sent it flying with the side of his sword. Beneath his foot, Kambyses arched his back and trembled, fighting to free himself and move a body which could do neither.
“Release me!” he roared. “Restore me! Now!”
The compulsion surged in the air. Dominique took his boot off Kambyses before he knew what he was doing. Monica scurried for one arm, Garrett stumbled toward the other, coughing and holding his side. Jackson climbed to his feet and turned toward the legs.
“Restore him and you all die,” Dominique shouted, letting his rising panic fly like an arrow in a compulsion of his own. He had no desire to kill these mortals—except perhaps Garrett—but if that was what it would take to prevent Kambyses from being made whole again, that was what he would do. Jackson’s step faltered as his head swiveled toward Dominique. Then he ran again, but with a different purpose. He tackled Monica and pinned both her wrists behind her back. She shrieked tear-soaked venom at the top of her lungs.
Garrett shook his head as though trying to shake loose from a sticky spider web.
“Some fucking help here?” Jackson called as Monica, fueled by her master’s blood, thrashed like an enraged leopard, pulling them both to the floor. One of her hands got free and went straight for Jackson’s eyes. With a yelp, he released her.
Garrett ripped open the small utility pack on his nephew’s back and pulled out the roll of duct tape.
“No,” Kambyses said, and a fresh wave of vertigo rippled through the room. Before he could utter another word, Dominique ground his boot heel into his sire’s voice box, silencing him. That wouldn’t stop Kambyses from casting psychic webs of compulsion, but at least he couldn’t reinforce them with his resonant voice.
Monica slipped in a smear of blood, and stumbled back to her feet when the vampire hunters caught up with her, each grabbing one arm and duct-taping them together behind her back. They did the same for her ankles. Her screams were worthy of gruesome torture, but they fell silent when Garrett slapped one last strip of tape across her mouth.
“Victorious at last,” Dominique said. “I was wondering what it might take for you two to accomplish anything other than disaster.”
They turned to face him, and something about what they saw gave them pause. He couldn’t blame them. A blood-drinker armed with bloodied swords standing over a dismembered body would have made even Dominique reevaluate his odds of survival.
“That thing’s still alive, isn’t it,” Garrett said when he rediscovered his voice.
“And will remain so until Cassidy has recovered,” Dominique countered with more certainty than he felt.
“Cassidy,” Jackson said, jogging back to where she lay.
