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“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.”
The expression on the narrow face hovered somewhere between wonder and incredulity. The twin flames in Dominique’s eyes mirrored in Aubrey’s obsidian stare. “And…if I submit to you?”
“The dark hunger will leave you.” And if he didn’t…
“Then I submit.” The words were a mere breath in the wind. Slowly, he tilted his head to one side, exposing his jugular in an invitation he may well never have issued before. More than an offer of blood and submission, it was the offer of his mind, his memories, his very life, a surrender of his body and his soul. It was not an offer made lightly, and Dominique took care to accept with all the respect due his new subject. As though welcoming a beloved friend, he embraced him and pierced the artery.
Aubrey’s blood was vibrant with the sweetness of spring, full of warm grass and dewy blossoms. When the serum in Dominique’s bite found Aubrey’s brain, he dropped into a mind resonant with a century and a half of memories. A man of the Victorian age emerged, a gentleman and a trained barrister in his queen’s service. Renowned for his diplomatic skill, Aubrey had been sent on missions around the world. It was in Rome where a vampire found him and invited him into the night without fully explaining what that would entail. Aubrey had sought to wield his new powers of persuasion in service to his queen. Instead, he wielded it to appease a hunger that horrified him. After a century of guilt and torment and the resulting ridicule from his sire and other blood-drinkers, he had turned his back on them all. Now he maintained a solitary existence, convinced that he was fit for no company but his own.
You are fit for me, Dominique spoke into his mind, compassion swelling his heart.
Aubrey’s arms shook as they came around him, and his hands fisted into the leather jacket.
Long after he had stopped feeding on the blood, Dominique still held him, feeding on Aubrey’s roiling uncertainty and hope, his own thoughts in turmoil. How many like Aubrey were out there? How many skulking in the shadows, fighting to live by a moral code opposed to everything they craved?
“I have a gift for you,” Dominique murmured when Aubrey at last loosened his grip. Baring his left wrist, he ran the nail of his right thumb deep into his flesh. Blood welled, dark and glistening as he held the wound out to Aubrey. This was where the magic happened. Or at least he hoped it would. He had re-sired only one other, Serge.
Aubrey gripped Dominique’s hand and ran his tongue over the injury just before it sealed again. The blood was only a few drops and nowhere near as volatile as Kambyses’s had been, but it was enough. It found the serum in Aubrey’s veins and ignited, tuning him into the new Lord of Night.
He gasped at the sensation of fire flashing through his flesh, and held on to Dominique’s hand, eyes screwed shut, swaying. A long moan slipped past the bloodstained lips, and Dominique knew that Aubrey Wainwright would never again be part of an amorphous gathering of ghosts. The Victorian gentleman blood-drinker was becoming a distinct entity of light in Dominique’s awareness.
“I feel it leaving,” Aubrey said, awed. “The darkness. It’s leaving.” When he opened his eyes, small flames of gold flickered in their depths. Moment to moment they grew until they blazed in the night.
Dominique didn’t trust his own voice. So he only grinned and planted a kiss on Aubrey’s forehead.Welcome,mon ami.Welcome to my kingdom.
2
The Gift
Present day...
Thehouse’slandlinerangso rarely that Cassidy Chandler associated the sound with nothing good. Mrs. Havashand, she guessed, sitting back in her leather executive chair and stretching stiff shoulders. No doubt Brinkley had left more corpses in her backyard. It was tempting to let the call go to voicemail, but a glance at the caller ID made her grab the extension.
“Good afternoon, ma’am,” said the brisk male voice on the other end. “This is the front gate. There’s a Jackson Striker here to see you, but we don’t have him on our list.”
Her thoughts skittering to a startled halt. She stared out the second-floor window, which overlooked an expansive backyard sloping down to the Intracoastal. Hard to decide if it was being called “ma’am” that threw her off or just the fact she even lived in a neighborhood that had a security gate staffed with round-the-clock armed guards. The maintenance crew and maid service had permanent passes. So few others visited during the day, she tended to forget. And at night…well, at night, none of that mattered.
“Ma’am?”
