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“Right.” The friend rubbed his face with one hand, pulling at his chin, frustrated. “And you are?”
“Dominique.”
“What are you?”
The pebbles turned to concrete. His mind emptied.
“Fuck.” He slid off the table. “Fine. Let me remind you.” Before Dominique could fathom what he was about, the friend produced a pocket knife, unfolded it, and ran the edge over the pad of his thumb. The welling blood sparkled with luminous beauty, and the meaty metallic smell of it hit Dominique with tangible force.
“Anything?”
He swallowed hard and hunched his shoulders against a sudden chill. He didn’t move as the friend pressed the injured thumb to Dominique’s mouth. Blood seeped between his lips. The concrete in his mind crumbled. The blockage disappeared.
Darkness spewed forth.
Dominique reared back and gasped. Reality crystallized around him in all its terror and fury.
The blood-drinkers he had been too weak to fight.
His sister among them.
The half-asleep fog he had awakened to.
The darkness he escaped—and was still trying to escape.
The darkness that defined him.
“Je m’souviens,” he said. “I’m back.”
Jackson retreated several steps and sucked the blood off his thumb. “About fucking time.”
Dominique doubled over, but his stomach only rolled for a second or two before settling down. He had consumed no solid food this day. His hands looked thin as they clasped his knees, and his whole body felt fragile as glass.
Hunger gnawed at him…even though he had fed.
He looked up. “Did I take their lives? The men you brought?”
“You remember what happened?”
“Maybe.” He straightened. His leather jacket flapped open over his bare chest, and a pair of cargo pants rode far too low on his skinny hips. His heart pushed sand through his veins. He would need more. Much, much more. “Like fading dreams. Nightmares,” he amended. “You came for me.”
“I wanted to get Geneviève. I kinda needed you.”
Renewed despair hit him. He tried to sift through Jackson’s memories of the day, but couldn’t quite muster the necessary focus. Still, on some level, he already knew. “We did not find her.”
Jackson shook his head. “No. You were a useless zombie today. I tried to get you to break down those doors, but you didn’t have the strength. It was better for us to get as far away from there as possible before we got anywhere close to sunset.”
“Did you try to stop me from taking lives, too?”
“Yes.”
Dominique remembered the blood’s scalding heat in his belly. So much blood. “You failed.”
Jackson’s jaw tightened. “With the first one, yes. The other two ran when they figured out what was going on.” He paused. “I don’t know if you heard me or not when you tracked them down, but you stopped before they were too far gone.”
“I heard you,” Dominique said softly. Jackson’s cursed demands had been desperate enough to reach him, even as the blood filled him. He had taken too many lives before becoming Lord of Night, but none since. Any life sacrificed to sustain him was a life too many. “Merci.”
“You listened to me when I told you to compel them to think their friend died of an accident. They carried him to the surface with us and then let us drive away. And here we are.” He waved a hand at the wilderness and picnic tables.
