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The wet heat of her mouth on his, and the suggestive movement of her hips, made it clear what she imagined he might expect of her. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. With no heartbeat in his body, physical passion had long been a thing of the past. Blood was the only actual pleasure that remained for him.

“I could be your eyes and ears in the daytime,” she said when he ignored her overture in favor of burrowing into her neck. “I could help you find Dominique.”

This made him pause, then draw back. She gazed up at him, her face flushed but completely serious. The offer was genuine—free of compulsion or even accidental influence because that possibility had not even remotely occurred to him.

“I will never allow you to know of me during the day.” What was he saying? She would never know of him again, day or night, and she might well be dead before she could utter another word.

Or not.

“Then compel me however you need to be comfortable. Anything. Just let me be with you. Let me be there for you. Since I’m willing, I’m sure you wouldn’t have to make a zombie out of me like that guy who brought the wine. At least, I hope not.”

This was true. Her mind would need only the lightest touch. But gods! An aware mortal for a companion? Was he as desperate as Nico now, to break all his own rules and risk his life so recklessly? He didn’t think so. Not at all. Which didn’t mean the proposition didn’t intrigue him.

With his rising emotions, his vision expanded further, bringing the soft pink light of her life force into brilliant relief while darkening his eyes to the full black of his truest self. With no small satisfaction, he heard her breath hitch. She saw him. Monica knew as much about him as any living thing ever had, and her submission to him was as quiet and eloquent as the turning away of her face to expose her vulnerable neck.

The last thread of restraint snapped. Kambyses clutched her against him, drove his teeth deep. The blood came, rich with heat and wine and lust. In mighty pulls, he inhaled it into his starving body, and when he flowed into her mind, he inhaled that, too.

Not even a whisper of trepidation met him, no hint of deception, nor the touch of any other blood-drinker’s meddling to account for her strange willingness to confront such lethal danger. Danger she was very much aware of. As Apokryphos shivered with the power of her engines rumbling to life, she knew he held her life in his hands, that life as she knew it was over. Yet, her faith in her ability to survive remained undaunted, worthy of any warrior.

She knew him—and refused to fear him.

So be it. Fear was not the only spice he enjoyed.

While he held her, drinking her life, he spun for her a new reality based on her most private fantasies. In her lucid dying dream, she knew passionate kisses and sweet caresses. Knew heat and moisture and penetration. She knew sure hands, hard strokes, and frantic rhythms, raw ecstasy that had her trembling and spasming and moaning his name.

His name.

Not the name of the human man she had bedded for months now. Nor the name of the friend’s husband she had pined over for years. Not even the imagined name of some exotic, faceless stranger.

Him. Kambyses.

He was her fantasy.

And when Kambyses discovered he had stopped feeding but continued to hold her, adrift in the wordless rapture of her acceptance, he knew he would be her reality, too.

Excerpt: Dark Reign of Forever

Dark Destinies, Book 3

1 – Kingdom of Night

Two years ago…

Most nights and most places, those who met the Lord of Night never saw him. To those who knew him, the ability to slide past the awareness of anyone near him was Dominique Marchant’s most disquieting talent. To Dominique, this skill was still disorienting, even after three months. It was instinctive and often rendered him invisible by accident. All it took was a wish for solitude and it was done.

Only Cassidy was immune. Being bound to her human soul as he was, she was always aware of him, which was as it should be. She was his conscience and his humanity.

At the moment, she was also over fifty miles away. Yet, Dominique still heard her whisper encouragement in their telepathic bond, overshadowing his nerves, which thrummed like an antenna. He had learned to dial it down, but the low-grade hum had suffused him ever since he became the center of the dark web. All the blood drinkers in existence were tethered to him, legions of vampires just beyond his reach, like a swarm of ghosts. They didn’t become concrete individuals in his awareness until Cassidy helped him track them down, or he re-sired them in a ritual exchange of blood.

Presently, he sensed one of these ghosts slipping over the locked entry gate at the mouth of the pier on which Dominique stood. He saw it, too, as a single bright white blood-drinker aura standing there just out of cover. The visitor looked around, unsure.

“I am here,” Dominique said, letting the salty wind carry his words to the supernatural ears.

The blood-drinker’s head swiveled toward him.

Dominique shifted his attitude from solitude to welcome. On the pier’s far end, his guest froze, staring, no doubt questioning his own eyes. Or fearing for his immortal life. Dominique couldn’t blame him. If someone had barged into his thoughts and talked to him from out of nowhere, he, too, would have run blindly into the night. When the strange blood-drinker had realized that he couldn’t outrun the bizarre voice in his head, he started asking questions, and Dominique suggested they meet. That had been two nights ago.

Two nights for a solitary vampire to question his sanity, to wonder if he would find anything or anyone at all at the end of the Lake Worth pier at one in the morning. Now, not only had he found someone, that someone appeared to melt out of the ocean mist.