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You may need family before all this is over, Dominique said silently, inviting her to reply in kind in case sensitive ears waited beyond his perception.

“I have no family,” she spat. “He’s dead to me.” A moment later, he felt her recoil at her own words as she recalled that his own beloved father was literally dead and why.

She wrapped her arms around her middle. Sorrow and apology rose as the fury loosened its grip on her. Serge seemed excited to see him.

Which meant for once he and the oracle were in agreement. If anything took Dominique away from her, at least one blood relative—no matter how flawed—would be there for her.

Cassidy leaned against him. Nothing is going to happen to you that won’t happen to us both.

Curling an arm around her shoulders, he pulled her closer and kissed the top of her head. That, mon amour, is my greatest fear.

The tension drained out of her in a rush, and she snaked an arm around his waist.

“Oh, good. You guys made up,” Samantha said as they turned up her driveway. “I was starting to worry that the world had come off its axis.”

“The night is young,” he said, feeling grim despite his relief.

Inside Samantha’s cottage, Serge sat cross-legged on the plush sofa, staring at the small book open on the coffee table before him.

Samantha sat beside him. “What did you find?”

“It’s all wrong,” he muttered. “This is all wrong.”

Dominique sat on the table facing Serge on the side opposite Samantha. “We poor fools who don’t see the future will need a little more than that.”

Serge looked up, frowning. “No, this is not the future. This writing—it’s wrong.”

“How so?” Samantha prompted.

“This—” He gestured at the book. “This is fantasy. We are all caught by tethers, it says, connected to the one who made us and that one to the one before them and so on, forever. Lunacy.”

Dominique’s brows knit together. “Is it?” The words were unfamiliar, but what they described had some basis in facts as he knew them. “We have a permanent telepathic bond with our sires. Our blood sires, anyway,” he amended ruefully. Kambyses had taken him to the brink of death, but the blood that finally changed him had been another’s.

“You are genetically linked as well,” Cassidy said. She had poured herself a glass of water and now settled into a swiveling bucket chair. “To whoever’s serum infected you.”

“True,” Dominique said, considering. The same virus that created a telepathic link with the prey when feeding also carried the genetic payload that—once at critical mass and presented with vampire blood—transformed the host. With every new blood-drinker, the virus mutated as it fit itself into the new genome.

A few months ago, he had only the barest idea about any of this and Serge none at all. They had Jackson and his vampire hunting family’s centuries of research to thank for this knowledge. Not that this was in any way useful to him. There was no pill he could take to undo the unwelcome updates to his DNA.

Serge’s eyes had gone owlish. “There is nothing in here about viruses.”

“I doubt they knew about things like that when this was written,” Samantha offered in the soothing tone one might use for a disturbed child. “But it makes sense. The strains of the virus in a sire and their youngling must be similar enough to maintain a link—a ‘tether’—between them. Right?” She looked at Dominique for confirmation. He arched a brow. Clearly, she had given this some thought. “Like children inherit traits from their parents?”

The ends of Serge’s curls trembled. “But children don’t die when their parents die.”

The room went still.

Serge took the book and flipped the warped yellow pages. “Right here. ‘The tether casts out the mortal soul and becomes the true nature of the consumer of life and rules him always. Break one tether and you shall unravel all who have sprung from it and cast them into death eternal.’” His bugging puppy-dog eyes dared anyone to argue.

“Wow,” Samantha said, thoughtfully brushing her lips with two fingertips. “That’s…dark.”

“It is lies,” he insisted.

“I don’t know. You have always seemed a little ‘unraveled’ to me,” Dominique said with a smirk he hoped would goad Serge out of his spiraling anxiety. It didn’t.

“But my sire has perished, and I have not been ‘cast into death eternal,’ have I, blood-child?”

Samantha put a calming hand on his shoulder. “Of course not, sweetie. So you know better. Why are you getting so upset?”