Page 88

Would-Be Assistants

Dominique returned to consciousness with a profound sense of doom. His plans hadn’t been more than a pale hope, but hope nevertheless. Now this, too, vanished in the encroaching night.

He still lived, which meant Kambyses did as well. The hunters had failed yet again. And if Cassidy wasn’t dead already, her fate was sealed.

Merde.

He leaned his head against the equipment rack in the cramped little wiring closet and felt despair circle like a hungry shark. Then he realized he was hearing heartbeats. Two of them, human, and close.

Tension rippled across his shoulders. He had chosen this closet for his daytime refuge for its proximity to Cassidy and its relative remoteness to the rest of the house, Apokryphos, and Kambyses. For once, being discovered while he slept hadn’t figured into his calculations. If either Kambyses or Bijou wanted him dead, they would do the job themselves, not delegate it to their human slaves.

He flared his nostrils to taste the air and cursed.

Outside, the heartbeats escalated.

Dominique slammed the door open and stepped into the moody light of a small home theater. Fifteen leather recliners in three rows faced him, all empty except for two at the front. He barely kept his voice down. “You useless pieces of shit!”

The Strikers stared up at him, bug-eyed and disheveled, mouths plastered with duct tape, tied hand and foot and lashed to their seats by sturdy rope. Dominique scraped up the edge of Jackson’s gag with a fingernail and yanked without mercy.

Jackson gasped. “Fuck, ow!”

“You will get worse yet for this latest blunder, which is sure to be your last.”

“Maybe if you stop talking and get me untied, we can still get something done.”

“Imbeciles. Mere mortals keep getting the better of you during the light of day. Now that night has come, you are as good as dead.” Dominique snapped off the plastic ties around Jackson’s ankles and reached for the rope across his chest. In the next seat, Garrett grunted with impatient fury.

The door at the back of the room opened. “What’s going on in—”

Recognizing the situation, the woman, a security guard judging by her outfit and weapon, spun on a heel. But before she could do more than draw breath to shout, Dominique clamped the discarded piece of duct tape across her mouth and hauled her to the front of the theater.

There was no time to waste on trying to overpower her existing compulsion. The impulse to kill her flickered in his mind, an impulse he now understood to be his sire’s. Dominique quickly squashed it, disarmed his captive, used Jackson’s rope to truss her up snug as a chicken for the oven, retrieved his swords from the electrical closet, shoved in the chicken, and latched the door.

Not quite ten seconds had elapsed since the door opened.

His audience stared.

Jackson recovered first. He wormed out of the recliner and turned to present his bound hands to Dominique. “Any time.”

Dominique snapped the tie. “Did you find Cassidy at all?”

“Yes. Around noon. Very weak, but still coherent. We had her, Nick. Then Monica—”

“Excuses? Truly?” When he freed Garrett, he took special pleasure in tearing off the gag with a violent flourish that ripped up a day’s growth of beard along with it.

“Son of a bitch,” the old hunter cursed and wiggled his jaw.

“Monica says Kambyses gave her his blood. She heard us breathing, for fuck’s sake.”

Dominique barely stopped to chastise himself for that unexpected development. This concept had never even crossed his mind outside of the actual making of a blood-drinker. He had dismissed the woman as inconsequential from the beginning, a potentially irrevocable mistake. “Regardless, she is human. As was everyone else here today.” He slung the swords across his back. “You have one last chance to get Cassidy out of this house alive. If you fail—”

“Don’t you dare threaten us, too, you punk,” Garrett snapped. “Your friends are way ahead of you there.”

Dominique arched a brow.

“Bijou made it clear she’d come after everyone we know,” Jackson said.

Of course she would. “So much more motivation not to fuck up this time, non? Go get Cassidy, run, do not look back. I will do all I can to keep your path clear.”