Page 106

Garrett looked around and gestured with the spatula. “Let’s keep the sofa and the bunk over the cockpit for us later. Stick them in the booth. We’ll eat at the picnic table outside.”

46

Sunlight

Hewasback.

Dominique knew it even before he opened his eyes. That strange world was about to claim him again. The one that had nothing to do with reality. The dream state populated by people he never met, claiming to be his closest friends or lovers. People claiming to be monsters.

People claiminghewas a monster.

One of these individuals hovered over him now in a twilight fog, blurred and indistinct. He turned his face away from the bees that drove their stingers into his eyeballs.

“Dominique, wake up. We need you. The real you.”

The real him? Something shifted around in his head, like two transparent pictures aligning in space, struggling to line up and come into focus, both as real as they were alien. The enormity of what was taking shape made him pant for air, and the memories that seeped in from everywhere made him shake. Darkness beckoned. Blessed nothingness.

“Don’t you dare,” Jackson snarled and grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket. “Stay with me. I used the last shot on you, and if you don’t get with the program right now, you’re never waking up again. You hear me?”

That didn’t sound like a bad thing, not at all—the things he had done deserved a death sentence—but the desperation in his friend’s voice seized him. Something was very wrong, and it was more than that he was a vampire. Or even a vampire conscious during the day. Much more.

“Would you miss me, Jackson?” The words rolled around his reluctant tongue and fell out of his mouth like random marbles.

“Not as much as Cassidy would. Now, please get the fuck up,” Jackson hissed under his breath.

Keeping his eyes to narrow slits, Dominique twisted away from the thin shade covering the rear wall of the tiny bedroom and bumped up against another body, this one still as death and secured in a body bag. A third bag lay against his other side. Wedged between them were the scabbards of several swords, including his own.

“You brought friends,” Jackson whispered as he hurried to unzip Dominique’s bag all the way to his feet. “We’re almost back to the cavern, but we got intercepted. I was taking a piss, so they don’t know I’m back here. They’re armed and trigger-happy, and there are more of them than I want to risk taking on.”

Dominique’s heart slammed against his ribs, and he couldn’t stop sucking at the air as though he needed it again. His legs felt like they belonged to someone else as he found the floor with his feet. “There are too many for you, even with my blood?”

“That won’t save me from a bullet to the head, and—” Jackson froze. “You remember.”

“Oui.I remember everything. From both of me.” He tried to look at Jackson, but the bees were back in his eyes again and he covered them with one hand. “But I am blind and useless.” And would stay useless well into the night if experience was anything to go by. He’d be at a disadvantage again. Geneviève was all but lost. “What made you do this?” The angry growl he aimed for emerged as a whine. Trying to read the situation from Jackson’s mind was like flipping pages in a mud-covered book.

Jackson shoved something at him. Dominique grasped it, felt sunglasses, and pushed them onto his face as Jackson spoke in hushed tones. “The moment we turned off the main road, we got pulled over by one cop that turned into four before I could zip up my fly, all of them armed to the teeth. They got one look at the bags in the booth and—”

“Goddamn it! I said leave that where it is,” Garrett bellowed from the other side of the door.

A male voice calmly told him to step aside. Sounds of a scuffle ensued. A hard thump and a low grunt of pain finished it. “Son of abitch!”

Jackson leaned over the bed and moved the shade up just enough to see the scene outside. Dominique winced and put up a hand against the light blazing in. It felt like the blast from an oven. Tears burst from his burning eyes, but with the sunglasses he could just make out two uniformed figures standing over a long, dark smudge lying on the side of the road. Two others joined them, another smudge swinging between them. A body bag.

“Ah,non.”

The door burst open and filled with a disheveled Garrett cradling his arm. “Are you just going to hide back here while they drag out our entire cargo at gunpoint?” Spotting Dominique hunched on the bed, he added, “And what thehelldid you do?”

“I got us help,” Jackson said.

“Oh, this ought to be good. What fraction of his head do we get this time?”

“All of it,” Dominique said.

Garrett stepped into the space between the bathroom and bunk beds, clearing the doorway. “Then get your all-of-it out there before they kill another one of your flock.”

Another one? Dominique maneuvered his string-puppet body to the front of the RV, stubbing his toes twice, once half-falling on top of a still, bagged body, and holding on to various bulkheads as he went. Never had his arms and legs been less cooperative, and when he got to the open door, they declared an all-out strike. It was as if something inside him with a mind of its own refused to step out there into all that sunlight. That something, his true vampire self, found itself half-awake and trapped in a nightmare. The edges of his vision darkened. Oblivion reached for him. Just pass out like he did before, like every fiber of his being screamed to do when the sun was up. Run, hide, seek the darkness.

“Ça va,” he reassured himself and forced his gaze to the scene outside, to the officer bending over, reaching for the zipper on the second bag. Two others turned back to the RV for the next bag. “C’est d’accord.”This was okay. This worked. He knew it did. He had walked in this inferno without so much as a blister before, without even thinking about it. He could do it again.