Incubus Moon (26 page)

Easier said than done. Because I was getting hungrier by the minute; and not for food.

“You must be exhausted. Let’s find Niko. He will show you to your quarters where you can wash up and get some well-deserved rest. Later, we can discuss a strategy for keeping my sister and Haemon at bay.”

“You don’t have to keep doing that, you know. Touch me and move away.”

Dimitri lowered his head and exhaled. “We haven’t time for this.”

That this man, this
vampire
, was keeping me safe should’ve been enough. So much for tempering my inner brat. “But sending me mixed signals, like back in the cave, that’s okay?”

“Incubus enchantment,” he said with a shake of his head. “Nothing more.”

“You are such a fucking hypocrite.”

Dimitri was on me in an instant. He gripped my arms with tremendous force, his voice booming over the atrium’s domed ceiling and frightening poor Niko who’d only just arrived. “We shall speak of this no further!”

This time, his touch didn’t rouse the
Hunger
. It produced a shuddering jolt of pure incubus fury that was accompanied by a low rumble over the atrium’s ceiling. Spirals of dust and small pebbles began to rain down on us.

“Do not do this, Austin!”

Dimitri went from holding my arms to assailing me. He wrapped his own around me and squeezed tight, while poor Niko braced himself against a marble column.

“Control yourself, or you will end us all.”

I couldn’t breathe. The bones in my chest were breaking under the force he exerted on them. Blackness was creeping in at the edges of my vision.

As I succumbed to it, I heard Dimitri’s voice echo down a long corridor. “Our friend must learn to bridle his power, Niko. He uses too much too quickly, leaving himself vulnerable.”

“What is he, Master?”

“A god.”

CHAPTER 27

I opened my eyes to find Dimitri Ravello staring back at me, his expression anything but welcoming. We were seated opposite one another on the other side of the atrium within a grand space of whitewashed walls, where panels of translucent fabric hung from the tall, rough-hewn ceiling to offer the illusion of windows where none existed. To my left, a fire blazed in a massive limestone hearth, its heat almost too warm. Straightening in the leather chair, a sharp sting radiated through my chest.

“What the hell did you do to me?”

“Prevented our being crushed by the acropolis above.”

“By breaking all of my ribs?”

“Not all of them.”

I wasn’t loving the intense pain or his cavalier attitude. If it hadn’t hurt so damn much to move, let alone breathe, I’d have gotten up and walked away.

“Look. I’m the one who nearly got burned alive. I’m also the chump who scaled a mountain to be here with you. Something tells me I shouldn’t have bothered.”

“Why did you?”

I exhaled deeply and paid the price. “Because you damn well want me to be here!”

“What I want is to be free of you!” His words registered like the sting of a whip. “And yet,” he said, his jaw muscles clenching, “I find myself unwilling to seek such freedom.”

I was about to pursue the emotional bomb he’d just dropped, when Dimitri got up and strode over to the fireplace. I could see the tension in the set of his shoulders, in the intensity of his focus on the orange and red flames. “What do you know of your kind?”

“Not much,” I responded, hoping for an entirely different conversation. But this one would do…for now. “Some Internet research. Why?”

“And what did this research reveal?”

“That I’m a short, ugly demon with a big iceberg for a dick.”

Dimitri threw his head back and laughed, but there was nothing joyful in the sound of it.

“Christians! What they fail to understand they invent.” He tuned to regard me intently. “What else?”

“Minor stuff, really. Storm spirits from thousands of years ago who liked to party, crap like that.”

My brooding vampire moved to the coffee table separating our two chairs and picked up an old, leather-bound book I’d noticed earlier but paid little attention to until now.

“Many of the answers you seek are in this.” He tossed the volume into my lap and returned to his own chair, where he fell silent and pensive as he watched the dancing flames within the massive fireplace.

“You want me to read all of this?” It was as thick as a dictionary. It smelled bad, too.

“Did you not scale a mountain in search of answers?”

The book, it turned out, was written entirely in Latin. Not a major obstacle for me, thanks to a Catholic school education and having been the tenth-grade Latin Club president.

I actually managed to bump along nicely.

An entire chapter was devoted to what the entity at Psychic Joy’s had revealed: that incubi and succubi were the descendants of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who demanded equality and failed to get it and who, in turn, fled the Garden with a promise to plague mankind.

Another equally intriguing discovery was that
my kind
were also linked to the origins of Greek Mythology. They had employed their supernatural strength and gift of mind control and seduction to influence humans who chose to worship them as gods and goddesses.

The book also mentioned extraordinary regenerative powers of which I was living proof. I could already feel the prickly re-knitting of my broken ribs as I sat reading, feel the inflammation of the muscle and tissue surrounding them diminish with every chapter I completed.

Too bad this same gift couldn’t dull the sting of rejection from a stubborn, twenty-four-hundred-year-old vampire who refused to own up to his feelings for me.

Believe me, I got the whole heterosexuality thing. I’d been happily living it for thirty years. Nevertheless, I’d also discovered that it no longer defined who I was. Women were no less attractive to me since my transformation. Quite the contrary. There was simply a new side to me now that happened to include appreciating of men and being open to fulfilling sexual encounters with them. This didn’t make me bisexual or gay. I wasn’t a convenient label for society. I was just me—albeit a newer, more realized version.

Also, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it, nor did I want to. Dimitri Ravello sure surprised me, though.

He’d had centuries to explore and experience life. Shouldn’t he be more evolved, more open-minded? After all, if I could get over it, why couldn’t he?

I glanced up from reading to see that my solemn vampire was still lost to the crackling flames, reflexively twisting the onyx band on his right-hand middle finger.

“Haemon has one just like it,” I told him, putting down the book.

Dimitri roused from his reverie. “Pardon?”

“Your ring.”

“Ah. A reward from the High Council for the extermination of your kind,” he said. “And a tribute to our fallen brethren. Of course Haemon has an identical ring. Every vampire who fought and survived the Great War possesses one.”

I waited for him to elaborate, but in typical Dimitri fashion he fell silent again.

If I wanted to learn more about the war—hell, about anything pertaining to his long life—I’d have to seduce it out of him. Not the wisest course of action to take at the moment. So I went back to reading. I hadn’t gotten far when Niko reemerged.

“The guest quarters are ready,” he said, without so much as a glance in my direction.

A young woman carrying a tray of fruit, cheese, and delicious smelling bread arrived soon after. The fabric of her long, mauve gauzy dress rode the curves of her lithe body as she moved toward us, her honey-blonde hair caressing sun-kissed shoulders.

She possessed many of Niko’s appealing facial features and generated a tug of desire in me upon approach. Unlike her brother, for the similarities were too great for them to be anything but siblings, she had no qualms about making direct eye contact with me.

Dimitri smiled up at her and she positioned the tray in front of me. “Thank you, Eva.”

Offering him one in return, her demeanor shifted to cool assessment when she glanced back at me. Eva might be aware of my appreciation for her physical beauty, but she was clearly not a fan. Which didn’t stop me from taking in the slow, inviting sway of her hips and the subtle movement of shadow from her buttocks against the airy fabric when she forfeited the room with her brother in tow.

Dimitri, I noticed with a twinge of jealousy, was equally enthralled.

Envy and aching ribs aside, a growl from my stomach reminded me that I hadn’t eaten all day, with the exception of the bottled blood with which Niko had provided me on the ride from the harbor. With all or most of Dimitri’s blood out of my system now, solid food was looking pretty damned good to me.

When I reached for a cluster of grapes, I was surprised to experience only a modest twinge of pain. Popping a few into my mouth, I let the dark, sweet meat slide over my tongue before swallowing it. It didn’t take me long to polish off half the tray.

No way could I be a vampire. I enjoyed food too much.

Dimitri retrieved the book I’d replaced on the table. “I have given considerable thought to what my sister and Haemon might want with you. For I know now with absolute certainty that Kassandra has not visited the Council in Rome for several months.”

“But back on the ship she—”

“My sister is cunning. Lies flow from her lips as truths.” He then regarded me intently. “As for Haemon, a trusted source has confirmed for me that the Council know nothing of his existence, which I suspected all along. They believe him to be dead, as I once did.”

“We both know that’s not true,” I said.

“Indeed. Centuries ago, the Council uncovered a plot to expose our kind to the humans, an act punishable by swift death to any vampire who betrays this most sacred law. Haemon was behind the plot and
the Council dispatched assassins to silence him. They trapped him in an abandoned
casale
on the outskirts of Mantua, Italy, and then burnt it to the ground.”

“But he survived the fire.”

Dimitri nodded. “Given the description of your attacker in Prague, and the vision you shared with me aboard the yacht, Haemon is very much alive.”

“At least we don’t have to worry about the Council anymore,” I said, relieved to scratch a few enemies off the hit list. “Maybe they could help us…”

No need to finish the sentence. The High Council of Vampires had ordered the slaughter of my ancestors. If they knew an incubus existed, they’d send more than a few assassins after us.

“Fortunately, our enemies are unacquainted with this sanctuary,” Dimitri said, having plucked the thought from my mind. “But that is where our luck ends. We are alone in this.”

I pushed up slowly to my feet, my ribs significantly less tender, and moved to the colossal fireplace. I stared into the crackling flames and let their warmth penetrate me.

“You said before that you knew what Haemon wanted with me.”

“
Might
want with you. “Dimitri held up the book. “A passage in this refers to a blood drinker who gains supremacy by harnessing the power of the
somnium deum
.”

“Dream god,” I said in a whisper. “An incubus.”

“Blood drinking rituals have been around since the dawn of time. I cannot be certain it speaks of a vampire.”

I walked over to him to better study the book’s cover and spine once more. It was so old I couldn’t make out the title. “What does it say?”

“
Pro Lux Lucis
.”

“Before Light.” I took the book from him and traced the raised lettering on the book’s worn leather cover. “Does it say how he gains this power?”

Dimitri offered me another pointed glance. “Through dark ritual.”

I didn’t get the chance to ask him to expand on this, because Haemon’s face flashed in front of me. Around him sped the headlights of fast-moving automobiles, with familiar high-rises reaching up into the nighttime sky and the smiling billboards of the rich and famous.

Haemon was in Los Angeles!

CHAPTER 28

Beautiful and lethal.

Kassandra Ravello was the embodiment of the archetypal
femme fatale
. She exuded a raw allure that made her irresistible to her victims, the promise of the forbidden reflecting in her cool, amber gaze. Except that in my vision of the vampire, the only thing that echoed in her eyes was an insatiable lust for inflicting cruelty and pain.

Curled up beside a blood-spattered Haemon in the rear of a speeding limousine, she offered him a chilling smile. The expression reminded me of a cobra’s seconds before it strikes.

“I did not care for the child,” she said with a sneer. “It tasted of lard and chemicals.”

“But the mother,” Haemon said with perverse glee, “mercifully did not share in her teen’s fondness for fast food.”

Kassandra laughed. “You know, I think I got a little buzzed off of her.”

When she leaned in to lick the blood spatter decorating the side of Haemon’s face, he pulled away. Using the tips of his index and middle fingers now, he scooped up a line of crimson globules from his cheek and held them a few teasing inches from her mouth.