Retribution (Book 3 of The Dominion Series) (50 page)

Dylan comes over to us as I start to cough.

"Drain her blood," Dylan says, his voice filled with urgency. "The infection's slower in her because she has more of your DNA than Soren's and you're healing fast. I don't know why Soren and the Twelve aren't disintegrating, but you'll have to act fast. Slit her carotid. Cut her femoral and jugular. Drain out all her blood and feed her yours just before her heart stops completely. Both of you feed her your blood. Your blood will heal any damage that the infection has caused. She'll die with your blood in her, and she'll be a vampire, but she'll survive. Your blood should now be immune to the infection."

"Dylan, you
promised
," I manage to whisper as Michel searches my face.

"Sorry, sister," Dylan says. "Some promises were meant to be broken."

"Eve, what should I do?" Michel whispers to me.

"Don't turn me," I say, shaking my head.

"I can't live without you," he whispers. Then, Julien drags himself over and when Michel hesitates, Julien reaches out to touch me, hesitantly, and then I remember Soren's compulsion. The battle Soren's waging with the infection must have weakened the compulsion so that Julien can touch me again. He grabs me and pulls me out of Michel's arms.

"Don't make me a vampire!" I say. "I don't want it!"

"Too fucking bad," Julien says. "You're not dying today. I won't let you. Michel, you better help me or I'll kill you."

Julien sweeps his arm over the tabletop, sending cups and papers flying and lays me on it. Then he takes his dagger and slits my throat and wrists, the pain overwhelming me. Next he hikes up my skirt, cutting the femoral artery on both legs so that my blood spurts out of me with every heartbeat. I feel the effects immediately, almost fainting from loss of blood, and he holds his hand against my chest to feel my heart.

He slits his own wrist and when my vision starts to fade, he presses his wrist against my open lips. Michel looms over me, as he too cuts his wrist and they take turns feeding me their blood. I feel the blood drip into my mouth and the last coherent thought I have is that I have to spit it out. I can't become a vampire. Before I can, darkness closes in.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

"Each moment of a happy lover's hour is worth an age of a dull and common life."

Aphra Behn

I wake up in Soren's home in Boston. It's day, and the light streaming in from the huge windows assaults my eyes. Julien's on the bed beside me, and he pulls the drape on the canopy so that there's more shade.

"The light won't hurt you. The windows are all UV screened, but it may bother your eyes for a while until you feed."

It's then I remember what happened last night in the boardroom. I'm transitioning and have to decide whether to feed or die.

"Where's Michel?"

I try to sit up but my head pounds when I move. He appears in my field of vision from the other side of the bed.

"I'm here, Eve. Just lie down and try to relax."

"You promised me," I say, anger filling me. "You said you wouldn't turn me."

Julien shakes his head but says nothing for a moment as if he's overcome with emotion. Michel takes my hand but I push his away.

"And you – you of all people. You told me you didn't want to be a vampire. That when you destroyed Soren, you'd gladly die yourself."

"Soren isn't dead, Eve. He's merely in stasis, his body in a continual battle with the infection, trying to stop it and it's taking all his energy. As a fallen angel, he's able to fight it off, but not completely. We've got him and the Twelve in tanks at the SCU. Nothing happened to all those vampires that they turned, although every blood slave they created died. Like you, they weren't able to self-heal the way vampires can. Blackstone still has their agenda. We have to recreate the plague nanotech virus so we can find a way to stop it or slow it, but the plague is spreading, and we have no easy way to get to everyone quickly with this technology. Destroying them will take a long time."

"I won't drink any blood."

"We won't let you die, Eve," Julien says, his voice emotional. "We'll
make
you drink."

"Eve, don't ask for the impossible," Michel says. "I can't bear," he says and looks at Julien, shaking his head. "Neither of us can bear to let you die."

I turn my face away from him and close my eyes. Something's building in me and I know what it is – it's bloodlust and it's completely different from anything I felt when I was just a blood slave, but I remember the feeling for I felt it when I was in both Michel's and Julien's minds.

Before, I felt sick when I went too long without vampire blood. Now, I feel a craving that is beyond anything I felt when human.

"I hate you both for this."

"Don't hate us for loving you too much," Julien says.

"If you truly loved me, you would have let me die!" I cover my face and finally, tears fill my eyes.

"That's not human love. That kind of love is only for the saints, Eve. Neither of us are saints," Michel says and I can hear a touch of humor in his voice, as if he's indulging me. I open my eyes and he's gazing at me, his head tilted to one side.

"You’re both bastards."

"Oh, that we are," Julien says, and he's smiling now, despite his eyes being wet. "You need to drink some blood. I have some here," he says and holds up a bottle. "No humans were killed in its production. All volunteer fans of us fanged types. Drink some and you'll feel much better."

I push his hand and the bottle of blood away. I look between them, sitting on either side of me, Michel with his longer dark hair falling in his blue eyes, Julien with his shorter hair and several-days worth of stubble on his jaw, that telltale scar on his cheek. They're both so beautiful and so different. I realize I love them both and despite everything, I want them both.

But I don't want
this
.

"Where's my brother? He's not innocent in all this either."

I watch as Michel waves to someone and the door opens. Michel and Julien rise up from the bed and Dylan strides over and stands at the bedside.

"Eve," he says, smiling. "How are you?"

"You promised me that you wouldn't let Julien turn me."

He shakes his head. "Do you really think I could let you die? I already lost one sister to this war."

"I barely even
know
you."

"Don't you want to?" he says, exasperation in his voice. "If you drink some blood, we'll have time to get to know each other. Eve, we're
family
," he says and sits on the bed beside me. "
Real
family. I love my parents but they were always my
foster
parents and they let me know who my real family was. I grew up wanting to meet you. I knew that one day, fate would bring us together and it has. Don't leave me, just when I've found you. Besides, we still have work to do."

"Fate," I say, tears in my eyes as I think of him as a small child hoping to meet me one day, knowing that his real mother and father couldn't raise him to protect his role in some predetermined destiny foretold by prophecy.

I struggle to sit up and he helps me, fluffing up the pillows behind me. I examine his face and he does look like me in a way, with his dark, straight hair and hazel eyes.  He smiles at me and he even has dimples. Our mother's dimples.

He takes my hand and squeezes it and I can see into his mind. He saw me at the same recital where Michel met me in London. He felt so excited to finally see me in real life and after the concert, he and the Rhys family came backstage to meet me. I don't remember the meeting because I met so many people that night, but he remembered it.

'Sister,'
he thought to himself.
'One who will live,'
for he knew even then that Sarah would die before she reached age thirty.

I look over at the fireplace and see Julien leaning on it, his head in his hand, staring out the window. Across from him, Michel stands, looking out at the cityscape.

How can I fight the three of them, all of them wanting me in their own way?

"Give me the bottle."

I hear a muffled sound from Michel and he turns his back to me, covering his eyes. Julien turns toward me and just watches as Dylan takes the bottle and pulls out the cork stopper. He hands it to me, exhaling loudly.

"Thank you."

I drink.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

"To witness two lovers is a spectacle for the gods."

Goethe

Dylan takes me to the SCU stasis tanks once before we return to Davis Cove. He shows me where they keep Soren and the Twelve so that I know he's really imprisoned and is unable to hurt me.

The chamber where all the Council prisoners are kept is deep beneath the ground beside the SCU's main offices near the waterfront in Boston. The entire block is one big cement warehouse that used to house vampires found guilty of crimes under the Treaty. All of the tanks failed after the second fall of red rain, the plague eating away all the plastic in the tanks so that the vampires emerged, recovering once the gel leaked out of their bodies. It was impossible for the few techs and guards who monitored the warehouse to fight them and all two hundreds of them escaped. Just one more threat for the Council to manage.

Now, the only residents of the huge chamber are Soren and the Twelve, kept in cement tanks filled with tank gel. They use all their reserves of energy and all their powers just to keep the infection from my blood at bay. There's nothing left over to actually animate so they're as good as in stasis. Now, the aqueous silver gel infuses their system, and they are effectively in a kind of purgatory. They are probably conscious only of the battle they are waging to keep the infection from taking over completely and killing them.

The Council's only hope is that the infection and the stasis gel will keep them in suspended animation until Council scientists can find a way to destroy them completely.

We walk down the narrow paths between rows and rows of crumbled stasis tanks, the cavernous underground facility like a huge parking lot, dimly lit using lanterns fueled with animal fat that has been processed into oil. Here and there are old computer monitoring stations, with blank screens, and melted casings. There's no energy to run them. The Council is working on setting up solar power systems, but as with everything in this new world, it's slow going.

"Here they are," the guard says and leads us to a special room set off from the others. The tanks in which Soren and the Twelve rest are different from the normal stasis tanks. They're made of cement and look like crypts with glass covers. Soren floats naked in the tank, his pale skin almost glowing, his white hair floating like weeds in water. He's really quite terrifying even in suspended animation, with his perfect musculature and height. His eyes are sewn shut.

"Why are his eyes sutured?"

"He kept opening them. They figure it's an involuntary motion, but it was bothering the guards to have his eyes open. They felt like he was watching them."

I walk down the row of tanks that hold the Twelve and they are similarly entombed in the stasis gel, floating like they're sleeping. Angels, fallen to earth – whatever that means. I still don't buy the Biblical explanation. To me, there's a scientific answer to this.

Council scientists haven't found a way to kill Soren and the others yet and with the plague ravaging the civilized world, it's extremely difficult to work around its effects. So much of our modern technology relies on plastics and fossil fuels. Scientists are busy finding workarounds, but it's very slow and tedious. Everything is a huge effort.

Council scientists didn't really believe Soren and the Twelve were fallen angels and what they designed to work on Ancients was not powerful enough to destroy them. Dylan is determined to keep trying and so am I. I'm going to start back at Boston U in January and I'll keep working part-time at the SCU to help out on cases. Only a few stalwart professors continue to hold classes – primarily those that will help develop new technology to replace the old, which relied on fossil fuels. While Dylan works with scientists at MIT to perfect the technology used to infect Soren and the Twelve, I'll work with Council scientists trying to find a way to cure vampires of our need for blood. If we can understand it fully, we may be able to do it. What makes us immortal is also an important area of research that will benefit not just existing vampires, but all of humanity.

That's for the future. I'm just not ready to return to real life yet.

We leave the SCU and take a horse and cart along the back roads to Davis Cove. The Council is working on getting an old steam locomotive up and running so there's some kind of transportation along the old Amtrak line that threads its way along the eastern seaboard, but it's not ready yet.