Page 1 of Dark Reign of Forever

1

Kingdom of Night

Two years ago...

Mostnightsandmostplaces, those who met the Lord of Night never saw him. To those who knew him, the ability to slide past the awareness of anyone near him was Dominique Marchant’s most disquieting talent. To Dominique, this skill was still disorienting, even after three months. It was instinctive and often rendered him invisible by accident. All it took was a wish for solitude and it was done.

Only Cassidy was immune. Being bound to her human soul as he was, she was always aware of him, which was as it should be. She was his conscience and his humanity.

At the moment, she was also over fifty miles away. Yet, Dominique still heard her whisper encouragement in their telepathic bond, overshadowing his nerves, which thrummed like an antenna. He had learned to dial it down, but the low-grade hum had suffused him ever since he became the center of the dark web. All the blood drinkers in existence were tethered to him, legions of vampires just beyond his reach, like a swarm of ghosts. They didn’t become concrete individuals in his awareness until Cassidy helped him track them down, or he re-sired them in a ritual exchange of blood.

Presently, he sensed one of these ghosts slipping over the locked entry gate at the mouth of the pier on which Dominique stood. He saw it, too, as a single bright white blood-drinker aura standing there just out of cover. The visitor looked around, unsure.

“I am here,” Dominique said, letting the salty wind carry his words to the supernatural ears.

The blood-drinker’s head swiveled toward him.

Dominique shifted his attitude from solitude to welcome. On the pier’s far end, his guest froze, staring, no doubt questioning his own eyes. Or fearing for his immortal life. Dominique couldn’t blame him. If someone had barged into his thoughts and talked to him from out of nowhere, he, too, would have run blindly into the night. When the strange blood-drinker had realized that he couldn’t outrun the bizarre voice in his head, he started asking questions, and Dominique suggested they meet. That had been two nights ago.

Two nights for a solitary vampire to question his sanity, to wonder if he would find anything or anyone at all at the end of the Lake Worth pier at one in the morning. Now, not only had he found someone, that someone appeared to melt out of the ocean mist.

Dominique turned to gaze over the sea, which heaved with wind-driven swells. A bright patch in the thin cloud cover pointed at a hidden moon, the faint light shimmering on the rippling water.

Emboldened, the other vampire approached, his footfall on the wood planks soft and measured. He didn’t speak until his steps had fallen silent for well over a minute.

“Are you the one I heard?” A cultured male voice. British. Dubious.

Dominique peered over his shoulder. “Oui.I am that one.”

The blood-drinker stood about thirty feet away, out of immediate reach, hands out by his sides, ready to run and disappear in an instant. Dominique listened to him inhale, taking his measure, and waited for his visitor to draw a conclusion from the crisp scent that marked him as a youngling vampire—and the golden glow deep in his dark eyes that marked him as something else entirely.

It took a solid fifteen seconds. Then there was an apologetic little cough. “You…are not what I expected.”

“What did you expect?” Dominique turned to face him and did his best to appear as non-threatening as possible in his ominous black motorcycle leathers and heavy boots. Wind ruffled his hair, and he casually gathered most of the jet-black mass in his nape and confined it with the leather string that circled his wrist. The unruly wave that forever fell across his forehead, however, refused to be tamed.

The other vampire was dressed in jeans and a tucked-in navy blue button-down shirt. He was tall, but slender, almost delicate, his own ash-blond hair neatly groomed and only slightly disheveled in the breeze. Except for his pale skin, he could have passed as a gangly young man of any era, but what Dominique could discern about his scent told him that this one’s birth to darkness was well over a century in the past.

“Not a Frenchman, I don’t think.”

Dominique laughed with delight. Instead of terror or attack, this blood-drinker opted for diplomacy and humor. “I like you, Englishman. What is your name?”

“Aubrey Wainwright.” His shoulders lost some of their tension.

“I am Dominique Marchant.” With a small tilt of his head, he added, “Lord of Night.” The title still felt pretentious falling off his tongue to a stranger.

“Indeed.”

“I was sired by Kambyses. You may know the name?”

“I have heard legends surrounding that name, yes. They say he is the first vampire.”

“He was the root of what we are,” Dominique corrected. Even Kambyses hadn’t considered himself the first of their kind. “After five-thousand years, he was weary of the darkness.” And what darkness there had been in that ancient one. He had teetered on the brink of madness, and all his children along with him. “Three months ago, he chose me as his heir. When he died, the essence of what animates us was transferred to me.”

Aubrey stared at Dominique, at the ethereal luminosity in the hyper-dilated pupils, like the reflected light in the eyes of an animal. His own were wide, bottomless wells of darkness. “Interesting. So this gives you the power to intrude into the heads of the unsuspecting?”

“Under the right circumstances.” Dominique sobered and separated from the railing. Aubrey did not retreat. “Every blood-drinker’s life is bound to mine the way every youngling’s life is bound to his or her sire. On some level, I am aware of them all, but they are not aware of me.”

“Oh. I’m most definitely aware of you,” Aubrey said faintly.

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