“Did you do that?”
He shrugged. “I tried not to, but I saw that shadow in them very early and I couldn’t help but watch them. I made everyone uneasy. At first the elders didn’t believe me, but when my predictions came true, they started paying attention. The moment that happened …” He trailed off, turning his back on her to grip the railing with both hands, staring out into the night.
Riley bit her lip. That little boy had to be somewhat of an outcast. The other boys and men in his village would have shunned him, kept their distance just in case he discovered that shadow in them and called them a potential vampire. She could feel the stark loneliness in him. As a man—a hunter—he didn’t seem to be aware of it. He didn’t recognize his own emotions let alone acknowledge them; he’d been too long without.
“The thing is, just because I saw the shadow didn’t mean they chose to give up their soul. Some found lifemates eventually and lived honorable lives.”
Riley held herself very still, refusing to give in to the urge to comfort him. Dax had no idea he needed comfort and he would shut down. She reached tentatively for their mind connection, not wanting him to pull away from her. Empathically she felt his childhood pain, but she wanted to “see” his memories through his eyes. The moment she reached for him, she felt not only Dax, but the Old One. The dragon was just as concerned for the Carpathian hunter as she was.
She focused on the rail Dax gripped as he looked out over the city. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like for him seeing the modern world, but he handled everything calmly, stoically, which gave her insight to his personality. The pressure from his fingers denting the wood told her much more about him.
“I saw the darkness in Mitro from the very beginning. He was from a powerful family and took great advantage, always a bully,” Dax continued.
His voice was very soft, but she almost felt each word, brushing at the inside of her mind with a paintbrush of pure shame and sorrow. He didn’t hear it—or know—but she felt that raw emotion tearing through his soul. The Old One felt it just as deeply as she did, because unlike Dax, they were both in tune with their emotions.
He had spoken to her about Mitro several times, just small snippets, but she’d seen the vampire’s depravity and his need for cruelty even as a young boy. Sometimes monsters were born, not made, and she feared Mitro was the former.
“I tried to tell the elders. I even went to the prince, but I was young and they discounted what I said. As I was proved right more and more and the others avoided me, I learned hard lessons about accusing someone before knowing for certain if they actually would make the choice to turn. Instead of telling others when I saw that darkness in some of our males, I studied each of those with the shadow in them, their ways and habits. I followed them and often, when they made that forbidden choice, destroyed them.”
Riley closed her eyes briefly. The sight of his hands gripping the rail until his knuckles were white saddened her.
“I had to let them kill someone while turning. It was the only way to assure I wasn’t committing murder.” He turned to look at her, sorrow weighing him down. “Do you know how many people I could have saved if I’d just destroyed them before they could make a kill?”
She fought the urge to rise and go to him, to put her arms around him to comfort him. He needed to tell someone. The weight on his shoulders—and he’d carried it for centuries—needed to be shared.
“You’re right, though, Dax, it would have been murder,” she advised gently.
He was silent for so long she nearly prodded him, but the dragon held her silent, stirring just enough to make her aware he was waiting, too—and he had the patience she needed. Dax wasn’t used to sharing, certainly not whatever fear he held so deep that even he couldn’t really recognize it.
Dax let out his breath slowly and nodded, but he didn’t seem too sure.
She clamped her mouth closed, pressing her lips together tightly. She wrapped her arms tighter around her knees as a surrogate for him. She needed to hold him, to comfort him in the way he offered her comfort and support.
“Mitro seemed … much more foul … than any other. There’s a nobility to most Carpathians and I respected them, but not Mitro. I watched him closely, and he enjoyed the pain of others, animals, humans and Carpathians. He was cunning and vain and unfortunately, quite intelligent. He found a lifemate in Arabejila. She was the other half of his soul—light to his darkness. The courtship began and I …”
Dax shook his head and turned his back completely to the rail, leaning against it to look directly into her eyes. “I looked away. I thought him safe. No Carpathian male with a lifemate would turn vampire, so as uneasy as I was, I quit watching him.”
Riley allowed her lashes to sweep down, veiling her eyes for a moment so he wouldn’t see her sympathy. Dax was not a man to recognize shame or guilt, yet he felt it just as much as she did.
“Arabejila’s father was my best friend. We hunted together. When others shunned me because of my strange talent, he didn’t. He told me my gift was useful, that I could keep our people safer than any other. We shared blood when we were injured. He knew his lifemate far before he ever would have lost emotion and color so he had nothing to fear from me, I know that, but still, he felt genuine affection for me as did his lifemate and Arabejila. They became my real ties to my people.”
She could see flashes of images—his memories of a laughing woman who looked very much like her. A man and a woman, holding hands, turned toward one another, a look of utter love on their faces. Their expressions took her breath away, so much love. Sometimes, when Dax looked at her, there was that intensity in his eyes, that amazing look of love focused on her, and she felt the luckiest woman in the world.
She forced herself to look at the next images, the ones in such stark contrast. The man, Dax’s best friend, dead on the ground, his hand inches from his lifemate’s, blood pooling around him, his throat and heart torn out. His lifemate dead, and Arabejila, her throat torn and bleeding, desperately trying to free her baby sister from her mother’s body.
It was a scene straight out of a horror film, and Dax had stumbled onto it—worse, felt responsible for it.
Riley could hardly bear the thought of those deaths and how Dax felt, even suppressed as his emotions had been. She couldn’t imagine knowing that happy family, being a part of it and coming upon them, discovering them dead and dying …
“When I could have prevented it.”
Her gaze jumped to his. He had known all along she was in his mind. “How?” she asked quietly. “How could you have prevented it?”
“I could have executed him.”
She shook her head. “That would have been murder. He hadn’t done anything yet, had he? You were genuinely shocked. I could feel your horror. You could barely believe what you were seeing. Until someone commits a crime, there isn’t much anyone can do—not even you.”
Riley gripped the arms of her chair to prevent leaping up to hold him. “Dax, you know you couldn’t touch him without proof. You didn’t know for sure. You aren’t God. You aren’t a judge.”
“That’s exactly what I am. The Judge. And I failed my friend and his family.” He shoved his hand through the short spikes of pitch-black hair. “Arabejila was Mitro’s lifemate. He killed her mother and father in front of her and bragged that he would be the most powerful vampire ever to live by killing his lifemate as he made the choice to give up his soul. When he couldn’t finish her off—that lifemate bond was too strong for even him—in his rage, as vampire, he claimed her, binding her soul to his lost one so that she would suffer every moment she lived.”
Riley found herself blinking back tears. She was Dax’s lifemate, and to her, the binding ritual had been beautiful and sacred. “What Mitro did is a sacrilege, no less.”
“I still see them like that,” he confessed in a low voice. “Torn apart. Katalina’s stomach ripped open. Arabejila trying to free her sister.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “I took the knife from her and finished the job. I hacked up my friend’s beautiful, wonderful lifemate.”
“To save a child, Dax. You saved a child. She would have wanted you to save her baby. She would have begged you had she lived.”
He pressed his fingers to his eyes hard. “To see that infant torn from its mother the other night, there in the rain forest, I actually felt …” He shook his head.
Sick.
The word shimmered in her mind.
Riley surrounded him with warmth, the only thing she could think to do. There were no real words to comfort him. There couldn’t be.
He shook his head. “Carpathians don’t feel sick. Not when they’re on the hunt. Mitro knows the one thing that …” He broke off again and straightened his shoulders. “What he did to Arabejila was the absolute, ultimate betrayal of his lifemate. In our world, there can be no greater sin than trying to murder one’s lifemate and condemning her to a half-life of sheer suffering and deliberately killing our children.”
Dax paced restlessly again, as if the smoldering rage buried so deep was climbing too close to the surface for him to contain.
“The lifemate bond doesn’t allow one to survive long without the other,” Dax continued. “Mitro chose to give up his soul, so he wasn’t affected—although he couldn’t bring himself to kill Arabejila. She traveled with me, devoting herself to tracking him and helping me send him to the next life, but she suffered greatly through the long years.”
“And you felt her sorrow.”
“Males lose their ability to see color or feel emotion after a couple of hundred years, or sooner if they make kills continually. I used to go to Arabejila’s home often when I returned from hunting because just being close to Katalina, her mother—and eventually Arabejila—allowed me to remember feelings easier. I didn’t see colors, but I knew what affection was. They made my life much more bearable until Arabejila lost her lifemate. I wanted to be numb, not to feel her great sorrow, or how she had to fight to stay alive. In a way I felt I should be punished by her emotions, although she tried to hide them from me.”
Riley brushed his mind with hers, the lightest of caresses, needing to surround him with her love. She knew he could barely stay there on the balcony, with the night sky trying to soothe him. It was a night for recriminations. Ever since he’d seen the infant and the torn body of the child’s mother, Dax had been restless and more than uneasy. She just didn’t know how to help him.
“We’re safe here, aren’t we? Inside this house? Mitro can’t know we’re here, can he?” she asked. “I can sense that you’re unhappy here. We need a place to stay, and Riordan De La Cruz has given us this beautiful house. You have a resting place …”
“Which I would never use, and he is well aware of that,” Dax said, his face darkening.
“Why? He’s Carpathian. He has a lifemate. Gary and Jubal both know him. His sister-in-law, Jasmine, is here.”
“The Old One is uneasy,” Dax said. “I can’t seem to settle him down. He’s leery of Riordan. And Carpathian hunters do not ever allow others to know their resting places.”
The dragon soul moved against hers. The dragon was sleepy, yawning, waiting for Dax to discover it was the hunter worried, not the dragon. The dragon would flame an enemy immediately and take care of any problem. There wouldn’t be the incessant talking.
As if the dragon had given him a little push, Dax continued, “When I go to ground, I will not have the luxury of being close to you, not unless I use what has been made available to me. I can’t keep you safe.”
Riley frowned, trying to understand. “Riordan appears to be very hospitable. He’s clearly devoted to his lifemate and his sister-in-law. What worries you—um—I mean the Old One?”
“I knew the oldest brother long before they came to this place. Then, they did not call themselves by these names. The eldest was not only shadowed, but held great darkness in him, even as a boy. If Mitro could still make the choice to give up his soul, it stands to reason that any Carpathian male could commit such an atrocity.”
There it was. No one was safe. Riley frowned, trying to put pieces of information she found in his mind with data she’d learned from a few conversations.
“Dax, can you please explain the lifemate bond to me one more time so I can better grasp the real concept? Gary tried to, but I don’t really fully understand.” She was missing something here, or Dax was. And given his state of mind, his explosive response to danger, she needed to be very knowledgeable about his world now. She’d been going on instinct, but the information was extremely important.
Dax crossed to her and sank into a chair beside her. Instantly his fresh scent enveloped her. He smelled of the outdoors. Of danger. Of heat and fire. Her entire body reacted to his close proximity, an electrical current surging through her bloodstream. Her lungs burned, and deep inside she ached. He reached out and took her hand, the movement so gentle, his touch barely there, but every sense heightened until she could feel every breath he took.
His skin was warm, almost hot, as his fingers tangled with hers. His thumb stroked caresses over the back of her hand. He was silent a moment, idly playing with her fingers, sliding his in between hers in slow, almost brushstrokes. She could barely breathe, barely think.
She found it strange that even here, back in a city teeming with life, with people, she was all too aware of her hunger and need for Dax. His love for her was so strong in that moment it was almost tangible, wrapping her up in strong warm arms when he was barely touching her. Her love for him brought her to tears when she was alone. Every beat of his heart was heard by hers. Every breath he drew, she drew, too. More than anything, right now she wanted—no, needed—to find a way to comfort him.
“A male Carpathian loses all emotion and the ability to see in color after the first two hundred years. Sometimes sooner. The more one hunts and kills, the faster the process. In my case, it was very fast. We are taught that there is one soul between a man and his lifemate. He holds the darkness, and she is his light. There is only one and she must be found.”