Incubus Moon (25 page)

Especially if learning more about my incubus nature would improve our odds of surviving Haemon and Kassandra.

Speaking of Dimitri, why did a millennia-old vampire need to carry a flashlight?

“It’s for you,” he said, handing me the electric torch. “I can sense the influence of my blood in you fading.”

One questioned answered…a whole bunch more to go
.

I accepted the flashlight and sent its beam around the cavernous gloom in slow, vertical movements that revealed a series of Doric columns. Supporting large architraves, their elaborate friezes and thick cornices abutted the dozen or so doorways encircling us.

“They’re mausoleums,” I said in a stunned whisper.

“And sanctuary.”

Dimitri brushed past me and headed toward one of the twelve crypts. The brief contact produced a wonderful little crackle of metaphoric lightening that roused the
Hunger
in me.

“Temper yourself,” he said over his shoulder. “There is much to accomplish this day.”

Surprisingly, I did what he asked.

Until we entered the crypt.

From luxury yacht to a narrow, decrepit rectangular tomb housing a ruined sarcophagus and two crumbling statues on either side of the entrance. How the mighty had fallen.

Granted, it was probably the last place on earth Haemon and Kassandra would think to look for us. But the idea of squatting in some dismal crypt for God only knew how long was hardly living. The air in here was as long-forgotten as the structure itself.

“Patience.” That single word conveyed more than a hint of irritation.

Dimitri stepped around the ancient marble coffin at the rear of the tomb, where he depressed a stone in the wall. A muffled grinding sound accompanied the sarcophagus’ slow progression toward us, which I approached it now to peer down into yet another dark opening.

This had to be the true entrance to his lair.

“Follow me and proceed with care,” he instructed. “Use the flashlight and keep to the wall at all times. Understand?”

Time to play the dutiful incubus and trail my cranky vampire protector down the flight of earthen stairs and into complete darkness. “Yes,
Master
.”

A short distance into our descent, the meager shaft of light proved useless against the gloom. Still, I continued to focus it on the steps ahead and hugged the walls as directed, using my left hand and fingertips as guides along their unevenness. Although my vamp vision had officially fizzled out, I was certain that the steps formed a wide, circular pattern.

For all I knew, Dimitri was leading me down into the Nine Circles.

After what felt like an eternity, we reached flat ground and I walked straight into his back, forfeiting the flashlight to the compacted dirt floor where it flickered out. The contactwas all it took for the
Hunger
to flare between us.

The dark chamber grew closer, more alive, and I couldn’t stop myself from reaching out and wrapping arms around Dimitri’s waist to pull him to me, as I breathed in more of his intoxicating scent. “Do you feel that?”

A thrumming energy rumbled up through my body, as if my bones were the drums for some primal ritual song calling the
Hunger
into greater existence.

Dimitri turned in my embrace, seizing my hands and bringing them to rest on the firm muscle of his broad chest, rising and falling in rapid succession.

I leaned in to brush the tip of my nose against the hollow at the base of his throat and took in more of his thrilling scent. It was like the forest after a rainstorm. His body was calling to me, begging me to take what he offered, and so I felt for and grabbed the gap at the top of his linen shirt and ripped it open. The buttons went skittering in the dark across the hard, earthen floor.

When I trailed my hands down the firm planes and valleys of his flat stomach, he rewarded my touch with a low moan, his body giving over to tiny, erratic spasms. At the waistband of his trousers, the ancient drumbeat intensified and I lowered my hand. His excitement twitched against the insistent press of my palm.

About to free it, Dimitri sucked in a deep breath and knocked my hand away. “Don’t!”

“But I—”

“You have called to me with your mind again, bade me to surrender to you. Precisely what I feared would happen.”

“Sorry.” There was that word again; one that I was growing tired of having to use all the time. I also felt idiotic for talking to a person I couldn’t see. “I’m still trying to figure out the whole being-a-demon thing. It might not kill you to cut me a little slack.”

“Indeed. For that is what many of my kind pleaded for when the Incubi began to invade our dreams,” he hit back. “They turned vampire against vampire in their greedy lust to dominate, to fashion us into pleasure slaves. Cut you some slack, you say?”

“Hey, don’t blame me for what happened back in the Stone Age.”

“Moments ago you would have had me succumb to your infatuation.” Dimitri’s voice boomed in the darkness. “Knowing that I do not share your same…sentiments. Forgive me if I fail to see the disparity.”

Infatuation?
“Not so long ago, I wouldn’t have felt what I’m feeling right now for another man. Regardless of what once was, my feelings for you are real. I don’t want to own you, Dimitri. I only want you to care about me. Is that such a horrible thing?”

“That I harbor affection for you should be obvious,” he countered. “If I did not, you’d have ceased to exist long ago. Now, shield your eyes.”

“What?”

“Cover your eyes, Austin.”

No sooner did I bring hands up than a brilliant light filled their outer edges. Peering around splayed fingers, Dimitri’s form appeared in fuzzy halos that danced around my retinas like electric hula-hoops on acid.

Once my eyes began to adjust, I was astounded to find that the source of all that brightness came from a single dusty bulb attached to
a cracked porcelain socket jutting out from the rough-hewn wall. With a squinting glance up, I retraced our multi-story descent. Not quite the Nine Circles of Hell I’d envisioned, we were nonetheless standing in what appeared to be a large, deep stone and mortar silo, the air dryer and dustier than in the room above.

“What troubles you now?”

I turned around at the center of the room and shook my head. “The big plan’s to seal the incubus up in an airless tomb and hope that the bad guys don’t find him?”

“Have you a better one?” His gaze was growing heated.

“Yeah, I do. Screw hiding!” Dimitri regarded me as though I’d just said I wanted to blow up the world. “I have powers. I can help you fight Haemon and your sister.”

Dimitri offered me a scoffing laugh. “And die trying.”

“So better I shut up, sit tight, and go crazy from lack of food and water?”

“Your abilities are maturing at an astonishing rate, this I cannot refute.” He held up a hand in a bid for silence when I started to speak again. “Their ripening may stem merely from the infusion of my blood. Like your other gifts, this newfound strength could prove fleeting. It might fail you when you most require it.”

“You’re wrong.”

“How can you be certain?”

“Because I don’t feel you inside me anymore.” Dimitri’s shocked expression clearly indicated that he’d misunderstood my meaning. “When I drank from you last night, your blood merged with mine. It connected us. That connection’s fading. Fast.” I couldn’t tell if this pleased him or not. “The power I’d gained in the exchange was borrowed.” I walked over and sat down on one of the earthen steps. “What’s left belongs to me. I can
feel
it.”

“Ancestral memory.”

I stared blankly at him as he moved to the center of the tower, his expression pensive.

“It is a philosophy from the East, whereby an individual’s blood is thought to hold the memories of their ancestors. In your case, memories linked to your incubi brethren.”

The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. What were any of us on earth but a series of DNA strings—supernatural or otherwise? And if he was right about this, then the DNA of my demon ancestors was calling to me even now, reaching out across time and space.

The million-dollar question was: What did it want?

“Indeed.” Dimitri folded arms across his exposed chest, his linen shirt worse for wear thanks to me. “Have you not sensed this influence, this connection, throughout your life?”

I shook my head. “Not until after my thirtieth birthday.”

His eyes widened. “The Awakening!”

I shrugged, not yet comprehending his meaning.

“It is the age when the males and females of your species come into their true power. Surely your mother…” His gaze hardened and he took a step closer. “Where is your mother?”

So much had transpired since Laura’s death, and yet the terrible pain of her loss lived on. So did the guilt and old wounds I could feel reopening. “She passed away, from cancer.”

“Impossible.”

I stood up, the air around me crackling with energy. “She died in my goddamned arms. I watched them zip her body up in a bag. So don’t fucking tell me impossible!”

He reached out for me, but let his hand drop. “I meant no disrespect. Only that a succubus could not be stricken by such a disease. Human maladies do not afflict supernaturals. If cancer took her from you, then she—”

“Wasn’t my real mother, I know.”

Heartache sought to overwhelm me, but I pushed it back. Haemon and Kassandra wouldn’t care that I still grieved for Laura, or that I missed her every single day.

“She adopted me. I don’t know who my real mother is.”

A memory of Psychic Joy resurfaced. The entity that had possessed her instructed me to search for my birth mother, that only she could bring me into my true nature.

Well, Mamma Succubus didn’t want to be found, and I was doing just fine without the bitch who’d abandoned me.

Dimitri bridged the gap between us, his expression driving the hairs on the back of my neck to stand on end. “A succubus could not give birth to one so powerful unless impregnated by an incubus. Where is your father?”

The same surge of power I’d experienced twice today, once with Vardoulakis and again with those young Greek men outside, exploded to the surface in hot, pulsating waves. Dimitri’s threatening demeanor had roused my own supernatural beast. It strained against its tether, eager to break free. To attack.

“Dead, or so I was told.”

“You are wise to distrust me, Austin. However, my promise not to harm you remains intact. Come,” he said, offering me his hand. “I fear we have little time to squander.”

I regarded him with suspicion. “Where are we going?”

What might be a moment of hurt (or regret) flickered in his eyes. Then Dimitri dropped his hand and walked to the far side of the chamber to depress yet another stone in the wall. The space instantly filled with a deep rumbling.

When a section of wall opened, what lay beyond it was so spectacular that I ignored my better judgment and let Dimitri usher me across its threshold, but without touching. Every time we did, it sparked
a hope in me that something more might exist between us. Although in my heart, I knew that day would probably never come.

“My home meets with your approval?”

His
home
was equal parts hip boutique hotel and Zen monastery, where my footsteps echoed softly on polished red oxide floors stretching along a corridor lined with ancient marble pillars. Frescoes bordered the walls on either side, some so faded I could scarcely make out their images. “How do you have all this?”

“I grew tired of living in crypts.”

Did Dimitri Ravello just make a funny? Whether or not he intended his response to be humorous, I laughed anyway. “As old as you are, I’m not surprised.”

“Sometimes I forget how it must appear to an outsider,” he said reflectively.

He lowered a metal lever just inside the opening and the monolithic wall slid back into place. “In this position, the mechanism will not grant access to anyone on the other side.”

My sense of security just ratcheted up a couple of notches.

“My sister and her companion would require more help than they could marshal to breach this sanctuary, if only they knew of its existence, which they do not.”

I was still trying to take it all in—my bizarre circumstances, this remarkable place and, for whatever reason, the incredible kindness being shown to me by a sworn enemy.

“Thank you,” I said and meant every word of it, “for not killing me in Los Angeles. For saving me when you could’ve let me die yesterday, and for keeping me safe from the bad guys.”

We experienced an awkward moment where neither of us knew what to say or do next.

Dimitri broke it by ushering me farther along the corridor, where I noticed how much fresher the air had become. Blackened scorch
marks stained the outer rock walls between frescoes, where torches had presumably once burned, but which now held contemporary wall sconces. Modern touches aside, the place resonated with the ancient and inexplicable.

“Austin?” Dimitri’s voice came at a distance. “Are you coming?”

I hadn’t realized that I’d fallen behind and hurried to catch up with him at the end of the passage. He waited for me in a large, circular atrium, a series of spotlights positioned above to create a dramatic contrast of shadow and rich golden light that gave the space a wonderfully theatrical atmosphere. “And it just keeps getting better.”

Dimitri rested hands on my shoulders, encouraging me to move forward.

His touch generated a spark of energy that shot down my arms and into places low in my body and I gave a little shiver.

He instantly let go. “Come. There will be time for discovery later.”

Was he referring to us, or this sanctuary? Also, did he expect me to ignore what continued to happen between us, to believe that it was just incubus enchantment at work, or some not-so-subtle manipulation on my part? Hell, it was hard enough for me to wrap my mind around the concept that I’d developed genuine romantic feelings for another man. So I suppose I should perfectly understand how he must be feeling and stop acting like a brat.