Retribution (Book 3 of The Dominion Series) (7 page)

I don’t know what I want anymore. I know nothing about who I am inside. Despite knowing I wrote the journal, it feels like it belongs to someone else. I lost the person I’m reading about in the pages of my journal.

I need to find her again, or create a new person.

I read the newspapers, read the coverage of the bombing now with different eyes. Michel never intended to take me to meet with the Council to talk about killing Soren. He doesn’t really intend to let me take up that cause again, and is just humoring me, hoping I'll give it up eventually. But I won't give up the cause and now that I've recovered, that means the mission can still go ahead, if I can meet with the Council. I may have to do it on my own. I think about Terri and wonder if she'd help me…

I try to track down where my possessions went after the bombing but it’s impossible. Michel took everything and now, unless I go back to him, I can’t even read my mother’s research to try to figure out what she knew. I have only my journal notes to go on and most of the time, they were more focused on my feelings than on specific details.

At night I sit and watch the stars, a profound loneliness filling me. I know I can have Michel if I want him but knowing that he killed my mother saddens me for how can I want the man who destroyed my life?

I don't know if I want him on his terms. He wants me to submit to him completely but as much as my journal claims I was falling in love with Michel, I’m just so angry and shocked to learn the truth about him that I don't know how I feel about him now. All I have is this story about a woman who wanted revenge and a vampire-killing vampire she thought she loved and who she thought would help her get revenge. Another vampire she thought she could love who got between them. She fucked them both.

Other than Michel's memories that he shared with me, I remember
none
of it. It’s a story. It’s fiction. I feel so detached.

Now, when I walk the beach, I notice the man trailing me about five hundred feet behind. I notice the car parked on the shaded street across from the cottage. I notice the security cameras set up around our property, which I never thought to ask about before.

I’m a prisoner of this life, I'm
his
prisoner, with no real memory of who I am.

It’s on Saturday as I’m on the beach for my morning walk when I see a figure approaching me in the distance. He’s barefoot, his jeans rolled up as he walks in the surf. I wonder if my security team will go to him or stop me from getting too close to him but they don’t.

He’s not looking at me, but stopping to pick up stones, throwing them out on the water. He bends down to pick up shells, using driftwood to move some kelp. He kneels down and examines the shells, holding them up one by one in the sunlight.

Finally he rises and starts walking towards me again, not looking at me, just walking with his head down as if his mind is busy.  He looks like Michel – except he has shorter hair and quite the growth of whiskers. He’s wearing a pair of faded jeans and a white t-shirt, a wooden cross on a black leather rope around his neck. Sunglasses hide his eyes, but his face is the same as Michel’s. I stop in the sand, waiting.

He glances up and when he sees me, he falters, his mouth opening.
 

It’s Julien – it
has
to be. He looks identical to Michel but has a long scar on his cheek. According to my journal, I fucked him after an intense and unconventional courtship, vampire style.

He stumbles, and falls to his knees, removing his sunglasses as if he doesn’t believe it.

“
Dieu
…”

He sits back on his heels, his head bowed, his hands on his knees as if he’s unable to remain upright. Huge dark wings unfurl behind him. He shakes his head, his lips moving and I can barely hear what he’s saying. He's speaking in French – cursing in French. Curse after curse.

"
Sacristy…"
he says.
"Crisse. Batard.…"

He rises up and staggers towards me. I step back, afraid of him, those wings making him look like some wild fallen angel. I’m shocked at the intensity of his emotional response. He grabs me, crushing me against his body, squeezing hard, harder, breathing fast.

“Oh, God,
oh, God
…” he whispers, taking my face in his hands, his blue eyes on mine and his eyes are brimming.

Then, he kisses me, one long intense kiss and when a connection forms between us, his emotions explode into me, leaving me breathless. He ends the kiss, his forehead against mine.

“I thought you were
dead
,” he says, his voice breaking. “I saw your body. I saw your
hair
…” He runs his fingers through it then over my throat where Michel bit me. He looks down at the gold crucifix around my neck and touches it, shaking his head.

"I thought…" he says, touching the crucifix around his own neck that looks identical to the one I'm wearing. "That
bastard
…"

He struggles to speak for a moment and when he does, he’s so emotional, he can only whisper. “They identified you through DNA because your body was so badly disfigured...”

“That wasn’t me,” I say, trying to pull back but he won’t let me, his arms going around me, his face in my neck, his tears wet on my cheek.

“Oh,
God
,” he says, squeezing me so tightly I can barely breathe. “Oh, God you’re
alive
…”

Then, he must finally realize I don’t remember him and he pulls back. He grimaces as if in pain, brushing the hair from my face.

“You don’t
remember
me?”

I shake my head.
  “I know you must be Julien,” I say quietly. “I can tell because of your scar. I read about you in the journal I kept before the bomb.”

He shakes his head as if he can’t comprehend what I’m saying.

“But we were
lovers
…”

“We had sex,
twice
,” I say, emotion filling me, making my throat choke. “We
weren’t
lovers.”

“
I
loved you. You said,” he says, his voice breaking. “You said you could love me.”

“It doesn’t matter.” I try to step away. “I don’t remember anything because of the head injury.” I turn away because the pain on his is just too blatant and brings tears to my eyes.

“
What?
”

“Retrograde amnesia and some agnosia caused by a Council drug your brother gave me. The damage was to my frontal lobe. I lost everything so far back, I can barely remember my mother’s face. No recent faces. No events since I was ten, according to my neurologist. Just body memories, sounds, smells, but I have no idea how I got them.”

He’s breathing fast. Faster.

“That
bastard
…” he says, his voice barely audible. “I’ll kill him. I’ll fucking
kill
him,” he says, and his fists are clenched, his lips pressed thin.

My emotions rise. He’s just so upset, this beautiful stranger who I don’t remember but who acts as if I’m his, and I don’t know how to take it.

“He didn't want me to try to kill Soren,” I say, unsure why I'm defending Michel.

“No,” he says. "He just wanted you all to himself." Then he glances past my shoulder and I hear someone coming up behind me. I turn as a man dressed in a black suit and white shirt, sunglasses, a wireless headset in his ear, comes along the beach towards us, struggling to run in the sand. He goes to Julien and tries to shove him away.

“Julien, leave now,” the guard says, his chest out, but Julien just takes the much larger man by the throat and lifts him up, squeezing. He's a fearsome sight, his face a mask of rage, the vampire coming out, his eyes red, his fangs extended, his wings spread out wide. The guard chokes, his limbs flailing, his face becoming purple.

“
Stop!”
I cry out to Julien, but it's as if he doesn't hear me. “Don’t, Julien please! He’s only doing his job.”

He turns to me, his face changing, eyes returning to normal as if I’ve called him back from some very dark place. He drops the guard, who falls onto the sand, choking, his hands at his throat as if he can’t breathe.

“You’ve hurt him,” I say, kneeling down to the man, who still can’t breathe. I glance up at Julien. “Help him!”

Julien shakes his head. “I’m not a medic, Eve. I'm a vampire. I kill. I don’t heal.”

“But you
can
,” I say, tears in my eyes. “Do something…”

Finally, Julien's wings fold up until they disappear and he kneels down beside me, taking the guard’s head in his hands. He runs his fingers over the man’s throat as if he's molding the man's windpipe, and after a moment, the guard starts to breathe again, inhaling loudly then coughing. Julien takes the man’s face in his hands once he’s breathing more normally.

“You’re going back to wherever you came from and you’re going to forget you saw me here. As far as you know, Eve’s fine. She’s safe. There’s nothing to worry about. Do you understand?”

The guard blinks. “She’s safe. There’s nothing to worry about.”

“Now go. Tell any other guards that Eve’s safe. Tell them she went with Michel and she’ll be gone for a while.”

The guard struggles but manages to stand, straightening his jacket and adjusting the headset. He turns around and goes back in the other direction towards my parent’s cottage.

“Thank you,” I say to Julien when he turns back to me.

He just stares at me, his gaze moving over my face.

“What am I going to do with you now?” he says quietly. “I’m not letting you out of my sight ever again.”

I shake my head.

“No,” I say, moving away from him. “Don’t you be like Michel. I don’t need two of you trying to treat me like I’m some kind of possession.”

“You
are,”
he says, his voice choked. “You were
meant
for me. I claimed you first.”

I frown and turn away, remembering another entry from my journal that it was Julien who bit me first.

“Do you have
any
idea how ridiculous that sounds? You sound like a spoiled child.”

“I
was
spoiled. I had you and then Michel took you away from me. Then, he led me to believe you were
dead
,” and even now, his voice breaks. “Eve, I didn’t know if I could go on when I thought you were dead...”

“But you did go on.”

“No I didn’t,” he says and his voice is almost a whisper. “I went back to the monastery. I quit fighting. I couldn’t imagine what I’d be fighting for anymore.”

“Stop it,” I say. “That's ridiculous. You’re a knight. You’re a soldier. You told me it’s what you do, fight. Kill enemies. Besides, we were barely even together.”

He’s silent for a moment.

“You don’t believe in love at first sight?”

Yes, I
do
. Or at least I thought I did. But my love at first sight wasn't for Julien.  It was for Michel. That much I do know from my journal.

"You had a strange way of showing it."

"I didn't
want
to love you,” he says. “I couldn’t help it."

I dig my nails into my palms and don’t respond.

“Eve, I thought my enemies won,” he says. “And I stopped caring anymore. But now…” We just stand there in an awkward silence. Finally, he speaks and his voice is barely above a whisper. “Are you,” he says. “Are you with him again?”

“Not anymore,” I say. “I found my journal and read everything. Until then, I had no memories of anything after my mother died. I didn’t even know vampires existed. Michel and I met again. Then I learned the truth – that it was Michel who killed my mother. I left him.”

"You
left
him? He
let
you go?” He shakes his head, disbelief on his face. "Soren compelled him to kill your mother, Eve," he says. "He wouldn't have done it himself."

"It doesn't matter. He killed my mother, Julien! He
lied
to me,” I say, tears in my eyes. “All this time. He lied to me all along and so did you. You never told me the truth either.”

“What good would it do to tell you?” he says, an edge in his voice. “You’d only obsess about it, plan some way to get revenge, and get yourself killed in the process. That’s exactly what you did, once you found out that Soren was responsible," he says and waves to the beach, "All this is because of your vendetta against him. We were both right not to tell you the truth.”

“The truth is always preferable to lies.”

“You think so?” he says, his voice suddenly hard. “You’ve barely been alive. You know nothing about existence. Believe me, sometimes a lie makes existence bearable. Like I lied to myself about you. That if we'd met first, you would have loved me instead of Michel. Believe me, that lie kept me alive during very dark times.”