Chapter Six

Dimitri paced thoughtfully in the kitchen while Nico shoved food—actual calories—into his mouth, his eyes fixed on the tray as if even a glance in Dimitri’s direction would derail them again. It probably would.

Dimitri hadn’t seen a Sire come into their power personally before, but there were plenty of rumors among the Court. He could imagine it looked a lot like this: an unhealthy fixation on whatever the Sire’s power-source was. An obsession with milking that power again and again to build up an initial reserve. Enough to support a couple of vampires without everyone succumbing to a blood frenzy immediately.

Dimitri felt flush with it. Almost as if he could turn a new vampire himself. Become his own Sire.

The temptation slipped away quickly. He’d have to do this whole process again, and whatever Dimitri’s power source was, he doubted it would be as pleasurable as fucking his favorite human.

His old Sire had gained power from inflicting pain, and not in a sexy setting. His targets didn’t matter to him: human, other vampires, shifters. Dimitri wasn’t sad to be rid of him.

But that freedom came with other complications he needed to see to. He’d already lost a lot of time indulging himself here.

Of course, he thoroughly enjoyed indulging himself here…

Dimitri growled. The thought blanked from his head a moment later. Then came back again, colored with growling and teeth and blood. Dimitri scowled at Nico. “You need to practice blocking your thoughts.” He tapped his own heart, indicating the bond. “Everything that flicks across your brain is being sent to me.”

Nico muttered into his food, “It’s a good thing you share all my kinks, or this would be awkward.”

“Focus, Nico.” It was like keeping a squirrel on track. “Have you ever meditated?”

“Tried once. Fell asleep.” He finished his food and turned around to wash the plate and utensils.

“I need you to practice.”

“I could practice having your cock in my mouth,” he said without inflection. Nico paused, a sponge dripping soap in one hand as arousal pingonged between them. “What is going on?”

Dimitri turned and walked the length of the room, from front door to couch and back. “The desire for power is riding you like the blood frenzy rode me, only you can’t hold any power because you’re human. If you don’t get control of this, we’ll end up fucking until you die of starvation.”

A weird mix of curiosity and fascination rose up in him, but Dimitri was getting better at identifying the emotions that weren’t his. He added, “And I’ll die right after you, since you’re my Sire. But I’ll go crazy and eat your neighbors first in the search for blood.”

The curiosity died. Instead a tangle of emotion Dimitri couldn’t parse hovered in the back of his heart, thoroughly drowning any desire for sex. Contrasting feelings of terror and elation. A mix of… something not quite pride. Followed rapidly by a series of self-directed, punishing thoughts that were too fast for Dimitri to read.

Nico had clearly gone down this mental path so often that he could speed-run it like a freeway.

Dimitri didn’t know what to do. The mental landscape shifted so quickly he was left unsteady, and Nico’s calm exterior—he finished his dishes and set them gently in the drying rack beside the sink—betrayed nothing of the heaving turmoil Dimitri had just been privy to.

Nico didn’t turn from the sink. His thoughts flickered over half a dozen subjects, then landed on a self-check for pain. He flexed his hands into fists, rolled both shoulders, and shifted from foot to foot—a hip check.

And they both came to the realization at the same time: whenever this surge of vampire power calmed down, Nico was going to be in a world of hurt.

He should take a painkiller.

Dimitri pivoted from the table abruptly, moving with purpose to the bathroom.

“Wait, where are you going?” Nico asked.

“To get you a painkiller.”

Nico was still standing at the sink when Dimitri returned. The bond still trickled power down to Dimitri, but Nico’s thoughts were muted by force.

“I sent you a compulsion, didn’t I.”

Dimitri held his hand out. He wanted to explain in detail how the compulsions weren’t blanket commands. Nico couldn’t make Dimitri do something he didn’t want to do in the first place.

Well. They’d cover that later.

But at this point it was complicated by the fact that Nico and Dimitri wanted the same things. Which meant neither of them had any natural resistance to each other. The upper logic system keeping Dimitri from acting on every impulse that crossed his mind was simply short circuited by Nico’s desires.

So he went with the simple answer. “Yes.”

Nico accepted the pills. The thought of chasing them with Dimitri’s cum flickered between them. Nico turned away and drank from the tap instead.

He leaned on the sink without looking back at Dimitri—probably for the best—and said, “Ok. Meditation. What else?”

“If laying down and concentrating isn’t working, you may find moving meditation easier to work with. Like yoga. It’ll teach you to be aware of your breath and to move with intention.”

“Meditation and yoga.” Nico smirked a little. “Strange homework for controlling vampire magic, but I’m not complaining.”

Dimitri hummed. “You need to exercise better control over the bond. You can send thoughts and emotion. You can send power. You’ll need to practice closing everything off and opening it again. When you get better you’ll be able to control exactly what you send, to whom, and how strongly.”

Nico glanced at him. “Who teaches a new Sire this if they’ve just turned a new vampire?”

Dimitri shook his head. “You’ve got it backward. New vamps learn this kind of control from their Sire when they’re turned. I was taught how to take power from blood, how to cultivate it to become stronger. How to send it up the bond so my Sire could protect us all…” He walked around the table, tapping his claws on the wood absently. “There’s a lot to teach you, but it starts with exercising the bond.”

Nico’s eyes narrowed. Dimitri was trying hard to keep a lid on his own intentions, but impressions must have been leaking through. It was hard to shut the door on his end when Nico had no interest in closing it.

Nico’s voice dropped with suspicion. “What are you not telling me?”

Dimitri wrinkled his nose. Better to rip off the bandaid. “I need to go. I’ll be back—“

Nico stiffened. “Go? Go where?”

Dimitri opened his hands like he could ward off a fight. “My Sire was killed. It’s why I fell into a blood frenzy and came here. But now I’m stable. So are you. I need to get back to my Court—I need to figure out if there’s even a Court left to go back to. I need to know what happened.”

“I’ll come with you,” Nico said instantly, his thoughts flickering over what he’d need to bring in a day-bag.

“You can’t,” Dimitri said emphatically. Fear for Nico speared suddenly into this heart. “You’re human. You’re nothing but food to other vampires and the ones I know don’t keep their food alive.”

“But I’m a Sire, now.” Nico moved around the table. “They won’t kill—“

“They will!” Dimitri grabbed Nico’s arms. He wanted to shake him. “You don’t understand the Court. It’s not a safe place even for other vampires. We absolutely will kill anyone who gets in the way that isn’t more powerful. Including the Sire. If you can kill the Sire, you’re probably strong enough to become one yourself and you need to control the court of they’ll turn on you.” He ran one stressed hand through his hair and stared Nico in the eyes, trying to convey how important this was. “There is a reason the Sire takes power from the vampires below them. It keeps everyone weaker. So they can’t challenge the Sire.”

Nico’s frustration and determination bled over the bond, but Dimitri didn’t need it to see the set of his face.

His arguments were clearly not getting through. “You need to practice closing the bond. And where I’m going you can’t follow anyway.” He stepped back, but only a bit. He didn’t need much room for what he’d do next.

And he’d be able to hear Nico’s anger from around the world.

“Watch me.” Nico frowned at him. “You think you can ditch me after all this? If I really want to stay on your tail?”

Dimitri gave him a flash of a grin. He knew Nico was motivated, but that wasn’t what he needed where Dimitri was going.

He shrugged, trying not to send too much of a challenge through their bond. He did, in fact, want to keep Nico safe.

Nico held his stare unflinchingly. Dimitri reached beyond himself with power, beyond the mortal realm and into the Shade. He stepped through, like pulling himself backward to a place that welcomed him home.

A place of absolute darkness. No sun. No stars. Nothing but flexing, living blackness. To Nico it would have looked like Dimitri simply vanished into thin air. To Dimitri, he felt almost like falling backward into a cloud, only for him to appear, upright and steady, in the middle of a ruin.

The expected spike of anger came through from Nico, but it was muted quickly by sheer determination. Dimitri hoped Nico would work his way toward meditation just to give himself some time. He need to know what happened here.

His red eyes widened to take in every detail. He stopped breathing—that was mostly for Nico’s benefit anyway—and stilled his heart to eliminate any possible sound. The Shade wasn’t just eternal darkness, it was also full of predators. Without light to see by, they had other senses to hunt with.

Dimitri didn’t need sight the way a human would. He could sense power, and he could stretch his awareness through the living darkness like a prowling cat. His senses touched every stone block, every broken corner, every single pebble that was the pile of destruction left behind.

His Court had been a castle of obsidian stone and velvet, the throne room large enough to hold over four hundred vampires. There had been entire wings of rooms, for meetings or feeding or other activities that held the business of an entire Court. Stories of activity. Two entire basement levels.

Dimitri turned silently on a pile of rock and detected nothing left but crumbling rubble. And beyond the walls blasted to bits, nothing stirred in the darkness.

His Sire hadn’t just been killed, his entire Court had been wiped clear of the Shade. Like the darkness itself had come through and consumed them.

He belatedly sensed bodies in the rock. No life or un-life remained. Blood, only hours old, ran under everything and was starting to congeal. Not enough bodies to account for the whole Court, but more than a hundred. Some number of vampires were always in the mortal world, luring food or on assignment. And another group would have escaped the attack into the mortal world like Dimitri had, doomed to fall into blood frenzy and die.

Some might have stepped into the sun before they lost all of their wits, knowing the fate that awaited them. Dimitri was glad that hadn’t occurred to him.

Dimitri made his way down the pile of stone in complete silence. Just because he couldn’t sense anything watching didn’t mean he was safe. A Court was more than just connection to a Sire. It was also safety in numbers, a little island of security in a vast sea of hostile darkness.

He worked his way across the cracked stone of the courtyard, through what had once been the arched doorways of the throne room, and found the disassembled throne cracked in three on a dais of steps also shattered to the foundation.

He’d been here, standing beside his Sire, when it happened. Every vampire in Court had felt it. That chilling, otherworldly moment when the Sire had seized up, standing suddenly from his throne, his eyes blazing with purple light.

Dimitri frowned at the memory, suddenly so clear. He could almost hear the icy crackle of power—not vampire power—that had flooded the Sire and cut him off from the King.

All of his bonds had been cut at once. A Sire was tied to the King just like Dimitri was tied to his Sire.

And there was only one source of power that burned like the cold of deep space.

Demons.