Dominion (15 page)

“I don’t care. I won’t have him lost in some other … place!”

“Serenity,” said Sebastian. “What we’re doing here isn’t for me. If I die or I’m lost in this … Dominion, then so be it. All I want is for you and Elizabeth to be safe. If it means the end of my existence, then I accept my fate.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “No, I won’t hear you talk like that. We need you. Both Elizabeth and I need you.”

He shook his head. “No, you’re both strong. You will live long and safe without me in your lives.”

She pressed her lips together, trying to suppress a sob and failing. “Stop it. Don’t talk like that.”

He held her with his intense gaze. “If it was the other way around, Serenity, and you needed to do something dangerous to keep me and Elizabeth safe, you’d want to be allowed to do it, wouldn’t you?”

She couldn’t look at him. She dropped her gaze to the ground and nodded. What he said was true. She’d do anything to keep the people she loved safe.

“Well, then let me do this.”

“Okay,” she relented. “But come back to us. Promise you’ll come back to us?”

“I’ll do everything in my power.”

That would have to be good enough. She knew he didn’t have the ability to promise such things. Iona stepped from the room, giving them, Serenity assumed, some time to say goodbye.

He leaned in, his cool lips pressing against hers. The back of his knuckles grazed against her jaw. “Do you know how much I love you?”

“I think so.” Serenity took his hand.
“Have you realized you didn’t have any of this stress in your life before I came along? No one was out to try to kill you or hurt you. You just got on with your life.”

“Serenity, the reason nothing affected me before you came along was because I didn’t have anything in my life for anyone to take away. I didn’t have anyone to protect. I didn’t have anything I cared about.”

“Wasn’t life easier before?”

“Before you came along, I had no life. I was nothing.”

She pressed her lips together, trying not to cry. She nodded frantically. “Me too,” she said. “I felt exactly the same way.”

His hand squeezed hers. “I’ll come back,” he reassured her. “We’re meant to be together—you, me and Elizabeth. I won’t let some other vampire, or demon, or other
place
come between us.”

Chapter Fifteen

Fear for his own well
-being wasn’t something Sebastian was used to experiencing.
Even when he’d been in the company of Demitri, he’d known the other vampire would never have been able to kill him—one vampire could not kill another. The threat of being holed up somewhere beneath the earth for hundreds of years to go mad with starvation had always been a possibility, but he would have made it out eventually. Now, the very real possibility of being stuck in that strange and frightening place the young sorceress, Iona, had called Dominion loomed and he was scared for his immortal life. There was a good chance he would spend the rest of his existence surrounded by scampering demons and lost souls. Just like him.

“Get Iona back in here,” he told Serenity.

The girl stepped through the door. “It’s okay, I’m here.” She looked between Serenity and Sebastian and her expression softened. “I’ll do everything I can to get this demon out of him,” she said, addressing Serenity. “Sometimes I wonder if my parents had survived ...
would they
love each other the way you both do.”

She had listened to their conversation.

“I’m sure they would have.” Serenity reassured the young sorceress. “After all, they loved each other enough to be together despite the risks.”

“You know about that?”

Serenity nodded. “Bridget told me.”

“Sometimes, it feels like they died because of me.
As if
I killed them myself.”

Serenity left Sebastian’s side to take the girl’s slender hand. “You were a baby—an innocent.”

“But if I’d never been born, they would still be alive today.
In love, like you and your vampire.”

Sebastian tried to not bristle at “
your vampire
.”

“Listen to me,” Serenity continued. “As a parent, the most important person in the world is your child. However much we love each other, we’d give up each other in an instant if it meant keeping Elizabeth safe.” She glanced over at Sebastian and he nodded in confirmation. “All we want is for her to be safe and happy. The rest of life is a bonus.”

Iona’s big, blue eyes swelled with tears.
“Really?”

Serenity nodded. “I’m sure your parents would have felt the same way about you.”

“Thank you. I hope so.” She turned her face away and wiped at tears she didn’t want them to see. She turned back and put on a brave smile.
“Right.
Let’s try to talk to this thing. Are you ready?” she asked Sebastian.

He nodded, trying to hide that fact that nerves churned his gut.
“As I’ll ever be.”

“Okay. Serenity, if you would stand back.”

Serenity did as she was told and took three steps back, away from the bed.

In the same way as before, Iona held her hands over Sebastian’s body. The experience was strange for him, lying there with a girl standing over him. He didn’t like his new found vulnerability and he felt more exposed than if he’d been faced with a room of angry vampires. At least with vampires he knew where he stood. Right now, caught between the powers of a sorceress and a demon, he was lost in the unknown.

Iona repeated the words she’d spoken before. “I call upon the five elements—air, fire, earth, water and ether—to give me control over the being that has been banished here.”

A strange buzzing started inside Sebastian’s head, like all the molecules of his brain were jostling together.

He closed his eyes to stop himself from focusing on what the sorceress was doing.

I want to go back,
he said in his head
. I want to go back, I want to go back.

He pictured himself walking down the streets
, each spot of darkness and shadows hiding strange and monstrous creatures he’d never known existed before. And no part of him wanted to be there.

Iona’s words tumbled down around him like falling leaves and the intensity of the buzzing increased, uncomfortable now. The room around him seemed distant, as though he was being pushed deeper inside himself. Or something else was rising up. He wanted to move, to get up from the bed and shake
himself
off, but he realized he couldn’t. His whole body was pinned to the bed by some invisible entity.

Iona’s magic.

He knew she couldn’t do this on her own. She needed him to remove himself from the equation and allow the demon through.

Do this! For Serenity and Elizabeth
, you can do this!

But the buzzing in his head began to fade and he sensed his consciousness starting to rise to the surface. He opened his eyes to find Serenity staring at him, her dark eyes wide,
her
face pale. Though he’d not achieved what he’d hoped, he realized Serenity had caught a glimpse of the demon at least.

Sebastian sighed in frustration and sat up. “I’m sorry. I can’t get myself to want to be in Dominion enough. When I willed myself there before, it was because I’d found myself standing in broad daylight and I was burning. I can’t get myself to want to leave here enough to
will
myself to go.”

The sorceress stared at his face and then her eyes flicked to Serenity.

“Then you need an incentive,” she said. She swung to face Serenity and shot out a hand. A bolt of blue light flew from the palm of her hand and hit Serenity in the chest. Serenity flew back and crashed against the wall, half sliding down the surface. She clutched at her chest, struggling to breath
e
, looking between Sebastian and Iona, her eyes wide with panic.

“What are you doing?” Sebastian roared.

“You said you needed to
want
to go, so go back to Dominion or I will kill her.”

“I can’t! Stop this immediately!”

“The last thing I want is a demon-ridden vampire running around here out of control. The loss of her life is less important than sending that thing back where it came from.”

“So kill me,” he said, springing from the bed to stand in front of her. He tried to put his body between the blue light and Serenity, but as soon as he went near, the light repelled him, throwing him away. He hit the floor with a crash. Curling his hands into fists, he slammed them against the floor in frustration.

“I can’t do that, Sebastian” Iona said. “If you die, the demon will simply look for somewhere else to go. I won’t have it taking an innocent.”

He glanced at Serenity. She seemed only able to take tiny gasps, as though her throat had constricted or something heavy sat on her chest. Her eyes rolled in their sockets and her lips were turning blue.

“Look at her, vampire,” spat Iona. All of a sudden, she wasn’t some innocent, young girl. She encompassed all of the powers and magic of her ancestors before her. “Go to Dominion and I’ll release her.”

Sebastian had no choice. Part of him wanted to tear the girl to shreds, but he couldn’t. Not only was she their only hope, she reminded him too much of Elizabeth for him to ever do her harm. If he even could.

He roared in frustration again, but forced himself to focus, to lock his eyes on Serenity’s distressed face. Only by going back to Dominion would her suffering stop.

He wanted to be there. He needed to be there.

All at once, the walls of the trailer grew faint—transparent—and he could make out the dark world of Dominion through them. The wallpaper began to flake away, holes opening in the walls, the now crepe paper-thin fortifications breaking apart.

Sebastian turned back to Serenity, but the spot where she had been thrown was empty. Turning his head slightly, he caught a glimpse of Iona, still standing with her
hand outstretched. She gave him a brief nod, one that told him “well done,” and then she, too, was gone.

When Sebastian looked back around, the whole trailer had vanished. Only the scrubby desert landscape surrounded him. He frowned. Why was the trailer not still here? In the city, all of the buildings had remained the same, so why not the trailer? The chain link fence and gate enclosing the compound were still present. Then he realized something else. The freeway had been empty of traffic. Perhaps anything that moved wasn’t reflected here?

The post-apocalyptic sky churned
over
head, the thick clouds swirling and rippling as though a hurricane force wind hurried them along, though no such wind touched his face or blew back his clothing. Here in the enormous expanse of the desert, with no city skyline to break up the vastness, the color and depth of the sky had even more of an impact, stretching as far as the eye could see.

Sebastian went to shove his hands into the pockets of his jacket, only to discover he wasn’t wearing it. Feeling even more exposed, he wondered exactly what he should be doing now that he was here.

Had Iona conjured the demon
?
Was the demon sitting up in bed right now, using his body like a puppet, telling them what Iona needed to know?

The thought made Sebastian uneasy. He felt so lost here,
untethered
to the real world. Exactly what Iona had told him was the most dangerous thing to be.

The small town of
Lenwood
lay ahead. Behind him stretched the city of Barstow. Like in Los Angeles, they blazed against the night sky—every bulb and fluorescent strip in them alight. With his vampire’s speed waning, he stood no chance of getting back to L.A. anytime soon. But then he had to question his reason for wanting to be back in the city. It wasn’t as though Serenity or Elizabeth would be waiting for him.

If he did decide to go home, he wondered, would his body vanish from Iona’s trailer and reappear in the city when Iona and Serenity brought him back? Or, even worse, would the distance between his physical body in the real world and whatever form he took here make it harder for him to get back to them?

I won’t go far,
he decided, not liking the idea of venturing out and somehow increasing the distance between
himself
and the real world. But, while he didn’t want to take any risks, he couldn’t just stand in one spot and wait.

Without the presence of the trailers, the desert plants had taken over—thick patches of green-grey, spiky leafed
b
rittlebush, the plant’s small yellow flowers not in bloom at this time of the year. Dotted between the
b
rittlebush, clumps of
c
reosote sprouted from the sandy soil, permeating the air with the bushes’ distinctive smoky scent.

He started to walk, figuring he’d get back on the road and decide his direction from there.

To his right, one of the bushes rustled.

Sebastian’s attention flicked to the movement. The rustling stopped instantly, as though whatever had caused the movement knew it had been spotted. He frowned, uneasiness crawling up over his shoulders and the back of his neck.

An animal
?

Some desert creatures liked to dig their burrows between the roots of the
c
reosote bush. Perhaps even a coyote? He didn’t like not having his heightened senses. Normally, he’d be able to smell what kind of animal was near long before he ever laid eyes on it.

Behind him, another shrub rustled and he spun around. Everything fell silent once again. He scoured the dimly lit land. He’d never found the desert threatening before, but right now, every square inch held the potential for something frightening.

With every muscle in his body tensed, he turned back and continued toward the road. More movement came from the bushes ahead now. With it came the same whispered chattering he’d heard coming from the fronds of the palm trees in Los Angeles.

I don’t like this.

He picked up his
pace,
wanting to get his legs out of the shadows of the bushes in the same way a child jumps into bed to avoid the dark spot beneath the bed. At least on the road he’d be able to see something coming at him.

He didn’t like being frightened; the emotion didn’t sit right with him. He was a vampire, goddamn it!

Suddenly, movement burst from beneath the bushes all around him. Little black creatures—like the one’s he’d seen in L.A., only smaller—launched at him. They ran with a scurrying sideways movement, like small primates. They snarled and chattered with mouths full of spiky white teeth. One leapt at him and attached itself to his leg. He let out a yell of shock and kicked it off. The creature flew into the bush, but rebounded. Before Sebastian had the chance to recover, the weight of another landed on his back, its sharp claws digging into his skin. One jumped on his arm, another on his shoulder, pulling him off balance.

His strength all but gone, Sebastian found himself
lying on his back,
surrounded by little creatures of darkness with red eyes and needle-like teeth. They had hold of his arms and legs, though he bucked and fought against them, lashing out with his arms and kicking. But nothing made a difference. As soon as he dislodged one, another took its place. He felt himself being lifted, the cool rush of air in the space between his back and the desert floor. The creatures held him above the ground as they ran
along, holding him up by his arms
,
legs
,
and torso. He struggled
against the
m, trying to get away, but he couldn’t. They chattered and laughed as they went—sounds of madness
.