Rafael opened his jacket, revealing a vest covered with wired sticks of dyn**ite. He held out his hand to display a remote device, a button on which his thumb had pressed down. “Release Samantha and the other women now, or I will detonate the explosives. There are enough strapped to me to obliterate everyone in this room.”
“Dear boy, I am impressed.” Donatien leaned against the table, striking a beautiful pose. “You are, of course, bluffing.”
“My master’s order were explicit,” Rafael told him. “Samantha is his sygkenis. If he can not have her, no one will.”
Donatien chuckled. “That sounds more like the Lucan I remember. But what of your little lover, Emissary? Are you ready to sacrifice her on the altar of honor as well?”
“I am the one responsible for poisoning you,” Rafael replied. “I am Kyn, and not easily killed. You can spend eternity taking out your vengeance on me.”
“No.” Dani walked slowly toward Rafael. “You don’t have to do this.” Her wrist throbbed, and she felt her flesh parting and blood welling.
“Listen to your sweetheart, Rafael,” Donatien said. “Do as I wish, and you and I can spend eternity playing with her.”
“Daniela.” Rafael met her gaze for a long, sorrowful instant.
“I know,” she whispered as she reached out and took Donatien’s cold hand in hers.
“My pearl, don’t be afraid. He is all… talk and…” a frown marred his perfect features as he tried to take his hand from hers and discovered that he couldn’t break her hold. “Cristál? What are you doing, child?”
Dani took his other hand in hers, and looked into his puzzled eyes. “What I was made to do.” She closed her eyes.
He felt her then, and struggled, jerking at her hands. “No. You are gifted, pet, but this is too ambitious. You cannot.”
From a distance Dani heard Rafael call her name in a terrible voice, and felt his hands wrench at hers. But even with his vampire strength, he could not break the connection between her and the monster.
“Take your hands off me,” Donatien ordered in a thick, ugly voice. “Stop this. Stop this immediately, I command you—”
Dani opened her eyes. Donatien’s face began to wither, his cheeks contracting, his lovely mouth thinning, his eyes sinking back into his head. His flawless skin grew mottled as capillaries burst and formed an ugly red web around his nose and across his cheeks. His teeth, bared now, darkened from flawless white to a stained, chipped yellow. Clumps of his caramel hair began to drift to the floor as patches of bare scalp sprouted on his head. Beneath his clothing, muscles thinned and shrank, and bones creaked and snapped.
Tiny dots appeared all over him; particles of copper being pushed out of the pores of his skin. They rained on the floor, reddish-orange dust.
Dani had never held on so long, but she did not let go until she felt the last of the copper and the strength leave Donatien’s body. Then she stepped back away from the stooped, skeletal thing he had become.
“Ashes to ashes,” Donatien croaked in an impossibly ancient voice. “Dust to dust. My pearl, you have… undone me.”
His body collapsed in on itself, a house of forgotten cards. The body she had healed was too old and fragile to sustain itself now. He had cheated the grave too long, and Death came to grind him under its heel. In less time than it took for Rafael to disconnect the explosives strapped to his body, what had been Le Marquis de Sade lay in a crumpled pile of velvet, bone and ash.
Dani knew she didn’t have much time left; what she had taken into herself would soon take over her. “Rafael.” She smiled as he came to her and took her face between his hands. “It was not him last night. It was you, and it was me. Only us. I promise.”
“Daniela.” He kissed her and held her against him, and shouted for someone. “Tell me what to do. What will happen to you?”
“I must go now.” She had already slipped the knife from his belt. One small push, and it slid between her ribs and into her heart as gently as a lover’s sigh. “Be happy.”
Epilogue
“I remember doing this,” Lucan said as he watched Rafael tuck the sheets around Daniela's motionless body. “I was about to give up when she finally came back to me.”
Rafael sat down beside the bed and rubbed his eyes. “With all due respect, my lord? Go away.”
“My friend, I will give you as much time as you need with her,” Lucan said. “But she absorbed the whole of Donatien into herself. I do not think Christ himself could have shouldered such a burden.”
The door closed, and Rafael was alone again with her. Alone and waiting, as he had for three weeks. She had healed from what had been a mortal wound, but she had not transitioned to Kyn as Samantha had. Still human, Daniela would drink and swallow soft foods, and her natural body functions continued, but she remained locked in what seemed an endless sleep. He had tried entering her dreams, as he had on the night they had spent together, but her mind never again opened to him.
Soon he would have to make a decision, Rafael knew that. He could not spend eternity waiting for Daniela to wake up. The women of the convent had offered to care for her. Perhaps it was meant to be.
Samantha paid the next visit. “How’s she doing?”
“No change.” His voice sounded like stones grating together.
“I finished running the background check on her,” Samantha said as she came to the bed. “No birth records, no missing person reports, nothing. As far as Argentina is concerned, she doesn’t exist. I did better with the dream about the compound, though.”
He looked up. “It was real?”
She nodded. “I had a guy I know over at University of Miami get in touch with an archeologist working down there. He went looking in the area you described and he found the compound and the hidden entrance under the shed. You’re never going to guess who ‘the Father’ was.”
“Joseph Mengele.”
“Oh, hell.” She planted her hands on her hips. “How did you know?”
“I saw photos of him on the wall, in the dream.”
“Yeah, well, that spoils my big surprise. Seems after Mengele fled Europe to avoid prosecution for war crimes, he set up this place and spent years conducting experiments on the locals. According to the records they found, he took in mostly poor pregnant women. He was trying to genetically alter their unborn children. Only one baby survived. A little girl.”
“Cristál. Patient six-one-two-seven.”
“That’s her.” Samantha took Daniela's hand in hers. “There are some weird bits we can’t explain. Like the fact that Cristál’s records indicate she was born on February seventh, nineteen sixty-one.” She gazed down at the young, unlined face. “You know, if this is her, she looks pretty damn good for a forty-five year old woman.”
“Impossible. The records must belong to someone else.”
“She remembers Mengele, and he died in nineteen seventy-nine, Rafael. That alone would put her in her mid-to-late thirties.” Samantha looked thoughtful. “Anyway, I’ll leave you two alone. You might try the Sleeping Beauty cure. It’s how Lucan brought me back to the land of the living.”
He couldn’t concentrate enough to decipher her meaning. “Sleeping Beauty cure?”
“Tell her you love her and kiss her, you dumb ass.” Samantha grinned at him and left.
Rafael moved to sit next to Daniela on the bed. “Is that all it would take? To tell you that I love you? I hardly know you.” He bent close, and breathed in the scent of her skin. “But if you will come back to me, Daniela, I will love you. I know that in my heart now. We only need time together.”
She did not stir.
“Daniela, please. I cannot love a dream. I need you.” He lifted her up into his arms. “Come back to me now. Give me some hope.” He put his mouth to hers, and kissed her, and felt the pulse of her heart under his lips.
Rafael held her for a long time, willing her to wake, but she remained in her dream world. He made her comfortable, turning her on her side so that bed sores wouldn’t form on her back, and went to stand at the window to watch another sunrise alone.
He had responsibilities to Lucan, and to the humans he protected as a cop. He couldn’t ignore them forever. If he put her in the care of the women of the convent, he could still visit her every day. He wouldn’t give up on her. She had saved him from an eternity of suffering. He would never abandon her.
His face felt wet. It couldn’t be. He had not wept in six hundred years.
“Rafael.” A soft hand slipped into his, and Daniela was there, standing beside him, alive, awake, a dream come true.
He had to touch her to be sure. “Sleeping Beauty.” He caressed her cheek.
“I dreamed I was hiding in the jungle. Someone wanted to catch me, but he couldn’t, and then I think he finally went away.” She yawned, as if she had done nothing more than wake from a long nap. “Are you all right?”
“I am now,” he said, and pulled her into his arms.