RoseBlood(70)

Thorn scowled. He’d had little choice to tell the driver anything else, with Erik seated across from him.

“The entire point is to make her feel like a monster,” Erik continued. “Convince her that her songs are tied to her insatiable hunger. That to give up the music will cure her.”

Lie to her, in other words. Thorn’s frown deepened.

Erik held up his brandy, admiring its color in the light. “Back in the States our precious little pigeon attacked a stranger, and it has haunted her. But to feed off someone she actually cares for . . . it will break her. Render her incapable of forming relationships or functioning in that world. And that’s exactly what we want. So, take pride in a card well played.”

Thorn tightened his grip on his wine goblet and swirled the deep, burgundy liquid, watching it slosh the tall, clear edges—a sea of tainted blood seeking to escape the crystalline fortress too pristine to contain it. He wished he could look into Rune’s memory and see the night she attacked the boy, Ben, to know what really happened. But only childhood moments were strong enough to survive transfer. Once innocence was gone, once a person started keeping too many secrets, memories frayed, became impossible to pass on without disintegrating into threads.

“You need to stay up here tonight,” Erik interrupted his grousing thoughts, blotting the upper lip of his mask where driblets of golden brandy dotted the tooth-shaped edges. “Your black moods make you unpredictable. Watch from your ringside seat, or go home. But do not show your face on the dance floor.”

Thorn managed a cynical smirk. “I wouldn’t dream of showing my face, Father. Grand unveilings are your modus operandi, not mine. à votre santé!” He raised his wine for a toast. “To the Exquisite Nightmare.”

Erik leaned in and clinked his glass against Thorn’s goblet, releasing a flat-pitched, high ping—strangely at odds with the deep, melodic laugh that drifted from the skeletal mask. “Honored, as always, to be the main attraction.” There was a sad underpinning to the quip—a genius and once gentle soul enslaved by the vile shadow of his own monstrosity.

Thorn battled an unwanted wave of admiration as he watched his father down his drink, then, wrapped in a hooded monk’s cloak—a striking contrast to his metallic mask—leave the room without a backward glance.

Erik had designed this establishment five years ago, when Thorn was fourteen. Back then, Erik was still testing the waters, to see if such a ruse would work to lure in people and harvest their energy. To see if they could keep the place secret from the outside world. He wouldn’t allow Thorn to join him and his demonic compatriots for another year after that.

He was protective, like any father. So Thorn would take solace up here, settling atop the lavender couch. Chin digging into the cushioned back, he’d stare out through walls made of windows on this side, and mirrors on the other, watching their victims arrive in Erik’s fleet of hearses. The cars were different than the ones that used to carry his mother to her reprehensible job—but every bit as ominous and sinful. Erik’s hearses brought unwary prey: bodies to provide entertainment and sustenance that would later be discarded in the streets of Paris. And after being injected with forgetting serum—a form of midazolam that Erik had altered in his lab—they would awake in a weakened, half-amnesiac state, alone and confused as to where they had been or what had taken place.

Thorn agreed it was more humane than how things were once done. There was no lurking in bedrooms, preying upon the vulnerable as they slept, or seducing them in their dreams. The victims came to them of their own free will, seeking a night filled with music, dancing, and uninhibited revelry. And their desires were met . . . although that pleasure came at a price.

Thorn needed the energy supplements, just as all psychic vampires did. And Erik needed them even more than most, being constantly drained to keep his one hope alive.

Although they were from different bloodlines, he and Erik were one and the same. Thorn had been born of a dream, just as Maman used to tell him. His incubus father—a creature Thorn never wished to know—had seduced his human mother as she slept, drained her of energy, but left her alive and with child.

Using his connections in the subterranean domain, Erik had traced Thorn’s preternatural lineage to a prosperous clan who lived in an underground mirrored city in Canada. When Thorn turned fourteen, Erik offered him the opportunity to go to them. But Thorn chose to stay. By then, he hated his real father for abandoning his mother, resulting in her death and Thorn’s orphaned childhood.

More important, by that time, Thorn already loved Erik as family.

That’s what drove him to lie to Rune in the note yesterday. A half-lie. He was going to give her a father tonight. Just not the one she was expecting.

If only he could forget the sound of her gentle voice from the last evening they were together, when she said the word: Etalon. How long had it been since he’d heard his true name spoken by anyone?

Each time he closed his eyes, he imagined Rune’s lips curved to a smile and pressing that name against his mouth, imagined stealing a kiss, drinking of that pure white light—her celestial essence that cradled and calmed him like nothing ever had in his life. Spending time with Rune gave him true serenity. She inspired him, yet at the same time, left him teetering at the brink of desolation. It was overwhelming, to be so close to being united, after being separate for so long.