“He did.”
“Lily, what’s he talking about?” Adrien felt dizzy suddenly, sick deep in his gut, as though his body knew exactly what Daniel had used to force Lily on this journey. He swallowed hard as Daniel closed the last few feet to stand a yard away from them.
He heard her breath hitch in her throat, but she said nothing.
“So you kept your word and you didn’t tell him?” Daniel chuckled and smiled, that broad, charismatic, beckoning smile of his.
“I told him nothing. I followed Kiernan’s instructions.”
Adrien felt panic rising in Lily, a wave of sensation that vibrated the double-chain at his neck.
Daniel shifted his gaze to Adrien. “And you didn’t tell her who I was. What an interesting pair you are. Well, I won’t give up Lily’s little secret, either; Kiernan wouldn’t like it.”
His cold light teal eyes shifted to Lily.
Adrien felt her trembling now, fear washing through her, then rage, then fear, then rage hot again, her skin flushing and burning Adrien. He held her pressed against his side, the relative position that tended to keep them both safe now.
But what would happen next, he couldn’t guess, except for one great truth: Pain would follow. When Daniel entered a room, pain always followed.
Try not to listen to him. Adrien needed Lily to be as strong as possible right now. He could sense what was coming and he needed her with him, aware and focused.
“You haven’t exactly fulfilled your promise to find the weapon, Lily, and I’m very disappointed. But use your power right now, the tracking ability you have, and focus on the weapon. Tell me where you sense it coming from. Do it now!”
Lily jerked at these last words and the force behind them. She obeyed and turned slightly to face the far wall, where the tunnel had allowed a few of the scientists to escape. Adrien felt her siphon his power and he let it flow as she reached out over the earth. “I don’t know,” she said. “The tendrils go to a hundred places at once, nothing specific. I’ve since learned that there was more than one weapon and that many of the separate parts were hidden away in over twenty cavern systems.”
“Yes, a plot to confuse even a tracker. The Council at that time didn’t lack for intelligence.” Daniel’s gaze shifted away from Lily as he once more surveyed the laboratory. “So there’s nothing here, just evidence that the weapon works and how it works, how it kills—very effectively, I see.”
He grew very still, the kind of stillness that broadened the pain in Adrien’s gut.
Daniel turned toward Adrien, his gaze fierce and controlling. He smiled. “At least you’ve taken a step to becoming an Ancestral like me, like your brothers here.” He turned his shoulders first one way then the other, slight movements that indicated Quill and Lev.
Adrien felt their Ancestral status. As Daniel’s devoted followers, they would have taken on the Ancestral mantle long ago. And yet, because of his new power, he could feel their inherent weakness, that neither would become as strong as Daniel. Had Daniel created them to be less than him? Or was it just the result of genetics, the luck of the draw?
Daniel’s eyes took on a fiery fervor. “You have such potential if you would just open yourself up to the true possibilities of your nature, that part of you deeply vampire. I was wrong to have created you from a human female because you’ve been polluted, you and your younger brothers. Yet strangely, the potential in you astounds me. You could almost be as powerful as me, if you’d just try.” He took a step closer, lowering his chin, holding Adrien’s gaze in his tight grip. “That’s why I’d treated you so harshly in the past, you and your brothers. It was to strengthen you and prepare you for your inheritance, what I’ve given you because of who I am as an Ancestral.”
“I’ll never do that,” Adrien returned, also lowering his chin, battling Daniel’s hypnotic abilities. “I took on the chain to keep Lily safe so she could fly without hurting. The rest, the potential you value so highly, revolts me. I have no intention of opening myself up to the kind of power that has devoured you.”
Daniel laughed. “You’re so naive, so much like Gabriel. I can see his handprint on your life. But who rules the Council now and is likely to rule for centuries, if not millennia, to come? Answer me that?”
Adrien remained silent.
“My son, you always lacked something indefinable, a certain finesse, or courage, perhaps, or confidence. I was never quite sure what defect it was that kept you from being a real man. You’re weak, not in power, but in those attributes that define a man, a willingness to set his eye on an object and take it merely because he wants it. Without that drive, a man is nothing but a whimpering shell, a child weeping at his mother’s knee because life is too hard. Poor Adrien. You’ll always be nothing, a little maggot of a vampire.”
The taunts piled up, one after the other, so familiar, a clanging bell from a torturous childhood, until Adrien’s brain seized, right in the middle where a sharp pain split his hemispheres in half. He breathed hard through his nose. He blinked and tried to pull his thoughts back into some kind of order, but couldn’t.
He wished like hell that he could believe Daniel was using some kind of thrall on him, but he wasn’t. No, what he felt, this kind of numbing pain and disorientation, always happened because at the core of Adrien’s being, when he confronted Daniel, was rage, a knife of rage that severed his soul and his mind into two dysfunctional parts. He couldn’t even speak. All he could feel was a profound need to slay the man now hovering in his fine Italian shoes a few inches above the ground.
He wanted to strike, but he didn’t have the power and Daniel knew it.
“Well, what an asshole you are.”
The words came from beside him, from Lily, the weak human, the one that Daniel could crush with a thought.
Adrien didn’t know what to do because suddenly, as Daniel shifted his gaze to Lily, turning all that evil on her, Adrien knew he would do her harm, and that he’d enjoy doing it because Lily now meant something to Adrien.
His sudden concern for Lily had at least one good effect: His rage dissipated enough to allow his thoughts to come back to him, for his brain to re-form and start functioning again.
He watched Daniel sweep his hand in a killing arc toward Lily. He knew the gesture and what it meant, and just how much pain Daniel would deliver in that one blow, pain to the edge of death. Or maybe with Lily, in this one strike, it would take her the entire distance and she would be dead.
A few hours ago Adrien could have done nothing about it, but he was no longer just a vampire; he had the beginnings of his Ancestral-based power that would one day make him as strong as the man in front of him. He swept in front of the blow and took it hard across his face, chest, and left arm, so that he fell prone to the floor at Daniel’s feet, his skin, all over his body, burned from the sheer preternatural power the man wielded. He was bruised as well from the force behind the blow.
But he knew his father, that one strike wouldn’t be enough to satisfy his rage at Lily’s slur. Adrien rose up swiftly as Daniel struck again, this one worse, and this blow would have reduced Lily to ash. Once more, he fell to the floor, dizzy, battered, and burned.
As Adrien recovered, his head spinning, he looked up at Daniel and watched as his father stared at Lily, his eyes wild with his mania, preparing for a third strike.
But something inside Adrien rebelled. He tapped into his growing Ancestral power and a new kind of energy flooded his body so that when the blow fell, Adrien flew up and into it, meeting all of Daniel’s power with an answering power of his own, a release of burning energy that caused Daniel and his sons to fly backward.
Daniel returned swiftly, his gold-flecked teal eyes glowing with a fierce light as once more he caught Adrien’s gaze, his intention to cow Adrien again, to fold him in half mentally, to break his will once more.
But something had shifted deep inside Adrien. This time Daniel couldn’t get in, couldn’t tap into the deep wounds he’d inflicted throughout Adrien’s childhood, couldn’t make him tremble in fear.
Adrien’s need to help his brothers survive, his fierce intention to keep the extinction weapon out of Daniel’s hands, and his mounting drive to keep Lily safe, built a cement foundation beneath his battling abilities. Power flowed like it had never flowed before, as Adrien stood up to his father for the first time in his life.
Sweat dripped from his forehead and chest. The energy he exerted coupled with the pain of the wounds taxed his strength. He stared hard at Daniel and let him feel how much he despised his father, hated him for the vampire he was, for the pain he’d inflicted on him and his brothers from the time he could remember, but mostly for the deaths of all three human mothers.
Yes, he hated Daniel.
And he wanted him dead.
With that desire, he opened up another fraction of his Ancestral power and let it flow. A jolt of energy fell on Daniel and he jerked backward as though punched in the face. A shot of surprise passed through his light teal eyes, then pleasure as he battled back. “That’s it, Adrien, keep reaching for your power. It’s intoxicating, isn’t it? There’s more, so much more. The fullness of your Ancestral power will be like nothing you’ve ever known.”
Adrien reached for his power, deep within his mind and his soul. He saw the open door and a beckoning of bright light and heat. He saw how easy it would be to just take it all in, drawing the power through his body, but he couldn’t for no other reason than doing it would be what Daniel wanted. Beyond that, would walking through that door turn him into a monster?
He had to do something, however. He couldn’t stand against Daniel forever. He knew his limitations.
Lily, I’m getting us out of here. Be ready.
I am. Do what you need to do. I can sense your intentions from one second to the next.
He’ll strike and I’ll fall. Latch onto my back like before.
Do it.
As Adrien drew back his power, Daniel completed the third blow. Just as it struck Adrien and as Lily latched onto his back, he took her simultaneously out of the cavern, engaging in altered flight, straight through the opposing wall of rock. He was right. Daniel didn’t have Silas’s ability to stop him from flight.
