Chapter Forty-five
From the moment of his inception, Fate had assigned Cain’s identity to him. Cain had been given no choice in the matter. Everyone else had a choice. They might not choose whether to be born as dogs or cats, cows, bugs or humans, but what they did with the forms they were given was more or less up to them.
Cain on the other hand had always been the exact same thing. Over and over again.
He would never understand why he’d been allotted the emptiness that filled him. What had he done to deserve it? But that was how it always was. There were no reasons. Not for anything. There was simply nature, the entropy that wreaked havoc within it, and the Fate that dealt it out, good or bad.
Some animals were born with missing limbs or even chromosomes. Sometimes plants didn’t grow when they were supposed to. Sometimes it didn’t snow in winter. And Cain had been created with a terrible, yawning vacuum inside him that hurt like a bitch and made him crazy.
It made him do equally crazy things. And it made him barely care.
It was just that bad.
There was only one thing in the cosmos capable of filling that vacuum and ending that pain. That’s what he’d been told, that’s what he believed, and that was what he’d fought for over and over again. Every time he was reborn, every time the fight saw him back to the starting line, he set his sights on the same goal and pined like a fucking nightmare for the day that this would all be over.
But the rules were cockeyed. Nothing made any sense. There was confusion batting around in the red and the black of his brain.
He had been close to an end once, or so he thought. Helena had come to him after lifetimes of denying him. But confoundingly, even with her by his side the pain hadn’t ended. The killing hadn’t stopped. Cain’s empty, cold essence had leaked out uncontrollably and destroyed legions. Ultimately, Cain had descended further and further into the madness of what he was – and what he could never be.
He was convinced now that he’d simply done it wrong. Maybe it hadn’t worked because she hadn’t truly loved him. Maybe she hadn’t really chosen him. Maybe she’d chosen Solan and was somehow withholding her power from him, her companionship, her life.
Life.
Son of a bitch, he thought. That was it.
As he floated on the outskirts of the dimension, he realized that’s what he’d done wrong before. He hadn’t taken from her that which flowed through her veins and fed the beating of her heart. He hadn’t taken her life – he hadn’t taken her blood.
Hence she had never become a part of him, not fully. She had never actually joined with him in a way that could physically fill up that space.
Of course, it wouldn’t have occurred to him that this was what he needed, not in any of his other forms. They’d all been human, more or less. Humans didn’t generally think about ingesting other people’s blood. But Cain thought of it now.
He watched as the dimension he’d been sequestered in by Time, and the one he’d been born into by Fate, collided on the battlefield of the multiverse. They became one. And so did he.
Julian Cain was Death. He always had been. He always would be. But now he was also the First Vampire, and though Time had shoved him, Helena, and William into that other world in order to give William a chance to win Helena for himself, how quaint, it had made a fatal mistake. It had given Cain a form in which taking blood came naturally. And so did thinking about it. Which was why he thought of it now.
Perhaps Time hadn’t done this on purpose. Perhaps Cain’s emptiness was so strong, his need so vast, it was that alone that had chosen his form in the other dimension, and Time had nothing to do with it. That made more sense. After all, why would Time give him a fair shot at Helena? Time played favorites. There was no arguing that. And William was most assuredly its favorite.
Either way, Cain was at a distinct advantage now as a vampire.
At the moment, his form floated free in the emptiness between dimensions. That emptiness was changing with the colliding of the worlds. Paranormal energy filled the normally void darkness. He knew what was coming. He knew the process would be painful. But Cain was no stranger to pain.
Darryl Maelstrom’s mark still held fast on William Solan’s arm. The spell still existed, and Cain was assuming Darryl Maelstrom still existed somewhere out there too. When Cain entered the older Slate cousin and attempted to use him to get to Helena, William had pulled an ace out of his sleeve. Cain had to hand it to the bastard. He hadn’t been expecting him to do what he’d done.
William dissolved into an immaterial form of pure power and shot into his cousin’s body with violent speed. Fortunately, that damned brand meant to work against Cain wound up saving him instead. It ejected him from William’s form in the nick of time. The Time King had been about to blow out his own brains in order to do away with Cain. Not that he could blame him. It had been a rough several thousand years. Any man’s patience would have worn well out by now. Cain’s sure as fuck had.
After he was ejected, he’d felt like he was being ripped apart. His immaterial presence was torn from William and thrown violently into the emptiness between worlds. And that was where he was now, floating in a miasma of electric nothing that was less and less like nothing with each passing second. It gave him time to think. Time to figure things out.
Time to realize what he needed from the Promised One.
It didn’t last long though, thank goodness. Only a short while passed before he felt the other half of him still trapped in the Storyteller’s prison. It was a slightly separate form, but not quite separate enough not to feel the pain.
Just as violently as he’d been ripped away from William and discarded in the emptiness, his other half was torn from the prison and tossed out as well. Cain would have cried out, but he had no lungs to cry out with.
He suffered the ordeal in silence. The crazy thing was, as he quietly agonized he was reminded of that one episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer called “Hush.” He’d watched it solely because of its name, but in point of fact he’d found it brilliant. What was worse than being murdered in some gruesome manner? Not being able to make a sound while it was happening.
Now he knew that was true.
Except he wasn’t being murdered. He wasn’t dying. The opposite was occurring, actually. He was being born.
The two halves of his being were drawn together through that space between with something close to light speed, and when they crashed into one another, Cain felt the impact down to his very first incarnation. It rippled through him, changing every one of his pasts, altering every event in history that he’d ever had a hand in.
The shockwave shook dimensions. The worlds within them would never know that he’d been the reason for their earthquakes and tornadoes. Hell, he barely knew it himself. What he did know was that moments after the collision, he was hitting the ground and rolling.
When he came to a stop, Cain remained where he was on his side, his eyes closed. He felt the grass beneath his skin, cool and sharp and itchy. He smelled the dirt, still moist from the rain. He heard distant sounds of traffic, perhaps half a mile or more away.
He also heard talking. Not nearly as distant. And very, very familiar.
He felt his eyes burning hot and blue behind his eyelids, which meant he once more had eyelids. He was solid. Cain opened his burning eyes and slowly pushed himself into a seated position to look around.
It was night. The moon, full and illuminating, was yet low on the horizon. It would be many hours before the sun shone again.
He got to his booted feet. Once standing, he looked down to take in the appearance of his solid form: Black engineering boots, worn and tough. Tight blue jeans. Gray T-shirt, solid muscle underneath. Cain ran his hand through his hair and yanked one of them out to turn it between his thumb and forefinger. Blond.
He had maintained the form he’d been given as First Vampire. A brush of his tongue over his gums and the sharp tips of the fangs waiting to sprout just beneath them confirmed it. Cain’s lips curled in a mirthless smile. It was hard for him to feel any real joy. All of his smiles were mirthless. But it didn’t mean he wasn’t pleased with the circumstances. Especially when he cocked his head slightly to the side, tuned his vampire hearing into the night, and honed in on the voices he’d heard earlier.
He heard them again and separated them out in his mind. They were familiar indeed.
And they were just around the corner.