***
Dominic followed Palo into his back yard. For a moment, he felt like he was navigating through a jungle. The grass and weeds were growing together to form a wall of twine. The covered patio was messy with a broken glass table, rusty chairs and a urine-stained sofa along the wall.
From around the corner, a Doberman pinscher sprinted toward them, his canine teeth almost a replica of vampires’ teeth. Saliva foaming around its drawn-back lips made Dominic smile at the challenge.
Behind Palo, Dominic instantly changed into his beast. His red eyes grew beady, forehead ridged, and his teeth dropped, as he squatted down and hissed at the animal. The whimper and quick retreat realigned the food chain.
“What are you doin’, man? That’s my dog!”
Dominic grinned with all of his fangs.
When Palo stopped in front of a dark brown tarp draped over something on the side yard, Dominic’s smirk turned to a curiosity.
Palo glanced over at Dom. “Go ahead, it’s for you.”
Dominic hesitantly walked over to the bulky item and ripped off the tarp. What he saw in front of him was a polished Harley VRSCAV in black and chrome. He was salivating. The cold silver chrome under his fingertips, the smell of rubber and a lingering invisible exhaust consuming the air swirled over his senses. The lines and curves of the bike sent a bolt of excitement through his body.
Dom was no stranger to the motorcycle. Two weeks ago, he’d had an introduction to the masterpiece of a Harley, but there was nothing like the feel of the hard metal between his legs and the way it floated in the air as he rode her. He had quickly fallen in love with riding.
Dominic heard Palo throw him a set of keys. He caught them in midair, never taking his eyes off the black hog with painted red and orange flames streaking the gas tank. He hadn’t moved. He couldn’t move. He was stuck in a euphoric bliss of the memory of riding Palo’s bike.
“This is mine?”
“Yep.”
Dom started the bike. She roared loudly and then settled in to a glorious purr. He gripped the throttle, turned it toward him and listened to her growl at the world.
Dom backed her out and waited for Palo to open the gate. When the gate opened, it was as if the prison cell of his heart had opened, and he was free to be or do what he wanted. It was the same feeling that he’d had when he surfaced to the top of the ocean, and he was able to breathe again.
Dom grinned at Palo, throttled and glided out the gate, down the driveway of his trailer home and onto the blacktop street. The soft wind whipped around him and the vibration of power against his inner thighs enticed Dom to break all laws and push the bike as fast as it would go.
The dark evening in Ransom, California, made his mouth salivate. His first thought was his desire to drive outside the town and past the city that he now called home.
He was finding his way around the year 2012, and for the first time, in a long time, he was living.
As he rode the hog down the street of Ransom, he absorbed the changes over the past two hundred years. He glared at an interracial couple who held hands as they walked along the sidewalk. A skateboarder who jumped curbs held an iPod in his hand with the ear buds plugged in his ears. Dominic watched cars fly past him. This world was growing on him—this world of fast-paced, fast-food-eating people who lived in harmony with vampires—as long as there was a bounty slayer somewhere near.
He wondered why he had been resurrected from his watery grave after two hundred years. So much had changed. He marveled at how humans thought their lives were easier with all their gadgets and electronic devices, but in reality, he remembered a slower-paced generation that seemed to stop long enough to smell the roses.
Of course, some things were not pleasant during his life before he was turned. Disease took hold and spread throughout whole towns in a matter of days back when he was human. Sewage systems were nonexistent in the area where Dominic had lived. And outlaws had often raped and pillaged a town, leaving broken lives in their dust.
As Dominic rode on his new hog, he couldn’t help but think about his mother who had died in his arms when he was a boy. He’d had very little time with her on Earth and her death caused him more grief than any child should have.
Her last hours had been a night like any other. They’d walked home from the farmers’ market and talked like they often did. She’d quiz him with math problems or sometimes tell him a story about their ancestors.
That night, they had walked in the dark, through the forest near their humble abode, when three men stepped out in front of them. These men had been peasants and outlaws. They’d taunted and teased his mother while Dominic had held onto her skirt, hiding behind her.
Those men had stolen the meager food she had bought with the last of their valuable household goods: a silver tray his mother had received from her grandmother when she was a child. The food was all they had. It would have been just enough to get them through the winter until spring when they’d have to find another way to survive the next season.
But those thieves wouldn’t even give them that much. They had raped Dominic’s mother in front of him, torn her tattered clothes from her body, tortured her, bitten her, stabbed her and left her to suffer.
His mother’s screams still haunted his dreams. She’d begged him to turn around and close his eyes, but he wanted to remember their faces, etch their flaws into his mind—their scars, the tattoos on their arms, the curvature of their faces, the slant of their eyes.
His mother had died in his arms that night. He had promised her that he’d avenge her. He would find and destroy the men who had taken her from him. He had been a seven-year-old boy, left alone to raise his five-year-old brother with no food, nor adult guidance.
Before his mother had closed her eyes and taken her final breath, she’d reached into a sewn-in pocket of her garment and handed him a snake brooch with a ruby eye—a ruby eye and their etched family crest.
She had told him to use it to buy food, which would get him and his brother through the winter. But Dominic had refused to part with the last family heirloom that his mother had cherished and protected. Nevertheless, he had gotten them—his younger brother and himself—through the winter to see another spring.
But those men saw ten more springs before Dominic left home to search and destroy them. He took the lives of everyone they loved and then while they begged to die, he had tortured them the way they had tortured his mother.
Now, centuries later, Dominic was back, and the world had changed. Like an infant, he had to learn how to live in this new era. Each step he took would bring him closer to his goal—to find and confront Florin, make him pay for betraying him and seek to avenge the death of his wife.
He revved the throttle and pushed the bike as fast as it would go while he wondered if his wife had still had his mother’s brooch when she died and if it had gone up in flames with his beloved.