Blood Revealed (12 page)

“Communes?” Kate asked, looking amused.

“Don’t laugh,” Nial had told her. “Even human lifestyles are being reinvented at the moment. Garrett may be right. Living together in big groups may be our only defense against the Summanus, particularly if they get together with the Ĉiela and the Elah.”

“I don’t think things have gone nearly that far yet,” Patrick had said from the corner of the room. They had been all sitting around Garrett’s big kitchen at the time. Dominic noticed that Patrick tended to pick a far corner in any room he happened to be in. He would stand back and keep his mouth shut. It seemed to him that Patrick had been subdued for weeks. Since the revelation, really. But then, the man’s career had imploded, so that was understandable. Now, though, Patrick was speaking up and what he was saying was quite unexpected. “I have a huge house. There are seven bedrooms and just as many bathrooms. Why don’t you move in with me, at least until things get settled?”

Winter had protested. What had decided the matter was the strength of the security surrounding Patrick’s house. The media had not forgiven him and the paparazzi hung around outside the house all hours of the day, hoping for a glimpse. Which meant that Patrick didn’t move out of the house very much, unless he could be smuggled out to avoid the paparazzi. The increased security sold Nial on the idea.

Now it was a week later and they were all moving into Patrick’s house. Dominic was distinctly uneasy at the idea. He had proposed finding himself an apartment somewhere in LA. Nial had refused to consider the idea.

“We need you close by, Dominic,” he had told him. “And I think you need us, too. You’re vulnerable out there on your own.”

Which was quite true. Dominic had no trouble accepting that. He was not a fighter, even though he had done his fair share of fighting in the last few years. It looked like he would be doing a lot more of it, too. The Summanus had invaded Los Angeles with the thoroughness of a rat invasion. No one went out at night anymore. Humans were adjusting to the idea that after sunset, all life came to a screeching halt.

And it seemed that Dominic had an advantage over most humans and vampires, one that he had acquired as a result of his deafness, which was ironic. He’d never thought that being deaf would provide such an benefit. He was able to sense the presence of the Summanus, even if they were undercover. That meant that he could tell if a Summanus was hiding and waiting for a human to come within reach.

He had expected that once humans had seen the Summanus for themselves and the truth of what the vampires had explained to them that first time they had exposed themselves, would gain for the vampires human acceptance. Even though the humans were more than happy to use the vampires as a defense mechanism, acceptance was very far from reality.

So Dominic had not argued very hard about finding his own apartment. And now here he was in Patrick’s house again, standing in the room where the piano was. He turned his back on it, as Patrick came into the room. Patrick was wearing jeans and a sweater in a blue color that made his eyes pop. It was the most casual clothing Dominic had ever seen him wearing. It seemed that Patrick was adjusting to his new life, too.

“Everything’s ready, Patrick said. “Come with me and I’ll show you the rest of the house. You can pick out what rooms you want. Do you need three bedrooms, or just one?”

Winter had pursed her lips and Sebastian just grinned.

“Three bedrooms would be good, if you can spare them,” Nial said easily.

“Three it is then. Come and see them.” Patrick had moved off ahead of the other three, who had followed him, leaving Dominic alone in the room.

Dominic put his backpack and duffel bag down slowly. He couldn’t help it. He found himself turning to look at the piano even though it was the last thing he wanted to do.

While telling himself he should follow the others, he moved over to the shining instrument. He realized his hands were straightening the brocade thing lying over the top of it, straightening out the folds with compulsive movements. The touch of the black lacquer under his fingers was cool. He let his fingers slide across the wood.

It was a simple step after that to move around the corner and sit on the bench. Someone had carelessly left the lid up and the keys gleamed crisp white in the morning sun. He stared at them.

He didn’t make a decision to touch them, yet his hands came up, anyway. They hovered over the keys, his fingers automatically moving into position. He watched the tips descend, until they made contact with the keys.

They were not ivory. Instead, they were a high quality resin that the better piano keys were made of. Resin didn’t stick to the fingers as plastic could, especially after several minutes of playing, when the fingers and hands could get sweaty.

Just by touching the keys Dominic could tell that this was a very good piano. Someone had known what they were doing when they had bought it. The keys snuggled up under his fingers like old friends.

His heart was drumming and for right now that was all he could hear because there was no one else in the room. He didn’t really hear it though. He could feel it because the beats were so hard.

He let his fingers simply touch the top of the keys for a long moment. His mind was yammering at him to stand up and walk away. He just couldn’t.

Finally his fingers pressed down. Wagner’s Tristan Chord, the unusual opening to
Tristan and Iseult.

Nothing.

His heart lurch sickeningly.

Clumsily, he pressed the chord again.

Still nothing.

The truth slammed into him with the impact of an anvil landing from a great height. His chest creaked.

How long did he sit there, with his fingers hovering over the keys, while the horror circled through him, making him sick with despair? He lost track of time. His vision swam as the tears gathered.

He did not dare touch the keys again. Yet he couldn’t take his hands away.

When the hand settled on his shoulder, he knew it was Patrick from the unique signature of his thoughts.

Dominic forced himself to turn his head away. He closed his eyes and tucked his hands onto his thighs, like he was hiding them away.

“You were a pianist, weren’t you?” Patrick’s mental voice was soft and filled with empathy.

Dominic swallowed. He still couldn’t look at him. “You mean you haven’t looked into my background yet and found out who I am?”

“It didn’t seem fair to do that, not without your knowledge. You don’t want to tell me yourself?”

“Why don’t you ask Sebastian to tell you? I can’t. Not now.”

He felt Patrick sit down next to him on the long bench. “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”

Dominic shook his head. It seemed impossible to say the words aloud.

“Is there something wrong with this piano?”

The defensive note in Patrick’s thoughts was almost funny. He thought Dominic was disparaging his very fine piano, which he had probably spent months looking for and days haggling over the price.

“Dominic?”

Dominic turned on him. “Don’t you get it?” He put his fingers over his ears. “I’m deaf.”

Patrick shrugged. The line over his fine nose deepened into a frown, though. “Winter cured you. You can hear again.”

“I can’t hear the
music
!” The cry tore out of him from deep inside his chest bringing pain with it. Tears gathered in the corners of his eyes. They hurt.

Patrick was staring at him with gathering horror. He was starting to get it. Dominic drove the point home, anyway.

“I can’t hear the music. I’m deaf. I can hear people because they have thoughts but a piano doesn’t have thoughts. I can’t hear the piano. I can’t hear an orchestra. I can’t follow the beat. I can’t hear the notes. Music is still lost to me.”

Patrick’s gaze dropped away from his. His shoulders lifted and dropped in a heavy sigh. His thoughts circled endlessly around the awfulness he felt. Building up from underneath that was a sense of identity.

Dominic recognized then that Patrick really did understand. Patrick had lost his art, too.

Was that why he kissed him? He wasn’t sure. Yet he found himself leaning through the few inches that separated them and pressing his lips up against Patrick’s.

Patrick’s breath expelled in a rush and he could feel the man stiffen and surprise. That only lasted for a second. Patrick groaned and his hand came up to hold Dominic’s head steady. Now, Patrick was kissing Dominic. That felt perfectly natural, too.

There was an inevitability about this moment, as if they had been circling around it and drawing closer for weeks.

Tentatively, their tongues met. They had bypassed the moment where one of them could have drawn back and pretended nothing had happened. They were both committed now. The kiss deepened.

Dominic realized that his hand was pressed against the keyboard and the keys were depressed. The room would be filled with discordant notes and he could hear none of them….except there was a distant echo of jarring chords from Patrick’s mind because Patrick could hear them. It didn’t matter. Not right now.

He felt the other person’s surprise in his mind at the same time he heard the throat clearing from somewhere across the room. Patrick jumped to his feet.

Dominic mentally sampled Patrick’s awkwardness and underneath it, a sense of defiance.

Dominic looked around. Sebastian was standing just inside the doorway that led to the family rooms at the back of the house and the stairs up to the second floor. He had a grin on his face that he was trying hard to suppress. “You took so long finding Dominic and bringing him up to the bedrooms that I figured I’d better come and see if you’d been dragged off by the paparazzi or something.”

“No one steps inside this house unless I say they can,” Patrick said.

He was deliberately shifting the subject. Dominic appreciated that.

Sebastian jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Should we just sort out the bedrooms and bathrooms for ourselves? I think I’ve got the lie of the land up there.”

“No, it’s fine, I’ll come up and help,” Patrick said.

Dominic got to his feet and moved around the piano, his fingers trailing along the black lacquer. “If there’s a small room at the back of the house overlooking the garden, could I have that?”

“Of course,” Patrick said immediately.

Dominic very carefully didn’t look for the emotions underneath his words. There would have to be a reckoning, of course. The kiss would have to be explained and spoken about. But it would have to come later, preferably much later, after Dominic had found time to think this through.

It had been a long day of moving heavy computer equipment around and unpacking boxes. That was the excuse Patrick gave himself for shutting himself up in his bedroom early that night. In truth, he wanted to get away from all the people in his house, so that he could be alone and think.

Because of his fame and because he spent his life in front of cameras, the vast majority of the world figured he was an extrovert, that he liked being among people.

It had taken him many years to understand that he was an introvert and that being among people for a long period of time tired him out. He drew energy from being alone and having time to think things through and sort them out, whether that was on paper, or in his head. Up until he realized that, he had spent miserable years passing time among virtual strangers, letting the cynicism of Hollywood color all his dealings with other humans.

He didn’t mind being in front of cameras, because when he was there, he was generally not being himself. He had lines and directions and a job to do. Being in front of cameras was part of his work.

Being among people as himself was a different sort of work, one that taxed him to the point where diving into a bottle had seemed like a much better proposition.

He had opened his house up to others. It had been a deliberate choice and a sensible one, yet he still had to deal with the impact of having people around him all the time.

So he escaped to his bedroom, sat on the bed he no longer used and listened to the silence in the room and let his body relax.

There was a lot to think about.

The tap on the door ten minutes later told him that he wasn’t going to get that chance. Even as he opened the door, he knew who it was.

Dominic frowned as he looked at him. “You want to be alone. I’m sorry, I should have left this until tomorrow or something.”

Patrick shook his head. “No, it’s okay. Let’s deal with this before it goes sour on us.”

“Goes sour?” Dominic gave a short laugh.

Patrick stepped away from the door and beckoned and Dominic followed him into the room and shut the door behind him. “Goes sour. You spend forever thinking things over and turning them over and mixing them up into a churn of sick feelings, until you don’t know which way is up.”

“That’s what you do? Go over things forever?”

“You don’t?”

Dominic’s smile was small and there was a twinkle in his eyes. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

True.

Patrick drew in a breath and let it out. “So let’s talk.” He waved toward the arrangement of easy chairs over by the window. Dominic made no move to head toward them. Instead he pushed his hands into his pants and Patrick could see that his hands were fisted under the fabric.

So Patrick stayed where he was in the middle of the floor. He let his hands hang loosely by his sides. When he had first started acting, it had taken him many weeks to learn how to stand still and not fidget with his hands and arms. The average human couldn’t stand and not cross their arms or put their hands on their hips or otherwise keep their hands moving. It was as if they didn’t know what to do with them while they were standing there.

But such movements, if they were not portraying character or story narrative, were a distraction on film. He had been forced to learn how to stand still and only let his hands move in ways that progressed the story.

Now it was easy to just stand there and wait out Dominic, because the fisted hands in his pockets said that Dominic wasn’t nearly as laid-back about this as he was trying to make himself look.