Darklight 3: Darkworld

by Forrest, Bella

  I stared at the medical station, unsure what to do. My body felt sore in all the wrong places, but adrenaline rushed through me. I wanted to do something, anything. Two weeks ago, I would have had to do everything myself along with our ragtag team of survivors, but now… it was out of my hands.

  Kane stood a little way off, his face for a moment displaying how equally helpless he felt. I couldn’t help with medicine, but I could help Kane clean up the spilled blood marking the tarmac and grass around him.

  “Want a hand cleaning up?” I asked. “The redbills might calm faster without the smell of vampire blood surrounding them.”

  I almost expected a snide question about when I’d become such an expert on redbills, but instead he just nodded. Harlowe gave me a worried frown. Some blood was smeared across her cheekbone, and the edges of her cloak were singed.

  A shiver of worry passed down my spine as I headed back to the stable to gather buckets, water, and mops.

  What had they run into over in the Immortal Plane?

  Chapter Two

  Vampire blood had a distinctly more metallic scent than human blood, I discovered. I scrubbed myself in the women’s communal showers for a half hour after helping Kane, watching the swirling red disappear down the drain. On my way to the mess hall for dinner, I smelled my hands. The pine soap had replaced the grisly aroma of Castral’s blood. Good.

  A strange habit had developed among our group. My human teammates and our vampire friends had taken to gathering around the TV in the mess hall before dinner. I could smell some delicious, hearty Scottish food being made in the kitchen, but I focused my attention on my crew.

  Last night’s gathering in the mess hall had been light and airy. Tonight, I felt like I could swim through the lingering questions in the air. We had already lost so much; how would we keep moving forward? My limbs felt heavy as I moved toward the table. Each new loss hit us harder than the last. Could we afford another?

  Zach, Gina, and Louise sat on one side of a mess hall table. Louise braided her shoulder-length, strawberry-blonde hair absentmindedly as Sike watched, amused at her instinctive habit, his dark brown eyes following every movement of her fingers. Louise suddenly flinched, losing her hold on the braid. Zach said something to Gina, and she nodded in response. Her birthday had been a few days earlier, and the number twenty-four was still faintly visible on her forehead where Zach had written it in marker as a prank. In retaliation, she’d wrestled him to the ground and drawn a mustache on him.

  The barrack’s dining area was like most military buildings, something akin to a high school cafeteria. Everything was in plain, muted colors like beige and faded greens and blues. Most of the color in the room was provided by its inhabitants and the large TV playing on the far wall. Roxy and Bravi sat on the other side of the table. Roxy had let her red hair down from its usual tight French braid, so the soft waves draped across her shoulders. The female vampire was the closest to the TV, her bright green eyes narrowed in concentration. She furrowed her brow.

  “Why do humans constantly advertise food?” she wondered aloud. “Don’t you have enough of it in your bright warehouses?”

  “You mean the grocery store?” Zach asked. He jerked his thumb at the TV. “That’s different. This is an ad for some fast food place. They advertise it because humans love to look at delicious pictures of food, and it makes us want to buy some. We’re easily manipulated.”

  Dorian was nowhere in sight. Arlonne sat with Gavril at another nearby table—this one slightly farther from the TV—puzzling over a game of checkers. Roxy gnawed her thumbnail, her eyes looking past the TV. A tense cloud hung over the group. Gina gave a halfhearted wave as I walked up. Looks like I’m not the only one who’s worried.

  “Any news from the scouting trip?” I asked, breaking through their small talk.

  “Not yet,” Roxy replied. “Med bay is too busy to give updates.”

  They were still holed up in the medical trailer with Castral? His rust-colored leather jacket sprang to mind. The color seemed plain in comparison to the vampire blood and how it danced with shadows.

  I sank into a seat beside Roxy, who said nothing but scooted over an inch to give me more room. Louise had nearly finished her second attempt at a braid, her nervous hands looking for something to occupy their time.

  “Back to our report on VampCon,” the TV announcer recounted cheerfully. “Although the event’s official title is the World Summit for Vampire-Human Relations, social media users have decried this title as too long and gave it a cheeky nickname. Tonight, we go to our panel of psychological experts to discuss the possible impact the integration of vampires could have on the human psyche.”

  I blocked out the sound of the TV. The organizers had invited our group to this summit, but we’d put off the decision. Some, like Bravi, thought it would help, or at least it couldn’t hurt. But most of the vampires had no desire to undergo another round of invasive questions and abuse from the media and general population. More media scrutiny wouldn’t help our cause—we could barely navigate it as it was. Truthfully, I’d been a little naïve about how the public would react to the supernatural. While Louise’s livestream of the Bureau’s admission of guilt had been excellent in the moment to gain us support, it might not have been the best way to break such news to the international public. But we’d been desperate and exhausted, and the Bureau had forced our hand. All we could do now was find a way to move the situation forward.

  While we recovered here at the VAMPS camp, the outside world continued to churn with anxiety and speculation. It felt like a new expert or pundit came out of the shadows every hour to give their (almost always incorrect) opinion.

  The Bureau had been slightly wrong in their prediction that the public would respond to the idea of the supernatural with nothing but hostility and chaos. The chaos was there, but the hostility was… complicated. Older generations generally polled at higher levels of fear and distrust of vampires, while younger generations had started fan clubs and pledged their support to vampires, sometimes in uncomfortably… ardent ways.

  Others firmly clung to denial and decried it as a giant hoax or an elaborate art project. Fanatics claimed this officially signaled the apocalypse. Vampire hunting groups reportedly began organizing all over the globe, though not all of them meant to kill vampires. Some wanted to find a vampire and request to be “turned,” which was impossible.

  On the screen, the news now showed a group of people gathered outside the summit, waiting to go inside. One teenage boy divebombed the camera with a poster. In all caps, it read: READY FOR MY VAMPIRE LOVE.

  Bravi shook her head with a snort of laughter.

  I was so glad I’d left hormone-fueled puberty behind. But then again, who was I to talk when I had my own vampire romance going on? That kid had no idea what he was asking for.

  I glanced at the main door of the mess hall, hoping Dorian would join us soon. He could be resting, but I wanted to ask him what he’d heard about Castral. Maybe he would know what could have caused that kind of damage. The Bureau had never managed to land a serious blow on the vampires, so what the hell did? Even the X-75s couldn’t do that. My feet felt restless, and I considered going to search for him.

  The cook—a tall, broad woman with a thick braid of dark hair—stuck her head out of the kitchen and pounded a frying pan with a mallet. “Food’s done!” she bellowed.

  The vampires winced at the explosion of sound, but it had the desired effect. Humans and vampires began appearing through the main doorway to congregate in the mess hall. They couldn’t eat with us, but the vampires had taken to gathering for discussions among themselves. Dorian said vampires could be quite social. I pressed a hand against my stomach, my hunger a pleasant reminder of my run.

  I grabbed a clean metal tray and inhaled the homey, simple scent of bread and stew, with an undercurrent of something fruity. Maybe they’d made crumble again. After our time on the run, it felt like such a luxury to be somewhere with a design
ated cooking staff. The servers, all volunteers or junior guards on kitchen duty for the day, stood on the other side of a buffet line, serving food.

  “Thanks, Eskra,” I said to the female vampire who had been part of our fugitive group not so long ago. She’d taken up cooking duties as a way to give back to the group, citing the time we saved her and her child. She gave me a healthy portion of hot, rich stew, a jumble of roasted potatoes and turnips known locally as “tatties and neeps,” and a hunk of warm brown bread. Much nicer than starving in a cave. “How’s Oten?” I asked as she returned the plate, referring to her toddler.

  “He’s doing fine,” she replied with a sweet smile, a wisp of her long, deep blue hair escaping the hairnet required for all food staff. “Sleeping now, but he’s been playing outside all day with Ayless and Kren. I know those girls are a little older, but he loves running around after them. They don’t seem to mind.”

  I smiled. “I’m glad to hear it.” I grabbed a cup of water. “Please tell Corporal Fraser her food looks delicious.”

  Eskra saluted me playfully and went on to serve Louise.

  Roxy nudged me when we sat back down and pointed toward the entrance. I looked over to see Kane and Harlowe coming in through the set of doors closest to the medical trailer. Kane walked with a swagger in his step but a scowl on his face. The light caught the scar running along the edge of his eye socket. Both looked healthy from their recent feed, their pale skin dancing with deep shadows, but the tightness around Harlowe’s gray eyes told me she was stressed.

  “Castral is finally stable, and his wounds are being taken care of,” Kane announced as he threw himself down beside Louise. He had a little trouble working his long legs under the low cafeteria table. Louise scooted up the bench a few inches to avoid his elbows. He glanced at me with a look of pointed expectation. “Ready for my horrible tales from the Immortal Plane?”

  He read me like a book. I leaned forward, unable to help myself. “Please.” I didn’t mind that I was giving Kane exactly what he wanted by giving him the spotlight. For the most part, I’d stopped caring about his cocky attitude after he saved our asses on the roof of the Chicago HQ.

  “Well, there we were. We flew to the stone circle Harlowe found when we first arrived.”

  I nodded along with the others. Dorian had explained it to us a little. The vampires were the only creatures who could cross the barrier between planes without going through the tear. But they couldn’t do it on a whim; they required a place where the barrier was thin enough to slip through without getting lost inside forever. They flew there on redbills and left the birds in the Mortal Plane while the vampires jumped through to the Immortal side. Dorian had shown me the stone circle area once when we were surveying the camp and surrounding mountains from the back of a redbill. It was a circle of standing stones on the other side of the peaks that surrounded us, long forgotten in a small valley about half an hour away.

  “It’s always been funny to me”—Harlowe’s voice sounded less than amused—“how humans spent millennia protecting vampire gateways without even knowing what they were. They sensed the spot was important somehow, that it was a place where things traveled and changed, yet had no concept of what existed on the other side.” She rested her head against her hand, as though exhausted. “It’s strange every time I see it from this side, unguarded. Maybe it’s just because that used to be my job in the Immortal Plane before the breach.”

  Her job? I remembered Dorian had once said that Laini had trained as an architect, so maybe most vampires used to have positions besides purifying souls. Mentally, I made a note to ask one of the other vampires later.

  “Strange or not,” Kane broke in, apparently uninterested in Harlowe’s musings, “we passed through to the Immortal Plane on foot, keeping stealthy. But as soon as we came through, they were waiting.” Anger crossed his face in a pulse of shadow.

  “They?” Zach echoed, egging him on. Kane knew how to tell a story.

  “The immortal rulers. Our enemies. A group of their hunters found the circle on the other side and set up an ambush,” Kane relayed bitterly. “Well, tried to. We sensed them immediately. We slipped in so quickly and quietly that they didn’t notice while they set up their ambush. Luckily, we caught them in the middle of final preparations. We darted to a hiding spot and fanned out in the opposite direction to look for something to feed on. There was nothing close, and going farther into the Immortal Plane to feed would risk alerting the patrol, which would make it even harder to escape. We didn’t have a lot of options. And… we needed to feed. So we decided to chance ambushing the ambush.”

  Harlowe’s mouth twitched restlessly. “In hindsight, not an amazing plan, but we didn’t have any other options. The vampires back here needed to feed.”

  “Also, the irony was too strong a temptation to resist,” Kane added, blunt as always.

  I imagined the immortal enemies as something close to vampires, but scarier. The vampires were reluctant to talk about them but not about the monsters we’d fought a few weeks ago: the soul-scourger, a burning black mist, and the shrieking decay, an acid-spewing lizard that Dorian and I had killed. The immortal rulers had to be worse than these creatures for the vampires to fear and hate them so much, but when I’d pressed for details, Dorian told me that rulers looked more like humans than anything else. Their magic was the deadly part.

  “We took down three, at most, before they noticed us feeding,” Kane continued, sounding bitter. “The ambush party was more heavily armed than we expected. One of the soul-bound beasts got Castral before we could retreat back to the Mortal Plane.”

  “They didn’t let it kill him,” Harlowe interrupted in a speculative tone. “They had the opportunity, but it seemed like they wanted to take him away. Castral pretended to be unconscious after the beast got its teeth into him, so it dropped him. Then, before they could get any restraints on him, he surprised them and dove for the circle so we could come in for a quick rescue.”

  “Harlowe, Neo, Drinn, and I still fed on plenty of dark energy. We have enough to pass around to the other vampires in the compound after that fiasco. After that ambush, though…” He shrugged, but I could sense his frustration. “We need to find a new spot to send our feeding parties through. They’ll double down on watches at that stone circle.”

  Harlowe nodded. “It’s a death trap now.” Her eyes softened. “I don’t want anyone else to go through the same thing as Castral.”

  Understandable. I didn’t want that either.

  Kane smacked his hand on the table with a groan and pointed a wagging finger toward Zach’s face, the noise and movement catching the attention of the rest of the mess hall. “You tell me something, Mr. Public Relations. Why can’t we just feed in the Mortal Plane? Going to the Immortal Plane is annoying and dangerous, and I’m tired of it.”

  I could sympathize with Kane; the vampires were risking their necks, going back and forth through the dangers of the Immortal Plane. But we’d had this conversation before. We couldn’t have hungry vampires running around and feeding on the very citizens offering us asylum. Even if someone ended up being a murderer, Scotland and the international community would have a fit.

  Zach drew himself up straighter, temporarily ignoring his dinner. Over the last few weeks, while finally recovering from the bullet wound in his right leg, my brother had grown into the role of public relations expert for our group. He worked closely alongside the Bryce siblings, monitoring both public and international opinion.

  “The Mortal Plane may be less dangerous in terms of monsters, but you still have enemies and threats here,” he said firmly. “Feeding in the Mortal Plane could derail our Scottish asylum and the Bureau investigation in America. Everything is tenuous. Right now, we’re building a house of cards and praying it doesn’t fall,” he explained gently.

  I picked at my food but didn’t eat. My mind churned. Zach was right. Our current state was anything but stable. Until the international community decided how to d
eal with or integrate vampires into human society, the vampires couldn’t hunt humans. A month ago, I would’ve found that perfectly reasonable from a not-super-down-with-murder perspective… but now I grew more and more concerned about my vampire friends having to brave the Immortal Plane. I bit into my food, appreciating the ease with which we humans could eat right now, enjoying the full taste of it.

  “I understand,” Harlowe muttered. She tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear.

  Kane simmered next to her, visibly chafing at Zach’s reasoning. His scowl told me he grew impatient. If the situation with the Immortal Plane continued to worsen at this rate, the vampires might have to starve again or space out their feedings to near starvation.

  “Tomorrow we’ll look for another stone circle or some other doorway,” Kane said gruffly. He slouched, eyes on the tabletop, and didn’t say any more.

  Still, I appreciated that he was at least trying to be optimistic in his own way. He was stubborn, and that wouldn’t change, but I found him easier to deal with now. Dorian certainly seemed to appreciate having Kane back.

  “Sounds like it’s all bad news today,” Louise said mournfully. Harlowe shook her head.

  “Not quite,” she countered. “Although Castral’s injury was bad, he told us everything after the medics stabilized him. He got captured, but it meant he got close enough to hear the hunters talking when he pretended to be unconscious. They thought he was one of the vampires they’d seen near Siron, a huge lake in the mountains.”

  Kane grinned wildly. “More vampires.”

  The corner of Harlowe’s mouth lifted slightly, but her eyes stayed serious. “The Immortals sounded angry that they had known of the group’s alleged existence for some time but hadn’t caught them yet. They wanted to persuade Castral to talk when he woke up, hoping to connect our group with those at Lake Siron, but he managed to get away, and we dragged him through the portal in time.”