I opened my mouth to speak, but stopped, reminding myself that nothing I could say anymore would convince them my species was trustworthy. Because we weren’t.
I couldn’t blame them for being angry with humans. But I hadn’t forgiven Dorian for what they’d all done to me, to Bryce, to our loyal human team, either. The guilt, hurt, and anger swirled through me, warring, as I tried to separate everything.
“Kane,” Dorian started, his voice still broken but resolute. “I know I let you down. I let you all down.” He paused, gazing around at the other vampires, trying to meet their eyes. “I won’t try to stop you from leaving. But I still think it’s safer here. I’m not going back, but I understand if you all do. It’s your choice.” His statement was met with combinations of pained, confused, and furious stares.
Kane scoffed at Dorian and turned his back on him. "Everyone who wants a chance to live, get on your birds. We're not dying in this wasteland," he announced harshly. “May as well die at home.”
Kreya took her children’s hands and led them to their bird. They looked around at the surrounding adults frantically, confusion warping their mouths. Detra pointed back at her father, and a whimper rose in her throat.
"Kreya, wait," Rhome called, following her. "We have to think this through!"
She snarled at him and lifted her children onto the redbill. "Come or stay. It's up to you. But I'm protecting our children." Carwin froze on the redbill’s back, white-faced, but Detra howled and struggled in her mother’s arms.
Rhome winced, sucking in a breath, struggling to find words. He glanced at Dorian, then back to Kreya.
“We can’t go back there, Kreya. Not after what happened. Some humans may be evil, but there’s far more evil in the Immortal Plane,” Rhome said firmly, over Detra’s sobs. His hands trembled as he raised his palm pleadingly to his partner. “It’s not safe for our children there. We’ve started something here. Let’s finish it, make a safe place here for our children with the humans that we can trust. That’s better than walking into certain death back home.”
Kreya acted like she hadn’t heard him. She gripped the redbill’s feathers, preparing to leap onto it. Detra leaned toward her father, tears flowing, arms outstretched. Carwin grabbed her to prevent her from falling forward. He’d started crying too, silently.
“Kreya, please,” Laini cried out, her voice cracking. She rushed to Kreya’s side, gripping her arm. “Please stay, just for tonight. We can talk about it in the morning. Don’t separate your family.”
“I’m saving my family,” Kreya hissed, yanking her arm from Laini’s hold. She mounted the bird behind her children. Laini choked on a sob. Rhome tried to mount as well, but at a growl from Kreya, the bill hopped backward.
“You know what?” she said viciously, eyes on Rhome. “If you love humans more than your own family, you can stay here. Don’t follow me. You’ll just try to convince me to come back.”
“No,” Rhome said, devastated. He reached for Kreya, but she hissed at him. Her redbill leapt into the sky, Detra’s howl trailing away as it faded into the darkness.
Dorian stood silently in the dark, watching the group splinter. Thoth passed Kane and Halla, nodding to them sullenly, and then mounted his redbill. Harlowe briefly set a hand on Dorian’s shoulder on her way to her bird. Rayne had remounted in the middle of the argument, her mind already set.
Rhome remained statuesque, the life drained from his form, staring helplessly at the stars. With vampire hearing, it was possible that he could still hear his daughter, even if I couldn’t. Bravi and Sike approached Dorian, setting their hands on his shoulders. The three gazed at each other, their faces fallen.
Tears bit at my eyes. Everything was ruined. We'd all been betrayed. Everything we'd hoped for was a lie. I held my head in my hands, unable to handle putting all of these pieces together. The bitterness from the past weeks, my frustration with the vampires… the fear I’d flown through to get here on time, the horror at what the Bureau had done. It was too much. My ears rang. The guilt weighed so heavy on my chest I felt faint.
Bryce watched with pained eyes. The silence thickened the air, broken only by small gurgles from the redbills.
"Let's go," Kane shouted. The birds carried the vampires into the air. I watched them rise, sand whipping my face in the wind.
The only vampires that remained—Dorian, Bravi, Sike, Laini, and Rhome—watched their families and friends disappear into the night. Rhome’s shoulders jerked, as though he’d been shot, and he fell to his knees, gasping for air. Laini dropped down beside him, wrapping him in her arms.
I collapsed back to the sand beside Zach.
Dorian groaned softly, tugging at his hair. His expression flowed from fallen to distraught to livid and then back again. His hopes, his clan, had dissolved before his eyes in a matter of hours. I watched him pace the sand.
"What do we do?" Sike asked. "They’re going away, and we're just going to sit around waiting for the humans to find us?"
"I don’t know yet," Dorian murmured. His grief and frustration gripped his voice, and as he talked to Sike, he was clearly trying to convince himself. “But we’re going to find a way. We still have to tell the group we left in hiding. Some of them will support us. Somehow, we have to fix this.”
Dorian, always a decisive leader, looked as lost as I’d ever seen him, and my heart ached for him.
But he was right. It couldn’t be over yet. Without the vampires to hunt it, darkness thickened and roiled in the Mortal and Immortal Planes, growing powerful. The words Dorian had spoken to me in his cave, the day he kidnapped me, came rushing back.
“Without us, evil will continue to grow.”
It had apparently already seeped into the Bureau, into the hearts of its leaders… My uncle. I could still hardly process what I’d witnessed. That it was his voice I’d heard talking in that meeting room.
And it made me wonder, my heart gripped in a vise of fear, how many other people in our world with positions of power and influence had been corrupted. How many other cops, captains, senators, people whom we trusted to lead and keep us safe.
And how much farther would the darkness spread, without the vampires to beat it back?
“In the end, it will consume everything. Everyone.”
A shiver ran through me as I clenched my fists, my chest rising in short, ragged breaths. No. We might have lost this battle, but we couldn’t lose this war.
“Let us know if there’s anything we can do to help,” I managed, my eyes fixed on Dorian. This problem was so much bigger than what had gone on between us. I could accept that.
Or I thought I could, until Dorian looked sharply over at me, startled from his grief. A flood of emotions warped his face too quickly for me to figure them out, before he schooled it to an all-too-familiar blankness. His face wasn’t quite the mask it had been for our last weeks at the facility, but it was close enough.
“This isn’t your fight, Lyra,” he replied, staring at me with dead eyes. “You’ve helped us, but do you really think you have some kind of say in this?”
I couldn’t let him speak another sentence. At that look, the horrible collection of emotions I’d been feeling combusted into flames. Adrenaline flooded my limbs.
I was so over his arrogance. Like he could just use me and set me aside at whim. My life was ruined now, too, as he’d apparently forgotten. He thought he could defend me in front of his group and reject me to my face. And now I was supposed to feel bad for him because people he trusted had turned their backs on him? That felt a little too familiar to me.
"Yes, I do!" I said, bolting to my feet. "I’ve been with you on this from the beginning! Do you have any idea what I’ve done for you? If we’re going to stand even the smallest chance of ‘fixing this,’ we need to work together. If you had kept your head instead of believing in 'omens' or whatever the hell—”
"I already explained—"
"You explained nothing. We don’t even have proof that it’s t
rue! What you did was very effectively alienate our teams. We could've worked together once we figured out the Bureau's plan. You keep saying you can read our intentions, so you know my team would’ve supported you. But no. This divide wasn't the real one. The split happened ages ago."
It came as a relief for my words to fly from my mouth like this, my internal truth finally resounding outside my own mind. The relief did not temper my rage, though.
Dorian growled, swiftly crossing the sand to get in my face. "We did what we had to do to protect both of our species,” he hissed at me. “But clearly you're too selfish to see that."
"I'm selfish?” That was it. “At least I didn't throw the entire mission away because I was afraid to admit I tried to kiss someone!"
Silence fell over the sand. Every pair of eyes fixed on us.
Dorian’s breath shook and wavered over my face. I stared into his eyes; tiny rivulets of white flickered through his irises. A rush of adrenaline surged through my limbs, and I couldn’t even care anymore who was watching. After all the crap he’d put me through, I was not letting him get away with this. I was going to find out once and for all if it was true. No more second-guessing.
I threw myself up against him, wrapping my arms around his neck, and pressed my lips to his.
My mind exploded.
Searing, beautiful, glorious pain careened through my veins as I breathed him in, the scent of cedar and wind flowing over me. Red-hot pokers slid between my ribs as I grabbed Dorian’s face, pulling him deeper into me. He stumbled forward, eyes wide, filling with bursts of white.
Then he grabbed my waist, swinging me up against a rock and returning my kiss. The impact knocked the wind from my lungs, stealing my breath and spilling it out over his face. That joy—that unprecedented joy consumed me again, the sheer elation of his presence so close, everything he was on the inside pressing into me, wanting to be closer to everything I was on the inside. I had never been so happy to be in pain.
Dorian’s fingers wrapped my cheeks, and he shoved his lips harder into mine, pressing me against the stone. Another jolt of fire burst from my sternum, filling my empty lungs with delicious, hellacious pain.
I gripped his wrists and twisted away, breaking our lips apart. As my vision darkened, I sucked in a breath, teetering on the edge of consciousness, and my back slid down the rock.
"Vindicated," I whispered.
Dorian’s shoulders heaved as he panted. He stared down at me, the white flares still billowing in his eyes. A fierce smile split the side of his mouth, and I grinned at him, my vision slowly growing less snowy.
“Dammit, Lyra,” Dorian said.
Yes, our physical—or rather, emotional—closeness appeared to harm my body. Yes, Dorian’s fear of hurting me through his attraction for me was valid. But now I knew, we both knew, that what we felt was real, and there was good to it, not just pain.
But whether his touch hurt me or not, whether anything would come of these feelings, as we stared at each other in the moonlight, it was clear we would have to come to terms with it. Now we were both alienated, pariahs in our worlds, hunted. But we were in this together, more than ever before.
"Um… guys?" Sike murmured from behind Dorian. "Hate to butt in, but we've got, ah… things to sort out…"
I pressed a hand against the rock wall behind me and pulled myself up. Zach gaped at me, then groaned at some jostle to his leg. Bryce didn’t bother to hide his smug smile.
Bravi cleared her throat, sounding uncomfortable, eager to change the subject. "Let's get moving. We can't sit out here, waiting to get shot." She led us through the rock crevice pathway to the vampires’ cavern. Laini helped Rhome, when he proved too dazed to follow.
In the pitch-dark passage, I felt Dorian put the corner of his cloak in my palm and tug it. His fingers brushed mine only briefly, then pulled away.
Once we reached the torchlit cavern, our five vampire friends greeted the other fifteen or so surprised vampires who had remained behind at the start of the trial period. We humans stepped away from the group out of respect and helped Zach lean against the stone wall.
“There really is more,” Bryce said in awe, staring at all the new vampires.
Zach groaned, but I wasn’t sure if it was from the pain or to express his feelings on the matter.
The vampires huddled, murmuring, communicating the worst imaginable outcome of the last six weeks. Gasps rang out against the stone walls. Fear gripped faces.
As Dorian whispered to the group, taking in their reactions, I saw a tear roll down his cheek. I had to look away. The guilt returned too strongly for me to bear, wrapped up in the desire to help, if only he’d let me. My victory had drained all the anger and fear from me, but I was left with all the oppressive, helpless feelings of our untenable situation.
Still, there was work to be done, and too few of us to do it. Bryce, Gina, and I helped Zach get comfortable in Dorian’s room, before Bryce and I left Gina with him. I would have stayed, but it looked like they wanted privacy to talk.
I spent the rest of the night leaning against the cool rock wall, speaking quietly with Bryce about why the Bureau would’ve done this. He had no answers. Just as my brother had been silenced by confusion earlier that night, the most opinionated person in my life had a lost, numb face and nothing to say. His pale blue eyes had heavy circles under them in the torchlight. My career had just begun and ended. His, on the other hand, had consumed a majority of his life before going up in flames.
Between our few words and numerous long silences, I checked on Zach, who finally found sleep through his pain.
I woke along the cavern wall the next morning, lying on Dorian’s cloak. I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and cringed from the aches lingering between my ribs. I walked around, whispering good mornings to the conscious members of our small group. I noticed there were fewer vampires in the cavern than there were the previous night, but our friends were all accounted for—except Dorian.
"He’s down there," Bravi murmured, pointing to the hallway entrance.
I peeked into Dorian's room as I walked down the hall. Gina and Zach snored in a pile on Dorian's bed, so I kept going.
The hall ended with a set of crude steps carved into the stone, ascending toward a flood of sunlight and fresh air. I climbed the stairs and walked out onto the flat top of a tall rock formation looming over the expanding desert.
Dorian sat before me, staring out over the red sand dotted with sage bushes. Part of me didn’t want to sit beside him. Part of me did. I still had no idea where we were with each other, besides in the middle of a desert. And both hunted.
I sat beside him with an exhale, ignoring my little bite of resentment. I didn’t know exactly what was going on between us, and I still wanted deeper explanations, but just being able to sit next to him without being pushed away was bracing. With my mind pulled in so many directions, the silence we sat in felt comforting.
Everything I’d believed about the Bureau, my life’s work, was a lie. Uncle Alan’s cold, indifferent voice filtering through the air vent filled my mind for the umpteenth time. I felt hollowed out, my internal truth evaporated. I knew nothing about the Bureau at all, and maybe I never had. I felt used.
And we were all enemies to the Bureau now. I’d gone from rising star to target in a matter of moments. What lies would the Bureau—my own uncle—tell my parents? How would I reach them ever again without the board finding out?
A sense of loneliness engulfed me. I had a lot more in common with the vampires now than I wanted to admit.
I just wished I understood why the board had done this. Their exact, specific reasons. I wanted to believe that it wasn’t simply because “darkness” was spreading. I wanted to believe they’d thought this through rationally. The vampires had proven, over and over, to be sincere, and to be useful to the human race. What could the Bureau possibly have to gain from their planned massacre? They’d be acting against their own self-interest. It made no sense.
W
hat was the bigger picture? I was missing something. At least one massive piece of this strange, dangerous puzzle. And it both chilled and frustrated me not knowing what it was.
I pulled my knees up to my chest, attempting some form of self-comfort, and felt a hard poke against my leg. Reaching into my breast pocket, I pulled out Dorian's stone. I had no use for it anymore. It was time he had it back.
Lowering my legs again, I slowly reached over and offered it to him. But instead of taking it, his cool hand closed my fingers around it, pushing it back against my chest.
His lips were tense, much like the air between us.
“Please don’t lose that,” he said quietly, his eyes searching for danger in the expanding, echoing desert surrounding us. “You might need it.”
* * *
Ready for the next part of Lyra’s story?
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Love,
Bella x
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