Darklight 5: Darktide

by Forrest, Bella

  Roxy fell to the ground with a cry as the other hunter’s barbed chain struck her across the back. Bravi and I rushed to help, but the ant wildling scuttled in front of me in an attempt to escape Gren's wrath.

  Gren let out a howl as he brought his mace down, crushing the wildling's head, and the metallic scent of blood grew even stronger. Over in the other skirmish, Dorian tore the helmet off the blue male hunter, then leapt away, narrowly avoiding the bladed quarterstaff. A second later, the hunter’s head exploded as Colin ended the exchange. Kane and Dorian immediately began to feed on the body. Kono, joined by Oz and Arlonne, tackled the albino hunter, who went down like a rock without her magic armor. She cried out as their fangs tore into her, draining her of darkness and life.

  More blood, more violence. I shut my eyes as I remembered the taste of Dorian’s blood. Had the injections given me a vampiric thirst for blood, or was this just the heat of battle?

  I pushed it down; there were still two hunters left. The bald hunter had dropped his swords, and Laini was keeping him pinned. The other, the male with the chain, struggled with Bravi. As the hunter whipped his barbed chain around her forearm, ripping the flesh, she growled and grabbed the chain. His solid white eyes went wide with pain as Gina darted in, slashing the back of his knee, as I had done to the female.

  I ducked under Bravi’s arm, slamming my stone to his armor, dagger flying up to press against his throat, but the hunter raised shaking hands in surrender.

  I wanted to kill him. The thought struck me, but it was like a dull knife on stone. Somehow, I took my knife away from his throat, and a freshly fed Neo and Drinn restrained the hunter.

  Now that we were safe, my body began to shake. It felt like the battle anger was dissolving me, and I backed away to take stock. Sheathing my dagger and putting Lanzon’s now warm stone back in its pouch, I tried to wrestle the clouding anger back under control as I went to help my brother. We’d won; I needed to return to calm.

  "Are you okay?" Roxy asked Zach as I approached. Sylas was already running over.

  Zach nursed his arm, nodding stiffly. "I will be."

  I moved aside to let Gina support him, stepping back to stare at the two bound hunters sitting by the lakeshore. Bravi approached me, a patch of her shoulder blistered from the heat of the blast but still bright-eyed from our victory, and pointed to the hunters.

  "Can you watch them?" she asked. “We’re trying to feed on the other three before the darkness leaves their blood.”

  I nodded stiffly, almost telling her that it felt like my bones, muscle, and skin were vibrating apart from the rage still surging through my system. But this was my problem. I could handle it. “Sure. Go feed.”

  Bravi's eyebrows knit with concern, but she turned away, heading to the body of the albino hunter, needing dark energy to heal.

  We had kept the Hive secret. I tried to focus on that as I loomed over the hunters, but we needed to take every precaution to keep our advantage.

  I stood straighter as I looked over the prisoners. Up close and without their magical items, they looked weaker. Rage bubbled up my throat again. My hands curled into fists. The bald, gray-skinned hunter stared up at me like he could sense the hostility brewing beneath my skin.

  It's not hostility but mercy.

  Mercy is what I thought about as I took out my pistol. I knew what needed to happen to protect the Hive, to protect Dorian, to protect my friends.

  The rage finally cooled and quieted as I fired a shot into each of their heads.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The hunters fell into permanent silent slumber as a ringing filled my ears.

  "Lyra?" Gina called, concern in her voice.

  I turned to see her, Zach, and Roxy rushing my way, faces tense. Some part of me registered that I was still holding my pistol with a death grip.

  From across the field, Arlonne and Kane looked at the hunters sprawled on the ground. Kane gave me a grave nod, a strange semblance of understanding coming over his face. My head spun as I took in the range of looks that my team was giving me: horrified, wary, impressed, confused. Vaguely, I realized I couldn’t feel my hands.

  Dorian approached from where he had been rolling the albino hunter into the lake for disposal by the wildlings. He looked at the dead hunters for a long time, then stared at me with a question in his eyes I couldn’t decipher. But it never left his mouth, and his gaze fell back to the bodies.

  "Hey," Zach breathed as he made it to me, extending a hand. "I need you to give me the gun." He spoke cautiously, carefully. His big brown eyes searched my face.

  I handed the gun over with a frown, the creeping feeling that I’d done something terrible crawling up the back of my brain. The surge of power from the vampire blood was fading, and the anger was withdrawing like a receding tide.

  Zach took the gun, and I saw his shoulders relax. Behind him, Gina wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  "Are you okay?" Zach asked slowly.

  "I… I think so?" I said, looking at the two fresh corpses.

  Zach gently touched my arm, drawing me away from the bodies. "Lyra, you just executed two surrendered prisoners without talking it over with your team."

  Roxy stepped up. “While I’m not crazy about Lyra making such a decision without including us… I’m willing to back her up on this.” She pointed back at the blue-skinned hunter being rolled into the lake. “Colin just turned that guy’s head to jam because that’s what needed to be done. How is this different?”

  I nodded, even though I wasn’t quite sure what I was agreeing to. There was a vortex somewhere between my lungs and my gut, and the dark sludge of the battle rage was slipping into it. Slowly, I felt my full awareness start to return to my body. How hard had I been disassociating?

  Zach shook his head. “They’d surrendered, Roxy—”

  “They would not have spared our lives,” Kono said gravely. “And we had no place to put them. Best that we feed on them now before…”

  His voice began to fade as I looked down at the bodies again. The ringing in my ears reaching a shrieking pitch, then shattered like glass, and an icy chill crashed over me as the full weight of my actions hit.

  I just…

  I’d never shot or killed outside the heat of battle. Surrender was always honored, but I’d ignored it, despite my years and years of pushing myself, always, to be the best and fairest version of myself. I pressed a hand to my chest, still vaguely aware of the conversation going on around me but only hearing my heartbeat. A shiver of doubt rolled through me, making me question the control I’d been certain I had. Gate Maker told me that I had changed, that he’d noticed my behavior shifting. But the anger during battle felt good and necessary. My performance during the battle had been optimal. I was laser-focused on our objective. But shooting the prisoners went against everything I believed in, no matter how anyone tried to justify it.

  Apparently seeing the story of emotion on my face, my teammates quieted, then backed away.

  Zach sighed and handed my gun back to me. “What’s done is done, I guess.”

  Taking the pistol, I searched Dorian’s face for his reaction. When he turned away, his expression telling me that we would talk later, I couldn’t help the pang of despair that slashed through my chest. What had I done?

  "Are you sure you're fine?" Gina asked quietly.

  I nodded slowly. The rushing buzz of the battle had totally drained from my head. The adrenaline and panic were gone, leaving me with only a numb sensation of confusion.

  "Let's head back," Dorian said shortly, already walking toward the entrance, where Hank was waiting.

  Bravi gestured Kane and the other vampires over. Without saying a word, they drained the hunters of their dark energy, their skin pooling dark with shadow, then dragged the exsanguinated corpses to the lake. The bodies sank in their heavy armor, only a few bubbles rising to the surface. The aquatic wildlings would take care of the rest.

  I tried to push away the feeling that I’d lost some
thing as we packed up and returned to the Hive, battered and bloodied but alive. Hank and his team met us in the tunnel entrance.

  “We… have a bit of a problem,” he said by way of greeting.

  Completely blocking the bridge to the Hive, we found a welcome party of angry faces waiting for us. A small mob of ten Hive vampires who I’d noticed were particularly hostile to the Coalition and to the refugees glared at our approaching group. One of medium height with greasy brown hair pulled into a tight bun stepped forward, his face pinched in anger, and I felt the dregs of adrenaline begin to rise again in weary response to this new threat.

  "You've openly rebelled against the council’s wishes," the man said bitterly. His eyes landed on Arlonne's prosthetic weapon. "And the elders are going to be very interested to hear about the weapons you’ve been manufacturing." He spat on the floor. “Will you stop at nothing to bring war to this place?”

  Arlonne returned his accusation with a stony stare. "Brand, I have no patience for your feeble threats, willful ignorance, and cowardice. The Coalition just protected the Hive from discovery. These weapons?" She lifted her arm, and he jerked back an inch. "They are necessary."

  Someone scoffed in the back of the mob. "They’re necessary to protect yourself from the other castes you mingle with."

  I searched for the face, but the angry grimaces blended into a haze of opposition. My head began to pulse as I forced myself to stay calm. We didn’t need any more bloodshed today.

  "How do you know these castes won't turn on you?" Brand asked. "They cave under the slightest pressure from the rulers. Nothing good can come from castes mixing so indiscriminately."

  "Unlike you, they just fought as my comrades in battle against hunters sent by the rulers," Arlonne growled. "Do you want to pick a fight? Or are you going to let us go back in to share the spoils of dark energy? You’ve been so concerned about us earning our keep."

  Brand glowered, but her confrontation made him hesitate. It was ten vampires against our entire group, with many of our vampire allies at full strength after feeding. He gestured to his companions to step aside, but his eyes remained narrow.

  "The council will hear about this," Brand warned. "We’re only letting you pass because I’m sure you would kill anyone who stood in your way."

  “Please, stop with your antagonism,” Kono said, shaking his head in exhaustion.

  Arlonne marched over the bridge, tossing Brand a withering look. "Go and tell your elders. Just make sure to also tell them about the hunters we dealt with for them."

  Just ahead of me, Dorian's body tensed as he moved past the Hive vampires. Was there any way for our groups to reconcile, after this? Unlikely.

  The rest of the day was chaos. Mere hours later, Kono received a message from a Coalition member that the council had heard of the battle. The report of the thwarted attack had spread through the Hive like wildfire. Pyma and Glim publicly called for Mox to administer punishment, but Kono believed the head elder was unlikely to do so, as she couldn’t dismiss that the Coalition's protection meant everyone was still safe. I wished I was able to share Kono’s confidence. Just because punishment wasn’t being enforced immediately didn’t mean we wouldn’t all be banished from the Hive.

  My paranoia grew over the course of the day and wasn’t helped by the fact that Dorian said nothing to me. I tried not to let it hurt, but it did, a knot settling in my chest. I wanted to talk to him about my fear that I was starting to spiral, remembering his promise that we’d be there for one another if things began to go badly. The hurt morphed into a needling sense of betrayal as the hours passed, doubling as Gina and Zach notably steered clear of me as well. I tried to reach for my rational side, arguing with myself that they just needed time to process what had happened, but it was harder than before the battle to manage the turmoil. It no longer settled in my stomach, but now radiated through me, like sepsis in my blood. I tried to just keep breathing but the anger and fear gnawed like maggots for the rest of the day.

  I tried to keep busy, hiding from my thoughts, so when Oz found us in the workshop that evening, I was helping Reshi and a few of the vampires fix and improve our multipurpose gauntlets.

  “Any news from the elders?” Kane asked.

  Oz nodded. “The elders announced they’re going ahead with the annual holiday of Helix tomorrow. We’re all invited, since Mox claims she wants the festival to celebrate the return of their captured members and welcome the new refugees.”

  I blinked in surprise. After the shock that had rippled through the Hive regarding the hunter attack and the coalition’s defense of the Hive, this was not the announcement I had been expecting.

  It was evident that the elders, Mox in particular, were hoping the celebration would defuse tension between the various factions. However, judging the skepticism of much of the Coalition, I had serious doubts that the Helix celebration would have the desired effect.

  “I think we should take it as a show of good faith,” Laini said quietly. “We should bring Juneau as well.”

  “It’s Zach’s birthday, too,” I murmured, knowing when Zach heard he’d get quite a kick over having such a unique twenty-fourth birthday. Or he would if he was in regular spirits. I was just hoping this could be a chance for me to reconnect with my brother.

  Later, as I walked the silent, glowing halls that led to my team’s sleeping quarters, the isolation and despair I’d felt in my solitary cell in the sanitarium draped across my shoulders with a crushing weight. There, I’d longed to see my brother and my lover again if only I could survive. For all intents and purposes, I’d escaped the sanitarium, but I was beginning to question whether I had wholly survived it. Too weary to hold it back anymore, I began to silently cry.

  I knew that battle and missions could affect a soldier’s mental health, and I had been through so much in just the past three months. I’d lost the job that I had built my life around, struggled with a love that was literally cursed, been betrayed and hunted by my uncle, become the face of an international political movement lobbying to prevent a genocide, survived an assassination attempt, traveled to another plane of existence where I’d nearly been killed, was now part of an interspecies rebellion against a tyrannical power, and had begun injecting vampire blood on a daily basis to be able to be in the same room as the man I loved. I sagged against the wall in the space between two soul-lanterns, suddenly too exhausted to take another step.

  Was this new, caustic anger that rose at the slightest provocation the legacy of my trauma? Or was it a message from my body that the lengths I was going to in order to remain close to Dorian through all this madness were dangerous for my health, as Gate Maker had suggested?

  But the vampire blood felt so separate from the anger. I wasn’t angrier right after I swapped blood with Dorian. And the blood did more than let me be close to Dorian; it made me sharper, stronger, better equipped to stay in this fight. Thinking back over the altercation with the five hunters, I replayed a dozen instances where, if the vampire blood hadn’t pushed me, I’d have far worse injuries than the shallow scratch on my back from the chirrok that Sylas had bandaged.

  As for the way I had dealt with the hunters who had surrendered… I still wasn’t sure what part of me had pulled the trigger. The hunters had been a threat, but I had still killed captives and didn’t even conference with my squad about it. Looking back through the hazy memories surrounding the moment, it felt like I’d done it before I’d even registered the impulse.

  I wanted to keep my promise to Dorian that I would talk to him if I felt myself losing control, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes all afternoon. It had been hours now since I’d seen him at all. How could I open up about all these fears and struggles when it was clear he didn’t want to talk to me?

  “Lyra?”

  For a moment, I thought my aching heart and weary mind had conjured a mirage, but then Dorian crouched in front of where I was curled against the wall. His usually icy eyes were softened to tropical lagoons by the s
oft light of the floating souls.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, wiping at my tear-stained cheeks. “I… I’m sorry…”

  “Lyra,” he said again, his tone gentler than before as he reached out to cup my face.

  The burst of pain from the heartburn took us both by surprise. He jerked back with a hiss, and I curled into the fetal position, my vision going dark around the edges.

  Dorian took a shaky breath, shuffling to lean against the opposite side of the deserted hallway. “You did what you obviously felt you had to,” he said eventually. “I know that. I was just so afraid, looking at those bodies, that my blood had driven you to such an action. That I’d… corrupted you.”

  I shook my head, needing to reassure him. “Even if the blood was making me darker, which you would see in my aura, it wouldn’t be you who had done that.” I tipped my head back against the wall. “I think I’m just teetering on the edge of a cliff right now. There’s only so much upheaval and personal horror you can go through before cracks start to show.”

  “I know the feeling,” he murmured, then gave a leaden sigh. “Do you think we need to stop our… experiment? Is it just too much for you to be processing right now?”

  I looked at him, cloaked in a patch of shadow only a few feet away, but already I could feel him slipping away. If we stopped the blood, one of us would have to sleep in a different room. There would be no pairing up on missions or patrols. In time, when we would need to move out of the Hive for one reason or another, we would no doubt split the forces to keep the two of us conscious. If that became more of a hindrance as time went on, there would likely be further discussion about sending me back to the Mortal Plane. My actions today would be cited by those who were concerned about me (definitely Zach and Gina, but there were probably others who were uncomfortable, even if they hadn’t said anything) as a reason for me to return home. To leave Dorian behind.

  Determination burst like a sunbeam inside of me. I couldn’t leave him here to get through this fight alone… I wouldn’t do it.