Michael swore and walked away. He retrieved his weapons and returned to set his VS and a box of ammunition on the ground beside her.
“Take this,” he said. “And take care of yourself, Alex.” He cast Damon a scathing glance and strode to the other side of the oak to wait.
“Alexia,” Damon murmured, kneeling beside her.
His nearness set her nerves to jangling again. She had to be tough now. She couldn’t afford any vulnerability when she was completely in his power and sick enough to lose her head the way she had just before Michael’s arrival.
“If you’re going to go, go,” she said, struggling to pull her jacket up again.
He helped her, though she shook him off once the jacket was safely closed over her chest. “If I had known—” he began.
“Do you think I’d admit that kind of weakness to an enemy?”
She could have sworn he flinched. “I would never harm you,” he said softly.
“Don’t lie for my sake. Michael was right. We may have worked as a team and saved each other’s lives for the sake of expedience, but you’ll kill me if you thought it was necessary to protect your people.”
“But it is not,” he said. “Quite the contrary.” He picked up his jacket and pulled it on. “You are being irrational. As I told you before, if I’d been sent to kill you, you would be dead. As your partner must know, if he could look beyond his hatred.”
She met his gaze again. “Don’t you hate us just as much?”
“My personal opinions are hardly relevant.”
“I know what hate is, and I see it in your eyes when you look at Michael. I’d say that was pretty personal.”
His mouth tightened. “My judgment of your partner changes nothing. I won’t let you die.”
“You might not have any choice.”
He leaned over her, bracing himself on his muscular arms. “I forbid it.”
“I’m not one of your harem serfs.” Her face grew hot, and she hardened her will. “Or do you think we have some...connection because of what happened before Michael showed up? That was my sickness, not me.”
“I was not ill,” Damon said huskily.
“But you have your instincts. You may be an outsider among your own people, but you’re still a predator under your civilized exterior, just like the rest of them. I was vulnerable, and you thought you could take advantage of that, one way or another.”
“And you wanted something from me, Alexia,” he said, “or was that your sickness, as well?”
“I was crazy. If you think I wanted to have sex with you—”
He drew back, his expression going blank. “I will not trouble you again.”
Because I’ll kill myself first, Alexia thought, though her cheeks burned under his gaze. She took herself in hand and released her breath. “Do you really intend to get Michael to safety?”
The light flickering between the oak’s branches shifted, pulling new shadows from Damon’s face. “I wasn’t lying.”
“But you have an idea what losing the patch can do to a dhampir, and you can guess the likely consequences once Aegis finds out that Nightsiders have one, colonists or not. If you work for the Council and they want to keep the peace, you might think it would be better not to let Michael make his report.”
Damon’s pupils constricted to pinpoints, lost in a deep and turbulent sea of blue. “If I killed him, I would have to kill you.”
“Yes. Because if I live, I’ll eventually make the same report. But if you kill him, I won’t survive, anyway.”
Something happened to Damon then, an unfurling of the rage she had glimpsed once or twice before when he’d sparred with Michael, but multiplied a hundredfold. His eyes narrowed, his lips drew back and his body seemed to expand and broaden like the hood on a striking cobra.
She knew that was illusion. But what she saw in his terrible gaze was not, and suddenly he was far less human than animal—some kind of animal she didn’t recognize, a creature neither Nightsider nor Daysider nor dhampir.
Because there was no rationality in that stare, in that expression, only pure, raw emotion. Whatever moved him now was nothing like what anyone dealing with vampires had ever reported before. Mindless savagery turned his face into a caricature of a man, lost to reason or even the leeches’ twisted morality.
The face of a killer that no rules, no weapons, no will could stop. A monster she had somehow awakened with her careless words, her bitter accusations.
It wasn’t some kind of act meant to scare her. It was terrifyingly real. Damon was going insane before her eyes, and she didn’t know how to stop it.
Chapter 6
“You—” Damon growled, panting between each word he forced out of his throat. “You—will—not—die.”
A brown leaf shook free from one of the oak’s down-curving branches, brushing against the coarse bark and drifting to lie among the handfuls that had fallen before it. Michael stood just out of sight behind the tree, utterly unaware of the danger.
Danger Alexia didn’t know how to define. Or fight. All she knew was that Damon wanted her alive, and that might be the only way to reach through his madness.
“If it matters so much to you,” she said calmly, hoping he could still understand her, “I promise I’ll stay alive as long as it takes. If you make sure Michael gets well away from the shooters or anyone who might attack him.”
Damon squeezed his eyes shut, breathing sharply through his nostrils. She could see him, feel him struggle to find words amid the chaos of a mind that was no longer wholly his own, ruled by a brutish, alien consciousness that was hungry for something it had never possessed.
“I—” he gasped.
“It’s all right, Damon. Whatever is wrong, I’ll help you.”
He bowed his head, shaking violently. “I will...not...”
“You won’t kill Michael.”
“No.”
“No matter what he does?”
She knew she was taking a grave risk, but it paid off. Damon’s eyes opened again, and there was a glint of real comprehension in them. He heard her. He understood.
“Won’t...kill,” he said.
“Even if he tries to kill you first?”
Abruptly Damon leaped to his feet, moving with sinuous, deadly grace. His whole body shivered as if he were emerging from icy water. He stalked in a circle around her, shoulders hunched, and came to a stop in front of her.
“Promise...” he said. “Stay alive.”
Alexia understood, without knowing how, that he would believe her if she did what he asked...that somehow her promise could bring Damon back from this strange and terrible darkness.
“I promise,” she said.
With a low moan, Damon flung back his head, clenching his fists at his sides. A violent shudder took him, and for a moment he seemed to go boneless, staggering and almost falling before regaining his feet. When he looked at her again, he was sane.
Alexia sighed. It had worked. But now she was faced with another problem. Because all she saw in Damon’s eyes at that moment was bewilderment, as if he had just awakened from an ugly dream.
He didn’t know what had happened. Alexia was sure of it, though she had only her own instincts to tell her so. His gaze was completely devoid of shame or horror or the kind of satisfaction that came of tricking an enemy into surrender.
Had this been some kind of psychotic break, a madness born of an abnormality in Damon’s brain or a trauma in his past? Was it an illness, a vampire or Daysider affliction no other agent of the Enclave had ever witnessed? Or something else she couldn’t begin to imagine?
And what had triggered it? He had changed right after she’d told him she would die if he killed Michael. Could it happen again? Could she make it happen, just with certain words and phrases?
Why should he care so much if she lived or died?
She couldn’t even attempt to understand any of it until she was sure he hadn’t known what had happened to him.
And
there was only one way to find out.
“You’d better go,” she said, as if they had been having a normal conversation. “Michael’s going to come looking if you wait any longer.”
Damon searched her eyes. “You aren’t getting any worse?”
A normal, rational question. No trace of the savage he had been only moments before.
“I said I’d hang on as long as necessary,” she said. “You just get Michael safely to the Border, as we agreed.”
He frowned a little, reached inside his jacket and withdrew the small, unfamiliar pistol he’d been carrying when they met. He bent to set it down beside her.
“Take this,” he said. “It was meant to be used only as a last resort, but it’s more powerful than it appears.”
“Michael already gave me his Vampire Sl— His VS,” she amended quickly.
“It will not hurt you to have both.”
She picked Damon’s pistol up and weighed it in her hands. The model wasn’t like anything Aegis had manufactured, not even for its agents.
“Your own version of a VS, huh?” she asked lightly.
“As I said, a last resort.”
“Thanks.”
Abruptly he scooped her up in his arms and carried her back to the scanty shelter of the bushes. He covered her with the blanket again, pushing leaves and twigs and dirt up around her and sifting a few handfuls of debris on top of her for good measure.
“I’ll be back soon,” he said. He stood, no longer graceful but oddly mechanical, as if he had forgotten how to use his limbs. “Don’t move from this place. Remain still and quiet. Fire only if you have no other choice.”
She curled her lips into a wry smile. “I’m not one of your harem slaves, remember?”
An echo of the savage gleamed in his eyes, a change so subtle that she never would have noticed if not for his recent and much more dramatic transformation. “Darketans do not have serfs,” he said, and walked away without looking back. In five minutes he and Michael were out of range of her senses.
Exhausted beyond her ability to resist, Alexia let her muscles go lax and allowed the sickness she’d been fighting to claim her, pulling her down into fever again.
And she remembered.
“You’ll be all right,” the voice whispered. It was comforting, full of gentle concern, and Alexia felt almost safe even though she felt so sick she could hardly breathe.
She didn’t remember how she’d come to this place, dark and cold as it was, or why the nice lady had come to help her. She only knew that when the lady had talked to her, she felt ever so much better.
“There, now,” the lady said, stroking Alexia’s hair. She rolled up her sleeve and held the underside of her wrist near Alexia’s mouth. “Don’t be afraid. You need to bite. Just a little blood, and you won’t feel so sick anymore.”
“But I’m not supposed to,” Alexia whimpered. “Mommy told me never to bite anybody. Blood is bad for you.”
“Not this blood. It will make you well.”
Alexia met the lady’s eyes doubtfully. They were different from hers, or Mommy’s, but so kind. And she felt so awful, worse than she ever had. She bent her head and brushed her lips against the lady’s skin. It smelled very sweet, and it was easy to open her mouth and let her teeth graze right where the blood beat so strongly.
It was like nothing Alexia had ever tasted before. She felt a twinge of guilt, but the hunger was too strong. She knew the lady was right. This would make her well.
She sipped just a little before the lady took her arm away. But it was enough. She felt better already, and with every breath she took she felt better still. She began to remember running away after Mommy had taken her to the big building with the very serious grown-ups who asked her so many questions. She remembered darting into hallways like long, dark tunnels and falling down stairs, hurting and crying for someone to find her.
That was when the lady came. She picked Alexia up and carried her outside, where it was nighttime, moving like a cat chasing a mouse, whispering for Alexia to be very quiet.
Alexia didn’t remember how long they walked. Sometime during the night the pain came, cramps in her stomach and the feeling that she wanted to throw up. Then she began to feel very hot and shivery, and she started to see ugly things, monsters with bloody teeth and red eyes who chased her and chased her and wouldn’t let her get away.
That was all she could see until the lady woke her up and told her she’d be all right. And now she was.
The lady took her by the hand. “We need to get you home now,” she said, sadness in her voice.
Alexia looked up. “Are you going to take me?”
“Yes.” The lady gave her a smile that wasn’t a smile, and she led her out of the dark room into the sunlight.
When they got back to the big building, Mommy was waiting for her. She was crying, and the very serious people looked more serious than ever. The lady took Alexia to Mommy, said something very soft that Alexia couldn’t quite hear, and went away with the serious people. She looked back once at Alexia, and Alexia stared at her for a long time after she disappeared inside the big building, memorizing her face.
Then Mommy took her to a place where other serious people made her undress and put things in her mouth and listened to her chest. When she went home again, she had to start taking two red pills every day. She still got sick a lot, and she always wished the lady would come back to make her well.
But she never saw the lady again.
* * *
Alexia jerked awake, the woman’s face as clear in her mind as it had been all those years ago.
The eyes. Daysider eyes, blue that was almost black.
She sat up, shoving the blanket aside. She had forgotten. All through the painful years of her childhood, the long spells of illness before they had developed the drugs for the patch, she had lost the memory of something that should never have left her consciousness.
Trembling, Alexia pressed the heels of her palms against her burning eyes. She understood now what it had all meant, or at least she could make a very good guess. She had run away from the Examiners at Aegis who had been conducting tests on her suitability as a future agent, as they had done with all the dhampir children born during or right after the war. Somehow she’d come upon a Daysider, who had known or guessed the nature of her first bout of blood-sickness and temporarily “cured” her.
Then the Daysider had taken Alexia back to Aegis and—
Alexia dropped her hands, staring unseeingly at a jay hopping from branch to branch among the oak leaves. Things that hadn’t made sense two decades ago looked very different in light of her years of training and experience. She’d been only six then, born the same year as the signing of the Treaty. The “nice lady” could have been anywhere from twenty to one hundred years old; no one could be sure of the age of any adult man or woman of vampire heritage.
Regardless of the Daysider’s age, she shouldn’t have been in the city. The Treaty specified that her kind, like Nightsiders, were forbidden within Enclave territory. That meant she could have been some kind of spy, an operative from Erebus, which had been completed just the year before. Somehow Alexia had stumbled into her hiding place.
But there was another possibility. If she wasn’t an agent, she must have been there with the full knowledge of Aegis. And they would never have let a potential enemy run loose in the city.
What if the woman had been a prisoner? If Alexia had found her while she was in the middle of an escape...
Alexia shook her head in disbelief. It couldn’t be. Under the Treaty, all prisoners were supposed to have been released. Never, in sixteen years with Aegis, had she ever heard so much as a rumor that the Nightsider captives might still be in Enclave custody.
Either way, spy or prisoner, the woman had returned Alexia and gone with the “serious people.” Examiners, agents, security...it didn’t matter. She’d given herself up. She could have used Alexia as a hostage, but she hadn’t. She had cared more
about Alexia than her own freedom.
What price had she paid for that compassion? How had Alexia’s time with Aegis so completely erased the memory that even Daysiders were capable of kindness and self-sacrifice?
Because that was not what she’d been taught from the day, at the age of ten, when she had begun the intense schooling that would eventually transform her into the perfect operative. Every day the same lesson had been drummed into her head: Daysiders and Nightsiders were monsters without empathy, morality or anything resembling human emotion.
Evil.
The jay screamed a querying note, tipping its dark head to examine Alexia with one bright, dark-rimmed eye.
What did they do with her? Alexia asked the bird silently. Did they set her free?
It would have been difficult to keep the woman’s presence secret all these years. But if they had killed her, there would be no need for secrets.
Battling her body’s weakness, Alexia struggled to her feet and made her way carefully toward the oak, hands outstretched to catch her weight. She spread her palms on the knotted bark and pressed her cheek against it, breathing in the scent of its indomitable life.
The unknown Daysider woman had sacrificed her freedom, possibly her life, for Alexia. Just as Damon, who could have killed both her and Michael anytime if he chose, had saved her life and fought to keep her alive.
And Damon had said he wanted to keep the peace. If he was telling the truth, whoever had attacked them was working as much against him as her. Whoever had stolen her patch hadn’t cared what might happen to her as a result.
But Damon did. She had very personally experienced his capability for loyalty, courage...commitment. How was he any different from the Daysider woman with her gentle voice and willingness to sacrifice herself for a child she had just met and would probably never see again?
Alexia laughed mirthlessly and bumped her forehead against the trunk. There was one major difference: Damon had most definitely been willing to extend their alliance to a more intimately physical plane. But he hadn’t tried to force her, not in any way. He had treated her body like something worth savoring, receiving as well as giving pleasure. It almost seemed as if he genuinely cared about her.
Daysider (Nightsiders) Page 8
