“Damon—”
He turned his back on her, and Alexia realized he wasn’t going to accept her help, let alone admit that he needed rest and nourishment. While she gathered up her pack, the weapons and the scraps of red-dyed cloth shed in the battle, Damon arranged the bodies, wiped the handle of his knife on his pants and put the weapon in the first Nightsider’s hand.
He stood up, scraping the back of his good hand across his face without taking notice of the still-raw gashes. “Anyone who comes is going to know an Orlok’s been here, anyway,” he said. He glanced sideways at Alexia. “That was unbelievable luck.”
She didn’t rise to the bait. “What about the clothes you’re still wearing?” she asked, dropping the wad of bloodstained fabric at her feet. “They’re saturated. If you think someone might find the bodies and come looking for us, you’ll have to do something about them. You’ll leave a trail even a human could find.”
Immediately Damon went to work on his belt. Hard muscle bunched and flexed under the night-pale skin of Damon’s arms, chest and ridged stomach as he stripped one-handed out of his trousers and underwear and bundled them into a loose ball, setting them on the ground beside the wad of bloodstained cloth Alexia had gathered. He bent to remove his boots, tied the shoelaces together—not an easy task with only one working arm—and placed his socks on top of the rest of his clothing.
“Do you have a lighter?” he asked.
Alexia bent to her pack and opened one of the many small interior pockets. She withdrew a pen-size lighter made to quick start a fire for cooking or any other use an operative might require in the field.
“Burn the clothes,” he said.
“The smoke—” she began, trying not to look at his naked body in all its magnificent splendor.
“It isn’t likely to make the situation more dangerous than it already is. Do you have any water left?”
“A little.” She handed him her canteen, still averting her gaze, and crouched to set fire to the clothing. Damon had kept a relatively unstained strip of his pants, which he wetted down with the remaining water and used to wash the blood off his skin.
It was a hopeless task—there was too much blood and not nearly enough water. But when the fire was going and Alexia glanced up again, Damon no longer looked like the walking dead.
She gripped the lighter tightly in her fist, doing her best to pretend Damon wasn’t there at all. After everything that had happened since she’d woken up to find she’d taken his blood, when she’d been so angry with him and so disgusted with herself, she shouldn’t have been capable of admiring the powerful symmetry of Damon’s body, the way even his slightest move evoked the grace of a hunting beast in its natural environment.
He had been a beast, all right. She ought to remember that, and not be thinking of how much she wanted to touch that body, soothe his injuries, press up against him and feel his big hands on her—
“We’ll have to get fresh water soon,” Damon said, gazing in the direction of camp as if he were totally oblivious of her stare and the thoughts behind it.
“When we know we’re not being hunted,” Alexia said, watching the flames consume Damon’s clothing.
He tossed the cleaning rag into the fire. Alexia rose, brushing dirt off the knees of her pants.
“Do you have a spare set of clothes?” she asked.
He picked up his boots and slung the tied laces over his shoulder. “In my pack back at camp,” he said.
Busying herself with her own pack, Alexia clipped on her empty canteen and made sure everything was in place again. Then she kicked the ashes of the fire, mingled with blackened scraps of cloth, into the dirt and thoroughly covered both. The burned smell did a good job of obscuring Damon’s scent, and hers.
If only disposing of all their other problems could be so easy. How this was all going to end—how she was going to settle things with Damon, and with herself—she didn’t know. The only thing she could still be sure of was her duty to protect the Enclave, its people and all humanity.
And perhaps she could be certain of one other thing: Damon’s commitment to her, which she could no longer deny. But just how deep was hers to him? When it really came down to it, how could she deal with his violently unpredictable shadow-side, and the knowledge that he refused to consider turning on his Opir masters in spite of his treatment at their hands?
If—when—they found themselves on opposite sides again...
“Are you ready?” Damon asked, glancing back at the bodies one last time.
“Wait a minute,” Alexia said. She pulled her own spare shirt out of her pack and rigged it into a sling, gingerly slipping it over Damon’s shoulder and easing his broken wrist into the cradle of cloth. “That should hold you until it heals.” He looked at her hand lingering on his shoulder and then met her gaze. “Thank you,” he murmured.
Hastily Alexia dropped her hand and stepped back. “Let’s go,” she said.
Damon fell in beside her, and they set off for the temporary hilltop camp, moving in a random zigzag pattern to throw off potential pursuit and listening to every rustle of leaf and patter of tiny feet as birds and animals fled their approach. Naked as he was, Damon seemed little more than a ghost, sometimes ahead of her, sometimes behind, his skin absorbing what moonlight reached them as they kept to any cover they could find.
The deceptive quiet made what they found halfway back to the camp an ugly shock. Damon stopped abruptly, head lifted, and gestured to Alexia. Within seconds she smelled what he had, and the two of them crept under the trees to the source of the stench.
The first corpse was a Daysider, his head nearly severed from his body, a pool of black blood soaking the earth underneath. Alexia guessed he’d been dead for at least six hours, probably longer. Damon crouched beside the body and touched the Daysider’s shoulder, his jaw clenched hard.
Alexia knew it was too risky to speak, so she let Damon examine the body and then went with him to find the second one. It lay a good dozen meters away—a female Nightsider, dressed in vampire daygear. Her helmet was missing, leaving her beautiful face exposed. A rash of burns pocked her skin, but they were not as severe as those of the double agent. She had been killed before the sun could complete its work, and the large, scorched hole in the chest of her suit made clear how she had died.
Damon studied her for a few moments, nodded to Alexia, and set off again. Neither of them spoke; there was far too much to say, and they were still in a very vulnerable position. By the time they reached camp—which was untouched, and still apparently safe—Alexia had managed to sort a dozen questions into some semblance of order.
She wiped her dry mouth with the back of her hand and paced in a circle around the hilltop, VS at the ready, trying to steady her emotions and buy a little more time while Damon dropped his pack and began unfolding his spare set of clothes. He seemed as reluctant to begin the conversation as she was.
“Who were they?” she asked at last.
“Council operatives,” he said, laying a neatly folded shirt, pants and socks on the top of his pack. His voice held no emotion, but Alexia had begun to learn how to read in it what might not be evident to anyone else.
He was angry, perhaps even grieved that his fellow agents had been slaughtered. It didn’t take much guesswork to figure out who was responsible.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “Lysander?”
“He wasn’t the only one.”
That wasn’t a very comforting answer, but it didn’t surprise her, either. God knew how many of them were running around the area now, setting up their little scheme to wipe out the colony.
Busy killing any and all opposition they could find.
“Did you know them?” she asked.
He gave short nod.
“Were they the other agents you mentioned when we met?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think they were looking for enemy operatives when they were killed?”
“It is possible.”
Alexia knew he wasn’t going to say anything more about it, at least for the time being. And they were still in grave danger.
Alexia’s grim reflections were cut short by Damon’s next words. “You should never have left camp alone,” he said.
The tension, uncertainty and violence of the past few hours had left Alexia with only the merest thread of control to hang on to, and now it snapped.
“Did you expect me to ask for your permission?” she demanded.
He stood up abruptly, his clean pants hanging from his good hand. “If you had been hurt—”
“Who was Lysander?” Alexia interrupted, taking the offensive. “What was between you two that made you hate each other so much?”
Damon jerked on the pants one leg after the other, testing the tough fabric to its limits. “Lysander is—” he reached down for his shirt and shook it out “—was,” he corrected himself, “a midrank Freeblood with ambition. And a traitor to the Council.”
A Freeblood...one of the four basic ranks in Nightsider society, and the second lowest. Freebloods were no longer vassal to any Bloodmaster or Bloodlord, but they had yet to establish households with serfs of their own, and so competition among them was particularly fierce.
“You didn’t know he was a traitor when you first found us, did you?” she asked. “You obviously wanted to kill him the moment you laid eyes on him, and he felt the same, whatever he was trying to achieve by lying to us.”
Damon crumpled the shirt in his good hand. “He would have behaved the same with any Darketan.”
“Maybe. But before you showed up, Lysander tried to convince me that he killed the other Nightsider because you had a personal grudge against the Expansionists that would make you believe what his victim said about not trusting him. But Lysander must have known all along that you’d never believe anything he said.” She lowered her voice. “He mentioned Eirene. What happened, Damon? How was he involved?”
Fabric hissed as it tore in Damon’s fists. He stared down at the damage he had done to his spare shirt—and undoubtedly to his wrist, which he had pulled out of its sling—before letting the garment fall to the ground.
Alexia tried again.
“Lysander said you were more driven by ‘irrational impulses’ than others of your kind. That that was why you were sent to work with me. What made him say that, Damon? What does it have to do with what you and I discussed before, about Darketans and feelings?”
His flat expression told her he wasn’t going to let her break him down. “We have far more important matters to discuss,” he said, “if we want to stay alive.”
He was right. She couldn’t waste time and energy trying to drag the truth out of him now, especially since there was one particular thing she had needed to know ever since she’d left camp late that morning. A question only Damon could answer.
Which was why she was alive at all.
Chapter 12
“Very well,” Alexia said, hardening her voice, “let’s talk about what happened yesterday.”
Damon pushed his good right arm through the sleeve of his shirt and took a deep breath. “It was necessary, Alexia,” he said.
So he wasn’t going to pretend he didn’t understand her line of questioning. That was something, anyway.
“Necessary to use sex as a way to make me bite you?” she asked, carefully controlling her voice so as not to reveal how much even the thought of his lovemaking aroused her even now.
“It wasn’t like that,” he said, easing his other sleeve over his injured arm with exquisite care. “I didn’t have it planned.”
“Didn’t you?” Alexia slung the strap of the VS back over her shoulder and turned her back on him, walking to the nearest tree. She rested both palms on the trunk, inhaling and exhaling slowly the way she had been taught in the earliest years of her training. “You said, before we...you said you wouldn’t take my choice from me. You lied.”
“And you broke your promise,” he retorted with some heat. “You tried to back out of it by asking me to remember your exact words. I believe they were ‘hang on as long as necessary.’”
At least he didn’t seem to remember what she had told him when he had been under his “spell,” demanding so ferociously that she stay alive. “That’s right,” she said. “As long as necessary. But once Michael was dead—”
“It was even more necessary,” Damon said, “because you were the sole survivor of your team and the only one capable of completing your mission.”
The anger went out of his voice. “I didn’t even know it would work, Alexia. I could only hope.”
“You’ve used that word before,” she said. “I never thought you really believed what it meant.”
“Have you abandoned it, Alexia?” he said, his voice thick with emotion that only confused her more. “Would you rather have died?”
As much as she wanted to say yes, she knew it wasn’t true. Maybe seeing Damon fight Lysander to the death had made her cherish life more than the principles she had thought were unbreakable. Maybe she valued her own existence more because she valued Damon’s.
No, she couldn’t lie to him. But she couldn’t dismiss her anger, her sense of betrayal, so easily.
“Do you expect me to thank you?” she asked.
“Do you think you had no part in it?” he asked, the edge returning to his voice. “Whether you admit it or not, even you are a creature of instinct, driven to survive.”
He was right. He could not have forced her teeth into his flesh. But she couldn’t admit it, because that meant she was no better than a Nightsider. No better than the monster Michael had become, or the thing inside Damon that would gladly have slaughtered Lysander with nothing more than his teeth.
Damon’s footsteps, barely audible, whispered across the ground behind her. “You were born as you are, Alexia,” he said. “It does no good to fight your nature.”
Or his. Even if she could despise herself, her weakness, she couldn’t despise him. The fact was that something had happened to her when she and Damon had made love—not just a matter of bodies coming together in sex, or even the ecstatic joy that had taken her at the end. Their lovemaking had hurled her into territories uncharted and far more dangerous than their tentative friendship.
Even the matter of taking his blood couldn’t diminish what she had felt then, what she was feeling now. He was so close now, and she could draw every familiar line of his body in her mind: broad shoulders tapering to taut stomach and trim waist; long, muscular legs; and the part of him she so badly wanted to feel inside her again.
She closed her eyes and turned her face up to listen to the rustle of the leaves in the midnight breeze, forgetting everything but the vivid memory of Damon’s passion.
Once that passion had been for Eirene. Perhaps he had been thinking of his former lover when he kissed Alexia, when he entered her and possessed her and accepted her bite.
She couldn’t believe it. Even if he wasn’t capable of regarding any other woman the way he had Eirene—even if what he and Alexia had shared was only a matter of the “attachment” Lysander had spoken of so mockingly—he cared. Genuinely and truly. And she could no longer put off acknowledging the overwhelming truth.
She laughed. No, she couldn’t hate Damon. Or even herself. Not as long as she was with him.
“I am what I am,” she said, turning to look at him. “I know I can’t change that. But I can still live in service to something bigger than myself, and die honorably.”
A sudden gust of wind lifted the unbuttoned placket of Damon’s shirt, blowing the edges away from his chest. “Honor is a human concept,” he said softly.
Alexia tried not to let herself become distracted by the sight of his partially naked body. “Is that why you have so much trouble keeping your promises?” she asked. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. “I—”
Damon looked away. “Why did you leave camp?” he asked again, as if their previous discussion had ne
ver happened.
“I went back to take care of Michael’s body,” she said, and then hesitated. Surely she could wait just a little longer to tell Damon about Michael, even though the mystery of his transformation, his behavior and his words remained unsolved. “It was gone when I got there.”
“I’m sorry,” Damon said. His voice turned gruff. “I should have seen to it earlier. It was still foolish for you to go out alone.”
“I felt fine. And if I hadn’t, I never would have had the chance to talk to the first Nightsider before Lysander killed him. I wouldn’t have been so much on my guard when Lysander gave me the line about stopping a traitor from deceiving me and getting me on his side.”
“And since Lysander was almost certainly lying or twisting the facts most of the time, everything the first Opir told you must have been the truth. What exactly did he say?”
She repeated what the man had told her. Damon hissed sharply through his teeth.
“Drugs,” he said. “The patch. He knew about it.”
“Yes,” she said, “but I don’t think he took it. I think he knew who did, and tried to tell me he knew where it was. He spoke of the colony in the same breath.”
“Interesting,” Damon murmured.
“Isn’t it? Lysander heard the first Nightsider mention the drugs before he killed the poor bastard, but he himself never once referred to them. I think he was trying to avoid the subject, because he had something to do with stealing the patch. I know he thought I was too stupid to notice.”
Damon smiled, displaying the tips of his incisors. “Arrogance. It’s a common failing among the Opiri. I wonder if he knew the nature and effects of the drugs and expected you to be weak and helpless without them.”
“Maybe,” she said, “but Lysander made a couple of other mistakes. He said the Expansionists want to destroy the colony because they expected the colonists to support their policies, and that wasn’t happening. But he also clearly implied that the Expansionists already had the plans in place, even though the man he killed hadn’t yet reported back to his masters.”
Daysider (Nightsiders) Page 15
