“I should get some sleep,” I croaked, halfheartedly pulling away. The anticipation faded, replaced by a deep disappointment.
“Are you sure you don’t want to stay with me tonight?” he asked with exaggerated longing.
I chuckled at his dramatic tone. Part of it was serious, but we both knew it was impossible.
“We can’t banish Sike to the couch in the rec room,” I reminded him and took a step back. The two camp beds per room were close together. It was all the Scottish military could manage for us at the moment.
He squeezed my hand one last time, admitting defeat. “Goodnight, Lyra.”
I could tell he didn’t want to let go. Neither did I.
I reluctantly backed out of the room, forcing myself to return to my quarters. I wanted a few minutes alone before Louise came to bed.
One thing hadn’t changed from being on the run. None of us had much privacy.
Chapter Three
I checked my watch as I made my way out of the mess hall. Seven thirty a.m. exactly. We were supposed to leave for the press conference in half an hour. Since I’d already done my morning run, hit the showers, and had a full stomach, I figured I could gather everyone. We couldn’t be late for our press conference.
Hopefully my teammates would miss the dark circles under my eyes. I’d slept fitfully last night. Waterfalls of red blood with flitting shadows filled my dreams. I’d abandoned sleep at just after five and headed out to run several laps around the camp, letting the sweat wash away my restlessness. Louise had said nothing when I passed her in the showers an hour later, so I was pretty sure I hadn’t called out in my sleep, at least.
Small blessings.
The barracks extended farther than one might think when looking at them from the outside. I headed to the rec room, knowing I was likely to find people there. The camp operated on an “early to rise, early to bed” type of schedule, so it wasn’t uncommon for everyone to be up and already busy at this time. As the humans and vampires grew closer, more and more time was spent hanging out in shared spaces. We can’t help but be around each other now. Which was convenient when you needed to gather everyone for a mission.
“The picture on the screen looks different today,” I heard Sike remark as I entered the rec room. He and Louise hovered in what I called our technology junkyard—a U-shaped formation of three tables with various deconstructed computers and gadgets. Louise spent her downtime piecing enough parts together to create her own, one-of-a-kind personal computer thanks to donations from the Scottish military, which was happy to unload its scrap on someone. Louise, with Sike helping to pass her tools and parts, had done everything herself from memory. Her technological prowess both impressed and frightened me.
“I changed the monitor’s display size,” Louise explained. She clicked something, and Sike leaned toward the screen, watching with great interest. “Now, let’s pick up where we left off yesterday. We’re going to open up a new internet window and search for some information.”
“And the internet is a computer program?” he asked, narrowing his eyes and tapping a finger to his chin.
“The internet isn’t, but the browser is,” Louise explained gently. “The browser is a software application that lets us look at the internet. Literally, browse. The internet itself is a complex network. The US originally commissioned research on it, but it was a global endeavor.”
Combat was my specialty. Computers? Not so much. Sike would no doubt have a better grasp of these things than I did before long. A teenage vampire with long, intricately braided red hair, whose name I was pretty sure was Fynn, hovered behind Louise and Sike in their swivel chairs. I was glad to know Louise was a good teacher for our ongoing pursuit of vampire-human relations.
“Louise. Sike. Don’t forget we have to move out in twenty minutes,” I called to them from the door.
Sike barely reacted.
“Sure thing,” Louise replied easily, her eyes glued to the screen. Let’s make sure we don’t give the vampires a bad case of internet addiction.
My next stop was the gym at the other end of the same building. The mess hall separated the two. Between my former Bureau comrades, the soldiers at the camp, and all the vampires, it was a popular haunt. In a time when everything was unfamiliar and it was sometimes a daily struggle to connect with the experiences of those around us, there was a simplicity in the controlled violence of training. As I pushed through the swinging doors out of the mess hall, I could already hear the sounds of exertion and fists hitting pads before I arrived at the gym. Most of the space was covered in mats to create a large area for sparring, with the rest of the room taken up by a fairly extensive weights section.
Right now, only one person—a grizzled older woman from the Scottish military group—was using the weights, bench-pressing an impressive amount with only the occasional grunt. Her spotter hovered nearby, waiting to switch roles. Everyone else was paired up for sparring. Bravi, stripped down to a tank top, military shorts, and bare feet, swiped at Zach with a quick punch, her movements sharp and precise as she bounced back and forth on the balls of her feet. He dodged and then came back up to hold his padded hands in front of him. Bravi punched the pads fiercely, finishing with a yell and a solid kick before letting Bryce, who hovered nearby, cycle in for striking practice. Bryce gave me a friendly wave before landing a vicious uppercut on Zach’s left pad that made my brother wince. Our ex-captain burned with new energy on Scottish soil, and his accent had definitely thickened.
It must be nice to be home.
Beside them, a much livelier and less structured exercise was taking place. I raised an interested brow as I watched Roxy lunge for Kane.
“Come here, fang face,” she barked, a taunting smile on her face. “I don’t want to hurt you. I just want to rearrange your bones.”
“In your dreams,” Kane snapped, but there was something odd about his tone. He dodged another blow from Roxy and went to kick her, but she successfully spun away. “Must be hard to be so weak, when you’re among a superior species constantly reminding you of your inferiority.”
Roxy let out a peal of laughter. “Superior? You’ve hit me twice, toothless.” They lunged for each other at the same time in a flurry of movement. Roxy grabbed Kane in a headlock, trying to use his height against him by levering him down and off balance, but he grit his teeth, straightened his unfathomably long legs, and lifted her off the ground with a grunt. Using a powerful motion, he threw her over his head. She landed flat on her back with an explosive grunt on the mat as the air was slammed from her lungs, but she scrambled back up.
“That all you’ve got, blood breath?”
“Come and say that to my face, weakling.”
I crossed my arms and studied them. Kane usually took offense easily, but he seemed to respond far more positively to Roxy’s direct insults than the genuine politeness of most people he interacted with. He brushed off the ribbing and slung it back without anger. Likewise, Roxy fired insults and retorts right back at him. In another life, I might’ve mistaken them for siblings. I could never have predicted this outcome.
“Hate to interrupt the fun,” I yelled, and I genuinely did. This was fascinating. “But everyone going to the press conference needs to shower and get ready, ASAP. Remember to throw some deodorant on, too.” It stank to high heaven inside the gym, relieved only slightly by the mountain air filtering in through the open windows to cool down the room. Personal hygiene wasn’t much of a priority for most missions, but today it would be vital.
I reluctantly peeled myself away. I’d spent a lot of time trying to keep my most fractious team members away from each other over the last few weeks, and I now resented that effort. I could have had this entertainment weeks ago.
I found Colin in the shooting range, a designated field just outside the gate. A few weeks ago, I’d been doing my best to dodge bullets. It was a pleasant return to normalcy to have a target for practice again instead of being the target.
“Yo
u want to keep your gaze steady on your target,” Colin explained to a group of gathered vampires, his short-cropped black hair covered by a tweed flat peak cap that he’d adopted as part of his look for some reason. I stared at the paper target tacked to a dummy down at the end of the range. “Your eyes may be more powerful and more accurate than humans’, but there’s a lot more that goes into hitting a target than just looking at it. Wind speed. How you hold your weapon. Your breath. How quickly the target is moving. Accuracy all comes down to practice.”
Teaching the vampires to shoot had been Morag’s idea. “There’s no such thing as being too prepared,” she argued when pitching the idea to the vampires. “Even if you are faster and stronger than humans, you can still be wounded or otherwise compromised. Those X-75s, the nasty dark energy guns the Bureau developed, can take you guys out in, what, five shots?”
“That seems to be the minimum,” one of the researchers confirmed. “In the tests we’ve been able to conduct so far, it seems one shot creates dizziness, nausea, and an energy spike similar to an adrenaline rush. Two shots intensify these symptoms and begin to overload the senses, increasing the heart rate to an uncomfortable level. Three shots remove most of the vision and make the subject incredibly sensitive to sound in addition to all other symptoms. The fourth shot activates a deeply primal mode in which the subject is incapable of rational thought and communication.”
“If you guys know how to use a weapon of your own,” Morag continued, “if you get hit once or twice or end up having your fangs restrained or something, you can back out of the range of the X-75s and still be able to fight. If you know how to handle a weapon, you will know how to disarm someone without endangering yourselves. I know a few of you are still recovering from bullet wounds.” She looked at Sike, Gavril, and a few others. “Gunshot wounds may not hurt you for as long as they hurt us, but they still bloody hurt. So”—she held up a pistol—“if you want to learn how to shoot this and other firearms properly, drop by the range.”
Most of the vampires, even Kane, had started taking lessons after that. Sike was an impressively good shot. Apparently, he found the practice meditative, although he said he didn’t like the idea of killing with guns. “The death is wasted,” he’d said. That was something many of the vampires struggled with—to kill a human with a bullet left the soul unclean. But it was better than dying themselves, as Dorian had pointed out.
I caught Colin’s eye and tapped my watch. He nodded and began to wrap up the lesson.
My last stop was the library. It was a smaller room, permeated by the yeasty smell of decaying books, which had once been someone’s office. Local people and Scottish organizations had donated the books to our group for our stay in Scotland, with more arriving each day from charities and pro-vampire groups. Some of the vampires burned through them quickly, eager to learn more about this world they found themselves in. I poked my head in the door to see Laini and Gina sitting on the desk, reading. Arlonne sat in the chair with a book open before her, but she was looking at a second book with Kren, one of Eskra’s adopted daughters. The tween vampire read from the page as Laini clapped a hand over her mouth, stifling a giggle.
“‘He gazed at Angela with passion dancing in his burning red eyes. Holding her hand to his chest, she knew that she would never feel a heartbeat in his gorgeous body. Undead, but not unlovable. She would teach him how humans loved. He bent to brush away a strand of her long chestnut hair, whispering that she was more beautiful than any creature he had known, vampire or human,’” the tween read dramatically. “‘He was hers forever. Her vampire. Her immortal lover.’”
Arlonne smiled crookedly, shaking her head. Gina erupted into laughter alongside Laini, who was nearly crying.
“I can’t believe I own all these,” Gina wheezed. “It all sounds so stupid now.”
“‘Undead, but not unlovable,’” Laini said dramatically, between bouts of laughter. “This sold a million copies?”
Arlonne checked the cover. “Two million,” she corrected.
I grinned as I watched the group. Laini had never looked so animated. I privately suspected that Major Morag, who had teenage daughters of her own, had donated the vampire romances to either get them out of the house or to stir the pot. Maybe both.
“Mission is a go soon,” I announced and winked at Kren. “Sorry to break up book club.”
“Oh, I think that’s all we can handle today,” Laini said assuredly. “Now, Lyra—please tell me how to act for this press event, because my undead body evidently lacks a heart.”
* * *
“Here goes nothing,” I muttered as our squad of black Range Rovers drove up. A complex line of security guards waved us along past Canongate until the driver parked in front of the Scottish Parliament building in the heart of Edinburgh. Guards swarmed around us—the security was tight. My gut clenched in a thrill of anticipation. This was it. Everything needed to go smoothly today.
I slid out of the car, my knee-high black boots catching the sun and making the leather shine. Major Morag strode toward our caravan. She looked strange out of uniform, having gone for a black pantsuit today. I wished I’d known that was an option. I felt vaguely uncomfortable wearing a dress for the first time in months. She pushed her sunglasses up off her face. Her gray-peppered red hair was an unruly mess of curls, but it made her look approachable rather than unprofessional. As various car doors slammed around me, I looked around to make sure everyone was accounted for. Dorian, Bryce, Kane, Roxy, Laini, Colin, Sike, Louise, and Tahn had joined our mission today. Tahn was a good noncombatant choice suggested by Kane. He came from the new cohort of vampires and gave off nonthreatening vibes. With short white hair and a long white beard, Tahn’s green eyes shone brilliantly in his light brown face as he swept a careful look over the Parliament building and gathered crowd. Today, he wore a scarlet knitted cardigan, tan slacks, and a pair of polished brown shoes. Essentially, he was a vampire grandpa. It impressed me that Kane possessed the social savvy to suggest him. Zach had coordinated the outfit with Gina and Louise’s help.
Soldiers styling vampires. Just another average day.
Morag shook my hand, surveying the group gleefully. “Not too shabby, Sloane. Our press conference will love this. The fashion is optimal vampire public relations.” Her eyes fell on Kane, who looked especially dapper in a white button-up shirt with a dark green tartan blazer. It had taken an army to convince him to leave the cape behind, but from the way he subtly preened in the car’s reflective window, I suspected the look was growing on him.
Morag whistled lowly. “Impressive! The cameras will love you, Kane.”
Kane scowled, apparently uncertain whether that was an insult. “Excuse me?”
Roxy snorted. “Precious pretty boy.”
I let them have their spat as I glanced around. Our clothing had been planned days in advance to make sure we looked professional yet relatable, capable but also in need of aid, sexy and also reliable as witnesses. It was exhausting.
Laini fidgeted with a pair of gold earrings on her ears. They were only a clip-on costume pair, but paired with her soft pink sundress, they gave her the air of a sweet vampire starlet. Dorian looked the best in my opinion, but I was probably a little biased. His tall frame suited human clothes well. He wore a tailored black overcoat over a white button-up shirt tucked into a pair of charcoal-gray slacks. Sike had surprised everyone by helping with the sewing, turning out to be an excellent tailor. He’d had to let down quite a few hems, as the vampires were, on the whole, of taller builds.
“Prepare for the swarm,” Morag told us in a low voice. I stiffened as she led us through a flock of activity. Several reporters shoved microphones and cameras in our direction.
“Mr. Bryce! How are you responding to allegations you’ve been a secret operative for the Scottish government during your entire time at the Bureau?”
“Mr. Clave, any contributions to the ethical debate about vampire feeding?”
“Do you believ
e you can get along with humans?” a red-faced man bellowed at Laini, probably misjudging her as weaker than the vampire men. Sike stepped in front of Laini, who had stared curiously at the fuzzy microphone being shoved at her. Louise hooked her arm with Laini’s and hurried her along while Sike faced a new barrage of reporters.
“Calm down. You’ll get your chance at questions.” Morag threw out her arm against a particularly pushy reporter and gestured for security to keep order. They took a massive step back. Guess you don’t mess with officials who have military combat training and a dedicated security team. Morag hustled us along as she barked warnings at reporters. Members of the general public pushed against the barricades, but I would much rather have the poster-toting fanatics at our throats than the reporters.
From the crowd, a young woman held up a poster of my face with a crown pasted on top of it with the words QUEEN OF THE UNDEAD underneath it. I twisted my fingers nervously. I could neutralize an armed soldier in fifty different ways, but the Bureau hadn’t ever given me training on being an international celebrity. More flashes went off from the reporters’ cameras. Morag placed us on the makeshift stage behind a fleet of podiums bristling with mics.
I glanced at the vampires nervously, hoping the onslaught of attention was manageable for them. Kane glared as he scanned the crowd but kept his mouth shut. His eyes narrowed briefly. Did he sense darkness? Sike and Laini studied the area similarly. They seemed steady enough. They had fed recently, so I didn’t expect trouble from them.
Beside me, Dorian gave a short growl under his breath. My stomach twisted uneasily as I grabbed his elbow. He kept his face tilted down for a moment, avoiding the cameras as shadows swarmed beneath his skin. He was hungry, but he had promised both me and Morag that he could handle this. I squeezed his arm gently, keeping my polite smile aimed at the crowd. Was it a mistake to let him come? Morag and Bryce had agreed to it since, thanks to the livestream, Dorian was the most recognizable of the vampires. But his hunger might place us in jeopardy… again.
Darklight 3: Darkworld Page 4