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 tha
nk 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 never 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.”
“Lysander already knew what they were going to do,” Damon said, echoing Alexia’s earlier conclusion. “In the past, he appeared to support the Sophist Faction, but his behavior was never in keeping with their desire for peace. He aspired to become a Bloodlord with his own harem, but he knew there are already too many in Erebus. He could never advance himself until Opir territory expands.”
Alexia nodded. “And so it would make perfect sense that he’d support the faction that would risk war to grab more turf.”
Damon crouched by the pack again and withdrew a pair of sturdy socks. “Maybe Lysander was originally sent out by the Council, but they don’t know he’s betrayed them.”
“Whatever they know or don’t know, I’m sure Lysander was involved with whoever was shooting at us before, even if he wasn’t one of the snipers himself. His surprise was just too off to be believable. And then there was that bit about not seeing Michael. That might be possible, but I think it’s far more likely that either he or the dead guy was the one Michael was following.”
Damon’s face settled into grim lines as he used his good hand to pull on his socks.
“Either he was unaware that your partner was dead, or he was lying about that, as well.”
At least I know he couldn’t have killed Michael, Alexia thought with a rush of sadness.
“We still don’t know if all the shooters were the same,” Damon said, “or if they had different motives. There are plenty of those to go around.”
“Michael raised a good point about the colony probably not having the tech to do anything with the patch,” she said. “Unless, as he also suggested, they were trying to buy freedom from Erebus by selling it to them.”
Damon untied the laces of his boots. “You said the colony wanted equality for all Opiri, regardless of rank.”
“That’s what Lysander told me.”
“Did he say who established the colony?”
“Someone named Theron, I think.”
Either it was her imagination, or Damon suddenly went unnaturally still all at once, like a vid caught between one image and the next.
“You know the name?” she asked.
He continued with his boots as if nothing had happened. “It is familiar,” he said. “But such a philosophy, if viable, would be anathema to all of Erebus, including the Council.”
Alexia searched his face. Was he admitting that the Council would be just as hostile to the colony as the Expansionists? Maybe enough to want it destroyed, too?
“We still can’t be sure how much of what Lysander said about the settlement or the Expansionists’ plans were lies,” she said.
Damon put on his boots, unfastened one of the outer pockets of his pack and withdrew a spare knife, smaller than the other but every bit as nasty-looking. “The first Opir’s warnings seem to confirm at least some of it was the truth. There must be a great deal more Lysander didn’t tell us.”
“And none of this explains why none of the shooters killed us.”
“Indeed.”
Alexia went to join Damon, aware in every nerve of the heat of his body, the smell of his skin, the planes and a
ngles of his face. As crazy as it was under these very dangerous circumstances, in spite of the matter of the blood, she wanted him again.
From the way Damon’s muscled clenched up, Alexia had an idea he was thinking the same thing she was. She could almost feel his desire, like static electricity raising all the hair on the back of her arm. His nostrils flared and the corner of his mouth twitched.
But he resisted his body’s demands. Even without moving, he seemed to lean away from her, putting more space between them.
It hurt. But Alexia was glad. Whatever Lysander had said, they could still both control their “irrational impulses.”
“We know Lysander was lying about your new ‘orders,’” she said, “unless you think the Council would really change your mission right after you left.”
“Unlikely,” he said, staring into the darkness clotted among the branches of the old oak.
“Then why would Lysander pretend that the Council wanted you to escort me back to the Border when he knew I’d report my suspicions to Aegis?”
Damon balanced the knife’s blade on one extended finger. “The orders Lysander gave me are not what he told you,” he said. “They instruct me to take you and Michael back to Erebus, where we would be met secretly by Council Security. They claim this is to protect you from the Expansionists, but I believe members of the Expansionists would be the ones to meet us, and probably before we ever reach the Citadel. They wouldn’t risk taking us too close to Erebus.”
“So they just want us to walk into a trap so they can kill us? What would be the purpose, considering how many times they’ve had a chance to do it already?”
“I don’t know.” He stabbed the knife’s tip into the dirt between his feet with enough force to bend the blade. “I think they’d keep you alive, if possible. You have too much potential value to them.”
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