The Brightest Night

by Jennifer L. Armentrout

  “Jesus,” he uttered.

  Grayson struck like lightning striking past me. In a blink of an eye, he had grabbed the front of the man’s shirt. Dishes rattled as Grayson shoved the hybrid against the cabinets. The new Luxen shouted, starting toward them as the glow of the Source surrounded him.

  I didn’t stop to think.

  Summoning the Source, I stopped the Luxen. His body jerked as if his feet were glued to the floor. It wouldn’t stop him from striking out with the Source, but I hoped it was a warning he’d heed. “Please don’t attack Grayson,” I said, and the Luxen’s head swung in my direction. His lips parted on a sharp inhale. “I don’t want to have to hurt you.”

  “Holy guacamole,” Heidi whispered. “You’re … Evie, you have black glitter all over you.”

  “I know.” I kept my eyes trained on the Luxen. “That’s one of the things you’ve missed.”

  “I don’t want to hurt anyone, either,” the Luxen responded. “Neither does he.”

  “You sure about that?” I asked. “You’re starting to glow like a lightning bug.”

  “Sorry. It’s a knee-jerk response,” he said, and the glow faded until nothing surrounded him.

  I nodded, but I didn’t ease up on him, keeping him in place.

  “Who are you?” Grayson demanded.

  Beyond Grayson’s shoulder, the hybrid’s wide eyes were fixed on me. A cold chill knotted my muscles as he swallowed. “A dead man. I’m a dead man.”

  34

  “That’s a strange-as-hell name,” Grayson said, lifting the hybrid off his feet. “So you may want to think that answer over.”

  Georgie, the old farmer, walked in from the dining area, a woven basket tucked under his arm as he jerked to a stop. He took one look at the room and sighed. “Not again. Doris,” he called out, setting the basket down. Straightening, he opened the old refrigerator door.

  My eyes nearly popped out of my head. The insides had been hollowed out to hold yet another stash of rifles.

  “What?” came Doris’s voice.

  Pulling out a rifle, he leveled it directly at the hybrid’s head. “You may as well wait outside for a bit. We’ve got an issue in here.”

  Grayson lifted the hybrid even higher as the Source started to bleed into the air around him. “I’m starting to get impatient, and just so you know, I’m not known for my patience.”

  “I know their names.” Jeremy had also grabbed one of the rifles from the mudroom. With one quick glance, I saw that Emery had Heidi behind her. The female Luxen’s pupils were diamond bright. “They were vetted. The Luxen is Chris Strom,” Jeremy answered. “The hybrid’s name is Blake Saunders.”

  Neither name meant a thing to me, but they did to Grayson and Emery.

  “Holy Christ,” whispered Emery.

  “That can’t be right.” The Source flared around Grayson. “I know that name. Blake Saunders is dead.”

  The hybrid said nothing, but the Luxen did. “It’s true. His name is Blake, and I’m sure a lot of people believe him to be dead, but he didn’t die. We’re not lying. We not here to cause any problems. If we’d known that Luc was here, we wouldn’t have come—”

  “Why would it cause problems?” I demanded. “Who are you two?”

  The hybrid’s gaze shot to me.

  “Don’t look at her,” Grayson warned. “Jeremy, I need you to get Hunter. Now. He’ll be able to confirm exactly who these two are. And I need you to get him fast,” Grayson instructed. “Don’t talk to anyone else about this.”

  “On it,” Jeremy said, and he then rushed from the room.

  “Everyone should leave. Sorry, Georgie. I know this is your house, but I want you and Doris nowhere near here,” Grayson instructed. “Take Emery and Heidi to Cekiah. She’s at the old library. Tell her what is going down. Make sure it stays quiet. There are others here that don’t need to learn of this.”

  “Others?” Chris asked, still frozen where I held him, his chest moving and falling rapidly. “Who else is here?”

  His question was ignored as Grayson dropped the hybrid. He fell back against the counter, eyes flying open. His shirt was torn around his collar. He said nothing, keeping his gaze trained on Grayson.

  “Evie,” Grayson said as Emery took ahold of Heidi’s arm and joined Georgie at the door. “Go with them.”

  “What?” I exclaimed. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “I don’t care where you go, but you’re going somewhere that’s not here.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  Keeping one hand planted on the center of the hybrid’s chest, he spared me a brief glance. “I’m not asking.”

  “Good,” I shot back. “Because even if you were, I’m still not listening. If you want me to leave, you’re going to have to make me, and that is something I’d like to see.”

  The Source flared violently around him, and for a moment, I thought he was going to try, but then he gave me a tight-lipped smile. “It’s your world, isn’t it?” Then he turned back to the hybrid. “Sit. I want both of you to sit.”

  The room had emptied by that point, and there was a part of me that wanted to go after Heidi. There was so much I needed to tell her, and I wanted to hug her again, but instinct was going off left and right, telling me that I needed to stay here.

  The hybrid slowly lowered himself to the floor, sitting with one leg drawn up, the other stretched out.

  “That means you, too.” Grayson looked at the Luxen.

  “I can’t,” he replied. “I can’t move.”

  “That’s me.” Pulling the Source back, I let the Luxen go.

  Jerking as if he were attached to a string and it was pulled, the Luxen swung his head toward me as he sat a few feet from the hybrid. “How did you do that?”

  I didn’t answer, because I wasn’t sure what I should admit in front of him.

  “The Daedalus is how she did that,” the hybrid answered. “The Andromeda serum, right?”

  I shifted toward him. “I want to know how you know me.”

  “No,” the hybrid said, his jaw hardening. “You don’t.”

  Tiny knots filled my stomach as I started toward him.

  “If you insist on staying, the least you can do is to stay away from them.” Grayson’s arm blocked me. “If they are who they claim to be, Luc wouldn’t want you in the same zip code.”

  Those knots grew. Neither seemed very threatening at the moment. The Luxen appeared seconds from breaking down. Then again, all of this could be an act.

  I didn’t know them even though the hybrid seemed to know me. “Who are they?” I asked Grayson.

  “Who are they claiming to be?” Grayson pulled a Blow Pop out of his pocket. “Two people who should definitely be dead.”

  “That tells me nothing.”

  “I never met you.” The hybrid eyed Grayson from where he sat.

  “No, you haven’t.” Grayson unwrapped the sucker. “But if you are who you say you are, I’ve heard the stories.”

  “From Luc?” he asked.

  Grayson didn’t answer.

  One side of the hybrid’s lips twitched upward as if he tried to smile. “If you didn’t hear it from him, then I think I know who the others are who are here.”

  “Then you know your shocking return from the grave is going to be really short term.”

  “We didn’t come here to cause trouble,” the Luxen spoke up. “I swear we didn’t. We were just looking for a safe place, and we heard that there were areas where we could go. We had no idea who was here. They told us nothing more. If we’d known, we wouldn’t have come. I swear it. We would’ve risked it out there.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Chris,” the hybrid said as he tipped his head back against the worn, faded white cabinets. “They wouldn’t believe us.”

  “Can you blame them?” the Luxen whispered.

  Tilting his chin in the Luxen’s direction, he shook his head. “No. I never blamed any of them.”

  The Luxen started to shift on
to his knees, but halted when Grayson looked at him. He sat back, facing the hybrid. “You did what you had to do to survive. We all did.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  Still staring at the Luxen, the hybrid pressed his lips together and then said, “Betrayed everyone. Everyone except Luc. He always knew. Can’t keep much from him. But he never told the others the truth about me. Wasn’t until later that I figured out why.”

  None of what he was saying made a bit of sense. “I want to know how you know me,” I asked once more, ignoring the sharp look Grayson shot in my direction.

  “Do you really?” The hybrid looked at me then with eyes haunted.

  A world of unease settled over me like a thick, coarse blanket. “You knew me when I was Nadia.”

  His brows knitted, one of them split in half by a faint scar. “They took your memories. Wiped them completely.”

  Air halted in my lungs.

  “That’s right. That’s what they’d said they would do. My memory is a bit spotty these days.” A sardonic twist curled his lips. “I didn’t know they did it. One day you were there. Then you were gone.”

  Oh my God, he knew me when I was with the Daedalus. Shaken, I didn’t know what to say or do, because I felt split into two. Half of me wanted to launch into an interrogation, forcing him to tell me everything. The desire to learn about the missing time burned through me, making my skin itchy. But the other half? Based on the way Luc had paled when he’d realized I’d been Nadia at that time, how Kat and Zoe both said my lack of memory was a blessing, and from the brief memories I could grasp and hold on to, the other part of me wasn’t sure I needed to know what was done to me. Or what I’d most likely done to others.

  “I saw you with Luc even though he tried to keep you hidden,” the hybrid said. “That was before the Daedalus.” His gaze lifted to me. “Before I understood why he wouldn’t tell the others who I was. It was because of you.”

  “That’s enough.” Grayson removed the Blow Pop. “It’s quiet time.”

  I wasn’t taking part in quiet time, not as I rapidly began to put what I did know together. Luc had used Daemon and Kat to get inside the Daedalus, to retrieve the serums he thought would heal me. Was this hybrid who claimed to be Blake involved, and were those he’d said he’d betrayed Daemon and Kat? If so, that meant …

  Anger filled me. “You worked for the Daedalus?”

  “Not by his choosing,” Chris answered with a nervous glance at Grayson. “We grew up together. Close. Like brothers. There was an accident when we were younger. A bad one, and I healed him. He mutated, and the Daedalus found out, and ever since then—up until we finally got away—the Daedalus used me to control him. It was like that for more years than it wasn’t.”

  “Really thought I said it was quiet time,” Grayson said.

  “They made him do terrible things—things he would’ve never done if they hadn’t been able to use me. They controlled us. You have to understand that,” Chris said—pleaded, really. “Everything he did, he did so that I lived, so that he survived. He did what anyone else would’ve done.”

  “Some would’ve done worse,” the hybrid murmured, eyes meeting mine. “Have done worse.”

  A cold air pressed to my back, and while his words were unnerving, I knew the sensation meant Hunter was near. Seconds later, he entered through the mudroom and headed straight for the two men sitting on the floor.

  Grayson stepped aside, and without saying a word, Hunter knelt in front of the Luxen. Static charged the air as the hybrid started to move, but Grayson was faster, catching him by the throat and slamming his head back.

  “Don’t even think it,” Grayson said around the Blow Pop.

  Hunter placed his hand on the center of the Luxen’s chest and lowered his head. Then his hand went into his chest. Chris’s body jerked and back bowed as his entire body lit up. He slipped into his true form, a being encased in rapidly flickering light as Hunter fed.

  I was guessing that was how you made feeding painful.

  Jeepers.

  Hunter was taking the Luxen’s memories, just like I had when I’d fed on Luc. It was as fascinating as it was horrifying to witness.

  “Stop!” the hybrid shouted. “You’re killing him! Stop.”

  My stomach dipped as Grayson laughed. “He’s not killing.” A pause. “Yet.”

  Hunter let go a few moments later, and the Luxen slumped back into the cabinet, his light still pulsing, but more slowly now.

  “Chris?” the hybrid whispered.

  Rising to his full height, Hunter looked over to the hybrid. “You are a dead man.”

  * * *

  Cekiah and other Luxen arrived shortly after, and the two men had been carted off to a holding area until it could be determined what to do with them. I’d heard that both would be searched once more for any trackers.

  It had been decided by Hunter that Kat and Bethany wouldn’t be told about the newest arrivals, not until Daemon returned, and I knew then that whatever Blake had done, it had been one of those terrible things that Chris had referenced, and it did involve them. I couldn’t imagine what it could be that they felt it was best to keep someone as strong as Kat in the dark, and that had been a ghost lingering in the back of my mind several hours later. Even now, as I sat at the house opened for Heidi and Emery, the empty one two homes down from the one I shared with Luc. Candles and lanterns lit the living room, fighting the coming night. I’d just finished filling Heidi and Emery in on everything that had happened since the night we’d all fled Columbia. Heidi had been sitting beside me on the couch, but she’d gotten up when I told them about Kent.

  She sat on the arm of the chair, running her hand over Emery’s head. “I don’t know what to say.” She bent down, kissing her temple. “I’m so sorry about Kent,” she whispered. “God, I’m so sorry about Clyde and Chas. All of them.”

  Emery stared at nothing, her lips mashed together as she inhaled deeply through the nose. “They’re dead?” she asked, blinking. “The men who killed Kent? They’re dead?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “All of them.”

  Taking another long breath, she nodded. “Good.”

  I watched her turn to Heidi, and I looked away when she was folded into her embrace, giving them as much privacy as possible.

  It was a while later before Emery said, “There’s been a huge increase in ART officers, but the real issue was the National Guard.”

  Heidi nodded. “They were all over the place.”

  “Heavy patrol of the interstates and at the rest stops,” Emery said. “Never have I seen anything like that, fully uniformed and armed. That’s what took us so long. We had to keep backtracking, taking different back roads and lying low. The news kept saying their presence was to ensure that there was no traveling in and out of the quarantined cities, but they were in states nowhere near the places that have outbreaks.”

  “ET.” Heidi rolled her eyes as she shook her head. “How stupid is that nickname?”

  “Very,” I said, leaning forward. “How bad are the outbreaks?”

  She repeated basically what Daemon had shared. “But the thing is, no one is going in or out of those cities, and there’s been some strange shit posted on social media from those areas.”

  “I created a fake account to try to check to see how James and some of the others that we knew were doing. I didn’t want to log in to mine in case they were tracking that. When I was able to check last, he was okay, but schools have been shut down, businesses closed.” Heidi tucked a piece of her hair back from her face. “He’d posted about a curfew and how the army had come in, pretty much taking over. There was this one post…” She trailed off, shaking her head.

  “What?” I looked to Emery.

  “I think she’s talking about the posts about the dead.”

  “Oh God.”

  “Yeah.” Heidi’s shoulders rose. “He said that soldiers went around in his neighborhood, telling everyone that if someone got sick, th
ey were to hang a white towel out the window or their front door. One of the houses next to him ended up putting one up. He posted that the next day he saw them carrying out three body bags.”

  I pressed my hands to my mouth.

  “And then the last post was about the others.” Heidi folded her arms around her. “The ones who got sick but didn’t die.”

  “The ones who mutated?” I said behind my hands.

  “I guess so,” Heidi replied. “He wouldn’t know that, but he’d posted something about him thinking they were the real reason the army was there. He said that people were acting weird. Attacking others and just, I don’t know, raging out. He posted that nighttime was the worst. All you could hear were these screams. Said it sounded like something from a horror movie.”

  Having seen with my own eyes what Sarah and Coop had done, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it was like if dozens or hundreds more were going through the same thing. “What is the army doing? Straight up shooting them?”

  “I don’t know,” Heidi said. “His last post was right before we reached Arkansas.”

  Fear was a bolt to the system. “Oh God.”

  “I don’t know if anything happened to him. It seems like the social media was just turned off in Columbia and the other cities, but the news keeps telling everyone that things are under control. That fewer and fewer people are getting sick. If that’s true, why would they shut those cities off completely?”

  I let that sink in. “They don’t want the world to know what’s happening. That want everyone as unprepared as possible.”

  “And for the most part, people are going about their lives like nothing has happened and as if it can’t touch them.” Emery leaned back. “We met up with those two in Arkansas. I had no idea that was who they were. Why would I? I’ve heard the stories and was told they were dead.”

  “Who are they?” I asked, hoping for once I’d get an answer.

  “From what I know, Blake was a hybrid the Daedalus often used to spy on recently mutated hybrids. See if they were viable—able to control their abilities and be of use to the Daedalus. Several years ago, he’d been sent to Petersburg, West Virginia, and enrolled in the school Kat and Daemon attended. The Daedalus knew that Kat had been mutated, and they wanted firsthand accounts. They had no idea who Blake really was until it was too late. He killed one of their friends—a Luxen who Dee had been seeing. Adam Thomson.”