“It’s an emergency,” Gina said, perhaps trying to convince herself.
I nodded reluctantly in agreement and turned to Dorian, who was eyeing his comrades wearily. “What is your plan?”
“There’s a strong concentration of malintent in this area,” he said.
I followed his pointed gaze to the shiny gates of a nearby house almost completely hidden from view by solid iron gates and a tall brick wall topped with decorative iron spikes.
“I’ve been here before while scoping out hiding places for my group,” he said. “This area, and indeed most of this gated community, is home to people involved in various human trafficking rings. We’re likely to find some kingpins in a meeting if our suspicions are correct.”
Laini took a deep breath, and for a moment, her eyes were stained solid black. “The amount of evil is startling,” she whispered. The look she gave me was almost pleading.
“Okay.” I tried not to think about fangs digging into someone’s neck. “We’ll go to the store for supplies with the money we pooled together. See you back here.”
* * *
“Forty-six dollars and seventy-two cents,” Gina lamented as we headed for the supermarket. “This is going to be the ultimate bargain hunt.”
Luckily, the proximity of the gated community and surrounding houses meant the market was large. I hated that we looked like we’d emerged from a music festival without showers, but it couldn’t be helped. We both ran our hands through our hair before going inside. I pulled my hair into a short ponytail with a hair tie. Gina tucked her blonde bob behind her ears. The first place we stopped was the bathroom. After being reintroduced to the luxury of indoor plumbing, we spent a few precious minutes scrubbing our hands and limbs as fast as we could, drying off with reams of paper towels.
As we were about to leave, Gina glanced around the empty bathroom, then darted into a stall. After a moment of clattering, she emerged trying to wrestle a large roll of toilet paper into one of the rucksacks we had brought with us.
“My parents would be so proud if they could see me now,” she muttered.
Aware that we might need to make a quick getaway at any moment, we speedily worked through the aisles.
“I forgot how bright fluorescent lights are,” Gina marveled. She picked up a bottle of bodywash, then winced at the price and put it back. “Too bad we don’t have a budget for soap. I hope Bryce finds some in the resort.”
I refused to lift my arms to check my suspicions that I reeked, but I hoped she was right. “Same.”
My stomach growled when we passed a display of hot paninis. Gina covered her mouth and nose with her hand.
Every human had turned out their pockets to give their available cash, but at the time of our narrow escape, none of us soldiers had been carrying much money, unfortunately. Still, we managed. We gathered a makeshift survival kit, complete with wound dressings, disinfectant, and strong thread. Our kits were running low, and the chances of minor wounds in our current setup were high. With our limited budget, we also managed to get flu medication, a box of protein bars, ten pounds of rice, and ten pounds of oatmeal. And we picked up a small bag of sugar and a carton of salt at Gina’s insistence.
“We’ll need the salts and sugars,” she said. “And if I have to eat almost exclusively oatmeal made with water and plain boiled rice for the next however many days, then I need something to add to it, so I don’t go insane.”
I glanced down at the red shopping basket in my hand as we lined up in the shortest line we could find. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do for now.
The cashier wrinkled her nose at our scent—a mixture of cheap bathroom soap and no hot showers for the last few days—but rang us up without any trouble.
Gina carried one rucksack and I the other as we walked back to our rendezvous point. “I guess we should appreciate this stuff while we can,” she said. “Next time we might need to dumpster dive.”
The vampires returned shortly after we arrived, faces bloodied and new shadows swirling under their skin. Some had apparently been more violent and eager than others in their feeding. Sabal’s gray shirt was splattered with dark red.
They joined us, forming a circle. I swallowed the hard lump in my throat, feeling suddenly vulnerable. They have all just fed on someone.
I shifted from foot to foot, wondering if we were the strangest and most uncomfortable party the world had ever seen.
“We’ll use a different route to return,” Dorian said, addressing the redbill riders. There was a thin trickle of blood at one side of his mouth, and his expression was somber.
I didn’t want to ask how it had gone or who they had found. It was clear enough from the darkness infringing on the edges of his ice-blue irises.
Bravi helped Gina balance one of the two bags of supplies as they mounted her bill. A familiar pain began to rise in my chest as we approached the redbill. Dorian was looking at me. I tried to ignore the ache. I was used to it by now.
I climbed onto Dorian’s redbill and settled in the spot behind him, keeping the gear bag full of supplies on my back. Our fingers brushed by accident as he mounted. When we took off, the pulsing ache began to travel through my chest, radiating outward. My fingers began to grow numb. I clung to him more tightly.
I had to push through this. I could push through. I’d done it several times before.
Our bodies are so close. I could practically feel his heart beating. My head spun when I saw the distance beneath the bill and the ground. My thighs brushed against him.
My heart gave a sudden tremor as it slammed against my chest. It was getting difficult to catch my breath. I tried to strengthen my hold by gripping the bill’s feathers with one hand. The pain was persistent, but I refused to be bested.
By my estimate, we were in the middle of our flight when I realized it wasn’t going to work. The corners of my vision began to fade. The sensation in my legs disappeared. It felt like white-hot pins and needles jabbing into my arms. The pain made me lightheaded. I gripped at his shoulders, but my hands were numb.
“Dorian, I’m not feeling well,” I breathed. But my vision was already blurring to black.
Why? My pain during our kiss in Canyonlands was bad, but not this bad. Why was it so strong now?
I didn’t have much time to consider these questions. The last thing I sensed was Dorian’s surprised cry as my body went limp and tipped sideways.
I couldn’t remember anything after that. The world faded completely into an unforgiving emptiness.
Chapter Seven
My eyelids felt like they’d been turned to lead by some bizarre alchemy. I groaned as I shifted on the surface beneath me. My joints popped, and I felt something soft against my body. Not a redbill’s feathers, but more like a mattress or pillow with an annoyingly scratchy blanket. The air smelled cold with a hint of woodsmoke. The memory of being on Dorian’s redbill struck me. His cry. Falling sideways.
I jerked upright. The pain came back. I fell off the redbill, didn’t I?
“Whoa, calm down,” Zach said and clapped a hand onto my shoulder. “Sleeping next to me isn’t that bad.”
“Zach?” I muttered, bewildered.
I turned to see him and Gina on the edge of the mattress. I sat between them and the wall. My lower body was tucked tightly beneath a red woolen blanket edged with yellow tassels. I struggled to stretch my tired legs, even though the movement created gaps that let in the chill from the mines.
“Bryce foraged this from a miraculously untouched supply closet in the resort,” Gina said, lifting the blanket. “It’s a touch motheaten, but it’s thick and warm.”
It certainly looked cleaner than most of what we had initially found in the cave. I grabbed my head as it pulsed with a dull ache. It was like a hangover without the drinking part. My stomach grumbled, so I added hungry to my list of troubles.
“What happened?” I asked. “I remember flying and then—” My memories flashed back to the sensation of pain from b
eing next to Dorian. “Please tell me I haven’t been in a three-day coma again?”
“You collapsed during our journey, but Dorian was able to grab you before you fell from the redbill,” Laini said from the entrance, her voice soft. “He put you on another redbill for the rest of the flight.”
I wanted nothing more than to crawl under the scratchy blanket for the rest of the day and hide my red cheeks.
“I was worried about you,” Zach said. He looked tired. Had he watched me while I slept?
“Oh.” My stomach dropped. I’d passed out because I was flying with Dorian. Another wave of heat flamed my face under their watchful eyes.
Great job, Lyra. I’d pitched my proposal of being just friends to Dorian and then fainted off the redbill. How many times was I going to wake up to Zach’s concerned face after an interaction with Dorian?
“You can’t keep doing this,” Zach said, all humor drained from his face. “I’m worried about you.”
“I know you’re worried,” I said quietly. “I’m trying to figure things out.”
“You could have died,” Zach insisted. “You could have fallen off the redbill to your death. You could have had a heart attack and gone into a coma again. There are no hospitals around.”
I felt tears prick my eyes. He was right. I should’ve said something as soon as I felt the pain before the redbill flight. He opened his mouth to fire off more brotherly advice, but Gina placed a gentle hand on his shoulder.
“Let’s give her some space,” she said, carefully ushering my brother out of the little pocket of space.
When I finally got up, I found my balance after a moment, eventually brushing aside the blanket that served as a door and stepping out. Bryce and Sike were outside in the central area, organizing a stack of salvaged supplies the scrounging team must’ve found during their mission. Another welcome addition was the small fire burning at the side of the cave. Sike stared at me, thoughtfully.
“Feeling better?” Bryce asked, his tone gruff but not unkind. He continued stacking several cans of creamed mushroom soup on top of each other, then made a note on a scrap of paper.
“Yeah.” I passed the two of them to warm my hands over the flames.
He grunted and went back to work with Sike. The new vampires talked in hushed whispers in various groups scattered around the space. Dorian wasn’t among them. Bravi and Laini were missing too. Was Dorian getting his own lecture from his group?
Zach’s words rang in my ears: You could have died.
I joined Bryce and Sike with their organizing. They let me wedge myself between them without another word. We worked in silence. I was grateful for the quiet and half-mindless task. Anything to stop me thinking about my brother being left to this fight without me there to have his back.
* * *
For two days, I took the time to reflect on Zach’s talk with mixed feelings of guilt and gratitude, keeping my distance from Dorian. We passed in the central space on occasion, but we both avoided eye contact. The rest of my team and the vampires most certainly noticed the strained interactions between us, but no one said anything, much to my relief.
Our waking hours were mainly spent napping to heal from the intense events of the past few days, gathering wood for the fire we always kept burning in the main cave and collecting snow from further up the mountain to melt in scavenged pots from the resort kitchen. Meals for us four humans were basic: for breakfast, we had oatmeal with a sprinkle of sugar and a handful of peanuts from a box Bryce had found in the abandoned bar, and dinner was rice mixed with the contents of one of our stockpiled cans.
Gina and Bryce, working with a multitool Zach had been carrying in his gear bag the day we had to flee, some needles from the medical kit, a lighter, and a set of tweezers from Gina’s makeup bag, spent most of a day working to make our three remaining communicators untraceable by the Bureau. Opening up the earpiece and the mic one after the other, the two of them dug around inside—cutting, soldering, and reorganizing the wiring until they pulled out a microscopic tracer barely the size of a grain of rice.
“Once we get these closed back up,” Gina said, flicking the final tracking device into the fire, “we’ll be able to use them without alerting the Bureau.”
“Aye,” Bryce said, rubbing his eyes, weary from the intense focus of the last few hours. “We’ll not only be able to have them turned on, but we’ll be able to take them with us when we go out on scouting or foraging trips.”
“The Bureau won’t be able to hear us, will they?” Zach asked, frowning. “Aren’t the comms only useable through Bureau-monitored channels?”
“Bryce told me of an old one from back in his day that’s no longer used for official Bureau business,” Gina said, heating the tip of a needle with a lighter and using it to carefully solder a wire back into place. “But even on the off chance they scour all of their radio channels—defunct or current—and hear us, they can’t track where the signal is coming from.”
“We’ll just have to make sure we don’t ever say anything on the comms that could give away our location,” I said, slowly stirring the rice cooking in a pot that we’d taken from the resort kitchen.
Bryce hummed in agreement. “We can never be too careful, team.”
I sighed, a wave of exhaustion washing over me. No, we definitely couldn’t be too careful right now.
* * *
On the morning of the third day after my near-death experience, I sought out Dorian to talk to him about what had happened. After our last conversation, passing out on his redbill was not exactly the progress I’d hoped for.
After several minutes, I found him in a remote part of the caves. The warmth of the fire didn’t reach this far, so it was colder and mustier in this area. He was sitting on a heap of rugs that seemed to be serving as his bed, lost in thought. I kicked a pebble to announce my arrival. He looked up, his face flashing with guilt when he saw me standing there. I didn’t quite know why. It wasn’t as if he’d wanted me to pass out on his redbill.
“Hey.”
His gaze lowered to the rocky ground after my greeting. He knew exactly what I’d come to talk about. Was it spelled out on my face?
I cleared my throat in the silence. “I haven’t thanked you yet for, you know, stopping me from plummeting to my death. So… thank you.”
“I shouldn’t have teased you before,” he said after a moment. “We knew it was dangerous.”
I sucked in a steadying breath, remembering his joke from before the redbill flight. I didn’t want to talk about this, but we had to. “I’m sorry too,” I confessed. “I regret not telling you… I felt a slight pain before we got onto the bill. I was hoping it would go away.”
He looked down, picking at a stray thread on the top blanket, a knitted royal-blue spread peppered with holes that looked like they’d been made by nibbling mice. “It’s dangerous if we keep doing this. I managed to catch you this time. What if next time I don’t? Or you go into a coma way out here in the middle of nowhere? We don’t know what the long-term effects of this pain could be for you.”
“I know,” I said with a frustrated sigh. “It’s not like I tried to faint.”
“Well, taking a step back from these feelings and trying to stay friends is worth more of a shot than I gave it credit,” he admitted. “I’m willing to try it. If it can help you, I’ll try anything.”
His desire to help me brought a flush of warmth, and yet… I also felt a sting of disappointment.
“Let’s do it,” he said finally.
My chest ached at the thought of putting distance between us again. It was necessary, but it wouldn’t be easy. If only we could figure out how to stop the fainting and remove the risk of a coma.
“I just need to say that you’ve taught me a lot about myself since we met and you’re still important to me,” I said. “In my life. And for my wellbeing, aside from the passing out. If we could figure that part out—”
His dark chuckle broke through my words. “Yo
u’re important to me too,” he said slowly. “Important enough to try friendship when we both want something more than that.”
I wanted to hear him say how important I was. I wanted to ask more about his feelings. But in my mind’s eye, I saw Zach’s worried face again and remembered how afraid I had been when he was shot.
For now, just being friends with Dorian would have to be enough.
There wasn’t much left to say. I was afraid lingering any longer than necessary might be dangerous after my short recovery. Keep it friendly. Keep it quick.
“I’ll see you around, Dorian.” Without giving him the chance to reply, I ducked back under the blanket covering the entrance and went to see if Gina needed any help gathering snow for our water supply.
* * *
The following days passed in a blur of tired discussions about what to do and who would do what and when they were going to do it. Like the first time after my coma recovery and Dorian’s stonewalling me during the trial, I felt a dull ache replace the sharp pain that had been there before. Every day seemed to be filled with cold alongside the general feeling of dread about what would happen to us next. I wished desperately that vampires with fortune-telling abilities existed.
One of the first things we did was drag two of the old baths from the resort to the caves to serve as laundry tubs. We cleaned them and boiled water to wash our now-filthy uniforms and the vampires’ tattered clothing, all of us wrapping ourselves in a collection of winter coats and old waitstaff uniforms. Our few precious personal items, including the stone of Dorian’s I still carried, were tucked into the blankets of our beds for safekeeping.
It was best to do giant batches to conserve fuel. To the first tub, we added a splash of dish soap found forgotten in a supply closet. Bryce took great joy in using the broken handle of a broom to batter the laundry. He looked like a bizarre wizard stirring a magic pot, but his movements were powerful and steady. When the water wasn’t quite so boiling, Rhome, Gina, Bryce, and I scrubbed the clothes by hand.
Darklight 2: Darkthirst Page 7