Darklight 2: Darkthirst

by Forrest, Bella

“We don’t creep. We stealthily move through the darkness,” Dorian countered. “Besides, cloaks are versatile. They keep you safe from the elements on long journeys.”

  I wrinkled my nose at a particularly bright pink hat with a garish snowflake embroidered on it. “Maybe you’re right about human fashion.”

  “Told you.” Dorian chuckled.

  I paused, relishing the sound. It was nice to talk about nothing in the midst of the chaos.

  I grew tired as we finished the laundry. Dorian spotted the yawn I tried to stifle.

  “It’s time to get to bed soon,” Dorian said. He smiled softly. His eyes suggested he wanted to stay, but he stood instead. I hovered beside the pile of folded laundry, unsure what to say.

  “We can talk about our plans tomorrow,” I managed. How does one end a talk after discussing vague attraction toward one another, in the middle of a fight for survival, followed by laundry?

  “I enjoyed talking to you last night,” Dorian said, catching me off guard. “It was nice to be next to someone when I woke up.”

  His words rang in my ears as I tried to work through their meaning. Next to someone? But I’d woken up in the tunnel. My mouth opened in shock. It hadn’t been a dream. Dorian gave me an impish smile and walked out the doorway. I blushed hard as I watched him go.

  It’s not fair to drop a bombshell like that and walk off.

  I had been cuddling with Dorian. I pressed a hand against my burning cheeks, wishing I’d thought of a good comeback in time.

  Chapter Twenty

  The next morning, activity was in full swing in the main cavern. I slept well despite the chaotic recent events. Occasionally, I blushed when thinking of Dorian’s revelation about our night together.

  Nobody notice my face. Nobody notice my face. I mentally chanted it to myself as I joined in on the daily activities. Around our little group, it seemed like there was no opportunity to keep secrets about our personal lives.

  “Are you ready?” Bravi called out. She stood next to the entrance tunnel, tapping her foot impatiently. The scouts were going out again to check the progress of the tear between the Immortal Plane and our plane. Their other duty was to keep searching for Rhome’s family on both sides of the tear, in case they returned from the Immortal Plane or ventured near the tear on the other side.

  Vonn and Rhome lingered near the center of the room. I smelled a fight brewing as I walked into the area.

  “Watch your mouth.” Rhome glowered at Vonn, who had evidently said something Rhome didn’t like. What a surprise. Why did we keep this guy around again? It felt like the universe had sent us a poor replacement for Halla.

  “We have to keep looking,” Rhome insisted. His voice was tight, desperate. My heart hurt for him. Kreya and his children hadn’t been spotted since their abrupt departure from the Canyonlands, nor had any of the other vampires who’d left for the Immortal Plane.

  Vonn cast an unsympathetic look toward Rhome. “They’re probably far within the Immortal Plane by now,” he said. “You won’t be able to find them.”

  What a ray of hopeful sunshine.

  “Watch your tongue, Vonn! You don’t know that,” Bravi said fiercely.

  I guessed she was still hostile from what had happened yesterday. Understandable.

  “I’m being realistic,” Vonn insisted, not giving an inch.

  Bravi stared at him as if she wouldn’t mind showing him who was boss again, and he relented slightly. I knew she could do it if she needed to.

  I pulled myself away from their heated conversation. It wasn’t my place to step in, and as much as I wanted to comfort Rhome, I couldn’t lie to him. To be honest, Vonn might be right, even if it hurt to think so. Rhome’s family could be deep within the Immortal Plane or dead for all we knew. Though I deeply hoped we would have good news about Kreya and the children soon. I thought of Detra and Carwin sprawled on the ground in their cell at the trial site, their stuffed animals spread out around them. I smiled to myself, remembering their tiny grins. They’d even asked me if Dorian and I had been on a date. Precocious kids who’d been too young to understand the separation between humans and vampires. I hoped their fierce mother was able to protect them until the group could find them and convince them to stay with us again. I hadn’t intended to, but I’d gotten attached to the little ones.

  I spotted Gina by the supplies. She pulled on another layer of clothing, the fluffy parka Bryce had managed to find in the resort.

  “Are you going on your scouting mission?” I asked.

  She nodded, the dark circles under her eyes murkier than usual. She and Bryce had decided to scout the perimeter of the hideout for any signs of Bureau soldiers today, in case they managed to track us thanks to Vonn’s bite-happy behavior.

  My throat tightened with worry. The Bureau could be using any number of ways to triangulate our location. They had the capability to track our flock of redbills from Jim’s house if they had any idea it was relevant, and Vonn’s attack could easily have put that spot on their radar. There was no telling what intel the Bureau had, but it was best to err on the side of caution. Better to be two steps ahead.

  “Louise and Colin will scout later today,” Gina replied. She subtly gestured toward the couch, wearing a little smirk, as if to say, Meanwhile...

  Louise sat beside Sike, the two of them chatting like old friends. It seemed watching a vampire feed hadn’t, in the end, put Louise permanently off the species. She seemed to brighten around Sike. At first, they had seemed standoffish, but it appeared that feeling had passed.

  The glassy, faraway look in Louise’s eyes had faded with each day that passed since we’d rescued her from the Bureau’s cells. I’d talked to her tentatively about what she’d experienced, but it had been clear she didn’t want to live through it again and equally clear she wanted to move on. I studied her closely as she tucked a strand of strawberry-blonde hair behind her ear. She already looked ninety percent of the way back to her usual bright, inquisitive self. Her balance and hearing hadn’t been an issue for days. It was a relief to know my teammate and friend hadn’t been damaged beyond repair when our own turned on her.

  She wasn’t alone in her recovery. As I surveyed our hideout, I could see Colin and Grayson beside Bryce, discussing the rationing of supplies. Grayson’s bruises had nearly faded, and his leg seemed to be doing better. The scrapes on Colin’s face were completely healed. The team was recuperating, little by little. It meant we had a better chance against the Bureau. A better chance to survive this and somehow end up able to go back to some semblance of ordinary lives. A tiny victory is still a victory.

  * * *

  A while later, when I was lost in the process of stretching out my cramped and aching body, a hand clapped down on my shoulder. I untwisted myself from the position to see Zach grinning at me.

  “Guess who has laundry duty today, sis?” he asked in a voice far too chipper for my liking. Had his wound gotten infected and caused a delirious fever again?

  “Us?” I ventured with a groan. I hadn’t had a chance to check our makeshift chore chart this morning. My brother nodded gravely, as though pronouncing a sentence of death. It wasn’t far off.

  Laundry duty was objectively the worst task to be assigned, but everyone had to do it. We rotated duties. The sheer number of bodies in the cave meant laundry had to be done often.

  I reluctantly followed Zach, who was only limping slightly now. Roxy shot me a smirk. She knew in the act of cleaning clothes, the washers got dirtier.

  Our current system was rudimentary, but it was an improvement over handwashing clothes in the jacuzzi tubs. We had taken a broken metal drum from the resort and brought it into the main cavern. The vampires had shoved the drum against the side of the wall nearest to a ventilation system. Working alongside the vampires, Bryce had helped dig a pit to form a depression in the floor.

  We filled the pit with coals, allowing us to heat the drum containing snow the redbills brought periodically from the high mounta
in peaks. The top of the mountain showed no signs of melting anytime soon. The snow the bills brought was packed from months of snowfall, but it worked for our purposes.

  I helped Zach haul a pile of laundry toward the drum. Bryce had lit the coals sometime this morning, as it always took a good hour for the water to boil. Armed with sticks, we shoved the clothes inside the makeshift washer. There was no soap left, but it was better than nothing.

  “How’s the heat?” Bryce asked, loping over and stoking the coals with a poker.

  “Plenty hot,” I replied.

  “Always a delight,” Zach said as he shoved the last scraps inside the barrel. The water bubbled, swallowing the dirty clothes. Their filth darkened the water immediately. We pushed our mismatched, torn clothing from side to side and mashed the garments around in the barrel with our sticks.

  My arm complained as I stirred, but I ignored it. Everyone was tired, and laundry still needed to be done. I much preferred folding it, especially when accompanied by late-night conversations with Dorian. I wished our chat had lasted longer.

  We may be able to control my pain if it really is caused by his feeding. The prospect sent a rush of energy through me. I stirred faster, feeling motivated. Sure, now wasn’t the time, but maybe once we’d sorted all this out…

  “Running around naked is looking like a promising option,” Zach remarked sourly as he stirred his stick around in the boiling mess.

  I snorted. “Only if you want frostbite. I much prefer to stink rather than freeze my bits off in these tunnels.”

  “Agree to disagree,” he muttered. “Hey, remember when I tried to use the washer for the first time when Mom and Dad went on that cruise?”

  “How could I forget?” I asked, smirking. “You used dish soap instead of laundry detergent and made a giant mess. The maintenance team was livid with you.”

  “Almost as livid as Mom,” he said with a shiver, recalling her fury. “She was not happy.”

  Nobody would be happy to find their son had sent a virtual tsunami of dish soap bubbles into the kitchen and hallways of our apartment.

  The fond tones in which he discussed the memory hid an element of bitter-sweetness that felt familiar to me. I miss being at home with our family. Will we be able to do that again soon? I swallowed as the silence gathered after we finished reminiscing. I hated to acknowledge that we had more pressing matters to discuss… but Zach and I hadn’t ended on the best terms with our conversation last night.

  “I know we had a difficult discussion,” I said slowly. “We should probably talk about it more.”

  Bryce hovered nearby. He and Gina looked prepared to head out any moment for their scouting mission. He eyed me carefully. Did he think it was best to press Zach about this now?

  Zach sighed and nodded. A sense of relief filled me. Good, we can talk.

  “You’re right. I just feel like we’re being too quick to decide to attack the Bureau—”

  “Lyra?” A voice rang out in the cavern.

  I froze over the steaming pot of clothes. My panicked eyes found Zach’s. I must have hallucinated because for a moment I’d thought my mother’s voice had called out to me. I briefly wondered whether this metal barrel might be full of toxic chemicals with hallucinogenic properties.

  But my brother was frozen in shock, too. His eyes darted around the cavern.

  “Zach!”

  My father’s voice.

  That wasn’t a hallucination. Bryce’s head swung toward the sound. The crackle after the second cry was unmistakable.

  “That’s a comm,” Bryce whispered. “They’re calling on a comm!”

  Zach and I dropped our sticks beside the laundry pot. I sprinted over to the supply area, hoping the comm would come alive again. We’d left it switched on to allow the scouting party to report back if necessary, but this was coming from a completely different channel. Judging by the code, it was one of the emergency channels that could be accessed nationally if necessary.

  “Lyra, are you there?” My father’s voice echoed.

  I snatched up the comm, my heart beating a mile a minute. My instinct was to answer, but I stopped when I realized everyone was staring at me.

  Zach and Bryce stood beside me. An audience had gathered. Dorian, Sike, Arlonne, Roxy, Laini, the twins, and some of the other vampires crowded around us in a circle. The weight of their stares burned into my skin. The comm felt like fire in my hands.

  My parents. I hadn’t seen them since my recovery from my coma during the trial. A wave of sadness I hadn’t realized I’d been carrying swept over me. I missed them terribly. Hearing their voices brought home how strange this situation was.

  I stared hard at Bryce. He gave a nod of approval. Let’s see what happens…

  “Dad?” I asked into the comm, hoping the connection would work the other way. These comms had been through some rough times.

  “Lyra!” He gasped with relief. “Is your brother there?”

  “Yes,” I replied slowly, wondering whether he was alone with just my mother. Was Alan beside him? “He’s safe.”

  “Lyra, we pulled a huge favor with someone in the Bureau to be allowed to call on this channel,” my mother informed us. The line crackled. “They didn’t want us to contact you.”

  The word someone did nothing to erase my vision of my uncle hovering at her shoulder, but maybe I was just being paranoid.

  “Yes, they’ve been incredibly strict.” My father’s voice shook slightly. “We’re terrified for our family. We want you guys home.” His desperate tone pained me almost physically.

  “What are they doing, exactly?” I asked cautiously, fearing what they might—and what they might not—tell me.

  “They’ve doubled down on the vampire situation. They removed any board members sympathetic to vampires, including one of the captains you were working with at the facility in Arizona. Fenton, I think his name is? Something about an effort to be more cohesive with the board’s primary mission,” my mother replied. “They want to present a united front against the real foe.”

  I swallowed hard, knowing what they were about to say.

  “They’re dangerous,” my father said, “and manipulating you and your friends, Lyra.”

  I gripped the comm with white knuckles. My parents thought we were being manipulated too? “Did Alan tell you that?”

  “Yes,” my father said easily. Not a trace of hesitation. “He’s so worried for you. He and the board explained everything to us. He told us the truth about the tear.”

  “The truth?” I asked, a sinking feeling in my stomach. What bitter irony. My parents thought I was the one living in a lie while Alan was feeding them his story about the vampires plotting the tear in the Immortal Plane themselves as a grand strategy to feed freely on people in the human world.

  My father sighed. “We know the vampires have been planning this for a long time. The tear, the feeding. Lyra, I know you’re going through a lot. We’ll figure this out. We just want things to end peacefully. None of this has to continue.”

  I stood, my feet feeling rooted to the spot. Nothing moved, yet I felt like the world was shifting around me, and for a moment, it was dizzying. I understood from my parents’ desperate pleading that Alan had conveniently not disclosed the plans for gas chambers and mass vampire extinction. They truly thought the vampires had us wrapped around their little fingers.

  “Do you know what the board has been planning?” I asked. “Do you know what happened to my teammates when the board, including Uncle Alan, decided they couldn’t be trusted, despite the fact that several of them had done nothing to earn suspicion?”

  “Lyra, what are you talking about?” My mother’s voice came through the crackling comm in splinters. “What’s are you saying Alan has done?”

  “Search the records,” I said, suddenly desperate. “Search the archives. Look for blueprints of the housing that was being designed for the vampires. Except it wasn’t meant to be housing. It was meant to be a death trap.”


  “Is that what the vampires have been telling you?” my father asked, his anger clear. “Have they been feeding you this… this twisted version of events?”

  I tried to say more, but the words stuck in my throat. Though I hated the thought, I couldn’t dismiss the worry that somebody else might be using this call to get information out of Zach and me.

  But that went both ways. My father might be able to give me some information. His job in defense technology meant he might know something about the strange weapons from the other day.

  “Tell me something, Dad,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking, not letting the anger and sadness overflow. “Did you know about a weapons project that involved the use of dark energy or dark frequencies? It was a gun that shot green lasers. The Bureau used it against us.”

  A tense pause followed, and my hopes went down.

  “I did work on a project like that, yes,” my father confessed. Hearing his voice over the crackling line somehow made his confession worse.

  Dorian’s body tensed. I hoped the vampires gathered wouldn’t jump to conclusions about my family or me.

  Please, Dad. Tell me something good.

  He continued, “I was involved in all our technology projects. But you have to be mistaken. That project was scrapped years ago. It was never even fully developed.”

  “They used it against Dorian,” I fired back, unable to control my frustration. I was so tired of people insisting I was wrong about things I’d seen with my own eyes. “It put him in an incredible amount of pain.”

  My father paused. “Lyra, they must’ve had their reasons for using it against him. There can be no question that vampires are dangerous. Remember your history? This is the whole reason the Bureau was formed. Alan and the board have reason to believe the vampires are manipulating you two and your team.

  “They’re not what they seem, Lyra,” my mother added. “I know it can be difficult, but sometimes… you have to accept the experiences of people who have been around the block a few more times than you.”