Darklight 2: Darkthirst

by Forrest, Bella

  “That can’t be true,” I forced out politely. “It’s only painful when he is fully fed. And why isn’t it affecting anyone else?”

  Halla exhaled irritably. “Well, it is true. You’re too close to Dorian, obviously. It’s as certain as soul-cleansing is necessary. You can’t ignore universal truths, and they can’t be changed.” Her grave eyes held mine with little sympathy. “If Dorian continues to fall in love with you, you will die.”

  My head throbbed with a needling sensation of dread. I opened my mouth, unable to find anything to say. Was she expecting me to argue with her? I hadn’t come prepared for a theoretical debate about vampire folklore. If I tried to argue with her now, it wouldn’t lead us anywhere productive. “I’m sorry that Kane didn’t come back with you this time,” I eventually said, helpless to think of anything else reasonable to say.

  Halla’s expression cooled into one of stony calm. “Think about it.” She left without another word.

  Did I believe her?

  And if I trusted her theory…

  Could I stop loving Dorian?

  * * *

  “Yes!” Bryce cried happily into his borrowed cellphone.

  I glanced at him over my shoulder, trying not to appear suspicious. Zach, Gina, and I stood on the corner to keep watch over Bryce as he used an ATM. A Chinese restaurant on the corner smelled absolutely heavenly. There wasn’t much foot traffic, but a small child peered at us from a stoop in front of a corner store. A sign above his head advertised the best tarot readings in southern California.

  We had chosen a small town far from the hideout, and while Dorian led a series of scouting missions toward the tear, Bravi and Sike had flown our quartet of humans there directly after the meeting. If the Bureau managed to spot us here, they might assume our refuge was closer to the West Coast. It would draw them away from the Canyonlands and our actual hideout right under their noses. We hoped to evade detection entirely, though.

  I smiled smoothly at a nearby businesswoman crossing the street. She smiled awkwardly back but increased her pace. Guess my outfit of tattered clothes and unbrushed hair failed to inspire confidence.

  Bryce had managed to find a drifter, a real hippie who by some miracle, had a cell phone he didn’t mind lending. The drifter’s name was Freebird. He leaned peacefully against the wall and braided his long hair while he waited for Bryce to finish his call.

  “Thank you,” Bryce said into the phone. “I’ll pay you back for this.” He smiled at Freebird and passed the phone back. “A huge thanks to you.”

  “No problem, man,” Freebird said breezily. “Good luck to you and your tribe.” He wandered off without another word.

  I shook my head in disbelief. We were lucky Freebird showed no interest in asking questions.

  “I will always be nice to hippies from now on,” Bryce promised with a grin as we joined him by the ATM.

  “Hopefully, Sike and Bravi won’t sense secret evil inside him and tell us he was a serial killer,” Zach muttered wryly as he watched Freebird disappear around the block.

  Sike and Bravi had flown us to the town. They waited nearby in a forested area while we completed our mission. The plan was for Bryce, Zach, Gina, and me to use today for a scavenging expedition. Colin, Louise, and Roxy would go on the next trip. If we spread out our visits, it would keep the Bureau from detecting our movements. Or so I hoped.

  But first, we needed food and water, which meant we needed money.

  Luckily, Bryce seemed to have good news. He proudly brandished the forearm not wrapped in bandages, which held a long, crudely written number on it with a few other details. I squinted at it, puzzled.

  “It’s a credit card number. That was my sister. She agreed to give us some money,” Bryce said, seeing my furrowed brow.

  My cheeks warmed with embarrassment. It had been a while since I was in human society. “I thought your family lived in Scotland,” I said. “Will the card work here?”

  “Cards usually work internationally, but in any case, she’s got an American Express card she uses when she comes to visit. She’s giving us enough to get supplies,” he said with a grateful sigh of relief. “I’m too old to climb into a dumpster. Let’s get to work.”

  We truly needed a shower, but it wasn’t possible. I requested soap among the more pressing needs for food, water, and medical supplies. We still needed to keep Zach’s healing wound cleaned. My mouth watered for a decent homecooked meal or even a slice of pizza, but we needed to be practical with the funds. Nonperishable foods were better for our purposes.

  A few hours later, I sat on a park bench in a secluded area beside Zach and Gina. Zach opened his backpack, a plastic shopping bag sticking out as he dug into the supplies. The cashier had given us a judgmental look at the supermarket, but nobody had seemed too alarmed.

  I gnawed at my thumbnail, knowing our mission was about to be wrapped up with calls to our families. In light of Grayson’s death and the constant threat of capture hanging over our heads, Bryce had insisted on contacting families today. He sat across from us on a separate bench, pecking at the phone screen with his finger.

  “Chip?” Zach asked cheerfully as he presented an open bag of barbecue chips. The scent drew me in. I had already wolfed down three granola bars, but I grabbed a handful of chips. Gina bounced her knee nervously, where she sat between Zach and me.

  Bryce had purchased a burner phone from a small tech shop squeezed between a goth shoe boutique and a yoga studio. Now it was phone time. The other group would get to use it tomorrow, so everyone would get a chance to call their families. It could be the last time for a while. My skin prickled with unease at the thought, but it was a harsh reality.

  Bryce passed the phone to Gina. “Remember, short and sweet. No answers about where you are.”

  “I know,” Gina said. Her glum look said everything.

  Bryce had already quickly called his sister again on the burner phone to confirm that he had received the money and to talk to his nieces. They sounded like a handful.

  Gina dialed quickly. “Mom,” she breathed into the phone.

  I averted my gaze when I noticed Gina’s eyes glossing with tears. Her voice dropped to a whisper. Zach gently squeezed her knee reassuringly.

  I tried to block out Gina’s call, not wanting to intrude on her intimate moment, but I could hear muffled crying despite my best efforts.

  “I know,” Gina whispered, her voice shaking.

  Here we were, hiding from the Bureau, scrounging around with the barest of supplies. Our lives were in turmoil, and our loved ones were probably worried sick. Gina let out a soft sob, and I swallowed hard, my eyes burning. I looked up into the harsh white-blue sky to keep my sadness from engulfing me. Zach wrapped an arm around her.

  I couldn’t help but remember that when I’d tried to call my parents from the small mountain town during my journey with Dorian, they hadn’t answered. I had told Zach about my call, but he was sure it just meant they were out of the apartment. It didn’t help that I’d called from an unknown phone number in the mountains.

  “I love you too,” Gina said finally. She ended the call and sucked in a ragged breath. “That was harder than I thought it would be.” She passed the phone to Zach without another word and brushed her tears roughly from her cheeks, hiding her face in her hands. Zach placed a kiss on her forehead and squeezed with the arm he had around her shoulders. She nodded gently but ushered him to hurry with the phone call.

  “We haven’t heard from them in so long,” Zach said worriedly as he dialed our home phone number. I followed his movements, counting out the numbers in my head.

  He brought the phone up to his ear with a deep breath and a broad smile, his technique for forcing cheer into his tone. He was trying his best to set aside his emotions to be pleasant with our parents.

  The phone was too soft for me to hear the greeting, but I knew when the line clicked because Zach’s eyes lit with hope.

  The hope quickly crashed down.
r />   His expression turned furious. “What did you just say?” he asked, his voice rising with anger.

  Something bad was happening, and I couldn’t hear it. Gina and I shared a panicked look as Zach rose from the bench. His mouth twisted.

  “Are you trying to hold our parents hostage?”

  My body froze. Mom and Dad. It can’t be.

  Zach tore the phone from his ear and thrust it at me with a look of desperation. His hand twitched. He might have thrown the phone if I hadn’t grabbed it in time. I pressed it to my ear. Zach paced, breathing hard.

  “Hello?” I called.

  A heavy sigh sounded on the other line. Everything inside me sank. I knew that sigh.

  “Lyra, Lyra, Lyra,” Alan muttered. “I need you to be the reasonable one here, okay? Your brother won’t listen. He’s not thinking clearly.”

  “What have you done?” I growled.

  “You’re worried about your parents. Well, if you want to speak to them, you’ll have to come down to the Bureau,” he replied icily. “Your parents are safe… for now. I can’t guarantee how long that will last. It would pain me if something were to happen to them due to the foolish choices of their own children. It really would. Do you understand, Lyra?”

  I gripped the phone until my knuckles turned white. Somehow his cold cruelty and the fact that he would stoop this low to get us to come back still shocked me. I understood trying to take down my brother and me as dissenting soldiers, but my parents hadn’t done anything wrong. Further proof the Bureau was willing to take extreme, unethical measures just like they had with Roxy’s team.

  “That’s your family,” I fired back furiously. “You would hurt your own brother?”

  “Don’t ask me that,” Alan replied in a disappointed tone. “And I would make your decision quickly. As soldiers, you should have realized you would have to face the consequences of your actions.”

  The line went dead. I stared at the phone in horror. He had our parents.

  I forced my gaze to my brother’s terrified face. Would he hurt them? Torture them? Or keep them locked away where we could never find them?

  Alan had destroyed us with one phone call. All our careful planning was out the window. Adrenaline coursed through my veins, and rage poured over me in a burning wave. I could hardly breathe.

  I would never forgive him.

  “We need to move up our plan of attack,” I said, my voice flat and hard. “We need to make tomorrow’s board meeting. Director Sloane just threatened our parents.”

  Dorian had told Vonn there was no place in this struggle for war.

  But it felt like a war was coming, whether we wanted it or not.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “We’ll arrive in ten minutes,” Bravi said, confident but tense.

  I sat with her on the back of a redbill alongside Zach. Slicing through the sky just behind us, Gina, Bryce, and Sike rode the other redbill. The birds tore through the sky, faster than I had ever gone before. Bravi urged them on because she knew what was at stake. We had agreed to tell her and Sike the full story when we got back to the hideout with the others, only taking enough time to convey the bare details. Time was of the essence.

  Our goal for the supply-gathering mission—to travel far away from Canyonlands in order to protect our location from the Bureau—was now a hindrance we could have done without. It would take that much longer to get back to the cave system.

  “I can’t believe Alan would do this,” Zach shouted bitterly, pressed close against me to be heard over the howling wind.

  I hesitated and grabbed my brother’s hand, squeezing it. Piling onto our panic through speculation wouldn’t help the situation, but I could try to comfort him. My stomach twisted in knots at the possibility of our parents locked in some Bureau cell, remembering the callous treatment of my teammates. Would Alan go through with his threat to hurt them?

  “It’s not like you can sense evil,” Bravi called back to us both. “Humans don’t have the ability to sense darkness. You’re missing an entire sense. Your uncle had everyone fooled. Based on your stories, he sounds incredibly calculating, even before you knew the truth, and when it seemed like he was acting for your benefit and safety.”

  Her blunt observations almost made me let out a dark laugh. It wasn’t the warmest way of comforting us, but she had a point. As humans, we relied on gut intuition and experiences to make decisions. It wasn’t like Zach or I could have magically sensed our uncle’s intentions from the beginning. I felt grateful for the reminder, even as I knew we were both second-guessing ourselves. In the interrogation room, I had hesitated and refused to believe Dorian was reacting to darkness within my uncle. But now there was no denying it. A part of me was relieved that Zach and I would never have to fully understand how evil Alan was. If I could feel the depth of his darkness every time I was in his presence, like the vampires had to, I didn’t think I could stand it.

  Yet… he had always seemed prudent, strategic, and all-knowing to me, a man driven in his ambition by honor and a desire for positive change. I had wanted to believe there was a tidy explanation for his actions, one that left some shred of a chance for redemption, but it was entirely clear that this was not the case. Regardless of his motivations, however, Alan and the board were pursuing this path with a full understanding of the consequences of their actions. Their reasons, though no doubt clear to them, were not clear to me no matter how much I reflected on them. The vampires could be of great benefit to humanity. They could teach us about another plane of existence. We could work together to create a better world on both planes. Who knew what advances in science, philosophy, medicine, art, and more could occur if the Bureau would be the first to extend a hand in friendship? Why wouldn’t the Bureau want that? There had to be something I wasn’t seeing.

  I shivered, my skin crawling as the hairs on my arms crackled to attention. Above us, the tear’s violet lightning danced, visible to the naked eye for the first time in the sharp blue sky. This doorway to Dorian’s strange, beautiful home, and the start to my adventures with him, was like a slowly forming bruise that grew day by day. Without the tear, we wouldn’t have met, but it still felt as if it carried an ominous warning. Beneath the redbills, the desert landscape rushed by, and the static hum of the tear faded.

  “It seems almost too quiet,” I noted as the bills soared above the area. In the daylight, the Canyonlands appeared peaceful despite the Bureau’s barricade marring the natural landscape. The diameter of the barricade had increased since we left. Perhaps the Bureau had spotted more monsters coming in from the Immortal Plane. This seemed a likely cause of the tear’s increased visibility.

  Calculating the current size and the growth that had occurred in under forty-eight hours, I set a mental marker at a patch of rocks and twisted trees several miles west of the Bureau’s presence. If the barricade passed that point, which I would pass on to the scouting team, we would need to begin planning a move to a new hideout.

  The redbills dropped down toward our lair, effortlessly navigating the network of canyons. I held on tightly, leaning against Zach. His back felt stiff with anger and fear.

  “We’ll figure it out,” I said to him.

  He nodded numbly, patting my hand. We couldn’t give up hope. That was what Alan wanted. He wanted us to panic and fly to the rescue without thinking.

  Dorian could rally a group of vampires to go with us to the HQ building. Bryce and I could go over the layout on the way over, forming a plan of attack. With both the redbills and the vampires, we had a better chance of finding my parents and freeing them.

  Bravi held up a hand, her whole body tensing like a dog hearing a distressing sound in the far distance, and the redbills stopped, hovering in place. “Something isn’t right.”

  “What?” I asked, scanning the sky around us and the ground below. We were close to the caves now, and nothing seemed out of place from our vantage point. However, I knew that despite my keen eyes, the vampires could sense far
more than I ever could without technological help.

  “I can’t sense our flock of redbills anywhere close by,” she said. Her worried gaze found Sike, and he nodded with a frown as if he had noticed the same thing. Silent as drifting feathers, the redbills descended and landed gently on the sand. Every nerve inside of me thrummed on high alert.

  “Has the tear scrambled their… auras?” I asked, keeping my voice low and using the term Dorian had used for the supernatural frequencies.

  Bravi shook her head. “It’s more difficult than normal, but I know them well. I can’t find them.”

  Does that mean they’re gone?

  I slid off the redbill, followed by Zach. Gina and Bryce stalked closer, and the four of us spread out, keeping our steps silent. Sike and Bravi flanked us, one on either side, and we all moved forward together. Had the Bureau come across our hideout? I couldn’t think of any other reason Dorian would have left. I rushed forward as quietly as possible, slowing down as the entrance came into view, inching toward the opening.

  Please let them be here.

  I froze as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.

  The cavern was empty. My jaw tightened, and I signaled for Gina and Zach to close in behind me. Dorian wouldn’t disappear without a trace. Even if he did have to run, leaving Sike and Bravi behind with no word was unthinkable. Still, a niggling worry followed me as the six of us crept deeper into the cool gloom of the caves. My heart slammed against my chest with the painful memory of the time during the trial. He had taken action without telling me when he and the other vampires had iced me out at the facility.

  Zach gestured toward the back of the cave, motioning for us to follow. He placed his finger against his lips.

  “Did Dorian tell you about them leaving for something?” I whispered to Bravi, close enough to keep our voices down. She could no doubt see the desperation written across my face.