Daysider

Chapter 17

Alexia went very still. She had known the time would come when the subject of his

“spells” would arise, even if she had to introduce it herself. But now that it was here, she wanted to tuck the entire matter away into some forgotten corner where it could never disturb either of them again.

“You fell, Damon,” she said. “You were sick. Even Theron recognized your condition.”

“No,” he said, setting his jaw. “You asked why I didn’t tell you what was happening before. That was because I couldn’t acknowledge it. The Hunger should not have come so soon. Something caused this to happen, something unnatural for my kind.”

Oh, God, Alexia thought. She reached out to take the hand he had clenched in the sheets and opened his fingers, lacing hers through them. “Tell me,” she said.

“I have felt this before,” he said. “Not this level of Hunger, not so quickly. No. But the savagery...the rage...” He met her gaze. “What did I look like when I left Theron’s house, Alexia? A monster?”

“Is that what you felt like?” she whispered, beginning to shiver.

“I don’t know.” He disengaged his fingers from hers. “Answer me, Alexia.”

“You never looked different,” she said, careful not to glance away.

“But I was different,” he said. “Wasn’t I?”

She couldn’t answer the pain in his eyes. They went distant with some ugly memory.

“Until I nearly killed Lysander,” he said, “I didn’t realize that there was a pattern. But the first time I felt it was in Erebus. The first time I fought him.”

“The first—” Alexia couldn’t forget a single brutal moment of the battle in which he and Lysander had almost killed each other. She had known then that there had been something very bitter between them. Lysander had compared her to Eirene. “Spirited,” he’d said. As if he had known the Darketan woman. Very well.

“You fought over Eirene,” she said, trying to keep her feelings from her voice. “You both wanted her.”

She expected Damon to bolt from the cot and begin striding around the small room, agitation translating into frantic motion. But he remained where he was, blank-faced and emotionless.

“After the Master of Agents discovered my relationship with Eirene and separated us,” he said, “Lysander tried to claim her. No Opir had ever attempted to claim a Darketan before, but he convinced the Master to give her to him rather than sending her away. She was forced to go with him.”

Alexia imagined the scene, the depravity of it, the pain and fear. Darketans had a kind of freedom—freedom from service to anyone but the Council and the Citadel. Eirene had had that taken from her after being forcibly parted from the man she had—

Loved. As Damon had loved her.

“I was kept confined for a week,” Damon continued. “When I was released, I obtained permission to enter the Citadel proper. I was planning to break in on Lysander in his quarters, but I found him on the Grand Concourse instead, parading Eirene around and showing her off to the other Opiri as if she were a valuable serf.”

“But she was, wasn’t she?” Alexia said, longing to reach out to him. “And you couldn’t bear it.”

“No. I attacked him on the Concourse. I remembered almost nothing except sinking my teeth into his neck. And rage. Boundless rage.”

The kind, Alexia thought, that would make him equal in strength to a full-blooded Nightsider.

“When I woke, I was in a cell,” Damon said. “I was told Eirene was being sent on a solo mission, and that it would be highly dangerous. I was also told that in spite of my actions, I was too valuable to Erebus to be expelled from the Citadel.”

“Expelled?” Alexia said, momentarily distracted from the tragedy of his story.

“Criminal acts by those of rank, Bloodmasters and the most powerful Bloodlords, are seldom punished by execution. Doing so would instigate more problems than the criminals themselves. That is why most who break the law are sent outside the walls.”

“To die in the sun, or of starvation?” she asked.

“Yes. Or to be changed.”

She didn’t know what he was talking about. “Changed?”

“As those humans selected to become vassals are changed. Only our criminals are not as fortunate as humans. They become something both our peoples fear and despise.”

All at once Alexia understood. He was talking about Orloks. Aegis had speculated that the creatures were in some way like Nightsiders, capable of converting humans into blood-drinkers like themselves.

But now Damon was saying they were Nightsiders. And Michael had become one of them.

“But how?” she asked, tears thickening her voice. “We never saw these creatures before the Armistice. How did the first ones come to be?”

“Mutations,” Damon said. “Grotesque reflections of Opiri. Like Darketans.”

“Not like Darketans. You can’t possibly think you’re anything like an Orlok.”

But he had asked her what he’d looked like when he had left Theron’s house. As if he’d almost expected...

She couldn’t complete the thought. “You aren’t a monster,” she said.

“They are mindless creatures who attack both humans and Opiri indiscriminately,” Damon said, as if he hadn’t heard her. “But recently it had been reported that most Lamiae had left the region. That was why when the thing attacked Michael and me, I—” He drew in a deep breath and released it slowly. “I wasn’t prepared.”

And Michael had never guessed what might happen to him. But he’d spoken to her, after. Warned her. He hadn’t been mindless at all.

“If you had been expelled,” she asked dully, “would the change have happened to you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “No Darketan has ever faced that particular punishment. But I asked for it, after Eirene left Erebus. I begged them to throw me into a pack of Lamiae.

Either the creatures would kill me, or I wouldn’t care any longer.”

Care. The one thing Darketans were not supposed to do. Damon’s punishment had been worse than any death or transformation.

He hadn’t been sent out to become an Orlok, but the savagery he claimed they possessed was part of him, too. If she hadn’t seen that shadow inside him before he and Michael had been attacked, she might have had reason to believe that he had also been affected by his contact with the Orlok.

But he had said he’d felt it in Erebus. It had already been there when she and Michael had met him.

She became aware that he was staring at her, his gaze fixed on her face with a kind of obsessive dread.

“You have seen it before, haven’t you?” he asked. “This is not the first time.” He edged farther away, ready to swing his legs over the side of the bed. “Was it when I fought Lysander?”

Lying, even evading his questions, was no longer possible. “Yes,” she said, holding his gaze. “It happened then, and once before.”

“When?”

“When you first swore you wouldn’t let me die. When you made me swear to stay alive.”

He closed his eyes. “Did I threaten you?”

“No! No. Nothing like that. Damon—” She reached across the cot for his hand. He jerked away, but she managed to grab hold again. His muscles twitched under her fingers. “Damon, whatever this is, you’re not alone. If we can be rational about this—”

“I knew where you were concerned I wasn’t rational,” Damon said. “I wanted you from the start, and I knew...if I gave in to those impulses, I would be no different than an Opir with his serfs.”

“You’re not a Nightsider, and I’m not a serf. I was never helpless, Damon. And I wanted you from the beginning, too. I just refused to let myself believe it.”

“Your feelings have nothing to do with it,” he said harshly. He opened his eyes, and she saw despair so great she couldn’t begin to touch it. “It is my feelings.”

Fast as a striking cobra, Damon seized her shoulders in his hands and dragged her toward him, lifting her until her face was level with his. “Emotions,” he said. “The trainers have always forbidden them, from the earliest part of our lives. We are little more than children when we come to the Master of Agents.”

“Children?” Alexia repeated in astonishment. “But you said you’re mutations!

Nightsiders don’t convert children!”

“So they say. None of us remembers what came before, except one thing. We are not to shame ourselves with emotion.”

Tears spilled from Alexia’s eyes. “Because Nightsiders don’t understand it. They have no real feelings.”

“And whatever mutates Darketans, makes us what we are, gives us too many. Every day of our lives we are reminded that we are like humans, inferior, driven by primitive sentiments that have no value in the Opir world. They must be beaten out of us before we are worthy to serve.” His gaze revealed his inner torment. “They should have been beaten out of me, as they are out of most Darketans. But Eirene—” He broke off, and Alexia was grateful. Because she was remembering how difficult it had been for Damon to admit he “cared” for her, how much he had fought against it. Not only because of what had happened with Eirene, but because he had been raised from childhood to despise emotion as weakness. He had been abused, both emotionally and physically. He had been made to believe what his masters wanted was the only thing that gave him worth.

Irrational impulses. Lysander had taunted him about them, said that he had been sent to join the Enclave agents because of them. And she still didn’t know why.

Anger pushed aside Alexia’s anguish for Damon. “They didn’t beat it out of you,” she said. “You beat them. You were never just a pawn, Damon.”

His mouth contorted in a bitter smile. “Humans believe in souls, do they not? I would have sold mine to destroy that part of myself that was never anything but a slave to these feelings.”

“No.” She took his face in her hands and forced him to look at her. “Do you believe humans are inferior, Damon? That we are weak for daring to feel for each other, for caring about justice and equality and freedom?”

“No,” he said, his breath hitching as he let it out. “I no longer believe that. If I hated the Enclave—” He covered her hands with his own. “In this place I’ve seen another way.

A good way.”

“If you’ve recognized that after only a few hours, some part of you must always have believed the Nightsiders were wrong about humans all along. And that meant they were wrong about you. ”

His hands slid down her arms and dropped to the cot. “They weren’t wrong, Alexia. I know now that every time I care, I change. I cared too much for Eirene, so I attacked Lysander. I care for you—” He stared into some hell of his own creation. “These emotions are the triggers that turn me into a monster.”

“Because your mind was twisted,” Alexia said. “You were abused as a child and an adult. It probably isn’t any coincidence that you don’t remember the time before you went into training.” She squeezed her hands together in her lap to keep from touching him again. “I’m no shrink, but even I can see that the psychological trauma you suffered in denying your feelings could push you to extremes your conscious mind would never permit.”

“Others endured the same,” he said, “and did not change.”

“How do you know? Have you spoken to every other Darketan in Erebus?” She leaned toward him, praying he was listening. “You can be helped, Damon. Not in Erebus. Not by Nightsiders, but by people who understand—”

“When it happens,” Damon said, looking through her, “I can’t control it. What if I had killed your partner, Alexia? I wanted to do it more than once. You make excuses for me, but it doesn’t change what I could do if it happens again.”

Even as he spoke, Alexia knew she was losing him. Losing him to despair, to resignation, to death. Because he cared, he would do anything to keep her, or any other innocent, from suffering what his rage might unleash.

“I know what you’d like to do,” she said with quiet intensity. “You’d like to hole up somewhere out there where you’ll either let yourself starve or become an Orlok. Well, forget it. I won’t let you.”

He focused on her again and brushed a tear from her cheek with his thumb. “If emotion is what awakens this thing inside me, then I must be away from anything that provokes it.” He lifted his thumb to his mouth and tasted her tear. “From any one. You must see that, Alexia.”

“I see that you’re giving up without any real understanding of what this thing is and how to fight it.” She heard her voice begin to rise in desperation. “You said Theron was a Bloodmaster. Maybe he’s heard of this condition, or even seen it. You don’t know it can’t be cured. How can you make any decision without more information?”

For one precious moment there was a flash of uncertainty in his eyes. The shadow of hope.

“Perhaps,” he murmured.

“I won’t lose you, Damon. I lost Michael to something I didn’t understand, and I won’t let it happen again.”

“Michael—” Damon began.

“Michael wasn’t...killed,” she said slowly. “He was changed. Into an Orlok.”

She expected to see shock on Damon’s face, but he hardly reacted at all. “I know,” he said. “And I know you were keeping this from me, and that I should wait until you felt safe enough to tell me.”

More deception all around, Alexia thought grimly. “He was trying to protect us,” she said. “And he...he communicated with me, Damon.” She touched her temple. “Here. In my mind.”

Like a child playing Simon Says, Damon touched his own forehead. “Yes,” he said. “I heard him, as well. ‘Protect,’ he said. ‘Save.’”

“Then he didn’t become a monster when he changed. He retained at least some of his intelligence, his loyalty. He tried to warn me. He said that someone was coming, and right after that the double agent showed up. He said something about an attack, and war.

Somehow he must have known what the Expansionists had planned for the colony.”

“How?” Damon asked, riveted by her words.

“I don’t know. Between the time you last saw his body and he came to me as an Orlok, anything could have happened. If Lysander was the Opir he followed, he could have overheard Lysander conspiring to attack the colony.”

Damon looked away. “Alexia,” he said heavily, “I didn’t plan to burden you with this, since he can no longer do any harm. But I believe Michael had some part in stealing your patch.”

Alexia stood up so suddenly that she shoved the cot, Damon still on it, seven or eight centimeters across the floor. “What did you say?” she asked, her heart freezing in her chest.

“I didn’t want to share my suspicions,” he said, “because I had no proof. But now it seems evident to me that Theron does not have the patch. He would have no use for it here. It appears more and more likely that Expansionist operatives took it.”

“What the hell does that have to do with Michael?”

“Someone from Aegis must have told the operatives what to look for. There were many aspects of your partner’s behavior when he learned your patch was gone that seemed strange to me, and—”

“Strange?” she echoed. “To you, who have admitted that you can’t control or understand your own emotions?” She heard the cruelty of her words but was too furious to stop. “I know you never liked him, but to accuse him now, when he has no way to defend himself...”

The cot creaked as Damon got up. “I should not have told you.”

“Setting aside the fact that he would have no motive, how do you think he managed to do it?”

“I have no theory as to his motive,” Damon said softly, moving to the small window.

“Oh, that’s just wonderful.” She glared at him, wondering how any person could go from love to hate, from sympathy to antagonism so quickly. “Do you have any idea what he sacrificed to be an agent? How loyal he was...how dedicated to his work?”

“I know he was your friend, Alexia.”

“And you expect me to think you’re—” She stopped, arrested by a thought that no longer seemed so ridiculous. “Are you jealous, Damon? Jealous of how I felt about Michael and he felt about me?”

He turned to look at her. “I have no reason to be jealous of a man who—” He broke off and looked away again. “You said you were not lovers.”

“No. But if you think that gives you the right to dishonor his memory...”

He’s not dead, she reminded herself. “You’re calling him a traitor, not only to Aegis, but to me. No dhampir would ever go over to the enemy. It’s never been done in the whole history of the Enclaves.” She strode across the room to confront him. “How can you possibly justify such a bizarre claim? A feeling? ”

He didn’t answer, and Alexia was left to pace from one wall to the other and back again, too enraged to think.

Except to remember, again, what Michael had said after he’d changed.

Coming. Signal. Attack. Warn. War.

Automatically Alexia reached for the communicator, but she had left it in the room Emma had assigned her in the east dormitory. Suddenly it seemed necessary—no, imperative—that she look at it again, study it carefully as she should have done when Michael had given it to her.

Without a word to Damon, she grabbed her pants, pulled them on and rushed out the door. The colony was still quiet, but dawn was breaking and all the lanterns, widely scattered across the commons, had been put out. She found the device where she had left it on the neatly made-up cot, along with her belt and her cleaned boots. Nothing else of her clothing had been worth saving. She snatched up the communicator and held it in her trembling hand.

As before, it appeared featureless with its beetle-black shell. But after a minute of careful examination, she found the nearly invisible recessed button at one end. She pressed on it, and a touch screen lit up, marked with only two symbols. One was the emblem for Aegis: the famous da Vinci Vitruvian Man with arms outstretched within a circle and square superimposed over the figure’s legs. The other was a red square.

It was flashing.

Alexia’s fingers almost lost their grip on the device before she could touch the square.

Immediately the flashing stopped, and a blue screen took the place of the two symbols, a field covered with small print spelling out terse sentences Alexia took in at a glance.

Message received re: colony. Strike force deployed. Maintain position. Report only in emergency. Do not intervene.

As soon as she had finished reading, the screen went blank. Even the symbols disappeared.

Alexia dropped the communicator on the cot. Strike force. From Aegis. They were deployed only in the rare case of a situation where more than the usual agent pairs were required for an assignment, where stealth and speed and force were all equally vital. Its operatives were heavily armed and trained to go in quickly, complete their missions and get out without regard to the Armistice or the rules of the Zone. In case of casualties, no bodies would be left behind, nor any other evidence that they had ever been in the Zone at all.

Using them meant that Aegis was willing to risk a complete breaking of the Armistice.

Coming. Signal. Attack. Warn. War.

Someone had sent a message calling in the strike force. Had it been Michael? Was that the signal he was talking about? What had he told them that would cause Aegis to act so precipitously? Even if he had learned the Expansionists’ plans for the colony, how could that be a good enough reason for Aegis to bypass all diplomatic channels?

And why hadn’t Michael told her?

He did, she thought. Just not soon enough.

Frantically she grabbed for the communicator again and punched on the button.

Nothing happened. As far as she could tell, the device was dead. “Alexia?”

Damon stood in the doorway, dressed in the same tunic and pants she wore but cut in a masculine style. She saw her terror reflected in his eyes.

“You were right, Damon,” she said, her voice shaking. “Michael was keeping secrets. I don’t know why he didn’t tell me, but he sent a signal to Aegis requesting a strike force, and they’re on their way. Do you know what that means?”

He knew. His concern hardened to a mask of grim resolve.

“War,” he said.