Daysider

Chapter 6

“You—” Damon growled, panting between each word he forced out of his throat.

“You—will—not—die.”

A brown leaf shook free from one of the oak’s down-curving branches, brushing against the coarse bark and drifting to lie among the handfuls that had fallen before it.

Michael stood just out of sight behind the tree, utterly unaware of the danger.

Danger Alexia didn’t know how to define. Or fight. All she knew was that Damon wanted her alive, and that might be the only way to reach through his madness.

“If it matters so much to you,” she said calmly, hoping he could still understand her, “I promise I’ll stay alive as long as it takes. If you make sure Michael gets well away from the shooters or anyone who might attack him.”

Damon squeezed his eyes shut, breathing sharply through his nostrils. She could see him, feel him struggle to find words amid the chaos of a mind that was no longer wholly his own, ruled by a brutish, alien consciousness that was hungry for something it had never possessed.

“I—” he gasped.

“It’s all right, Damon. Whatever is wrong, I’ll help you.”

He bowed his head, shaking violently. “I will...not...”

“You won’t kill Michael.”

“No.”

“No matter what he does?”

She knew she was taking a grave risk, but it paid off. Damon’s eyes opened again, and there was a glint of real comprehension in them. He heard her. He understood.

“Won’t...kill,” he said.

“Even if he tries to kill you first?”

Abruptly Damon leaped to his feet, moving with sinuous, deadly grace. His whole body shivered as if he were emerging from icy water. He stalked in a circle around her, shoulders hunched, and came to a stop in front of her.

“Promise...” he said. “Stay alive.”

Alexia understood, without knowing how, that he would believe her if she did what he asked...that somehow her promise could bring Damon back from this strange and terrible darkness.

“I promise,” she said.

With a low moan, Damon flung back his head, clenching his fists at his sides. A violent shudder took him, and for a moment he seemed to go boneless, staggering and almost falling before regaining his feet. When he looked at her again, he was sane.

Alexia sighed. It had worked. But now she was faced with another problem. Because all she saw in Damon’s eyes at that moment was bewilderment, as if he had just awakened from an ugly dream.

He didn’t know what had happened. Alexia was sure of it, though she had only her own instincts to tell her so. His gaze was completely devoid of shame or horror or the kind of satisfaction that came of tricking an enemy into surrender.

Had this been some kind of psychotic break, a madness born of an abnormality in Damon’s brain or a trauma in his past? Was it an illness, a vampire or Daysider affliction no other agent of the Enclave had ever witnessed? Or something else she couldn’t begin to imagine?

And what had triggered it? He had changed right after she’d told him she would die if he killed Michael. Could it happen again? Could she make it happen, just with certain words and phrases?

Why should he care so much if she lived or died?

She couldn’t even attempt to understand any of it until she was sure he hadn’t known what had happened to him.

And there was only one way to find out.

“You’d better go,” she said, as if they had been having a normal conversation.

“Michael’s going to come looking if you wait any longer.”

Damon searched her eyes. “You aren’t getting any worse?”

A normal, rational question. No trace of the savage he had been only moments before.

“I said I’d hang on as long as necessary,” she said. “You just get Michael safely to the Border, as we agreed.”

He frowned a little, reached inside his jacket and withdrew the small, unfamiliar pistol he’d been carrying when they met. He bent to set it down beside her.

“Take this,” he said. “It was meant to be used only as a last resort, but it’s more powerful than it appears.”

“Michael already gave me his Vampire Sl— His VS,” she amended quickly.

“It will not hurt you to have both.”

She picked Damon’s pistol up and weighed it in her hands. The model wasn’t like anything Aegis had manufactured, not even for its agents.

“Your own version of a VS, huh?” she asked lightly.

“As I said, a last resort.”

“Thanks.”

Abruptly he scooped her up in his arms and carried her back to the scanty shelter of the bushes. He covered her with the blanket again, pushing leaves and twigs and dirt up around her and sifting a few handfuls of debris on top of her for good measure.

“I’ll be back soon,” he said. He stood, no longer graceful but oddly mechanical, as if he had forgotten how to use his limbs. “Don’t move from this place. Remain still and quiet. Fire only if you have no other choice.”

She curled her lips into a wry smile. “I’m not one of your harem slaves, remember?”

An echo of the savage gleamed in his eyes, a change so subtle that she never would have noticed if not for his recent and much more dramatic transformation. “Darketans do not have serfs,” he said, and walked away without looking back. In five minutes he and Michael were out of range of her senses.

Exhausted beyond her ability to resist, Alexia let her muscles go lax and allowed the sickness she’d been fighting to claim her, pulling her down into fever again.

And she remembered.

“You’ll be all right,” the voice whispered. It was comforting, full of gentle concern, and Alexia felt almost safe even though she felt so sick she could hardly breathe.

She didn’t remember how she’d come to this place, dark and cold as it was, or why the nice lady had come to help her. She only knew that when the lady had talked to her, she felt ever so much better.

“There, now,” the lady said, stroking Alexia’s hair. She rolled up her sleeve and held the underside of her wrist near Alexia’s mouth. “Don’t be afraid. You need to bite. Just a little blood, and you won’t feel so sick anymore.”

“But I’m not supposed to,” Alexia whimpered. “Mommy told me never to bite anybody. Blood is bad for you.”

“Not this blood. It will make you well.”

Alexia met the lady’s eyes doubtfully. They were different from hers, or Mommy’s, but so kind. And she felt so awful, worse than she ever had. She bent her head and brushed her lips against the lady’s skin. It smelled very sweet, and it was easy to open her mouth and let her teeth graze right where the blood beat so strongly.

It was like nothing Alexia had ever tasted before. She felt a twinge of guilt, but the hunger was too strong. She knew the lady was right. This would make her well.

She sipped just a little before the lady took her arm away. But it was enough. She felt better already, and with every breath she took she felt better still. She began to remember running away after Mommy had taken her to the big building with the very serious grown-ups who asked her so many questions. She remembered darting into hallways like long, dark tunnels and falling down stairs, hurting and crying for someone to find her.

That was when the lady came. She picked Alexia up and carried her outside, where it was nighttime, moving like a cat chasing a mouse, whispering for Alexia to be very quiet.

Alexia didn’t remember how long they walked. Sometime during the night the pain came, cramps in her stomach and the feeling that she wanted to throw up. Then she began to feel very hot and shivery, and she started to see ugly things, monsters with bloody teeth and red eyes who chased her and chased her and wouldn’t let her get away.

That was all she could see until the lady woke her up and told her she’d be all right.

And now she was.

The lady took her by the hand. “We need to get you home now,” she said, sadness in her voice.

Alexia looked up. “Are you going to take me?”

“Yes.” The lady gave her a smile that wasn’t a smile, and she led her out of the dark room into the sunlight.

When they got back to the big building, Mommy was waiting for her. She was crying, and the very serious people looked more serious than ever. The lady took Alexia to Mommy, said something very soft that Alexia couldn’t quite hear, and went away with the serious people. She looked back once at Alexia, and Alexia stared at her for a long time after she disappeared inside the big building, memorizing her face.

Then Mommy took her to a place where other serious people made her undress and put things in her mouth and listened to her chest. When she went home again, she had to start taking two red pills every day. She still got sick a lot, and she always wished the lady would come back to make her well.

But she never saw the lady again.

Alexia jerked awake, the woman’s face as clear in her mind as it had been all those years ago.

The eyes. Daysider eyes, blue that was almost black.

She sat up, shoving the blanket aside. She had forgotten. All through the painful years of her childhood, the long spells of illness before they had developed the drugs for the patch, she had lost the memory of something that should never have left her consciousness.

Trembling, Alexia pressed the heels of her palms against her burning eyes. She understood now what it had all meant, or at least she could make a very good guess. She had run away from the Examiners at Aegis who had been conducting tests on her suitability as a future agent, as they had done with all the dhampir children born during or right after the war. Somehow she’d come upon a Daysider, who had known or guessed the nature of her first bout of blood-sickness and temporarily “cured” her.

Then the Daysider had taken Alexia back to Aegis and—

Alexia dropped her hands, staring unseeingly at a jay hopping from branch to branch among the oak leaves. Things that hadn’t made sense two decades ago looked very different in light of her years of training and experience. She’d been only six then, born the same year as the signing of the Treaty. The “nice lady” could have been anywhere from twenty to one hundred years old; no one could be sure of the age of any adult man or woman of vampire heritage.

Regardless of the Daysider’s age, she shouldn’t have been in the city. The Treaty specified that her kind, like Nightsiders, were forbidden within Enclave territory. That meant she could have been some kind of spy, an operative from Erebus, which had been completed just the year before. Somehow Alexia had stumbled into her hiding place.

But there was another possibility. If she wasn’t an agent, she must have been there with the full knowledge of Aegis. And they would never have let a potential enemy run loose in the city.

What if the woman had been a prisoner? If Alexia had found her while she was in the middle of an escape...

Alexia shook her head in disbelief. It couldn’t be. Under the Treaty, all prisoners were supposed to have been released. Never, in sixteen years with Aegis, had she ever heard so much as a rumor that the Nightsider captives might still be in Enclave custody.

Either way, spy or prisoner, the woman had returned Alexia and gone with the

“serious people.” Examiners, agents, security...it didn’t matter. She’d given herself up.

She could have used Alexia as a hostage, but she hadn’t. She had cared more about Alexia than her own freedom.

What price had she paid for that compassion? How had Alexia’s time with Aegis so completely erased the memory that even Daysiders were capable of kindness and self-

sacrifice?

Because that was not what she’d been taught from the day, at the age of ten, when she had begun the intense schooling that would eventually transform her into the perfect operative. Every day the same lesson had been drummed into her head: Daysiders and Nightsiders were monsters without empathy, morality or anything resembling human emotion.

Evil.

The jay screamed a querying note, tipping its dark head to examine Alexia with one bright, dark-rimmed eye.

What did they do with her? Alexia asked the bird silently. Did they set her free?

It would have been difficult to keep the woman’s presence secret all these years. But if they had killed her, there would be no need for secrets.

Battling her body’s weakness, Alexia struggled to her feet and made her way carefully toward the oak, hands outstretched to catch her weight. She spread her palms on the knotted bark and pressed her cheek against it, breathing in the scent of its indomitable life.

The unknown Daysider woman had sacrificed her freedom, possibly her life, for Alexia. Just as Damon, who could have killed both her and Michael anytime if he chose, had saved her life and fought to keep her alive.

And Damon had said he wanted to keep the peace. If he was telling the truth, whoever had attacked them was working as much against him as her. Whoever had stolen her patch hadn’t cared what might happen to her as a result.

But Damon did. She had very personally experienced his capability for loyalty, courage...commitment. How was he any different from the Daysider woman with her gentle voice and willingness to sacrifice herself for a child she had just met and would probably never see again?

Alexia laughed mirthlessly and bumped her forehead against the trunk. There was one major difference: Damon had most definitely been willing to extend their alliance to a more intimately physical plane. But he hadn’t tried to force her, not in any way. He had treated her body like something worth savoring, receiving as well as giving pleasure. It almost seemed as if he genuinely cared about her.

No, he wasn’t evil. Not even close. In her heart, she’d known it all along, even though she’d fought every minute to remind herself what his kind had done to her mother. To Garret.

But he wasn’t a Nightsider, either . He hadn’t made the rules that condemned human convicts to eternal slavery. Nothing could change what had happened to the people she loved. Damon was not to blame for the sins of those who could never fully accept him.

Even if he was capable of becoming something savage and unpredictable for reasons she didn’t understand, she knew she could never go back to hating him.

Michael hadn’t experienced what she had. He still loathed Damon with every fiber of his being. If he did try to kill Damon—if he provoked the Daysider far enough—maybe he could provoke the shadow inside Damon, as well. She’d been a fool to think Damon could speak for that other side of himself. If it came to a fight, one of them would surely die.

However, she would do everything in her power to prevent that from happening.

Neither blood-sickness, invisible snipers nor even Damon himself would stop her.

Lurching back to the bushes, she crouched to dig in her pack for a spare shirt and took off her jacket, wincing at the pain, and then put on the fresh shirt. She strapped the VS to the back of her pack and dragged it over her shoulders. Finally, she picked up the weapon Damon had given her and tucked it in her belt.

Inhaling a deep lungful of air, she set out after the men, praying she would reach them in time.

If there had been any other way, Damon would have taken it. For Alexia’s sake.

But he had to know. And though he and Carter had made it well away from the area of the colony and over the hills to their western border without once being attacked, they both knew there would be no fond farewells between them.

And Carter was still prepared to fight. He moved fast against Damon the moment he had the chance, and his speed was almost enough to let him shed his pack and slip Damon’s grasp. He managed to work his knife free during the struggle and slash Damon’s arm before Damon got his hands around Carter’s throat and slammed him up against the nearest large tree.

After that, it was as if the dhampir had given up. He let Damon remove his weapons and stood quiescent in his enemy’s hold, breathing hard but offering no further resistance.

It was if he’d wanted to be defeated.

“What did you do?” Damon asked, staring into Carter’s catlike eyes.

“I don’t...know what you’re talking about,” the dhampir said without inflection.

“When you uncovered Alexia’s other wound,” Damon said softly, “you were shocked.”

Carter gave a choked laughed. “She’s my partner. What did you expect?”

“It was not your concern that was strange,” Damon said, “but the way you expressed it.”

“Naturally. Your kind doesn’t have normal feelings. You wouldn’t know a real one if it hung you up and left you out to dry.”

Damon didn’t rise to the bait. “I was trained to understand human feelings,” he said.

“Funny. I’m not human.”

“But in many respects you are as much one of them as if you had been born of two human parents. And I know you were overreacting. The way a man does when he isn’t as surprised or shocked as he wishes to appear.”

Carter spat. Damon dodged, and the shot went wide.

“There isn’t much you wouldn’t do to hide your own part in this,” Carter said, grinning like a death mask. “Just because she doesn’t believe you betrayed her—”

“That is an interesting word, betray, ” Damon said, returning the operative’s smile. “I had understood the loyalty between Aegis partners to be virtually unbreakable.”

“And there’s nothing you can do to change that,” Carter said. “Alexia and I would die for each other. That’s a concept you couldn’t possibly comprehend.”

“Perhaps. Unless your commitment has already been given to someone or something else. Or your hatred is too powerful to bind you to anyone.”

Carter lunged against Damon’s grip, but Damon held him fast.

“I was born to a mother who was abused and abandoned by a bloodsucker, like all of my kind,” Carter rasped. “If we could find a way to wipe you out once and for all—”

“Again,” Damon said. “Too histrionic, like your accusations against me. Even Alexia discounted your charges because you were clearly not rational.”

“I saw you grunting on top of her.” Carter pushed forward again, seemingly indifferent to the risk of strangling. “Whatever you did to her back there, it only worked because she’s—”

“Weak?” Damon finished. “Too trusting? Yet, in spite of your mistrust of me, you were willing to leave her to my mercy.”

For the first time Damon saw uncertainty in the slight twitch at the corner of Carter’s mouth. “I didn’t have much choice,” he said. “She’ll die for certain if I don’t get another patch. But you always knew that, didn’t you?” He displayed his teeth like a Bloodmaster challenging a rival. “I swear I’ll come back and skin you alive if you hurt her.”

Damon’s heartbeat began to rise. “It would be foolish of me to tell you I’ll hunt you down if Alexia dies, but I will do it, even if you spend the rest of your days cowering in the Enclave.”

Carter’s sandy brows lifted. “You’re good,” he snickered. “I admit you’re almost convincing.”

Bearing down on the pulse points in Carter’s neck, Damon shoved the Enclave agent back against the tree. “I know you took the patch,” he said evenly. “You were also one of those shooting at us.” He pressed on the arteries until he could feel them begin to close off the blood supply to Carter’s brain. “Who are you working for?”

Carter closed his eyes and began to wheeze. “I work...for Aegis. For my people.”

“Tell me who took the patch, and I may let you go.”

“If you...don’t let me go,” Carter grunted, “Alexia will die.”

That was the ugly dilemma, and Damon knew he’d underestimated Carter’s will to resist.

“How can I be sure you’ll return with the patch?” he asked.

Carter’s lips twisted in a grotesque grin. “You can’t.”

A pulsing shadow fell over Damon’s vision. Alexia had said it was hatred, and he knew she was right. He could feel it trying to seize his mind with claws of iron.

Protect Alexia. That was everything. For the first time in his years of field work—here in the Zone, where he was free—he didn’t know what choice to make. If he dared leave Alexia alone, he could go with Carter all the way to the Border and make sure the agent did what he said he would.

But if he left her, and she died...

His fingers loosened on Carter’s neck. The dhampir jerked up his arms, striking Damon’s with the stiffened edges of his hands. Ordinarily it wouldn’t have been enough, but Damon had been off guard for a fraction of a second, and in that infinitesimal span of time Carter broke free and was sprinting in the direction of the Border, leaving pack and weapons behind.

He didn’t go far. Half a dozen running strides away he faltered, came to a sudden halt and spun around. Damon nearly ran into him.

Carter scrambled just out of reach. “What is it?” he asked, his voice rising. “What’s coming?”

Expecting some kind of trick, Damon tensed his muscles to attack. But then he smelled the thick, acrid odor and heard the tread of something neither animal, human nor Opir.

Lamia.