Daysider

Chapter 8

Without hesitation Damon herded her back to the blanket, compelled her to kneel and pulled his pack close with his free hand. He unfastened one of the outer pockets and withdrew a carefully bundled length of cord. In spite of its thinness, it was easily strong enough to bear a large Darketan’s weight or keep a dhampir firmly bound.

Alexia struggled, but her excursion to look for him and Carter had taken a severe toll on her body. Damon pinned her down, caught both her wrists in his free hand and lashed the cord around them. He let her go just long enough to secure the cord and then helped her sit up.

There was nothing but cold contempt in her eyes.

“You won’t like what happens when I get free,” she snapped.

“I’ll take my chances.”

Alexia lapsed into silence, and after a while her chin began to sink to her chest as she gave way to her body’s demands. Damon wasn’t deceived. She might be too weak to resist him now, but he knew she wouldn’t give in, even with her last breath.

So he waited her out, keeping watch over her and looking for any sign that she might be worsening. He removed the remnants of his shirt and undershirt, leaving his torn jacket spread over a bush to air out.

The night was cool and silent save for the usual animal sounds, and Alexia fell asleep sitting up within fifteen minutes. Gently Damon laid her down and pulled half the blanket over her. She didn’t awaken at his touch.

He knew he shouldn’t postpone the inevitable, not even for another hour. Yet when it came down to the decision of forcing her to drink his blood, he couldn’t do it. She had to be willing.

As “willing” as she had been before? Or fully conscious of her choice?

He had no answer, and so as the long night dragged on, Damon paced the hilltop until he had memorized every twig, every rock, and every leaf on every bush. Still Alexia slept. A few hours before dawn he lay down beside Alexia, his back to her chest, and forced himself to relax. Even if he fell into the twilight sleep Darketans and Opiri used to regenerate, he would still be fully capable of sensing danger.

But sleep wouldn’t come. He rolled over and studied Alexia’s quiet face. Her features were soft again, revealing that strange innocence that her years as an agent had erased from her conscious mind. Her lips were slightly parted, and her lashes brushed her cheeks like fine strands of silk.

Slowly he reached for her, brushing his fingertips across her chin. She sighed and curled toward him.

Her body did what her mind could not. It trusted him.

Damon let his fingers trail across her lips, move up to trace her brows and brush back the hair that had fallen across her forehead. He couldn’t bear it, this strange tenderness, this desire that was so much more than physical. How could he justify the way he had taken her dignity by trussing her like a steer bound for the serfs’ table?

Rising silently, Damon walked around her and knelt to free her hands. He tossed the cord aside, settled her arms in a more natural position and rested his hand on her back. It was like touching a smoldering fire. A shiver worked its way through her body, and Damon knew she was sinking into fever again.

She would be vulnerable now, as vulnerable as she could ever be. But Damon knew he couldn’t steal her will and dignity again.

Even if I must let her die? he thought.

No. He’d let her keep her pride until her body and mind failed, until there was no hope left. And then...

He stretched out beside her again, cradling her against his chest. Her breath hitched and released, but she was no longer shivering. Damon rested his face against her hair, breathing in the fragrant scent that days of hardship hadn’t erased. He pressed his lips to her neck, feeling her thready pulse and the sluggishness of her blood. He nuzzled her shoulder, her ear, her jaw, drawn into a memory of Eirene lying in his arms on his narrow cot in the Darketan dormitory.

The image froze and Damon stopped, arrested by the recognition of a change in himself he had never expected. Until this moment, his thoughts of Eirene had been acutely painful, laced with hatred, grief and guilt he thought he would carry until the end of his days.

But suddenly those feelings had receded into shadow, driven away by the remarkable woman he held now. He could remember Eirene’s smile, her courage, the warmth and gentleness even a Darketan’s rigorous training hadn’t diminished. He could remember and not despise himself.

It was almost as if he were free—not of the memories of Eirene’s death, but of the blackness it had left festering inside him.

The blackness that would come roaring back to life when Alexia died.

But not yet.

“You would have liked Eirene,” he murmured against Alexia’s ear. “She was not afraid of what all Darketans fear most.” He brushed his knuckles across Alexia’s cheek.

“She cared for me, and I lost her. But now...”

Alexia shivered again. “Now,” she echoed. She pushed her back against Damon’s chest, compelling him to loosen his hold, and rolled over to face him. The first, thin light of false dawn filtered through the darkness, deepening the shadows under her lower lids and beneath her cheekbones, but there was a kind of peace in her eyes. No fear, no anger, only acceptance.

“Now is all we have, you and I,” she said. “It was all we ever could have, even if I still had my patch.”

Damon berated himself for having spoken his thoughts aloud. He had never meant Alexia to know about Eirene, or anything else about his life in Erebus.

But it was too late to take back his confession. And what did it matter? Alexia was right. Even if she hadn’t been condemned to a painful death...

“Yes,” he said. “There could never be anything else.”

Alexia bowed her head and examined her wrists, unbound and unmarked. “You let me go,” she said. “Why?”

“I could not take your choice from you,” he said. Hesitantly he touched the moisture gathering under her eyelids. “I didn’t know that dhampires wept like humans.”

She gave a husky laugh. “Don’t rub it in.” She scraped her palm across her cheeks.

“Do Darketans? Cry, I mean?”

It was an absurd conversation under the circumstances, but he had already exposed the worst of his weaknesses to Alexia. One more would hardly make a difference.

“Yes,” he said, keeping his expression carefully neutral. “Darketans are capable of it.”

She searched Damon’s face. “Who was Eirene?”

He reached for the canteen and offered it to Alexia. “Drink,” he said.

Without taking her eyes from his, Alexia took the canteen from his hand. Her arm trembled so much that Damon had to help her lift the vessel to her lips. He watched her uneasily as she swallowed the stale water, half afraid she might choke, but she finished without difficulty and let him take the canteen away.

“Thank you,” she said, brushing moisture from her cracked lips. “I’ve never been so thirsty.”

Nor, Damon realized, had he. But not for water. A short time ago he’d seen Alexia bite her lip and tried to ignore his immediate reaction to the sight, dismissing it as a brief aberration. He had taken nourishment just before he had left Erebus, and that had been only been a few days ago.

But now, all at once, he began to realize that his lapse then hadn’t been just a passing impulse. It seemed his need for blood had come on him far more quickly than it should have. If he concentrated, he could trace this new and unexpected hunger to the moment when he had tasted Alexia’s blood during their interrupted embrace and had detected that

“other” in its signature.

Whatever had brought it on, there was nothing he could do about it. Not without leaving Alexia.

“Tell me about her,” Alexia asked softly. “Talk to me, Damon. I don’t want to be alone in my head just now.”

Alone in her head. How many times had Damon felt the same, knowing how few Darketans would understand?

Eirene had.

He rolled onto his back, staring up at the lightening sky. “She was Darketan,” he said quietly. “One of the best operatives Erebus has ever known.”

“You said she cared for you, and you lost her.” She hesitated, her voice dropping to a murmur. “I’m sorry.”

Damon didn’t let himself respond to her gentleness. “It was long ago.”

“Not long enough for you to forget.” He heard her shift to lie on her back, sharing his study of the heavens. “What wasn’t she afraid of, Damon? Emotion?”

It was impossible for Damon to answer. Not with her, in this place, at this time. Alexia accepted his silence for a while, but she wasn’t finished.

“You aren’t a Nightsider,” she said. “We know they aren’t capable of feelings as we understand them. You’ve proven that doesn’t hold true for Darketans. Why do your people fear it?”

Damon clenched his fists, welcoming the bite of his nails into flesh. “Are Enclave operatives not discouraged from letting emotion interfere with duty?” he asked.

“Of course we are. But sometimes it can’t be helped. I’m proof of that. So is...was Michael.” She laid her forearm across her face as if she didn’t want him to glimpse whatever might lie in her eyes. “I guess that’s what makes us...” She sucked in a breath.

“What makes us human.”

And what had sent Carter rushing to meet his inevitable downfall.

“Eirene wasn’t human,” Alexia said, “but she wasn’t afraid. And you weren’t afraid to care for her.”

“It was a mistake,” Damon said flatly. “It cost her her life.”

“How?” She lowered her arm and turned on her side to face him, her weight resting on one elbow. “How, Damon?”

The concern in her voice made it even more difficult for him to speak. “It is forbidden for agents to become personally involved,” he said. “Sex is allowed, but only for recreational purposes. To go beyond that is a grave transgression that must be punished.”

“The way Nightsiders punish their serfs for disobedience?”

Damon sat up, stung by her question even as he acknowledged how accurate it was.

“If we were serfs,” he said, “we would not be permitted to move freely in the Zone.”

“They don’t think you’ll try to escape,” she said.

“Why should we wish to?”

“You just told me why.” She rested her hand on his thigh. “They did punish Eirene, didn’t they?”

Her question lodged inside him like the projectile from a Vampire Slayer, sending tiny, razor-sharp slivers outward from his chest to sever his spine and slice through his brain.

No, he hadn’t forgotten. Alexia hadn’t quite driven the rage and hate and guilt away.

Nothing could ever do that.

“They sent her on a suicide mission against the Enclave,” he said. “She was reported dead within a week.”

Alexia’s fingers tightened on his leg. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I...know what it is to lose someone.”

Damon met her gaze. Her eyes were laced again with tears that he knew were more for him than herself. “Who was he?” he asked gruffly.

“My brother. My half brother.” She drew her hand away, and he knew she was going to change the subject even before she spoke again. “What did they do to you? ” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said, clenching his jaw against any further explanation.

“They didn’t have to, did they?” Alexia said. Her gaze grew distant, as if she had been claimed by her own painful memories. “You loved her, and—”

“Love,” he said harshly, “is a word even Darketans have no use for.”

He thought for a moment that she flinched, but when he looked again she was as still as before. “Of course not,” she said. “There is a Zone of difference between caring and love.”

“Have you loved, Alexia?” he said, trying and failing to hold the question behind his teeth.

“I loved my brother, my mother, my stepfather,” she said. “I loved Michael, as a friend and comrade. But you wouldn’t understand that, would you?” Her breath caught, as if she was finding it increasingly difficult to fill her lungs. “Your kind doesn’t have parents...or brothers or sisters. Only Sires and fellow vassals. What could actual love or loyalty mean in a society where there is no compassion, power and ruthlessness determine rank, and the weakest are kept as chattel?”

Contempt thickened her voice, but there was challenge in it, as well. Was she expecting him to agree with her, to admit that his people were no better than savages?

“The Opiri consider your society decadent and unfit to survive,” he said.

“Is that really what you believe?”

“I can judge only by what I have observed.”

“And what exactly have you observed, Damon? All you’ve ever seen of humans in Erebus is your beaten-down slaves. You said you’ve never dealt with dhampires before.

How many times have you met free humans?” He felt more than saw her lean toward him. “You know only what you’ve been taught, the propaganda and prejudice of Erebus and every Citadel like it.”

He met her gaze. “The Enclave killed Eirene.”

“How?” Alexia lifted herself higher on her arm, the lines around her eyes deepening in distress. “You said the Council sent her on a suicide mission. What was she sent to do, Damon?”

“Eirene was no assassin, if that’s what you mean.” He looked away, swallowing his grief as he had done a thousand times before. “She was captured by your agency. It was reported that they tortured her before she died.”

“I don’t believe it,” Alexia said. She got to her knees and caught at his arm, compelling him to look at her. “We don’t torture, Damon,” she said. “We have laws.”

“Laws that send every condemned criminal in your city to Erebus.” He turned his arm to grab her wrist, feeling the pulse beating fast under the soft skin of the underside. “You make the serfs as much as Erebus does.”

Alexia twisted her arm, but he refused to let her go. Her nostrils flared and her eyes narrowed in an expression that must terrify any human she turned it on. She and Damon stared at each other, neither willing to give ground.

But when she began to slump and her breathing grew constrained, Damon let her go, cursing himself for upsetting her when she had so little energy to spare for pointless argument.

Alexia sank back on her heels. “Do you think I don’t know that?” she whispered, the heat of anger draining away with her sigh. “It was part of the Treaty, a system developed so the leeches wouldn’t be driven to raid and kidnap citizens to feed their hunger. Can you justify the way Nightsiders live?”

Damon could hardly bear the raw pain in her voice. He understood that in spite of Alexia’s hostility toward the Opiri, the hatred she had expressed for their way of life, she believed in something better than the fragile Armistice that kept Opiri and humans from each other’s throats. Her sincere question was a revelation to him, an admission of hope.

Hope Eirene had shared.

“You and I,” he said thickly, “can have no effect on the decisions of those we serve. It is beyond our power.”

“Is it?” She placed her palm on his chest. “Why do you still serve them, Damon? You hate what they did to Eirene. From what you’ve said, they’d do the same to any Darketan who cared for another. Why doesn’t all your kind leave and start your own society?”

“Like the illegal colony?” he asked.

“No. It would be different, because you are different.” Her eyes were no longer dull with illness or dark with anger. They shone with the reflection of excitement, as if she could see what she envisioned as surely as she could see his face. “What if there’s a way to create what you need, the same way the Enclave used Darketan blood to create the drugs?”

He looked down at her small hand, so delicate in spite of its strength, wondering if she could feel how hard and fast his heart was beating. “Even if that were possible,” he said, “why do you think any Darketans would wish to leave?”

“If they’re like you—” He pulled out of her reach. “You don’t know me, Alexia,” he said harshly. “Eirene was different. But most of my kind would never consider what you suggest. It wouldn’t even occur to them. They know only one way to live.”

“You could teach them. Damon—”

“We would never be allowed to leave Erebus permanently.”

“Because they’re afraid of you,” she said, as if she had finally understood some great mystery.

“The Opiri have nothing to fear from us,” he said bitterly. “But we are rare mutations, so—”

“Mutations?”

“You didn’t know?”

“We’ve all heard the rumors and theories, but if Aegis knew, they didn’t see any reason to tell us.” Her mouth tightened. “How does it happen?”

Damon closed his eyes. “During the Awakening and the War after,” he said, “when the Opiri were converting many humans to become their soldiers, it sometimes happened that the process failed to complete. It was believed to be a result of an allergic reaction to Opir blood, which resulted in unforeseen genetic changes.”

“Was?”

“It happens rarely now, since few humans are permitted to convert.”

She leaned toward him again, reaching out to stroke the tense muscles under his ribs.

“How long ago were you converted?”

The distraction of her intimate touch almost robbed him of his ability to speak. “I don’t remember,” he said, his voice roughening. “Loss of memory is another side effect of an incomplete conversion.”

Her fingers worked into the waistband of his pants. “The eldest Nightsiders claim they were always on Earth, even before humans,” she murmured. “But you were human once.

And now you’re something else, with insights and abilities they don’t have. That’s why they’re afraid of you, and why you have to leave Erebus, go far beyond any vampire’s reach.”

Flattening his hand, Damon pressed his palm over her fingers and held them still.

“That would be to the benefit of the Enclave, would it not?” he said. “They would be pleased to see the Darketans abandon the Citadel.”

“You’re right,” she said. “But you know that’s not why I said it.”

“Would the Enclave welcome us if we went to them?”

She lowered her gaze and didn’t answer. Damon hardly noticed. His desire for her was devouring him, a forbidden temptation that made him crave not only her body but her spirit, the unique spirit he had met in only one other in all the course of his existence. It was all he could do to keep from pulling her into his arms, forgetting her bizarre ideas and existing only in the “now” Alexia had spoken of before this pointless discussion.

But he couldn’t. He respected her too much. He began to rise, but Alexia gripped his pants and pulled him back down. She slid her hand up to his collarbone and curled her fingers around the back of his neck.

“When I’m gone,” she said, “I want you to promise me to think about what I’ve said.

It’s almost all I have to give you.”

Despair and defiance rose like a tempest in Damon’s chest. He caught Alexia’s face between his hands. “I said I would not let you die.”

Her smile was sad. “You’re not a god.”

“There must be something—”

“Let’s not talk about it now,” she said. “There are other things we could be doing....”

Sires help me, Damon thought. “Let me go to the Enclave,” he said. “There is still a chance—”

“You’d never make it in time.”

“Then I’ll track down the Opir your partner was following. He may have the patch, or know where it is.”

Alexia put a finger to his lips. “I want only one thing of you, Damon. Let’s finish what we started.

“Make love to me.”