Night Quest
Night Quest
Susan Krinard
Blood enemies, bound loversHe’d loved a vampire once, only to have her murdered by her own kind. Now, to save his son, Garret Fox must look to another vampire for help. Garret knows empathic Artemis can’t deny him once she drinks his human blood. But despite the attraction between them, Garret can never forget what Artemis truly is…Sharing Garret’s thoughts and feelings has wreaked havoc on Artemis’s emotions. But when she discovers a malevolent force bent on destroying them, she finds herself drawn even closer to the human. Dare she hope to find a home with a man who hates her kind?
“Are you certain?” she asked softly.
“Look at me, Artemis.”
Whatever she saw in Garret’s eyes apparently frightened her, and she almost bolted. But he grabbed her hand, and she settled down again, panting and trembling. Her teeth penetrated his flesh. She moaned as his blood began to flow, and he felt desire take hold exactly as he had prayed it wouldn’t. He reached out to clasp his hands around her waist. He found the hem of her tunic and slipped his fingers beneath, sliding his palms over the skin below her ribs.
Then he paused, because she hadn’t asked for his touch, because he knew that she was not Roxana. But Artemis gripped his wrist and held his hand where it was.
She was too far gone to stop. And so was he.
SUSAN KRINARD has been writing paranormal romance for nearly twenty years. With Daysider, she began a series of vampire paranormal romances, the Nightsiders series, for Mills & Boon Nocturne. Sue lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her husband, Serge, her dogs, Freya, Nahla and Cagney, and her cats, Agatha and Rocky. She loves her garden, nature, painting and chocolate … not necessarily in that order.
Night Quest
Susan Krinard
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
With special thanks to my editor, Leslie Wainger, for her patience and editorial expertise; and to Serge, who will never give up on me.
Contents
Cover (#u4eb24d1b-6cfa-56fb-a67c-08d16ec72ca5)
Introduction (#u9ea3277c-4783-5aea-b961-817865950820)
About the Author (#u7102a2a9-25e6-5dd4-aa40-72b52b92e531)
Title Page (#uaece315a-3373-5795-bd70-b307dc8bb68c)
Dedication (#u16e32330-d58c-50f8-9f8e-16d516f5c766)
Prologue (#ulink_1a667443-a72e-54aa-b462-9df240daf8f4)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_62b1fbd0-0c60-589d-af5c-d9c0ea8f7547)
Chapter 2 (#ulink_0ab6f064-e60c-5675-94d4-0d5e7ff6cbec)
Chapter 3 (#ulink_211df39b-2fed-545a-90f2-3a56b7c3e677)
Chapter 4 (#ulink_372065ef-c264-5a87-92ec-a06b481215b1)
Chapter 5 (#ulink_969ed07e-8b9e-55d9-bfe4-18c91d756172)
Chapter 6 (#ulink_cf488448-5373-5910-90bd-344253157dbb)
Chapter 7 (#ulink_0ed6bbd6-49bc-5f15-a14f-e9621a753193)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_11481c89-8699-50e2-9f0f-8c59e1030b32)
Some thirty years after the signing of the Treaty between human and Nightsider, or Opiri, forces, human Enclaves and Nightsider Citadels maintained a sometimes uneasy peace. Territories were well established, and the neutral Zones between were regularly patrolled by Citadel and Enclave agents.
The agents were of two specific genetic types. The half-breed Daysiders, or Darketans, day-walking Opiri, were born of human fathers and Nightsider mothers. Previously considered mutants, they had human coloring and extra-human speed and strength, but possessed the standard need for blood.
The half-blood dhampires, offspring of human mothers and Opir fathers, were of a different genetic type, with “cat-like” eyes and the ability to walk in daylight, while also possessing full Opiri speed, strength and acute senses. A percentage were dependent on blood, while some were able to digest human food.
Though both Daysider and dhampir agents were charged to prevent potential enemies from entering their respective territories, they could not prevent the establishment of illicit colonies.
In California, humans and progressive Opiri founded mixed settlements in which humans and Nightsiders could live in peace and cooperation. These new colonies were for the most part left alone by both Citadels and Enclaves. Farther north, in the former states of Oregon and Washington, humans established heavily guarded compounds inhabited by militias more devoted to killing stray Opiri than maintaining the peace.
Their victims were primarily exiled Opiri known as Freebloods. Most Freebloods were humans who had been bitten and turned into Opiri by powerful Bloodlords and Bloodmasters after the beginning of the ten-year War, first serving as vassals to their sires and then, after being replaced by other vassals, released from the bond created by the process of conversion.
Freebloods within the Citadels were forced to compete for human serfs in order to establish a Household and gain rank. But though, by treaty, the Citadels were compelled to send convicts to their former enemies, the supply of such convicts began to dwindle, and competition for the serfs became a significant problem.
As a result, hundreds of Freebloods were exiled from the Citadels to survive in any way they could. These Freebloods, running in packs, became a significant threat to human and mixed colonies, often stealing humans or killing Opiri colonists.
At the same time, certain Citadels began to see the necessity of changing the Opir way of life in order to deal with the ever-shrinking supply of accessible human blood. Some Opiri spoke of the need to abandon the taking of human blood in favor of animal blood, while others favored a new war. Meanwhile, the mixed colonies continued to grow and spread, offering a new alternative of peaceful coexistence based on the voluntary sharing of blood.
It was, of course, inevitable that these competing philosophies would come into conflict.
—from the Introduction to The Armistice Years: Conflict and Convergence
Chapter 1 (#ulink_c7d3e27d-766c-5366-a122-4ce13de07a14)
Timon.
Garret Fox knelt beside the footprints scattered in the dirt, tracing the smallest with his fingertip. They had paused here, the kidnappers, and the little person to whom the footprint belonged had briefly touched ground before being swept up again.
Still alive, Garret thought. He dragged his hand across his face, scraping against the four-day beard he hadn’t had time to shave off, and got to his feet. Fear for his son made him ignore the deep ache in his muscles, the rawness of blistered feet, the heavy autumn rains that penetrated his coat and pried icy fingers under his collar. He hardly noticed the sting of the scratches across his face and hands where branches from trees and bushes had scraped his skin.
Speed had been far more important to him than caution. He wasn’t interested in concealing his trail. Neither were the rogues ahead of him. They felt safe now, nearly two hundred miles away from the colony they had raided. Safe because they had left complete chaos in their wake, and every adult human or Nightsider had been needed to clean up the mess and protect the other children.
The rogues believed they had nothing to fear from a single human.
Garret adjusted his pack, reassured by the weight of the VS-134 rifle—the highly effective and notorious weapon known as the “Vampire Slayer,” whose use was strictly forbidden except in cases of extreme emergency.
And that was why this had happened, Garret thought bitterly. Timon had paid for the colony’s philosophy of nonviolence and indiscriminate acceptance of every potential settler. Garret had no compunction about using deadly force to save him.
If Roxana had been alive, she would have done the same. Timon was all he had left, the only thing in the world that gave meaning and purpose to what remained of his life.
I will get him back, Roxana, he promised.
He set out again, though dawn was still hours away. Rain turned to sleet with the unseasonable cold. The moon was bright enough for him to see by, but he didn’t need to rely on it completely. He’d spent years not only honing his body and skills to fight enemy Nightsiders, but also in developing his senses of hearing and touch to help him move in darkness. The night would never be his element, but he had long ago reached a truce with it.
As darkness gave way to sunlight, he moved more quickly. As each day passed, the trail had led him deeper into wild country that seemed to grow colder with every mile, far from any human Enclave, Nightsider Citadel or free colony.
Time and again, he lost the trail and then picked it up, losing ground by night and gaining by day. Along the way he found the bodies of solitary humans drained of blood, their hollow shells cast aside, and each time he spoke a few brief words over the dead before he forced himself onward. His supply of dried foods shrank steadily, but he didn’t dare search for some isolated homestead or settlement to replenish his stores. He sought clean streams to fill his canteen, gathered edible greens and caught whatever game he could find.
At the end of the second week, his stomach hollow and his gait uneven with exhaustion, he knew he had fallen far behind. Still he drove himself on. He began to see more human settlements—not mixed colonies, like Avalon, but high-walled, paramilitary compounds with heavily armed militias whose sole purpose seemed to be hunting down and killing rogue Freebloods. Garret avoided them, as he had avoided the less warlike settlements he passed.
Fifteen minutes before dawn on the first morning of the third week, near what used to be the city of Eugene, he heard the distant sound of a woman’s scream.
He didn’t pause to think. Dropping to his knees, he shrugged out of his pack and removed the components of the VS. With shaking hands he assembled the rifle and looped its strap over his shoulder. If the woman was being harassed by Nightsiders, the Vampire Slayer might be all that stood between her and an ugly death.
* * *
The sound of a twig snapping brought Artemis to attention. She grabbed her bow, her hunt unfinished, and ran toward the denser forest and one of the many refuges she had built for herself in the area she had chosen as her territory.
If it hadn’t been for her hunger, she might have been clearheaded enough to notice the humans before she ran into them. If there had been one less human, she might have taken them down before they trapped her.
But there were five, all armed with automatic rifles, and they had thrown the wire netting over her before she could do more than raise her hands. Each segment of the weighted net was razor sharp, and though a thousand small cuts couldn’t kill an Opir, the damage would prevent her escape.
“You were right, Coleman,” one of the men said. “Never would have believed we’d find a female bloodsucker living alone out here.” He looked at the sky. “Just about sunrise. We might still get her back—”
“Why?” a younger man asked, holding his section of the net with thickly gloved hands. “She ain’t no spy.”
“Dean’s right,” a third human said. “She wouldn’t be out here alone near sunrise if she was. She won’t have no useful intel. Might as well take care of her here.”
Artemis barely heard their voices. The wire burned wherever it touched her skin and sliced through her clothing, but she tried to focus on calculating her best means of escape. One of these humans would surely be careless enough to loosen his grip on the net, giving her a few seconds to fight her way out. Blood loss might be great, but if she could grab even one of these monsters...
“Watch out!” the first male said as she lunged toward the loosest part of the net.
“Burn her!”
Something jabbed against Artemis’s neck, and a paralyzing shock jolted her nerves and froze her muscles. She felt her useless body being dragged across the ground and through the mud, the wires cutting deeper as the humans found a patch of dry earth far from any hint of shade.
The sky had grown pale in the east. The sun was minutes away from rising, and her body ignored every command her brain tried to send it. She was aware of increasing pain as the humans jostled the net and anchored it to the ground, driving stakes into the earth to pin its edges so tight and close that she wouldn’t find even the smallest opening.
Still, she tried. The paralysis broke, and she flung herself up and against the stinging web, cutting what remained of her clothes to ribbons and shredding the skin of her hands while the guttural laughter of the humans echoed inside her skull.
Then they stepped back, denying her what little shelter their shadows might provide, and watched the first rays of the sun strike her bleeding fingers.
She didn’t intend to scream. She fought it with all the discipline and self-control she had learned both in the Citadel and as an exile in the wilderness.
But her own cry deafened even the laughter of the humans, and the last thing she saw was the bright hair of a man with green eyes blazing like emeralds in the rising sun.
* * *
For a few fleeting seconds Garret considered the possibility of leaving the Opir woman to her fate. There were five men, all carrying modified assault rifles, and numerous knives and bladed weapons. It would be impossible to approach them without being seen.
He’d faced similar odds before and met them head-on. But he had expected a human woman, not a Freeblood. For all he knew, the female might be among the most vicious rogues in this patch of wilderness, as bad as those who had taken his son.
And if anything were to happen to him now, there would be no one to look for Timon. No one to save him from whatever fate the rogues intended for him.
But the militiamen were torturing the woman, and that was far beyond the pale of what Garret could accept. He had no doubt of what Roxana would have done if she were here.
Kneeling behind a screen of shrubs, Garret separated the VS into its component parts and returned them to his pack. Raising his hands above his head, he walked out into the clearing. Almost as one, the militiamen lifted their rifles and pointed them at his chest.
“Human,” Garret said in his mildest voice, trying to ignore the muffled moans of the Opir woman in the net. “Peace.”
Two of the men lowered their rifles. The others held steady. The eldest of the bunch, grizzled and scarred, stepped forward.
“Who are you?” he demanded, his hand on the butt of his hunting knife.
“My name is Garret Fox,” Garret said. “I’m looking for my son, who was taken by rogue bloodsuckers.” He glanced at the Freeblood in the net. “Have you seen any children in the area?”
The leader looked at his comrades. They shook their heads.
“We ain’t seen no kids outside our compound,” he said, his eyes narrow with suspicion. “Or any bloodsuckers except this one.” He kicked at the body curled up on the ground, and Garret fought the instinct to stop him. “Your son, you said? Where you from?”
Garret estimated that he had no more than a few minutes before the sun was high enough to kill the Nightsider woman. He didn’t have time for conversation.
“South,” he said. “I’ve traveled a long way.”
“Looks like it,” one of the younger men said. His eyes were small and cruel. “If bloodsuckers took your kid, he’s probably dead.”
“Shut up, Dean,” the grizzled man said. “How’d it happen?”
“We were out hunting,” Garret said, staying as vague as possible. “Maybe this female knows something. Will you let me question her before you kill her?”
There were murmurs of protest, but the leader silenced them with a wave of his hand.
“Get her out of the sun,” he ordered his men. He met Garret’s eyes. “You got five minutes. Here.” He tossed a shock stick to Garret, who snatched it out of the air. “Use this if she don’t cooperate.”
Garret edged closer to the leader as the other men dragged the net into the scant shade of a nearly leafless bush. “She probably won’t respond to more pain,” he said. “Let me tell her that you’ll give her a quick death if she cooperates.”
“Why should she believe you?”
“I was the interrogator in my compound,” Garret said. “Even with them, persuasion can be effective.”
“Why should I give her a quick death?”
“I didn’t say you had to keep my promise.”
The grizzled man bared his teeth in a grin. “Five minutes, like I said.”
“Thanks.” Garret turned toward the net, but the leader grabbed his arm with a callous hand.
“You got guts to travel out here by yourself,” he said, “and you look like a good fighter. You married?”
The grief was almost as fresh now as it had been four years ago. “No,” he said.
“Then you might be welcome to join us if you decide not to go back south again.”
“After I find my son, I may take you up on your offer.”
“My name’s Claude Delacroix. Find the old town of Melford and wait by the bridge over the creek. Someone’ll find you and bring you to the compound.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Garret pulled free, firmly but politely. “If you can keep your men away, I’d appreciate it.”
“Will do.” Delacroix gestured to his crew, cast Garret another assessing look and followed them.
Well aware that the militiamen were watching every move he made, Garret crouched by the net. The Opir woman’s pale skin was striped everywhere with narrow lacerations, her jacket and pants were little more than scraps of fabric held together by a few threads, and the hand tucked half under her chest was blistered and red. Her hair, a rich shade of ivory, was just long enough to cover her face.
No matter what she was or what she might have done, Garret thought, she didn’t deserve this.
“Listen to me,” he said, leaning as close to the net as he dared. “I can help you get out of here, but you’ll have to do exactly as I say.”
Slowly she lifted her head. Her eyes were dark amethyst, unexpectedly and extraordinarily beautiful. Her body was slender, her face delicate and fine-boned, but there was nothing weak in either. The defiance in her eyes told him that anyone who made the mistake of thinking her fragile would quickly regret their assumption.
“I heard what was said,” she said. “You are lying.”
The misery in her voice cut straight through Garret like the razor wires that cut her body. “Where I come from,” he said, “we don’t leave people to be tortured to death.”
“People?” she said with a brief, hoarse laugh. “Is that what you think I am, human? A person?”
“They obviously don’t think so,” he said, tilting his head toward the militiamen.
“You wish to interrogate me, but I have nothing to tell you.”
“Do you live in this area?”
Her full lips remained stubbornly closed.
“You don’t know anything about a pack of rogues with a human child?” Garret asked.
“No.”
“I know his kidnappers came this way, but I lost their trail. You must have sensed them.”
“I did not.”
“Where is the rest of your pack?”
“I have no pack.” She coughed, turning her face away. “If you have any of your supposed human mercy in you, let me have the quick death the other humans will never give me.”
“Is that what you want?” he asked. “To die?”
“I cannot help you. Why would you offer me any other alternative?”
He glanced over the top of the net. The militiamen were muttering among themselves. Garret’s five minutes were almost up.
“You have two choices,” he said. “Trust me, or force me to hand you over to them. And I don’t want your death on my conscience.”
She tried to brush her hair out of her face, but the movement cracked the burned skin of her hand, and her expressive eyes blurred with pain. “What do you want me to do?”
“What’s your name?”
“If it matters... Artemis.”
He showed her the shock stick. “Artemis, you’ll have to pretend I’m using this on you. Be convincing. I’ll flip the net back. You come out, grab me and drag me into the woods.”
“You believe I will not kill you?” she asked with obvious astonishment.
“Will you?”
“They will shoot both of us.”
“It’s possible. But I think I’ve persuaded them to believe that I’m one of them.”
“Yes. You are human.”
Garret held her gaze. “I hope you’ll choose to live.”
With another quick glance at the militiamen, Garret raised his voice in a harsh question and pretended to jab the stick into the net. The Opir woman began to convulse very convincingly, and as she did Garret grabbed two of the weights with his gloved hands and flung the net back over itself, leaving a narrow gap at the bottom.
Artemis was injured and in great discomfort, but she moved very fast, scrambling out from under the net, grabbing him by the shoulders and half dragging him toward the woods. He dropped the shock stick. Sunlight struck her, and she swallowed a cry. The weakness of her grip told Garret that she wouldn’t be able to keep up the pretense for long, so he made a show of helplessness, struggling as if she had complete control of him.
A bullet whizzed past his ear when they were still a few yards from the woods’ edge. Garret shouted and raised one hand in a plea as the woman continued to tug at him, her fingers beginning to slip from his coat.
“A little farther,” Garret said. “Once we’re inside the woods, run.”
Artemis stumbled, and Garret twisted to push her toward the trees. The militiamen were jogging after them now, deadly silent and ready to shoot. Garret and the Freeblood reached the shade, and she staggered, her breath sawing in her throat.
“Go!” Garret said.
“They’ll kill you,” she said hoarsely, refusing to move.
“For being an idiot and allowing you to escape? I don’t think so.”
She didn’t have time to answer, because the men were almost on top of them. Artemis grabbed him around the neck and dragged him deeper into the shadows. He could have escaped easily, but he played along, gasping for air and digging his heels into the dirt.
“Come no closer!” she shouted. “I will kill him!”
Chapter 2 (#ulink_6ec795e3-2833-5cb4-a04b-75c699c7f002)
The militiamen slowed to a walk. Delacroix signaled a halt. He met Garret’s gaze.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I can’t let her escape.” He lifted his rifle and aimed at the center of the woman’s forehead.
“She knows where my son is!” Garret rasped. “Let her go, please!”
Delacroix hesitated. “Your son is no more important than the people this bloodsucker will kill.”
“I will release him if you give me five more minutes before you follow me,” Artemis said.
Bending his head toward the man next to him, Delacroix spoke in a low voice, listened to his comrades and nodded.
“Five minutes,” he said, checking his watch.
Without warning, Artemis released Garret, pushing him toward the men, and sprang into a run. Almost immediately the militiamen started after her.
“Wait,” Garret said. “I thought you said—”
Delacroix signaled a halt. “You think we’d keep a promise to one of them?” he asked. “Don’t you want the info you say she has?”
“Yes, of course,” Garret said, rubbing his throat as he got to his feet. “But if you go into those woods after her, she’ll have the advantage.”
Two of the men aimed their rifles at him. “Who are you?” Delacroix asked again.
“A former serf from the Citadel of Erebus,” Garret said. “Do you know what that’s like? Any of you?”
The men exchanged glances. One lowered his gaze. Another spat.
“This is my fault,” Garret said. “Give me one of your weapons and I’ll get her myself.”
“She’ll have even more of an advantage over one hunter,” Delacroix said. “Why aren’t you carrying a gun?”
The VS seemed to burn a hole through Garret’s pack and into his coat. “I had one,” he began, “but—”
“Take off your pack,” Delacroix said.
“Why?”
“You’re hiding something, and I want to know what it is.”
Garret lunged at Delacroix, grabbed the man’s rifle in both hands, yanked it away and slammed the butt into the leader’s face. Without slowing, he struck the next man in the neck and then reversed the rifle.
Two of the others began to shoot, but Garret had already moved out of their path. He shot one of the men in the hand, forcing him to drop his rifle. The youngest one yelled and charged at Garret wildly. His heedless rage gave Garret the chance to kick the weapon out of the boy’s grip before he could pull the trigger.
But another rifleman and the one he’d struck in the neck were almost on top of him. Someone flashed by him, a small figure who took the two men down so quickly that Garret couldn’t see how she’d done it. He didn’t take time to think it over. Shrugging out of his pack, he uncoiled the rope hanging from the metal frame and cut it into five lengths. By the time he turned back, all the militiamen were on the ground—alive, but weaponless and either unconscious or disabled.
He met Artemis’s gaze briefly and knelt beside Delacroix, who was moaning as he began to wake up. Garret rolled him over and tied his hands securely. The Opir woman helped him with the other men, her face and body shielded by an oversize hooded daycoat that was thick enough to protect her from the worst of the sun. She wore equally heavy gloves. Garret could only assume that she had kept the day clothes close by in case she was caught out of the woods after dawn.
He checked on each of the men when he was finished. Two of them were already struggling and cursing, while Delacroix and his second-in-command were bleary-eyed and disoriented. The youngest glared at Garret with undisguised hatred.
“Listen to me,” Garret said, crouching in front of him. “I’m going to set you free. You go back to your colony and tell them to come fetch their people.”
The boy pulled hard against the ropes around his wrists. “You gonna leave them out here for the rogues to eat?” he demanded.
Garret glanced at Artemis. “Are there any other Opiri in the area?” he asked.
“No.”
“You believe her?” the boy said, his face twisted in amazement.
“No Opiri are going to attack you in sunlight. Your people should be able to return with plenty of time to spare before dark.”
“Traitor!” the boy spat, tears running down his cheeks. “We’ll hunt you down.”
Garret moved behind the boy and cut through the ropes. “Take your pack,” he said, “and go.”
For a moment he thought the boy would stay and try to fight, but even he had enough sense to realize he didn’t have a chance. He grabbed the pack and ran off, his pace much too fast to maintain for more than a few minutes.
“You will pay for this,” Delacroix said, his words a little slurred. “We kill sucker-lovers around here.”
Garret ignored him. He gathered up the weapons and backed away until he was in the woods again. Artemis went with him. He noticed that she was carrying a bow in one hand and a quiver full of arrows in the other.
“Thank you,” Garret said roughly, trying to adjust the rifles’ straps so that he could carry them all at once to a place where the militiamen wouldn’t find them. “You can go.”
“You saved my life at the risk of your own,” Artemis said, her eyes reflecting crimson under the hood of her coat.
“I told you—”
“That you would not leave someone to be tortured,” she said. “But I still do not understand why you would turn against your own kind to help one of mine.”
Anger and grief clogged Garret’s throat and tore at his heart. “I knew an Opir who did the same for us.”
Her brows drew down and her lips parted as if she were about to ask how such a thing could be possible.
And then she collapsed.
* * *
Artemis woke to pain. Tiny filaments of agony circled her limbs and waist, her chest and neck. And her hands...
“Easy,” the human said as she tried to sit up. He eased her back down to the bed of fallen leaves on which she’d been lying.
Instinctively she resisted, irrational panic flooding her body. But he refused to let her up, and she realized that he was strong enough to impose his will.
Human or not, he was dangerous. She had seen him fight. He moved almost as fast as an Opir.
“You’re already healing,” he said, his brows knitting in a frown, “but if you push yourself, you’ll slow it down. We don’t want to stay here any longer than we have to.”
She disregarded the “we” and compelled herself to relax. “Where are the men?” she asked, casting about for their rank scents.
“It’s only been a few hours.” He glanced over his shoulder, and for the first time Artemis saw that they were far into the forest under a thick canopy of cottonwoods, protected on two sides by boulders that stood beside a small creek. She realized that she was wearing unfamiliar clothes that were much too large for her, carrying the oddly pleasant smell of the human who had saved her. Her daycoat and gloves lay neatly folded within reach; her knives, bow and quiver were farther away. It would take some effort to get them.
She might have just enough strength to surprise the human, grab her things and run.
“You don’t have to be afraid of me,” the man said, his eyes tracking her gaze.
“I am not afraid of you...human.”
“My name is Garret Fox,” he said, seemingly indifferent to her mockery.
“There is no need for you to stay,” she said. “It would be best if you did not.”
“Why? Are you planning on attacking me when my back is turned?”
The question seemed hostile, but his face was impassive. Too impassive to be credible. “If you believed that,” she said, “you would never have brought me here.”
“That’s right,” he said, dropping back into a crouch. “Saving my life just to kill me wouldn’t make much sense.”
She began to formulate an answer, but all at once she found herself lost in the extraordinary green of his eyes, like the moss clinging to the sides of the boulders. His dark red hair brushed the back of his collar, as if he hadn’t cut it in some time, and there was a shadow of darker hair on his jaw and upper lip. His features were strong but not coarse, his mouth mobile but decisive.
By human standards he was very attractive. And Opiri appreciated human beauty well enough to seek out serfs that bore the same qualities this man exemplified, such as his lean, fit body, broad shoulders and easy grace.
Artemis had never owned such a serf. She had never owned a serf at all, though she had been strong enough to stake out her own Household in Oceanus, if that had been her intent.
Now, in a haze of pain and caught in the snare of this human’s gaze, she wondered what it would have been like to own a man like this. What it might have been like if he were her Favorite, and they—
The man jerked away, and she realized that she had been touching his hand with her raw fingertips. His reaction had been so violent that she expected to see distaste on his face, but there was only confusion, as if he had been taken unaware by more than just the touch itself.
Artemis, too, was bewildered. Her fingertips tingled, and a series of small shocks ran through her arms and deep into the core of her body. Physical sensations she hadn’t experienced in many, many years.
And through that touch she felt something else. Something that she thought she’d been rid of for a very long time. An emotional aura flared briefly around Garret Fox, as red as his hair, fed by all the anger and passion his expression concealed.
The aura vanished quickly, but her shock lingered. The ability she had worked so hard to erase—the ability to sense and feel the emotions of others—had returned with a vengeance, and a human had reawakened it.
But how could that be possible, when her brief dealings with her own kind since her exile had had no effect at all?
Fight it, she told herself. If it takes hold again...
“Lie still,” Garret said, as if nothing had happened. “And keep that hand covered.”
She lifted her chin, hoping that he hadn’t noticed her bewilderment. “I am not accustomed to taking orders from your kind.”
“Call it a suggestion, then.” He cocked his head. “Why did you come back for me?”
“Do I not owe you my life?”
“Most of your kind wouldn’t feel bound by a debt to a human.”
“You said another Opir had helped you.”
Artemis could hear the steady rhythm of his heartbeat break and then resume at a slightly faster pace. “She was a remarkable person,” he said.
She. “What was her name?” Artemis said, trying and failing to control her curiosity.
“Roxana.” He shifted his weight and looked away. “Which Citadel did you come from?”
“Why does it matter?” she asked. “Do you plan to interrogate me now, where you will not be interrupted by my untimely death?”
“You are an exile, aren’t you?”
She wondered why he had chosen that word when he might as easily have called her a “rogue bloodsucker.” It was how he had spoken of her to the other humans. And how most humans thought of Freebloods, or Opiri in general.
Opiri. Nightsiders. Vampires.
“What else would I be?” she asked.
Her supposedly rhetorical question provoked a raised eyebrow and a keen look. She knew what was going through his mind: the same thing that was going through hers, but in reverse.
Both sides in the ongoing conflict between humans and Opiri had scouts and spies in the vast, supposedly uninhabited areas between human and Opir settlements, usually known as “Zones.” Most of the human colonies’ scouts and agents were mixed-breed Opiri, called dhampires. But a few pure-blood humans were skilled enough to survive in the Zones, even against Nightsider opponents.
Garret could easily be one such human. But he was too far from the nearest human Enclave to be one of their scouts, and she would bet her life—again—that he didn’t work for any of the militias.
“I am not an operative for any Citadel,” she said, answering his unfinished question.
“I believe you,” he said. “You were alone when those men found you?”
“I told you I was.”
“You also said you knew nothing about a human boy in this area.”
“I do not.” She hesitated. “This boy is your son?”
“Timon,” he said.
“I am sorry,” she said, realizing that she truly meant it. “I would help you if I could.”
He met her gaze. “You can.”
Alarmed by thoughts of what he might ask of her, she forgot her pain. “I am leaving,” she said, propping herself up on her elbows. “Do not try to stop me.”
“You aren’t going anywhere,” he said, getting to his feet.
“I may be injured,” she said, “but you appear to be unarmed except for a hunting knife, and even now I am stronger than any human.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it. Sit down, before you—”
Artemis climbed to her knees. Agony like a spear of sunlight drilled into her skull. Her mouth was dry, though she suspected that Garret must have given her water. She swayed, and all at once he was beside her, supporting her, holding her. He was warm and solid, and she could hear the steady beat of his pulse, the throbbing of his blood in his veins. The shock she had experienced earlier returned with his touch, a raw electric current that attacked her mind and body as if she had literally been struck by lightning.
“I said you weren’t going anywhere,” he said, gripping her more tightly when she tried to jerk away. He eased her down to the ground. “You’ll need blood or you won’t fully recover.”
His matter-of-fact statement gave her a very different kind of shock. Humans didn’t despise Opiri only because of their attempt to conquer the world but also because the very idea of feeding on blood was an abomination to their kind.
He did not offer you his blood, she thought wryly. But where else did he think she would get it, in her condition?
“Wherever you lived,” she said, “it must be very unlike the human compounds in this area.”
He pulled his pack close so that he could reach inside, and she caught a glimpse of a rifle stock, a kind she didn’t recognize. It wasn’t one of the weapons he’d gathered from the militiamen, then hidden. Apparently he wasn’t unarmed, after all.
“I assume the local militias kill every Nightsider they find,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “They consider it their divine purpose to hunt down as many Opiri as possible. Do you find that strange?”
“The militia compounds see packs of vicious predators, and the rogues only a source of food. An eye for an eye.”
Now she heard in his voice what she’d sensed in his mind and seen in his aura: simmering anger fed by a deep fear that was not for himself.
Don’t think about his feelings, she reminded herself. Don’t let them get inside you again.
But she knew it wasn’t that simple. Her shields had fallen, and she had to build them back up again. As quickly as possible.
“What was it that your famous peacemaker once said?” she asked, forcing herself to remain calm. “‘An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.’”
His laugh reflected his obvious surprise at her knowledge of human philosophers. “Very clever,” he said. “Most Opiri don’t have much interest in human wisdom. Are you one of those rare Nightsiders who see humans as more than barbarians, killers like the militiamen or potential serfs?”
“How else should I regard them?”
“Forgive me for my foolish question. Tell me—why don’t you live with other exiles?”
“It is not in the nature of Freebloods to live in packs,” she said.
He searched through his pack, and the scent of his skin—his blood—drifted toward her. “Not in the Citadels,” he said.
“And how do you know so much about our lives inside the Citadels?”
“Inside the Citadels or out,” he said, “Freebloods spend most of their time struggling constantly for dominance, so they can build Households of their own. That’s the entire basis for their existence.”
“It is not the basis for my existence,” she said.
“Because you don’t want to fight?” He withdrew a wrapped object from his pack. “Somehow, I don’t think you live apart because you’re afraid of being killed by your own kind.”
“I am not.”
“Then there’s something else about your fellow Freebloods that you don’t like. Do you hunt humans?”
The direct question startled her. “No,” she said, without thinking.
“That would explain it, then.” He opened the package to reveal several strips of dried meat, and Artemis’s stomach clenched with hunger. “I knew you were different when I first met you.”
“How would you know that?”
“Instinct.”
The same kind of instinct, she wondered, that had made her trust him so quickly? “And if you had determined that I was like every other Freeblood,” she asked, “would you have let me die?”
His very green eyes met hers. “But you aren’t,” he said. “I’ve met Opiri who didn’t believe in living on human blood on principle, and others who just didn’t believe in taking it by force. Which type are you?”
He spoke, Artemis thought, as if he had engaged in long, philosophical discussions with other Opiri, and that idea was flatly ridiculous. Wasn’t it?
“Many Freeblood exiles do not know how to live without human blood,” she said. “But most do not kill.”
Garret offered her a piece of jerky. “Too bad the ones who don’t kill can’t—or won’t—stop the ones who do.”
She pushed the offered food away. “Are you so certain they have not tried?”
“Have you?” he said, searching her eyes.
“I want what is best for my—” She broke off and took a deep breath. She had no reason to tell him what she had attempted and failed to achieve in Oceanus. He would never believe it was possible.
“You hate us, just like the militiamen do,” she said, covering her confusion with anger.
“Us is a very big word,” he said. “I don’t hate you.”
He was right, she realized. She couldn’t sense any personal hostility from him. To the contrary, he was intrigued by her, genuinely interested in knowing more about her life. She was afraid to look any further.
“I am still a Freeblood,” she said.
“But you’re no rogue,” he said, setting the knife down on a flat rock beside him.
She was almost tempted to let him go on thinking that she was superior to her own people. Different, as he claimed. She found that she wanted his good opinion.
But if she let herself believe that she was better than the rest, she would betray her own principles. Freebloods only needed to be shown, guided, by one who had seen a little way beyond the bars of the prison they so blindly accepted as the limit of their lives.
Guided not by emotion, but by rationality. She didn’t need her unwanted empathic ability to tell her that Garret was controlling feelings that might have paralyzed him if he set them free. In that, they were frighteningly alike.
“Where do you come from?” she asked. “From all you have said, it cannot be anything like the local compounds.”
“I live alone.”
“Without the protection of your own kind?” she asked. “Is that how you lost your son?”
Her cruel question had been meant to provoke an unguarded response—any response that would help her understand him—but all it did was open her mind to the ache of his sadness.
“It is my fault,” Garret said quietly.
The red aura flared around him again, and Artemis covered her face. It made no difference. She wasn’t seeing it with her eyes but with her heart. And now all she could feel was his pain, his sorrow, his terrible sense of loss.
She had known loss, too. But nothing like this. Not since she had been human herself.
“I am sorry,” she said, dropping her hands from her face. “Have I convinced you that I know nothing of this abduction?”
Staring at the dried strip of meat he still held in one hand, he gave a ragged sigh. “Yes,” he said.
His simple answer almost made her doubt his honesty. But the “talent” she’d tried to bury insisted otherwise.
If she was wrong...
A fresh stab of hunger caught her unaware, and she sank back to the ground with a gasp. Garret set down his scanty meal and leaned over her.
“You’ve spent too much time talking and not enough resting,” he said.
“And whose fault is that?” she whispered.
“I should have been more careful.”
She did her best not to notice the concern in his voice, his worried frown, the compassion he should not feel for one like her. Whoever and whatever he was, son or no son, she had to get away from him. The temptation to feed was terrifyingly strong in the wake of her injuries. If she should hurt him...
“You should continue your search,” she said, turning her face away, “and I must return to my shelter to collect my things and move on before the other humans find me.”
He ran his hand up and down his left sleeve. “Your physical state is obviously deteriorating. How far do you expect to get this time?”
“Far enough.”
“And then?”
Shivering with animal desires she could barely contain, Artemis moved to gather her things. “I am going. Do not follow me.”
“It won’t work.” His footsteps were almost silent as he moved behind her. “In a few minutes you’re going to collapse.”
“Then what do you suggest?” she asked, spinning to face him. “I see no other—”
“I obviously didn’t make myself clear,” he said. He pushed up his left sleeve. “I’m offering an alternative.”
Chapter 3 (#ulink_3fd96b79-a13f-56d5-b72f-f214cb0141ad)
His meaning was terrifyingly clear, and suddenly Artemis was furious—at her own helplessness; at his inexplicable generosity, in spite of his valid reasons for despising her kind; at a world that had created such a bizarre set of impossible circumstances. Her mind and emotions and physical senses reacted all at once, making her excruciatingly aware of the body she had so admired.
Even thinking of taking his blood aroused not just her hunger for nourishment but for other things, as well. Her imagination began to spin scenarios that could never be. Her empathic talent burned more brightly—extending fingers of amethyst light, her light, toward Garret—and he began to breathe more heavily.
Vivid images sprang into her mind: lying beside Garret, naked in his arms as she sank her teeth into his neck; moaning in pleasure as the blood flowed over her tongue and he guided her down on top of him; urgency building as her hunger exploded into an unbearable need to feel him inside her, giving as she took, taking as she gave...
She came back to herself, her body hot and throbbing, to find him looking at her with that steady gaze, his eyes so clear that she could see every shadow passing beneath the surface. No pain now, no anger, no sorrow. Only need. And desire.
Desire for a Freeblood. For her. She looked from Garret’s hungry eyes down to his broad chest and lean waist, and then below, where the evidence of his response was so readily apparent.
And she was responsible. She had to put an end to it.
“How can you do this?” she asked. “How can you bear to let an Opir take your blood? Is it because of this Roxana?”
“I’ve done it before,” he said, his hunger still burning in her mind. “I have no reason to fear it.”
She wondered again where he’d come from. He hadn’t always been alone, not with such a casual attitude about donation. But if he had ever lived among Opiri...
“If I take your blood,” she said, “what do you expect in return?”
“Your help in finding my son.”
His blunt response took her aback. She felt the completely unexpected and irrational disappointment of realizing that he was being generous only because he wanted something from her. Something he had probably wanted from the very beginning.
If she gave in now, she would be throwing away the very principles she had worked so hard to establish since her exile.
“I cannot accept,” she said. “I must go.”
Garret’s expression changed again, as if he were waking from a deep sleep and had forgotten where he was. His aura folded in on itself and vanished. He rolled down his sleeve, returned to his pack and began to shift things inside it, clearly pretending to keep himself busy so that he wouldn’t have to deal with her. She watched him, her muscles frozen, knowing she would never see him again.
“I will lay a false trail,” she said, pulling on her daycoat with clumsy hands. “If the humans do find our tracks, they will follow mine. I’m sure they would far rather kill me than you, traitor though they may name you.” She stumbled a little as she took up her bow. “As your own people say, good luck.”
An instant later she was running...throwing all her energy into every step, hoping that the initial burst of speed would carry her beyond his reach before she lost her breath. She knew it was time to abandon the area completely, and not only because of Garret. She had to get away from the possibility of any human or Opir contact, and lose herself in a place so remote that not even the most desperate Freeblood exiles would claim it.
True to her word, she laid a false trail, though it took a good deal more of her energy than she could afford. When she reached her temporary shelter, a small cave in the side of a hill, she gathered up her few possessions and left as quickly as she could, dizzy but still able to maintain a regular pace.
Every step carried her farther and farther away from the human who had inexplicably saved her life, then turned it upside down. Her heart seemed to drag several feet behind her.
By the time she left the woods a few hours later and reached the narrow path that paralleled the old northbound Interstate 5, a cold, driving rain had begun to fall. Normally it would not have bothered her; Opiri had lower body temperatures than humans, but their efficient metabolisms and greater strength enabled them to bear adverse conditions for longer periods.
But her energy was draining away a little more with every hour that passed. Hunger gnawed at her constantly. The weather didn’t make her attempt to find game any easier, and she soon discovered that something had frightened away most of the local wildlife...a situation that might suggest an Opir pack in the area. She needed to avoid such packs at all costs.
As sunset approached, she sat down on a boulder under a stand of pines at the edge of a wide meadow and simply waited. The light began to fade. Nocturnal creatures would soon be venturing from their dens and hiding places, giving her another chance. Whatever came, she would have no choice but to take it.
Something large moved through the undergrowth on the other side of the meadow, an animal powerful enough to disregard any need for stealth.
A bear and her half-grown cubs emerged from the trees. The sow rose up on her hind legs, nostrils flaring, while the cubs tumbled about and cuffed each other in play.
Artemis caught her breath. She had seen plenty of bears before, but something in the scene touched her in a way she hadn’t expected.
She rose slowly, careful not to attract the bears’ attention, and prepared to set off again, feeling as if she had become detached from her body. Pebbles rolled on the ground behind her. She spun around, lost her balance, and then righted herself as she belatedly grabbed at the waterproof case of her bow.
Garret was standing a few feet from the boulder. He had thrown back the hood of his coat, and his wet auburn hair had darkened to a deep brown. His strong face seemed sculpted out of the rain itself, but he seemed no more disturbed by the weather than the bears were.
What disturbed Artemis was that he had approached almost as silently as an Opir. Once again she was surprised at his skill. Surprised—and furious that she had been caught off guard.
The only thing she had to be grateful for was that she perceived him only through her physical senses, not her mental ones. There was no aura to distract her.
Is that truly all you have to be thankful for? an inner voice demanded.
“What are you doing here?” she asked aloud. “Were you following me?”
“Did you finish your hunt?” he asked.
“Leave,” she said, taking an aggressive step toward him. “Leave this place, before I must force you to go.”
He looked her up and down with those keen eyes. “Why are you so afraid?” he asked softly as the rain continued to pelt down on his head and shoulders. “Is the prospect of helping me find a lost child so repugnant to you?”
A human child, she wanted to cry out. Why should I care?
But how could she lie to him, and to herself?
“You would ask me to hunt my own people,” she said.
“They’re barely ‘your people’ at all.”
“But they are. And I believe they have a chance at a better future than what they face in the Citadels or as exiles.”
He arched a brow. “You didn’t mention this before.”
“Why should you listen?”
“What does this ‘better future’ involve, Artemis? Teaching the rogues to follow your example and refuse to take human blood? Convincing them that humans aren’t animals, aren’t just another form of prey? How would they consider that an improvement on their lives now?”
She shook her head sharply. “There is so much you cannot possibly understand.”
“I understand that you follow an ethical code of conduct that stretches to include humans, and that you live alone because you won’t share your life with barbaric killers.”
“I will not debate this with you,” she said, knowing that she’d made a mistake in bringing her philosophy into the argument. “If our positions were reversed,” she said, “would you lead me to humans I might choose to kill?”
“When did I say that I planned to kill anyone?”
“You have made your feelings about Freebloods very clear,” she said, “and you will not hesitate to use any means to save your son.”
“You’re right,” he said, matching the challenge in her voice. “But I’m not seeking revenge. If I can get Timon safely back without resorting to violence—” He broke off and took a deep breath, his gaze shifting to a point somewhere behind her.
She glanced over her shoulder. The bear had obviously seen them and had reared up again. Her formidable teeth flashed in her brown muzzle.
“Is that what you were hunting?” Garret asked.
Artemis licked the moisture from her lips. “I had no plans to attack them,” she said, grasping eagerly at the change of subject.
“But you haven’t found anything else.”
“That is not your concern.”
Garret set his pack down against the boulder. “I think you need my help,” he said.
Growing sick with hunger and the scent of the blood pumping beneath his skin, Artemis stopped herself from falling against the boulder by a sheer act of will. “You cannot help me,” she said.
“Do you object to taking human blood, even if it’s freely given?”
“Freely given—at a price,” she whispered.
“You live in the wilds. I’m well trained, but you’re faster and have keener senses than I do. Even if you won’t come with me, you can point me in the right direction. That’s all I ask.”
His voice began to fade in and out, the sound replaced by a thrumming behind her ears. She tried to convince herself to hold to her convictions, her vow never to take human blood again.
But philosophy would always fail when survival was at stake.
“Come with me,” he said, holding out his hand.
No longer able to resist, she stumbled toward him. He picked up his pack and kept just ahead of her, leading her under the shelter of a stand of close-growing alders. Without quite knowing how she got there, she found herself on the damp ground beside him.
Garret removed his coat and then his shirt, neatly folding both garments and laying them across his pack. Her head began to pound, and she found herself staring at the muscles of his shoulders, arms and chest—an ideal image of human masculinity. There was nothing vulgar in the way he displayed himself, but she felt need pulsing not only in her belly but also between her thighs.
As she struggled with growing delirium, he removed a rubber cord from his pack, tied it around his arm above his biceps and flexed his hand into a fist, raising the veins in his wrist. His forearm was corded with muscle, the kind achieved only through hard manual labor.
But then she looked up at his face and noticed the pulse beating in his neck. Her mouth watered. She knew that he was no serf to be taken by the throat, though the desire to bare her own body, press it against his and sink her teeth into his neck was nearly more than she could endure. She looked at his mouth, the lips slightly parted, and wondered what it would be like to kiss him.
She hadn’t kissed anyone in over a century.
“Are you certain...this is what you wish?” she asked, her voice raw with thirst.
He didn’t seem to hear her. He ran his finger along the length of the most prominent vein in his arm and met her gaze.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
A thread of sickness coiled through her belly like a parasitic worm. “I should not—”
“Are you afraid you’ll hurt me? I promise that won’t happen.”
She licked her lips. “I can’t.”
Garret held her gaze. “You’re afraid of losing control, aren’t you? Whatever you think you might do, I’m prepared for it.”
“Perhaps... I am not.”
“You’ve run out of options, Artemis. Take my blood—or die.”
His words were more than merely a warning. They were certainty, and Artemis knew he was right. It was a kind of blackmail, but he must know that in her desperation she might still overpower him and take what she needed.
He trusted her.
One time, she told herself. Then she would be strong again, and she would have learned from her mistakes.
Unable to fight her instincts, she grabbed his arm just below the elbow and bit into his wrist, barely remembering to temper the force of the bite before her teeth pierced his skin. He didn’t so much as flinch, nor did he look away.
As his blood flowed over her tongue, Artemis felt something quite extraordinary. It wasn’t at all like taking blood from the Citadel’s public serfs, provided to Freebloods solely for the purpose of keeping them alive...barely. Nor was it similar to the times she had been compelled to feed from humans before and during the War, before the establishment of the Citadels.
That had been necessity. This was a far more intimate act, not merely a bargaining chip.
Intimate. That was the word, the sensation, the emotion, that overwhelmed her. Her body grew warm with the rush of vital nourishment and the headiness of lust.
Only after she was sated did she dare to look up. Garret’s aura was alive, a scarlet halo visible only to her mind. His eyes were like faceted emeralds, cool and hot all at once. His chest rose and fell quickly, and she could smell a distinctive change in his earthy, masculine scent.
Lust. It was happening again...his emotions were invading her mind, feeding her desire as hers fed his in an endless cycle.
Bending to his arm again, she sealed the wound. Her tongue lingered on his skin, tracing a line down to his palm. He made a sound deep in his throat, and she felt herself being pulled toward him. Her heart seemed ready to leap from her chest into his. She closed her eyes and pressed herself against him, her breasts exquisitely tender. He adjusted her to straddle him, and she could feel his hardness thrusting against her through his camouflage pants.
Then he turned his face aside, pushed her away and jumped to his feet. She did the same, trembling when she should have been at her strongest, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
Wrong, she thought, all wrong. Garret had knocked her so far off balance that she wasn’t sure she would ever find her footing again.
“That should be enough to help you finish healing,” he said, reaching for his shirt as if nothing had happened. “But we’ll need to move soon.”
“We.” For a moment, she had almost forgotten.
This was a bargain. Now she had to fulfill her part of it.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_80409491-5dc9-544a-9515-b7935831afc1)
Artemis’s lovely face turned utterly cold.
Garret wasn’t surprised. She justifiably believed that she’d been blackmailed into helping him. She’d taken his blood only because she knew she had no other choice, and he would have done nearly anything to get her help.
But he also knew that she had been struggling ever since he’d rescued her...struggling with the same impulses and emotions he’d been feeling almost from the moment of their first meeting. Emotions most Nightsiders denied, believing them to be the bane of inferior humanity.
Yet when she’d taken his blood, he had experienced the kind of intense physical attraction he hadn’t felt since Roxana’s death. He’d been painfully aware of Artemis’s petite but generously curved body, the quickness of her breathing, the deep mystery of her dark eyes. He had held her against him, feeling the heat of her arousal matching his, imagining her soft moans as he stroked her naked skin...
He cut off the thoughts before they could carry him into dangerous waters. In the end, he’d rejected his own lust. As the leader of Erebus’s human Underground, he had always striven to be disciplined, watchful and patient. Roxana had made it almost easy.
Artemis didn’t. What was it about her that stirred his body and soul to such an inexplicable degree? Knowing that she was different from other Freeblood rogues couldn’t account for this strong, almost uncontrollable reaction. What had started out as a compulsion to save an intelligent being from an act of barbarism had quickly evolved into something else, something he didn’t want any more than she did.
If he were making the decision only for himself, he would go his own way and let her go hers. It would be far better for both of them.
But Timon came first. His well-being was a thousand times more important than the relief of any small discomfort his father might experience along the way. No price was too high.
He had to gain Artemis’s trust and keep it. Until Timon was safe.
“I’m sorry,” he said, grabbing his coat. “I should have remembered that we’ll both need to recover before we move on.” He pulled on the coat and zipped it up with slightly numb fingers, aware that he had begun to tremble from loss of blood. The ground seemed to tilt toward him. He’d forgotten what it was like to give so much blood at one time.
“Are you ill?” Artemis asked, a little of the coldness leaving her eyes.
“Nothing that an hour of rest won’t cure,” he said. “And if you move too fast after taking so much blood, you’re likely to have problems yourself.”
She studied him with a frown. “I am in no danger,” she said. “But I see that you are not steady enough to travel. You had better sit down.”
With a brief nod of acknowledgment, Garret slid to the base of the tree and leaned his head back against the trunk, grateful that they’d independently made the decision not to mention what had happened during the blood-taking.
“I don’t expect you to stand guard for both of us,” he said. “Wake me if I start to drift off.”
Artemis chose a tree a little distance away and sat beneath it, holding herself erect and alert. “You are a strange human,” she said.
“I thought you’d reached that conclusion when we first met,” he said, closing his eyes.
“I know why you saved my life and shared your blood, or at least why you claim you did. What I do not understand is why you are so willing to reveal weakness.”
Garret wondered if she was trying to make him angry. She didn’t know him well enough to realize that he’d been through far too much to let pride influence his actions.
“I’ve already put my life in your hands many times over,” he said. “If I didn’t trust you—”
“No,” she interrupted. “I have always heard that free human males believe themselves to be stronger than females in every way, and will do anything to avoid revealing any physical or mental impairment before one of the opposite sex.”
Garret opened one eye a crack. “How do you know?”
“It is common knowledge.”
“The same way it’s common knowledge among humans that all Nightsiders are vicious killers?” He laughed shortly. “Not all human males feel the need to prove that they’re invulnerable.”
Artemis reached for her own small pack and unhooked her canteen. “It would be foolish to attempt it with a female Opir.”
“I’d like to think I’m not a fool,” Garret said.
“Would you have begged for my help, if I had been unwilling to give it?”
“Would that have made you feel better?”
“It would only have proven how much you wish to find your son.”
“Then you have no more interest in having power over me than I do in having it over you. Which makes you exactly what I judged you to be.”
“I still do not accept your ‘judgment.’”
Garret rolled his head to observe the bears, who had apparently determined that the human and Nightsider were no threat and resumed their search for food. “Why didn’t you go after them when you needed blood?” he asked. “It wasn’t fear that stopped you, was it?”
“I was not afraid,” she said, indignation in her voice.
“But something about them made you hesitate.” He straightened, wishing he could sleep but determined to keep Artemis engaged. “They are a family.”
She shrugged, though he could see that he had struck true. “Many creatures belong to what you call ‘families,’” she said. “I cannot spare all of them.”
“Do you know how long the female black bear protects her cubs?”
“I am not ignorant about the behavior of the creatures that live in the wild.”
“One and a half years,” Garret said. “These cubs are less than a year old. They’ll go into torpor with her pretty soon, and then they’ll be with her through the spring. No one can fault a bear’s skill at parenting.” He met Artemis’s gaze. “When were you converted?”
“What has that to do with—”
“Did you have children?”
Her body stiffened. “I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember, or have you chosen to forget?”
“Even humans leave the past behind,” she said.
“We try,” he said, thinking of Roxana. His throat felt thick and full. “Do you remember what love is?”
“I...”
Garret unfastened his coat’s padded chest pocket, withdrawing the battered photograph in its transparent envelope.
“This is Timon,” he said. He rose and reached out to hand her the picture, and she accepted it with obvious reluctance. It had been taken before Roxana’s death; Timon was smiling, a ball in his hands, and his best friend and cousin, Alessa, at his side. With his red hair and violet-gray eyes, Timon looked human.
There was softness in Artemis’s face as she gazed at the picture, a softness that Garret had glimpsed only once or twice when she was at her most unguarded. Now she touched the picture with the tip of her finger, her lips curving in something like a smile.
“This picture was taken in a time of peace,” she said. “Who is the other child?”
“Her name is Alessa. She’s the daughter of my sister Alexia and her husband, Damon.” He tucked the photo back into his pocket. “Alexia is half Opir. A dhampir.”
Artemis stared at him. “Your father was a—”
“We had different fathers. I assure you, I’m fully human.”
“But your sister—”
“Was born in the Enclave of San Francisco, after our mother found refuge there. She married a human in the Enclave, and I was the result.”
Wrapping her arms around her chest, Artemis looked away. “I know...” she began. “I know it is an ugly thing, what our males did to your females during the War.”
“It wasn’t my intention to bring up the time before the Armistice,” Garret said, regretting his slip.
“But surely Alexia was an agent for the Enclave, like all those of mixed blood.”
“She left that life long ago. All I want for Timon is the freedom to live as he chooses, when he’s old enough to make that decision. I’d hoped this would help you to understand.”
“I always understood,” she said in a near whisper.
“Then help me track the rogues who stole my son, and then return to your life. I won’t trouble you again.”
Her mouth tightened. “You will not expect me to fight for him?”
“I won’t ask what you can’t give.”
They both fell into an uncomfortable silence, and Garret knew that it didn’t matter whether or not they talked about what had happened between them. It was there, hanging in the air, haunting them, mocking them. An odd sensation seemed to tickle the surface of his brain, and all at once he was reliving the endless moments of lust and desire, hopelessly entangled with Artemis’s need for blood and the memories of saving each other’s lives.
“Artemis,” he said, desperately resisting the urge to touch her, “I swear on Timon’s life that what happened today won’t be repeated.”
It was clear that she understood him. She felt for the tree trunk at her back, fingers digging into the rough bark. Her breath came in short, sharp bursts.
“No,” she said. “It will not.”
They both looked away at the same time, and Garret released his breath. She said that now, and she must truly believe it.
But the connection between them couldn’t simply be explained by the sharing of blood. He had wanted her in a way he hadn’t wanted any woman since Roxana, and she’d wanted him. The blood was only the catalyst.
His mind refused to speculate further.
“I think we should go,” he said, pushing himself to his feet. “If we walk slowly for a while, I’ll be back to normal in a few hours.”
“Surely you are not ready,” she said. “It is nearly dark.”
“As long as I stay close enough behind you, we can travel at night. It’ll be harder for you by day, and we need to keep moving as long as we can.” He hesitated, choosing his words carefully. “You can hunt along the way, and I’ll do whatever I can to make things easier for you by keeping my distance.”
Easier for both of us, he thought. But Artemis had already turned her back on him and was self-consciously examining her arrows, leaving him to wonder if they could both hold to their promises.
* * *
They started north in silence, setting out along a woodland trail commonly used by both men and Opiri passing through the region once known as the Willamette Valley. Artemis took the lead, casting her senses wide for any trace of Freebloods. The rain had obliterated most animal tracks in the area, and she knew it would perform the same service for any two-legged creatures.
However, she didn’t have to rely only on sight. The scents of the wet forest were almost overwhelming, and she could track the movements of every animal—reptile, bird and mammal—that passed anywhere near them. Ironically, now that she no longer needed to hunt, she could hear tiny feet pattering over the pungent earth, and through the weeds and fallen pine needles, the rustle of wings in the undergrowth and deep among the branches.
But no Freebloods, and no humans.
As good as his word, Garret remained some distance behind. Yet he might as well have been clinging to her back; she could hear his rough breathing, the muffled tread of his boots, even the beat of his heart. And she could smell him, a pleasant scent that seemed to complement the aroma of freshly washed vegetation.
She could also smell his blood. As full darkness fell and he moved closer to take advantage of her night vision, she realized that the situation would not become any easier. One taste of his blood had been enough to make her crave it again. If she didn’t find a way to ignore him, the journey would soon become intolerable.
As intolerable as the memory of other cravings...and the way he had turned her own unwanted emotions against her by asking her about her former life. About children, and loss, and forgetting.
And love.
As she walked, she concentrated on rebuilding the crumbling barriers inside her mind. By dividing her consciousness between observing their surroundings and reconstructing her mental shields bit by bit, she could almost forget Garret for minutes at a time.
After several hours of unceasing rain, stillness fell over the woods. Artemis slowed her pace. She knew this area well; after her expulsion from Oceanus she had lingered here, well outside the borders of the Citadel’s territory, hoping that she might locate other exiled Freebloods and persuade them to accept her philosophy. She’d soon discovered that the outcasts had no interest in anything beyond survival.
She looked over her shoulder as she and Garret passed through a clearing where a cluster of ruined buildings stood, relics dating to sometime before the War. Garret was moving unsteadily, though his pace had never flagged. She came to a halt and waited for him to catch up.
“It’s after midnight,” she said as he drew level with her. “We should stop so that you can rest and eat.”
He met her gaze from underneath his hood. “I’m not tired,” he said.
“Nevertheless, you must have food. Wait here. I will hunt.”
Before he could protest, she slipped away into the darkness where he couldn’t follow. She brought down two rabbits in rapid succession and carried them back to the abandoned buildings.
Garret looked up, his eyes shadowed with exhaustion. “The goddess of the hunt returns,” he said.
There was a complex note to his statement, not mockery but something more lighthearted. Belatedly, she remembered what it was. Teasing. And there was real admiration behind his words.
Admiration that deeply unsettled her.
She laid the rabbits down on a broken chunk of concrete and crouched beside it. “If I were a goddess,” she said, “I could guarantee that a fire would be safe. As it is, I can only suggest that maintaining your strength is probably worth the risk.”
“My future strength is worth nothing if we attract a pack of Freebloods or militiamen,” he said. “Did you see or hear anything?”
“Freebloods have passed this way, but not in many nights.”
“Then I’ll risk the fire.”
He removed a lighter from his pack and began to gather kindling. She went to look for fallen branches, and by the time she returned he had a small fire going. With quick, efficient movements, he skinned and cleaned the rabbits and suspended them from a long sharpened branch over the fire.
“You’re welcome to share this with me, if you have an appetite for meat,” he said, the firelight dancing in his eyes and carving his face out of the shadows.
“There is little enough for you, and I am not hungry,” she said. “Eat, and I will patrol the area.”
“Thank you, Artemis.”
She ducked her head and pretended to examine her bow. While he finished cooking his meal, she paced out several wide circles around the ruins, listening as much as watching. By the time she returned, the fire was out, the remains of the rabbits had been buried and Garret was fast asleep.
He trusts me, she reminded herself with more than a little wonder. It was likely that he hadn’t intended to sleep, but his body had insisted, and his instincts...
His instincts told him that she would be there to wake him if any danger threatened them.
Squatting beside him, she studied his face. Now that he was asleep, she was even more aware that his usually calm demeanor was only a kind of mask. He mumbled something that sounded like a name. She couldn’t quite make it out, but his muscles were tense, and she could feel distress radiating from him along with his body heat. Grief beat against her new and fragile mental barriers.
“Garret,” she whispered. “It is only a dream.”
His eyelids fluttered. He expelled a short, harsh breath and then relaxed into normal sleep. The pressure inside her head disappeared, and she realized that learning to block him was no longer a matter of mitigating the uncomfortable turmoil his emotions created in her thoughts. It had become a necessity.
Still, a part of her longed to stroke the damp hair from his forehead, to tell him that all would be well and there was no need for bad dreams.
If she surrendered to such impulses, anything that happened afterward would be entirely her own fault.
An owl hooted somewhere above her and glided out of the trees. It dived into the tall brown grass, and something squealed. The strong taking the weak. The world fell into a deep hush, as if in mourning for the fallen. Another sound came faintly to Artemis’s ears. No animal had made it.
She entered the woods on the other side of the ruins and listened for a repeat of the cry. It came again, softer than before, a moan of someone in pain.
Unbearable pain, forcing its way into Artemis’s mind. She paused to brace herself and searched for the source.
She found the Freeblood lying half tangled in a mass of blackberry bushes, one arm caught in the brambles and his body twisted awkwardly. There was a gaping wound in his neck, too severe to heal on its own. The bite of another Opir.
Dark eyes rolled toward Artemis as she approached cautiously. He made a sound in his ruined throat. Most Opiri maintained the appearance of the age they’d been when they were converted, and this one appeared to have been turned in his late teens. Perhaps, she thought, after the end of the War.
“I will not hurt you,” she said, though she knew such an assurance would probably mean nothing to an exile. He jerked as she drew nearer, his hands clenching and unclenching.
She didn’t try to ask him what had happened. She could guess well enough. He might have been dying for hours, and his body’s attempts to heal would have driven him to starvation.
“Brother,” she said, dropping to her knees beside him. “Can you hear me?”
If he did, she thought, she had a feeling that things were going to get a lot more complicated.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_2b258113-3d9d-50d3-b9cd-6f451ec173df)
The boy’s mouth opened, but all that emerged was another groan.
“I know you suffer,” she said. “But I can ease your discomfort.” She laid her hand on his cool forehead and bent over him. She placed her mouth on his neck, releasing a little of the healing chemicals she had used on Garret. He tried to resist her, but he didn’t have the strength to fight for long. After a few moments he relaxed and closed his eyes.
Artemis withdrew and sliced her wrist with her smaller knife. While the blood of a pure Opir could not nourish another full Opir, it would temporarily ease his raging hunger. She offered her wrist and let him take what he could.
When he was finished, she pressed her palm to her wound until it began to close, and then touched his forehead again. It was slightly warmer, but she knew he had little time left.
“Listen,” she said, stroking the boy’s pale hair out of his face. “I am seeking a pack of Freebloods who might be carrying a human child with them. Have you seen such a pack?”
Confusion crossed the young Freeblood’s face. “Human?” he mumbled.
“A child, who never did any Opir harm.”
“Why...you care?” he whispered.
“Because I believe that it is not our true nature to kill each other over humans, or take life, even human life, simply because we can.”
With unexpected strength, the Freeblood grasped her wrist. “I...saw...the child,” he said. “I was...with...”
She covered his hand with hers. “Where?”
Both she and the Freeblood heard the approaching footsteps before he could answer. The young Opir flinched. His fear nearly paralyzed Artemis, and only her rational assessment of Garret’s essential character permitted her to keep her objectivity.
“Stay back,” she called to Garret without looking away from the Freeblood’s panic-stricken eyes. “He won’t hurt you,” she said to the boy.
Disregarding her warning, Garret circled around the bushes to stand just on the other side. “He was with them?” he asked. There was no pity in his voice.
The young Opir pushed against her, the urge to flee warring with his body’s need for blood. Artemis held him down.
“What is your name?” she asked him.
“P-Pericles,” he croaked.
“Pericles,” she said, “this human is called Garret Fox. He saved my life from other humans who would have killed me.”
“Where is my son?” Garret demanded.
“Garret,” Artemis said sharply. She cupped the dying Freeblood’s head in her hands. “Pericles, where did you see the child?”
Pericles closed his eyes again. “Make the human go.”
Ruthless in his suspicion, Garret moved to stand behind her and gazed down at the boy with his hand on his knife. “Where is he?” he repeated.
Shifting her body, Artemis placed herself between human and Opir. Garret felt like a looming thundercloud at her back.
“Don’t come any closer,” she warned.
“Answer me,” Garret said, stepping around her.
Artemis stood and turned, her face only inches from his. “It would be very foolish if you and I were to fight now, when we may learn something of use to us,” she said.
They stared at each other until the Freeblood gurgled in a way that sounded very much like death. Darkness swirled up in Artemis’s mind.
The boy’s time had run out.
Pushing all thoughts of dying aside, Artemis knelt beside him again. “It’s all right,” she said gently, cradling his head in her arms. “Garret, if you provide him with a little blood, he may be able to speak.”
She expected refusal. Instead, he crouched beside her and gazed at the boy, his jaw working. He began to draw his knife from its sheath. Artemis caught his arm.
Garret jerked away and cut his wrist. “Tell me where I can find my son,” he said to Pericles.
“Take it,” Artemis urged. “His blood cannot cure you, but if you help us, at least one of your people will remember you with honor.”
Licking his dry lips, the boy stared at the dripping blood in fascination. “North,” he said. “Beyond...Oceanus’s territory, across the...Columbia River.” He choked. “Wa-Washington.”
“Why?” Garret asked. “Why are they taking my son so far away?”
“I...” Pericles closed his eyes, beginning to lose consciousness. With a quick glance at Artemis, Garret offered his wrist to Pericles. The young Freeblood’s mouth clamped on his flesh. Garret winced but held steady, and Artemis found herself battling both her own unexpected hunger and Garret’s heightened emotions.
After a minute the boy’s head fell back onto Artemis’s arms, and he went still. The echo of his pain faded from Artemis’s mind. Then there was only an emptiness where he had been for such a short while.
Somewhere in the darkness, an owl hooted. Perhaps, Artemis thought, the same owl as before. She laid the boy’s head on the ground and closed his eyes with a sweep of her palm.
“Thank you,” she said to Garret. She took his arm and sealed the wound. Garret hardly seemed to notice.
“He was with the ones who took my son,” he said, his voice hoarse with anger.
“And they left him here to die,” she said.
“They are rogues, and so was he.”
“Yet you showed him mercy.”
“To find out what we needed to know. It’s unlikely he’d have done the same for me.”
Garret had not felt the boy’s very real fear of him, Artemis thought. She wished she had not. She lifted the boy in her arms and carried him to a place under the trees. She laid him out there, his hands folded across his chest, and stood over him for a few moments. Garret waited silently behind her.
“I know you don’t believe it,” she said, “but this boy was also a victim. I do not think he has been Opir for more than a few years.”
“That makes it worse,” Garret said. “He doesn’t have the excuse of having had decades or even centuries to forget what it was like to be human. He chose to join a pack of rogues and kidnap a human child.”
“Did it occur to you that he might have needed to join a pack in order to survive?”
“Like you did?”
His sarcasm bit hard. “It is because I am older that I could do what he could not,” she said.
“You can’t make excuses for every rogue who commits crimes against humanity.”
“Many of your kind would say that I have committed such crimes merely by existing.”
Garret gripped her arm and turned her to face him. “Those humans would be wrong,” he said.
“How many would have saved my life?” she asked, trembling at his touch.
“I would not be the only one.”
“And I believe that only the worst of my kind would harm a human child.” She pulled her arm from his light hold and strode back to the ruins.
“Artemis,” he called after her.
She stopped without turning. “I do not wish to quarrel,” she said.
“Neither do I,” he said. His moon-cast shadow fell over her, and she felt his breath stir her hair. “We obviously don’t understand each other very well yet.”
“Perhaps it would be better if we did not.”
“Our survival might depend on it.”
She swung around to face him. “What is it that you do not understand?”
“I heard you tell Pericles that you believe it isn’t in your people’s true nature to kill each other over humans, or take human lives just because you can.”
“Why is that a surprise to you?” she asked.
“Are you really concerned about saving humans, or only about Freebloods killing each other?”
Without answering, she broke into a fast walk back to camp, where she began to gather up her things. Garret did the same, though he moved more slowly. Artemis thought she sensed regret in his mind. He checked again to make certain the fire was out, and that the rabbit carcasses and entrails were well buried, not that an Opir hunter couldn’t have smelled them if he’d been searching.
But there was still no sign of intruders, so Garret withdrew a folded sheet of paper from his pack, and carefully smoothed it across the cracked and overgrown floor of the building, right where a shaft of moonlight illuminated the ground. Artemis recognized a precise drawing of the western half of the former state of Oregon.
“If I judge correctly,” he said, pressing his fingertip to a spot on old Highway 99E, “we’re right about here, roughly twenty miles south of Albany.” He glanced up at her for confirmation.
“Yes,” she said, grateful for the need to focus on practicalities. “That is also my estimate.”
“And ten miles north of Albany is the southern border of Oceanus,” he said, indicating a large black square on the eastern slope of the Coast Range. “We have only limited information about this area. Do you know how far inland their territory reaches?”
“Why do you think I can tell you?” she asked.
“You were exiled from Oceanus, weren’t you?”
“How do you know?”
“Because we’ve learned that most exiles stick pretty close to their home territory. There are only a few small Opiri outposts between Oceanus and the northern California Citadel, Erebus. And I know you didn’t come from Erebus.”
“What of the rogues who stole your son? Were they not from Erebus, nearer to your colony?”
“As near as I can tell, they were from a Citadel some distance away. They were acting out of character. It’s all a mystery.” He withdrew his hand and clenched his fist on his thigh. “From what the Freeblood—Pericles—told us, the rogues are taking Timon across the river into old Washington. God knows why. But if he was right, they’ll probably have to cross the Columbia River near Portland, where one bridge is still supposed to be intact. They’ll follow the path of least resistance, the I-5 corridor.”
“But that will also be a more exposed route,” Artemis said. “Oceanus itself may be situated in the foothills of the Coast Range, but its territory reaches across the valley to the western slope of the Cascades. The rogues will be summarily executed if they are caught.” She tapped the map with her fingertip. “They might have gone farther into the Cascade foothills to avoid any chance of meeting a patrol.”
“And that’s much rougher terrain,” Garret said. “If we can find a more direct route across the territory, we may catch up with them, or even get to the Columbia before them.”
“Or we may be captured,” she said. “I am of no use to them, so they will kill me quickly. But they will either take you as a serf or, if they think you are dangerous enough, execute you as an example to other humans.”
“No surprises there,” Garret said, carefully folding the map. “But I don’t expect you to take unnecessary risks on my behalf.”
“You always knew I would be taking such risks.”
“Yes,” he said, meeting her gaze. “But I’m prepared to release you from our pact.”
“Because we quarreled?”
“I was wrong to interfere between you and the Freeblood. And I have no excuse for saying what I did about your motives for helping your fellow Freebloods. But my son must come first.”
“Then nothing has changed,” Artemis said, feeling another jolt of his worry and pain. “The most logical route to Portland is also the shortest, but there is still no guarantee that the rogues have not chosen the same route.”
“Agreed.”
“So we continue to parallel Interstate 5 for the time being.”
She shrugged into her pack and returned to the path, leaving the young Freeblood to the elements and the scavengers that would return him to the earth.
* * *
Three days’ cautious travel brought them to Oceanus’s southern boundary. They crossed the Willamette River at Albany and continued north, roughly paralleling Interstate 5, to the rural city of Salem—which, like most other pre-War human cities, was a mishmash of half-fallen buildings and bare foundations, overgrown parking lots, cracked streets and patches of woodland that filled every available space in between. The river and a long line of hills stood between them and the western half of the valley and the Coast Range.
Patrols of Opiri and Daysiders from Oceanus would have to cross those hills to find them, Garret thought, and the presence of such a patrol on their side of the Willamette would be a matter of very bad luck.
At the moment, he and Artemis were observing from the edge of what had been a wide street bordered by parking lots and the remains of large, warehouse-style buildings. The woods ended here, replaced by scattered, smaller trees and shrubs, and resumed a thousand feet to the northeast.
Artemis rose from a crouch, shaking her head. “Nothing new,” she said.
Garret concealed his frustration. Artemis had been vigilant; as they’d traveled, varying the hours between night and day, she had found numerous indications that Freeblood packs had passed this way. The “when” was more difficult to pin down, and there had been no clear signs of the presence of a human child.
He’s still alive, Garret told himself. He’s a fighter. And they must have a reason for taking him so far.
“Garret.” Artemis laid a gloved hand on his shoulder, her dark eyes catching reflected light under the shelter of her hood. It was the first time they’d had any physical contact since they’d left Pericles, and suddenly he was immersed in the warmth of her body and the indescribable scent of her skin drifting out from beneath her heavy cloak. His heart began to race as it had when she had taken his blood, triggering the same startling current of desire and longing he had felt before and had struggled to ignore ever since.
Her fingers began to shake, and she withdrew her hand. “It’s still early,” she said. “We can be halfway across the territory before night falls.”
“How long since you’ve taken blood?” he asked, breathing deeply to slow his heartbeat and suppress his arousal before it became too obvious. “You haven’t hunted for yourself since you took mine, have you?”
She shook her head in a distracted way that worried him. He’d expected her to hunt at least once during the times they’d stopped to rest, but he’d begun to suspect that she’d neglected herself because of his eagerness to keep moving.
“Go now,” he said, “I can wait as long as it takes.”
“Later,” Artemis said. With an abrupt, almost clumsy motion, she hitched up her pack and headed north toward the next patch of forest. Garret jogged to catch up, and then strode ahead of her. He could see far better in daylight than she could, and though the chances of ambush seemed small, he wasn’t prepared to risk her walking into one. The Vampire Slayer, though still hidden in his pack, was close enough at hand that he could pull the segments out, assemble them and fire in less than a minute.
Sooner or later Artemis would find out about the weapon. He just hoped it wasn’t because he had to kill a Nightsider right in front of her eyes.
They cleared the ruins of Salem by midday and began to travel in a more northeasterly direction, moving well away from the river and mountains to the west. Garret kept a constant eye on Artemis, watching for any sign of weakness that would indicate an urgent need for blood. But she continued to behave as if everything were normal, and he knew that forcing the issue wouldn’t do anything to gain her cooperation.
At last they crossed the old six-lane freeway, passing through former pastures, farmland and orchards that had given way to mixed conifer and deciduous forest. Several times Artemis detected the scent or tracks of Opiri moving in groups, but again there was no indication that they carried a human prisoner. They met no patrols from Oceanus. It seemed to be going almost too smoothly until, soon after sunset, Artemis began to weave and stumble again.
Garret was looking for shelter where she could safely rest when she jumped the thicket of wild roses that stood between them and barreled into him, dragging him to the ground. Her hood barely stayed over her head.
“Opiri!” She flung her body across his as if to prevent him from rising.
His pack—and the VS—were trapped beneath him. He lay still as her breath puffed against his cheek, the gentle curves of her body seeming to fit against his like a missing piece of a puzzle falling into place.
“How close?” he asked.
Artemis turned her head, her lips inches from his. “Close,” she said. “It is fortunate that the wind is with us.”
“Patrol? Or rogues?” he asked.
“I believe they are Freebloods. I think there is a human with them, but—”
“Timon!” Garret began to rise, but she held him back with all her obviously waning strength.
“Don’t be a fool!” she said. “If they have him, it won’t do us any good to rush right up to them and try to take him.”
Closing his eyes, Garret worked to regain his composure. Artemis was right. God knew what the Freebloods might do with Timon if they felt threatened. If it even was Timon.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m all right.”
She stared into his eyes for a long moment and then rolled off. Keeping low, he got to his knees and looked over the top of the thicket.
“You won’t see them,” Artemis said, kneeling beside him. “They are some distance ahead.” She slid him a glance out of the corner of her eye. “You know I have a far better chance of getting near them without alerting them.”
“Not when you haven’t fed,” he said.
“I am well,” she said.
“You’ll have to take my blood again.”
“No.”
“You’re being irrational, Artemis.”
“I will not do it.”
“Then you’ll have to stay here while I scout, or you could get both of us killed.”
“I tell you I am well!” she said, her voice nearly rising from a whisper.
He took her face between his hands, though he knew what it might do to both of them. “Are you so disgusted by what happened between us that you’d ignore your own health and risk your life?”
The moment he finished speaking, he realized how desperately he wanted her to say no.
Chapter 6 (#ulink_6224b8f8-4890-5be3-8ee5-1e881a687022)
Her breath caught, and so did Garret’s. Fear and desire surged through his body, and it almost seemed as though they were her feelings as well as his. She was afraid of him, and of herself. Afraid she would take, and give, too much. She sensed that he was desperately afraid for her. Not because she could help him find Timon, but—
Artemis pulled away, her face paler than it had been a moment before. “When we know whether or not your son is with these Opiri,” she said, “I will do whatever is necessary. For the moment, you must let me go ahead.”
“No,” he said. “We go together.”
“So that you can protect me?”
He knew how she would react if he admitted the truth. Yes, he wanted to protect her, as much as he’d ever wanted to protect Roxana. And he’d been in a far less advantageous position to help Roxana in the Citadel where he’d been a serf and she his mistress.
“If you’re not in your right mind, you’ll need my protection,” he said. He glanced up at the sky. “It’s nearly sunset. In a few minutes you won’t need your heavier clothes, and you’ll be able to move faster. But don’t make a move without me, Artemis. I mean it.”
She gave him a scathing glance. “And to think I had thought you a human male without undue pride in his own abilities.”
“It’s your pride I’m worried about. Let’s go.”
Bent nearly double, they ran northeast, Artemis pausing twice to get her bearings. A quarter mile on, she stopped again and threw back her hood. Only a trace of pink light lingered over the hills to the west.
“The Opiri are somewhere beyond those trees,” she said, pointing at a wide stretch of mixed woodland. As she began to move forward, Garret knelt to check the VS parts in his pack.
He rose again and trotted after Artemis as she slipped from tree to tree as lightly as a leopardess. She was nearly crawling when they reached the border of the woods. He dropped to his belly behind her. An area of nearly unbroken grassland stretched ahead as far as he could see.
“Do you see the rogues?” he said, squinting into the darkness.
“No, but I know where they are.” Her voice held a new note, and the hair prickled at the back of Garret’s neck. “They are camped less than two hundred yards from here. There are seven, perhaps eight, of them, and—”
“Timon?”
“I...sense that there is more than one human in the area.”
He tensed to move again. “We have to get closer.”
“Wait.” Her nose wrinkled. “These Opiri are ready to fight. They are expecting to attack or be attacked.”
“Attacked by whom?”
“The humans, perhaps,” she murmured. “Whoever they may be, they are remarkably foolish to venture within the Citadel’s borders.”
“And my son could be caught in the middle of whatever’s about to happen.”
She turned to meet his gaze. “If the Freebloods have protected him so far, they will not let him be hurt. And if the humans should win...”
“We can’t stand by and let this—”
“We must. If we die, who can save Timon?”
Clenching his teeth, Garret tried to weigh the options objectively. Artemis was right. Whoever the humans were, they would want to help a human child, and in a fight, the rogues would keep Timon out of the way. He and Artemis would probably have a better chance of grabbing Timon when the battle was decided one way or the other.
“I know this is against your every instinct,” Artemis said. “I am sorry. I will go ahead, and see if—”
“No,” he said, pulling her down when she attempted to move. “Can we get any closer without the Nightsiders sensing us?”
“No. In fact we have to go back to be safe,” she said.
She retreated. Garret lingered a moment, listening, but his human senses were not acute enough to gather any additional information. Reluctantly, he followed Artemis to a point well within the shelter of the woods but close enough to the grassland that she could monitor what was happening there.
They waited as the long minutes went by, sitting a long arm’s reach apart from each other. Garret was constantly, painfully aware that Artemis was very near but not quite close enough to touch, and that he badly wanted to touch her. Even in the midst of so much uncertainty, those feelings refused to go away.
An hour passed in silence, and then another. Artemis’s head began to droop, and her breathing grew shallow. Garret moved closer to her. He noted a new transparency to her pale skin, a dullness in her hair and a deepening of the shadows under her cheekbones and closed eyes.
“Artemis,” he said, carefully touching her shoulder.
She jerked awake, her body snapping into a defensive posture far more slowly than it should have. She blinked, recognized him and clambered to her feet.
“What has happened?” she demanded.
“Nothing, as far as I can tell,” he said. “But you were falling asleep.”
“I wasn’t—” She broke off and strode away through the trees. Garret waited ten minutes and then got up to follow her.
He found her at the edge of the woods. “Nothing has changed,” she said as he crouched beside her.
“That’s right,” he said. “You still need what you need. We have to be ready to move quickly.”
“You will become weak if I take too much.”
“I trust you to take only as much as is safe for both of us.”
They stared at each other, and Garret could see her struggling with arguments he knew she didn’t want to make. Arguments that had nothing to do with her fear of his becoming weak. But she knew he was right, and she was the first to look away.
“Very well,” she said. “But we should use the other wrist.”
Garret hesitated, reexamining the decision he’d made. He couldn’t pretend that there wasn’t a risk in giving her much more intimate access to his blood.
But she would derive nourishment from his throat more efficiently than she would by taking blood from his wrist. And if he couldn’t trust her now, he might as well let those Opiri in the field kill him themselves.
He led her back to their camp, removed the blanket from his pack and laid it down at the foot of a tall pine. Then he removed his coat and unbuttoned his shirt. Her gaze flew to his hands, watching his progress with apparent fascination, and he found himself suddenly self-conscious. He could sense her need as if it were his own.
“What are you doing?” she asked in a slightly strained voice.
“Just what we agreed,” he said.
Removing his shirt, he folded it and laid it on the ground behind him. He rested his palms on his thighs and settled into the calm, detached state that had always served him well when he had worked with the human Underground in Erebus. He would need all that detachment to treat this feeding like any other.
He tilted his head back, took a deep breath. “I’m ready,” he said.
“You are...” Artemis stammered. “You expect me to...”
“It’s fast, and it’s practical,” he said, staring up into the green boughs overhead. “The sooner we’re finished, the sooner we’ll both be ready to take whatever action is necessary.”
“How many times have you done this?” she asked.
“Often enough to know what I’m doing.”
He waited, holding himself ready, until he felt the heat of her body close to his, her breath sighing over his skin, her lips brushing his throat.
“Are you certain?” she asked softly.
“Look at me, Artemis.”
Whatever she saw in his eyes apparently frightened her, and she almost bolted. But he grabbed her hand, and she settled down again, panting and trembling. Her teeth penetrated his flesh. She moaned as his blood began to flow, and he felt desire take hold exactly as he had prayed it wouldn’t. He reached out to clasp his hands around her waist. He found the hem of her tunic and slipped his fingers beneath, sliding his palms over the skin below her ribs.
Then he paused, because she hadn’t asked for his touch, because he knew that she was not Roxana. But Artemis gripped his wrist and held his hand where it was.
She was too far gone to stop. And so was he.
* * *
The moment Artemis tasted his blood, she knew it was too late.
She felt his warm breath stirring her hair, heard the rapid drumming of his heart, smelled the surge of his lust and only drank the more deeply, caught up in an ecstasy more overwhelming than any she had known before.
Even the last time he had given his blood, it hadn’t been like this. She’d underestimated the impact of taking it directly from his throat. An intimate act, she’d thought when she’d first met him, one he surely wouldn’t share with her.
And yet here she was, and her body and mind were opening to Garret, abandoning all caution, renewing the intense emotional connection she had wanted so badly to extinguish. She had forgotten what it could be like, how quickly one could lose control with the right partner. And she had never taken blood during what humans called “making love.”
But now, when Garret touched her bare skin, she felt his excitement as well as her own. She was being carried away by a current she couldn’t stop, delirious with feelings and sensations that superseded mere arousal or the sensual stimulation that so often accompanied feeding.
She wanted him. She wanted to possess him, to be possessed by him, to join in complete physical union. What happened afterward...
No. The unraveling thread of her sanity begged her to remember what she could lose, what she could do to Garret. Once she stepped onto this path, she might never find her way back again. A single reckless act might finally shatter any hope she had of closing the gate against Garret Fox.
But sanity had no hope when Garret’s fingertips discovered her nipples and teased them into firm, sensitive peaks. His blood soothed her tongue. Erotic images shaped in Garret’s mind slipped into hers as his fingers slid down her belly and to the waistband of her pants. He unfastened the fly and dipped inside. Callous skin touched tender flesh. She shifted her body, urging him to explore as she continued to drink.
Garret stroked her with one hand while his other worked at the buttons of her shirt. Cool air washed over her breasts, and she straightened as his emotions told her what he wanted to do. Acting entirely on instinct, she sealed the bite and leaned back, giving him complete access to her breasts.
When he took her nipple into his mouth, she moaned at the incredible sensation of his reaction as well as her own, desire doubled and redoubled as he suckled her hungrily. His other hand found its way between her thighs and grazed the tight little bud where pleasure was almost like pain. She gasped, and he gasped with her.
Somehow her pants came off and she was straddling his thighs, rubbing against the taut bulge of his erection. She felt herself floating, guided to the ground by strong arms, lying on her back with her thighs parted.
The touch of his lips and tongue in her most sensitive place drew a muffled cry from her throat, quieted only by some distant sense of self-preservation. She seemed to recall something like this happening long ago, but the past was as unreal as the future. Garret knew exactly where and how to use his tongue to tickle and tease, drawing out each caress with rapid flicks and long strokes.
She arched her back, begging him with her entire body. He turned his attention to her breasts and continued his ministrations while she felt for the waistband of his pants.
“Garret,” she whispered, filling her mind with the emotional images of taking and being taken. His aura erupted around him, emitting tongues of flame that strained toward her. Her own aura flared for the first time, a blue-tinged amethyst radiance that opened to accept the thrust of his fire as her body was ready to accept his.
Garret was more than ready. Her hand found him, large and very hard. The intensity of his need—hers—multiplied a thousandfold.
For a moment there was nothing between them. Nothing at all—no boundaries, no barriers, no walls. He eased himself over her, gazing down at her with his weight braced on his hands and his hips between her thighs.
Again she saw herself through his eyes, less a distinctive shape than an aura enclosing the interwoven strands of her emotions. But the image began to take form, and she glimpsed her face: eyes closed, lips parted, hair wild and tangled about her shoulders.
And beautiful. Beautiful in a way she could never have imagined. It was the face she’d seen in mirrors before her exile and sometimes in the imperfect reflection of water, but bathed in a gentle light that softened the blue of her aura to a silky violet. Violet water, smooth and untroubled.
Garret caught her lips with his, exploring the terrain of her mouth, coaxing her to open for him. With a low moan of surrender, she parted her lips, and his tongue found its way inside. He curled it around hers, sucked, kissed her more deeply than she would have believed possible.
Violet transformed to deep, hot purple. She pushed her fingers into his hair and bit lightly into his lower lip, drawing blood. He adjusted his position so that a single thrust would make them one at last.
Something remarkable happened then. Feelings she barely recognized bloomed in her mind, so astonishing that, at first, she didn’t know how to name them.
But not all the memories were dead. There were no times, no places...only the joy and happiness and exhilaration of the single thing she had sought and found and lost before the change. The thing she wanted again, here within her grasp.
Everything else vanished. There was no more need to struggle, to aspire to anything greater than this. Her emotions swelled to obliterate all other desires. She would float in this perfect world forever, in endless bliss and exultation.
She had found what the humans called heaven.
But there was a bubble of disturbance in the flawless pool of eternal rapture, a devil in this paradise. It picked and prodded at her, mocking her with warnings she could not quite shut out.
There is no heaven for Opiri.
“Artemis,” Garret said. His voice was hoarse and urgent, his mind spinning on the edge of euphoria. She knew that all she had to do was speak a single word, and every other voice would be silenced.
So would her dreams and hopes for her people. She would no longer care about them, because she had what she wanted, all she would ever want.
Forget them, she thought. You owe them nothing.
But her past would not be silent. They are your people, it said. How can you abandon them for a human?
“No,” she whispered.
All we fought for destroyed, because of you. Because of him.
Garret’s face came into sharp focus, blazing with elation. He could destroy nothing, but he could give her—
“Roxana?” he murmured.
She saw her own face again...saw it change, felt Garret’s bewilderment and her own turmoil as that other face slipped over hers like a mask. Eyes too dark, hair too long, features too...
“No,” Garret said hoarsely. The stranger vanished, but the sheer weight of his emotions—regret, grief, confusion—bore down on her with such force that she thought they would crush her. Illusion shattered. Shock worked as no careful discipline could have done.
She pushed him out—out of her heart, her mind, her very being—and slammed the wall down between them, severing all emotional ties, all the feelings that had tempted her into relinquishing the new way she had sought to win for her own kind.
The feelings that had nearly made her surrender to a human who saw another face even as he prepared to possess her.
Chapter 7 (#ulink_0d8b1a32-62e0-5411-a04a-fa44cc227331)
Artemis scrambled to her feet, snatching up her pants as she bolted away from him. Garret’s face was drained of color, and though she could no longer sense his emotions, she saw the stark pain in his eyes.
For her, or for himself?
Roxana.
Somehow Artemis dressed, gathered her weapons and fled without looking at him again. She ran recklessly toward the border of the woods, as if by simply putting physical distance between herself and Garret she might undo the past hour and forget.
But she knew it was not possible to regain that safe sense of living in a fortress that could never be breached. There was no undoing this. The gate had closed, but she knew that she could never take Garret’s blood again. It wasn’t simply a matter of becoming dependent. Death would be preferable to losing herself, losing all she believed had made her what she was.
Garret had asked her if she remembered what love was. She hadn’t been honest then. She remembered the physical and emotional closeness that accompanied complete faith in another: a lover, life partner, the one she could not live without. Garret had made her experience some of those feelings again. His blood, his touch, had engulfed her in passions she had left behind for a greater, nobler purpose.
But there was no reality behind those passions, no foundation. Garret’s invocation of that other name was proof enough of that.
Had that other woman been so different from her, though? Ivory hair, eyes the color of rich, purple wine—the distinctive traits of any Opir save for the newest converts.
Artemis filled her lungs with pine-scented air, and then expelled her agitation along with her breath. The only purpose in analyzing her emotions was to rid herself of them. If she could not be an impartial, dispassionate teacher, she could not help her own people break the chains of savagery that bound them to lives of degradation and self-destruction.
She slowed as she approached the field, focusing her attention on her surroundings. There was no sound, no movement in the sea of grass, but she knew the Freebloods and humans were still there.
Stretching out on her belly, Artemis rested her cheek against the cool earth. This was a test. If she truly considered the fate of her kind more important than anything else, she could leave this place and let Garret find his own way to his son, facing the dangers of capture and death alone.
But she could no more leave him than she could erase her empathic “gift.” The test did not ask her to choose which commitment was more important. It asked for proof that she could remain by Garret’s side and not lose herself again. If she succeeded, then she might be capable and worthy of carrying out her mentor Kronos’s great dream. The one he had died for.
She was preparing to return to Garret when a flock of birds exploded from the tall grass, followed by the report of many guns firing in unison. She froze as cries of pain and terror and rage rent the night, and the thump of flesh meeting flesh accompanied the rising scent of blood.
“Timon!”
Garret staggered up behind her, his pack dangling from his shoulder by one strap. His face was pale, his breathing shallow. Artemis trapped her concern in a cage of logic, grateful that she could not feel what he felt, trying not to imagine what he had thought when she left him without explanation.
“I am certain that Timon is well,” she said calmly. “You have lost a great deal of blood, and you have been running. You must rest.”
He looked at her as if she had lost her sanity, let the pack drop to the ground and knelt beside it. He fumbled inside with shaking hands, withdrawing a handgun.
“You cannot go out there,” Artemis said. “Certainly not with that.”
There was another scream, but Garret never so much as glanced up. He set the gun aside and withdrew several components of a weapon Artemis didn’t remember ever having seen before. He pushed the pieces together, pausing several times when his clumsy fingers lost their grip. When he was finished and raised the weapon to check his work, she knew what it was: the only projectile weapon the humans had produced that could kill an Opir with a single shot to almost any spot on the body.
“No,” she said. “You will be killed before you can ever use that thing.”
“There’s no other choice.” He met her gaze as he got to his feet. “Don’t try to stop me.”
“I said the same thing to you once,” she reminded him. “I believe I managed to make it ten feet before I collapsed.”
Jaw set, Garret stepped out into the darkness. He had gone perhaps three yards when one of his legs gave out from under him and he fell to his knee. Another spatter of gunshots blotted out whatever sound he might have made, and then a deep hush fell, even more absolute than the silence that had come before.
Garret clambered to his feet, swinging the rifle back into position. Artemis joined him. She sniffed the air, and it was as if she could see what had happened as surely as if she had been in the middle of it.
“Let me go ahead,” she said. “If there are any survivors, I can move more quickly to do whatever must be done.”
“Together,” he said grimly.
Artemis knew that trying to stop him would be pointless. He was already moving again, ready to shoot at anything with pale skin and sharp incisors. All she could do was hope that she was right about his son.
* * *
Before them lay a scene of utter carnage. Bodies were scattered across the field, mostly Opiri, seven or eight of them lying in pools of dark red. There were several humans, dressed in the mottled clothing of militiamen. Their annihilation had left abstract, scarlet patterns on the grass and shrubs around them, attesting to the violence of their deaths.
Timon was not with them.
He squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for his heart to resume its normal speed. After a few moments he opened his eyes again and examined the battlefield. He’d seen such violence before, but somehow this seemed worse, as if he might have prevented the killing with a few well-chosen words in the same way he’d once rallied and encouraged members of the human Underground in Erebus.
He glanced at Artemis. Her face was expressionless. She, too, must regret the killings, but he had no way of knowing what else she thought.
And she wasn’t going to tell him. Now he knew that she had been correct to hesitate before taking his blood again. If it had only been a matter of physical attraction, he might have been able to hold himself aloof. He had deceived himself into thinking he could donate without being affected by her the way he’d been the first time—wanting her, wanting to be inside her, to claim her for his own in a way he had no right to do.
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Susan Krinard
Blood enemies, bound loversHe’d loved a vampire once, only to have her murdered by her own kind. Now, to save his son, Garret Fox must look to another vampire for help. Garret knows empathic Artemis can’t deny him once she drinks his human blood. But despite the attraction between them, Garret can never forget what Artemis truly is…Sharing Garret’s thoughts and feelings has wreaked havoc on Artemis’s emotions. But when she discovers a malevolent force bent on destroying them, she finds herself drawn even closer to the human. Dare she hope to find a home with a man who hates her kind?
“Are you certain?” she asked softly.
“Look at me, Artemis.”
Whatever she saw in Garret’s eyes apparently frightened her, and she almost bolted. But he grabbed her hand, and she settled down again, panting and trembling. Her teeth penetrated his flesh. She moaned as his blood began to flow, and he felt desire take hold exactly as he had prayed it wouldn’t. He reached out to clasp his hands around her waist. He found the hem of her tunic and slipped his fingers beneath, sliding his palms over the skin below her ribs.
Then he paused, because she hadn’t asked for his touch, because he knew that she was not Roxana. But Artemis gripped his wrist and held his hand where it was.
She was too far gone to stop. And so was he.
SUSAN KRINARD has been writing paranormal romance for nearly twenty years. With Daysider, she began a series of vampire paranormal romances, the Nightsiders series, for Mills & Boon Nocturne. Sue lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her husband, Serge, her dogs, Freya, Nahla and Cagney, and her cats, Agatha and Rocky. She loves her garden, nature, painting and chocolate … not necessarily in that order.
Night Quest
Susan Krinard
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
With special thanks to my editor, Leslie Wainger, for her patience and editorial expertise; and to Serge, who will never give up on me.
Contents
Cover (#u4eb24d1b-6cfa-56fb-a67c-08d16ec72ca5)
Introduction (#u9ea3277c-4783-5aea-b961-817865950820)
About the Author (#u7102a2a9-25e6-5dd4-aa40-72b52b92e531)
Title Page (#uaece315a-3373-5795-bd70-b307dc8bb68c)
Dedication (#u16e32330-d58c-50f8-9f8e-16d516f5c766)
Prologue (#ulink_1a667443-a72e-54aa-b462-9df240daf8f4)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_62b1fbd0-0c60-589d-af5c-d9c0ea8f7547)
Chapter 2 (#ulink_0ab6f064-e60c-5675-94d4-0d5e7ff6cbec)
Chapter 3 (#ulink_211df39b-2fed-545a-90f2-3a56b7c3e677)
Chapter 4 (#ulink_372065ef-c264-5a87-92ec-a06b481215b1)
Chapter 5 (#ulink_969ed07e-8b9e-55d9-bfe4-18c91d756172)
Chapter 6 (#ulink_cf488448-5373-5910-90bd-344253157dbb)
Chapter 7 (#ulink_0ed6bbd6-49bc-5f15-a14f-e9621a753193)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_11481c89-8699-50e2-9f0f-8c59e1030b32)
Some thirty years after the signing of the Treaty between human and Nightsider, or Opiri, forces, human Enclaves and Nightsider Citadels maintained a sometimes uneasy peace. Territories were well established, and the neutral Zones between were regularly patrolled by Citadel and Enclave agents.
The agents were of two specific genetic types. The half-breed Daysiders, or Darketans, day-walking Opiri, were born of human fathers and Nightsider mothers. Previously considered mutants, they had human coloring and extra-human speed and strength, but possessed the standard need for blood.
The half-blood dhampires, offspring of human mothers and Opir fathers, were of a different genetic type, with “cat-like” eyes and the ability to walk in daylight, while also possessing full Opiri speed, strength and acute senses. A percentage were dependent on blood, while some were able to digest human food.
Though both Daysider and dhampir agents were charged to prevent potential enemies from entering their respective territories, they could not prevent the establishment of illicit colonies.
In California, humans and progressive Opiri founded mixed settlements in which humans and Nightsiders could live in peace and cooperation. These new colonies were for the most part left alone by both Citadels and Enclaves. Farther north, in the former states of Oregon and Washington, humans established heavily guarded compounds inhabited by militias more devoted to killing stray Opiri than maintaining the peace.
Their victims were primarily exiled Opiri known as Freebloods. Most Freebloods were humans who had been bitten and turned into Opiri by powerful Bloodlords and Bloodmasters after the beginning of the ten-year War, first serving as vassals to their sires and then, after being replaced by other vassals, released from the bond created by the process of conversion.
Freebloods within the Citadels were forced to compete for human serfs in order to establish a Household and gain rank. But though, by treaty, the Citadels were compelled to send convicts to their former enemies, the supply of such convicts began to dwindle, and competition for the serfs became a significant problem.
As a result, hundreds of Freebloods were exiled from the Citadels to survive in any way they could. These Freebloods, running in packs, became a significant threat to human and mixed colonies, often stealing humans or killing Opiri colonists.
At the same time, certain Citadels began to see the necessity of changing the Opir way of life in order to deal with the ever-shrinking supply of accessible human blood. Some Opiri spoke of the need to abandon the taking of human blood in favor of animal blood, while others favored a new war. Meanwhile, the mixed colonies continued to grow and spread, offering a new alternative of peaceful coexistence based on the voluntary sharing of blood.
It was, of course, inevitable that these competing philosophies would come into conflict.
—from the Introduction to The Armistice Years: Conflict and Convergence
Chapter 1 (#ulink_c7d3e27d-766c-5366-a122-4ce13de07a14)
Timon.
Garret Fox knelt beside the footprints scattered in the dirt, tracing the smallest with his fingertip. They had paused here, the kidnappers, and the little person to whom the footprint belonged had briefly touched ground before being swept up again.
Still alive, Garret thought. He dragged his hand across his face, scraping against the four-day beard he hadn’t had time to shave off, and got to his feet. Fear for his son made him ignore the deep ache in his muscles, the rawness of blistered feet, the heavy autumn rains that penetrated his coat and pried icy fingers under his collar. He hardly noticed the sting of the scratches across his face and hands where branches from trees and bushes had scraped his skin.
Speed had been far more important to him than caution. He wasn’t interested in concealing his trail. Neither were the rogues ahead of him. They felt safe now, nearly two hundred miles away from the colony they had raided. Safe because they had left complete chaos in their wake, and every adult human or Nightsider had been needed to clean up the mess and protect the other children.
The rogues believed they had nothing to fear from a single human.
Garret adjusted his pack, reassured by the weight of the VS-134 rifle—the highly effective and notorious weapon known as the “Vampire Slayer,” whose use was strictly forbidden except in cases of extreme emergency.
And that was why this had happened, Garret thought bitterly. Timon had paid for the colony’s philosophy of nonviolence and indiscriminate acceptance of every potential settler. Garret had no compunction about using deadly force to save him.
If Roxana had been alive, she would have done the same. Timon was all he had left, the only thing in the world that gave meaning and purpose to what remained of his life.
I will get him back, Roxana, he promised.
He set out again, though dawn was still hours away. Rain turned to sleet with the unseasonable cold. The moon was bright enough for him to see by, but he didn’t need to rely on it completely. He’d spent years not only honing his body and skills to fight enemy Nightsiders, but also in developing his senses of hearing and touch to help him move in darkness. The night would never be his element, but he had long ago reached a truce with it.
As darkness gave way to sunlight, he moved more quickly. As each day passed, the trail had led him deeper into wild country that seemed to grow colder with every mile, far from any human Enclave, Nightsider Citadel or free colony.
Time and again, he lost the trail and then picked it up, losing ground by night and gaining by day. Along the way he found the bodies of solitary humans drained of blood, their hollow shells cast aside, and each time he spoke a few brief words over the dead before he forced himself onward. His supply of dried foods shrank steadily, but he didn’t dare search for some isolated homestead or settlement to replenish his stores. He sought clean streams to fill his canteen, gathered edible greens and caught whatever game he could find.
At the end of the second week, his stomach hollow and his gait uneven with exhaustion, he knew he had fallen far behind. Still he drove himself on. He began to see more human settlements—not mixed colonies, like Avalon, but high-walled, paramilitary compounds with heavily armed militias whose sole purpose seemed to be hunting down and killing rogue Freebloods. Garret avoided them, as he had avoided the less warlike settlements he passed.
Fifteen minutes before dawn on the first morning of the third week, near what used to be the city of Eugene, he heard the distant sound of a woman’s scream.
He didn’t pause to think. Dropping to his knees, he shrugged out of his pack and removed the components of the VS. With shaking hands he assembled the rifle and looped its strap over his shoulder. If the woman was being harassed by Nightsiders, the Vampire Slayer might be all that stood between her and an ugly death.
* * *
The sound of a twig snapping brought Artemis to attention. She grabbed her bow, her hunt unfinished, and ran toward the denser forest and one of the many refuges she had built for herself in the area she had chosen as her territory.
If it hadn’t been for her hunger, she might have been clearheaded enough to notice the humans before she ran into them. If there had been one less human, she might have taken them down before they trapped her.
But there were five, all armed with automatic rifles, and they had thrown the wire netting over her before she could do more than raise her hands. Each segment of the weighted net was razor sharp, and though a thousand small cuts couldn’t kill an Opir, the damage would prevent her escape.
“You were right, Coleman,” one of the men said. “Never would have believed we’d find a female bloodsucker living alone out here.” He looked at the sky. “Just about sunrise. We might still get her back—”
“Why?” a younger man asked, holding his section of the net with thickly gloved hands. “She ain’t no spy.”
“Dean’s right,” a third human said. “She wouldn’t be out here alone near sunrise if she was. She won’t have no useful intel. Might as well take care of her here.”
Artemis barely heard their voices. The wire burned wherever it touched her skin and sliced through her clothing, but she tried to focus on calculating her best means of escape. One of these humans would surely be careless enough to loosen his grip on the net, giving her a few seconds to fight her way out. Blood loss might be great, but if she could grab even one of these monsters...
“Watch out!” the first male said as she lunged toward the loosest part of the net.
“Burn her!”
Something jabbed against Artemis’s neck, and a paralyzing shock jolted her nerves and froze her muscles. She felt her useless body being dragged across the ground and through the mud, the wires cutting deeper as the humans found a patch of dry earth far from any hint of shade.
The sky had grown pale in the east. The sun was minutes away from rising, and her body ignored every command her brain tried to send it. She was aware of increasing pain as the humans jostled the net and anchored it to the ground, driving stakes into the earth to pin its edges so tight and close that she wouldn’t find even the smallest opening.
Still, she tried. The paralysis broke, and she flung herself up and against the stinging web, cutting what remained of her clothes to ribbons and shredding the skin of her hands while the guttural laughter of the humans echoed inside her skull.
Then they stepped back, denying her what little shelter their shadows might provide, and watched the first rays of the sun strike her bleeding fingers.
She didn’t intend to scream. She fought it with all the discipline and self-control she had learned both in the Citadel and as an exile in the wilderness.
But her own cry deafened even the laughter of the humans, and the last thing she saw was the bright hair of a man with green eyes blazing like emeralds in the rising sun.
* * *
For a few fleeting seconds Garret considered the possibility of leaving the Opir woman to her fate. There were five men, all carrying modified assault rifles, and numerous knives and bladed weapons. It would be impossible to approach them without being seen.
He’d faced similar odds before and met them head-on. But he had expected a human woman, not a Freeblood. For all he knew, the female might be among the most vicious rogues in this patch of wilderness, as bad as those who had taken his son.
And if anything were to happen to him now, there would be no one to look for Timon. No one to save him from whatever fate the rogues intended for him.
But the militiamen were torturing the woman, and that was far beyond the pale of what Garret could accept. He had no doubt of what Roxana would have done if she were here.
Kneeling behind a screen of shrubs, Garret separated the VS into its component parts and returned them to his pack. Raising his hands above his head, he walked out into the clearing. Almost as one, the militiamen lifted their rifles and pointed them at his chest.
“Human,” Garret said in his mildest voice, trying to ignore the muffled moans of the Opir woman in the net. “Peace.”
Two of the men lowered their rifles. The others held steady. The eldest of the bunch, grizzled and scarred, stepped forward.
“Who are you?” he demanded, his hand on the butt of his hunting knife.
“My name is Garret Fox,” Garret said. “I’m looking for my son, who was taken by rogue bloodsuckers.” He glanced at the Freeblood in the net. “Have you seen any children in the area?”
The leader looked at his comrades. They shook their heads.
“We ain’t seen no kids outside our compound,” he said, his eyes narrow with suspicion. “Or any bloodsuckers except this one.” He kicked at the body curled up on the ground, and Garret fought the instinct to stop him. “Your son, you said? Where you from?”
Garret estimated that he had no more than a few minutes before the sun was high enough to kill the Nightsider woman. He didn’t have time for conversation.
“South,” he said. “I’ve traveled a long way.”
“Looks like it,” one of the younger men said. His eyes were small and cruel. “If bloodsuckers took your kid, he’s probably dead.”
“Shut up, Dean,” the grizzled man said. “How’d it happen?”
“We were out hunting,” Garret said, staying as vague as possible. “Maybe this female knows something. Will you let me question her before you kill her?”
There were murmurs of protest, but the leader silenced them with a wave of his hand.
“Get her out of the sun,” he ordered his men. He met Garret’s eyes. “You got five minutes. Here.” He tossed a shock stick to Garret, who snatched it out of the air. “Use this if she don’t cooperate.”
Garret edged closer to the leader as the other men dragged the net into the scant shade of a nearly leafless bush. “She probably won’t respond to more pain,” he said. “Let me tell her that you’ll give her a quick death if she cooperates.”
“Why should she believe you?”
“I was the interrogator in my compound,” Garret said. “Even with them, persuasion can be effective.”
“Why should I give her a quick death?”
“I didn’t say you had to keep my promise.”
The grizzled man bared his teeth in a grin. “Five minutes, like I said.”
“Thanks.” Garret turned toward the net, but the leader grabbed his arm with a callous hand.
“You got guts to travel out here by yourself,” he said, “and you look like a good fighter. You married?”
The grief was almost as fresh now as it had been four years ago. “No,” he said.
“Then you might be welcome to join us if you decide not to go back south again.”
“After I find my son, I may take you up on your offer.”
“My name’s Claude Delacroix. Find the old town of Melford and wait by the bridge over the creek. Someone’ll find you and bring you to the compound.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Garret pulled free, firmly but politely. “If you can keep your men away, I’d appreciate it.”
“Will do.” Delacroix gestured to his crew, cast Garret another assessing look and followed them.
Well aware that the militiamen were watching every move he made, Garret crouched by the net. The Opir woman’s pale skin was striped everywhere with narrow lacerations, her jacket and pants were little more than scraps of fabric held together by a few threads, and the hand tucked half under her chest was blistered and red. Her hair, a rich shade of ivory, was just long enough to cover her face.
No matter what she was or what she might have done, Garret thought, she didn’t deserve this.
“Listen to me,” he said, leaning as close to the net as he dared. “I can help you get out of here, but you’ll have to do exactly as I say.”
Slowly she lifted her head. Her eyes were dark amethyst, unexpectedly and extraordinarily beautiful. Her body was slender, her face delicate and fine-boned, but there was nothing weak in either. The defiance in her eyes told him that anyone who made the mistake of thinking her fragile would quickly regret their assumption.
“I heard what was said,” she said. “You are lying.”
The misery in her voice cut straight through Garret like the razor wires that cut her body. “Where I come from,” he said, “we don’t leave people to be tortured to death.”
“People?” she said with a brief, hoarse laugh. “Is that what you think I am, human? A person?”
“They obviously don’t think so,” he said, tilting his head toward the militiamen.
“You wish to interrogate me, but I have nothing to tell you.”
“Do you live in this area?”
Her full lips remained stubbornly closed.
“You don’t know anything about a pack of rogues with a human child?” Garret asked.
“No.”
“I know his kidnappers came this way, but I lost their trail. You must have sensed them.”
“I did not.”
“Where is the rest of your pack?”
“I have no pack.” She coughed, turning her face away. “If you have any of your supposed human mercy in you, let me have the quick death the other humans will never give me.”
“Is that what you want?” he asked. “To die?”
“I cannot help you. Why would you offer me any other alternative?”
He glanced over the top of the net. The militiamen were muttering among themselves. Garret’s five minutes were almost up.
“You have two choices,” he said. “Trust me, or force me to hand you over to them. And I don’t want your death on my conscience.”
She tried to brush her hair out of her face, but the movement cracked the burned skin of her hand, and her expressive eyes blurred with pain. “What do you want me to do?”
“What’s your name?”
“If it matters... Artemis.”
He showed her the shock stick. “Artemis, you’ll have to pretend I’m using this on you. Be convincing. I’ll flip the net back. You come out, grab me and drag me into the woods.”
“You believe I will not kill you?” she asked with obvious astonishment.
“Will you?”
“They will shoot both of us.”
“It’s possible. But I think I’ve persuaded them to believe that I’m one of them.”
“Yes. You are human.”
Garret held her gaze. “I hope you’ll choose to live.”
With another quick glance at the militiamen, Garret raised his voice in a harsh question and pretended to jab the stick into the net. The Opir woman began to convulse very convincingly, and as she did Garret grabbed two of the weights with his gloved hands and flung the net back over itself, leaving a narrow gap at the bottom.
Artemis was injured and in great discomfort, but she moved very fast, scrambling out from under the net, grabbing him by the shoulders and half dragging him toward the woods. He dropped the shock stick. Sunlight struck her, and she swallowed a cry. The weakness of her grip told Garret that she wouldn’t be able to keep up the pretense for long, so he made a show of helplessness, struggling as if she had complete control of him.
A bullet whizzed past his ear when they were still a few yards from the woods’ edge. Garret shouted and raised one hand in a plea as the woman continued to tug at him, her fingers beginning to slip from his coat.
“A little farther,” Garret said. “Once we’re inside the woods, run.”
Artemis stumbled, and Garret twisted to push her toward the trees. The militiamen were jogging after them now, deadly silent and ready to shoot. Garret and the Freeblood reached the shade, and she staggered, her breath sawing in her throat.
“Go!” Garret said.
“They’ll kill you,” she said hoarsely, refusing to move.
“For being an idiot and allowing you to escape? I don’t think so.”
She didn’t have time to answer, because the men were almost on top of them. Artemis grabbed him around the neck and dragged him deeper into the shadows. He could have escaped easily, but he played along, gasping for air and digging his heels into the dirt.
“Come no closer!” she shouted. “I will kill him!”
Chapter 2 (#ulink_6ec795e3-2833-5cb4-a04b-75c699c7f002)
The militiamen slowed to a walk. Delacroix signaled a halt. He met Garret’s gaze.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I can’t let her escape.” He lifted his rifle and aimed at the center of the woman’s forehead.
“She knows where my son is!” Garret rasped. “Let her go, please!”
Delacroix hesitated. “Your son is no more important than the people this bloodsucker will kill.”
“I will release him if you give me five more minutes before you follow me,” Artemis said.
Bending his head toward the man next to him, Delacroix spoke in a low voice, listened to his comrades and nodded.
“Five minutes,” he said, checking his watch.
Without warning, Artemis released Garret, pushing him toward the men, and sprang into a run. Almost immediately the militiamen started after her.
“Wait,” Garret said. “I thought you said—”
Delacroix signaled a halt. “You think we’d keep a promise to one of them?” he asked. “Don’t you want the info you say she has?”
“Yes, of course,” Garret said, rubbing his throat as he got to his feet. “But if you go into those woods after her, she’ll have the advantage.”
Two of the men aimed their rifles at him. “Who are you?” Delacroix asked again.
“A former serf from the Citadel of Erebus,” Garret said. “Do you know what that’s like? Any of you?”
The men exchanged glances. One lowered his gaze. Another spat.
“This is my fault,” Garret said. “Give me one of your weapons and I’ll get her myself.”
“She’ll have even more of an advantage over one hunter,” Delacroix said. “Why aren’t you carrying a gun?”
The VS seemed to burn a hole through Garret’s pack and into his coat. “I had one,” he began, “but—”
“Take off your pack,” Delacroix said.
“Why?”
“You’re hiding something, and I want to know what it is.”
Garret lunged at Delacroix, grabbed the man’s rifle in both hands, yanked it away and slammed the butt into the leader’s face. Without slowing, he struck the next man in the neck and then reversed the rifle.
Two of the others began to shoot, but Garret had already moved out of their path. He shot one of the men in the hand, forcing him to drop his rifle. The youngest one yelled and charged at Garret wildly. His heedless rage gave Garret the chance to kick the weapon out of the boy’s grip before he could pull the trigger.
But another rifleman and the one he’d struck in the neck were almost on top of him. Someone flashed by him, a small figure who took the two men down so quickly that Garret couldn’t see how she’d done it. He didn’t take time to think it over. Shrugging out of his pack, he uncoiled the rope hanging from the metal frame and cut it into five lengths. By the time he turned back, all the militiamen were on the ground—alive, but weaponless and either unconscious or disabled.
He met Artemis’s gaze briefly and knelt beside Delacroix, who was moaning as he began to wake up. Garret rolled him over and tied his hands securely. The Opir woman helped him with the other men, her face and body shielded by an oversize hooded daycoat that was thick enough to protect her from the worst of the sun. She wore equally heavy gloves. Garret could only assume that she had kept the day clothes close by in case she was caught out of the woods after dawn.
He checked on each of the men when he was finished. Two of them were already struggling and cursing, while Delacroix and his second-in-command were bleary-eyed and disoriented. The youngest glared at Garret with undisguised hatred.
“Listen to me,” Garret said, crouching in front of him. “I’m going to set you free. You go back to your colony and tell them to come fetch their people.”
The boy pulled hard against the ropes around his wrists. “You gonna leave them out here for the rogues to eat?” he demanded.
Garret glanced at Artemis. “Are there any other Opiri in the area?” he asked.
“No.”
“You believe her?” the boy said, his face twisted in amazement.
“No Opiri are going to attack you in sunlight. Your people should be able to return with plenty of time to spare before dark.”
“Traitor!” the boy spat, tears running down his cheeks. “We’ll hunt you down.”
Garret moved behind the boy and cut through the ropes. “Take your pack,” he said, “and go.”
For a moment he thought the boy would stay and try to fight, but even he had enough sense to realize he didn’t have a chance. He grabbed the pack and ran off, his pace much too fast to maintain for more than a few minutes.
“You will pay for this,” Delacroix said, his words a little slurred. “We kill sucker-lovers around here.”
Garret ignored him. He gathered up the weapons and backed away until he was in the woods again. Artemis went with him. He noticed that she was carrying a bow in one hand and a quiver full of arrows in the other.
“Thank you,” Garret said roughly, trying to adjust the rifles’ straps so that he could carry them all at once to a place where the militiamen wouldn’t find them. “You can go.”
“You saved my life at the risk of your own,” Artemis said, her eyes reflecting crimson under the hood of her coat.
“I told you—”
“That you would not leave someone to be tortured,” she said. “But I still do not understand why you would turn against your own kind to help one of mine.”
Anger and grief clogged Garret’s throat and tore at his heart. “I knew an Opir who did the same for us.”
Her brows drew down and her lips parted as if she were about to ask how such a thing could be possible.
And then she collapsed.
* * *
Artemis woke to pain. Tiny filaments of agony circled her limbs and waist, her chest and neck. And her hands...
“Easy,” the human said as she tried to sit up. He eased her back down to the bed of fallen leaves on which she’d been lying.
Instinctively she resisted, irrational panic flooding her body. But he refused to let her up, and she realized that he was strong enough to impose his will.
Human or not, he was dangerous. She had seen him fight. He moved almost as fast as an Opir.
“You’re already healing,” he said, his brows knitting in a frown, “but if you push yourself, you’ll slow it down. We don’t want to stay here any longer than we have to.”
She disregarded the “we” and compelled herself to relax. “Where are the men?” she asked, casting about for their rank scents.
“It’s only been a few hours.” He glanced over his shoulder, and for the first time Artemis saw that they were far into the forest under a thick canopy of cottonwoods, protected on two sides by boulders that stood beside a small creek. She realized that she was wearing unfamiliar clothes that were much too large for her, carrying the oddly pleasant smell of the human who had saved her. Her daycoat and gloves lay neatly folded within reach; her knives, bow and quiver were farther away. It would take some effort to get them.
She might have just enough strength to surprise the human, grab her things and run.
“You don’t have to be afraid of me,” the man said, his eyes tracking her gaze.
“I am not afraid of you...human.”
“My name is Garret Fox,” he said, seemingly indifferent to her mockery.
“There is no need for you to stay,” she said. “It would be best if you did not.”
“Why? Are you planning on attacking me when my back is turned?”
The question seemed hostile, but his face was impassive. Too impassive to be credible. “If you believed that,” she said, “you would never have brought me here.”
“That’s right,” he said, dropping back into a crouch. “Saving my life just to kill me wouldn’t make much sense.”
She began to formulate an answer, but all at once she found herself lost in the extraordinary green of his eyes, like the moss clinging to the sides of the boulders. His dark red hair brushed the back of his collar, as if he hadn’t cut it in some time, and there was a shadow of darker hair on his jaw and upper lip. His features were strong but not coarse, his mouth mobile but decisive.
By human standards he was very attractive. And Opiri appreciated human beauty well enough to seek out serfs that bore the same qualities this man exemplified, such as his lean, fit body, broad shoulders and easy grace.
Artemis had never owned such a serf. She had never owned a serf at all, though she had been strong enough to stake out her own Household in Oceanus, if that had been her intent.
Now, in a haze of pain and caught in the snare of this human’s gaze, she wondered what it would have been like to own a man like this. What it might have been like if he were her Favorite, and they—
The man jerked away, and she realized that she had been touching his hand with her raw fingertips. His reaction had been so violent that she expected to see distaste on his face, but there was only confusion, as if he had been taken unaware by more than just the touch itself.
Artemis, too, was bewildered. Her fingertips tingled, and a series of small shocks ran through her arms and deep into the core of her body. Physical sensations she hadn’t experienced in many, many years.
And through that touch she felt something else. Something that she thought she’d been rid of for a very long time. An emotional aura flared briefly around Garret Fox, as red as his hair, fed by all the anger and passion his expression concealed.
The aura vanished quickly, but her shock lingered. The ability she had worked so hard to erase—the ability to sense and feel the emotions of others—had returned with a vengeance, and a human had reawakened it.
But how could that be possible, when her brief dealings with her own kind since her exile had had no effect at all?
Fight it, she told herself. If it takes hold again...
“Lie still,” Garret said, as if nothing had happened. “And keep that hand covered.”
She lifted her chin, hoping that he hadn’t noticed her bewilderment. “I am not accustomed to taking orders from your kind.”
“Call it a suggestion, then.” He cocked his head. “Why did you come back for me?”
“Do I not owe you my life?”
“Most of your kind wouldn’t feel bound by a debt to a human.”
“You said another Opir had helped you.”
Artemis could hear the steady rhythm of his heartbeat break and then resume at a slightly faster pace. “She was a remarkable person,” he said.
She. “What was her name?” Artemis said, trying and failing to control her curiosity.
“Roxana.” He shifted his weight and looked away. “Which Citadel did you come from?”
“Why does it matter?” she asked. “Do you plan to interrogate me now, where you will not be interrupted by my untimely death?”
“You are an exile, aren’t you?”
She wondered why he had chosen that word when he might as easily have called her a “rogue bloodsucker.” It was how he had spoken of her to the other humans. And how most humans thought of Freebloods, or Opiri in general.
Opiri. Nightsiders. Vampires.
“What else would I be?” she asked.
Her supposedly rhetorical question provoked a raised eyebrow and a keen look. She knew what was going through his mind: the same thing that was going through hers, but in reverse.
Both sides in the ongoing conflict between humans and Opiri had scouts and spies in the vast, supposedly uninhabited areas between human and Opir settlements, usually known as “Zones.” Most of the human colonies’ scouts and agents were mixed-breed Opiri, called dhampires. But a few pure-blood humans were skilled enough to survive in the Zones, even against Nightsider opponents.
Garret could easily be one such human. But he was too far from the nearest human Enclave to be one of their scouts, and she would bet her life—again—that he didn’t work for any of the militias.
“I am not an operative for any Citadel,” she said, answering his unfinished question.
“I believe you,” he said. “You were alone when those men found you?”
“I told you I was.”
“You also said you knew nothing about a human boy in this area.”
“I do not.” She hesitated. “This boy is your son?”
“Timon,” he said.
“I am sorry,” she said, realizing that she truly meant it. “I would help you if I could.”
He met her gaze. “You can.”
Alarmed by thoughts of what he might ask of her, she forgot her pain. “I am leaving,” she said, propping herself up on her elbows. “Do not try to stop me.”
“You aren’t going anywhere,” he said, getting to his feet.
“I may be injured,” she said, “but you appear to be unarmed except for a hunting knife, and even now I am stronger than any human.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it. Sit down, before you—”
Artemis climbed to her knees. Agony like a spear of sunlight drilled into her skull. Her mouth was dry, though she suspected that Garret must have given her water. She swayed, and all at once he was beside her, supporting her, holding her. He was warm and solid, and she could hear the steady beat of his pulse, the throbbing of his blood in his veins. The shock she had experienced earlier returned with his touch, a raw electric current that attacked her mind and body as if she had literally been struck by lightning.
“I said you weren’t going anywhere,” he said, gripping her more tightly when she tried to jerk away. He eased her down to the ground. “You’ll need blood or you won’t fully recover.”
His matter-of-fact statement gave her a very different kind of shock. Humans didn’t despise Opiri only because of their attempt to conquer the world but also because the very idea of feeding on blood was an abomination to their kind.
He did not offer you his blood, she thought wryly. But where else did he think she would get it, in her condition?
“Wherever you lived,” she said, “it must be very unlike the human compounds in this area.”
He pulled his pack close so that he could reach inside, and she caught a glimpse of a rifle stock, a kind she didn’t recognize. It wasn’t one of the weapons he’d gathered from the militiamen, then hidden. Apparently he wasn’t unarmed, after all.
“I assume the local militias kill every Nightsider they find,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “They consider it their divine purpose to hunt down as many Opiri as possible. Do you find that strange?”
“The militia compounds see packs of vicious predators, and the rogues only a source of food. An eye for an eye.”
Now she heard in his voice what she’d sensed in his mind and seen in his aura: simmering anger fed by a deep fear that was not for himself.
Don’t think about his feelings, she reminded herself. Don’t let them get inside you again.
But she knew it wasn’t that simple. Her shields had fallen, and she had to build them back up again. As quickly as possible.
“What was it that your famous peacemaker once said?” she asked, forcing herself to remain calm. “‘An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.’”
His laugh reflected his obvious surprise at her knowledge of human philosophers. “Very clever,” he said. “Most Opiri don’t have much interest in human wisdom. Are you one of those rare Nightsiders who see humans as more than barbarians, killers like the militiamen or potential serfs?”
“How else should I regard them?”
“Forgive me for my foolish question. Tell me—why don’t you live with other exiles?”
“It is not in the nature of Freebloods to live in packs,” she said.
He searched through his pack, and the scent of his skin—his blood—drifted toward her. “Not in the Citadels,” he said.
“And how do you know so much about our lives inside the Citadels?”
“Inside the Citadels or out,” he said, “Freebloods spend most of their time struggling constantly for dominance, so they can build Households of their own. That’s the entire basis for their existence.”
“It is not the basis for my existence,” she said.
“Because you don’t want to fight?” He withdrew a wrapped object from his pack. “Somehow, I don’t think you live apart because you’re afraid of being killed by your own kind.”
“I am not.”
“Then there’s something else about your fellow Freebloods that you don’t like. Do you hunt humans?”
The direct question startled her. “No,” she said, without thinking.
“That would explain it, then.” He opened the package to reveal several strips of dried meat, and Artemis’s stomach clenched with hunger. “I knew you were different when I first met you.”
“How would you know that?”
“Instinct.”
The same kind of instinct, she wondered, that had made her trust him so quickly? “And if you had determined that I was like every other Freeblood,” she asked, “would you have let me die?”
His very green eyes met hers. “But you aren’t,” he said. “I’ve met Opiri who didn’t believe in living on human blood on principle, and others who just didn’t believe in taking it by force. Which type are you?”
He spoke, Artemis thought, as if he had engaged in long, philosophical discussions with other Opiri, and that idea was flatly ridiculous. Wasn’t it?
“Many Freeblood exiles do not know how to live without human blood,” she said. “But most do not kill.”
Garret offered her a piece of jerky. “Too bad the ones who don’t kill can’t—or won’t—stop the ones who do.”
She pushed the offered food away. “Are you so certain they have not tried?”
“Have you?” he said, searching her eyes.
“I want what is best for my—” She broke off and took a deep breath. She had no reason to tell him what she had attempted and failed to achieve in Oceanus. He would never believe it was possible.
“You hate us, just like the militiamen do,” she said, covering her confusion with anger.
“Us is a very big word,” he said. “I don’t hate you.”
He was right, she realized. She couldn’t sense any personal hostility from him. To the contrary, he was intrigued by her, genuinely interested in knowing more about her life. She was afraid to look any further.
“I am still a Freeblood,” she said.
“But you’re no rogue,” he said, setting the knife down on a flat rock beside him.
She was almost tempted to let him go on thinking that she was superior to her own people. Different, as he claimed. She found that she wanted his good opinion.
But if she let herself believe that she was better than the rest, she would betray her own principles. Freebloods only needed to be shown, guided, by one who had seen a little way beyond the bars of the prison they so blindly accepted as the limit of their lives.
Guided not by emotion, but by rationality. She didn’t need her unwanted empathic ability to tell her that Garret was controlling feelings that might have paralyzed him if he set them free. In that, they were frighteningly alike.
“Where do you come from?” she asked. “From all you have said, it cannot be anything like the local compounds.”
“I live alone.”
“Without the protection of your own kind?” she asked. “Is that how you lost your son?”
Her cruel question had been meant to provoke an unguarded response—any response that would help her understand him—but all it did was open her mind to the ache of his sadness.
“It is my fault,” Garret said quietly.
The red aura flared around him again, and Artemis covered her face. It made no difference. She wasn’t seeing it with her eyes but with her heart. And now all she could feel was his pain, his sorrow, his terrible sense of loss.
She had known loss, too. But nothing like this. Not since she had been human herself.
“I am sorry,” she said, dropping her hands from her face. “Have I convinced you that I know nothing of this abduction?”
Staring at the dried strip of meat he still held in one hand, he gave a ragged sigh. “Yes,” he said.
His simple answer almost made her doubt his honesty. But the “talent” she’d tried to bury insisted otherwise.
If she was wrong...
A fresh stab of hunger caught her unaware, and she sank back to the ground with a gasp. Garret set down his scanty meal and leaned over her.
“You’ve spent too much time talking and not enough resting,” he said.
“And whose fault is that?” she whispered.
“I should have been more careful.”
She did her best not to notice the concern in his voice, his worried frown, the compassion he should not feel for one like her. Whoever and whatever he was, son or no son, she had to get away from him. The temptation to feed was terrifyingly strong in the wake of her injuries. If she should hurt him...
“You should continue your search,” she said, turning her face away, “and I must return to my shelter to collect my things and move on before the other humans find me.”
He ran his hand up and down his left sleeve. “Your physical state is obviously deteriorating. How far do you expect to get this time?”
“Far enough.”
“And then?”
Shivering with animal desires she could barely contain, Artemis moved to gather her things. “I am going. Do not follow me.”
“It won’t work.” His footsteps were almost silent as he moved behind her. “In a few minutes you’re going to collapse.”
“Then what do you suggest?” she asked, spinning to face him. “I see no other—”
“I obviously didn’t make myself clear,” he said. He pushed up his left sleeve. “I’m offering an alternative.”
Chapter 3 (#ulink_3fd96b79-a13f-56d5-b72f-f214cb0141ad)
His meaning was terrifyingly clear, and suddenly Artemis was furious—at her own helplessness; at his inexplicable generosity, in spite of his valid reasons for despising her kind; at a world that had created such a bizarre set of impossible circumstances. Her mind and emotions and physical senses reacted all at once, making her excruciatingly aware of the body she had so admired.
Even thinking of taking his blood aroused not just her hunger for nourishment but for other things, as well. Her imagination began to spin scenarios that could never be. Her empathic talent burned more brightly—extending fingers of amethyst light, her light, toward Garret—and he began to breathe more heavily.
Vivid images sprang into her mind: lying beside Garret, naked in his arms as she sank her teeth into his neck; moaning in pleasure as the blood flowed over her tongue and he guided her down on top of him; urgency building as her hunger exploded into an unbearable need to feel him inside her, giving as she took, taking as she gave...
She came back to herself, her body hot and throbbing, to find him looking at her with that steady gaze, his eyes so clear that she could see every shadow passing beneath the surface. No pain now, no anger, no sorrow. Only need. And desire.
Desire for a Freeblood. For her. She looked from Garret’s hungry eyes down to his broad chest and lean waist, and then below, where the evidence of his response was so readily apparent.
And she was responsible. She had to put an end to it.
“How can you do this?” she asked. “How can you bear to let an Opir take your blood? Is it because of this Roxana?”
“I’ve done it before,” he said, his hunger still burning in her mind. “I have no reason to fear it.”
She wondered again where he’d come from. He hadn’t always been alone, not with such a casual attitude about donation. But if he had ever lived among Opiri...
“If I take your blood,” she said, “what do you expect in return?”
“Your help in finding my son.”
His blunt response took her aback. She felt the completely unexpected and irrational disappointment of realizing that he was being generous only because he wanted something from her. Something he had probably wanted from the very beginning.
If she gave in now, she would be throwing away the very principles she had worked so hard to establish since her exile.
“I cannot accept,” she said. “I must go.”
Garret’s expression changed again, as if he were waking from a deep sleep and had forgotten where he was. His aura folded in on itself and vanished. He rolled down his sleeve, returned to his pack and began to shift things inside it, clearly pretending to keep himself busy so that he wouldn’t have to deal with her. She watched him, her muscles frozen, knowing she would never see him again.
“I will lay a false trail,” she said, pulling on her daycoat with clumsy hands. “If the humans do find our tracks, they will follow mine. I’m sure they would far rather kill me than you, traitor though they may name you.” She stumbled a little as she took up her bow. “As your own people say, good luck.”
An instant later she was running...throwing all her energy into every step, hoping that the initial burst of speed would carry her beyond his reach before she lost her breath. She knew it was time to abandon the area completely, and not only because of Garret. She had to get away from the possibility of any human or Opir contact, and lose herself in a place so remote that not even the most desperate Freeblood exiles would claim it.
True to her word, she laid a false trail, though it took a good deal more of her energy than she could afford. When she reached her temporary shelter, a small cave in the side of a hill, she gathered up her few possessions and left as quickly as she could, dizzy but still able to maintain a regular pace.
Every step carried her farther and farther away from the human who had inexplicably saved her life, then turned it upside down. Her heart seemed to drag several feet behind her.
By the time she left the woods a few hours later and reached the narrow path that paralleled the old northbound Interstate 5, a cold, driving rain had begun to fall. Normally it would not have bothered her; Opiri had lower body temperatures than humans, but their efficient metabolisms and greater strength enabled them to bear adverse conditions for longer periods.
But her energy was draining away a little more with every hour that passed. Hunger gnawed at her constantly. The weather didn’t make her attempt to find game any easier, and she soon discovered that something had frightened away most of the local wildlife...a situation that might suggest an Opir pack in the area. She needed to avoid such packs at all costs.
As sunset approached, she sat down on a boulder under a stand of pines at the edge of a wide meadow and simply waited. The light began to fade. Nocturnal creatures would soon be venturing from their dens and hiding places, giving her another chance. Whatever came, she would have no choice but to take it.
Something large moved through the undergrowth on the other side of the meadow, an animal powerful enough to disregard any need for stealth.
A bear and her half-grown cubs emerged from the trees. The sow rose up on her hind legs, nostrils flaring, while the cubs tumbled about and cuffed each other in play.
Artemis caught her breath. She had seen plenty of bears before, but something in the scene touched her in a way she hadn’t expected.
She rose slowly, careful not to attract the bears’ attention, and prepared to set off again, feeling as if she had become detached from her body. Pebbles rolled on the ground behind her. She spun around, lost her balance, and then righted herself as she belatedly grabbed at the waterproof case of her bow.
Garret was standing a few feet from the boulder. He had thrown back the hood of his coat, and his wet auburn hair had darkened to a deep brown. His strong face seemed sculpted out of the rain itself, but he seemed no more disturbed by the weather than the bears were.
What disturbed Artemis was that he had approached almost as silently as an Opir. Once again she was surprised at his skill. Surprised—and furious that she had been caught off guard.
The only thing she had to be grateful for was that she perceived him only through her physical senses, not her mental ones. There was no aura to distract her.
Is that truly all you have to be thankful for? an inner voice demanded.
“What are you doing here?” she asked aloud. “Were you following me?”
“Did you finish your hunt?” he asked.
“Leave,” she said, taking an aggressive step toward him. “Leave this place, before I must force you to go.”
He looked her up and down with those keen eyes. “Why are you so afraid?” he asked softly as the rain continued to pelt down on his head and shoulders. “Is the prospect of helping me find a lost child so repugnant to you?”
A human child, she wanted to cry out. Why should I care?
But how could she lie to him, and to herself?
“You would ask me to hunt my own people,” she said.
“They’re barely ‘your people’ at all.”
“But they are. And I believe they have a chance at a better future than what they face in the Citadels or as exiles.”
He arched a brow. “You didn’t mention this before.”
“Why should you listen?”
“What does this ‘better future’ involve, Artemis? Teaching the rogues to follow your example and refuse to take human blood? Convincing them that humans aren’t animals, aren’t just another form of prey? How would they consider that an improvement on their lives now?”
She shook her head sharply. “There is so much you cannot possibly understand.”
“I understand that you follow an ethical code of conduct that stretches to include humans, and that you live alone because you won’t share your life with barbaric killers.”
“I will not debate this with you,” she said, knowing that she’d made a mistake in bringing her philosophy into the argument. “If our positions were reversed,” she said, “would you lead me to humans I might choose to kill?”
“When did I say that I planned to kill anyone?”
“You have made your feelings about Freebloods very clear,” she said, “and you will not hesitate to use any means to save your son.”
“You’re right,” he said, matching the challenge in her voice. “But I’m not seeking revenge. If I can get Timon safely back without resorting to violence—” He broke off and took a deep breath, his gaze shifting to a point somewhere behind her.
She glanced over her shoulder. The bear had obviously seen them and had reared up again. Her formidable teeth flashed in her brown muzzle.
“Is that what you were hunting?” Garret asked.
Artemis licked the moisture from her lips. “I had no plans to attack them,” she said, grasping eagerly at the change of subject.
“But you haven’t found anything else.”
“That is not your concern.”
Garret set his pack down against the boulder. “I think you need my help,” he said.
Growing sick with hunger and the scent of the blood pumping beneath his skin, Artemis stopped herself from falling against the boulder by a sheer act of will. “You cannot help me,” she said.
“Do you object to taking human blood, even if it’s freely given?”
“Freely given—at a price,” she whispered.
“You live in the wilds. I’m well trained, but you’re faster and have keener senses than I do. Even if you won’t come with me, you can point me in the right direction. That’s all I ask.”
His voice began to fade in and out, the sound replaced by a thrumming behind her ears. She tried to convince herself to hold to her convictions, her vow never to take human blood again.
But philosophy would always fail when survival was at stake.
“Come with me,” he said, holding out his hand.
No longer able to resist, she stumbled toward him. He picked up his pack and kept just ahead of her, leading her under the shelter of a stand of close-growing alders. Without quite knowing how she got there, she found herself on the damp ground beside him.
Garret removed his coat and then his shirt, neatly folding both garments and laying them across his pack. Her head began to pound, and she found herself staring at the muscles of his shoulders, arms and chest—an ideal image of human masculinity. There was nothing vulgar in the way he displayed himself, but she felt need pulsing not only in her belly but also between her thighs.
As she struggled with growing delirium, he removed a rubber cord from his pack, tied it around his arm above his biceps and flexed his hand into a fist, raising the veins in his wrist. His forearm was corded with muscle, the kind achieved only through hard manual labor.
But then she looked up at his face and noticed the pulse beating in his neck. Her mouth watered. She knew that he was no serf to be taken by the throat, though the desire to bare her own body, press it against his and sink her teeth into his neck was nearly more than she could endure. She looked at his mouth, the lips slightly parted, and wondered what it would be like to kiss him.
She hadn’t kissed anyone in over a century.
“Are you certain...this is what you wish?” she asked, her voice raw with thirst.
He didn’t seem to hear her. He ran his finger along the length of the most prominent vein in his arm and met her gaze.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
A thread of sickness coiled through her belly like a parasitic worm. “I should not—”
“Are you afraid you’ll hurt me? I promise that won’t happen.”
She licked her lips. “I can’t.”
Garret held her gaze. “You’re afraid of losing control, aren’t you? Whatever you think you might do, I’m prepared for it.”
“Perhaps... I am not.”
“You’ve run out of options, Artemis. Take my blood—or die.”
His words were more than merely a warning. They were certainty, and Artemis knew he was right. It was a kind of blackmail, but he must know that in her desperation she might still overpower him and take what she needed.
He trusted her.
One time, she told herself. Then she would be strong again, and she would have learned from her mistakes.
Unable to fight her instincts, she grabbed his arm just below the elbow and bit into his wrist, barely remembering to temper the force of the bite before her teeth pierced his skin. He didn’t so much as flinch, nor did he look away.
As his blood flowed over her tongue, Artemis felt something quite extraordinary. It wasn’t at all like taking blood from the Citadel’s public serfs, provided to Freebloods solely for the purpose of keeping them alive...barely. Nor was it similar to the times she had been compelled to feed from humans before and during the War, before the establishment of the Citadels.
That had been necessity. This was a far more intimate act, not merely a bargaining chip.
Intimate. That was the word, the sensation, the emotion, that overwhelmed her. Her body grew warm with the rush of vital nourishment and the headiness of lust.
Only after she was sated did she dare to look up. Garret’s aura was alive, a scarlet halo visible only to her mind. His eyes were like faceted emeralds, cool and hot all at once. His chest rose and fell quickly, and she could smell a distinctive change in his earthy, masculine scent.
Lust. It was happening again...his emotions were invading her mind, feeding her desire as hers fed his in an endless cycle.
Bending to his arm again, she sealed the wound. Her tongue lingered on his skin, tracing a line down to his palm. He made a sound deep in his throat, and she felt herself being pulled toward him. Her heart seemed ready to leap from her chest into his. She closed her eyes and pressed herself against him, her breasts exquisitely tender. He adjusted her to straddle him, and she could feel his hardness thrusting against her through his camouflage pants.
Then he turned his face aside, pushed her away and jumped to his feet. She did the same, trembling when she should have been at her strongest, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
Wrong, she thought, all wrong. Garret had knocked her so far off balance that she wasn’t sure she would ever find her footing again.
“That should be enough to help you finish healing,” he said, reaching for his shirt as if nothing had happened. “But we’ll need to move soon.”
“We.” For a moment, she had almost forgotten.
This was a bargain. Now she had to fulfill her part of it.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_80409491-5dc9-544a-9515-b7935831afc1)
Artemis’s lovely face turned utterly cold.
Garret wasn’t surprised. She justifiably believed that she’d been blackmailed into helping him. She’d taken his blood only because she knew she had no other choice, and he would have done nearly anything to get her help.
But he also knew that she had been struggling ever since he’d rescued her...struggling with the same impulses and emotions he’d been feeling almost from the moment of their first meeting. Emotions most Nightsiders denied, believing them to be the bane of inferior humanity.
Yet when she’d taken his blood, he had experienced the kind of intense physical attraction he hadn’t felt since Roxana’s death. He’d been painfully aware of Artemis’s petite but generously curved body, the quickness of her breathing, the deep mystery of her dark eyes. He had held her against him, feeling the heat of her arousal matching his, imagining her soft moans as he stroked her naked skin...
He cut off the thoughts before they could carry him into dangerous waters. In the end, he’d rejected his own lust. As the leader of Erebus’s human Underground, he had always striven to be disciplined, watchful and patient. Roxana had made it almost easy.
Artemis didn’t. What was it about her that stirred his body and soul to such an inexplicable degree? Knowing that she was different from other Freeblood rogues couldn’t account for this strong, almost uncontrollable reaction. What had started out as a compulsion to save an intelligent being from an act of barbarism had quickly evolved into something else, something he didn’t want any more than she did.
If he were making the decision only for himself, he would go his own way and let her go hers. It would be far better for both of them.
But Timon came first. His well-being was a thousand times more important than the relief of any small discomfort his father might experience along the way. No price was too high.
He had to gain Artemis’s trust and keep it. Until Timon was safe.
“I’m sorry,” he said, grabbing his coat. “I should have remembered that we’ll both need to recover before we move on.” He pulled on the coat and zipped it up with slightly numb fingers, aware that he had begun to tremble from loss of blood. The ground seemed to tilt toward him. He’d forgotten what it was like to give so much blood at one time.
“Are you ill?” Artemis asked, a little of the coldness leaving her eyes.
“Nothing that an hour of rest won’t cure,” he said. “And if you move too fast after taking so much blood, you’re likely to have problems yourself.”
She studied him with a frown. “I am in no danger,” she said. “But I see that you are not steady enough to travel. You had better sit down.”
With a brief nod of acknowledgment, Garret slid to the base of the tree and leaned his head back against the trunk, grateful that they’d independently made the decision not to mention what had happened during the blood-taking.
“I don’t expect you to stand guard for both of us,” he said. “Wake me if I start to drift off.”
Artemis chose a tree a little distance away and sat beneath it, holding herself erect and alert. “You are a strange human,” she said.
“I thought you’d reached that conclusion when we first met,” he said, closing his eyes.
“I know why you saved my life and shared your blood, or at least why you claim you did. What I do not understand is why you are so willing to reveal weakness.”
Garret wondered if she was trying to make him angry. She didn’t know him well enough to realize that he’d been through far too much to let pride influence his actions.
“I’ve already put my life in your hands many times over,” he said. “If I didn’t trust you—”
“No,” she interrupted. “I have always heard that free human males believe themselves to be stronger than females in every way, and will do anything to avoid revealing any physical or mental impairment before one of the opposite sex.”
Garret opened one eye a crack. “How do you know?”
“It is common knowledge.”
“The same way it’s common knowledge among humans that all Nightsiders are vicious killers?” He laughed shortly. “Not all human males feel the need to prove that they’re invulnerable.”
Artemis reached for her own small pack and unhooked her canteen. “It would be foolish to attempt it with a female Opir.”
“I’d like to think I’m not a fool,” Garret said.
“Would you have begged for my help, if I had been unwilling to give it?”
“Would that have made you feel better?”
“It would only have proven how much you wish to find your son.”
“Then you have no more interest in having power over me than I do in having it over you. Which makes you exactly what I judged you to be.”
“I still do not accept your ‘judgment.’”
Garret rolled his head to observe the bears, who had apparently determined that the human and Nightsider were no threat and resumed their search for food. “Why didn’t you go after them when you needed blood?” he asked. “It wasn’t fear that stopped you, was it?”
“I was not afraid,” she said, indignation in her voice.
“But something about them made you hesitate.” He straightened, wishing he could sleep but determined to keep Artemis engaged. “They are a family.”
She shrugged, though he could see that he had struck true. “Many creatures belong to what you call ‘families,’” she said. “I cannot spare all of them.”
“Do you know how long the female black bear protects her cubs?”
“I am not ignorant about the behavior of the creatures that live in the wild.”
“One and a half years,” Garret said. “These cubs are less than a year old. They’ll go into torpor with her pretty soon, and then they’ll be with her through the spring. No one can fault a bear’s skill at parenting.” He met Artemis’s gaze. “When were you converted?”
“What has that to do with—”
“Did you have children?”
Her body stiffened. “I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember, or have you chosen to forget?”
“Even humans leave the past behind,” she said.
“We try,” he said, thinking of Roxana. His throat felt thick and full. “Do you remember what love is?”
“I...”
Garret unfastened his coat’s padded chest pocket, withdrawing the battered photograph in its transparent envelope.
“This is Timon,” he said. He rose and reached out to hand her the picture, and she accepted it with obvious reluctance. It had been taken before Roxana’s death; Timon was smiling, a ball in his hands, and his best friend and cousin, Alessa, at his side. With his red hair and violet-gray eyes, Timon looked human.
There was softness in Artemis’s face as she gazed at the picture, a softness that Garret had glimpsed only once or twice when she was at her most unguarded. Now she touched the picture with the tip of her finger, her lips curving in something like a smile.
“This picture was taken in a time of peace,” she said. “Who is the other child?”
“Her name is Alessa. She’s the daughter of my sister Alexia and her husband, Damon.” He tucked the photo back into his pocket. “Alexia is half Opir. A dhampir.”
Artemis stared at him. “Your father was a—”
“We had different fathers. I assure you, I’m fully human.”
“But your sister—”
“Was born in the Enclave of San Francisco, after our mother found refuge there. She married a human in the Enclave, and I was the result.”
Wrapping her arms around her chest, Artemis looked away. “I know...” she began. “I know it is an ugly thing, what our males did to your females during the War.”
“It wasn’t my intention to bring up the time before the Armistice,” Garret said, regretting his slip.
“But surely Alexia was an agent for the Enclave, like all those of mixed blood.”
“She left that life long ago. All I want for Timon is the freedom to live as he chooses, when he’s old enough to make that decision. I’d hoped this would help you to understand.”
“I always understood,” she said in a near whisper.
“Then help me track the rogues who stole my son, and then return to your life. I won’t trouble you again.”
Her mouth tightened. “You will not expect me to fight for him?”
“I won’t ask what you can’t give.”
They both fell into an uncomfortable silence, and Garret knew that it didn’t matter whether or not they talked about what had happened between them. It was there, hanging in the air, haunting them, mocking them. An odd sensation seemed to tickle the surface of his brain, and all at once he was reliving the endless moments of lust and desire, hopelessly entangled with Artemis’s need for blood and the memories of saving each other’s lives.
“Artemis,” he said, desperately resisting the urge to touch her, “I swear on Timon’s life that what happened today won’t be repeated.”
It was clear that she understood him. She felt for the tree trunk at her back, fingers digging into the rough bark. Her breath came in short, sharp bursts.
“No,” she said. “It will not.”
They both looked away at the same time, and Garret released his breath. She said that now, and she must truly believe it.
But the connection between them couldn’t simply be explained by the sharing of blood. He had wanted her in a way he hadn’t wanted any woman since Roxana, and she’d wanted him. The blood was only the catalyst.
His mind refused to speculate further.
“I think we should go,” he said, pushing himself to his feet. “If we walk slowly for a while, I’ll be back to normal in a few hours.”
“Surely you are not ready,” she said. “It is nearly dark.”
“As long as I stay close enough behind you, we can travel at night. It’ll be harder for you by day, and we need to keep moving as long as we can.” He hesitated, choosing his words carefully. “You can hunt along the way, and I’ll do whatever I can to make things easier for you by keeping my distance.”
Easier for both of us, he thought. But Artemis had already turned her back on him and was self-consciously examining her arrows, leaving him to wonder if they could both hold to their promises.
* * *
They started north in silence, setting out along a woodland trail commonly used by both men and Opiri passing through the region once known as the Willamette Valley. Artemis took the lead, casting her senses wide for any trace of Freebloods. The rain had obliterated most animal tracks in the area, and she knew it would perform the same service for any two-legged creatures.
However, she didn’t have to rely only on sight. The scents of the wet forest were almost overwhelming, and she could track the movements of every animal—reptile, bird and mammal—that passed anywhere near them. Ironically, now that she no longer needed to hunt, she could hear tiny feet pattering over the pungent earth, and through the weeds and fallen pine needles, the rustle of wings in the undergrowth and deep among the branches.
But no Freebloods, and no humans.
As good as his word, Garret remained some distance behind. Yet he might as well have been clinging to her back; she could hear his rough breathing, the muffled tread of his boots, even the beat of his heart. And she could smell him, a pleasant scent that seemed to complement the aroma of freshly washed vegetation.
She could also smell his blood. As full darkness fell and he moved closer to take advantage of her night vision, she realized that the situation would not become any easier. One taste of his blood had been enough to make her crave it again. If she didn’t find a way to ignore him, the journey would soon become intolerable.
As intolerable as the memory of other cravings...and the way he had turned her own unwanted emotions against her by asking her about her former life. About children, and loss, and forgetting.
And love.
As she walked, she concentrated on rebuilding the crumbling barriers inside her mind. By dividing her consciousness between observing their surroundings and reconstructing her mental shields bit by bit, she could almost forget Garret for minutes at a time.
After several hours of unceasing rain, stillness fell over the woods. Artemis slowed her pace. She knew this area well; after her expulsion from Oceanus she had lingered here, well outside the borders of the Citadel’s territory, hoping that she might locate other exiled Freebloods and persuade them to accept her philosophy. She’d soon discovered that the outcasts had no interest in anything beyond survival.
She looked over her shoulder as she and Garret passed through a clearing where a cluster of ruined buildings stood, relics dating to sometime before the War. Garret was moving unsteadily, though his pace had never flagged. She came to a halt and waited for him to catch up.
“It’s after midnight,” she said as he drew level with her. “We should stop so that you can rest and eat.”
He met her gaze from underneath his hood. “I’m not tired,” he said.
“Nevertheless, you must have food. Wait here. I will hunt.”
Before he could protest, she slipped away into the darkness where he couldn’t follow. She brought down two rabbits in rapid succession and carried them back to the abandoned buildings.
Garret looked up, his eyes shadowed with exhaustion. “The goddess of the hunt returns,” he said.
There was a complex note to his statement, not mockery but something more lighthearted. Belatedly, she remembered what it was. Teasing. And there was real admiration behind his words.
Admiration that deeply unsettled her.
She laid the rabbits down on a broken chunk of concrete and crouched beside it. “If I were a goddess,” she said, “I could guarantee that a fire would be safe. As it is, I can only suggest that maintaining your strength is probably worth the risk.”
“My future strength is worth nothing if we attract a pack of Freebloods or militiamen,” he said. “Did you see or hear anything?”
“Freebloods have passed this way, but not in many nights.”
“Then I’ll risk the fire.”
He removed a lighter from his pack and began to gather kindling. She went to look for fallen branches, and by the time she returned he had a small fire going. With quick, efficient movements, he skinned and cleaned the rabbits and suspended them from a long sharpened branch over the fire.
“You’re welcome to share this with me, if you have an appetite for meat,” he said, the firelight dancing in his eyes and carving his face out of the shadows.
“There is little enough for you, and I am not hungry,” she said. “Eat, and I will patrol the area.”
“Thank you, Artemis.”
She ducked her head and pretended to examine her bow. While he finished cooking his meal, she paced out several wide circles around the ruins, listening as much as watching. By the time she returned, the fire was out, the remains of the rabbits had been buried and Garret was fast asleep.
He trusts me, she reminded herself with more than a little wonder. It was likely that he hadn’t intended to sleep, but his body had insisted, and his instincts...
His instincts told him that she would be there to wake him if any danger threatened them.
Squatting beside him, she studied his face. Now that he was asleep, she was even more aware that his usually calm demeanor was only a kind of mask. He mumbled something that sounded like a name. She couldn’t quite make it out, but his muscles were tense, and she could feel distress radiating from him along with his body heat. Grief beat against her new and fragile mental barriers.
“Garret,” she whispered. “It is only a dream.”
His eyelids fluttered. He expelled a short, harsh breath and then relaxed into normal sleep. The pressure inside her head disappeared, and she realized that learning to block him was no longer a matter of mitigating the uncomfortable turmoil his emotions created in her thoughts. It had become a necessity.
Still, a part of her longed to stroke the damp hair from his forehead, to tell him that all would be well and there was no need for bad dreams.
If she surrendered to such impulses, anything that happened afterward would be entirely her own fault.
An owl hooted somewhere above her and glided out of the trees. It dived into the tall brown grass, and something squealed. The strong taking the weak. The world fell into a deep hush, as if in mourning for the fallen. Another sound came faintly to Artemis’s ears. No animal had made it.
She entered the woods on the other side of the ruins and listened for a repeat of the cry. It came again, softer than before, a moan of someone in pain.
Unbearable pain, forcing its way into Artemis’s mind. She paused to brace herself and searched for the source.
She found the Freeblood lying half tangled in a mass of blackberry bushes, one arm caught in the brambles and his body twisted awkwardly. There was a gaping wound in his neck, too severe to heal on its own. The bite of another Opir.
Dark eyes rolled toward Artemis as she approached cautiously. He made a sound in his ruined throat. Most Opiri maintained the appearance of the age they’d been when they were converted, and this one appeared to have been turned in his late teens. Perhaps, she thought, after the end of the War.
“I will not hurt you,” she said, though she knew such an assurance would probably mean nothing to an exile. He jerked as she drew nearer, his hands clenching and unclenching.
She didn’t try to ask him what had happened. She could guess well enough. He might have been dying for hours, and his body’s attempts to heal would have driven him to starvation.
“Brother,” she said, dropping to her knees beside him. “Can you hear me?”
If he did, she thought, she had a feeling that things were going to get a lot more complicated.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_2b258113-3d9d-50d3-b9cd-6f451ec173df)
The boy’s mouth opened, but all that emerged was another groan.
“I know you suffer,” she said. “But I can ease your discomfort.” She laid her hand on his cool forehead and bent over him. She placed her mouth on his neck, releasing a little of the healing chemicals she had used on Garret. He tried to resist her, but he didn’t have the strength to fight for long. After a few moments he relaxed and closed his eyes.
Artemis withdrew and sliced her wrist with her smaller knife. While the blood of a pure Opir could not nourish another full Opir, it would temporarily ease his raging hunger. She offered her wrist and let him take what he could.
When he was finished, she pressed her palm to her wound until it began to close, and then touched his forehead again. It was slightly warmer, but she knew he had little time left.
“Listen,” she said, stroking the boy’s pale hair out of his face. “I am seeking a pack of Freebloods who might be carrying a human child with them. Have you seen such a pack?”
Confusion crossed the young Freeblood’s face. “Human?” he mumbled.
“A child, who never did any Opir harm.”
“Why...you care?” he whispered.
“Because I believe that it is not our true nature to kill each other over humans, or take life, even human life, simply because we can.”
With unexpected strength, the Freeblood grasped her wrist. “I...saw...the child,” he said. “I was...with...”
She covered his hand with hers. “Where?”
Both she and the Freeblood heard the approaching footsteps before he could answer. The young Opir flinched. His fear nearly paralyzed Artemis, and only her rational assessment of Garret’s essential character permitted her to keep her objectivity.
“Stay back,” she called to Garret without looking away from the Freeblood’s panic-stricken eyes. “He won’t hurt you,” she said to the boy.
Disregarding her warning, Garret circled around the bushes to stand just on the other side. “He was with them?” he asked. There was no pity in his voice.
The young Opir pushed against her, the urge to flee warring with his body’s need for blood. Artemis held him down.
“What is your name?” she asked him.
“P-Pericles,” he croaked.
“Pericles,” she said, “this human is called Garret Fox. He saved my life from other humans who would have killed me.”
“Where is my son?” Garret demanded.
“Garret,” Artemis said sharply. She cupped the dying Freeblood’s head in her hands. “Pericles, where did you see the child?”
Pericles closed his eyes again. “Make the human go.”
Ruthless in his suspicion, Garret moved to stand behind her and gazed down at the boy with his hand on his knife. “Where is he?” he repeated.
Shifting her body, Artemis placed herself between human and Opir. Garret felt like a looming thundercloud at her back.
“Don’t come any closer,” she warned.
“Answer me,” Garret said, stepping around her.
Artemis stood and turned, her face only inches from his. “It would be very foolish if you and I were to fight now, when we may learn something of use to us,” she said.
They stared at each other until the Freeblood gurgled in a way that sounded very much like death. Darkness swirled up in Artemis’s mind.
The boy’s time had run out.
Pushing all thoughts of dying aside, Artemis knelt beside him again. “It’s all right,” she said gently, cradling his head in her arms. “Garret, if you provide him with a little blood, he may be able to speak.”
She expected refusal. Instead, he crouched beside her and gazed at the boy, his jaw working. He began to draw his knife from its sheath. Artemis caught his arm.
Garret jerked away and cut his wrist. “Tell me where I can find my son,” he said to Pericles.
“Take it,” Artemis urged. “His blood cannot cure you, but if you help us, at least one of your people will remember you with honor.”
Licking his dry lips, the boy stared at the dripping blood in fascination. “North,” he said. “Beyond...Oceanus’s territory, across the...Columbia River.” He choked. “Wa-Washington.”
“Why?” Garret asked. “Why are they taking my son so far away?”
“I...” Pericles closed his eyes, beginning to lose consciousness. With a quick glance at Artemis, Garret offered his wrist to Pericles. The young Freeblood’s mouth clamped on his flesh. Garret winced but held steady, and Artemis found herself battling both her own unexpected hunger and Garret’s heightened emotions.
After a minute the boy’s head fell back onto Artemis’s arms, and he went still. The echo of his pain faded from Artemis’s mind. Then there was only an emptiness where he had been for such a short while.
Somewhere in the darkness, an owl hooted. Perhaps, Artemis thought, the same owl as before. She laid the boy’s head on the ground and closed his eyes with a sweep of her palm.
“Thank you,” she said to Garret. She took his arm and sealed the wound. Garret hardly seemed to notice.
“He was with the ones who took my son,” he said, his voice hoarse with anger.
“And they left him here to die,” she said.
“They are rogues, and so was he.”
“Yet you showed him mercy.”
“To find out what we needed to know. It’s unlikely he’d have done the same for me.”
Garret had not felt the boy’s very real fear of him, Artemis thought. She wished she had not. She lifted the boy in her arms and carried him to a place under the trees. She laid him out there, his hands folded across his chest, and stood over him for a few moments. Garret waited silently behind her.
“I know you don’t believe it,” she said, “but this boy was also a victim. I do not think he has been Opir for more than a few years.”
“That makes it worse,” Garret said. “He doesn’t have the excuse of having had decades or even centuries to forget what it was like to be human. He chose to join a pack of rogues and kidnap a human child.”
“Did it occur to you that he might have needed to join a pack in order to survive?”
“Like you did?”
His sarcasm bit hard. “It is because I am older that I could do what he could not,” she said.
“You can’t make excuses for every rogue who commits crimes against humanity.”
“Many of your kind would say that I have committed such crimes merely by existing.”
Garret gripped her arm and turned her to face him. “Those humans would be wrong,” he said.
“How many would have saved my life?” she asked, trembling at his touch.
“I would not be the only one.”
“And I believe that only the worst of my kind would harm a human child.” She pulled her arm from his light hold and strode back to the ruins.
“Artemis,” he called after her.
She stopped without turning. “I do not wish to quarrel,” she said.
“Neither do I,” he said. His moon-cast shadow fell over her, and she felt his breath stir her hair. “We obviously don’t understand each other very well yet.”
“Perhaps it would be better if we did not.”
“Our survival might depend on it.”
She swung around to face him. “What is it that you do not understand?”
“I heard you tell Pericles that you believe it isn’t in your people’s true nature to kill each other over humans, or take human lives just because you can.”
“Why is that a surprise to you?” she asked.
“Are you really concerned about saving humans, or only about Freebloods killing each other?”
Without answering, she broke into a fast walk back to camp, where she began to gather up her things. Garret did the same, though he moved more slowly. Artemis thought she sensed regret in his mind. He checked again to make certain the fire was out, and that the rabbit carcasses and entrails were well buried, not that an Opir hunter couldn’t have smelled them if he’d been searching.
But there was still no sign of intruders, so Garret withdrew a folded sheet of paper from his pack, and carefully smoothed it across the cracked and overgrown floor of the building, right where a shaft of moonlight illuminated the ground. Artemis recognized a precise drawing of the western half of the former state of Oregon.
“If I judge correctly,” he said, pressing his fingertip to a spot on old Highway 99E, “we’re right about here, roughly twenty miles south of Albany.” He glanced up at her for confirmation.
“Yes,” she said, grateful for the need to focus on practicalities. “That is also my estimate.”
“And ten miles north of Albany is the southern border of Oceanus,” he said, indicating a large black square on the eastern slope of the Coast Range. “We have only limited information about this area. Do you know how far inland their territory reaches?”
“Why do you think I can tell you?” she asked.
“You were exiled from Oceanus, weren’t you?”
“How do you know?”
“Because we’ve learned that most exiles stick pretty close to their home territory. There are only a few small Opiri outposts between Oceanus and the northern California Citadel, Erebus. And I know you didn’t come from Erebus.”
“What of the rogues who stole your son? Were they not from Erebus, nearer to your colony?”
“As near as I can tell, they were from a Citadel some distance away. They were acting out of character. It’s all a mystery.” He withdrew his hand and clenched his fist on his thigh. “From what the Freeblood—Pericles—told us, the rogues are taking Timon across the river into old Washington. God knows why. But if he was right, they’ll probably have to cross the Columbia River near Portland, where one bridge is still supposed to be intact. They’ll follow the path of least resistance, the I-5 corridor.”
“But that will also be a more exposed route,” Artemis said. “Oceanus itself may be situated in the foothills of the Coast Range, but its territory reaches across the valley to the western slope of the Cascades. The rogues will be summarily executed if they are caught.” She tapped the map with her fingertip. “They might have gone farther into the Cascade foothills to avoid any chance of meeting a patrol.”
“And that’s much rougher terrain,” Garret said. “If we can find a more direct route across the territory, we may catch up with them, or even get to the Columbia before them.”
“Or we may be captured,” she said. “I am of no use to them, so they will kill me quickly. But they will either take you as a serf or, if they think you are dangerous enough, execute you as an example to other humans.”
“No surprises there,” Garret said, carefully folding the map. “But I don’t expect you to take unnecessary risks on my behalf.”
“You always knew I would be taking such risks.”
“Yes,” he said, meeting her gaze. “But I’m prepared to release you from our pact.”
“Because we quarreled?”
“I was wrong to interfere between you and the Freeblood. And I have no excuse for saying what I did about your motives for helping your fellow Freebloods. But my son must come first.”
“Then nothing has changed,” Artemis said, feeling another jolt of his worry and pain. “The most logical route to Portland is also the shortest, but there is still no guarantee that the rogues have not chosen the same route.”
“Agreed.”
“So we continue to parallel Interstate 5 for the time being.”
She shrugged into her pack and returned to the path, leaving the young Freeblood to the elements and the scavengers that would return him to the earth.
* * *
Three days’ cautious travel brought them to Oceanus’s southern boundary. They crossed the Willamette River at Albany and continued north, roughly paralleling Interstate 5, to the rural city of Salem—which, like most other pre-War human cities, was a mishmash of half-fallen buildings and bare foundations, overgrown parking lots, cracked streets and patches of woodland that filled every available space in between. The river and a long line of hills stood between them and the western half of the valley and the Coast Range.
Patrols of Opiri and Daysiders from Oceanus would have to cross those hills to find them, Garret thought, and the presence of such a patrol on their side of the Willamette would be a matter of very bad luck.
At the moment, he and Artemis were observing from the edge of what had been a wide street bordered by parking lots and the remains of large, warehouse-style buildings. The woods ended here, replaced by scattered, smaller trees and shrubs, and resumed a thousand feet to the northeast.
Artemis rose from a crouch, shaking her head. “Nothing new,” she said.
Garret concealed his frustration. Artemis had been vigilant; as they’d traveled, varying the hours between night and day, she had found numerous indications that Freeblood packs had passed this way. The “when” was more difficult to pin down, and there had been no clear signs of the presence of a human child.
He’s still alive, Garret told himself. He’s a fighter. And they must have a reason for taking him so far.
“Garret.” Artemis laid a gloved hand on his shoulder, her dark eyes catching reflected light under the shelter of her hood. It was the first time they’d had any physical contact since they’d left Pericles, and suddenly he was immersed in the warmth of her body and the indescribable scent of her skin drifting out from beneath her heavy cloak. His heart began to race as it had when she had taken his blood, triggering the same startling current of desire and longing he had felt before and had struggled to ignore ever since.
Her fingers began to shake, and she withdrew her hand. “It’s still early,” she said. “We can be halfway across the territory before night falls.”
“How long since you’ve taken blood?” he asked, breathing deeply to slow his heartbeat and suppress his arousal before it became too obvious. “You haven’t hunted for yourself since you took mine, have you?”
She shook her head in a distracted way that worried him. He’d expected her to hunt at least once during the times they’d stopped to rest, but he’d begun to suspect that she’d neglected herself because of his eagerness to keep moving.
“Go now,” he said, “I can wait as long as it takes.”
“Later,” Artemis said. With an abrupt, almost clumsy motion, she hitched up her pack and headed north toward the next patch of forest. Garret jogged to catch up, and then strode ahead of her. He could see far better in daylight than she could, and though the chances of ambush seemed small, he wasn’t prepared to risk her walking into one. The Vampire Slayer, though still hidden in his pack, was close enough at hand that he could pull the segments out, assemble them and fire in less than a minute.
Sooner or later Artemis would find out about the weapon. He just hoped it wasn’t because he had to kill a Nightsider right in front of her eyes.
They cleared the ruins of Salem by midday and began to travel in a more northeasterly direction, moving well away from the river and mountains to the west. Garret kept a constant eye on Artemis, watching for any sign of weakness that would indicate an urgent need for blood. But she continued to behave as if everything were normal, and he knew that forcing the issue wouldn’t do anything to gain her cooperation.
At last they crossed the old six-lane freeway, passing through former pastures, farmland and orchards that had given way to mixed conifer and deciduous forest. Several times Artemis detected the scent or tracks of Opiri moving in groups, but again there was no indication that they carried a human prisoner. They met no patrols from Oceanus. It seemed to be going almost too smoothly until, soon after sunset, Artemis began to weave and stumble again.
Garret was looking for shelter where she could safely rest when she jumped the thicket of wild roses that stood between them and barreled into him, dragging him to the ground. Her hood barely stayed over her head.
“Opiri!” She flung her body across his as if to prevent him from rising.
His pack—and the VS—were trapped beneath him. He lay still as her breath puffed against his cheek, the gentle curves of her body seeming to fit against his like a missing piece of a puzzle falling into place.
“How close?” he asked.
Artemis turned her head, her lips inches from his. “Close,” she said. “It is fortunate that the wind is with us.”
“Patrol? Or rogues?” he asked.
“I believe they are Freebloods. I think there is a human with them, but—”
“Timon!” Garret began to rise, but she held him back with all her obviously waning strength.
“Don’t be a fool!” she said. “If they have him, it won’t do us any good to rush right up to them and try to take him.”
Closing his eyes, Garret worked to regain his composure. Artemis was right. God knew what the Freebloods might do with Timon if they felt threatened. If it even was Timon.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m all right.”
She stared into his eyes for a long moment and then rolled off. Keeping low, he got to his knees and looked over the top of the thicket.
“You won’t see them,” Artemis said, kneeling beside him. “They are some distance ahead.” She slid him a glance out of the corner of her eye. “You know I have a far better chance of getting near them without alerting them.”
“Not when you haven’t fed,” he said.
“I am well,” she said.
“You’ll have to take my blood again.”
“No.”
“You’re being irrational, Artemis.”
“I will not do it.”
“Then you’ll have to stay here while I scout, or you could get both of us killed.”
“I tell you I am well!” she said, her voice nearly rising from a whisper.
He took her face between his hands, though he knew what it might do to both of them. “Are you so disgusted by what happened between us that you’d ignore your own health and risk your life?”
The moment he finished speaking, he realized how desperately he wanted her to say no.
Chapter 6 (#ulink_6224b8f8-4890-5be3-8ee5-1e881a687022)
Her breath caught, and so did Garret’s. Fear and desire surged through his body, and it almost seemed as though they were her feelings as well as his. She was afraid of him, and of herself. Afraid she would take, and give, too much. She sensed that he was desperately afraid for her. Not because she could help him find Timon, but—
Artemis pulled away, her face paler than it had been a moment before. “When we know whether or not your son is with these Opiri,” she said, “I will do whatever is necessary. For the moment, you must let me go ahead.”
“No,” he said. “We go together.”
“So that you can protect me?”
He knew how she would react if he admitted the truth. Yes, he wanted to protect her, as much as he’d ever wanted to protect Roxana. And he’d been in a far less advantageous position to help Roxana in the Citadel where he’d been a serf and she his mistress.
“If you’re not in your right mind, you’ll need my protection,” he said. He glanced up at the sky. “It’s nearly sunset. In a few minutes you won’t need your heavier clothes, and you’ll be able to move faster. But don’t make a move without me, Artemis. I mean it.”
She gave him a scathing glance. “And to think I had thought you a human male without undue pride in his own abilities.”
“It’s your pride I’m worried about. Let’s go.”
Bent nearly double, they ran northeast, Artemis pausing twice to get her bearings. A quarter mile on, she stopped again and threw back her hood. Only a trace of pink light lingered over the hills to the west.
“The Opiri are somewhere beyond those trees,” she said, pointing at a wide stretch of mixed woodland. As she began to move forward, Garret knelt to check the VS parts in his pack.
He rose again and trotted after Artemis as she slipped from tree to tree as lightly as a leopardess. She was nearly crawling when they reached the border of the woods. He dropped to his belly behind her. An area of nearly unbroken grassland stretched ahead as far as he could see.
“Do you see the rogues?” he said, squinting into the darkness.
“No, but I know where they are.” Her voice held a new note, and the hair prickled at the back of Garret’s neck. “They are camped less than two hundred yards from here. There are seven, perhaps eight, of them, and—”
“Timon?”
“I...sense that there is more than one human in the area.”
He tensed to move again. “We have to get closer.”
“Wait.” Her nose wrinkled. “These Opiri are ready to fight. They are expecting to attack or be attacked.”
“Attacked by whom?”
“The humans, perhaps,” she murmured. “Whoever they may be, they are remarkably foolish to venture within the Citadel’s borders.”
“And my son could be caught in the middle of whatever’s about to happen.”
She turned to meet his gaze. “If the Freebloods have protected him so far, they will not let him be hurt. And if the humans should win...”
“We can’t stand by and let this—”
“We must. If we die, who can save Timon?”
Clenching his teeth, Garret tried to weigh the options objectively. Artemis was right. Whoever the humans were, they would want to help a human child, and in a fight, the rogues would keep Timon out of the way. He and Artemis would probably have a better chance of grabbing Timon when the battle was decided one way or the other.
“I know this is against your every instinct,” Artemis said. “I am sorry. I will go ahead, and see if—”
“No,” he said, pulling her down when she attempted to move. “Can we get any closer without the Nightsiders sensing us?”
“No. In fact we have to go back to be safe,” she said.
She retreated. Garret lingered a moment, listening, but his human senses were not acute enough to gather any additional information. Reluctantly, he followed Artemis to a point well within the shelter of the woods but close enough to the grassland that she could monitor what was happening there.
They waited as the long minutes went by, sitting a long arm’s reach apart from each other. Garret was constantly, painfully aware that Artemis was very near but not quite close enough to touch, and that he badly wanted to touch her. Even in the midst of so much uncertainty, those feelings refused to go away.
An hour passed in silence, and then another. Artemis’s head began to droop, and her breathing grew shallow. Garret moved closer to her. He noted a new transparency to her pale skin, a dullness in her hair and a deepening of the shadows under her cheekbones and closed eyes.
“Artemis,” he said, carefully touching her shoulder.
She jerked awake, her body snapping into a defensive posture far more slowly than it should have. She blinked, recognized him and clambered to her feet.
“What has happened?” she demanded.
“Nothing, as far as I can tell,” he said. “But you were falling asleep.”
“I wasn’t—” She broke off and strode away through the trees. Garret waited ten minutes and then got up to follow her.
He found her at the edge of the woods. “Nothing has changed,” she said as he crouched beside her.
“That’s right,” he said. “You still need what you need. We have to be ready to move quickly.”
“You will become weak if I take too much.”
“I trust you to take only as much as is safe for both of us.”
They stared at each other, and Garret could see her struggling with arguments he knew she didn’t want to make. Arguments that had nothing to do with her fear of his becoming weak. But she knew he was right, and she was the first to look away.
“Very well,” she said. “But we should use the other wrist.”
Garret hesitated, reexamining the decision he’d made. He couldn’t pretend that there wasn’t a risk in giving her much more intimate access to his blood.
But she would derive nourishment from his throat more efficiently than she would by taking blood from his wrist. And if he couldn’t trust her now, he might as well let those Opiri in the field kill him themselves.
He led her back to their camp, removed the blanket from his pack and laid it down at the foot of a tall pine. Then he removed his coat and unbuttoned his shirt. Her gaze flew to his hands, watching his progress with apparent fascination, and he found himself suddenly self-conscious. He could sense her need as if it were his own.
“What are you doing?” she asked in a slightly strained voice.
“Just what we agreed,” he said.
Removing his shirt, he folded it and laid it on the ground behind him. He rested his palms on his thighs and settled into the calm, detached state that had always served him well when he had worked with the human Underground in Erebus. He would need all that detachment to treat this feeding like any other.
He tilted his head back, took a deep breath. “I’m ready,” he said.
“You are...” Artemis stammered. “You expect me to...”
“It’s fast, and it’s practical,” he said, staring up into the green boughs overhead. “The sooner we’re finished, the sooner we’ll both be ready to take whatever action is necessary.”
“How many times have you done this?” she asked.
“Often enough to know what I’m doing.”
He waited, holding himself ready, until he felt the heat of her body close to his, her breath sighing over his skin, her lips brushing his throat.
“Are you certain?” she asked softly.
“Look at me, Artemis.”
Whatever she saw in his eyes apparently frightened her, and she almost bolted. But he grabbed her hand, and she settled down again, panting and trembling. Her teeth penetrated his flesh. She moaned as his blood began to flow, and he felt desire take hold exactly as he had prayed it wouldn’t. He reached out to clasp his hands around her waist. He found the hem of her tunic and slipped his fingers beneath, sliding his palms over the skin below her ribs.
Then he paused, because she hadn’t asked for his touch, because he knew that she was not Roxana. But Artemis gripped his wrist and held his hand where it was.
She was too far gone to stop. And so was he.
* * *
The moment Artemis tasted his blood, she knew it was too late.
She felt his warm breath stirring her hair, heard the rapid drumming of his heart, smelled the surge of his lust and only drank the more deeply, caught up in an ecstasy more overwhelming than any she had known before.
Even the last time he had given his blood, it hadn’t been like this. She’d underestimated the impact of taking it directly from his throat. An intimate act, she’d thought when she’d first met him, one he surely wouldn’t share with her.
And yet here she was, and her body and mind were opening to Garret, abandoning all caution, renewing the intense emotional connection she had wanted so badly to extinguish. She had forgotten what it could be like, how quickly one could lose control with the right partner. And she had never taken blood during what humans called “making love.”
But now, when Garret touched her bare skin, she felt his excitement as well as her own. She was being carried away by a current she couldn’t stop, delirious with feelings and sensations that superseded mere arousal or the sensual stimulation that so often accompanied feeding.
She wanted him. She wanted to possess him, to be possessed by him, to join in complete physical union. What happened afterward...
No. The unraveling thread of her sanity begged her to remember what she could lose, what she could do to Garret. Once she stepped onto this path, she might never find her way back again. A single reckless act might finally shatter any hope she had of closing the gate against Garret Fox.
But sanity had no hope when Garret’s fingertips discovered her nipples and teased them into firm, sensitive peaks. His blood soothed her tongue. Erotic images shaped in Garret’s mind slipped into hers as his fingers slid down her belly and to the waistband of her pants. He unfastened the fly and dipped inside. Callous skin touched tender flesh. She shifted her body, urging him to explore as she continued to drink.
Garret stroked her with one hand while his other worked at the buttons of her shirt. Cool air washed over her breasts, and she straightened as his emotions told her what he wanted to do. Acting entirely on instinct, she sealed the bite and leaned back, giving him complete access to her breasts.
When he took her nipple into his mouth, she moaned at the incredible sensation of his reaction as well as her own, desire doubled and redoubled as he suckled her hungrily. His other hand found its way between her thighs and grazed the tight little bud where pleasure was almost like pain. She gasped, and he gasped with her.
Somehow her pants came off and she was straddling his thighs, rubbing against the taut bulge of his erection. She felt herself floating, guided to the ground by strong arms, lying on her back with her thighs parted.
The touch of his lips and tongue in her most sensitive place drew a muffled cry from her throat, quieted only by some distant sense of self-preservation. She seemed to recall something like this happening long ago, but the past was as unreal as the future. Garret knew exactly where and how to use his tongue to tickle and tease, drawing out each caress with rapid flicks and long strokes.
She arched her back, begging him with her entire body. He turned his attention to her breasts and continued his ministrations while she felt for the waistband of his pants.
“Garret,” she whispered, filling her mind with the emotional images of taking and being taken. His aura erupted around him, emitting tongues of flame that strained toward her. Her own aura flared for the first time, a blue-tinged amethyst radiance that opened to accept the thrust of his fire as her body was ready to accept his.
Garret was more than ready. Her hand found him, large and very hard. The intensity of his need—hers—multiplied a thousandfold.
For a moment there was nothing between them. Nothing at all—no boundaries, no barriers, no walls. He eased himself over her, gazing down at her with his weight braced on his hands and his hips between her thighs.
Again she saw herself through his eyes, less a distinctive shape than an aura enclosing the interwoven strands of her emotions. But the image began to take form, and she glimpsed her face: eyes closed, lips parted, hair wild and tangled about her shoulders.
And beautiful. Beautiful in a way she could never have imagined. It was the face she’d seen in mirrors before her exile and sometimes in the imperfect reflection of water, but bathed in a gentle light that softened the blue of her aura to a silky violet. Violet water, smooth and untroubled.
Garret caught her lips with his, exploring the terrain of her mouth, coaxing her to open for him. With a low moan of surrender, she parted her lips, and his tongue found its way inside. He curled it around hers, sucked, kissed her more deeply than she would have believed possible.
Violet transformed to deep, hot purple. She pushed her fingers into his hair and bit lightly into his lower lip, drawing blood. He adjusted his position so that a single thrust would make them one at last.
Something remarkable happened then. Feelings she barely recognized bloomed in her mind, so astonishing that, at first, she didn’t know how to name them.
But not all the memories were dead. There were no times, no places...only the joy and happiness and exhilaration of the single thing she had sought and found and lost before the change. The thing she wanted again, here within her grasp.
Everything else vanished. There was no more need to struggle, to aspire to anything greater than this. Her emotions swelled to obliterate all other desires. She would float in this perfect world forever, in endless bliss and exultation.
She had found what the humans called heaven.
But there was a bubble of disturbance in the flawless pool of eternal rapture, a devil in this paradise. It picked and prodded at her, mocking her with warnings she could not quite shut out.
There is no heaven for Opiri.
“Artemis,” Garret said. His voice was hoarse and urgent, his mind spinning on the edge of euphoria. She knew that all she had to do was speak a single word, and every other voice would be silenced.
So would her dreams and hopes for her people. She would no longer care about them, because she had what she wanted, all she would ever want.
Forget them, she thought. You owe them nothing.
But her past would not be silent. They are your people, it said. How can you abandon them for a human?
“No,” she whispered.
All we fought for destroyed, because of you. Because of him.
Garret’s face came into sharp focus, blazing with elation. He could destroy nothing, but he could give her—
“Roxana?” he murmured.
She saw her own face again...saw it change, felt Garret’s bewilderment and her own turmoil as that other face slipped over hers like a mask. Eyes too dark, hair too long, features too...
“No,” Garret said hoarsely. The stranger vanished, but the sheer weight of his emotions—regret, grief, confusion—bore down on her with such force that she thought they would crush her. Illusion shattered. Shock worked as no careful discipline could have done.
She pushed him out—out of her heart, her mind, her very being—and slammed the wall down between them, severing all emotional ties, all the feelings that had tempted her into relinquishing the new way she had sought to win for her own kind.
The feelings that had nearly made her surrender to a human who saw another face even as he prepared to possess her.
Chapter 7 (#ulink_0d8b1a32-62e0-5411-a04a-fa44cc227331)
Artemis scrambled to her feet, snatching up her pants as she bolted away from him. Garret’s face was drained of color, and though she could no longer sense his emotions, she saw the stark pain in his eyes.
For her, or for himself?
Roxana.
Somehow Artemis dressed, gathered her weapons and fled without looking at him again. She ran recklessly toward the border of the woods, as if by simply putting physical distance between herself and Garret she might undo the past hour and forget.
But she knew it was not possible to regain that safe sense of living in a fortress that could never be breached. There was no undoing this. The gate had closed, but she knew that she could never take Garret’s blood again. It wasn’t simply a matter of becoming dependent. Death would be preferable to losing herself, losing all she believed had made her what she was.
Garret had asked her if she remembered what love was. She hadn’t been honest then. She remembered the physical and emotional closeness that accompanied complete faith in another: a lover, life partner, the one she could not live without. Garret had made her experience some of those feelings again. His blood, his touch, had engulfed her in passions she had left behind for a greater, nobler purpose.
But there was no reality behind those passions, no foundation. Garret’s invocation of that other name was proof enough of that.
Had that other woman been so different from her, though? Ivory hair, eyes the color of rich, purple wine—the distinctive traits of any Opir save for the newest converts.
Artemis filled her lungs with pine-scented air, and then expelled her agitation along with her breath. The only purpose in analyzing her emotions was to rid herself of them. If she could not be an impartial, dispassionate teacher, she could not help her own people break the chains of savagery that bound them to lives of degradation and self-destruction.
She slowed as she approached the field, focusing her attention on her surroundings. There was no sound, no movement in the sea of grass, but she knew the Freebloods and humans were still there.
Stretching out on her belly, Artemis rested her cheek against the cool earth. This was a test. If she truly considered the fate of her kind more important than anything else, she could leave this place and let Garret find his own way to his son, facing the dangers of capture and death alone.
But she could no more leave him than she could erase her empathic “gift.” The test did not ask her to choose which commitment was more important. It asked for proof that she could remain by Garret’s side and not lose herself again. If she succeeded, then she might be capable and worthy of carrying out her mentor Kronos’s great dream. The one he had died for.
She was preparing to return to Garret when a flock of birds exploded from the tall grass, followed by the report of many guns firing in unison. She froze as cries of pain and terror and rage rent the night, and the thump of flesh meeting flesh accompanied the rising scent of blood.
“Timon!”
Garret staggered up behind her, his pack dangling from his shoulder by one strap. His face was pale, his breathing shallow. Artemis trapped her concern in a cage of logic, grateful that she could not feel what he felt, trying not to imagine what he had thought when she left him without explanation.
“I am certain that Timon is well,” she said calmly. “You have lost a great deal of blood, and you have been running. You must rest.”
He looked at her as if she had lost her sanity, let the pack drop to the ground and knelt beside it. He fumbled inside with shaking hands, withdrawing a handgun.
“You cannot go out there,” Artemis said. “Certainly not with that.”
There was another scream, but Garret never so much as glanced up. He set the gun aside and withdrew several components of a weapon Artemis didn’t remember ever having seen before. He pushed the pieces together, pausing several times when his clumsy fingers lost their grip. When he was finished and raised the weapon to check his work, she knew what it was: the only projectile weapon the humans had produced that could kill an Opir with a single shot to almost any spot on the body.
“No,” she said. “You will be killed before you can ever use that thing.”
“There’s no other choice.” He met her gaze as he got to his feet. “Don’t try to stop me.”
“I said the same thing to you once,” she reminded him. “I believe I managed to make it ten feet before I collapsed.”
Jaw set, Garret stepped out into the darkness. He had gone perhaps three yards when one of his legs gave out from under him and he fell to his knee. Another spatter of gunshots blotted out whatever sound he might have made, and then a deep hush fell, even more absolute than the silence that had come before.
Garret clambered to his feet, swinging the rifle back into position. Artemis joined him. She sniffed the air, and it was as if she could see what had happened as surely as if she had been in the middle of it.
“Let me go ahead,” she said. “If there are any survivors, I can move more quickly to do whatever must be done.”
“Together,” he said grimly.
Artemis knew that trying to stop him would be pointless. He was already moving again, ready to shoot at anything with pale skin and sharp incisors. All she could do was hope that she was right about his son.
* * *
Before them lay a scene of utter carnage. Bodies were scattered across the field, mostly Opiri, seven or eight of them lying in pools of dark red. There were several humans, dressed in the mottled clothing of militiamen. Their annihilation had left abstract, scarlet patterns on the grass and shrubs around them, attesting to the violence of their deaths.
Timon was not with them.
He squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for his heart to resume its normal speed. After a few moments he opened his eyes again and examined the battlefield. He’d seen such violence before, but somehow this seemed worse, as if he might have prevented the killing with a few well-chosen words in the same way he’d once rallied and encouraged members of the human Underground in Erebus.
He glanced at Artemis. Her face was expressionless. She, too, must regret the killings, but he had no way of knowing what else she thought.
And she wasn’t going to tell him. Now he knew that she had been correct to hesitate before taking his blood again. If it had only been a matter of physical attraction, he might have been able to hold himself aloof. He had deceived himself into thinking he could donate without being affected by her the way he’d been the first time—wanting her, wanting to be inside her, to claim her for his own in a way he had no right to do.
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Susan Krinard
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Blood enemies, bound loversHe’d loved a vampire once, only to have her murdered by her own kind. Now, to save his son, Garret Fox must look to another vampire for help. Garret knows empathic Artemis can’t deny him once she drinks his human blood. But despite the attraction between them, Garret can never forget what Artemis truly is…Sharing Garret’s thoughts and feelings has wreaked havoc on Artemis’s emotions. But when she discovers a malevolent force bent on destroying them, she finds herself drawn even closer to the human. Dare she hope to find a home with a man who hates her kind?