Daysider

Daysiders or leeches. Damon had denied there could be Daysiders in the colony, and given that their numbers were believed to be very limited, the shooters would almost certainly be vampires.

But were they from the colony, or Erebus? Damon had also dispelled the notion that the Expansionists had their own agents, but even if he believed that, she had no reason to take his word for it.

Alexia crawled over to Damon and touched his back. It rose and fell steadily. There was a hole in his jacket that marked where a large-caliber bullet had pierced his body.

Carefully she rolled him a little to the side and felt the front of his torn shirt. There was another hole that matched the first. A through-and-through, then. Thank God for that.

She shivered, quickly realizing that the state of her body, and Damon’s, left them both more vulnerable to the chill of the early autumn night. Getting to her feet, she retrieved her pack and jacket, which Damon must have taken from her after the attack. She draped the jacket over her shoulders, removed the tightly wrapped blanket from the pack, laid the blanket over Damon’s back and picked up the rifle lying about a meter away. It had recently been fired, and she was pretty sure Damon was the one who had done it. With luck, he’d taken down at least one of the shooters.

Her Vampire Slayer, however, was gone. That didn’t surprise her. But if the shooters had gotten so close and intended to do so much damage, why in hell had they left her and Damon alive?

She sat beside him and sipped from her canteen, drawing her knees up to her chest to combat the chill. There was no question of leaving him. They had become partners of a sort, and no field agent abandoned her partner.

Except Michael had. He’d gone far enough away from her that he hadn’t known she was being attacked.

Not good. Not good at all.

She dozed a little, chin on knees, unable to help herself. Some time later she jerked awake again, aware for the first time of another ache she hadn’t noticed before, camouflaged by the greater pain of her shoulder. She removed her jacket, wincing at the stabs of pain radiating out from her shoulder, and touched her left inner arm. Her shirtsleeve was crusted with dried blood.

Suddenly alarmed, she unbuttoned her shirt, pulled it open and slid it down behind her shoulders. There was a thick scab under her arm where her patch should have been.

It was gone. Someone had dug it out in a hasty, brutal attempt at surgery, leaving it to heal over.

Leaving her without the drugs she needed to survive.

Chapter 4

Alexia closed her eyes, breathing deeply to control her panic. Calm, she told herself.

You have choices. Think.

But she really didn’t have choices at all.

Damon shifted slightly, a low groan catching in his throat. That was a positive sign...the only good news she had to cling to at the moment, aside from the fact that she could feel the bullets in her shoulder emerging from the skin of her back. She loosened the bandage and ran her hand across the exit wound, dislodging the nearly scoured bullets and brushing them off like dead ticks.

She moved the bandage back into place and rose to her feet, determined to stay awake.

She paced the little hollow, measuring out its width from the base of one hill to the other.

By the time she sensed the coming dawn, her legs would barely carry her.

It wasn’t just lack of sleep and her body’s need to heal. The effect of the drugs in her bloodstream would already be diminishing. She’d be able to get through a few days—a week, maybe, if she was lucky—before she began to starve.

Dropping down beside Damon again, she took one of the bags of field rations out of her pack and withdrew a dense nutrient bar. She ate it slowly as misty light crept into the hollow. Soon her ability to digest solid food would be seriously compromised, and so she had to use all her rations while she could.

She had just finished her third bar when Damon opened his eyes. He looked at her through slitted lids and tried to lift himself on his elbows. Her blanket slid from his back.

Alexia hurried to his side, intending to tell him that he was moving much too soon. But he was already pushing his body up, though stiffly, and rolling onto his knees. He grimaced and sat there with his hands braced on his muscular thighs. His skin was still extremely pale, almost as light as a Nightsider’s. Even though he was recovering from a serious wound, the change in color seemed almost unnatural, considering the darkness of his tan the previous day.

He spoke before she could. “You’re all right,” he said, his voice rasping with pain.

“How long have I been out?”

“I don’t know,” she said, crouching to hand him his canteen. “I remember going down almost as soon as we were attacked. That was around sunset. Considering it’s almost dawn, I’d say we were both dead to the world all night.”

Damon drank with a nod of thanks, set down the canteen and raised his hand to pluck at the front of his bloody shirt. Alexia realized for the first time that the garment was in tatters, the hem ripped off almost to the level of his pectorals.

“They shot me soon after you fell,” he said grimly. “I didn’t know if you had—”

“I’m fine,” she lied. “The shooters haven’t come back.”

Damon nodded and dropped his hand from his chest. “They let us live.”

“Yes. Considering how badly they wounded us, that’s a little surprising. Any idea why?”

“None.”

“You didn’t see anything? Recognize any scents?”

“I could not identify them. But I don’t think they are the same as the first shooter.”

“What makes you say that?”

“A feeling.” He said the word almost mockingly, as if he recognized how ridiculous a reason it was. “Did they take anything?”

“One of my weapons.” She hesitated, wondering how much she should tell him about her real state. She knew what she had to do to survive: abandon the mission and return to the Border.

But there was something else at stake besides her life. Someone—vampires, either from Erebus or the colony—had stolen her patch. Aegis had always assumed that the Nightsiders didn’t know about the inherent weakness in a percentage of Enclave agents, or they would have exploited it long ago.

Apparently Aegis had been wrong. The shooters had obviously known what to look for. That meant the Nightsiders must already be aware of the patches and that they had some essential purpose, even if they’d never been able to get their hands on one before.

Maybe Damon knew about them as well. If he did...

Keeping her face perfectly still, Alexia reconsidered what she’d assumed about his motives. He had outright admitted that the Council had sent him to join her. Sometimes telling part of the truth was more effective than an all-out lie. Had their “partnership” been part of the plan to get her patch? Had he lulled her suspicions just enough to leave her vulnerable?

Had they caught Michael and done the same thing to him?

She examined Damon’s face covertly, feeling such a conflicting jumble of emotions that she could hardly think straight. She had almost begun to trust him, forgetting all her rigorous training, because he’d sounded so reasonable. And, if she were honest with herself, because she had felt drawn to him in ways that defied logic. In the brief time she’d known him, they had forged enough of a bond that she’d been sick with worry that he might be fatally injured, or already dead.

That was all in the past now. She wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. But the question remained: If Damon had been assigned to take her where the Nightsiders could get to her, why would they try to kill