Daysider

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

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

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

And now she was.

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

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

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

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

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

But she never saw the lady again.

* * *

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

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

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

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

Then the Daysider had taken Alexia back to Aegis and—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

sacrifice?

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

Evil.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *