Daysider

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What makes us human.”

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

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

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

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

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

“The way Nightsiders punish their serfs for disobedience?”

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

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

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

“Why should we wish to?”

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

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

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

Nothing could ever do that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is that really what you believe?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope Eirene had shared.

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

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

“Like the illegal colony?” he asked.

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

He looked down at her small hand, so delicate in spite of its strength, wondering if she could feel how hard