Daysider

He stood up abruptly, his clean pants hanging from his good hand. “If you had been hurt—”

“Who was Lysander?” Alexia interrupted, taking the offensive. “What was between you two that made you hate each other so much?”

Damon jerked on the pants one leg after the other, testing the tough fabric to its limits.

“Lysander is—” he reached down for his shirt and shook it out “—was,” he corrected himself, “a midrank Freeblood with ambition. And a traitor to the Council.”

A Freeblood...one of the four basic ranks in Nightsider society, and the second lowest.

Freebloods were no longer vassal to any Bloodmaster or Bloodlord, but they had yet to establish households with serfs of their own, and so competition among them was particularly fierce.

“You didn’t know he was a traitor when you first found us, did you?” she asked. “You obviously wanted to kill him the moment you laid eyes on him, and he felt the same, whatever he was trying to achieve by lying to us.”

Damon crumpled the shirt in his good hand. “He would have behaved the same with any Darketan.”

“Maybe. But before you showed up, Lysander tried to convince me that he killed the other Nightsider because you had a personal grudge against the Expansionists that would make you believe what his victim said about not trusting him. But Lysander must have known all along that you’d never believe anything he said.” She lowered her voice. “He mentioned Eirene. What happened, Damon? How was he involved?”

Fabric hissed as it tore in Damon’s fists. He stared down at the damage he had done to his spare shirt—and undoubtedly to his wrist, which he had pulled out of its sling—

before letting the garment fall to the ground.

Alexia tried again.

“Lysander said you were more driven by ‘irrational impulses’ than others of your kind. That that was why you were sent to work with me. What made him say that, Damon? What does it have to do with what you and I discussed before, about Darketans and feelings?”

His flat expression told her he wasn’t going to let her break him down. “We have far more important matters to discuss,” he said, “if we want to stay alive.”

He was right. She couldn’t waste time and energy trying to drag the truth out of him now, especially since there was one particular thing she had needed to know ever since she’d left camp late that morning. A question only Damon could answer.

Which was why she was alive at all.

Chapter 12

“Very well,” Alexia said, hardening her voice, “let’s talk about what happened yesterday.”

Damon pushed his good right arm through the sleeve of his shirt and took a deep breath. “It was necessary, Alexia,” he said.

So he wasn’t going to pretend he didn’t understand her line of questioning. That was something, anyway.

“Necessary to use sex as a way to make me bite you?” she asked, carefully controlling her voice so as not to reveal how much even the thought of his lovemaking aroused her even now.

“It wasn’t like that,” he said, easing his other sleeve over his injured arm with exquisite care. “I didn’t have it planned.”

“Didn’t you?” Alexia slung the strap of the VS back over her shoulder and turned her back on him, walking to the nearest tree. She rested both palms on the trunk, inhaling and exhaling slowly the way she had been taught in the earliest years of her training.

“You said, before we...you said you wouldn’t take my choice from me. You lied.”

“And you broke your promise,” he retorted with some heat. “You tried to back out of it by asking me to remember your exact words. I believe they were ‘hang on as long as necessary.’” At least he didn’t seem to remember what she had told him when he had been under his “spell,” demanding so ferociously that she stay alive. “That’s right,” she said. “As long as necessary. But once Michael was dead—”

“It was even more necessary,” Damon said, “because you were the sole survivor of your team and the only one capable of completing your mission.”

The anger went out of his voice. “I didn’t even know it would work, Alexia. I could only hope.”

“You’ve used that word before,” she said. “I never thought you really believed what it meant.”

“Have you abandoned it, Alexia?” he said, his voice thick with emotion that only confused her more. “Would you rather have died?”

As much as she wanted to say yes, she knew it wasn’t true. Maybe seeing Damon fight Lysander to the death had made her cherish life more than the principles she had thought were unbreakable. Maybe she valued her own existence more because she valued Damon’s.

No, she couldn’t lie to him. But she couldn’t dismiss her anger, her sense of betrayal, so easily.

“Do you expect me to thank you?” she asked.

“Do you think you had no part in it?” he asked, the edge returning to his voice.

“Whether you admit it or not, even you are a creature of instinct, driven to survive.”

He was right. He could not have forced her teeth into his flesh. But she couldn’t admit it, because that meant she was no better than a Nightsider. No better than the monster Michael had become, or the thing inside Damon that would gladly have slaughtered Lysander with nothing more than his teeth.

Damon’s footsteps, barely audible, whispered across the ground behind her. “You were born as you are, Alexia,” he said. “It does no good to fight your nature.”

Or his. Even if she could despise herself, her weakness, she couldn’t despise him. The fact was that something had happened to her when she and Damon had made love—not just a matter of bodies coming together in sex, or even the ecstatic joy that had taken her at the end. Their lovemaking had hurled her into territories uncharted and far more dangerous than their tentative friendship.

Even the matter of taking his blood couldn’t diminish what she had felt then, what she was feeling now. He was so close now, and she could draw every familiar line of his body in her mind: broad shoulders tapering to taut stomach and trim waist; long, muscular legs; and the part of him she so badly wanted to feel inside her again.

She closed her eyes and turned her face up to listen to the rustle of the leaves in the midnight breeze, forgetting everything but the vivid memory of Damon’s passion.

Once that passion had been for Eirene. Perhaps he had been thinking of his former lover when he kissed Alexia, when he entered her and possessed her and accepted her bite.

She couldn’t believe it. Even if he wasn’t capable of regarding any other woman the way he had Eirene— even if what he and Alexia had shared was only a matter of the

“attachment” Lysander had spoken of so mockingly—he cared. Genuinely and truly.

And she could no longer put off acknowledging the overwhelming truth.

She laughed. No, she couldn’t hate Damon. Or even herself. Not as long as she was with him.

“I am what I am,” she said, turning to look at him. “I know I can’t change that. But I can still live in service to something bigger than myself, and die honorably.”

A sudden gust of wind lifted the unbuttoned placket of Damon’s shirt, blowing the edges away from his chest. “Honor is a human concept,” he said softly.

Alexia tried not to let herself become distracted by the sight of his partially naked body. “Is that why you have so much trouble keeping your promises?” she asked. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. “I—” Damon looked away. “Why did you leave camp?” he asked again, as if their previous discussion had never happened.

“I went back to take care of Michael’s body,” she said, and then hesitated. Surely she could wait just a little longer to tell Damon about Michael, even though the mystery of his transformation, his behavior and his words