Daysider

execution. Doing so would instigate more problems than the criminals themselves. That is why most who break the law are sent outside the walls.”

“To die in the sun, or of starvation?” she asked.

“Yes. Or to be changed.”

She didn’t know what he was talking about. “Changed?”

“As those humans selected to become vassals are changed. Only our criminals are not as fortunate as humans. They become something both our peoples fear and despise.”

All at once Alexia understood. He was talking about Orloks. Aegis had speculated that the creatures were in some way like Nightsiders, capable of converting humans into blood-drinkers like themselves.

But now Damon was saying they were Nightsiders. And Michael had become one of them.

“But how?” she asked, tears thickening her voice. “We never saw these creatures before the Armistice. How did the first ones come to be?”

“Mutations,” Damon said. “Grotesque reflections of Opiri. Like Darketans.”

“Not like Darketans. You can’t possibly think you’re anything like an Orlok.”

But he had asked her what he’d looked like when he had left Theron’s house. As if he’d almost expected...

She couldn’t complete the thought. “You aren’t a monster,” she said.

“They are mindless creatures who attack both humans and Opiri indiscriminately,” Damon said, as if he hadn’t heard her. “But recently it had been reported that most Lamiae had left the region. That was why when the thing attacked Michael and me, I—” He drew in a deep breath and released it slowly. “I wasn’t prepared.”

And Michael had never guessed what might happen to him. But he’d spoken to her, after. Warned her. He hadn’t been mindless at all.

“If you had been expelled,” she asked dully, “would the change have happened to you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “No Darketan has ever faced that particular punishment. But I asked for it, after Eirene left Erebus. I begged them to throw me into a pack of Lamiae.

Either the creatures would kill me, or I wouldn’t care any longer.”

Care. The one thing Darketans were not supposed to do. Damon’s punishment had been worse than any death or transformation.

He hadn’t been sent out to become an Orlok, but the savagery he claimed they possessed was part of him, too. If she hadn’t seen that shadow inside him before he and Michael had been attacked, she might have had reason to believe that he had also been affected by his contact with the Orlok.

But he had said he’d felt it in Erebus. It had already been there when she and Michael had met him.

She became aware that he was staring at her, his gaze fixed on her face with a kind of obsessive dread.

“You have seen it before, haven’t you?” he asked. “This is not the first time.” He edged farther away, ready to swing his legs over the side of the bed. “Was it when I fought Lysander?”

Lying, even evading his questions, was no longer possible. “Yes,” she said, holding his gaze. “It happened then, and once before.”

“When?”

“When you first swore you wouldn’t let me die. When you made me swear to stay alive.”

He closed his eyes. “Did I threaten you?”

“No! No. Nothing like that. Damon—” She reached across the cot for his hand. He jerked away, but she managed to grab hold again. His muscles twitched under her fingers. “Damon, whatever this is, you’re not alone. If we can be rational about this—”

“I knew where you were concerned I wasn’t rational,” Damon said. “I wanted you from the start, and I knew...if I gave in to those impulses, I would be no different than an Opir with his serfs.”

“You’re not a Nightsider, and I’m not a serf. I was never helpless, Damon. And I wanted you from the beginning, too. I just refused to let myself believe it.”

“Your feelings have nothing to do with it,” he said harshly. He opened his eyes, and she saw despair so great she couldn’t begin to touch it. “It is my feelings.”

Fast as a striking cobra, Damon seized her shoulders in his hands and dragged her toward him, lifting her until her face was level with his. “Emotions,” he said. “The trainers have always forbidden them, from the earliest part of our lives. We are little more than children when we come to the Master of Agents.”

“Children?” Alexia repeated in astonishment. “But you said you’re mutations!

Nightsiders don’t convert children!”

“So they say. None of us remembers what came before, except one thing. We are not to shame ourselves with emotion.”

Tears spilled from Alexia’s eyes. “Because Nightsiders don’t understand it. They have no real feelings.”

“And whatever mutates Darketans, makes us what we are, gives us too many. Every day of our lives we are reminded that we are like humans, inferior, driven by primitive sentiments that have no value in the Opir world. They must be beaten out of us before we are worthy to serve.” His gaze revealed his inner torment. “They should have been beaten out of me, as they are out of most Darketans. But Eirene—” He broke off, and Alexia was grateful. Because she was remembering how difficult it had been for Damon to admit he “cared” for her, how much he had fought against it. Not only because of what had happened with Eirene, but because he had been raised from childhood to despise emotion as weakness. He had been abused, both emotionally and physically. He had been made to believe what his masters wanted was the only thing that gave him worth.

Irrational impulses. Lysander had taunted him about them, said that he had been sent to join the Enclave agents because of them. And she still didn’t know why.

Anger pushed aside Alexia’s anguish for Damon. “They didn’t beat it out of you,” she said. “You beat them. You were never just a pawn, Damon.”

His mouth contorted in a bitter smile. “Humans believe in souls, do they not? I would have sold mine to destroy that part of myself that was never anything but a slave to these feelings.”

“No.” She took his face in her hands and forced him to look at her. “Do you believe humans are inferior, Damon? That we are weak for daring to feel for each other, for caring about justice and equality and freedom?”

“No,” he said, his breath hitching as he let it out. “I no longer believe that. If I hated the Enclave—” He covered her hands with his own. “In this place I’ve seen another way.

A good way.”

“If you’ve recognized that after only a few hours, some part of you must always have believed the Nightsiders were wrong about humans all along. And that meant they were wrong about you. ”

His hands slid down her arms and dropped to the cot. “They weren’t wrong, Alexia. I know now that every time I care, I change. I cared too much for Eirene, so I attacked Lysander. I care for you—” He stared into some hell of his own creation. “These emotions are the triggers that turn me into a monster.”

“Because your mind was twisted,” Alexia said. “You were abused as a child and an adult. It probably isn’t any coincidence that you don’t remember the time before you went into training.” She squeezed her hands together in her lap to keep from touching him again. “I’m no shrink, but even I can see that the psychological trauma you suffered in denying your feelings could push you to extremes your conscious mind would never permit.”

“Others endured the same,” he said, “and did not change.”

“How do you know? Have you spoken to every other Darketan in Erebus?” She leaned toward him, praying he was listening. “You can be helped, Damon. Not in Erebus. Not by Nightsiders, but by people who understand —”

“When it happens,” Damon said, looking through her, “I can’t control it. What if I had killed your partner, Alexia? I wanted to do it more than once. You make excuses for me, but it doesn’t change what I could do if it