been part of an experiment, and not what Aegis had told him.”
She swallowed and looked up. “They starved the Darketan before they sent him out, Damon. He didn’t know it, but they were injecting him with drugs that leached all the nutrients out of the blood he’d been drinking. Both sides wanted to see how long he could work with an Aegis agent, under orders not to hurt her, before he was forced to take her blood. They wanted to see if she’d cooperate, and if she didn’t, if he would kill her.”
“Sires,” Damon swore. He cupped Alexia’s hand between his. “That was why he hated his own people as well as mine.”
“It gets worse.” Alexia closed her eyes. “When Michael returned to the Enclave, he made it his business to find out if what the Nightsider said was true. He learned that Aegis had sent Jill out with a defective patch so that the Daysider couldn’t find out about the drugs if he and Jill discovered a way to coexist without killing each other. She would have died even if the Darketan didn’t kill her.”
“That wasn’t quite the way it happened,” a familiar woman’s voice said behind Damon.
Alexia’s eyes widened, and Damon turned. Eirene stood a few meters away, Sergius nearly impaled on the muzzle of her rifle. The man Alexia had called McAllister stood a little distance from her, with Theron beside him. McAllister stared at the woman as if he were trying to silence her with his gaze alone.
“I learned almost by accident,” Eirene said, as much to the human as to Damon and Alexia. “Alexia, I first met you after I was sent to San Francisco as an object of study for Aegis, a gesture of goodwill and a spy. I was trying to escape when I found you, and gave you my blood.”
“I remember,” Alexia said in a hushed voice.
“You inspired me in a way I didn’t believe possible, Alexia,” she said. “I decided to stay, to cooperate with Aegis and find a way to work for peace. Because my blood put your illness in remission, they found a way to derive drugs from it that could work to counteract the genetic condition that prevented almost half your kind from digesting human food.”
Damon glanced at Alexia, wondering if she was as astonished as he felt. “You’re Eirene, aren’t you?” she asked, a catch in her voice.
“Damon didn’t tell you?” She sighed. “How did you know?”
Tensing for Alexia’s answer, Damon cursed himself for his blindness. Alexia had recognized Eirene as someone who had helped her long ago, but she must also have felt that there was something between him and the Darketan stranger. Somewhere along the way, she had put it all together. And he had done nothing to prepare her.
“I wasn’t completely sure until now,” Alexia said. “But Damon spoke of a woman he’d loved in Erebus, a woman who had been sent away on some kind of suicide mission. Other things you said, the way you acted...it all started to make sense.”
“Yes,” Eirene said softly, glancing at Damon. “As I told him, I made myself so much a part of the furniture at Aegis that I was able to learn things I never should have heard, about certain experiments they conducted with the Council’s cooperation.” She paused.
“That first experiment with Jill and the Darketan... Her patch wasn’t disabled because he might have discovered what it was. It was because they wanted to see if a starving Daysider and a dying dhampir could save each other.”
“And not just
He smiled at Damon. “Like you, Damon, he was driven by bestial urges but unable to understand why. The Council was also very interested in learning if he could control those urges in the presence of a food source. He and the female Jill would be entirely dependent on each other—she on his blood, he on hers. Just like you and Agent Fox.”
Damon was too stunned to speak. He heard Alexia gasp, a sickened sound, and then Eirene spoke again.
“Yes,” she said, “they chose a certain kind of Darketan, but not just to find out if he could control the Lamia side of himself. They also knew Damon was capable of the kind of emotion that would help him understand human, and dhampir, nature.”
Eirene shook her head sadly. “That first time didn’t work,” she said. “The Darketan killed Jill, and Michael killed him before the Council could send agents to retrieve him.
So they sent you two out for the same purpose, hoping for a different result.”
“And they got it,” Theron said. He moved to join Alexia and Damon, as if to lend his support in their time of trial. “You were able to build the bridge, and help each other survive.”
“Because there was something special about Alexia, too,” Eirene said. She hesitated, glanced away and looked back again with even greater sorrow than before. “When I gave Alexia my blood twenty years ago, I left a part of myself inside her, a trace of my signature that was never extinguished. Aegis chose Alexia for the experiment when they learned that I and Damon—” She swallowed. “When they, and the Council, realized that my previous connection to Damon might enable him to recognize that signature and be drawn to Alexia as he would be to no one else.”
The shock was so thick in the air that Damon could hardly breathe. He felt blindly for Alexia, desperate to make sure she was still breathing herself.
As if to prove his fears were unfounded, Alexia spoke again, though she almost seemed not to have heard what Eirene had just told them.
“Michael found out about the first experiment,” she said in a dazed voice. “Now it all makes sense. He managed to hide his knowledge so well that Aegis sent him in with me, even though his first partner had died under similar circumstances. He was supposed to leave me alone with Damon, but he had his own plans. He wanted to sabotage the second experiment, because he—” She nearly choked, and Damon reached out to steady her. His hand closed on empty air.
“He wasn’t the only one who didn’t want the experiment to succeed,” Sergius said, filling the unbearable silence. “The Expansionists also learned of it and determined to stop it by killing you and Damon. After all, were you to build the bridge Theron mentioned—” he nodded toward his former mentor “—it would scarcely benefit those who wanted war.”
“And Michael wanted war, as well,” Alexia said, her voice growing stronger, “no matter whom he destroyed in the process. He led the assassins to us. Lysander was one of them, and Michael made a deal that he’d deliver my patch to him as long as he and his men didn’t kill me. It all went as Michael planned, and he took my patch. But other operatives, presumably from the Council, killed two of the assassins before they could finish Damon off, and Michael fled.”
She met Damon’s gaze with a steadiness that surprised and humbled him. “Later, Lysander killed the Council operatives—the ones we found—and Michael came back to us with the intention of murdering you. By then, he’d already sent the message to Aegis.
He knew the colony was the other new hope for peace, and summoning the strike force would wipe that out, as well.”
“How did he learn the true nature of the colony?” Damon asked, resisting his desire to sweep Alexia into his arms and carry her to that place out of time they had once—oh, so briefly—found together.
“I told Lysander, of course,” Sergius said, “and he must have told Carter. How well it would have worked if he had not underestimated you, Agent Fox.”
“And Damon,” Alexia added, lifting her chin. “And Theron, and the colonists.”
“And the Lamiae,” Damon said. “Was that what made Michael decide to help us, Alexia? Changing into one of them?”
“He recorded his message to me before he became an Orlok,” she said. “At the time, he was fully committed to his course and wanted me to understand why he’d done it. But yes, something happened to him when he changed. Something that made him realize what a terrible mistake he’d made and inspired him to fix it in any way he could.”
“If he hadn’t,” Eirene said, “if Lamiae really were the monsters we always believed them to be, we wouldn’t be standing here now.” She met Alexia’s gaze. “What became of your patch?”
“We don’t know,” Alexia said, glancing at Damon. “We thought it might have been brought here, to the
