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“Yes,” he said with a wry twist of his lips. “We are only spies, after all, tasked to make certain the buffer zone is maintained. But it would not be the first time an agent of either side has died between the Borders.”
Not the first time, Alexia thought, and certainly not the last. There had been at least one dhampir fatality in the Zone each year since the Treaty had been signed, the latest Michael’s former partner. Such facts could not be openly acknowledged by either side. But dhampir agents were hardly a renewable resource, and they weren’t casually sent on missions to assassinate enemy operatives for no good reason.
“Even if I believed one of ours did it,” she said, “I wouldn’t tell you.”
“I wouldn’t expect it,” he said. “Just as you won’t expect to learn anything from me that my superiors don’t want you to know.”
So he was confirming that everything he said to her was calculated to achieve a certain goal. Not that she’d ever doubted it.
She smiled back at him, baring her teeth. “I guess we understand each other,” she said. “After you…”
Without a word he turned and set off north, moving almost soundlessly now that he had no need to be heard.
Alexia followed close on his heels. He was giving her the chance to shoot him in the back, but nothing in his posture suggested that he was worried. She kept half an ear out for Michael, but he must have decided to stay out of range of her senses, or Damon’s. Just as well.
They traveled quickly over once-occupied land that was gradually reverting to its original state, hiking up and down oak-studded hillsides and avoiding the valleys with their decaying suburbs and open streets. Damon picked up his rifle and pack after they’d gone a few miles, securing the weapon to the back of his pack as a sign of “good faith.” There was no further sign of human or vampire presence until they reached the summit of a hillside overlooking what had once been known as the Bennett Valley.
Most of the fields and vineyards below had long since become overgrown with native grasses, shrubs and scattered trees, but there wasn’t any mistaking the nature of the several green rectangles that marked out the deliberate cultivation of crops. They had not been created for Nightsiders, who had no need to rely on such food sources, but for their human “property.” At the opposite side of the valley, tucked up against the foot of the low Sonoma Mountains, stood a high, rectangular wall guarding a compound of buildings—twelve or thirteen according to Alexia’s count, suggesting the presence of as many as a dozen Nightsiders and perhaps three or four times as many humans.
The sight both chilled and infuriated her. She glanced at Damon, who crouched beside her with his own binoculars in hand, almost as if she expected the same reaction from him.
Of course that was ridiculous. He was from Erebus. What disgusted her would be perfectly natural for a leech. This was only a job to Damon. There was nothing personal in it.
She couldn’t afford to make it personal, either. Not if she wanted to keep her head…and her life.
Alexia pulled off her pack, and Damon did the same. “How do you want to do this?” she asked him. “If we split up here, you can go around from the north and I’ll approach from the south.” She glanced up at the sky, noting the angle of the sun. “We don’t have much daylight left. Let’s rendezvous tomorrow morning at 0900 hours on that hill directly east of the colony, by the rock formation. Whoever gets there first will wait for the other. Agreed?”
Damon lowered his binoculars. “Agreed,” he said. He met her gaze, his own unreadable. “I trust you’ll keep your partner from killing me if he rejoins you?”
“I already told you. He won’t do anything rash, unless you—”
The report of an automatic weapon cut her off, and she flung herself flat on the ground. Damon was down beside her a second later. Bullets whizzed over their heads and struck the tree trunk just behind them.
“Someone,” Damon said, “does not want us here.”
Chapter 3
Alexia smothered a cynical laugh. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
As much as he detested his own feelings, Damon couldn’t help but admire her. He had done so from their first meeting, when she’d played it so cool in the face of her partner’s intransigence.
All feigned, of course. Not her courage—he had no reason to doubt that—but certainly Carter’s fury. No trained agent of Aegis would be so flagrantly emotional when facing the enemy. It had all been an act for his benefit.
Just as he was putting on an act for the dhampires, doing his best to make them believe he didn’t hate everything they stood for.
But not Alexia herself. Lying so close beside her, he could inhale her scent, both floral and spicy, without the distraction of other smells. He breathed in deeply, tasting the air around her: the heat of her skin, the unique signature of the blood pulsing through her veins, and the faint female tang that stirred his body in a way he wanted very much to ignore.
Once again, as at the beginning, he was captivated by her beauty, her natural grace, the harmony of her movements. Not even the bulky camouflage fatigues could conceal how extraordinary she was. Her sleek, slender figure, strong and utterly female at the same time, was as perfect as that of the most beautiful Opir female. Her hair was the color of her namesake’s fur, her skin honey-warm in the light of the dying sun, her green eyes with their oval, almost catlike pupils vivid and fearless.
If it hadn’t been for all those compelling qualities and a hundred more uncounted, he might have continued to forget that he had once been capable of wanting a woman. But she had made it impossible for him to take any further comfort in that denial. Or in the solitude he had learned to embrace over the past two decades.
Lifting his head a little, Damon peered in the direction from which the shots had come. The shooter wasn’t in the valley; Damon estimated that he or she must be hidden somewhere in the hills on the other side.
“Do you see anything?” Alexia whispered, unslinging her rifle from her shoulder.
Once again he found himself focused on her instead of the danger confronting them. He remembered the first time he had met her gaze, the brief flash of uncertainty and surprise he had glimpsed in her eyes. It had been obvious that she, unlike her partner, had never met one of his kind before.
He had been careful to watch her reaction when he’d told her about the dead Council agent, hoping she would slip and reveal some knowledge of a previous Aegis mission to investigate the colony. In spite of her defiance, he could tell she knew nothing.
Perhaps she and her partner were the first. But he wasn’t foolish enough to believe she wouldn’t use her time with him to augment her agency’s knowledge of the Council’s activities in the Zone.
That was good. As long as Alexia was asking questions and he kept her satisfied with vague answers, she would be less likely to realize what he was doing. The fact that her partner had broken away was a problem, but not an insoluble one. Not as long as Damon kept his head.
And kept himself From feeling.
“Our would-be executioner is firing from the east,” he said, belatedly answering Alexia’s question.
“A single sniper,” she said. “From the colony?” She looked sideways at him, eyes narrowed. “It’s still light. Do they have any Daysiders down there?”
Damon was genuinely surprised at the question, though he had no intention of offering the real reason why that was virtually impossible.
“Unlikely,” he said.
“But a Nightsider would be taking a chance emerging so early,” she said, watching him out of the corner of her eye. “Even protective gear doesn’t ease most vampires’ fear of sunlight.”
She waited for Damon to answer, but he held his silence. She shifted her weight and rested her chin on her forearms.
“It wouldn’t be one of the colony’s humans unless he or she is under the direct control of a Bloodmaster,” she said. “You suggested the Nightsiders who founded the settlement were the kind who wouldn’t be missed leaving Erebus. Are you sure there are no Bloodmasters down there?”
“That is what I am here to find out,” Damon said.
A second round of shots pierced the air above them, almost close enough to graze Damon’s scalp. He grabbed Alexia and rolled them both down the slight incline behind them, fetching up against a clump of scrub oaks with Alexia’s chest and hips and legs atop his, her rifle trapped beneath him.
She lay panting in his arms for a moment, obviously surprised by his sudden action, and he felt the thumping of her heart through her clothing and the rush of her breath on his cheek. He was holding a woman in his arms, a woman like no other, and his body woke to furious life.
Damon had engaged in sexual intercourse with only three females in his brief three decades of memory: one a Bloodmistress named Jocasta, with whom he’d had a clandestine, lengthy affair; the second a human female “given” to him by the Council as a reward for good work; and the third the Darketan woman with whom he had shared the only happy year of his life.
The first relationship had begun because the Bloodmistress had been intrigued by the Darketans’ outsider status and their reputation for sexual prowess, and it continued so long because she had been pleased with his performance and he had been content to sate her considerable appetite. There had been little affection involved. The second had been a matter of some shame to him and had never been repeated. But the last…
It had begun as a means of easing loneliness, two equals coming together for mutual comfort in a world they could never fully be a part of. But it hadn’t stayed that way. Damon had learned what it was to feel as the Opiri claimed no Nightsider could, a way no Daysider dared.
Eirene had returned his feelings, but she and Damon had been forcibly separated, and the Council had sent her on a solo mission to the Border. He had never seen her again.
From that day forward, Damon had been numb to his body’s sexual demands. But now the protective distance was gone, and so was his control. Every hair on his body was standing erect, and his heart seemed to thunder like the vast generators beneath Erebus.
As if she sensed—or felt—his arousal, Alexia rolled off him with a sound very much like a growl, yanked her rifle from under Damon’s back and dropped into a crouch two meters away. Damon got to his knees and raked his fingers through his hair, dislodging twigs, dun-colored grass and last autumn’s brittle leaves.
“Don’t do that again,” Alexia said.
“You mean save your life?” he snapped, struggling to regain his equilibrium.
They stared at each other, confusion and hostility warring for dominance in Alexia’s remarkable eyes. Oh, she’d felt it, too, that searing physical awareness, but she didn’t want to acknowledge it any more than he did.
He looked away. “We’ll have to fall back,” he said, “and find a way to lure the shooter into a trap so that we can question him. If he’s from the colony, he can give us valuable information.”
“And what if he’s not? You admit the Expansionists may have known about the colony before the Council did, even if they didn’t actually help found it. Maybe your war party has sent its own agents to stop you from reporting back.”
“Impossible,” Damon said. “All operatives answer to the Council, not to individual factions.”
“Are you so sure? Every government has its dissidents, those who work secretly against the ruling party.”
Of course she was right. But he knew that was not the case here, and even to consider that the Expansionists could send their own operatives into the field and so blatantly attack legitimate agents would suggest that the Independents’ hold on the Council was dangerously weak. If he believed that, anything he did now would ultimately be meaningless.
There was a part of him that wanted war with the Enclave. They had slaughtered thousands of Opiri, including his fellow Darketans. But he had made a promise to Eirene. “Work for peace,” she had said just before their final parting. “For peace, and freedom.”
He met Alexia’s gaze. “You seem to be overlooking one other possibility,” he said. “The shooter could be your partner.”
Alexia drew herself up, her shoulders rigid. “No,” she said. “I’ve already told you why that couldn’t happen. He would know he’d be as likely to hit me as you.”
Her denial was just a little too vehement, and Damon wondered if she thought it was possible…if Michael Carter had really been as angry and bitter as he had appeared. Angry enough to risk his partner’s life.
If he could encourage her to believe the worst about Carter, Damon could keep her off balance and make sure she never even considered the truth.
“It seems there is more than one possibility here,” he said, retrieving his pack, “and we won’t know which one is correct until we catch the shooter. If he wants us dead badly enough, he’ll keep firing and we can track his position.”
“That wouldn’t be too bright of him,” Alexia remarked, keeping low to the ground as she pulled on her own pack.
“It depends on how desperate he is and what his orders are, if any,” Damon said. “If he’s from the colony, he won’t want to be cut off from it.”
“If he’s from the colony, he probably isn’t the only one guarding it. They must know we’re coming. That’ll make it a little tricky getting close enough to observe.”
Naturally, Alexia would regard that as a serious problem, but to Damon it meant that everything was proceeding as planned. “Are you giving up?” he asked.
She grinned, revealing her very white incisors. “I’ll give up when you do.”
“Then I suggest our primary goal now should be to catch the shooter and stay alive in the process.”
Alexia studied him a moment longer, green eyes slitted like those of a deceptively lazy cat. “All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”
They started back down the other side of the hill, Alexia taking the lead. There were no more shots, no sound but the typical movements of small mammals and leaves sighing in the evening breeze. The sun was beginning to set, and soon, Damon knew, he would have to rely on Alexia’s superior ability to see in the dark. Darketans were by no means night-blind like humans, but Opir-like night vision was one of the few advantages dhampires had over his kind.
But his advantages over her—greater speed and strength—would come into play sooner or later, if they remained together. And he would make sure they did.
Perhaps it was time for a little reinforcement of Alexia’s decision to work with him. He would do so by telling her part of the truth.
As they turned south, hiking parallel to the valley, Damon caught up with her.
“There is something I should have disclosed earlier,” he said.
She stopped abruptly, her hand moving to the strap of her rifle. “What is it?”
“It was not my idea to join forces,” he said. “I was instructed to contact and work with any Aegis agents I encountered in the area of the colony.”
Her hand remained on the strap. “The Council ordered it?” she asked, frowning. “Why?”
“For the same reasons I gave you when we met. I would not be surprised if your own agency had some part in it.”
Her frown deepened. “We were given no such instructions.”
Damon had never thought they had, but he had succeeded in planting the idea in her mind.
“Would it shock you to learn that Aegis and the Council were already in contact regarding the colony?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said without hesitation. “As much as it would shock me if you defected to our side.”
A palpable tension vibrated between them, in some ways not unlike what Damon had felt when she had lain in his arms. Her words were a challenge, one she didn’t expect him to take up, and yet there was an undercurrent beneath the flatness of her voice that hinted of a strange, almost wistful regret.
As if, secretly, she wished he would shock her by saying yes.
“You’re right,” he said, setting off again with a long, ground-eating stride. “It’s impossible.”
She caught up with him, matching his pace in spite of her smaller frame and shorter legs. “What gave you the idea they might be working together?” she demanded.
“It was only speculation,” he said. “And perhaps a little hope.”
“Hope? That your Council would want to work with my people beyond the bare minimum necessary to keep the Armistice? Why would that matter to you?”
He glanced down at her. “We should be quiet now, Agent Fox, unless we wish to tell our shooter we’re coming.”
Alexia offered no further conversation, but Damon sensed that she was thinking through what he’d told her. She would be wondering if her own government was, in fact, secretly conferring with his own without the knowledge of their citizens, their operatives, or those who would gladly revert to a state of war.
It might even be true. Damon was too far from the circles of Opir power to know for certain, and the Council had no earthly reason to confide such matters to a Darketan. Their business concerned him only so far as it affected his work. And his promise to Eirene.
But he didn’t think it was impossible. And if there was some new rapprochement over the illegal colony, the Council would never allow the Enclave government to learn any secrets that would endanger Erebus.
The humans would know that. Just as Alexia did.
Listening intently, Damon slowed his pace as the sun sank behind the hills to the west. Alexia took the lead again. The landscape darkened, the details blurring in Damon’s sight. Alexia moved with assurance, certain of her path as they descended into a narrow hollow between two low hills.
But it was Damon who sensed the attack. The snap of a single twig beneath a booted foot warned him an instant before the bullets began flying.
He was just a second too late to push Alexia out of the way. Several bullets tore into her shoulder in rapid succession, spinning her to the ground. She went limp, curled on her side with her red hair fanned around her head.
Swallowing a howl of protest, Damon knelt beside her, broke the strap of her rifle between his hands and brought the weapon into position, spraying the hillside above them.
A drift of unfamiliar scent behind him sent him skidding around on his knees to take aim at the second shooter, but he got off only a dozen shots before a single large projectile struck him full in the chest. He continued to fire, ignoring the black burst of pain that filled his lungs with blood and flame. He heard a faint grunt that told him one of his bullets had found a mark, and then the gunfire ceased.
Gasping for air, Damon crouched over Alexia and pivoted on his feet, doing his best to cover every possible angle of attack. None came. He and Alexia would have made easy prey, but their enemies were leaving them alone.
