Daysider

“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.