She took herself in hand and released her breath. “Do you really intend to get Michael to safety?”
The light flickering between the oak’s branches shifted, pulling new shadows from Damon’s face. “I wasn’t lying.”
“But you have an idea what losing the patch can do to a dhampir, and you can guess the likely consequences once Aegis finds out that Nightsiders have one, colonists or not.
If you work for the Council and they want to keep the peace, you might think it would be better not to let Michael make his report.”
Damon’s pupils constricted to pinpoints, lost in a deep and turbulent sea of blue. “If I killed him, I would have to kill you.”
“Yes. Because if I live, I’ll eventually make the same report. But if you kill him, I won’t survive, anyway.”
Something happened to Damon then, an unfurling of the rage she had glimpsed once or twice before when he’d sparred with Michael, but multiplied a hundredfold. His eyes narrowed, his lips drew back and his body seemed to expand and broaden like the hood on a striking cobra.
She knew that was illusion. But what she saw in his terrible gaze was not, and suddenly he was far less human than animal—some kind of animal she didn’t recognize, a creature neither Nightsider nor Daysider nor dhampir.
Because there was no rationality in that stare, in that expression, only pure, raw emotion. Whatever moved him now was nothing like what anyone dealing with vampires had ever reported before. Mindless savagery turned his face into a caricature of a man, lost to reason or even the leeches’ twisted morality.
The face of a killer that no rules, no weapons, no will could stop. A monster she had somehow awakened with her careless words, her bitter accusations.
It wasn’t some kind of act meant to scare her. It was terrifyingly real. Damon was going insane before her eyes, and she didn’t know how to stop it.
Chapter 6
“You—” Damon growled, panting between each word he forced out of his throat.
“You—will—not—die.”
A brown leaf shook free from one of the oak’s down-curving branches, brushing against the coarse bark and drifting to lie among the handfuls that had fallen before it.
Michael stood just out of sight behind the tree, utterly unaware of the danger.
Danger Alexia didn’t know how to define. Or fight. All she knew was that Damon wanted her alive, and that might be the only way to reach through his madness.
“If it matters so much to you,” she said calmly, hoping he could still understand her, “I promise I’ll stay alive as long as it takes. If you make sure Michael gets well away from the shooters or anyone who might attack him.”
Damon squeezed his eyes shut, breathing sharply through his nostrils. She could see him, feel him struggle to find words amid the chaos of a mind that was no longer wholly his own, ruled by a brutish, alien consciousness that was hungry for something it had never possessed.
“I—” he gasped.
“It’s all right, Damon. Whatever is wrong, I’ll help you.”
He bowed his head, shaking violently. “I will...not...”
“You won’t kill Michael.”
“No.”
“No matter what he does?”
She knew she was taking a grave risk, but it paid off. Damon’s eyes opened again, and there was a glint of real comprehension in them. He heard her. He understood.
“Won’t...kill,” he said.
“Even if he tries to kill you first?”
Abruptly Damon leaped to his feet, moving with sinuous, deadly grace. His whole body shivered as if he were emerging from icy water. He stalked in a circle around her, shoulders hunched, and came to a stop in front of her.
“Promise...” he said. “Stay alive.”
Alexia understood, without knowing how, that he would believe her if she did what he asked...that somehow her promise could bring Damon back from this strange and terrible darkness.
“I promise,” she said.
With a low moan, Damon flung back his head, clenching his fists at his sides. A violent shudder took him, and for a moment he seemed to go boneless, staggering and almost falling before regaining his feet. When he looked at her again, he was sane.
Alexia sighed. It had worked. But now she was faced with another problem. Because all she saw in Damon’s eyes at that moment was bewilderment, as if he had just awakened from an ugly dream.
He didn’t know what had happened. Alexia was sure of it, though she had only her own instincts to tell her so. His gaze was completely devoid of shame or horror or the kind of satisfaction that came of tricking an enemy into surrender.
Had this been some kind of psychotic break, a madness born of an abnormality in Damon’s brain or a trauma in his past? Was it an illness, a vampire or Daysider affliction no other agent of the Enclave had ever witnessed? Or something else she couldn’t begin to imagine?
And what had triggered it? He had changed right after she’d told him she would die if he killed Michael. Could it happen again? Could she make it happen, just with certain words and phrases?
Why should he care so much if she lived or died?
She couldn’t even attempt to understand any of it until she was sure he hadn’t known what had happened to him.
And there was only one way to find out.
“You’d better go,” she said, as if they had been having a normal conversation.
“Michael’s going to come looking if you wait any longer.”
Damon searched her eyes. “You aren’t getting any worse?”
A normal, rational question. No trace of the savage he had been only moments before.
“I said I’d hang on as long as necessary,” she said. “You just get Michael safely to the Border, as we agreed.”
He frowned a little, reached inside his jacket and withdrew the small, unfamiliar pistol he’d been carrying when they met. He bent to set it down beside her.
“Take this,” he said. “It was meant to be used only as a last resort, but it’s more powerful than it appears.”
“Michael already gave me his Vampire Sl— His VS,” she amended quickly.
“It will not hurt you to have both.”
She picked Damon’s pistol up and weighed it in her hands. The model wasn’t like anything Aegis had manufactured, not even for its agents.
“Your own version of a VS, huh?” she asked lightly.
“As I said, a last resort.”
“Thanks.”
Abruptly he scooped her up in his arms and carried her back to the scanty shelter of the bushes. He covered her with the blanket again, pushing leaves and twigs and dirt up around her and sifting a few handfuls of debris on top of her for good measure.
“I’ll be back soon,” he said. He stood, no longer graceful but oddly mechanical, as if he had forgotten how to use his limbs. “Don’t move from this place. Remain still and quiet. Fire only if you have no other choice.”
She curled her lips into a wry smile. “I’m not one of your harem slaves, remember?”
An echo of the savage gleamed in his eyes, a change so subtle that she never would have noticed if not for his recent and much more dramatic transformation. “Darketans do not have serfs,” he said, and walked away without looking back. In five minutes he and Michael were out of range of her senses.
Exhausted beyond her ability to resist, Alexia let her muscles go lax and allowed the sickness she’d been fighting to claim her, pulling her down into fever again.
And she remembered.
“You’ll be all right,” the voice whispered. It was comforting, full of gentle concern, and Alexia felt almost safe even though she felt so sick she could hardly breathe.