The anger went out of his voice. “I didn’t even know it would work, Alexia. I could only hope.”
“You’ve used that word before,” she said. “I never thought you really believed what it meant.”
“Have you abandoned it, Alexia?” he said, his voice thick with emotion that only confused her more. “Would you rather have died?”
As much as she wanted to say yes, she knew it wasn’t true. Maybe seeing Damon fight Lysander to the death had made her cherish life more than the principles she had thought were unbreakable. Maybe she valued her own existence more because she valued Damon’s.
No, she couldn’t lie to him. But she couldn’t dismiss her anger, her sense of betrayal, so easily.
“Do you expect me to thank you?” she asked.
“Do you think you had no part in it?” he asked, the edge returning to his voice.
“Whether you admit it or not, even you are a creature of instinct, driven to survive.”
He was right. He could not have forced her teeth into his flesh. But she couldn’t admit it, because that meant she was no better than a Nightsider. No better than the monster Michael had become, or the thing inside Damon that would gladly have slaughtered Lysander with nothing more than his teeth.
Damon’s footsteps, barely audible, whispered across the ground behind her. “You were born as you are, Alexia,” he said. “It does no good to fight your nature.”
Or his. Even if she could despise herself, her weakness, she couldn’t despise him. The fact was that something had happened to her when she and Damon had made love—not just a matter of bodies coming together in sex, or even the ecstatic joy that had taken her at the end. Their lovemaking had hurled her into territories uncharted and far more dangerous than their tentative friendship.
Even the matter of taking his blood couldn’t diminish what she had felt then, what she was feeling now. He was so close now, and she could draw every familiar line of his body in her mind: broad shoulders tapering to taut stomach and trim waist; long, muscular legs; and the part of him she so badly wanted to feel inside her again.
She closed her eyes and turned her face up to listen to the rustle of the leaves in the midnight breeze, forgetting everything but the vivid memory of Damon’s passion.
Once that passion had been for Eirene. Perhaps he had been thinking of his former lover when he kissed Alexia, when he entered her and possessed her and accepted her bite.
She couldn’t believe it. Even if he wasn’t capable of regarding any other woman the way he had Eirene—even if what he and Alexia had shared was only a matter of the
“attachment” Lysander had spoken of so mockingly—he cared. Genuinely and truly.
And she could no longer put off acknowledging the overwhelming truth.
She laughed. No, she couldn’t hate Damon. Or even herself. Not as long as she was with him.
“I am what I am,” she said, turning to look at him. “I know I can’t change that. But I can still live in service to something bigger than myself, and die honorably.”
A sudden gust of wind lifted the unbuttoned placket of Damon’s shirt, blowing the edges away from his chest. “Honor is a human concept,” he said softly.
Alexia tried not to let herself become distracted by the sight of his partially naked body. “Is that why you have so much trouble keeping your promises?” she asked. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. “I—” Damon looked away. “Why did you leave camp?” he asked again, as if their previous discussion had never happened.
“I went back to take care of Michael’s body,” she said, and then hesitated. Surely she could wait just a little longer to tell Damon about Michael, even though the mystery of his transformation, his behavior and his words remained unsolved. “It was gone when I got there.”
“I’m sorry,” Damon said. His voice turned gruff. “I should have seen to it earlier. It was still foolish for you to go out alone.”
“I felt fine. And if I hadn’t, I never would have had the chance to talk to the first Nightsider before Lysander killed him. I wouldn’t have been so much on my guard when Lysander gave me the line about stopping a traitor from deceiving me and getting me on his side.”
“And since Lysander was almost certainly lying or twisting the facts most of the time, everything the first Opir told you must have been the truth. What exactly did he say?”
She repeated what the man had told her. Damon hissed sharply through his teeth.
“Drugs,” he said. “The patch. He knew about it.”
“Yes,” she said, “but I don’t think he took it. I think he knew who did, and tried to tell me he knew where it was. He spoke of the colony in the same breath.”
“Interesting,” Damon murmured.
“Isn’t it? Lysander heard the first Nightsider mention the drugs before he killed the poor bastard, but he himself never once referred to them. I think he was trying to avoid the subject, because he had something to do with stealing the patch. I know he thought I was too stupid to notice.”
Damon smiled, displaying the tips of his incisors. “Arrogance. It’s a common failing among the Opiri. I wonder if he knew the nature and effects of the drugs and expected you to be weak and helpless without them.”
“Maybe,” she said, “but Lysander made a couple of other mistakes. He said the Expansionists want to destroy the colony because they expected the colonists to support their policies, and that wasn’t happening. But he also clearly implied that the Expansionists already had the plans in place, even though the man he killed hadn’t yet reported back to his masters.”
“Lysander already knew what they were going to do,” Damon said, echoing Alexia’s earlier conclusion. “In the past, he appeared to support the Sophist Faction, but his behavior was never in keeping with their desire for peace. He aspired to become a Bloodlord with his own harem, but he knew there are already too many in Erebus. He could never advance himself until Opir territory expands.”
Alexia nodded. “And so it would make perfect sense that he’d support the faction that would risk war to grab more turf.”
Damon crouched by the pack again and withdrew a pair of sturdy socks. “Maybe Lysander was originally sent out by the Council, but they don’t know he’s betrayed them.”
“Whatever they know or don’t know, I’m sure Lysander was involved with whoever was shooting at us before, even if he wasn’t one of the snipers himself. His surprise was just too off to be believable. And then there was that bit about not seeing Michael. That might be possible, but I think it’s far more likely that either he or the dead guy was the one Michael was following.”
Damon’s face settled into grim lines as he used his good hand to pull on his socks.
“Either he was unaware that your partner was dead, or he was lying about that, as well.”
At least I know he couldn’t have killed Michael, Alexia thought with a rush of sadness.
“We still don’t know if all the shooters were the same,” Damon said, “or if they had different motives. There are plenty of those to go around.”
“Michael raised a good point about the colony probably not having the tech to do anything with the patch,” she said. “Unless, as he also suggested, they were trying to buy freedom from Erebus by selling it to them.”
Damon untied the laces of his boots. “You said the colony wanted equality for all Opiri, regardless of rank.”
“That’s what Lysander told me.”
“Did he say who established the colony?”