“Except in this place,” she said. “If it was unpleasant, I can’t imagine the humans in Eleutheria would be so ready to provide blood at the drop of a hat. Like that woman last night.”
Damon shifted. “I apologize,” he said, a little stiffly. “When I find the woman, I will ask her forgiveness.”
“Oh, I don’t think you need to look for her yourself,” Alexia said hastily, wishing she hadn’t raised the subject. “Emma planned to introduce me to some of the other colonists once we finished our business with Theron. I’m sure I can pass on your apology.”
Damon looked up. “You have no reason to be jealous, Alexia.”
“Jealous? Because you were going to take her blood without asking me if I was willing?”
“I was incapable of discussing it at the time.”
“You could damned well have told me what was happening before it got so bad,” she shot back. “If you were so out of control, you could have hurt that woman. I know you would never have hurt me, no matter how far gone you were.”
“She knew how to react without fear or provocation,” Damon said, utterly serious. “I don’t know what I would have done if—”
“Nothing happened, Damon,” she said, resting her hand on his knee. “Everything is all right now.”
“Is it?” Damon stared blankly into the darkness. “Opiri can lose control like that if they’re starving, literally on the edge of death. But I wasn’t dying, Alexia. I was insane.”
Chapter 17
Alexia went very still. She had known the time would come when the subject of his
“spells” would arise, even if she had to introduce it herself. But now that it was here, she wanted to tuck the entire matter away into some forgotten corner where it could never disturb either of them again.
“You fell, Damon,” she said. “You were sick. Even Theron recognized your condition.”
“No,” he said, setting his jaw. “You asked why I didn’t tell you what was happening before. That was because I couldn’t acknowledge it. The Hunger should not have come so soon. Something caused this to happen, something unnatural for my kind.”
Oh, God, Alexia thought. She reached out to take the hand he had clenched in the sheets and opened his fingers, lacing hers through them. “Tell me,” she said.
“I have felt this before,” he said. “Not this level of Hunger, not so quickly. No. But the savagery...the rage...” He met her gaze. “What did I look like when I left Theron’s house, Alexia? A monster?”
“Is that what you felt like?” she whispered, beginning to shiver.
“I don’t know.” He disengaged his fingers from hers. “Answer me, Alexia.”
“You never looked different,” she said, careful not to glance away.
“But I was different,” he said. “Wasn’t I?”
She couldn’t answer the pain in his eyes. They went distant with some ugly memory.
“Until I nearly killed Lysander,” he said, “I didn’t realize that there was a pattern. But the first time I felt it was in Erebus. The first time I fought him.”
“The first—” Alexia couldn’t forget a single brutal moment of the battle in which he and Lysander had almost killed each other. She had known then that there had been something very bitter between them. Lysander had compared her to Eirene. “Spirited,” he’d said. As if he had known the Darketan woman. Very well.
“You fought over Eirene,” she said, trying to keep her feelings from her voice. “You both wanted her.”
She expected Damon to bolt from the cot and begin striding around the small room, agitation translating into frantic motion. But he remained where he was, blank-faced and emotionless.
“After the Master of Agents discovered my relationship with Eirene and separated us,” he said, “Lysander tried to claim her. No Opir had ever attempted to claim a Darketan before, but he convinced the Master to give her to him rather than sending her away. She was forced to go with him.”
Alexia imagined the scene, the depravity of it, the pain and fear. Darketans had a kind of freedom—freedom from service to anyone but the Council and the Citadel. Eirene had had that taken from her after being forcibly parted from the man she had—
Loved. As Damon had loved her.
“I was kept confined for a week,” Damon continued. “When I was released, I obtained permission to enter the Citadel proper. I was planning to break in on Lysander in his quarters, but I found him on the Grand Concourse instead, parading Eirene around and showing her off to the other Opiri as if she were a valuable serf.”
“But she was, wasn’t she?” Alexia said, longing to reach out to him. “And you couldn’t bear it.”
“No. I attacked him on the Concourse. I remembered almost nothing except sinking my teeth into his neck. And rage. Boundless rage.”
The kind, Alexia thought, that would make him equal in strength to a full-blooded Nightsider.
“When I woke, I was in a cell,” Damon said. “I was told Eirene was being sent on a solo mission, and that it would be highly dangerous. I was also told that in spite of my actions, I was too valuable to Erebus to be expelled from the Citadel.”
“Expelled?” Alexia said, momentarily distracted from the tragedy of his story.
“Criminal acts by those of rank, Bloodmasters and the most powerful Bloodlords, are seldom punished by execution. Doing so would instigate more problems than the criminals themselves. That is why most who break the law are sent outside the walls.”
“To die in the sun, or of starvation?” she asked.
“Yes. Or to be changed.”
She didn’t know what he was talking about. “Changed?”
“As those humans selected to become vassals are changed. Only our criminals are not as fortunate as humans. They become something both our peoples fear and despise.”
All at once Alexia understood. He was talking about Orloks. Aegis had speculated that the creatures were in some way like Nightsiders, capable of converting humans into blood-drinkers like themselves.
But now Damon was saying they were Nightsiders. And Michael had become one of them.
“But how?” she asked, tears thickening her voice. “We never saw these creatures before the Armistice. How did the first ones come to be?”
“Mutations,” Damon said. “Grotesque reflections of Opiri. Like Darketans.”
“Not like Darketans. You can’t possibly think you’re anything like an Orlok.”
But he had asked her what he’d looked like when he had left Theron’s house. As if he’d almost expected...
She couldn’t complete the thought. “You aren’t a monster,” she said.
“They are mindless creatures who attack both humans and Opiri indiscriminately,” Damon said, as if he hadn’t heard her. “But recently it had been reported that most Lamiae had left the region. That was why when the thing attacked Michael and me, I—” He drew in a deep breath and released it slowly. “I wasn’t prepared.”
And Michael had never guessed what might happen to him. But he’d spoken to her, after. Warned her. He hadn’t been mindless at all.
“If you had been expelled,” she asked dully, “would the change have happened to you?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “No Darketan has ever faced that particular punishment. But I asked for it, after Eirene left Erebus. I begged them to throw me into a pack of Lamiae.