“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.”