Chapter 1 Brecca #2
She didn't disappear. She kept walking, and as she got closer I could see she'd changed — leaner, harder, a scar on her left forearm that hadn't been there when she'd left.
Her auburn hair was longer, still in that braid, but her eyes were the same.
Dark and fierce and ready to fight the whole damn world.
Behind her was Danton. Prince Danton Trask of the Vampyren royal line, the man who had freed my best friend from a breeding pool and then fallen in love with her, because apparently that was a thing that happened now.
He was limping. Favoring his right leg badly — I could tell from the way he compensated, shifting his weight with each step.
My brain filed it automatically. Possible ligament damage.
Chronic injury, poorly healed. Needs imaging I don't have.
I set down the Beretta and walked toward the gate.
Cassi saw me and her face did something complicated. She'd been holding it together: the jaw set, the eyes straight ahead, the posture of a woman who'd been leading people through the end of the world and couldn't afford to crack. But when she saw me, the mask slipped.
"Brec."
"Cass."
And then she was running, which was something Cassi King almost never did because she considered it undignified unless she was being chased, and she hit me hard enough to knock the breath out of both of us.
I held on to my best friend and felt something crack in my chest that I'd been keeping sealed shut for a very long time.
Three seconds. That was all I allowed. Then I pulled back, grabbed her arm, checked her pupils, felt her pulse, examined the scar.
"That healed badly," I said.
Cassi laughed. It was wet and a little broken. "I missed you too."
"I'm serious. Who stitched this? A drunk toddler?"
"Danton."
"With his fingers?"
"He tried his best."
"His best is terrible. I'm redoing it later."
Behind Cassi, the rest of the group had reached the gate.
Jonas and two of the perimeter guards were staring at the Vampyren with their mouths open.
I couldn't blame them. We'd had a few Vampyren pass through the camp over the years, usually loners or deserters looking for shelter, but four of them at once?
Four mated Vampyren warriors traveling with their human women, a pregnant lady, and enough weaponry to arm a small militia? That was new.
"Everyone," Cassi said, turning to the group with the air of a woman making introductions at the most surreal dinner party in human history. "This is Brecca. She's kept this camp alive for three years and she will absolutely tell you what's wrong with you before you ask. Brec — this is everyone."
I took stock. It was what I did. It was what I always did. Medical assessment first, feelings never.
The dark one with the goatee and the Converse sneakers, that had to be Kal, was hovering over a woman with short black hair and a belly that told me she was solidly in her third trimester.
Pregnant. Thirty-two weeks, give or take.
Needs prenatal care immediately. Elevated heart rate.
Dehydrated. The woman, Tess, looked like she wanted to punch someone, which based on Cassi's radio descriptions was her resting state.
The tall one with the unusual tawny gold hair, Loren, the prince who was supposedly running the whole show from Chicago, looked like he hadn't slept in a month.
Dark circles under gold eyes, a hollowed-out exhaustion I recognized from my own face.
His woman, Kiera, was holding his hand with the determined grip of someone keeping her partner standing through sheer will.
A massive warrior with blue-black hair and a nicked ear, Alek, the general, was already scanning the camp perimeter with the calculating eyes of someone cataloguing defensive weaknesses.
His woman, Mindy, was doing the same thing three feet to his left, which was either terrifying or romantic depending on how you looked at it.
And the last pair: Mark, the one with the kohl-lined eyes and the braid hanging to his waist, standing slightly behind a compact woman with a high ponytail who was already looking around the camp with an expression that said she'd found seventeen things wrong with it and was going to tell me about every single one.
That would be Crystal. I already knew we'd either be best friends or kill each other.
Ten people. Six humans, four Vampyren. Walking out of the wreckage of a plane crash and a Lucian beach battle, into a camp that could barely feed the people it already had.
"Tess," I said, pointing at the pregnant woman. "You. Medical tent. Now."
"I'm fine —"
"You're eight months pregnant and you just hiked from Newport Beach in July. Your lips are cracked, your ankles are swollen, and your heart rate is about twenty beats above where it should be. You can walk to my tent or I can have one of your alien boyfriends carry you. Pick."
Tess stared at me. Then she looked at Kal. Kal looked at me. Something passed between us, the unspoken understanding of two people who both knew this woman was going to be impossible about everything related to her own health, and who were both going to deal with it anyway.
"Please," Kal said to Tess. Quiet and surprisingly gentle from a man the size of a refrigerator.
Tess went.
* * *
Tess's exam took the better part of an hour, with Cassi sitting on a crate in the corner of the medical tent, talking.
Cassi had always narrated when she was processing, not nervously, but like speaking the events out loud would help her make sense of them.
She told me about Chicago. About the council and its revolution.
About the battle and the six months of fragile peace afterward.
About the decision to fly to Los Angeles to unite the coasts against the Lucian before it was too late.
"And then the pilot turned out to be a terrorist," Cassi said, "who crashed the plane. So that was fun."
"Your life is a series of terrible decisions made by other people," I said, pressing gently along Tess's abdomen. The baby kicked. Hard. Strong. "Measuring about right for thirty-two weeks. Heartbeat's strong." I paused, pressing my stethoscope to a different spot. "Heartbeats. Plural."
"Two hearts," Kal said from the tent entrance, where he'd been standing absolutely still like a seven-foot statue with anxiety. "Vampyren have two hearts."
"I know that. I'm confirming it in a live patient for the first time." I moved the stethoscope. Two rhythms, layered, slightly offset. It was one of the strangest things I'd ever heard. "Both sound healthy. Strong."
Kal's shoulders dropped about half an inch. On a man that size, it was the equivalent of collapsing in relief.
"She needs at least a thousand extra calories a day," I told him. "Whatever she's been eating, double it. More protein. More water. Less walking across the goddamn state of California."
"That won't be a problem," Kal said, and I could hear it in his voice: the fierce, trembling protectiveness of a father who hadn't been able to do enough and now desperately wanted to.
These enormous, terrifying alien warriors who could punch through concrete and rip throats out with their teeth turned into absolute disasters around their pregnant mates.
It would have been sweet if it wasn't so profoundly weird.
Tess left with Kal hovering at her side like a bodyguard who'd been personally hired by God, and I stood at the basin washing my hands, and Cassi was still sitting on the crate, watching me with that look I hated.
"What?" I said.
"You look tired."
"I'm always tired."
"You look alone, Brec."
"I'm always that too. So what? I get more done this way."
Cassi stood up. She was a full head shorter than me but she'd always had the presence of someone twice her size. She touched my arm. Lightly, carefully, because Cassi knew better than anyone that I'd stopped being big on physical contact somewhere around year two of the apocalypse.
"You can't keep everyone alive and keep no one close, Brec." She looked at me with those dark, fierce eyes. "That's not surviving. That's just dying slower."
I pulled my arm away. Gently, but I pulled it away.
"I'm surviving just fine. Two hundred and fourteen people in this camp. I track the mortality rate by the month. It's been dropping every quarter since I took over medical. That's not dying slower — that's getting better at living."
"That's not what I meant."
"I know what you meant." I rinsed the basin and hung the rag to dry on the tent's support rope.
"And I'm glad you're back. Truly. I'm glad you have Danton and your whole alien rescue squad out there.
But I've been running this med tent alone since everything fell apart, Cass. Don't lecture me on how to live."
Cassi looked at me for a long moment. Then she shook her head, half-smiling in a way that was more sad than amused.
"God, I missed your stubborn ass."
"Go eat something. You're all cheekbones and attitude."
She went. And I stood in my tent alone, and I told myself the ache in my chest was just fatigue.
It was always just fatigue.
* * *
By evening, the camp was transformed. Or destabilized, depending on who you asked.
Loren had called a meeting with the camp's leadership council, five humans who'd been elected to make decisions back in the early days and had been doing their best ever since.
I wasn't on the council. I'd been asked twice and declined twice.
I patched people up. I didn't govern them.
Governing meant caring about outcomes beyond the next wound, and I didn't have the bandwidth for that.
But I could hear the meeting from my tent because Vampyren voices carried like church bells in a canyon, and what I heard wasn't encouraging.
The Mojave resistance had been fighting Vampyren since the invasion.
Having four of them walk into camp — princes, generals, royalty — was not being received as the cavalry.