Chapter 1 Brecca #3
"They're the reason we're in this situation," I heard Marta, the council's senior member, say through the tent canvas. She was a fifty-year-old former district attorney who'd survived the invasion by being meaner than anything that tried to eat her. "And now they want to help?"
Cassi's voice, sharp and immediate: "They chose the other side. They've bled for it. Two of them nearly died on a beach three days ago fighting the same Lucian that have been hitting your patrols—"
"Our patrols. Not theirs."
"Marta—"
"I'm not done." Marta's voice went cold and flat. "The last time Vampyren showed up here promising to help, three of our people ended up in a tank farm. Forgive me for not rolling out the welcome mat."
Silence. Even Cassi didn't have an answer for that.
Better to keep my head down and treat Alek's ear. The nicked earlobe from the Lucian beach battle had started healing at a wrong angle — Vampyren healed fast but not always clean, and this one would scar into a visible notch if I didn't clean and reclose it.
"Hold still," I told him. He sat on the edge of a supply cot that creaked under his weight like it was filing a formal complaint.
He looked at me with gold eyes that were deeply unsettling. Not because they were threatening, but because they were assessing. Reading me the way I read everyone else.
"You are Cassi's friend," he said. It wasn't a question.
"Since we were nineteen."
"She spoke of you often. With admiration." He didn't flinch when I cleaned the wound. Vampyren pain tolerance was inhuman, which was technically accurate. "She said you refused to leave Los Angeles."
"Someone had to stay."
"That is what she said you would say." There was the faintest flicker of humor beneath his granite expression. "Verbatim."
I tied off the suture, dental floss, mint-flavored, my signature material, and cut it clean. "There. Try not to let anyone else slice it off."
"I will endeavor," Alek said, and left the tent with the silent, precise movement of a man who'd been a general for longer than I'd been alive.
Danton was next. His leg was worse than I'd estimated from a distance. Not just a limp — the knee joint had damage that hadn't set properly after some battle in Chicago months ago. The misalignment was obvious through his skin. Bones tracking wrong, cartilage grinding where it shouldn't.
"You need actual surgery," I said. "Not field-medic-with-dental-floss surgery. Real surgery."
"You are the only surgery available," Danton said, with that slightly formal cadence the Vampyren used, like they'd learned English from a textbook and only recently started adding contractions. "I have been told you are very good."
"I'm very good at keeping people from dying. I'm mediocre at orthopedics. I can brace it, give you back some range of motion, but I can't reconstruct the joint."
"Then brace it. I'll fight on one leg if I have to."
"You people," I muttered, measuring his knee for the brace. "You're all the same. Just patch me up, doc, I'll be fine, I have to go wrestle a bear."
Danton almost smiled. "Cassi warned me about your bedside manner."
"Cassi doesn't appreciate honesty."
I was finishing the brace when Cassi found me again. She stood in the entrance of my tent, backlit by the camp's evening fire, and I could see on her face that whatever the council meeting had produced, it hadn't been what she wanted.
But that wasn't what she'd come to talk about.
"The blood farms," she said. Her voice was different now.
Not the sharp, commanding tone of the resistance general she'd become.
Smaller. Younger. The voice of the girl I'd known before the world ended.
"Marta says there are still blood farms operating in downtown LA.
Vampyren holdouts running them. Hundreds of people still in there. "
I set down the brace and looked at her.
"Your mom," I said.
It wasn't a question. I'd been with Cassi on the worst night of her life — the night the Vampyren came and took her mother to a tank farm while Cassi screamed and fought and I held her down because fighting back that night meant dying, and I refused to let her die.
I'd held her while she sobbed. I'd promised we'd get her mother back, and then three years had gone by and we hadn't, and that promise had sat in my chest like a stone I couldn't swallow.
Cassi's jaw was tight. Her eyes were wet but she wasn't crying. She almost never cried anymore. None of us did.
"Some of the farms have been running since year one," she said. "Marta said some of the captives are still alive. If my mom is in there—"
"If she's there, we'll get her out."
"Brec—"
"I said we'll get her. Whatever it takes. I owe you that and about a thousand other things."
Cassi nodded once, hard, and then took a breath that shuddered on the way in, and straightened her shoulders, and became the general again. She opened her mouth to say something else — probably something practical, probably about tomorrow's plans — when the shouts started.
Not from the meeting tent. From the north gate.
Not argument. Alarm. The sharp, staccato calls of the perimeter guards — the ones that meant threat, not visitor. I grabbed the Beretta from under my cot and was already moving when Jonas appeared at the tent entrance, breathing hard, eyes wide.
"Patrol's coming in," he said. "They've got something."
"Wounded?"
"Not one of ours." He swallowed. "Not Vampyren either."
Outside, the camp was coming alive. People emerged from tents with weapons they'd learned to keep within arm's reach.
The four Vampyren males were on their feet, fanning out with that predatory alertness that said they'd shifted from guests to soldiers in the span of a heartbeat.
I saw Kal step in front of Tess, saw Cassi's hand go to her gun, saw Crystal pick up a rifle from the weapons rack like she was grabbing a bag of groceries.
The patrol came through the north gate. Five of our people — dusty, shaken, half of them bleeding from shallow cuts — dragging something between them.
Not something. Someone.
The crowd parted as I pushed through, and then I stopped.
The prisoner was tall — not Vampyren-tall, but taller than any human in the camp.
Lean. Wiry. Built like something designed for speed, not siege.
His skin was pale to the point of translucence, as if the blood underneath had been diluted to nearly nothing, and even in the copper evening light I could see a faint shimmer to it — a luminescence, like the surface of still water catching the last light of day.
His hair was white. Not blond, not gray, not silver. White, cropped short and fine-textured in a way that looked nothing like human hair and nothing like the thick dark manes of the Vampyren.
He was bleeding from a wound across his ribs, and the blood was dark. Not red. Black.
"Holy shit," Crystal said from somewhere behind me.
"What the fuck is that?" someone else said.
Every person in this camp knew what it was — from the black blood to the translucent skin to the lean, wiry frame that survivors swore could move faster than their eyes could track. Lucian.
They'd brought in a Lucian. Alive.
His hands were bound with zip-ties and loops of climbing rope, and the patrol had forced him to his knees in the dirt.
His head was down, his breathing shallow and rapid — twenty breaths a minute, my brain counted automatically — and the wound on his ribs was deep.
Whoever had gotten close enough to cut him was lucky to still be breathing.
Then he looked up.
His eyes were silver. Not gold like every Vampyren I'd ever seen. Not any color I'd encountered in a human face. Mercury-bright, reflective, catching the dying light, and for a moment those eyes found mine with a directness that felt less like being looked at and more like being read.
I didn't look away.
I don't know why.
"What the hell do we do with that?" Jonas asked, staring.
Good question.
Around me, the camp erupted into noise. I heard Marta's voice, sharp with fear: "Kill it!" I heard Alek say something low in Vampyren to Loren. I heard Cassi swearing and Kal moving forward, blade in hand.
But I was looking at the wound on the Lucian's ribs, and at the black blood pooling in the dirt under his knees, and I was watching the shallow rise and fall of his chest as my brain did what it always did — what it couldn't stop doing — filing, assessing, calculating.
Respiratory rate: twenty per minute, elevated. Blood loss: moderate and ongoing. Wound depth: two to three inches. Intercostal muscle involvement. Possible rib fracture. Needs treatment within the hour or risk of hemorrhagic shock or infection.
He was the enemy. Every person in this camp had lost someone to his kind. The smart thing — the safe thing — was to let him bleed out in the dirt and be done with it.
But I'd never been good at letting things die.
"Bring him to my tent," I said.