Chapter 5 Cassi
I hadn't been back to Los Angeles in over a year, and the city had gotten worse.
Which was saying something, because when I'd left it, Los Angeles had already been a bombed-out, blood-drained, alien-occupied ruin of its former self.
But at least back then there'd been structure to the ruin.
The Vampyren had their territories, the humans had their corners, and everybody operated under a set of unspoken rules that kept the machinery of occupation grinding forward.
Now it was just broken.
Danton and I took a recon team into the city the morning after the council meeting — six of us, two Vampyren and four humans, moving fast through the outskirts.
The plan was simple: scout the current state of things, identify holdout positions, find out if the local Vampyren council that Loren had been communicating with still existed, and get back to camp before dark.
The plan went sideways before we hit the first intersection.
The freeway overpass we'd planned to use as a covered approach had collapsed since I'd been here last. A whole section of the 101, crumbled into a wall of concrete and rebar that blocked the street and turned what should have been a twenty-minute walk into an hour of picking through rubble and exposed rebar and the sun-bleached remains of cars abandoned mid-commute the day the world ended, doors hanging open, radios silent.
I'd grown up on these streets. I'd ridden my motorcycle down this exact stretch of road a thousand times, dodging traffic and cursing tourists and racing Brecca to the bar because whoever got there last had to clean the ice well.
These streets had been loud and dirty and alive and full of people who complained about traffic and rent and parking, and now they were quiet in a way that made my skin crawl.
"The eastern district is controlled by holdouts," said Martinez, one of the Mojave camp's scouts who'd been running recon into the city for the last eight months.
He was a compact, nervous man with a scar that bisected his left eyebrow and a working knowledge of LA's post-invasion geography that made him invaluable.
"Vampyren who refused the council's authority.
They've got maybe thirty, forty warriors, and they're running the blood farms."
"How many farms?" I asked.
"Three that we know of. Could be more. The biggest one's downtown, in the old convention center. They converted the exhibition halls."
My stomach did something terrible. The convention center. I'd been there once, years ago, for a car show my dad had dragged me to. Big, open floors. Easy to compartmentalize. Easy to fill with people and drain them dry.
"How many captives?" Danton asked. He was walking beside me, and I could hear the careful control in his voice, the way he always sounded when we talked about the things his people had done to mine.
Not guilty, exactly. Danton had moved past the point of personal guilt years ago and into something more complex: a reckoning with what it meant to love a human woman while belonging to the species that had destroyed her world.
"Hundreds," Martinez said. "The farms rotate. People die, they bring in more from the scavenging runs. Some of the captives have been in there since year one."
Since year one. Three years. Drained and kept alive and drained again, over and over, existing as a blood supply for creatures who had decided your species was cattle.
My mother had been taken in the first month.
I didn't say anything. I kept walking. Danton's hand found the small of my back and I let it stay there, a warm point of contact that kept me from going somewhere dark.
* * *
We reached the neighborhood I'd grown up in by midmorning, and I wished we hadn't.
Spring Street. My parents' house was somewhere ahead, or what was left of it.
One corner bombed out, another burned, enough damage that nobody had fought me for it when I'd claimed it as a twenty-three-year-old bartender trying to survive the end of the world.
I'd lived there alone for months before Brecca started staying over, before the resistance started, before everything.
I could see it from the end of the block. Still standing. Still damaged. But someone had been inside. The front door was open and there were marks on the frame that hadn't been there when I'd left.
"Let me go first," Danton said.
"It's my house."
"Cassi—"
"It's my house, Danton."
He let me go first. I walked down Spring Street with my hand on my gun and my heart hammering and I looked at the place where I'd grown up and I felt nothing.
No grief. No nostalgia. Just the flat, empty recognition of a place that existed in your memory as one thing and in reality as something entirely different.
The front room was trashed. Not by the invasion.
That damage was old, the bombed-out corner patched with plywood and tarps by some previous squatter.
This was recent. Someone had been living here, and recently, and they'd left in a hurry.
There were blankets on the floor, food wrappers, a couple of water bottles.
A Vampyren blade, serrated, jammed into the wall like a coat hook.
"Deserters," Danton said, examining the blade. "This is standard military issue. Modified grip. Probably taken from an officer."
"How recent?"
"Days. Maybe a week."
I looked at the blade in my parents' wall and something tightened in my chest that had nothing to do with tactical assessment.
"Let's keep moving," I said.
The high school compound was next. I hadn't planned to go there. Martinez's route took us east of it, through residential streets toward the convention center. But when we passed within two blocks, I stopped.
"I need to see it," I said.
"Cassi—" Danton started.
"Two minutes."
I left the group and walked the two blocks alone. Danton started to follow and I held up a hand without turning around and he stopped, because he'd learned in three years as my partner that there were moments when I needed to do things by myself, and this was one of them.
The high school compound. Where the Vampyren had set up their breeding pool when they first arrived.
Where they'd kept human women behind chain-link and concrete and processed them like livestock.
Where I'd been captured and thrown into the pool with the others and told I'd be bred to the highest-ranking Vampyren who claimed me.
Where I'd flipped off Prince Danton Trask and called him every name I knew and some I invented on the spot, and he'd looked at me with those gold eyes and — later, much later, after everything — told me that was the moment he'd decided I was the most interesting creature he'd ever encountered on any planet.
It was rubble.
The buildings had been demolished. Not recently — the ruin had the weathered, settled look of something that had been destroyed months ago and left to the elements.
Weeds pushed through the cracked foundation.
Some kind of wildflower had taken root in the gym where they'd penned us — bright yellow, obscenely cheerful, growing out of the same concrete floor where I'd slept on a mat and planned my escape and tried not to hear the sounds from the rooms where the warriors took the women they'd claimed.
Rain had filled the basement levels, turning them into murky pools that reflected the hazy sky.
The chain-link fence where I'd once gripped the links hard enough to cut my palms was a twisted line of metal half-buried in debris.
I could still feel the diamond pattern of that chain-link against my fingers.
Some things your body never forgets, no matter how many years pass or how many miles you put between yourself and the place where they happened.
The admin building was half-standing. One wall remained, and on it, faded but still visible, someone had spray-painted the words WE WERE HERE in letters three feet tall.
I didn't know who'd written it. One of the women, maybe.
Or one of the resistance fighters who'd come through after.
It didn't matter. The words said everything.
I stood at the edge of what had been the compound and looked at the rubble and the wildflowers and the spray paint and thought about the women I hadn't been able to save.
There had been thirty of us in the pool when I was there.
Thirty women, different ages, different backgrounds, all of us terrified, all of us angry in different ways.
I'd gotten out. I'd gotten Brecca out. We'd gotten maybe a dozen others free in the chaos of the escape that Danton had made possible.
The rest, I didn't know. I had never found out what happened to all of them. Some had been moved to other facilities. Some had been given to warriors as claimed mates. Some had died in the subsequent fighting. The breeding pool records were destroyed when Chicago fell.
Standing in the ruins, I let myself feel it for exactly thirty seconds.
The grief, the fury, the guilt of having survived when others hadn't.
I let it wash through me like a wave and then I pulled it back, pushed it down, locked it into the compartment where I kept all the things I couldn't afford to feel while there was still work to do.
Thirty seconds. That was my limit. After that, the general took over and the girl who'd grown up on Spring Street went back into the box where I kept her.
I walked back to the group. Danton looked at my face and said nothing, which was exactly the right thing. He simply took my hand — careful, gentle, his massive fingers swallowing mine — and we kept moving.
* * *
We didn't make it to the convention center. Martinez had scouted far enough to confirm the holdout Vampyren's perimeter — a ring of patrols and lookout posts around the downtown core that made approach from the east extremely dangerous in daylight — and we turned back before we were detected.