Chapter 5 Cassi #2
But we'd learned enough. Three blood farms, hundreds of captives, a fortified holdout force that wasn't aligned with Loren's council. And somewhere in that maze of occupied streets and drained humans, my mother might still be alive.
Might. That word was doing a lot of heavy lifting.
The walk back to camp was quiet. I let the tactical half of my brain process what we'd seen — approach vectors, patrol timing, defensive positions — while the other half, the part I never let anyone see, turned over and over the image of the convention center's exhibition halls converted into a blood farm and wondered what all that time had done to a woman who'd once kept a beautiful garden and made tamales on Sundays and told me I was going to be somebody special.
We got back to camp just after noon. I reported to Loren and Marta, gave them the intel, answered their questions, and then excused myself because I needed to not be a general for five goddamn minutes.
I found Brecca in her medical tent. She was bent over a notebook, writing with the intense concentration of someone documenting something important, and she looked up when I came in with an expression that shifted quickly from focus to concern.
"What happened?" she said. "Sit down. Are you hurt?"
"I'm not hurt. I'm—" I sat down on the crate. "I went to the compound."
Brecca's face changed. She didn't need me to specify which compound. There was only one compound in our shared history that warranted that tone of voice.
"Oh, Cass."
"It's gone. Demolished. Just rubble." I pressed my palms flat on my knees and looked at them. "I don't know why I went. I knew it would be gone. I just—"
"You needed to see it."
"Yeah."
Brecca sat down beside me. Close, but not touching.
She'd gotten even worse about physical contact since I'd been gone, which I hadn't thought was possible.
But present. She didn't say anything for a while.
She didn't need to. We'd been best friends since we were nineteen and she knew the difference between the times when I needed words and the times when I needed someone to just sit with me in the wreckage.
After a minute, I said, "The blood farms are real. Downtown. Convention center. Martinez confirmed it."
"I know. I heard."
"My mom—"
"I know."
I looked at her. My best friend. She was thin and tired and her hair was chopped short and dark and she had the kind of face that didn't let you see what was happening behind it unless she chose to show you.
Running a field hospital alone in the foothills since the invasion had turned her into something sharp and efficient and, I was starting to realize, profoundly lonely.
"We're going to get her," Brecca said. Flat. Certain. The way she said don't scratch it and drink more water. Medical-grade certainty applied to a promise she couldn't possibly guarantee.
"I know we are." I wiped my eyes. When had they gotten wet? "Okay. Enough. Talk to me about something else. Talk to me about your Lucian."
Brecca went very still. "He's not my Lucian."
"Brec."
"He's a prisoner. I'm keeping him alive for interrogation. That's the assignment."
"Uh huh." I watched her face. I knew that face.
I'd seen the early stages of this exact process before — in my own mirror, back when a Vampyren prince first looked at me like I was the most fascinating thing in the room and I'd told myself I felt nothing but anger.
"The interrogation happened this morning. Alek and Kal questioned him."
"I know. I heard about it after the fact, which — I should've been told. He's my patient, his stress markers—"
"Brecca."
She stopped. Looked at me.
"You went and checked on him afterward, didn't you?"
"Of course I did. He'd just been through—"
"Did you yell at the guards?"
A pause. "I may have... expressed concern firmly."
"About the prisoner's stress levels."
"About the impact on my baseline data—"
"Brec." I leaned forward. "I've seen that look before. On my own face."
She went rigid. The expression that flickered across her features was so fast I almost missed it: fear, recognition, denial, all compressed into half a second before the shutters came back down and she was just Brecca again, clinical, controlled, composed.
"That's different," she said. "You fell for a Vampyren. A species we at least understood. This is a Lucian. They've been killing your camp members. They staked heads on poles. They—"
"And Danton's people put women in breeding pools. And I fell for him anyway." I put my hand on her arm. "I'm not warning you, Brec. I'm not telling you to be careful. I'm telling you I understand. Because I've been exactly where you are, and I know what it looks like, and I know it's terrifying."
She pulled her arm away. She always pulled away.
"There's nothing to understand. He's a patient. I'm a medic. That's it."
"Okay."
"That's it."
"I said okay."
She glared at me. I held up my hands, surrendering, and after a moment her shoulders dropped half an inch and she looked away, toward the tent entrance, toward the world outside where an alien prisoner sat in a containment tent and waited for the next time a human woman would come and check on him.
"He told them the Lucian homeworld was destroyed," she said quietly. "By the Vampyren. Three hundred years ago. He said they've been running ever since."
"I heard."
"His vitals didn't lie, Cassi. When he talked about running, his blood pressure dropped. When people lie, their autonomic system betrays them. He wasn't lying."
I looked at my best friend. The woman who'd saved two hundred lives with dental floss and willpower and who would rather stitch a wound than feel a feeling. The woman who'd sworn, loudly and repeatedly, that she would never be one of those women who fell for an alien.
She was going to fall so hard.
"Be careful," I said, standing up. The thing you say to the person you love most when they're about to walk off a cliff and you can't stop them and you wouldn't want to anyway, because the fall is how they learn to fly.
"I'm always careful," Brecca said.
"No, you're not. You're always controlled. It's not the same thing."
She didn't have an answer for that. I left her tent and walked out into the afternoon sun and went to find Danton, because I needed to stand next to someone who loved me and let myself be held for a while.
I found him by the garden, of all places.
Standing in the rows of green shoots, his massive frame absurdly out of scale with the tiny plants, his bad leg braced against a raised bed while he studied the leaves with genuine interest. When I came up beside him, he put his arm around me without looking, as naturally as breathing.
"The compound?" he said.
"Rubble."
"And you?"
"I'll be okay." I leaned into him. Pressed my face against his arm, which was as high as I could reach without him bending down.
He smelled like he always did. Leather and the faint cinnamon-sweet undercurrent of Vampyren pheromones that he was too thoughtful to deploy but couldn't entirely suppress.
It had taken me a long time to admit that I found that smell comforting.
Now it was the closest thing I had to home.
"We'll get your mother back," Danton said.
"Brecca said the same thing."
"Then it must be true. Brecca doesn't say things she doesn't mean."
"No," I agreed, looking back toward the medical tent. "She doesn't."