Chapter 11 Cassi
We hit the convention center at four in the morning on a Thursday.
I knew it was Thursday because I'd been counting the days since the recon mission — nine days of planning, arguing, gathering intelligence, and trying to convince Marta that a strike on the downtown blood farm was worth the risk.
Nine days of staring at the hand-drawn maps Tess and Crystal had made and thinking about my mother's face and wondering if she was still alive and knowing that the only way to find out was to go in.
Marta had been against it. "We just survived a Lucian raid. We have three dead, seven wounded, and a prisoner who may or may not be an asset. This is not the time to split our forces for a rescue mission."
"It's not a rescue mission," I'd said, standing at the Denny's table with my hands flat on the surface and my voice level and my heart going at a hundred and forty beats per minute.
"It's a liberation operation. There are hundreds of human captives in that building.
We leave them there, we're no better than the people who put them there. "
That had been the argument that worked. The strategic one. The moral one. We were building a world where Vampyren and humans lived as equals, and you couldn't build that world while ignoring the fact that three blocks away, humans were being kept as livestock.
Loren had supported it. Alek had planned it. Crystal had supplied it.
And now here I was, in the pre-dawn darkness of downtown Los Angeles, leading a strike team of twelve toward the largest blood farm in the city, and the general in me was running tactical calculations while the girl from Spring Street was screaming inside her chest.
Our team: four Vampyren (Danton, Kal, and two of the Mojave camp's allies who'd fought holdouts before) and eight humans, including Martinez, two of Mindy's sharpshooters, and five resistance fighters who'd volunteered because they had people inside too.
Everybody had someone. That was the thing about blood farms. They'd been operating for three years.
Every family in the resistance had lost someone to them.
We approached from the west, through the parking structure that abutted the convention center's loading docks.
Martinez had mapped the holdout patrols during the recon: twelve-minute rotations, three guards on the west approach, two on the roof, and an unknown number inside.
The holdout Vampyren running this farm were military deserters who'd refused Loren's council and set up their own operation.
They weren't organized the way the old regime had been.
They were worse. Desperate, cornered, feeding off captive humans because they'd lost access to the blood distribution network that Loren's council controlled.
Desperate Vampyren were the most dangerous kind. The hunger made them volatile.
"Hold," Kal whispered, raising a fist. He was on point, moving through the parking structure with the silent, liquid grace that still made me think of a cat the size of a truck. His eyes glowed faintly in the darkness, the only light source in a building that hadn't had electricity in two years.
Two holdout guards at the loading dock entrance. Both Vampyren. Both armed with the serrated blades that were standard military issue. One was leaning against the wall, half-asleep. The other was smoking an actual cigarette, which would have been comical if it hadn't been so pathetically human.
Kal and Danton moved simultaneously. I'd seen them do this before.
The coordinated strike, no verbal communication, reading each other's body language with the precision of creatures who'd trained together for decades.
They were silent and they were fast and the two guards were unconscious before the cigarette hit the ground.
"Secure them," I whispered. "Don't kill them unless you have to."
Loren had been clear about that. These were Vampyren deserters, not enemy combatants. They'd broken from the council, not from the species. If we could take them alive, we would. If we couldn't — well. That was what the blades were for.
We moved through the loading dock and into the convention center's service corridors. The smell hit me first.
Blood. Old blood, layered, accumulated. The thick, sweet, copper-iron stench of a place where blood had been spilled and drained and collected and spilled again for years. It was in the walls. In the concrete. In the air itself, so dense I could taste it on the back of my tongue.
I'd smelled blood before. I'd been covered in it, bathed in it, slept beside it. The invasion had desensitized me to a lot of things. But this was different. This was farming blood. Systematic. Industrial. The smell of human beings being used as a resource.
My stomach clenched. I kept moving.
The service corridor led to the main exhibition hall.
Hall B, according to the faded signage on the walls that still read LOS ANGELES AUTO SHOW and PREMIUM EXHIBITOR ACCESS.
Martinez had said the captives were kept in Halls B and C, with the holdout Vampyren operating out of Hall A as their living quarters and command center.
I signaled the team to split. Kal took four fighters to flank through Hall A. Engage the holdouts, draw their attention, create chaos. Danton stayed with me and the remaining six to hit Hall B directly.
"Cassi." Danton's hand on my shoulder. I looked up at him in the dark. Eight feet of warrior prince with gold eyes and the face of a man who knew exactly what we were about to find and was dreading it for my sake.
"I'm fine," I said.
"You're not."
"I'll be fine after."
He held my gaze for a second. Then he nodded and drew his blade and we moved.
* * *
The door to Hall B was barred from the outside.
Two steel bars crossed through welded brackets, a lock designed to keep rescue parties out.
It took Danton thirty seconds to bend the bars apart with his bare hands, the metal groaning and shrieking in a way that eliminated any remaining element of surprise.
It didn't matter. Kal's team had already engaged in Hall A. I could hear it. The crash of blade on blade, the splintering of furniture, and then Kal's war cry splitting the darkness like a thunderclap. The holdout Vampyren would be focused on the threat from the west. We had minutes.
Danton pulled the door open and I went through first because I had to. I had to be the first thing they saw. A human face.
The exhibition hall was enormous. High ceilings, concrete floor, the skeletal remains of display booths and stage rigging. And in the space where cars had once been displayed on rotating platforms and families had walked through admiring paint jobs and leather interiors, there were cages.
Not cages, exactly. Pens. Partitioned sections built from chain-link fence and welded rebar, creating a grid of enclosures across the hall floor. Each pen held between eight and fifteen people. I counted quickly. Twelve pens visible, most of them full.
Over a hundred humans. Maybe a hundred and fifty.
They were thin. Gaunt. The kind of thin that comes from months and years of controlled starvation, kept just barely alive enough to keep producing blood.
They were pale with that waxy, translucent pallor Brecca had described to me once.
The look of a body that doesn't have enough red blood cells to color its own skin.
Some of them were lying on mats. Some were sitting against the chain-link with the glazed, absent expression of people who had stopped processing their surroundings a long time ago. Some had bandages on their arms. The puncture sites. Where the Vampyren fed.
One woman near the front of the nearest pen saw me and flinched. Actually flinched, pressed herself backward against the chain-link, arms up, as if my presence was a threat.
"We're here to help," I said. My voice came out steady because I'd practiced it on the walk over, rehearsing the words in my head until they sounded calm instead of shattered. "We're the resistance. We're getting you out."
The woman stared at me. She didn't seem to understand.
"Start cutting," I told the team. Martinez and the others moved with wire cutters and bolt cutters and started opening the pens.
The captives didn't rush out. They didn't cheer, didn't cry, didn't react in any of the ways movies had taught me liberations were supposed to go.
They sat or stood or lay where they were and watched us with the careful, suspicious stillness of people who had learned that hope was more dangerous than despair.
I moved through the hall, pen by pen, scanning faces.
Looking for one face. The face I'd been carrying in my memory since the invasion.
Dark hair streaked with gray, laugh lines, brown eyes that were the same shape as mine.
The face of a woman who'd made tamales on Sundays and kept a garden full of tomatoes and peppers and told me I was going to be somebody special.
Pen after pen. Face after face. Women and men, old and young, all of them hollowed out and pale and looking at me like I was a hallucination.
I reached the back of the hall. The last row of pens, set apart from the others, smaller.
These held the ones too weak to produce blood regularly.
Kept alive for some reason I didn't want to think about.
The people in these pens were skeletal. Some of them didn't open their eyes when I shone my flashlight through the chain-link.
The second-to-last pen. Five people. Three men, two women. All of them lying on mats, wrapped in blankets that were more hole than fabric.
The woman on the far left was curled on her side with her back to me. Dark hair. Gray streaks. Impossibly thin, her spine visible through the shapeless garment she was wearing. Her wrists were wrapped in medical tape that was brown with old blood.
"Mom?"