Chapter 11 Cassi #2
The word came out of me before the general could stop it.
Small and raw and nothing like the voice of a resistance leader.
The voice of a girl from Spring Street who was looking at what a blood farm had done to a woman who'd once been strong enough to garden in the July heat and carry grocery bags up three flights of stairs and hold her daughter when the world ended.
She didn't move.
"Mom. It's Cassi." Nothing.
I cut the pen open. My hands were shaking. Actually shaking, which they hadn't done during the combat approach or the breach or the horrifying walk through the hall. My hands were steady when people were shooting at me. They fell apart when my mother didn't answer.
I crawled in beside her and touched her shoulder and she flinched away from me with a sound that wasn't a word — a whimper, animal and instinctive, the sound of a creature that had been touched too many times by hands that meant harm.
"Mom. It's me. It's Cassi. I'm here."
She turned.
And I saw my mother's face, and the thirty-second limit I'd set for grief broke like glass.
She looked eighty. She was fifty-two. Her face was sunken, the cheekbones too sharp, the skin stretched thin over bones that shouldn't have been visible.
Her eyes were open but unfocused, looking at me without seeing me, the pupils dilated, the brown irises I'd inherited faded to something flat and tired.
Her lips were cracked. Her hair was lank and dirty and had gone fully gray, every trace of the dark brown I remembered erased by years of stress and starvation and captivity.
Her arms. God, her arms. Both forearms were covered in scars.
Puncture marks, dozens of them, layered on top of each other in a pattern that spoke of regular, systematic feeding.
Some of the scars were old and white. Some were newer, pink, barely healed.
The most recent ones were covered in the medical tape I'd seen from outside, and beneath the tape, the skin was raw.
"Mom." I couldn't breathe. "Mom, it's Cassi. Your daughter. I'm here."
She looked at me. Through me. Past me. Her mouth moved and nothing came out except a thin, papery sound that might have been words in a language she'd forgotten how to speak.
"She doesn't—" One of the men in the pen had pushed himself up on one elbow. He was young — mid-twenties, gaunt, with the same puncture scars on his arms. "She stopped talking about a year ago. She's — she's in there, somewhere. She just doesn't come out."
"What's her name?" I asked, even though I knew. I needed to hear someone else say it.
"Elena. She — are you really her daughter? She used to talk about a daughter. In the beginning. Cassi. She said Cassi would come."
My mother had waited for me. All this time, she'd waited for me, and I hadn't come.
I'd been building a resistance and fighting a war and falling in love with a Vampyren prince and traveling across the country and she'd been here, in a cage, being drained, waiting for a daughter who'd told herself that hope was a luxury she couldn't afford.
"I'm here now, Mom." I pulled her into my arms. She was so light.
Bird-light. The weight of a woman who'd been kept alive on just enough food to keep producing blood and not one calorie more.
I could feel her ribs, her spine, the fragile architecture of a body that had been systematically depleted since the day the ships came.
She made that sound again — the papery whisper — and this time I caught a word. My name. "Cassi." So quiet it was barely a breath.
"Yeah, Mom. I'm here. I've got you."
Her hand moved. Slowly, as if the motion cost everything she had. Her fingers found the front of my jacket and closed around the fabric and held on, and the grip was weak — barely there, the strength of a child, not a woman — but it held.
The general was gone. The girl from Spring Street was on her knees in a blood farm holding her mother's body and crying in a way she hadn't cried since the day the ships appeared in the sky, and somewhere in the building Vampyren were fighting and captives were being freed and the war was still happening but I couldn't hear any of it because the only sound in the world was my mother breathing my name.
* * *
Danton found me there.
I don't know how long I'd been on the floor.
Minutes? An hour? Time had collapsed into a single point that contained nothing but my mother's weight in my arms and the sound of her breathing and the smell of blood and unwashed skin and underneath it all, a faint trace of the hand lotion she'd always used, the one that smelled like coconut.
She still smelled like my mother under all of it.
That was the thing that broke me completely.
He stood in the entrance to the pen. Eight feet of Vampyren prince, blade in hand, holdout blood dark and cold on his shirt. His eyes found me on the floor with my mother, and his whole face changed.
We were past guilt. This was older and heavier. A man looking at the undeniable cost of what his species had done to mine, and the cost had a face, and the face was the mother of the woman he loved.
"Cassi." His voice was barely a whisper.
"Help me carry her."
He knelt. He set down his blade. He looked at my mother, this woman he'd never met, who'd been drained by his own kind since the day they arrived. He reached for her with a gentleness that contradicted every inch of his massive frame.
"May I?" he asked. Not asking me. Asking her.
My mother's eyes shifted toward him. The Vampyren. The alien. The species that had caged her and drained her and stolen years of her life. She should have screamed. She should have recoiled.
She looked at the way his hands hovered. Open, palms up, waiting for permission the way he'd waited for my permission that first night in the breeding pool when I'd been terrified and furious and he'd looked at me with those gold eyes and hadn't touched me until I said it was okay.
My mother nodded. The smallest motion. A dip of her chin that cost her visible effort.
Danton lifted her like she was made of paper.
He cradled her against his chest, this woman who weighed nothing, who should have weighed so much more.
She pressed her face against his shirt and I watched a Vampyren prince hold my human mother in a blood farm and I understood why this war had to end.
With the simple, radical act of one species choosing to stop hurting another.
"The building is secured," Danton said quietly, looking at me over my mother's head. "Kal's team subdued eight holdout Vampyren. Two escaped. The rest are in custody."
"The captives?"
"Being evacuated. Martinez is coordinating transport to camp. We have—" He paused. Counted. "A hundred and forty-seven. Some need immediate medical attention."
A hundred and forty-seven people. Three years of captivity. Three blood farms in downtown LA alone, and this was only one of them.
"Brecca's going to need help," I said. My voice was steadier now. The general was coming back, not because the grief was over but because a hundred and forty-seven people needed the general more than the girl from Spring Street needed to cry.
"Loren is sending additional medical supplies from camp. And the Lucian—" Danton hesitated. "Rael has offered to help with the evacuation."
I looked at him.
"He said that carrying wounded humans was a better use of his speed than sitting in a tent."
I almost laughed. It came out closer to a hiccup. Half-grief, half-hope, or close enough. A Lucian volunteering to carry rescued humans. A Vampyren prince cradling my mother. The world was so broken and so strange and so capable of producing moments that shouldn't have been possible.
"Let him help," I said. "Let everyone help."
We moved through the hall. Around us, the other captives were being guided out of their pens, supported by resistance fighters, carried by Vampyren warriors who looked at the human faces and saw what I saw. The cost. Every face proof of what the invasion had done.
Some of the captives could walk. Some couldn't. Some held onto each other with the desperation of people who'd shared a pen for years and were afraid that separation meant death.
An elderly man gripped a young woman's hand and wouldn't let go, and the young woman gripped his back, and they walked out of the convention center together, blinking in the pre-dawn light, and neither of them said a word.
A woman my age stumbled at the loading dock entrance and one of Kal's Vampyren allies, a warrior with a scar across his jaw and arms the size of tree trunks, caught her without thinking, steadied her, and said, "I've got you.
" The woman looked up at him with an expression that was equal parts terror and gratitude, and the Vampyren warrior looked back at her with an expression that was just shame.
"Keep moving," I said. To everyone. To myself.
* * *
The walk back to camp took two hours. It should have taken one, but we were moving at the pace of the weakest captive, and the weakest captives could barely stand.