Chapter 11 Cassi #3
Danton carried my mother the entire way.
She'd gone silent again. That absent, vacant silence the young man in the pen had described.
In there, somewhere, but not coming out.
She lay in Danton's arms with her eyes half-open and her hand still gripping the front of his shirt and I walked beside them and tried to figure out how to be both the general who was managing the logistics of evacuating a hundred and forty-seven traumatized humans and the daughter who wanted to curl into a ball and scream.
Both. The answer was both. It was always both.
Kal fell into step beside me as we climbed the last hill toward camp. He was sweating (even Vampyren sweated after sustained combat, though they'd deny it) and his Converse sneakers were caked with blood and dust.
"Fourteen holdout Vampyren total," he reported. "Eight in custody. Two fled. Four—" He paused. "Four resisted. They didn't make it."
"You killed them."
"They drew weapons and refused to stand down. Two of them were feeding on captives when we breached. They had a woman between them—" He stopped. His jaw worked. "They weren't going to let her go."
I looked at Kal — this Vampyren who'd deserted his own military because he'd seen a breeding pit and couldn't stomach it. Who wore human clothes and sang classic rock and was going to be a father. Who had just killed four of his own species to rescue humans from a blood farm.
"Thank you," I said.
He looked surprised. "For what?"
"For being you."
He didn't respond. He just walked beside me, and after a moment, he reached over and squeezed my shoulder once. Quick, rough, the way men who weren't comfortable with tenderness expressed it anyway. Then he dropped his hand and kept walking.
The camp came into view as the sun crested the hills.
The gates opened and the captives walked through, and the camp residents came out to meet them, and for a few minutes the air was full of the sounds of people recognizing people.
Names called across the dusty ground, embraces that were more collision than hug, the raw, gutted crying that happened when you found someone you'd given up for dead.
Not everyone found someone. Some of the captives walked through the gates and looked around and saw nothing familiar, no one waiting, and the expression on their faces was the worst thing I'd ever seen.
Worse than the cages, worse than the scars, worse than any of it.
The look of someone who'd survived only to discover that what they'd survived for was gone.
Brecca was waiting at the medical tent with Jonas and two volunteers and more supplies than I'd ever seen her assemble.
She took one look at the procession and her face went through the calculation I'd watched her do a thousand times: counting bodies, assessing severity, triaging in her head before a single patient reached her.
"Critical cases to me," she called out. "Walking wounded to Jonas at Tent B. If you can stand and talk, you're in line — sit down, drink water, I'll get to you."
Danton carried my mother to Brecca's tent and laid her on the examination table with the same care he'd carried her for two hours.
Brecca looked at her and her expression didn't change, the clinical mask firmly in place, but I saw her hands hesitate for just a fraction of a second before she picked up the stethoscope.
"Elena King," I said. "Fifty-two. Three years of captivity. Regular feeding, both arms, looks like twice a week minimum. She's nonverbal. She recognized me but she's—" My voice broke. "She's not all there."
"I've got her, Cass." Brecca's hand on my arm. Brief. Firm. The touch of a medical professional taking custody of a patient. "Go be the general. I'll take care of your mom."
I stood in the entrance to the medical tent and watched my best friend start to assess my mother's vital signs, and I thought about what this war had cost us. The people. The specific, irreplaceable people who'd been chewed up by an invasion that treated them as a resource.
My mother had survived. She was alive. But the woman who'd made tamales and kept a garden and told me I was going to be somebody special — I didn't know if that woman was still in there, underneath the captivity and blood loss and silence.
I didn't know if a person could come back from what had been done to her.
I knew one thing. I was going to find out. I was going to sit beside her bed and hold her hand and talk to her until she talked back, even if it took months, even if it took years, even if the general had to wait and the girl from Spring Street had to be patient for the first time in her life.
"Cassi." Danton was behind me. He didn't touch me — he was waiting, the way he always waited, giving me the choice.
I turned around and walked into his arms and pressed my face against his chest and cried. The real kind. The kind that came from years of not knowing and one morning of finding out, and the answer being both better and worse than anything I'd imagined.
He held me. He didn't say anything. He just held me, his massive arms wrapped around me, his chin resting on top of my head, his heartbeat — both of them, the double-rhythm I'd fallen asleep to a thousand times — steady against my ear.
"She's alive," he said, finally. Just that.
"She's alive," I repeated.
And for now — for this morning, for this one broken, terrible, miraculous morning — that was enough.