Kitabı oku: «Daysider»

The man who walked out from behind the bushes was tall.

That was the first thing Alexia noticed as she drew a bead on his chest directly over his heart. Then she looked up into his face. He was one of the most beautiful things she’d ever seen. Not beautiful like a woman, but in the perfect harmony of his features: the strong chin, straight nose, high cheekbones, expressive lips.

And his eyes. They were dark…not maroon like those of a Nightsider, but the deepest sapphire imaginable. His short hair was not white, like most vampires, but a hue somewhere between brown and gold, and his skin was deeply tanned.

Alexia swallowed. She had met her first Daysider at last, and he was so much…more than she had expected.

About the Author

SUSAN KRINARD has been writing paranormal romance for nearly twenty years. Her books include a number of novels for Mills & Boon. With Daysider she begins a series of vampire paranormal romances, the NIGHTSIDERS series, for Mills & Boon^® Nocturne^™.

Sue lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her husband, Serge, her dogs, Freya, Nahla and Cagney, and her cats, Agatha and Rocky. She loves her garden, nature, painting and chocolate…not necessarily in that order.

Daysider
Susan Krinard

www.millsandboon.co.uk

With thanks to both “L’s” for their

patience and support.

The first known offspring of a voluntary union between a human female and a male Opir, aka “Nightsider,” was born in the San Francisco Enclave during the seventh year of the Opir-Human War, conceived during the brief period of the first Truce. The child, Jenna Donnelly, daughter of Special Forces Captain Fiona Donnelly and Opir refugee Kane, remained the only documented example of such a union until the last year of the War, when other hybrid children—christened “dhampires”—and their mothers, who were accused of willingly “consorting with the enemy,” were brought into the capital city of San Francisco.

In the final year of the War and immediately afterward, human soldiers sweeping the newly created Zone—otherwise known as “No-man’s land”—between Enclave and Opir territories discovered lost, abandoned dhampir children, as well as those in hiding with their mothers. Unlike the women of the first “wave,” these mothers had been impregnated by male Opir soldiers without their consent, and they were often unaware that they had conceived until weeks after the encounter.

Such women and their children were given full refugee status in the Enclave, though their acceptance among Enclave citizens was slow in coming. This acceptance was impossible in Opir society, where hybrid children were considered undesirable half-castes and even abominations. It was a common belief in the Enclave that any children born to human serfs in Opir territory, particularly the city of Erebus, were destroyed before birth—a credence that was largely refuted in subsequent years, though the practice was not unknown.

In spite of their awkward status within the Enclave, dhampires soon proved to be invaluable assets. With the ability to see clearly in the dark, along with keener senses, strength and speed than homo sapiens, these children were soon recruited by Aegis, the Enclave Intelligence agency responsible for Opir-Human relations.

On its face, Aegis studied Opir society and arranged ambassadorial visits between Erebus and the Enclave, but in practice it also ran covert infiltration, intelligence operations, espionage and counterespionage within the Zone, occasionally inserting specially trained moles, posing as serfs, into Erebus itself.

Though not required to undergo Aegis training, most dhampir youths eventually sought affirmation by serving the Enclave as covert operatives. The only complication in utilizing such resources lay in some dhampires’ need for blood, another trait they held in common with their Opir Sires.

With few exceptions, dhampires rejected the taking of blood from humans. While fully sixty percent of dhampires could survive on human food alone, the remaining forty percent, in addition to being immune to the bite of a full Opir, required a special drug to allow them to digest human fare.

In time, scientists developed a means of delivering the drug into the body through a subdermal patch. This allowed the “immune” dhampires to work in the field for extended periods without requiring blood.

But dhampir operatives faced yet another challenge: Opir scouts who, while dependent on blood for survival, were capable of sustained exposure to sunlight. These “Daysiders,” outcasts within their own rigid society, nevertheless served as counterparts to Aegis agents and hindered the gathering of intelligence and other clandestine operations within the Zone.

—from the Introduction to A Brief History of the Nightsider War, San Francisco Enclave

Prologue

San Francisco, California

Mommy was crying. Alexia knew it had something to with do the lady on the TV, talking in soft words that didn’t match the angry expression on her face.

Behind the lady was a picture of a city, a black, upsidedown bowl that gleamed like a beetle’s shell in bright sunlight. “Erebus,” the lady on the TV said. Alexia didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded like a very bad word. And somehow, it was making Mommy sad.

Alexia got up from her seat on the thin carpet and went to Mommy, searching her face anxiously. There were dark blotches under Mommy’s eyes, and her nose was red.

“What is it, Mommy?” Alexia asked, reaching up to be taken into her mother’s arms.

Mommy picked her up and sat her on the couch beside her. “Nothing’s wrong, Lexie,” she said, trying to smile.

Alexia always knew when Mommy was fooling. It wasn’t just that she smelled different, or the way her voice got very tight, even though she was smiling. There was something wrong, and it made Alexia upset that Mommy was unhappy. Upset and angry.

“What are they talking about?” Alexia asked, pointing at the TV.

Mommy pulled Alexia close and stroked her hair. “It’s a city,” she said.

“Like San Francisco?”

“Not the same,” Mommy replied. She breathed in and out in a funny way that made Alexia’s heart hurt. “You remember when we talked about the Nightsiders?”

Alexia made a face. “They’re nasty. We had a big fight with them.”

“That’s right.” Mommy bent her head so her nose pressed against Alexia’s hair. “That is the city they built in what we used to call the Sonoma Valley. They made it all for themselves, where they don’t have to be in the sun.”

“Sun kills them,” Alexia said solemnly.

“That’s right.”

“And they used to kill people all the time, didn’t they? During the big fight?”

Mommy covered Alexia’s eyes as if she didn’t want her to see the TV anymore. “You shouldn’t know about that,” she said, a funny warble in her voice. “No child should know.”

“Don’t worry, Mommy.” Alexia pulled her mother’s hand away from her eyes. “The kids at school talk about the bloodsuckers all the time. I’m not scared.”

“Oh, God,” Mommy whispered. “Do they…Are the other kids…nice to you, at school?”

“Oh, they’re okay. Some of the girls are mean sometimes. They give me funny looks. The boys just stare at me a lot.”

Mommy cupped both her hands around Alexia’s face. “What do they say?”

Alexia shrugged the way she had seen grown-ups do when they were pretending something didn’t matter. “Silly things, about my eyes.” She touched her own eyelids. “They say I’m like a cat because I can see in the dark.”

“That’s right,” Mommy said in a completely different voice than before. “Like a cat. And cats are beautiful, aren’t they? So graceful and brave.” She smiled, moving Alexia to sit in her lap. “But you know what? I think you look even more like a fox. Remember the pictures I showed you?”

Alexia nodded. “It was red, like my hair.”

“And quick and clever. Like you.”

They were very nice words, but Alexia couldn’t help looking at the TV again, and at the ugly city with the scary name.

“The bloodsuckers aren’t ever going to come here, are they?” she asked, just a little bit scared after all.

“Lexie, that word—”

“Isn’t that what they are, Mommy?”

Mommy made a sound a little like a laugh, but it wasn’t a happy one. “Yes,” she said. “But you don’t have to worry about that.”

“I’m not worried.” Alexia bit her lip. “We aren’t ever going to get in a big fight with them again, are we?”

“No.” She took a big, long breath. “I wish—”

Alexia wriggled free and looked up into Mommy’s eyes. “What do you wish, Mommy?”

“I wish things could be the way they were before…before the big fight.”

“When my daddy was alive?”

Mommy’s face seemed to crumple all at once. She sobbed, and Alexia knew it was because of what she had said. It was all her fault.

“It’s okay, Mommy,” she said, stroking her mother’s trembling hand and soft, wet cheeks. “I won’t ever talk about Daddy again.”

“Oh, my baby,” Mommy said, gathering Alexia up again so tightly that she could barely breathe. “I will never, ever let anyone hurt you. Not anyone. I’m going to keep you with me forever and ever.”

Alexia pressed her face to the pulse in Mommy’s neck. It was so warm and sweet. It made her feel safe.

But she didn’t want to just be safe. She wanted to find a way to make Mommy happy.

And keep those nasty bloodsuckers in their ugly black city from making anyone afraid, ever again.

Chapter 1

San Francisco Enclave, West Coast Region

“It may be fatal,” the Director said.

Alexia laughed. “Since when hasn’t that been true of every mission?”

Aegis Director of Field Operations Wilson McAllister regarded her without a trace of amusement. “This isn’t funny, Alex,” he said. “We’re talking about violating our side of the Treaty and striking deep into the Zone. Even the Mayor doesn’t know about it.”

“At least not officially,” Alexia said.

“Not officially enough to send someone to pull your ass out of the fire if you get caught.” The steel rims of McAllister’s glasses flashed as they caught the cold and sterile light from the overhead fixtures. “Your mission will be to learn everything you can about the Nightsiders’ illegal colony without doing anything to attract the Citadel’s attention. If you fail or are captured—”

“—Aegis will disavow any knowledge of our actions. I know the drill.” Alexia wandered to the window overlooking the glimmering waters of San Francisco Bay. From Aegis headquarters in the old Financial District, she could see a heavily guarded convoy of trucks carrying agricultural products from the Central Valley into the city. The Treaty meant that the Nightsiders were supposed to leave such convoys alone.

Usually they did. But there were always the terrorists, the ones who wanted to ignite a new War. On both sides. And that was what her team would be sent in to try to prevent.

Alexia drifted back into memory, of the year the Nightsiders had first appeared. Not that they’d been her memories, not exactly. But she’d seen the archived news vids, the looks of bewilderment and fear on the newscasters’ faces when the first reports came in: horror stories of vampires arising seemingly out of nowhere, some emerging from decades or centuries or even millennia of sleep in sanctuaries built far beneath the earth. No one knew—or at least the leeches weren’t telling—what had roused them, or why they had chosen that time to rise and claim the earth.

Ten years later—ten years of chaos and plague and terrible war, the time when Alexia’s mother gave birth to a halfvampire child—had led to the Treaty, and now most parts of the world were carefully divided into territories: vampire Citadels and human Enclaves, separated by the unclaimed regions known as the Zones.

Just outside the Enclave that embraced San Francisco and the area formerly known as the East Bay, the Zone comprised an immense semicircular region that had once held thriving suburbs, now abandoned and slowly crumbling back to the earth as new forests and fields absorbed stone and concrete, and animals—once driven away by human incursions—reclaimed their original habitats. Beyond the Zone, to the south and east in the regions of the Central Valley, lay the farmlands that produced sustenance for the Enclaves, each surrounded by its own Zone and patrolled by special military forces whose job it was to keep Nightsiders out and human workers safe from them. In theory, as per the Treaty, the workers were protected, and so were the routes to the Enclaves.

To the north, in the area once distinguished by its scenic fields of grapevines and boutique wineries, its rolling hills and towering redwoods, stood Erebus. The Citadel of Night.

Alexia remembered the images on the TV when the construction began. Very little had been known then, because the Zone had just been established, and rumor was more plentiful than fact. Human laborers…prisoners of war…had built the city by day, vampires by night. In a year the Citadel—all black, gleaming, windowless towers and paradoxically Gothic ornamentation—was large enough to hold a population of ten thousand, and that was only on the surface. It was speculated that the underground portion of the city could house five thousand more. Today, the Citadel was twice as big, with its own farms and fields to support its human inhabitants.

Slaves, Alexia thought with that burning anger that never diminished. Blood-serfs. The prisoners, the castoffs from the human Enclaves. The damned.

Like Garret.

“Ms. Fox?”

She turned back to McAllister, who was leaning over his desk with an ominous frown on his lean brown face. His sudden formality wasn’t a good sign.

“You aren’t listening to me,” he said. “Are you sure you’re up to this?”

Alexia returned to stand before the desk, taking a formal stance that betrayed none of her emotions. “Yes, sir. More than up to it.”

“It’s only been a year since your brother was—”

“I haven’t forgotten, sir.”

He cleared his throat. “The Examiners say you may still harbor resentment against the Court for sentencing him to Deportation.”

Deportation. Such a nice way of putting it. “I know the Court weighed the evidence thoroughly, sir. It was a fair trial.”

The Director sighed and sank back into his chair. “Was it?”

Alexia knew it was another test, and one she had to pass. “The evidence was conclusive, sir.”

“Then you no longer believe it was self-defense?”

The same questions the shrinks had asked her, over and over again, ever since Garret had been sent to Erebus.

“Without the laws there would be chaos, and the Enclaves would die,” she said with perfect sincerity. “I blame the leeches, sir. Only them.”

“But do you blame them enough to lose your objectivity in an operation of such extreme delicacy? That is the question.”

“Have the Examiners suggested that’s the case, sir?”

McAllister smiled without pleasure. “If they had, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But the final decision rests with me. If I’m making a mistake—”

Alexia straightened, staring hard at the framed mission statement hung on the wall behind the Director’s chair. “You aren’t, sir. When do we go?”

McAllister made a show of shuffling a few folders on his desk and slid one of them across the desk. “Tomorrow. You and Michael will be the only team for the time being, and your mission will be to observe, and observe only.”

“Understood, sir.”

“Call Carter and study the report. There’ll be a briefing at 1100 hours.”

Before Alexia could salute, McAllister was back to his computer, typing away as if she had already left the room. She knew he preferred it that way. And so did she.

She returned to barracks and the small apartment that she, as a highly valuable Aegis asset, was permitted to occupy alone. Alexia unlaced her boots and allowed herself a small glass of the rare and expensive Riesling she had bought with the better part of last month’s pay. After a short breather she buzzed Michael, and they synced their computers to study the report.

“Looks easy,” her partner said when they had gone over it a second time. “In and out.”

Alexia glimpsed her reflection in the computer screen, briefly blotting out the image of Michael’s habitual smirk: straight auburn hair cut at an efficient and regulation chin length, tilted green eyes, slightly pointed chin. New recruits sometimes thought themselves clever by suggesting how much her appearance matched her surname.

But even a fox might not sneak out of this one. Not even a highly trained dhampir agent like her. If she’d thought Mike was taking this as lightly as his words suggested, she might have been genuinely worried.

She knew better. Her partner was one of the survivors, an agent who had made it through ten missions with only minor wounds and the same partner until Jill had been killed a year ago. Since then, he and Alexia had been on three assignments together, and they’d worked as a perfect team. She trusted him more than anyone else in Aegis, even the boss.

Michael had been deep into the Zone several times, while she’d never gone much beyond the Border. She would be relying on his greater experience, but she intended to pull her full weight. This was her chance to prove just how good she was.

She glanced at her watch. “Briefing in fifteen minutes. See you there.”

Michael gave her a mock salute. “Don’t even think about finishing that wine. I plan to drink at least half of it when we get back.”

“It’s a deal.” Alexia signed off, laced up her boots and sipped the last few drops of the wine in her glass, wondering who would be drinking the rest if she and Mike didn’t make it back.

Craving some fresh air, Alexia took the elevator to the lobby and walked out into the busy morning street. Twentysix years ago, on the day she was born, no one would have believed that San Francisco could ever return to what it had been in the years before the Awakening.

It hadn’t, of course. Not completely. But the rhythms of human life had resumed after the Treaty had permitted regular farming, manufacturing and inter-Enclave commerce. There were bankers and office workers, reporters and shopkeepers, cops and financiers all going about their business much the same way they had in the twentieth century.

But Alexia could never venture out among the general public without knowing what had changed. Because when her eyes met those of an ordinary human on the street, she saw the suspicion. Suspicion, or fear, or hostility—all the same emotions most humans felt for Nightsiders, only a little less severe because they knew she wasn’t one of the enemy.

The existence of dhampir agents couldn’t be kept from Nightsiders or Enclave citizens. But neither she nor any of her fellow Half-bloods could pass for human. Not with eyes like those of a cat and teeth a little too reminiscent of a wolf’s.

Or a Nightsider’s.

As Alexia paused at a fruit stand to examine a fresh orange, just shipped in from the Los Angeles Enclave, she heard a child’s voice on the other side of the stacked crates.

“Look, Mommy,” the little girl said. “Is that a bloodsucker?”

Alexia tried to smile at the mother, hoping to express her understanding for the child’s mistake. The woman looked mortified, but she couldn’t hide her distaste.

“You mustn’t say such things, Jenny,” she said, jerking at the little girl’s hand. “It isn’t polite, and anyway, she’s on our side.”

Our side, Alexia thought as she returned to headquarters. Yes, her loyalties could never be in question. It was her late human mother who had raised her, not her unknown and reviled Nightsider father.

But for the dhampires, there would never truly be an “our.”

The ferry slid quietly away into the fog, its wake swallowed up in the choppy waves stirred by a brisk late-summer wind off the Pacific. Unless an observer were standing nearly on top of Alexia and Michael at the old Larkspur Ferry Terminal, he or she would hardly know a boat had ever been at the dock.

But then again, Alexia thought, this was still technically part of the San Francisco Enclave, and there shouldn’t be any leeches here. Which didn’t mean a damned thing. They were standing almost at the border of the Zone, where the Redwood Highway crossed over Mission Avenue in the crumbling city of San Rafael. It was an arbitrary border, like so many of them, but it was quite real. Broad daylight, more than any mere treaty, was what protected them now.

The abandoned stronghold of the former San Quentin Correctional Facility stood within view across the inlet to the southeast, and beyond it the twisted halves of the Richmond Bridge, separated by a kilometer of empty water, reached out from each side of San Rafael Bay like hands desperate to touch one last time before an eternal parting.

Alexia tightened the straps of her pack and nodded to Michael, who was already scanning the disintegrating ferry buildings for any sign of movement. She watched him for a moment, grateful that she’d never felt the slightest romantic interest in him in spite of their close partnership. It would have made things very complicated, and fraternization was against Aegis policy in any case. But with his rugged good looks, heavily muscular build and sun-streaked blond hair, he had plenty of female admirers.

“All clear,” Mike said, oblivious to her inspection. He checked his weapons, traditional XM30 assault rifle and VS120 “Vampire Slayer” pistol and combat knife. The XM30 was powerful enough to slow a vampire down, even stop one for some time when used by an expert marksman, but the Vampire Slayer was the only weapon that could kill a leech. And it was to be used as a very last resort, because the damage it inflicted on a vampire, as well as any other creature unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end, couldn’t be mistaken for anything but what it was. It almost literally blew its target apart.

After checking her own weapons, Alexia instinctively touched the underside of her arm, tracing the raised shape through the heavy fabric of her uniform jacket and the shirt beneath. The patch was exactly where it should be, attached to her skin by a thin graft of synskin that held it in place and continuously fed the necessary drugs into her bloodstream. It was new, replaced only yesterday, and would remain effective for up to a month.

Without the drugs, she—like approximately forty percent of dhampir agents—would be unable to take nourishment from human food, and since Half-bloods never fed on blood, death was the inevitable result. At least she, unlike the other sixty percent, was immune to any risk of conversion by a vampire’s bite.

And that was a horror far worse than death. Michael noticed her gesture and touched her shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll have this over and done within a week.”

Alexia quickly dropped her hand. There were eleven hours of daylight left, but it was a good thirty miles northeast across the Zone. If the garbled reports were correct, the illegal colony was just west of the old city of Santa Rosa, on the other side of the Sonoma range and at least three miles from the eastern border of the territory claimed by Erebus.

And the closer they got to Erebus, the more likely they were to run into the Citadel’s own agents, both Nightsiders and the elusive Daysiders… . That is, if they managed to make it past the mutant creatures even the Nightsiders wouldn’t allow near their city.

Without exchanging another word, Alexia and Michael set off toward Highway 101.

Damon crouched at the crest of the hill, looking down into the valley below. From this elevation, the abandoned city was a maze of streets and decaying buildings, empty of human life. Rusting automobiles caught the sun’s light—brief, glaring beacons that appeared and vanished in a matter of seconds like the signals of an unknown code.

But he knew the emptiness was only an illusion. Somewhere, nestled at the foot of these hills, was a society that shouldn’t exist.

He smiled, though there was no one to see. It wasn’t as if the Council hadn’t known about the colony. They hadn’t shared that fact with their field agents, but those the humans called Daysiders, despised minority that they were, had their own secret channels of communication within Erebus. Certain powerful Bloodmasters had simply failed to acknowledge the “problem”…as long as the humans, other than the serfs in the colony itself, didn’t know about it. After all, it was to Erebus’s benefit if the Opiri gained a strong foothold in the Zone. One step here, another there, testing the waters, seeing just how far they could push.

But the colony wasn’t a secret any longer. Word had come that the Enclave knew something was up, and at this very moment Aegis operatives were on their way to investigate.

And that could mean war. A new war the Expansionists would be eager enough to encourage, if the humans would be cooperative enough to instigate it. Some believed the Expansionists had established the colony themselves for that very purpose.

Even if they hadn’t, Damon had no doubt that the conservatives were secretly giving the settlement their full support, perhaps even providing serfs for the colonists. Not so the ruling Independent. They still controlled the Council, and they had no intention of letting the fragile Armistice be destroyed.

But they faced a problem that wasn’t likely to be solved without significant conflict. Damon knew the establishment of the illegal colony had been motivated by a very simple instinct shared by both Opiri and humans: the need to survive.

For Opiri, survival meant not only blood but room to live as their very biology demanded. Erebus was beginning to outgrow itself. Opiri were not meant to dwell in close proximity to each other like humans or rabbits, squeezed into apartments stacked like blocks under a single roof. Though Bloodmasters and many Bloodlords were accorded their own towers to accommodate their many serfs and vassals, there was little room in the Citadel for upward mobility. And Freebloods needed blood as much as any other Opir.

Sooner or later, the pressure to increase their territory would incite certain Opiri to violence. The only thing to be done was to delay the inevitable until some new bargain could be reached with the human government…or the Expansionists found a way to break the power of the Enclaves forever.

Damon had no personal stake in the colony’s fate one way or another, and his opinions were of no consequence except where they related directly to his work. He belonged to no Bloodmaster. He served only the Council, and Erebus. Because that was his nature, and his destiny.

To be forever alone. Neither human nor Opir, too valuable to be discarded like the Lamiae, too different to ever fully integrate into Erebusian society. But vital to the Citadel nevertheless, and free in a way no vassal could ever be.

Squinting against the lowering sun, Damon started down the slope, his feet deftly finding their way among stones and tough, hardy shrubs scattered like spots over the hillside pelt of summer-gold grass. He would not be approaching the colony; his job was both more dangerous and much simpler.

He reached the foot of the hill and opened his senses. He smelled nothing but the sharp scent of spice bush and the musk of a fox, heard only the rustle of fleeing mice and the distant cry of a hawk. As long as he traveled by the sun, he was not likely to be detected by the Opir colonists, whose own powerful senses would be muted by their retreat into daytime shelter. As for the human serfs, they might as well be blind and deaf.

That left only the dhampires. It was not a matter of if they were coming, but when.

And he would be ready.