Darklight 2: Darkthirst Read online

  Sike’s eyes swung toward Louise first. Surprise flickered over his face, but then his gaze fell toward Dorian. Bryce, Laini, Bravi, and Gina had been gathered near the entrance but ran over to our tangled forms. Gina wore a comically oversized parka we’d found in the abandoned resort. I felt a pang of jealousy. The cold had bitten into my body throughout the flight, leaving me numb.

  “Sweet Mary,” Bryce said as he spotted the three extra humans.

  Roxy and Colin shot him guilty looks. Louise’s eyes focused on Bryce for a second before flicking away. Still, there was a trace of remorse on her face.

  “What happened?” Bravi asked, dropping to her knees beside Dorian, her green eyes worried.

  Limbs stiff from cold and tension, I finally released Dorian’s form. Gina and Bryce ran to help me to my feet as Bravi and Sike gently lowered Dorian to lie flat on the ground. Dorian’s redbill gave a panicked chirp and snapped his beak in the air. He trained a beady eye on our little group.

  Dorian’s condition had deteriorated. His lips opened and closed, mumbling a mysterious repetition of phrases I couldn’t make out. He’s in so much pain, and I can’t even help. The flight from Phoenix was short thanks to the redbills, but he’d grown worse. Would the vampires know what to do? Gina pressed her shoulder against me. I hadn’t realized I was slumping against her.

  “You’re exhausted,” she said with concern. “Let’s get them all into the warmth.”

  She supported me as I stumbled farther into the caves with her. Bravi and Bryce carefully picked up Dorian between them, draping one of his arms over each of their shoulders. Colin and Roxy followed of their own accord, and Sike hovered somewhat awkwardly at Louise’s side.

  Gina directed me to sit on a nearby chair, and I was helpless to argue. While I wanted to stay with Dorian, I doubted I would be much use right now. Without pause, she edged her way over to Roxy, Colin, and Louise.

  “I need to look at injuries,” she said tightly. Even when she was angry, Gina was a soldier and professional first and foremost.

  Colin winced when Gina touched his arm. Zach limped over to them with our box of medical supplies.

  Bravi and Bryce brought Dorian in, and he grunted feverishly as he looked around. He reminded me of a wild animal in an unknown environment. Was this really Dorian? It was a far cry from his typical composure and the immense strength he usually wielded. I held back frustrated tears at my powerlessness. The other vampires gathered from side tunnels and caves, attracted by the sounds, watching the horror unfold.

  Dorian snarled, but Bravi refused to back away, surveying him with a worried glance. Sike shot me a desperate look. Laini covered her mouth with her hand, her face filled with distress.

  “What happened to him?” Bravi asked, voice sharp.

  “They had strange guns,” I blurted. “I’ve never seen Bureau soldiers carrying anything like them before. That’s what they shot him with.”

  As if in response to the word, Louise absentmindedly lifted her gun. Sike stared at her, horror on his face at her blank expression.

  What had the Bureau done to her? She was out of it. We would need to figure out whether she would be okay, but Dorian’s snarling frame was the sole thing I could focus on at the moment.

  I shook my head fiercely. “No, they were different. Their guns had a stripe on the side and shot green lasers,” I explained. “What was strange was that they had zero effect on humans.”

  Roxy nodded. “The lasers struck both Lyra and me but didn’t do a thing to us. It barely even tingled. As soon as they hit Dorian, though… he went down like a rock after six or seven.”

  “What could do that to a vampire?” Gina asked, fearfully watching the frantic rise and fall of Dorian’s ribcage.

  Laini’s concerned gaze surveyed Dorian. “I don’t know how the Bureau would manage to create such a thing, but this looks like an overdose of dark energy, potentially. Too little or too much isn’t good for a vampire.”

  Bryce and Bravi began to lay Dorian on a tattered mattress near the group, but he resisted, clouded eyes wild. He’d lost all control.

  What was he seeing? Did he recognize his family… or me?

  “Get a hold of yourself!” Bravi snapped, but Dorian lunged at her, his hands outstretched to strike her. She twisted away and fell back against the wall with a sharp gasp. Bryce dropped Dorian’s other arm and took several hurried steps back, leaving the vampire to sway unsteadily on his own two feet. Laini stepped between Bravi and Dorian, and I saw her hand clench until the knuckles were bleached white with worry.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Sike said, his face tense.

  Never? Even the vampires had no idea what was happening to Dorian. Fear sat cold in my gut.

  Rhome surged through the group with wide eyes, but before he could ask what had happened, Dorian growled wildly, fangs gnashing together. He lurched forward and collapsed back as if the pain constricted him. An indecipherable sound escaped his gritted teeth.

  “You said he was shot?” Laini asked, not taking her eyes off Dorian. “I don’t see a wound.”

  “It looked like a laser of some kind,” I said. “There weren’t any bullets.”

  “He doesn’t seem to recognize anyone,” Rhome said, his voice choked.

  Sike stepped protectively in front of Louise as Dorian let out an agonized howl.

  “Not with eyes like that,” Bryce said.

  “Is there anything we can do?” I asked. “We need to restrain him. We can’t do anything while he’s flailing around and snapping at people.”

  Dorian slashed the air in front of him as if fighting off some evil that wasn’t there. I couldn’t watch while everyone just stood around. Fine. I got to my feet and prepared to take him down with a tackle, but Rhome threw out his arm to stop me.

  “I don’t recommend you do that,” he said, his tone respectful but firm. He looked pointedly at my arms, where fresh scars remained from my last attempt to hold Dorian down when he was in a wild state.

  I imagined he wasn’t taking many more chances these days when Dorian was the only family he had left on this plane. Unable to look at Rhome’s stern face, I averted my gaze.

  Across the room, Gina wrapped a bandage around Colin’s arm. Grayson winced as Zach pressed a wet cloth against his face. A bucket rested by my brother. Ice. They had harvested some compacted snow from up on the peaks. Great. I could help them with Roxy’s team after the Dorian situation.

  “Hold him down,” Bryce said in a grim voice. “I’ve got a hunch about what might have hit him.”

  He did? I stared at Bryce, shocked. If the vampires didn’t know what was wrong with Dorian, how would he?

  “You’re kidding. You know what did this?” Bravi asked in disbelief. She casually dodged a swinging punch from Dorian. Her tough composure was back.

  Bryce nodded gravely. “Can we restrain him?”

  Tense glances passed between the gathered vampires. The twins Myndra and Sabal looked uncomfortable. Jeth and the vampire mother ushered the children away. Oleah rocked nervously from foot to foot. Gavril left the cavern, huge shoulders hunched. The usual sly smile of the sleazy vampire I’d heard referred to as Vonn was missing. They were hesitant. It seemed no one wanted to restrain their leader… or maybe they were afraid of his strength even in his weakened state.

  “We can. Everyone on a limb,” Rhome said.

  Laini, Bravi, Sike, and Rhome surrounded Dorian. He blinked and shook his head, growling quietly to himself as they closed around him in a ring. With a speed that I still found startling, the four vampires threw themselves onto him. Dorian lashed out. For a frightful second, he broke free of the grip Bravi and Laini had on his arms. Rhome cursed and tried to pull Dorian’s left leg up to set him off balance. Dorian bared his fangs and kicked out. The blow caught Sike under the chin, his teeth clicking together as his jaw snapped closed. Swiping out with a hand, Dorian narrowly missed Bravi’s neck.

  In a blur, Arlonne leapt at him
, her one hand fitting around his throat as she slammed her whole bodyweight into Dorian. They crashed to the ground. Snatching the opportunity, Bravi and Laini renewed their grip on his arms and Rhome succeeded in pinning one of Dorian’s legs, the four of them holding their leader down.

  Even then, he fought. His muscles strained against their collective force. Foam flecked the sides of his mouth. I felt tears begin to rise as a series of choked, broken howls and snarls poured from his throat. Arlonne knelt on his chest, the tendons in her arm standing out as she held onto his neck. Finally, he collapsed against the ground, slowly going still and quiet.

  “Is he okay?” I asked, suddenly afraid. Had it been too much for him?

  “He’s fine,” Rhome assured me.

  Arlonne carefully released her grip and took her weight off his torso. Without a word, she disappeared back beyond the shaken onlookers.

  “It’s times like these that make me glad we aren’t usually the ones fighting Dorian,” Sike said as he forced Dorian’s leg to the ground. Blood welled from his split lip.

  Bravi snorted, pressing her knee and hands into Dorian’s arm, pinning him to the stone floor.

  The moment felt surreal. Four vampires restraining their leader at the command of a Bureau captain. Had someone just walked in, they would have assumed they were hallucinating.

  All eyes were on Bryce. Captain has some explaining to do, and I don’t think I’m going to like it…

  Bryce took a ragged breath and spoke. “Five years ago, back when your lot had just disappeared, and we weren’t sure if you were coming back or not, I did a brief stint on a vampire defense tech team. It had good pay and seemed interesting enough. The researchers told me they’d been throwing around the idea of a weapon they hoped could immobilize or even kill vampires using what they called a dark frequency. As they explained it to me, it was a particularly high frequency they suspected would cause… extreme discomfort in vampires.” He looked down at Dorian twitching on the ground. “I didn’t understand it fully, but from what I saw there and what I see here, they seem to have found a frequency that mimics that of the energy you feed on. Looking at it now, I guess the idea was that it would work by overwhelming the vampires with dark energy.”

  Dorian growled and tried to lurch upward. His fangs edged dangerously close to Laini. Rhome used his other hand to press down on Dorian’s throat, effectively silencing him.

  “But back then it was just in the planning stages,” Bryce said, scratching at his chin in thought. “I thought the weapon was a long-term goal. Something that would take a long time to figure out if they even managed to.” His mouth twitched worriedly. “And why would they continue to develop it if they thought vampires were gone?”

  His confidence used to make being in the field both a joy and a terror, especially when his evaluation eventually came. Distraught Bryce was new. I didn’t like it.

  “Dark energy.” Sike glanced at Bravi. “Well, we know how to get rid of that.”

  My eyes widened in shock. Of course. Vampires siphoned away dark energy by feasting on it. It was how Kreya had fed Carwin and Detra while the vampires were in the Arizona training facility. I remembered how it had drained her.

  “How can you make sure you won’t take too much?” I asked, voice shaking. It would be too cruel for Dorian to die like that.

  “It’s the only way,” Rhome said grimly and leaned down toward Dorian. “Look, this will hurt us more than it hurts you.”

  “Hopefully, it’ll help him, if Bryce is right,” Laini said with a note of reluctance.

  I tried not to look away as their fangs extended, anxiety gripping my throat. How had it come to this?

  Bravi went first, her motions almost tender as she sank her fangs into the side of Dorian’s throat. She was there for mere seconds before she jerked back up, nearly spitting out a mouthful of oily-looking liquid. “That’s more dark energy than I’ve ever sensed in a body! He should be dead.”

  “Then let’s work fast,” Rhome said tersely. He hated doing this.

  They took turns feeding on Dorian. After a few minutes, Bryce came to stand beside me and uncertainly rested a hand on my shoulder. I stared at the spectacle before us, unwilling or unable to look away. The rest of the vampires stayed too, their discomfort almost palpable in the air.

  The movements of the feeding vampires were reluctant but steady. After a few minutes, Dorian stopped struggling so much. The panic faded from his face. The shadows began to thin, and slivers of his usual pale complexion began to appear on his head and neck.

  But it still wasn’t enough. Sike leaned down and began to feed with a grimace, his shaggy, sand-colored hair hiding the disgust in his eyes as he leant forward.

  “It doesn’t feel good feeding on anyone… especially your own,” Laini explained softly when she saw us staring at Sike. “And the darkness inside of him is… unnatural. I can’t find another word for it.”

  The shadows began to fade even more from Dorian’s body. His eyes cleared on the third round.

  Don’t lean forward like the world’s weirdest spectator. He’s getting better. I forced myself to remain calm among the other vampires around us, watching. All the vampires had recently fed. Could they overfeed? Bravi seemed to be growing tired. Sike’s usually pale skin was beginning to darken with shadow.

  “There,” Rhome said as Dorian finally calmed, his limbs going slack.

  I let out a sigh of relief. Rhome slowly released his grip on Dorian, who didn’t fight back. He muttered something, as if half-asleep, and relaxed even further. Taking that as a good sign, the other three released their holds. The entire room seemed to breathe out and relax—united in relief, if only for a moment.

  “Can I do anything?” I whispered to Bravi.

  She shook her head sadly. Her skin was grayer than I’d ever seen it. “He just needs to rest. We all do.”

  Rhome bent to examine Dorian up close. He and Laini exchanged a worried glance.

  “He needs space and quiet,” Laini announced.

  Nobody argued.

  A tense quiet replaced the relief. Bravi helped Rhome move Dorian to a nearby chamber, the entrance covered by a blanket. A mattress sagged, springs creaking.

  Pulling the tattered comm out of my ear and taking the broken pieces of casing out of my pocket, I tucked it back into the gear bag where we were storing all our supplies. Fixing that was a problem for another time. Right now, I needed information about the gun. I needed to help my team. I needed there to be more than twenty-four hours in this day.

  Rhome came back through the doorway and flipped the blanket that served as a door closed behind him. “The weapon,” he said. “How were humans able to harness that power?”

  “It was never explained to me,” Bryce said, the frustration that he couldn’t offer more information evident in his voice. “And I’ll be honest, I never thought about it much. It didn’t make a lot of sense or sound very feasible to me. I wasn’t an advisor to the defense department for long. I’ve always been better in the field, training recruits and running missions.”

  “You didn’t think it would work at all?” I asked him, surprised to find my voice had more strength in it. Worry mode is gone. Let’s figure this stuff out. I needed answers and actions.

  He shook his head. “I thought it was a pipe-dream project. I wasn’t sure they could ever pull it off. The high-frequency science seemed too far-fetched to me, especially since I didn’t know about the dark energy thing. I barely saw any tests done on subjects, and those subjects had already been tortured…” The look he gave Rhome was apologetic. “Besides, vampires had just stopped showing up, and they were supposed to have gone extinct, according to our intel. It didn’t make sense for the Bureau to continue to pour resources into developing such a thing. Unless it was a ‘just in case’ scenario, or they developed it before vampires were truly ‘confirmed’ as extinct.”

  Rhome let out a doubtful grunt.

  “Yes, highly unlikely for such a
complex weapon,” Bryce said. “If they hadn’t figured it out five years ago, they might well have been working on it all this time.”

  “Director Sloane said something to me about how I’d undone years of planning by blowing the whistle on the gas chambers for the vampires,” I said, speaking slowly as the thoughts came together. “So, I’d say it’s not outside the realm of possibility for them to have been working on this weapon for all of that time too.”

  “If they knew they had a secret weapon against vampires,” Gina said grimly, “that might have been why they felt they could put the genocide plan into action.”

  “I wonder…” I felt the weight of everyone’s stare. “Do you think that’s why they were okay with me traveling to HQ, even if they suspected I might bring Dorian?”

  “Hard to say,” Bryce said. “I used to think I knew the Bureau, but after all this… who knows what else they were hiding?” He didn’t need to say anything more.

  Laini crossed her arms as if protecting herself from such an ominous statement. “They did that to Dorian with only a few shots?”

  The memory of the lasers striking Dorian entered my mind. The beams sinking into him over and over again. I shuddered, feeling an echo of the fear I’d felt seeing him fall.

  “The Bureau might be too dangerous for us to even negotiate with,” Rhome muttered. A dark shadow crossed his face. Was he thinking of Kreya? Thinking she was right about chancing it in the Immortal Plane?

  “We’re strong,” Sike said gravely. “But we’re not invincible.”

  Bravi came through the doorway. “He’s resting well enough. Not fighting us anymore, at least.” Her tone was casual, but anxiety flashed across her face.

  Bravi being worried wasn’t a good sign.

  “What do you think the source of dark energy could be?” she asked with a pointed look at Bryce. “I’ve never tasted anything like that. That’s pure evil inside him.” She made a face like she wanted to spit the aftertaste from her mouth.

  “Last I understood, the Bureau didn’t even know what dark energy was,” Bryce said bitterly. “And now they’ve somehow harnessed it?”