Night Quest

“And my son could be caught in the middle of whatever’s about to happen.”

She turned to meet his gaze. “If the Freebloods have protected him so far, they will not let him be hurt. And if the humans should win...”

“We can’t stand by and let this—”

“We must. If we die, who can save Timon?”

Clenching his teeth, Garret tried to weigh the options objectively. Artemis was right. Whoever the humans were, they would want to help a human child, and in a fight, the rogues would keep Timon out of the way. He and Artemis would probably have a better chance of grabbing Timon when the battle was decided one way or the other.

“I know this is against your every instinct,” Artemis said. “I am sorry. I will go ahead, and see if—”

“No,” he said, pulling her down when she attempted to move. “Can we get any closer without the Nightsiders sensing us?”

“No. In fact we have to go back to be safe,” she said.

She retreated. Garret lingered a moment, listening, but his human senses were not acute enough to gather any additional information. Reluctantly, he followed Artemis to a point well within the shelter of the woods but close enough to the grassland that she could monitor what was happening there.

They waited as the long minutes went by, sitting a long arm’s reach apart from each other. Garret was constantly, painfully aware that Artemis was very near but not quite close enough to touch, and that he badly wanted to touch her. Even in the midst of so much uncertainty, those feelings refused to go away.

An hour passed in silence, and then another. Artemis’s head began to droop, and her breathing grew shallow. Garret moved closer to her. He noted a new transparency to her pale skin, a dullness in her hair and a deepening of the shadows under her cheekbones and closed eyes.

“Artemis,” he said, carefully touching her shoulder.

She jerked awake, her body snapping into a defensive posture far more slowly than it should have. She blinked, recognized him and clambered to her feet.

“What has happened?” she demanded.

“Nothing, as far as I can tell,” he said. “But you were falling asleep.”

“I wasn’t—” She broke off and strode away through the trees. Garret waited ten minutes and then got up to follow her.

He found her at the edge of the woods. “Nothing has changed,” she said as he crouched beside her.

“That’s right,” he said. “You still need what you need. We have to be ready to move quickly.”

“You will become weak if I take too much.”

“I trust you to take only as much as is safe for both of us.”

They stared at each other, and Garret could see her struggling with arguments he knew she didn’t want to make. Arguments that had nothing to do with her fear of his becoming weak. But she knew he was right, and she was the first to look away.

“Very well,” she said. “But we should use the other wrist.”

Garret hesitated, reexamining the decision he’d made. He couldn’t pretend that there wasn’t a risk in giving her much more intimate access to his blood.

But she would derive nourishment from his throat more efficiently than she would by taking blood from his wrist. And if he couldn’t trust her now, he might as well let those Opiri in the field kill him themselves.

He led her back to their camp, removed the blanket from his pack and laid it down at the foot of a tall pine. Then he removed his coat and unbuttoned his shirt. Her gaze flew to his hands, watching his progress with apparent fascination, and he found himself suddenly self-conscious. He could sense her need as if it were his own.

“What are you doing?” she asked in a slightly strained voice.

“Just what we agreed,” he said.

Removing his shirt, he folded it and laid it on the ground behind him. He rested his palms on his thighs and settled into the calm, detached state that had always served him well when he had worked with the human Underground in Erebus. He would need all that detachment to treat this feeding like any other.

He tilted his head back, took a deep breath. “I’m ready,” he said.

“You are...” Artemis stammered. “You expect me to...”

“It’s fast, and it’s practical,” he said, staring up into the green boughs overhead. “The sooner we’re finished, the sooner we’ll both be ready to take whatever action is necessary.”

“How many times have you done this?” she asked.

“Often enough to know what I’m doing.”

He waited, holding himself ready, until he felt the heat of her body close to his, her breath sighing over his skin, her lips brushing his throat.

“Are you certain?” she asked softly.

“Look at me, Artemis.”

Whatever she saw in his eyes apparently frightened her, and she almost bolted. But he grabbed her hand, and she settled down again, panting and trembling. Her teeth penetrated his flesh. She moaned as his blood began to flow, and he felt desire take hold exactly as he had prayed it wouldn’t. He reached out to clasp his hands around her waist. He found the hem of her tunic and slipped his fingers beneath, sliding his palms over the skin below her ribs.

Then he paused, because she hadn’t asked for his touch, because he knew that she was not Roxana. But Artemis gripped his wrist and held his hand where it was.

She was too far gone to stop. And so was he.

* * *

The moment Artemis tasted his blood, she knew it was too late.

She felt his warm breath stirring her hair, heard the rapid drumming of his heart, smelled the surge of his lust and only drank the more deeply, caught up in an ecstasy more overwhelming than any she had known before.

Even the last time he had given his blood, it hadn’t been like this. She’d underestimated the impact of taking it directly from his throat. An intimate act, she’d thought when she’d first met him, one he surely wouldn’t share with her.

And yet here she was, and her body and mind were opening to Garret, abandoning all caution, renewing the intense emotional connection she had wanted so badly to extinguish. She had forgotten what it could be like, how quickly one could lose control with the right partner. And she had never taken blood during what humans called “making love.”

But now, when Garret touched her bare skin, she felt his excitement as well as her own. She was being carried away by a current she couldn’t stop, delirious with feelings and sensations that superseded mere arousal or the sensual stimulation that so often accompanied feeding.

She wanted him. She wanted to possess him, to be possessed by him, to join in complete physical union. What happened afterward...

No. The unraveling thread of her sanity begged her to remember what she could lose, what she could do to Garret. Once she stepped onto this path, she might never find her way back again. A single reckless act might finally shatter any hope she had of closing the gate against Garret Fox.

But sanity had no hope when Garret’s fingertips discovered her nipples and teased them into firm, sensitive peaks. His blood soothed her tongue. Erotic images shaped in Garret’s mind slipped into hers as his fingers slid down her belly and to the waistband of her pants. He unfastened the fly and dipped inside. Callous skin touched tender flesh. She shifted her body, urging him to explore as she continued to drink.

Garret stroked her with one hand while his other worked at the buttons of her shirt. Cool air washed over her breasts, and she straightened as his emotions told her what he wanted to do. Acting entirely on instinct, she sealed the bite and leaned back, giving him complete access to her breasts.

When he took her nipple into his mouth, she moaned at the incredible sensation of his reaction as well as her own, desire doubled and redoubled as he suckled her hungrily. His other hand found its way between her thighs and grazed the tight little bud where pleasure was almost like pain. She gasped, and he gasped with her.

Somehow her pants came off and she was straddling his thighs, rubbing against the taut bulge of his erection. She felt herself floating, guided to the ground by strong arms, lying on her back with her thighs parted.

The touch of his lips and tongue in her most sensitive place drew a muffled cry from her throat, quieted only by some distant sense of self-preservation. She seemed to recall something like this happening long ago, but the past was as unreal as the future. Garret knew exactly where and how to use his tongue to tickle and tease, drawing out each caress with rapid flicks and long strokes.

She arched her back, begging him with her entire body. He turned his attention to her breasts and continued his ministrations while she felt for the waistband of his pants.

“Garret,” she whispered, filling her mind with the emotional images of taking and being taken. His aura erupted around him, emitting tongues of flame that strained toward her. Her own aura flared for the first time, a blue-tinged amethyst radiance that opened to accept the thrust of his fire as her body was ready to accept his.

Garret was more than ready. Her hand found him, large and very hard. The intensity of his need—hers—multiplied a thousandfold.

For a moment there was nothing between them. Nothing at all—no boundaries, no barriers, no walls. He eased himself over her, gazing down at her with his weight braced on his hands and his hips between her thighs.

Again she saw herself through his eyes, less a distinctive shape than an aura enclosing the interwoven strands of her emotions. But the image began to take form, and she glimpsed her face: eyes closed, lips parted, hair wild and tangled about her shoulders.

And beautiful. Beautiful in a way she could never have imagined. It was the face she’d seen in mirrors before her exile and sometimes in the imperfect reflection of water, but bathed in a gentle light that softened the blue of her aura to a silky violet. Violet water, smooth and untroubled.

Garret caught her lips with his, exploring the terrain of her mouth, coaxing her to open for him. With a low moan of surrender, she parted her lips, and his tongue found its way inside. He curled it around hers, sucked, kissed her more deeply than she would have believed possible.

Violet transformed to deep, hot purple. She pushed her fingers into his hair and bit lightly into his lower lip, drawing blood. He adjusted his position so that a single thrust would make them one at last.

Something remarkable happened then. Feelings she barely recognized bloomed in her mind, so astonishing that, at first, she didn’t know how to name them.

But not all the memories were dead. There were no times, no places...only the joy and happiness and exhilaration of the single thing she had sought and found and lost before the change. The thing she wanted again, here within her grasp.

Everything else vanished. There was no more need to struggle, to aspire to anything greater than this. Her emotions swelled to obliterate all other desires. She would float in this perfect world forever, in endless bliss and exultation.

She had found what the humans called heaven.

But there was a bubble of disturbance in the flawless pool of eternal rapture, a devil in this paradise. It picked and prodded at her, mocking her with warnings she could not quite shut out.

There is no heaven for Opiri.

“Artemis,” Garret said. His voice was hoarse and urgent, his mind spinning on the edge of euphoria. She knew that all she had to do was speak a single word, and every other voice would be silenced.

So would her dreams and hopes for her people. She would no longer care about them, because she had what she wanted, all she would ever want.

Forget them, she thought. You owe them nothing.

But her past would not be silent. They are your people, it said. How can you abandon them for a human?

“No,” she whispered.

All we fought for destroyed, because of you. Because of him.

Garret’s face came into sharp focus, blazing with elation. He could destroy nothing, but he could give her—

“Roxana?” he murmured.

She saw her own face again...saw it change, felt Garret’s bewilderment and her own turmoil as that other face slipped over hers like a mask. Eyes too dark, hair too long, features too...

“No,” Garret said hoarsely. The stranger vanished, but the sheer weight of his emotions—regret, grief, confusion—bore down on her with such force that she thought they would crush her. Illusion shattered. Shock worked as no careful discipline could have done.

She pushed him out—out of her heart, her mind, her very being—and slammed the wall down between them, severing all emotional ties, all the feelings that had tempted her into relinquishing the new way she had sought to win for her own kind.

The feelings that had nearly made her surrender to a human who saw another face even as he prepared to possess her.

Chapter 7

Artemis scrambled to her feet, snatching up her pants as she bolted away from him. Garret’s face was drained of color, and though she could no longer sense his emotions, she saw the stark pain in his eyes.

For her, or for himself?

Roxana.

Somehow Artemis dressed, gathered her weapons and fled without looking at him again. She ran recklessly toward the border of the woods, as if by simply putting physical distance between herself and Garret she might undo the past hour and forget.

But she knew it was not possible to regain that safe sense of living in a fortress that could never be breached. There was no undoing this. The gate had closed, but she knew that she could never take Garret’s blood again. It wasn’t simply a matter of becoming dependent. Death would be preferable to losing herself, losing all she believed had made her what she was.

Garret had asked her if she remembered what love was. She hadn’t been honest then. She remembered the physical and emotional closeness that accompanied complete faith in another: a lover, life partner, the one she could not live without. Garret had made her experience some of those feelings again. His blood, his touch, had engulfed her in passions she had left behind for a greater, nobler purpose.

But there was no reality behind those passions, no foundation. Garret’s invocation of that other name was proof enough of that.

Had that other woman been so different from her, though? Ivory hair, eyes the color of rich, purple wine—the distinctive traits of any Opir save for the newest converts.

Artemis filled her lungs with pine-scented air, and then expelled her agitation along with her breath. The only purpose in analyzing her emotions was to rid herself of them. If she could not be an impartial, dispassionate teacher, she could not help her own people break the chains of savagery that bound them to lives of degradation and self-destruction.

She slowed as she approached the field, focusing her attention on her surroundings. There was no sound, no movement in the sea of grass, but she knew the Freebloods and humans were still there.

Stretching out on her belly, Artemis rested her cheek against the cool earth. This was a test. If she truly considered the fate of her kind more important than anything else, she could leave this place and let Garret find his own way to his son, facing the dangers of capture and death alone.

But she could no more leave him than she could erase her empathic “gift.” The test did not ask her to choose which commitment was more important. It asked for proof that she could remain by Garret’s side and not lose herself again. If she succeeded, then she might be capable and worthy of carrying out her mentor Kronos’s great dream. The one he had died for.

She was preparing to return to Garret when a flock of birds exploded from the tall grass, followed by the report of many guns firing in unison. She froze as cries of pain and terror and rage rent the night, and the thump of flesh meeting flesh accompanied the rising scent of blood.

“Timon!”

Garret staggered up behind her, his pack dangling from his shoulder by one strap. His face was pale, his breathing shallow. Artemis trapped her concern in a cage of logic, grateful that she could not feel what he felt, trying not to imagine what he had thought when she left him without explanation.

“I am certain that Timon is well,” she said calmly. “You have lost a great deal of blood, and you have been running. You must rest.”

He looked at her as if she had lost her sanity, let the pack drop to the ground and knelt beside it. He fumbled inside with shaking hands, withdrawing a handgun.

“You cannot go out there,” Artemis said. “Certainly not with that.”

There was another scream, but Garret never so much as glanced up. He set the gun aside and withdrew several components of a weapon Artemis didn’t remember ever having seen before. He pushed the pieces together, pausing several times when his clumsy fingers lost their grip. When he was finished and raised the weapon to check his work, she knew what it was: the only projectile weapon the humans had produced that could kill an Opir with a single shot to almost any spot on the body.

“No,” she said. “You will be killed before you can ever use that thing.”

“There’s no other choice.” He met her gaze as he got to his feet. “Don’t try to stop me.”

“I said the same thing to you once,” she reminded him. “I believe I managed to make it ten feet before I collapsed.”

Jaw set, Garret stepped out into the darkness. He had gone perhaps three yards when one of his legs gave out from under him and he fell to his knee. Another spatter of gunshots blotted out whatever sound he might have made, and then a deep hush fell, even more absolute than the silence that had come before.

Garret clambered to his feet, swinging the rifle back into position. Artemis joined him. She sniffed the air, and it was as if she could see what had happened as surely as if she had been in the middle of it.

“Let me go ahead,” she said. “If there are any survivors, I can move more quickly to do whatever must be done.”

“Together,” he said grimly.

Artemis knew that trying to stop him would be pointless. He was already moving again, ready to shoot at anything with pale skin and sharp incisors. All she could do was hope that she was right about his son.

* * *

Before them lay a scene of utter carnage. Bodies were scattered across the field, mostly Opiri, seven or eight of them lying in pools of dark red. There were several humans, dressed in the mottled clothing of militiamen. Their annihilation had left abstract, scarlet patterns on the grass and shrubs around them, attesting to the violence of their deaths.

Timon was not with them.

He squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for his heart to resume its normal speed. After a few moments he opened his eyes again and examined the battlefield. He’d seen such violence before, but somehow this seemed worse, as if he might have prevented the killing with a few well-chosen words in the same way he’d once rallied and encouraged members of the human Underground in Erebus.

He glanced at Artemis. Her face was expressionless. She, too, must regret the killings, but he had no way of knowing what else she thought.

And she wasn’t going to tell him. Now he knew that she had been correct to hesitate before taking his blood again. If it had only been a matter of physical attraction, he might have been able to hold himself aloof. He had deceived himself into thinking he could donate without being affected by her the way he’d been the first time—wanting her, wanting to be inside her, to claim her for his own in a way he had no right to do.

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