Jocelynn Drake - Dayhunter

“Ryan!” I shouted, my voice shaking. Hugo was stirring, a new moaning rumbling through his brain. Danaus was denying him his only chance at survival. Fear had gripped the nightwalker, and I didn’t want him to try to move, reopening wounds that had begun to heal.

“I’ve got it.” The warlock’s voice was remarkably calm despite the insanity reigning around us. With a wave of his hand, the two humans grew instantly silent. A dull, unfocused stare returned to their faces. They were no longer aware of where they were or what was going on. I had thought Ryan would know such a trick. We all had to learn to hide in the open and control the minds of others if we were going to survive in a world that demanded we keep such a big secret.

With a growl, I finally turned my attention to Danaus, who was putting his sword back to the scabbard on his back. “What the hell were you thinking? She was only trying to save Hugo. How could you kill her, you heartless bastard?” My voice was choked and broken, struggling to push past the lump in my throat.

“She was going to let him kill both the humans,” Danaus said. “You know she was. She was going to sacrifice two humans in hopes of saving him.” I looked up again to find him staring down at me, his blue eyes narrowed on my face. “I won’t let you kill humans to save yourself.”

“Yes she was! But did you ask me what I was planning? Did you ever wonder if I would allow such a thing to happen?” I had to close my eyes to keep the tears from falling. I felt so betrayed. Not until that moment did I realize how much I’d come to depend on Danaus. I had wrongly thought that he’d started to trust me, that he believed in me to do the right thing.

But even the idea of the right thing had begun to blur. Was sacrificing two humans such a bad thing when it came to trying to save the entire human race from the naturi? Keeping Hugo alive would give us one more fighter against the naturi. As it stood now, Penelope was dead and it was highly unlikely that Hugo would last the rest of the night. Any other nightwalker wouldn’t have thought twice about draining those two humans dry, but I’d hesitated. No longer sure.

“I don’t kill humans when feeding,” I said in a voice that sounded broken and beaten. “And I won’t allow those around me to do it either. I thought you knew that. You didn’t think and you’ve damned us all.” Shaking my head, I looked up at Ryan, who was standing next to the humans. “You and Danaus take the humans. Wipe their memories and send them home. Leave me the car. I’ll take care of Hugo.”

“But—”

“Just go,” I interrupted Ryan before he could argue further. “I’ll clean up here.”

I sat still on the ground next to Hugo, my hand still pressed to his stomach as if it was my only anchor to sanity in this world. For the first time since becoming a nightwalker, I could feel the night pull in around me and a deep emptiness filled my chest. Even when I was being held captive by the naturi, I didn’t give up hope that Sadira or another nightwalker would come to my rescue. But with one nightwalker dead by the hand of a man I had come to rely on, and another dying in my arms, I couldn’t find any hope to cling to. The naturi would crush us all.

Isat with my back pressed against the stone wall of the mausoleum I hid in during the daylight hours. Exhaustion had settled deep within my bones, making it hard to even move, let alone crawl into the crypt so I could hide from the approaching dawn. Too much had happened in the past few hours, which left me struggling to find some good to cling to in the end.

When I moved Hugo to the car, I discovered that he had also been stabbed in the back, puncturing his heart, which explained why he was so weak. Stopping at the edge of Heraklion, I summoned a dozen inhabitants from their warm, comfortable beds. Hugo fed briefly from each of them before I sent them blindly back to bed again. The drain on my powers was enormous, forcing me to feed as well before I could deposit a sleeping Hugo in a dark crypt in a cemetery between Heraklion and Knossos. When I dropped him off, only the worst of his wounds was slowly seeping blood. I hoped he would last the day.

After leaving him, I returned to the palace ruins, where I burned the bodies of the naturi and Penelope. Guilt gnawed at me for burning her with the naturi, but I no longer had the strength to maintain several fires, and I didn’t want to take any chances being so close to the swell of energy rising up from the earth. I’d been burned once; I couldn’t afford for it to happen again. What bones I couldn’t destroy were buried in a shallow grave. It was the best I could do. Daylight was approaching.

With all evidence of our existence eliminated from Knossos, I cleaned the blood and fingerprints off the car and left it in the heart of Heraklion. I checked on Hugo one final time before finding my own crypt, not far from his.

Now as I sat in the dark, my mind numb, I felt someone approaching me. I pulled the Browning from the holster at the base of my spine and laid it on the ground beside me, partially hidden in the shadows cast by my body. A quick scan revealed that my visitor was Danaus, but I was surprised when I found that I didn’t want to put the gun away. I didn’t trust him any longer. If push came to shove, I knew I wouldn’t try to kill him with a gun. I’d just try to slow him down enough so I could rip his heart out with my bare hands.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I murmured wearily when the hunter finally came into view. He was still several yards off, but his hearing was nearly as good as mine. He heard me.

“I came to talk,” he said in a low voice, as if he was afraid of waking some other graveyard occupant.

I snorted, but still loosened my grip on the gun at my side. My fingers didn’t completely uncurl from around the butt, but stayed close just in case. “I can’t image we have much to talk about. Everything has been cleanly laid out.”

Danaus walked around the last tree separating us in the cross-dotted garden, coming into full view. From what I could see, he was completely unarmed. Both his guns were missing, along with the sword on his back and the two knives usually attached to his leg and waist. Even his leather wrist guards were missing. He stood before me as vulnerable as it was possible for him to be. Could he still kill me in a heartbeat? Without a doubt. He could boil my blood as quickly as I could set him on fire, but he was trying to come before me without weapons.

“I—I came to apologize,” he admitted.

I sat in stunned silence for a moment before finally shaking my head to clear it. “I’m not the one you should be apologizing to. You should be apologizing to Penelope for taking her head off. You should be apologizing to Hugo for stealing away his one chance at survival,” I bitterly snapped.

“I’m apologizing to you because I should have trusted you,” he corrected, standing before me with his legs spread wide, his hands shoved in his pockets. I gazed up, my frown matching his. “I know you. You wouldn’t have let Hugo kill those two people. But Penelope would have. Hugo would have. They wouldn’t have thought twice about it, and I can’t forgive them for that.”

“You can’t forgive them for wanting to survive?” I demanded, my hand reflexively tightening around the gun as my other hand balled into a fist in the dirt.

“I can’t forgive them for killing innocent people,” he said. What sympathy and compassion he may have felt drained from his voice, leaving it cold and hard like Siberian permafrost.

“But you have no problem with him dying for these people that you protect,” I said, gritting my teeth as I sat up. “We’re allowed to fight for them and die for them, but we’re not allowed to do anything that might save our own lives.”