Night Quest

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 (#ulink_0d8b1a32-62e0-5411-a04a-fa44cc227331)

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.