Night Quest

“You hate us, just like the militiamen do,” she said, covering her confusion with anger.

“Us is a very big word,” he said. “I don’t hate you.”

He was right, she realized. She couldn’t sense any personal hostility from him. To the contrary, he was intrigued by her, genuinely interested in knowing more about her life. She was afraid to look any further.

“I am still a Freeblood,” she said.

“But you’re no rogue,” he said, setting the knife down on a flat rock beside him.

She was almost tempted to let him go on thinking that she was superior to her own people. Different, as he claimed. She found that she wanted his good opinion.

But if she let herself believe that she was better than the rest, she would betray her own principles. Freebloods only needed to be shown, guided, by one who had seen a little way beyond the bars of the prison they so blindly accepted as the limit of their lives.

Guided not by emotion, but by rationality. She didn’t need her unwanted empathic ability to tell her that Garret was controlling feelings that might have paralyzed him if he set them free. In that, they were frighteningly alike.

“Where do you come from?” she asked. “From all you have said, it cannot be anything like the local compounds.”

“I live alone.”

“Without the protection of your own kind?” she asked. “Is that how you lost your son?”

Her cruel question had been meant to provoke an unguarded response—any response that would help her understand him—but all it did was open her mind to the ache of his sadness.

“It is my fault,” Garret said quietly.

The red aura flared around him again, and Artemis covered her face. It made no difference. She wasn’t seeing it with her eyes but with her heart. And now all she could feel was his pain, his sorrow, his terrible sense of loss.

She had known loss, too. But nothing like this. Not since she had been human herself.

“I am sorry,” she said, dropping her hands from her face. “Have I convinced you that I know nothing of this abduction?”

Staring at the dried strip of meat he still held in one hand, he gave a ragged sigh. “Yes,” he said.

His simple answer almost made her doubt his honesty. But the “talent” she’d tried to bury insisted otherwise.

If she was wrong...

A fresh stab of hunger caught her unaware, and she sank back to the ground with a gasp. Garret set down his scanty meal and leaned over her.

“You’ve spent too much time talking and not enough resting,” he said.

“And whose fault is that?” she whispered.

“I should have been more careful.”

She did her best not to notice the concern in his voice, his worried frown, the compassion he should not feel for one like her. Whoever and whatever he was, son or no son, she had to get away from him. The temptation to feed was terrifyingly strong in the wake of her injuries. If she should hurt him...

“You should continue your search,” she said, turning her face away, “and I must return to my shelter to collect my things and move on before the other humans find me.”

He ran his hand up and down his left sleeve. “Your physical state is obviously deteriorating. How far do you expect to get this time?”

“Far enough.”

“And then?”

Shivering with animal desires she could barely contain, Artemis moved to gather her things. “I am going. Do not follow me.”

“It won’t work.” His footsteps were almost silent as he moved behind her. “In a few minutes you’re going to collapse.”

“Then what do you suggest?” she asked, spinning to face him. “I see no other—”

“I obviously didn’t make myself clear,” he said. He pushed up his left sleeve. “I’m offering an alternative.”

Chapter 3 (#ulink_3fd96b79-a13f-56d5-b72f-f214cb0141ad)

His meaning was terrifyingly clear, and suddenly Artemis was furious—at her own helplessness; at his inexplicable generosity, in spite of his valid reasons for despising her kind; at a world that had created such a bizarre set of impossible circumstances. Her mind and emotions and physical senses reacted all at once, making her excruciatingly aware of the body she had so admired.

Even thinking of taking his blood aroused not just her hunger for nourishment but for other things, as well. Her imagination began to spin scenarios that could never be. Her empathic talent burned more brightly—extending fingers of amethyst light, her light, toward Garret—and he began to breathe more heavily.

Vivid images sprang into her mind: lying beside Garret, naked in his arms as she sank her teeth into his neck; moaning in pleasure as the blood flowed over her tongue and he guided her down on top of him; urgency building as her hunger exploded into an unbearable need to feel him inside her, giving as she took, taking as she gave...

She came back to herself, her body hot and throbbing, to find him looking at her with that steady gaze, his eyes so clear that she could see every shadow passing beneath the surface. No pain now, no anger, no sorrow. Only need. And desire.

Desire for a Freeblood. For her. She looked from Garret’s hungry eyes down to his broad chest and lean waist, and then below, where the evidence of his response was so readily apparent.

And she was responsible. She had to put an end to it.

“How can you do this?” she asked. “How can you bear to let an Opir take your blood? Is it because of this Roxana?”

“I’ve done it before,” he said, his hunger still burning in her mind. “I have no reason to fear it.”

She wondered again where he’d come from. He hadn’t always been alone, not with such a casual attitude about donation. But if he had ever lived among Opiri...

“If I take your blood,” she said, “what do you expect in return?”

“Your help in finding my son.”

His blunt response took her aback. She felt the completely unexpected and irrational disappointment of realizing that he was being generous only because he wanted something from her. Something he had probably wanted from the very beginning.

If she gave in now, she would be throwing away the very principles she had worked so hard to establish since her exile.

“I cannot accept,” she said. “I must go.”

Garret’s expression changed again, as if he were waking from a deep sleep and had forgotten where he was. His aura folded in on itself and vanished. He rolled down his sleeve, returned to his pack and began to shift things inside it, clearly pretending to keep himself busy so that he wouldn’t have to deal with her. She watched him, her muscles frozen, knowing she would never see him again.

“I will lay a false trail,” she said, pulling on her daycoat with clumsy hands. “If the humans do find our tracks, they will follow mine. I’m sure they would far rather kill me than you, traitor though they may name you.” She stumbled a little as she took up her bow. “As your own people say, good luck.”

An instant later she was running...throwing all her energy into every step, hoping that the initial burst of speed would carry her beyond his reach before she lost her breath. She knew it was time to abandon the area completely, and not only because of Garret. She had to get away from the possibility of any human or Opir contact, and lose herself in a place so remote that not even the most desperate Freeblood exiles would claim it.