City of the Fallen (11 page)

“Belle, do you remember what I asked you about yesterday?”

Her body tensed up and he instinctively tightened his arms around her.

“The wild vampires?”

“Rabids,” he corrected her. “That’s what we call them.”

She swallowed hard and he heard her heart thump just a little faster. He hated talking to her about this, but there was no avoiding it. He needed to know if she had any information that could help him—but more importantly, he needed to protect her. The only way to do that was to tell her the truth.

“What are they?” she finally asked and the words came out just slightly shaky.

He sighed. Nothing about this was easy. He got up and grabbed a robe, handing Belle another one. Her eyes followed him through the room before she put the robe on and got out from under the blankets, sitting on the edge of the bed.
 

“They’re sick. Starving would be a better word, I guess.”

Belle was quiet for a second, and he realized she was trying to process the information. She moved slowly and he wondered if he had taken too much blood. It wasn’t a question he worried about often, but with Belle, keeping things under control was a lot more difficult than he had expected.

“So they’re dying?” she finally asked.

“In a way. The difference is that starvation can take a long time to kill us.” He could guess what the next question was going to be. “Years,” he added before she could ask.

The silence in the room bothered him. He wanted to know what she was thinking, what she was feeling. He desperately wanted to charm her so he could ask whatever he wanted and get the truth out of her. Because that was what charming really was—a sort of truth serum, a surrendering of the mind.

“Why?” she finally asked. It was a basic, simple question, but he understood what she was really asking.

“Just as humans do, we require a minimum amount of nourishment to stay alive. If we don’t get it, our organs start to shut down.” He searched for the right words. “And our minds shut down along with our bodies.”

“You… they go crazy?” The words came out warily.

“Yes. We call it ‘the void’ because everything becomes hollowed, as if you’re slowly being swallowed by the darkness.”

Belle shuddered.

“The less they eat, the faster the void spreads,” he continued. “Until they can no longer think and they’re just like rabid animals, destroying everything in their path, human or not.”

He could almost hear the rush of thoughts flowing through her mind.

“So they’re a danger to you too?”

“They’ll attack anything, yes.”

He paused for a second to let her absorb the meaning of those words.

“The compound?” she finally whispered.

He gave a quick nod. “We found some rabids nearby. Just a couple of hours away.”

He stepped closer and studied her, savoring the warmth flowing from her.

“I want you to stay away from the outer walls, Belle. We have extra guards posted, but there’s always a chance a rabid might get in.”

He could smell her blood, rushing fast through her. It was a lot to grasp and process, but she seemed to be doing all right with the information. There was no panic in her eyes and although her heart was drumming at a frantic speed, everything else in her body was maintaining a steady pace: her breathing, her movements. It was certainly a lot more than he could have expected of any human—and he was impressed.

“How many are there?”

“Rabids? I don’t know. Not that many right now, but the void spreads fast.” He straightened and then ran a hand through his hair. “Eventually, humans won’t be able to make it to the compound anymore because they’ll get attacked on the roads.”

Belle adjusted her position on the bed, crossing her legs. “Humans can still travel during daytime.”

He could feel his own expression darken and wondered how much Belle could see in it. There were a lot of secrets in the vampire world, and he wasn’t sure how many of those he wanted to give away.

“Not exactly,” he finally said and his body got tense.

“What do you mean, not exactly? The rabids can’t walk in daylight, can they?”

He took a step closer, his eyes locked on hers the whole time.

“We all can, Belle.”

~*~

It couldn’t be. For the past five years, her whole world had operated on the notion that vampires were night creatures. They were the boogieman that came out to get you when the lights went out.

“That’s not possible,” she finally said, and the words came out as a whisper.

“The sun is debilitating, but it won’t kill us right away,” he explained. “Most of us avoid it because it takes time to get our energy back after being outside in daylight.”

Her chest felt tight and the words danced in her head in a sort of dizzying haze that threatened to take over.

“You can… you can walk in daylight?”

Daylight was all she had. All that humanity had. All this time she had thought they were safe and it had all been a lie. The realization hit her hard. That meant vampire patrols could be out during the daytime, waiting in the shadows to hunt unsuspecting humans.

It also meant that the vampire back in the factory could have stepped into the light and grabbed her. The truth sent shivers down her spine.
 

He shook his head. “We rarely do because it’s not exactly comfortable. It’s almost… painful. But the rabids don’t care. They lack the basic understanding to stay away from the sun.”

She tried to process what Marcus was saying and it suddenly clicked. The rabids would hunt during the day too. They would be out in the prowl for food during the day and during the night. Humans would never be safe again, free to scavenge for supplies. If they didn’t die on the roads, attacked by the vampires, they would die of starvation because they wouldn’t be able to leave their hiding places. Why hadn’t she ever heard rumors about vampires walking in daylight?

“How long can they stay out in the sun at once?”

There was an air of darkness around him. The kind that lingered in the air when somebody was revealing a sinister secret they’d been hoping to keep hidden. He didn’t look pleased about the confession, and Isabelle had to wonder why he was telling her at all.

“A few hours without any permanent damage,” he finally said. “After that, deeper burns and maybe some scars, but I’m guessing they’ll seek cover by then.”

Words were buzzing in her head. There was another war raging in the world. One she didn’t know anything about—and it could potentially be a lot worse than the one they’d already been through. If the void spread, if it reached every corner of the country, there would be no fighting to be had. No hope for a future in which humans could reclaim Earth as theirs. The rabids wouldn’t have compounds and surrendering spots. They would be out hunting at all times, killing everything they ran into.

She was beginning to realize that maybe she had stumbled onto something a lot more important than killing the king of the vampires. She had found a secret that could destroy what little was left of her world. Despite her mounting fear, she couldn’t help but wonder whether this discovery would change everything.
 

Perhaps more disturbing of all: she was relieved she had an excuse not to kill the king just yet.

Marcus walked away from the bed and towards the window. The night was quiet, even to his ears.
The wind whistled up and down the corridors and a few familiar voices drifted toward him
. The harsh white lights above the walls gave the whole compound a ghostly luster. Right now, the place looked more like a prison than a castle. He couldn’t see what was beyond the compound. Not from his window, anyway, as the walls were taller than any building inside. He could guess what was waiting beyond the barricade, though. Pitch black, deep darkness.

When the world had been alive, before the invasion, the darkness had always been a pulsing thing, alive with the breathing and the buzzing of people, animals and machines. Now, it was just a blanket of silence.
  

He didn’t know why he’d told her about the rabids. Miles was right that he needed to be more careful, but there was something about her that stirred long-asleep emotions in him. Or maybe the answer was that he wasn’t worried. After all, he was a hundred times stronger—and older—than she was. It was very unlikely that a frail human could do any real damage to any vampire, especially in vampire territory.

Even more telling, though, was the fact that her safety had suddenly become more important than keeping secrets. He did have a good reason for that, because the truth was that he could do damage control on a few humans knowing about their ability to walk in daylight if he had to—but if she got attacked by a rabid because she wasn’t expecting to see one under the sun… well, he could never forgive himself for that.

His intention had been to find out more about her. The human who couldn’t be charmed. He had even sent a convoy out to see if they could trace her way to the compound and figure out where she came from—and what secrets she had brought along with her. But the guards had run into a rabid just hours outside of the compound, and the mission objective had changed in seconds.

His main concern right now was to keep the rabids away. And to make sure his scientists managed to come up with a blood substitute as soon as possible. The void was curable, at least in theory. He wasn’t sure where the dividing line was, however, as the last time the void had spread, everybody—including him—not infected had wasted no time and just ran away. His theory (and the scientists agreed) was that if you caught the void early enough, you could feed a rabid enough blood to revert the effects until he returned to normal. “Early enough” was tricky, though, because nobody knew exactly what that meant.

He did know that the blood supply was getting lower and lower. Nobody in the compound was going hungry because humans were still making it there. But the more rabids were out there, the fewer the chances that humans could get cross-country and into the compound before being attacked. And he was worried that at some point, his major problem wouldn’t be how to keep things out—because the void would slip right into the compound.

He turned around to look at Belle, who seemed lost in thought. She looked so vulnerable sitting on his massive bed, so fragile—but he knew better. She had survived on the roads for at least a night. Hell, she had survived the invasion and the years after it, when food became scarce and illness was rampant.

Whatever fragile creature she appeared to be, he doubted it was the real her.

~*~

The first scream didn’t sound like a human scream at all. In fact, it sounded like metal screeching, and Belle’s first thought was that somebody was opening the entrance gate. People coming in? Darkness was still blanketing the surroundings, so it would have been risky trying to reach the compound.