Alejandro had no doubt he'd had fun that night so long ago,
fun
killing Julia and the others. The man might be capable of love, sure, but there was a savage portion that Alejandro suspected Sante had a hard time controlling.
Right now Sante looked far from dangerous. He slumped on the couch, about seven feet from Ari, looking defeated and oddly vulnerable. His zipstrainted wrists lay in his lap and his gaze rested on his sobbing former lover. He stared at her like he wanted to memorize every inch of her face and body, like a man knowing he would soon be walking into the desert wanting to store up as much rain as he could to last him awhile.
Alejandro recognized it, because that's how he felt about Daria.
From the corner of his eye, he caught movement. Daria entered the room, took a seat to the left of Sante, and gave Alejandro a thumb's-up. Everyone who needed to be contacted had been. The calvary was on its way.
By dawn the dome would be swarming with law enforcement, ABI and GBC alike. This mission would be over, and Daria would move on, taking a huge chunk of his heart with her.
He'd move on, too, just like he had the first time she'd left. He loved her, but he wasn't going to beg her. The woman loved him back, but she was too stubborn to see it. Alejandro knew he couldn't force her to open her eyes; she had to come to that on her own.
The truth could be so hard to see sometimes. Ari Templeton was learning that right now. She deserved the truth, though. All of it.
“What about the blood slaves, Sante?” The question fell like a rock into the silence of the room. Daria looked up at him from where she sat and then studied Sante. “Was Daria right about that?”
Sante shifted his gaze to the floor. “I'll bring you to them.”
A disgusted look passed over Daria's face. “I knew it.”
Ari leapt up, her face flushed bright red with anger. “Why?” She whispered the word. It came out hoarse and strangled. Then louder, “Why, Christopher? Why?”
Slowly, he moved his gaze from the floor to her face. “I learned how to manage the carmin and slaves from my blood mother. It makes money. It keeps the dome running. It provides a safe home for everyone who stays here. It was a little sin for the greater good.”
Daria snorted. “A little sin? You call the enslavement and sale of human beings a
little
sin? I fail to see the little and I really fail to see any good.”
Ari didn't respond, couldn't respond, perhaps. She stared at Sante like she'd never met him before.
“Humans are cattle,” Alejandro interjected. “Only weaker. Right, Sante? That's what Lucinda used to say. Their value is minimal and they're fragile. You have to buy them in bulk and use them quickly, before they die.”
Ari made a low gagging sound.
“Shut your mouth!” Sante snapped at him.
“That's it, though, right?” Alejandro pressed. “That's the prevailing attitude among many older Chosen.”
“Yes,” he hissed. “If they're stupid enough to get themselves addicted they deserve anything they get.”
Ari turned her head away from him and closed her eyes.
Daria stood. “Well, on that cheery note, let's go.”
“Ari should remain,” Sante said softly.
Ari's head snapped around. “No! I want to see this. I want to see what you've done, Christopher. I have a right to know all of it.” She stalked out of the room and down the stairs. The front door slammed behind her.
A few minutes later they mounted two dune bikes. Alejandro with Sante on one, and Ari and Daria on the other. With the pale gray fingers of dawn just beginning to spread over the roof of the dome, Sante led them toward the honey fields. Not a big surprise to Daria or Alejandro.
They set down in the restricted area about three miles from where he'd been working with Brandon, in front of a large metal warehouse.
Two tall, well-built guards snapped to standing position where they'd been lazing on either side of the door and picked up their pulse rifles. Once they caught sight of Alejandro helping the zipstrainted Sante from the bike, they both bristled. The men glanced at each other and moved toward them, hands tense on their weapons. Alejandro touched his pulser, set to stun, hoping there wouldn't be trouble.
“Stand down,” Sante commanded. “Stand away and let us through.”
The guards, clearly aching with the desire to defend their leader, hesitated, but didn't lower their weapons. A tense moment passed in which both Alejandro and Daria charged their pistols, the soft whirring sound loud in the suddenly quiet air.
“Obey me,” Sante snapped.
The guards immediately stepped away from the door and lowered their weapons. They clattered to a rest, the pulse lights at the top of their weapons, keyed to their brain wave patterns, still violently red. Their boss had told them to stand down, but they were pissed as hell he was being held and might just try and play hero anyway. These guards seemed even more likely to go vigilante than the ones back at the house.
Alejandro glanced at Daria, who gave him a knowing look. They would have to watch their backs with these guys. If they were going down, they were going down swinging.
They entered the warehouse and immediately darkness and stench enveloped them. Beside him, Ari caught herself against a wall and dry heaved.
Unwashed bodies. Blood. Urine. Fear.
It clung to the inside of their nostrils and curled into the back of their throats.
Noises filtered to them. Coughing to his left. Murmuring straight ahead of them. Somewhere to the distant right, low moaning.
“Illumination,” commanded Sante in a hoarse voice.
Light flooded the building, making all the humans in the large area in front of them flinch and cover their eyes.
But not the Chosen, who had immediate pupil dilation in light changes. Alejandro and the others saw every detail right away, in its full, terrible reality. They stood in horror at the sight before them.
Daria's only reaction was a quick intake of breath at the cringing sea of enslaved humanity. There had to be close to four hundred men and women crammed into the small area, so close they probably had trouble moving. They were dressed in tatters, their bodies gaunt from hunger.
29
ONE piercing cry rose above the others. A small child, a boy of perhaps six or seven, pushed past the adult legs around him to the front of the crowd. He was dressed in ripped adult clothing. The boy turned a pale face up at them, his dirty cheeks tear-tracked. Hunger, not for food, but for veil, lay openly on his tiny visage.
Alejandro turned and caught Sante hard in the cheekbone with his fist. Taken unaware, Sante plummeted backward under the force of the punch, hit the wall behind him, and crumpled to the floor.
“You bastard,” Alejandro growled and went down after him, taking him by his shirtfront and pummeling him with his free hand.
With rage thundering in his ears and the need to punish zinging through his veins, Alejandro didn't hear Ari and Daria screaming at him until both women were hoarse. Female hands pounded on his back and pulled at his arms.
When their protestations finally registered, Alejandro paused and looked down at his handiwork. Sante was still conscious, but barely. If he hadn't been Chosen, he'd be out cold. Sante's face was a mess, and blood marked Alejandro's knuckles.
Alejandro released Sante and rocked back on his heels. “Fuck.”
“Anger management, Alejandro,” murmured Daria. “You might work on that.”
Ari rushed past them both and gathered Sante in her arms. The older Chosen male groaned and his eyes fluttered open.
“I wanted to kill him with my bare hands,” Alejandro said, rising to his feet. He pushed a shaky hand through his hair.
“Past tense? Alejandro, I want that with every breath I take.”
He and Daria turned to view the ravening horde again. Luckily heavy metal mesh separated them from the slaves, because once the slaves' eyes had adjusted to the flood of light in the room, they'd realized Chosen stood there. Normally slave traffickers drugged their stock to mute the drive to seek stimulus from the Chosen. Usually it was done through the food or water supply. It had to be close to dose time because these slaves weren't controlling their urges very well.
Like something out of an ancient horror movie, they moved toward the metal mesh separating them from the ones who could give them the dark kiss and the fix they so badly craved. They'd come to stand just inches from them, their grimy fingers threading though the barrier, trying desperately to reach them. All of them mewled, whined, and whimpered like nothing human anymore. The little boy was gone, lost in the crush.
“There's no way to get the child out,” Daria stated in an emotion-laden voice. “We can't open those doors no matter what. They'd kill us trying to get a fix.”
“Where there's one child, there's more children. We have to get all those people out of there.”
The humans curled their fingers around the wire mesh and banged in an effort to pry it off.
Both he and Daria took a step backward, but it was clear their prison was too strong and the slaves too weak. They'd never get through.
The scent of blood and sweet, willing human infused Alejandro's nostrils, but not a wisp of hunger curled through his stomach. These blood slaves were too pathetic, too victimized to be looked at that way. Not even the hardcore animal part of him, the pure Chosen heart of him, could look at these people as food. They needed help, every last one of them.
Sadder still would be the individual stories. Alejandro had heard them all. Some of them would have courted the Chosen's dark kiss once, maybe on a whim or a dare, only to find they possessed the genetic makeup that made addiction instantaneous. Others would have been kidnapped and forced into the addiction because they were attractive, or simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The children had perhaps been sold by their parents into slavery to pay off debts. Some of them had simply been careless, gone too far one night. No matter the reasons behind their addiction, this was wrong, pure and simple.
There had been a time, though, when he would have found them alluring no matter what. That time was not so long in the past. Understanding the reason why, he glanced at Daria. Having fallen in love with her seemed to have eased the dark need he had for human blood. She seemed to sustain him in so many ways.
Behind them, Ari and Sante had risen. Now Ari stood a distance away from Sante, having apparently regained her sense of outrage and grief.
“You're treating them like animals,” whispered Ari. She was only barely audible over the rising clamor of hungry blood slaves and their demands for the dark kiss. “Like-like livestock.”
Sante didn't turn, probably didn't want to meet her eyes, or maybe he couldn't turn his head after the beating Alejandro had given him. He only stared out over the swell of slaves. “They
are
livestock.”
Ari flew at him, hitting him with her fists, screaming and crying. “How could you do this? How could you not tell me about it? You are not the man I thought you were, Christopher! How could I have ever thought I loved you?”
Alejandro took a step away and allowed it to happen. Sante took her pummeling calmly for a several long moments, then he turned and hooked his bound hands around her throat, pulling her against him and kissing her on the mouth. She protested at first and then stilled, allowing him to kiss her but not returning it.
Together they sank once more to the filthy floor of the warehouse, Ari with her arms around him. She sobbed against his chest as he told her over and over that he loved her and he was sorry.
Sante's blood now marked Ari's cheek and her tangled hair. His left eye was nearly swollen closed and his lip and cheek were split from Alejandro's fists.
Daria stared down at the couple, her expression mostly unreadable. She looked exhausted and completely unsatisfied with her snare of Christopher Sante.
He shared the sentiment. He just wanted to get this over with and obtain aid for these blood slaves.
Water popped on from spigots in the ceiling, drenching the crowd. Immediately, the slaves tipped their heads up and raised their arms, catching the falling water in their mouths. It was probably the only drinking water they ever got.
The dose was likely in the water, since soon the slaves quieted and began to settle back onto the floor, their expressions slack and the burning need to feed their addiction dimmed in their eyes. Alejandro searched the crowd for the little boy, but he was nowhere to be seen.
“There!” Daria pointed into the throng.
Alejandro spotted him curled up on the concrete at the edge of the crowd. He nodded. “I'm going in for him.”
He went to the door and popped the lock. Slowly, he opened it. When none of the humans stirred, now sedated from the drugged water, he deemed it safe to enter. He did it quickly, scooping the limp child into his arms and backing out of the area. Daria locked the door once he was out.
The boy lolled sleepily in his arms and snuggled against his chest. He met Daria's stricken face over the top of his head. “He'll be okay.”
She glanced at Sante with a gaze made of acid. “Yes, he will.
Now.
”
Outside the building came the sounds of commotionâshouting, pulse shots fired in hard blasts of airâand the noise of many approaching vehicles.
He and Daria moved toward the door, pulsers at the ready. It was probably the ABI and the GBC answering their summons.
Without Sante in command, they'd likely had no trouble knocking down the dome's defenses. After that, they would have been able to find him and Daria by the tracking implants they both wore.