LITMIR.BIZ

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before the bullets began flying.

      He was just a second too late to push Alexia out of the way. Several bullets tore into her shoulder in rapid succession, spinning her to the ground. She went limp, curled on her side with her red hair fanned around her head.

      Swallowing a howl of protest, Damon knelt beside her, broke the strap of her rifle between his hands and brought the weapon into position, spraying the hillside above them.

      A drift of unfamiliar scent behind him sent him skidding around on his knees to take aim at the second shooter, but he got off only a dozen shots before a single large projectile struck him full in the chest. He continued to fire, ignoring the black burst of pain that filled his lungs with blood and flame. He heard a faint grunt that told him one of his bullets had found a mark, and then the gunfire ceased.

      Gasping for air, Damon crouched over Alexia and pivoted on his feet, doing his best to cover every possible angle of attack. None came. He and Alexia would have made easy prey, but their enemies were leaving them alone.

      It would have made perfect sense, all part of the plan, if the ones he’d expected hadn’t tried to kill both him and the dhampir agent he was supposed to keep by his side.

      Something was very, very wrong. And Damon’s ability to grasp what had happened was rapidly fading. One of his lungs was collapsed, and there was blood filling his chest cavity. He could recover in healing stasis, but it would take time, and once he was unconscious he would be unable to protect Alexia.

      And he had to protect her. He couldn’t risk being held responsible for an Aegis agent’s death when the situation was so precarious. At another time, he might have let her die.

      So he told himself.

      With the last of his energy, he shrugged out of his pack, bent over Alexia and tried to assess the damage. She was rapidly losing blood, and her eyelids fluttered in semiconsciousness. Fighting off waves of nausea, Damon removed her pack, worked her jacket off and fumbled inside his pack for the field dressing every Darketan carried in the Zone. He tore open the waterproof packet and applied the treated bandage to her wound, fixing it in place with the attached strip of fabric.

      He was forced to lift her body to remove her bandage, and it soon became apparent that the dressing wouldn’t be sufficient to stop the bleeding. There were still bullets inside her, and though they would eventually be pushed out by her healing flesh, she couldn’t afford to lose too much blood or she wouldn’t be able to heal. He rooted inside her pack, found her med kit and unwrapped her field dressing.

      Hardly able to catch his breath, Damon applied the second dressing. Alexia’s blood soaked through it almost before he had finished. He yanked the tail of his shirt from the waistband of his pants, tore the bottom half of the shirt into wide strips and folded them together, pressing the makeshift bandage over the soaked field dressings. He knew he wouldn’t be able to maintain the pressure once he was out, so he lay across Alexia’s slender body, using his own weight to hold the bandages in place.

      “Hold on, Alexia,” he whispered. “Hold on.”

      Then the last of his air ran out.

      Alexia woke to throbbing agony that centered in her right shoulder and numbed her arm all the way down to her fingertips. In a flash she remembered the attack, and the bullets that had slammed into her flesh. She knew she had fallen, shocked by the blinding pain and the impact, and then there had been some kind of movement, a voice.

      Then nothing. But now she was awake, and alive, and someone was lying on his belly beside her, his cheek pressed against a rough patch of dirt.

      Damon. It had been his voice she’d heard, his hands working over her body and tying the bandage that had stanched her wounds. Now the bleeding had stopped, and though she was still very weak, she knew she wasn’t going to die.

      But she couldn’t tell from her position if Damon had survived the attack. Her heart lurched. She rolled over on her right side, pressing her hand to her bandages, and watched for signs that he was breathing.

      He was. She closed her eyes and sank onto her back again, sick with pain but too grateful to care. She didn’t understand why she should be grateful; Damon was still the enemy and had probably been lying about nearly everything he’d told her to advance his own agenda.

      But he’d quite possibly saved her life by giving her body a chance to repair itself. He was probably in stasis himself, letting his own body do its work to heal whatever injuries he had sustained.

      Hissing through her teeth, Alexia tried to sit up. It took her three tries, but she finally managed it, taking care not to risk damaging the tissue still knitting under the bandage or jog the bullets working their way out of her back. She scanned the hollow where they lay and the slopes of the hills to each side, but there was no sound, smell or sight of the enemy…whoever they had been.

      Not Michael, she thought with relief. Not that she’d ever believed he was capable of turning on her. There had been at least two shooters this time, maybe more, and they had to be either Daysiders or leeches. Damon had denied there could be Daysiders in the colony, and given that their numbers were believed to be very limited, the shooters would almost certainly be vampires.

      But were they from the colony, or Erebus? Damon had also dispelled the notion that the Expansionists had their own agents, but even if he believed that, she had no reason to take his word for it.

      Alexia crawled over to Damon and touched his back. It rose and fell steadily. There was a hole in his jacket that marked where a large-caliber bullet had pierced his body. Carefully she rolled him a little to the side and felt the front of his torn shirt. There was another hole that matched the first. A through-and-through, then. Thank God for that.

      She shivered, quickly realizing that the state of her body, and Damon’s, left them both more vulnerable to the chill of the early autumn night. Getting to her feet, she retrieved her pack and jacket, which Damon must have taken from her after the attack. She draped the jacket over her shoulders, removed the tightly wrapped blanket from the pack, laid the blanket over Damon’s back and picked up the rifle lying about a meter away. It had recently been fired, and she was pretty sure Damon was the one who had done it. With luck, he’d taken down at least one of the shooters.

      Her Vampire Slayer, however, was gone. That didn’t surprise her. But if the shooters had gotten so close and intended to do so much damage, why in hell had they left her and Damon alive?

      She sat beside him and sipped from her canteen, drawing her knees up to her chest to combat the chill. There was no question of leaving him. They had become partners of a sort, and no field agent abandoned her partner.

      Except Michael had. He’d gone far enough away from her that he hadn’t known she was being attacked.

      Not good. Not good at all.

      She dozed a little, chin on knees, unable to help herself. Some time later she jerked awake again, aware for the first time of another ache she hadn’t noticed before, camouflaged by the greater pain of her shoulder. She removed her jacket, wincing at the stabs of pain radiating out from her shoulder, and touched her left inner arm. Her shirtsleeve was crusted with dried blood.

      Suddenly alarmed, she unbuttoned her shirt, pulled it open and slid it down behind her shoulders. There was a thick scab under her arm where her patch should have been.

      It was gone. Someone had dug it out in a hasty, brutal attempt at surgery, leaving it to heal over.

      Leaving her without the drugs she needed to survive.

       Chapter 4

      Alexia closed her eyes, breathing deeply to control her panic. Calm, she told herself. You have choices. Think.

      But she really didn’t have choices at all.

      Damon shifted slightly, a low groan catching in his throat. That was a positive sign…the only good news she had to cling to at the moment, aside from the fact that she could feel the bullets in

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