Dawnbreaker

Eight

Cooper put Barrett’s arm over his shoulders and helped his brother walk into the back room, where he settled in him one of the few chairs. Barrett blinked a couple times until his eyes finally focused on Kevin. A low wheeze escaped the nightwalker and I saw him make a fist with his left hand. He was struggling to hold onto his soul, but it was a battle he couldn’t win.

“Is he from the park?” Barrett asked.

“Yes,” I replied, coming to stand near Kevin’s head. I wished I could ease his pain, I wished I could end his life now so he would no longer be washed in this agony, tortured with the knowledge that the end was hovering so close. But I couldn’t. He deserved these last seconds of his life—we all needed every second we could get.

“I won’t feel guilty over him when I still have to bury my brother,” Barrett said, clenching his teeth as he looked up at me.

“I’m not asking you to. I wanted you to see that you’re not the only one with a body count.”

“And you’re the only one that can end this.” Barrett tried to push to his feet but immediately wobbled and sat back down as he struggled to remain conscious. “You’re the one killing both nightwalkers and lycans.”

“The naturi are killing them. Not me. I’m trying to get rid of the naturi forever. What are you doing to help me on this front? What are you doing to save not only your own people but also the lives of nightwalkers and humans?”

“Just leave, Mira. Save us all by just leaving Savannah,” Cooper said wearily with a shake of his head.

“Would you leave, Barrett?” I asked, drawing the shifter’s dark eyes from the dying nightwalker to me again. “If our roles were reversed, would you leave?”

“Of course.”

I smiled down at him and shook my head. “We both know that’s a lie. Savannah is as much in your blood as it is in mine. This is home, the only home either of us has ever known. You would make a stand and fight, regardless of the potential loss of life.”

“Mira,” Knox suddenly said. I looked up at my companion, who was leaning against the door, his hands shoved into the pockets of his soaked slacks. “He’s gone.”

My gaze jumped back down to Kevin. I did a quick scan of his body to find that his soul had completely left him despite the fact that we still had more than an hour before the sun finally rose on this nightmarish night. I couldn’t feel his soul in the room with us. Kevin had died.

“Take him to Archie. Tell him—” I started, then caught myself. The coroner wasn’t mine to command. He was a friend that did me favors for the protection of my people. “Ask Archie to cremate the body immediately.”

“What about…?” he asked, his eyes moving over Barrett and Cooper, who was hovering just behind his brother’s shoulder.

“I’ll be fine. Barrett won’t be strong enough to attack me for another couple hours, and Cooper knows that if he takes a single step toward me I’ll set him on fire.”

Knox was still frowning when he picked up Kevin and carried him out of the room, shutting the door behind him.

I sat on the arm of the sofa and looked at Barrett. We had been friends since he was only twelve years old. I had known his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather. I had worked with each of them to maintain strong ties between the nightwalkers and the lycanthropes. I was unwilling to lose everything we had gained during those years tonight. Unfortunately, it meant putting my good friend in a very awkward position.

“Tomorrow night I go to rescue a nightwalker that has been kidnapped. The naturi will pull everyone back in an effort to end my life. And I will do everything within my power to wipe out as many of them as I possibly can. Not long after that I will go to Peru to fight them again, to preserve the barrier that has blocked the naturi horde from the rest of the world. Any remaining naturi in Savannah will follow me.”

“But what about when you come back?” Barrett asked.

A small laugh escaped me and I smiled at him. “There’s only a slim chance that I will survive Peru and return home again. But if I do, it is unlikely that the naturi will follow me. I like to think that if I return to Savannah, it means that we won and the remaining naturi have been scattered to the wind. They won’t dare to take me on again.”

Barrett shook his head, looking down at his open hands where they rested between his knees. “I’m sorry about this, Mira. We’ve been friends a long time. I hate what the naturi have ruined between us.”

“Yes, this damage may never be repaired,” I agreed. A lump grew in my throat as I stared at him. He looked so defeated, and it wasn’t over yet. “I won this battle, Barrett. It means you at the very least owe me a boon.”

His head snapped up and he straightened in his chair. “Are you going to ask me to leave Savannah?”

“I had thought about it, but that wouldn’t solve my current dilemma.”

“I thought that’s why you sent that Gromenko to me. He’s obviously the Alpha from another pack. You want him to take over the Savannah pack.”

“I never considered that. Nicolai is here for his own protection. It has nothing to do with you and your pack. It’s between me, Nicolai, and another nightwalker. It will never extend to the rest of your pack.”

“But we have to protect him if he’s attacked,” Barrett countered.

“No, you don’t, and we both know that you wouldn’t. You’ve never accepted him, never welcomed into the fold. You and your people wouldn’t raise a finger to help him if he needed it. I’m no fool, Barrett. Nicolai is fully aware that I’m the only one that has his back.”

Barrett looked away from me, shame eating away at him. He had created an outcast of Nicolai because of his own lack of security. “He doesn’t belong with us.”

“Only because that’s how you want it to be. But that’s your choice. I’m not here to tell you how to run your pack, the same way you won’t tell me how to manage my nightwalkers. What you do with Nicolai is your business, but you have to understand that it is my duty to protect him from all threats.”

“So he is to come between us as well. Isn’t it enough that we have the naturi between us?”

“Nicolai will only come between us if you let him,” I said, rising to my feet. “Besides, we have other problems to discuss. My boon. From you, I simply want the truth.”

His brow furrowed and a frown pulled at the corners of his mouth as he again shifted in his chair. “I’ve never lied to you.”

“But you would have a very good reason to lie to me now. I want to know how deep your betrayal of me has gone. How deep the betrayal of your people runs against nightwalkers.”

“Betrayal?” Cooper demanded, taking a step toward me. I cocked one eyebrow at him in warning, and he took a step backward again. “We’ve never betrayed you or the other nightwalkers.”

I looked back down at Barrett, who was watching me with angry eyes. “Tonight you offered to hand me over to the naturi. We have all vowed to not aid the naturi in any way. You seemed more than willing to break that vow tonight,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest against the chill that was creeping into my frame. The warmth I had gotten from his blood was starting to fade, and the sunrise was growing close. I would need to leave soon if I hoped to find sanctuary against the sun.

“I—I—I didn’t mean it like that,” Barrett stuttered, growing ghostly pale.

“We’ve never willingly sided with the naturi,” Cooper argued. His right hand rested on his brother’s shoulder and squeezed. “We’re not traitors.”

“Give me the truth, Barrett. Would you hand me or any nightwalker over to the naturi?”

“No!”

“Would you order someone from your pack to hand a nightwalker over to the naturi?”

“No!”

“Would you hand Nicolai over to the naturi?”

“No! No! No! I wouldn’t do anything that would help the naturi. I wouldn’t side with them no matter what was being done. I know, Mira, that they are at the root of our problems. They are not a solution.”

“The naturi aren’t our only problem,” I said, causing some of the anger to leak from Barrett’s frame. “This past summer I asked you to retrieve evidence from the Daylight Coalition database, evidence that could expose me as a nightwalker. I never asked you about that, but I’m asking now. Was the evidence retrieved as I requested?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Was it destroyed?”

He was silent.

So I thought. I’d feared that his people had downloaded the information, wiped the Coalition database clean, and kept a copy for themselves. A little insurance for a rainy day. Well, it was raining now and I couldn’t afford to be fighting the Coalition at the same time I was fighting the naturi. The Daylight Coalition was a group of humans who took it upon themselves to hunt down and destroy anything that wasn’t human. We all believed that included all the races, but so far their focus has been exclusively on nightwalkers.

“You’re not willing to betray me to the naturi, but you have no problem betraying me to the Daylight Coalition,” I snarled at him.

Barrett shoved to his feet and managed to remain standing. “I haven’t betrayed you!”

“Then destroy the evidence. We’re in this together—against both the naturi and the Coalition. We’ve all promised to watch out for each other against the Coalition. What have I done to earn this animosity?”

“Nothing. I—I was just trying to protect my own people. You’re powerful, Mira. You’re an unstoppable force, feared across all the continents. What if you suddenly decided to turn on my people? How would I protect them?”

“So you chose the Coalition? So you came in here tonight and threatened to hand me over to the naturi? Until now I had no reason to turn on the lycanthropes. I handed you Nicolai, who is important to me, because I trusted you to watch out for him.”

“I’ll destroy the evidence!” Barrett quickly said. He reached out to take my hand, but I took a step away from him, unwilling to bear his touch at that moment.

Since taking his blood, I had been in his thoughts, reading his emotions without his knowledge. He was telling the truth. He was also terrified I would report him to the other packs that he was potentially making deals with both the naturi and the Coalition. He was on thin ice and we both knew it. I had never wanted to put him in this position, particularly since the Coven already tried to make a bargain with the naturi. Our hands certainly weren’t clean. However, I still needed Barrett’s assistance.

“I believe you,” I murmured, wishing I could give him some other kind of reassurance, but I wasn’t feeling too forgiving at the moment. “But I have one last request.”

“Name it.”

“Someone among the lycanthropes has already begun to deal with the Coalition.”

“Are you sure?” Cooper inquired, his brow furrowed in confusion.

“While I was in London, I ran across a witch and a lycanthrope traveling with a member of the Coalition. They both attacked Tristan and me. They could have walked away, but didn’t. They had chosen a new side. I want you to look into what’s going on.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Barrett agreed.

“The lycan was called Harold Finchley. I want to know who his pack was. I want to know if there are others like him. I want to know if we’ve been betrayed.”

“I’ll find out.”

“We’ll find out,” Cooper corrected, coming to stand next to his older brother.

“Good. You handle the Coalition and I’ll get rid of the naturi. Now get out of here. I need to rest.”

Barrett nodded and allowed his brother to lead him out of the nightclub and out into the slowly dying night. I slumped onto the sofa the moment they were outside the club, the last of my strength seeming to drain from my body. Sunrise was but an hour away. I had just enough time to catch a taxi back to my home outside the city. I’d endured enough blood, pain, and betrayal for one night.