Dizziness swept over me. Maybe the getting up wasn’t such a smart move. I sat back on the bed. Lydia came over and sat next to me. She touched my cheek. If I was feeling better, I’d have swatted her hand away. I had to admit, however, that her cool hand felt nice.

She looked at Micah. “I think he might be getting warm again.”

Micah knelt in front of me. “Lydia has been looking after you day and night.” He touched my forehead. “Not hot. Just foolish in the getting-up-too-fast department.”

“I would never hurt you. Either of you.” Her voice cracked. “I realize I’ve been lying in omission. You can’t trust my grandmother, the council, or most people here. I’ll admit that. I’ll tell you whatever you need to know. I know you have no reason to believe me, but I won’t let them have you.”

Micah rolled his eyes. “You’re not stopping any Vampires from doing anything. Not yet, anyway. And if no one but you can be trusted, we’re going to have to figure some things out because he isn’t making a run for it tonight.”

“I could, if you need me to.” All bravado aside, I didn’t want to end up Vamp food while I was out of it.

She touched my arm. “Tomorrow. I was thinking I could hide you.”

“They’d find us.” We were going to have to come up with a better plan. “How many come and what’s the deal with the Werewolves? How do they feature in this drama?”

“Two of them usually.”

Micah stood. “I’ll take them out. Two Vampires are no problem. They’ll send more, right? But I can get those two out on my own.”

Lydia rose and went back to the window. It was her thinking spot. I’d seen her do it half a dozen times since I’d been in this room with her over the last two days. “The Werewolves are a problem, and we can’t deal with them. They know we’re basically unprotected. They won’t kill all of us because that would upset the Vampires. The Vampires won’t handle them or make them stop. As you said, they don’t make deals or at least they don’t anymore. Micah,” she spoke with her back to us, “if you kill them, the next Vampire that comes will kill all of us. I realize we’re not your problem and we were going to feed you to them. You have every right. I just wanted you to understand.”

I shouldn’t care. As she said, we were going to be bait. Still, my heart turned over. I’d spent time with these lying, devious people, and as much as I didn’t like what they’d done, I didn’t want to think of Charlie or any of the other innocents being Vampire feed. If I was honest, I didn’t want any of them to die. Particularly not a beautiful blonde woman who said she’d been in love with me at first sight. I pushed away that thought.

“Do you know where they are? Where the entrance to their lair is?”

She nodded. “Yes. If it means anything, Deacon, I was really hoping we’d find an entrance to some underground lair, if for no other reason than maybe I could get you two in it and save you from the Vampires.”

That was right. We’d spent hours together, and she hadn’t said a word about the Vampires. I shook my head. “We’ll deal with your lying later.” If at all. “It only takes a dozen Vampires to run a Vampire facility. They can keep up to two hundred humans subdued that way. If you’ve never seen a Vampire feed, you won’t understand. But…”

She stepped away from the window, looking at me. “I have, actually. Once.”

“Then you know. Everything inside of you revolts against the idea. Even when you’re raised with it as a factor in your life, there is some part of you that just can’t believe what you’re seeing is real. You would do anything to not have them feed on you.”

The first feeding I remembered was my friend, John. He’d been dragged off, and I’d followed. The Vampires had gone a step further from just feeding and killing him—they’d made him a Vampire. I shook my head. After that, he’d been my tormenter. I’d never forget the sight of those fangs descending into his neck, piercing the skin, his screams and the way the noise abruptly stopped…

I cleared my throat. Enough with the memories. “A dozen. Usually there are three Werewolves to keep the population subdued during the daytime and the few people they have working during daylight hours compliant.”

Lydia nodded. “That’s all very interesting, but I’m not sure…”

“He’s talking about a strike,” Micah confirmed. “Him and me in the Vampire facility, just us. A strategic strike. Three Werewolves, twelve Vampires. We can take them out and free your people, hence ending this nightmare. He’s right. Only problem is I’m not sure why you want to do this, Deacon, or if you’ll be able to.”

I rubbed my eyes. “Give me twenty-four hours. I’ll be ready. You can count on me. And I want to do this”—I distinctly didn’t look at Lydia so I wouldn’t confess that part of me wanted to do this for her—“because I hate Vampires. I hate they are screwing with human lives. I’ll never turn down the chance to deliver them a blow. Maybe if they get their men back, this town can stop luring in innocent people. Maybe the people here can have a real life.”

When I left here, I’d know Lydia could go on. She was kind. I believed that. The way she’d cared for me when I was ill told me that much about her. She was brave. She’d tried to take down Werewolves with a stick. If I could leave her with a life that didn’t include Vampires taking all the men in their town, then I’d have made life better for someone. That had to count for something.

“That was what Keith would have done.” I hated saying his name, but Micah needed to hear it.

He looked away. “Tomorrow. If you’re not well enough, I’ll do it myself.”

I’d never let that happen.

I fell asleep in the midafternoon. It was a hard sleep, the healing kind. I had to be better to help Micah take down the Vampires. This had been my idea. I thrashed around. Images of Vampires killing humans, my parents crying, fear, Rachel almost dying from the Werewolves, Keith’s death, Rachel coming down through the roof as the Werewolves hunted her—they were the predator she was their prey, blowing up Vampire holdings, the sounds of babies crying in the night with no one to hold them.

“Sshh.” The cold washcloth again. I opened my eyes. It was Lydia. “Just rest. You don’t have fever. You’re just having bad dreams.”

I touched her arm. “Memories. Where’s Micah?”

I didn’t ask her why she was there. I was just grateful she’d woken me up. “Doing something called patrol. Who’s Rachel?”

Now there was a question. The darkness made me feel like being honest. “She was a girl I loved. But she didn’t love me. We were more like best friends than anything else. She got married to another Warrior. She’s Micah’s sister-in-law.”

Lydia lay down next to me, stretched out. I scooted over to let her, glad the machete was on my side of the bed. She whispered her response. “Stupid girl.”

I laughed. “Or really smart. I told you. I’m not a hero.”

“I’m sorry I lied to you, Deacon. Believe it or not, lying goes against my very soul. I hate the feeling. If I could go the rest of my life without ever telling another one, I would gladly do so.”

The darkness was like a blanket. “I don’t know how much longer the two of us will know each other.”

She reached out and grabbed the edge of my shirt. “I hate that.”

“Okay, but it’s true. If you can tell me the truth between now and goodbye, even if it’s awful, I’ll let it go. I’ve lied when I had to. One time, an entire group of us lied to Rachel to get her to go along with a plan we knew she wouldn’t agree with. I get having to do what you have to do. That’s the world we live in. Just truth between us now?”

“Only truth.”

I was relieved by her answer. A cold breeze moved through the room, probably from the fireplace, and I pulled the covers around us. If she was staying with me, then I didn’t want either of us cold. “Did Rachel ever lie in the dark like this with you?”

That was an odd question. Then again, I didn’t understand women. “A few times.” It hadn’t felt like this. I was always half convinced she was going to kick me out because most of the time she did.

“I’ve never met her, I’ll likely never know her, but I hate her. Just a little bit.” She yawned and closed her eyes.

I listened to her breathe for a minute. “Why?”

She sighed. “You love her. And maybe that’s a stupid reason to hate someone I’ve never met. But we’re doing honest, right? I’m not a nice person.”

I pressed my nose against her hair. She smelled clean and like springtime. “You need sleep, Lydia. And… I don’t love her. Not as anything more than a friend, nothing more.”

I didn’t know if she heard me. Her breathing was even, her eyes closed. I put my arm around her and held on. I had to admit, in the darkness with a long night ahead of me, having Lydia share my covers made everything feel like it really might be okay.

I woke up to Micah shaking me gently. “Hey, sleepyhead, up.” I opened my eyes, and he smirked at me, looking over at the still sleeping Lydia. “Take it you two worked things out?”

I groaned and shoved at his leg since it was the closest thing I could reach. “Get your mind out of the gutter. We shared a bed.”

He smirked. “Get up, lover boy.”

I did and managed not to wince. I was going on this mission, and I wasn’t going to give him any reason to tell me not to. I was definitely better than the day before, if not quite ready. Micah couldn’t do what had to be done alone.

“She and I worked some things out.”

He elbowed me. “I’d think so, or it would be weird that you slept together.”

Lydia woke. I felt the long breath she took move through my body even though she was a distance away from me. My cock hardened, I somehow managed not to groan. I turned away, suddenly finding her thinking spot fascinating.

“Hey Micah, don’t you need to sleep?”

“I got an hour earlier in the night before I went on patrol. I’m good for twenty-four hours now.”

Talking to Micah helped. My blood cooled a bit, which was good because that was the second Lydia decided to speak. “Good morning.”

Did she always have a husky voice in the morning? I put my head on the glass panel of the window. There wasn’t anything interesting happening outside. “Morning.”

Micah walked to his bag and started rummaging inside of it. I didn’t have to guess what he was doing. He was going to sharpen his stakes. I knew the sounds of the wood banging around without having to look.

“Morning, Lydia. So we need directions. Where is the Vampire lair?”

She got out of bed. “I’m terrible with directions. I can do basic north, south, west, east but other than that I know where I’m going based on landmarks. Turn right at the tree that looks like the letter y. You’re going to hate this, but I have to bring you there.”

Micah groaned. “You can’t be fucking serious.”

“Hey.” I turned around. “Watch your language.”

“Ah.” Micah stared at me a long few seconds. “Sure. Sorry.”

Lydia waved her hand. “I’ve heard worse. Believe me. You haven’t met my father yet. Curses every other word.”

“Well, maybe we’re going to meet him today.” Micah rose. “Assuming you aren’t leading us to a trap.”

She nodded. “I’m not.”

I caught her eyes. We’d promised each other truth. This would be the chance for me to see if I was an idiot or if it was possible there was still good in the world.

The three of us walked through the woods.

Lydia spoke for the first time since we left Geronimo. “What would you two be doing in Genesis if you were still there?”

“Right now?” I looked at the sun in the sky. “I’d be asleep.”

Her eyes widened. “This late in the day?”

“As Warriors, we’re nocturnal,” Micah supplied. “We fight all night and sleep most of the day, except for the days when we guard the rest of the habitat from Werewolves. It’s a shifting around. Twenty-four hours off to get our body clocks shifted to daytime, and then we take on the guarding for a week.”

I shook my head. “I always feel awful for the first forty-eight hours. Then when I’m finally like yeah, daytime, I can live with daytime, I’m back to fighting every night.”

She scrunched up her face. “Your people must worry so much about you when you fight.”

“My people don’t worry about much. Having come up from the Vampire holding places, they’re mostly just happy to be above ground with food to eat.” I spoke without giving it much thought, and then I wished I hadn’t. The situation with my blasé family wasn’t something even Micah knew about. We’d gone out of our way to rescue them, and now they were… a problem.

Another reason I’d needed a long break from Genesis.

“My people are Warriors.” Micah gave no indication he’d even heard my announcement about my family. “Almost all of them. Mom doesn’t fight because my two little brothers are very young. She’ll likely get back to it soon. They’ll be fighting, too. Tia, my sister, doesn’t fight. She has a toddler to take care of. Not that she was much of a Warrior before that. Panicked her first time out and never went again.”

I shook my head. “That was a scene.”

“To say the least.” Micah smiled.

“I don’t have people like you.” Lydia looked away from me. “I mean, I’ve lived here my whole life. I can’t think of a single person I’d laugh with like you two do. We all spend so much time maintaining this lie, even when we don’t have anyone with us to give to the Vampires. No one is ever happy. Except Charlie.”

I touched her arm to get her attention. I liked her eyes on me. “That could change. And don’t be jealous; most of Micah’s and my stories start with, ‘Remember the time you were almost dismembered?’ ”

Micah snorted.

Lydia stopped moving. She pointed ahead. “Up there.”

Micah spoke without much emotion in his voice. “Well that’s a change.”

He was right. Most Vampire lairs were below ground, but the one in front of us had been constructed to look more like a fort. We’d twisted and turned so many times to get to the location, it wouldn’t be easily found by someone who wasn’t specifically looking for it.

“Are the Vampires living above ground?” Micah turned his head to the side like he was trying to get a good look at the thing.

“No.” Lydia sighed. “I don’t know anything except the location. I followed once. Mama took a belt to my rear for the effort later. I think most of the women from Geronimo don’t know where this is.”

“You do a lot of things you shouldn’t do, don’t you Lydia Matthis?” I admired her for it. I was usually the only one not obeying rules.

She shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Well.” I guessed this was goodbye for a bit. “Are you going to be okay to get back on your own?”

She raised her pale eyebrows. “Why would I do that? I mean, yes, I could. But I’m not leaving.”

“You’re not going in with us.” The idea made my neck stiff. She had no fighting skills and…

Lydia interrupted my thoughts. “Well, obviously not. I’m going to stay here and wait.”

“It’s cold.” I knew that wasn’t much of an answer. “We have no idea how long this will take.”

She held up three fingers. I’d never seen her do that before. Maybe we were rubbing off on her. That was a Warrior move. “You’re pretending to be fine. I’ve seen you wince three times since we left. Micah’s pretending he hasn’t seen it, too.”

Had I? I was so busy pretending I was okay I hadn’t noticed. Micah cleared his throat and looked away.

“You’re going to need help when you get back up. He’s going to be busy taking care of the people you guys rescue or dealing with whatever happened down there. I’m going to help you. You’re bringing people back who know me, not you. You’ll want me to be here. And thirdly.” She paused to blow out a breath. “I’m not some wilting flower. I can take the cold.”

Micah pointed to a large tree in the distance. “I’m going to wait over there.”

“Why?” I didn’t follow his statement, my mind still too caught up in trying to process Lydia’s remarks. She was right. I still hated the idea of her being cold. There had to be another solution that…

“So you can say goodbye to her. In case you die down there, and I have to drag your body back up for burial.”

I closed my eyes. “All right. Thanks for that image.”

“Yep.”

When I opened them again, Lydia’s cheeks were red. What Micah said wasn’t exactly correct. I had to explain it better. “He’d never drag my body back. If I’m dead, it’ll stay down there.”

“Deacon.” She shook her head. “How about ‘I’m not going to die?’ How about saying that?”

“But I don’t know if I’m going to die or not.”

She hugged me tightly to her. “Be careful. Okay?”

I put my arms around her. “I can’t be careful. It goes against the nature of this kind of thing.”

Lydia groaned. “Okay. Go.”

She let go and stepped back. “Thanks for believing me, by the way. I’ll show you every day we know each other that I’m not a liar.”

I walked toward Micah then stopped. “It could still be a trap. I won’t really know until it’s over, right?”

She rubbed her eyes. “Yes, you’re right.”

In two steps, I was to her, and before I could overthink it, I kissed her as gently as I could. She sighed against my mouth, and it moved through me. “Bye, Lydia. Try to stay warm. See you later.”

Her grin felt like summer had suddenly descended on me and we were in the middle of hot day.

I made my way to Micah, knowing I was about to hear about it.

He waited a beat before he spoke. “You know if she doesn’t turn out to be a sociopathic liar, she’ll be perfect for you. Or maybe she’s perfect even if she is one.”

I shoved him. “Bite me.”

His mood shifted, and I felt the change in energy. Serious Micah had shown up. He turned to me before he spoke. “Split up or go together?”

I thought for a second before I answered him. “Together until we have more of an idea of what we’re dealing with.”

He nodded. “Agreed.”

I didn’t let myself turn and look at Lydia again when I made my way toward the fort. I could feel her eyes on my back. I took a deep breath. Maybe it was better when no one worried.

Getting into the fort proved a challenge. We ended up having to scale the wall. Before Micah gripped a brick, he eyed me. “Up for this?”

“Fuck off.” I gripped the brick. My stitches were holding. Nothing had changed. I was doing this.

He nodded. “That’s what I thought you’d say.”

Took us ten minutes to get up and over the wall. I didn’t know if it really was as hard as it seemed or if it was just my body letting me down. Micah took as long, only I wasn’t sure if he’d done that in solidarity with me or if he’d found it challenging, too. That wasn’t a question Warriors asked each other.

We landed on the ground on the other side. The long stretch of climb at least told me no one watched. We would have had trouble on the inside if they had. My hands were cut up from the gray bricks. The walls would have been non-scalable had the building not been constructed a long time ago.

I waved off the sensation of pain and looked around. There was no one living in the fort, at least not above ground. We searched until we found the entrance to the Vampire holding.

Most of the time, there were just lids covering holes in the ground. It wasn’t like there were all that many people looking to go fight Vampires. Even in Genesis, the Warriors had their hands full without invading Vampire holdings. Rachel had led the crusade to take them down after Chad died. Other than that, they were pretty much left alone. There weren’t enough humans left alive in the world to manage everything that was wrong with it.

“Sincerely missing Clancy’s bombs right now.”

I bent over. The Vampires near Genesis had to be crafty. They locked up their entrances. I tugged on the lid, and it slid right off. “Looks like they’re not concerned.”

“Probably think they’re safe because of the walls.” He turned back. “See that lever? I bet it brings down a gate. Do it now?”

“No.” I shook my head. “They might hear that. We’re going to be doing this as quietly as possible.”

I had my machete on my back in case of Werewolves, but otherwise, the stake was my friend. It didn’t help to cut off a Vamp's head. They just grew back. I pushed away the memories; it didn’t do me any good to dwell on them.

“Follow me down.” I grabbed the ladder and swung my feet down to take the rungs two at a time. If there was trouble at the bottom, I wanted to face it, not leave it to Micah to handle. This was my need to take down every Vampire I saw, not his. He would get out of this alive.

No one was at the bottom, which wasn’t a surprise in the middle of the day. Best time to beat the Vamps was when they were sluggish. They weren’t able to handle sunlight. Underground, that wasn’t any problem. But their body clocks still made them the least lethal when the sun shone, even if they couldn’t see it.

They never slept. They moved slower.

Micah got down the ladder and looked around. “Do they all look alike? This one is just the same as the ones by Genesis?”

“As far as I know. Don’t forget, it was the same crazy humans who built them all.”

He smiled. “How could I ever forget? They were the same fuckers who shoved me in stasis.”

I didn’t have those memories. This place, this kind of existence, was all I’d ever known.