by Karen Chance
“All packed, then?” That was the consul, suddenly moving forward on her own, without her guards, but with a creepy smile on her face. I couldn’t see it, being behind her, but Caedmon’s reaction was eloquent.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your sister. You did say she was leaving us?”
“I—yes. We both are. I’ll be taking her with me.”
“Very well. I should like to wish her a safe journey. If she is available?”
“I . . . will go and check.”
Someone touched my shoulder, and I looked around to find Mircea standing behind me. He pulled me over beside some yellow-and-white-striped chairs, but we didn’t sit down. He put a hand on my cheek and looked into my eyes like he was trying to see something behind them.
Or someone.
“Are you all right?”
“She’s not here,” I said irritably.
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I’m fine. What’s going on?”
“It’s . . . complicated.”
It usually was around here. I decided to cut to the chase. “Am I free to go? Or are they planning to pull out some fingernails first?”
A small frown appeared on the otherwise unlined forehead. “You helped the consul, possibly saved her life. If you hadn’t realized that thing was riding her, and disrupted its concentration—”
“I also got a blade in her. How long has it been since that happened?”
Mircea’s lips quirked. “Some time, I believe. But it was preferable to the alternative.”
“So I’m free to go?”
“In a moment.”
Why did I know he was going to say that?
“First I wish to hear about Dorina. You said she was talking to you. Has she done that before?”
“Not directly.”
“Meaning?” It was sharp.
“Meaning, usually she just sends me these weird dreams—”
“What kind of dreams?”
I rubbed my eyes, and suppressed a yawn. I kept getting sleep, but not enough. Possibly because I was constantly being woken up in the middle of it. “More like memories. Your memories, mostly. She was hitching a ride on you a lot while growing up—did you know?”
He grimaced. “Eventually. I would have preferred to realize it before I spent quite so many nights in dissolute company.”
“And in dissolute beds?”
He raised an eyebrow. “More like playing cards in rough taverns. Sometimes I wonder what you think of me.”
So did I. But he’d been doing the good-father routine in the stuff Dorina had showed me, fighting to keep her—us—safe, and putting himself in danger to do it. I was about to ask how he’d got off that damned death boat, and if it was Dorina whose voice he’d heard, but I didn’t get the chance.
“What has she shown you?” It was idle—too much so. Mircea and I don’t make a lot of small talk.
“Why? What are you afraid of?”
“Nothing. But if you want to know about those days, you have only to ask. I could tell you—”
“But it would be from your perspective, wouldn’t it?”
He didn’t say anything, and his face—of course—gave nothing away. But, somehow, I knew I was right. “That’s it, isn’t it? You’re afraid of me seeing things through her eyes. Is that why you told her not to talk to me?”
“No.”
“Then why? Because it’s caused some damned problems, Mircea!”
“And could cause more, if you allow it to continue.”
His expression hadn’t changed, but his voice was clipped, the way it got when he was angry—or afraid. He didn’t process fear any better than I did; he just hid it better. We both had a tendency to lash out, to savage whatever was threatening us, even if that was each other. It had led to some truly spectacular fights in the past.
“I warned her to be careful,” he told me. “Now I am warning you. Give yourself time.”
“Assuming I have any.”
I’d spoken without thinking, because I was still half-asleep. But of course he picked up on it. And pulled me even farther away from the others—I didn’t know why. With the acoustics in here, and with most people’s hearing, we could be eavesdropped on from anywhere in the room.
Or maybe not.
“Explain,” he told me, but I was preoccupied, watching Burbles and the other guys suddenly start drifting this way.
“What are they doing?”
“Putting up a screen.”
“What?”
“Creating mental white noise.” Mircea’s voice was impatient. “No one will hear us.”
“No one but them.”
“They’re family.”
Maybe yours, I thought, watching Burbles flutter his fingers over a tray of hors d’oeuvres that was being passed around. “Are these fey?” he asked delightedly.
“Yes.” The blond fey holding the tray bent down a little, to provide better access, since he was tall enough to give Olfun a run for his money. And I suddenly understood why the consul had NBA-sized guards.
She was damned if anyone was going to tower over her people in her own house.
“Dory.” That was Mircea.
“I don’t know if I can explain,” I told him. “I don’t know what Dorina wants, since I haven’t been able to talk to her. But I’ve been getting mixed messages.”
“Such as?”
“On the one hand, she’s sending me dreams about that mission you were on back in Venice, to find the people murdering vampires for their bones. You remember?”
“Vividly.”
Yeah, I guessed so. “Anyway, I haven’t got the whole story, but I saw enough to realize that the same thing is happening now. Only with fey bones instead of vampire—”
“Yes, Kit told me what you said. So that’s how you knew what was in those weapons.”
“Partly. There were other clues, but I wouldn’t have made that connection without Dorina, and I think she sent it to me on purpose. Like she picked up something when we were at the fights a few days ago, and wanted me to know.”
“And the other?”
“What?”
“The other hand. I assume there’s also been a downside?”
“Yeah, well.” I thought about the last few days. “That’s one way of putting it.”
“So delicious,” Burbles was saying. “So, so good. What was that again?”
The fey waiter said a word I couldn’t pronounce.
“And what is that?”
“I do not know the equivalent in English. Stuffed . . . field mouse?”
Burbles turned slightly green.
“How exactly would you put it?” Mircea demanded.
I hesitated. I don’t claim any diplomatic abilities myself, but even I have limits. And telling somebody “There’s a chance your daughter might hate you and also me and has every reason to do so” is a bit much.
But as it turns out, I didn’t have to.
“I know what Dorina thinks of me,” Mircea said grimly. “I locked her away. It was meant to be temporary, until you stopped growing and caught up.”
“But it wasn’t,” I pointed out. “Why?”
The dark eyes glanced around the room, distracted—or disingenuous. “I’ve told you. I was afraid I couldn’t raise the wall again once it fell. If you weren’t compatible, and couldn’t live as one, I would lose you both.”
“As it was, you just lost her.”
“I didn’t lose her!” The dark eyes snapped back to me. “The situation wasn’t ideal, but as you’ve seen, she wasn’t trapped. Physically, yes, unless you were asleep or let your emotions get the better of you. But mentally she could go anywhere. Anywhere she could find an avatar, that is.”
“And you decided that was
enough for her.”
It wasn’t harsh, or even inflected. I didn’t have the control over my voice that the vamps did, and right then I was too tired to try. But Mircea flinched anyway.
That must have really struck a nerve.
“I didn’t think it was enough! But it was better than nothing—which is what I would have had otherwise!”
“What you would have had?” I felt my forehead wrinkle. “What about what she had? She could go flitting about, riding different people, but she wasn’t in control of any of them. She can’t just take over like that. Maybe in an emergency, but not reliably, and not for long.”
It hit me suddenly that Dorina had been left just . . . watching things. She could get out, see the world, watch other people’s families, lovers, children, but could never have any of her own. And wasn’t that almost worse than the reverse? To be left watching others live while you have no way to influence anything, decide anything, plan anything . . .
Even with me. I chose where we went. Dorina just went along for the ride.
And now, after five hundred years, what did she want? Had anyone ever asked her? Had she ever even asked herself?
Maybe part of the reason she hadn’t talked to me was that she didn’t know what she wanted yet. I could relate. Until I met Claire, and finally found some sort of stability, I hadn’t done a lot of planning, either. What was the point when you don’t see a future anyway?
But now, after all this time, Dorina could have one.
Damn, it was a miracle she hadn’t banished me already.
“Banished?”
Shit.
“Stay out of my head.”
“You’re projecting.”
“Don’t give me that. I couldn’t project shit right now. My head feels like a lead balloon.”
“Perhaps if you would cease beating it into hard things, it would not.”
Mircea turned me around, and ran practiced fingers over my scalp. The bump was in the back this time, where I’d almost cracked my skull against the hard marble of the consul’s wall, thanks to her sending me and everybody else in the area flying out of the way of her little storm. I couldn’t complain too much, since I’d be a skeleton right now otherwise, but damn, it hurt!
Until Mircea’s soothing fingers stole the pain away, better than a shot of morphine.
I drowsily watched Burbles, who was back at it again, I guess in the hopes of bettering interspecies relations. “What a lovely little molded salad, with all the tiny flowers in! Why, it’s almost too pretty to eat—”
The server plucked it out of his hand, halfway to his mouth. “Sir. Please do not consume the tray ornaments.”
“There’s another way,” Mircea murmured.
“Another way for what?”
“Out of this dilemma we find ourselves in.”
I turned around to look at him, because there was something in his voice. “What dilemma?”
He frowned. No, it was more like a full-blown scowl, which I guess he could risk, being currently hidden from the room. Doubly so, since the consul’s guards had also drifted over here, leaving us behind two walls of vamps and cut off from everything.
But it was still strange.
Like the small shiver that suddenly went up my spine.
“You and Dorina.”
It was my turn to frown. “What about us?”
Mircea suddenly gripped my arm. “Do you think to hide it from me? I know exactly how powerful she is, what she can do. I know what she can do to you.”
I shifted uncomfortably in my stiff, backless slippers. I wasn’t ready to talk about this right now. I wasn’t ready to talk here at all, where the walls had ears and Marlowe, damn him, was probably listening in no matter what Mircea said. Not that I thought I’d be any more prepared back home.
“We will discuss it now,” Mircea said grimly. “If she already has this much access to your mind, there’s no choice. We have to act, and act soon.”
“Act how? What are you—”
“These new weapons. They aren’t normal magic, the type the mages produce. Our kind can’t manipulate that, can’t use it. We can buy it, at a high cost, from others, but that’s all. But this . . . The energy in those weapons was taken from the life force of the creatures providing it.”
“What? Then the soul thing . . . is true?”
“Soul thing?”
“Something some of the fey believe. That their souls are, well—that somehow they end up in their bones. Ask Caedmon.”
“I will.” Mircea looked at the fey king, still arguing with Louis-Cesare. The expression did not bode well for him. “All we know for certain is that the weapons are utilizing life magic, the same kind we tap into when we feed. And that kind of magic we can utilize; we do so every day!”
“So?”
“So that cache that the mages stole back tonight, if we could find it again . . .” He licked his lips. It was such an uncharacteristic gesture that I stared. He didn’t notice. “There should be enough.”
“Enough for what? Mircea, what are you talking about?”
His eyes found mine again. “The problem with separating the two of you was always the amount of power it required. Especially now, with the age gap between Dorina and me insignificant. On my own, I cannot hope to contain her. But with the power in those weapons . . .”
I gripped his arm, the shiver a full-on shudder now. “Mircea! What are you saying?”
Dark brown eyes bored into mine, fierce and compelling. “I’m saying . . . that I might be able to rebuild the wall.”
Chapter Forty-nine
I stared up at him. This close, he and Radu could almost have been twins instead of brothers. The arched brows, the patrician nose—just a little too straight for aquiline—the high cheekbones and the sculpted lips were all the same.
But no one would ever have any trouble telling them apart.
Radu had a slightly more delicate cast to the features, which had earned him the sobriquet “the Handsome,” once upon a time. Mircea was plenty handsome himself, but it wasn’t the same type. There was a sweetness to Radu, a gentleness that had somehow survived everything that had happened to him. His thick lashes and bright eyes had always reminded me of a stag: beautiful, regal, occasionally silly, one of nature’s great works of art.
But lovely as it was, and as powerful as it could be at times, a stag was still prey.
And Mircea could never be that.
He was the wolf in the darkness, the eagle flying overhead, the predator you never saw coming. The eyes could melt with genuine feeling, or brighten with laughter, or charm or seduce or any of the other thousand tricks in his repertoire. But if you looked close enough, you could see them, even then: the watchful eyes of the predator, staring back at you.
I recognized them because I had them, too. I sometimes wondered if that’s why we clashed so often. We were too alike: too stubborn, too suspicious, too . . . something. We’d never had an easy relationship; I doubted we ever would. But I wanted that relationship, no matter how much I’d denied it—wanted it fiercely.
And so did Dorina.
She might resent him, even hate him, but she loved him, too. I remembered that pang of longing she’d felt in the hall, while he searched for her. Remembered and experienced it all over again, because it echoed the same emotion in me. She loved him, however much she didn’t want to; loved him despite knowing it wasn’t returned; loved him even after he locked her away.
And now he was planning to do it all over again?
How could he do that?
How could he even think that?
“Because I want you to live.” Hard hands gripped me. I struggled, but was too weak to break his hold, to do anything but stare up at him in disbelief and pain—hers, mine, ours, I wasn’t sure anymore.
How could he do this?
>
“Listen to me!”
“I’ve listened to you for five hundred years, and what has it got me?”
“Life!”
I laughed, and it was cruel. I heard it in my voice, but couldn’t stop it, didn’t care. “Yeah, and I’ve enjoyed it so.”
“More than you would have if I’d done nothing!”
I’d finally managed to pull away, and had started to walk off to clear my head, but at that I rounded on him. “How do you know that? How do you know anything? You don’t know much about me, and less about her! Maybe she could have compensated in time; maybe we’d have reached some kind of balance. Or maybe not. Maybe we’d have been torn apart like all those other dhampirs, and died screaming, but you don’t know. Because you had to interfere, to handle everything, just like you always do—how has that worked out, Mircea?”
“Better than the alternative!”
I spread my hands. “How? I’ve spent centuries scrabbling, half-mad, on the edges of a society that hates me, looking for a foothold I only found because of her. Meanwhile, she’s been caged like some kind of animal, only able to emerge when there’s something to kill, abandoned, alone—and now you’re planning to do it all over again!”
A hand like steel found my arm. “I am planning to save your life! Something you will not have if she banishes you. And you’ve thought about it—don’t deny it. That word came from your head, not mine. You’ve thought—”
“Maybe I have.” I struggled with his hold and went nowhere. “It doesn’t mean she’ll do it!”
“And it doesn’t mean she won’t. Vampires have a constant war between our two natures, pulled by the beast on one hand and our humanity on the other. Forced to reconcile the two because we don’t have a choice. You do. And now so does she—”
“I’m not listening to this.”
“Yes, you are. For once you are going to listen—”
“For once? For once?” I stared at him.
“You never listen—”
“You never talk!”
“Well, I’m talking now.” It was grim. “We vampires have no choice but to blend our two natures, to come to equilibrium or to go mad—and some do. Unable to reconcile the monstrous part of themselves that every human has, but that every human does not have to feed. We cannot hide from what we are; we have to prey on others to survive. But we cannot give in to it utterly, or we risk becoming the monsters we are so often thought to be. It is a constant balancing act and there are times—oh, yes, there are times—when we would love to banish one part or the other.
