Chapter Twenty-eight

The vision, or whatever it was, snapped, leaving me staring at Claire’s hallway. And visibly shaking and feeling like screaming; I wasn’t sure why. I suddenly had so many reasons to choose from.

The fey weren’t looking much better. Two of them had naked swords in their hands, but were being held back by Tall Guy. Coffee Lover was plastered to the wall, one hand on his sword hilt and the other clutching his mug, most of the contents of which were sloshed down his front. The final fey was on the ground underneath me, his face red with gore and broken blood vessels, his expression as shell-shocked as I felt.

Because that . . . What the hell was that?

Nobody spoke. Sunlight was streaming through the octagonal window, the beams lighting up the dust in the air and putting an ironic halo around the head of Angry Ass. The fey weapons were sliding back into their sheaths, courtesy of a terse gesture from Tall Guy, who must have noticed the change in my expression. Because Dorina’s rage—or mine, or a combination of both—was simply gone.

It looked like time had rewound and I’d just come out of my room, except that I was sitting on a fey.

I sat there some more.

Dorina, I thought blankly, but didn’t get anything back.

One of the fey cleared his throat. It wasn’t the guy on the floor, whose eyes were starting to pop, I realized. I slowly pulled my fingers out of his flesh and a sigh rippled around the hall, along with a fervent sentence from Coffee Lover in a language I didn’t know.

I also didn’t care.

“Dorina?” I said again, my eyes flicking around, as if I was waiting for her to materialize out of thin air.

Nothing.

“Dorina!” I waited, my heart about to beat out of my chest, my breath coming heavily as it hadn’t during the fight.

More nothing. She wasn’t going to talk to me. And there was a reason for that, wasn’t there?

“I didn’t tell Mircea to do that!” I yelled. “It wasn’t my fault!”

The silence was deafening. And accusing. But I couldn’t defend myself if she wouldn’t—

“Damn it, talk to me!” A sudden surge of emotion tore through me: anger, fear, longing, sadness. I didn’t know what it was, or why it was there; I just knew I was tearing up. Which made me even more frantic, because there was nowhere for the emotion to go.

She wasn’t here.

But she had been here, just a minute ago. And now she was gone, because, what? There was nothing left to talk about?

“Dorina . . .” I said, and even to me, it sounded sad and broken and weak.

No wonder she didn’t want to talk to me.

Someone cleared his throat. “It is Dory, yes?”

I looked up at Tall Guy, half-blind with tears I didn’t understand. He was staring at me along with everyone else, but instead of looking angry or shocked like the rest, his face was almost . . . gentle. It confused me.

“Are you unwell?” he asked, after a moment.

“I . . . don’t know.”

He crouched down beside me, and I realized that I was still straddling his guy. Should probably do something about that, as soon as I made sure that he wasn’t going to attack me again. And figured out why he had in the first place.

I poked him in the chest. “What’s your deal, again?”

He didn’t say anything.

His face was still too red, his eyes too prominent, and his stare too distant. He looked like he was reevaluating his life choices. Tall Guy didn’t have that problem, and after a moment, he answered.

“There is a series of heroic deeds among our people,” he told me. “Or ‘challenges’ might be a better word. Nine in all that, if performed before witnesses, grant . . .” He frowned. “There is no equivalent in English. One is remembered in song and legend thereafter, counted among the bravest of the brave, and greatly admired by one’s fellow warriors.”

“And that has what to do with me?”

“One of the nine is to defeat a vargr in battle,” he admitted.

Great.

“Well, I’m not one, so jumping me before I have breakfast won’t bring you any renown,” I told Angry Ass, and climbed off him.

He flushed some more, I guess at the implication that he’d tried to take me down when I was at less than my best. But he didn’t say anything. Maybe because I still had his knife.

Dorina had shoved it in my—our—pocket, why I had no idea. To make the point that she didn’t need it to kill him? To keep as a souvenir? To leave me a message?

A spot of blood had run off the blade and stained my sweats. It wasn’t much, and it wasn’t mine, but it showed that, despite my best efforts, she’d gotten a blade in him. I swallowed, feeling sick.

“What do you mean, you’re not vargr?” Coffee Lover asked. “The king said—”

“The king doesn’t know everything,” I rasped.

There was a stunned silence, like I’d blasphemed in church.

“The king doesn’t know everything about me,” I rephrased, shaking my head to clear it.

Tall Guy looked confused. He had a long, somewhat homely face for a fey, with a slightly bulbous tip to the nose, and eyes that were too small and too close together. It made him look like a puzzled greyhound.

I decided I needed a name for him. I didn’t usually bother, since I couldn’t tell them apart anyway, but he seemed to be in charge. Or maybe just older. He had that seen-it-all-didn’t-think-much-of-it world-weariness of an old soldier. He was also something approaching eight feet tall, putting him almost a foot above the rest of the fey, including Caedmon. So I thought I’d remember.

“You have a name?” I asked, expecting the usual speech I got from the fey before I’d learned not to ask that question. They tended to rattle off all the nicknames they’d won over the years, I suppose as a way of telling you something about themselves. But it was annoying.

Except for this time, when I got exactly two syllables.

“Olfun.”

“Okay, Olfun. I’m having kind of a . . . problem . . . lately. Call it a split personality; call it whatever you want. Just don’t fuck with it, okay? ’Cause I’m not always the one in charge.”

The confusion didn’t go away, but he didn’t ask any stupid questions. “All right.”

I handed him back his guy’s knife, because the fey are weird about their weapons, and I didn’t need any more trouble.

“See what I can do about the coffee,” I said, and went downstairs.

---

Mircea wasn’t answering his phone. He was probably at the consul’s, where the wards played hell with modern tech. I knew that. It didn’t keep me from wanting to punch through the wall, however.

I was on the front porch, because I needed some air and it was getting harder to find any place to be alone around here. I’d called Mircea because I didn’t know who else to call, but I didn’t need him. I needed his daughter, and she wasn’t reachable by phone.

Or any other way I knew.

And, honestly, I couldn’t blame her.

I didn’t even know why I wanted her to talk to me so badly, because what was I going to say? Yell again that it wasn’t my fault? I didn’t see that helping.

Especially since it kind of was.

I flashed back to a half-remembered dream, one of the ones she’d shown me because I didn’t recall the years we’d spent in Venice at all. Mircea hadn’t been sure that this barrier of his would hold; Dorina’s mental gifts threatened it, and he’d been afraid that if I started to get curious, too, it might undermine the whole thing. So he’d made sure I never would by erasing my memories of the place—all of them.

For centuries, I’d had gaping holes in my past filled with absolutely nothing, which I’d put down to the crazy, but which were actually things Mircea had thought might trigger my curiosity. I hadn’t remembered Horatiu, the kindly old man who had apparently been important to me, other than as a servant of Mircea’s. I hadn’t recalled the quirky house on the ocean, where I’d spent much of my childhood. And I definitely hadn’t remembered my child body twisting in agony as Dorina raged inside her little human cage.

Because how was she supposed to develop properly like that?

I didn’t know how she’d developed at all. Vampires didn’t. Not even those taken as children, which was why it was forbidden to change one so young. But it had happened in the past, when the rules weren’t as well enforced, and what had been the result?

Nothing. A child vamp was a child vamp. He got stronger with age and feeding, but never matured, because his growth had been arrested at the moment he was changed. Leaving him as limited in understanding as he’d ever been, no matter how many years of experience he gained, because his brain just . . . stayed the same.

Which had caused some seriously messed-up masters, on occasion, with all the petulance, two-dimensional thinking and tantrums of a child, in a body capable of leveling a small city.

I didn’t think that was true of Dorina—the bits I remembered from her memories had seemed adult enough—but I didn’t know. Like I didn’t know what happened to a vampire’s brain when it did evolve, when it was forced to change and grow, because the eternally static body it was in wasn’t so static. When something meant to be forever the same was ripped apart, over and over again, as the human child it had been welded to in the womb decided to have another growth spurt.

No wonder most dhampirs died in childhood, and the rest went mad!

Or were walled away in a tiny section of my mind, only able to emerge when I was asleep or when my mental grip was compromised through shock, anger, or fear. God! No wonder she hated me!

And once done, the separation had been permanent. Her mental powers had been growing right alongside Mircea’s, because a few decades’ difference in age is no time at all in vampire terms. He’d told me once that he’d been afraid of lowering the barrier, because once it was down, he might never be able to raise it again. At the time, it had sounded like the truth. Maybe it even was.

Or maybe it was a convenient excuse, a small voice said.

I shifted uneasily.

So, instead of a life with occasional wild episodes, Dorina had had only a fraction of one, and had lived it with the knowledge that Mircea, the father she’d loved, the father she’d rescued, didn’t feel the same way. Because Horatiu had been right; it hadn’t been me that night, scouring the streets for him. Mircea had been saved by someone who spoke to him mentally, something I still had trouble with.

So it had been Dorina.

And since she’d also been the one to send me memories of that talk in the kitchen, she must have been listening. Or maybe riding along again, which made it worse. If someone said something hurtful, you could try to pass it off as their having a bad day, and lashing out. Could convince yourself that they didn’t really mean it. But if you were in their head at the time?

She’d known he was serious, that he thought of her as a monster. Or, worse than that, he thought of her as a disease. The same one that had stolen everything from him, from his life to his position to his wife. And was now killing the only thing he had left.

Like he’d wanted to kill her.

I swallowed, and put my arms around myself, because what the fuck did that do to you? Growing up knowing your only parent didn’t just hate you, but wanted you dead? And that, since he couldn’t kill you without killing the daughter he did want, he was determined to lock you away.

Forever.

I felt the old ball of anger and distrust for him well up, the one I’d carried for so long that it felt normal, natural. Mircea had separated from me after I reached adulthood, and the memory wipe that followed had made certain that I thought of him as a cold, distant master vamp, ashamed of the nasty dhampir he’d sired. And who seemed to show up only when he wanted something.

He’d told me recently that he’d been concerned that his growing status would put a spotlight on me, a dangerous prospect, since the deal he’d made with the Senate to overlook my existence was nullified once I grew up. And because he himself might serve as a trigger to all those repressed memories. Maybe it was even true.

But it had left us most definitely at odds, to the point that this recent spate of familial closeness felt strange. Nice in some ways, but strange nonetheless. My default was hating him, or at least seriously suspecting him. I hadn’t known what to do with the other feelings that had been bubbling up lately.

Like I didn’t know what to do with this.

I sat there on the steps, the sun on my face, but my thoughts dark. He’d condemned Dorina and me to a half-life, but what else was he supposed to do? What would I have done, in his place? Kept looking for another solution while the fits tore my kid apart, fits I could stop with knowledge I already had?

It reminded me of those parents with a troubled pregnancy, the ones forced to select one child to die so that the other might live. Lose one, or lose them both; a horrible choice.

But how much worse was it when the one selected out knew it? When she was aware that she’d been made into a sacrifice? That her life had been deemed less important; her wishes discounted; her hopes, dreams, and ambitions stifled, so that her far less talented sister might thrive? What the hell happened then?

The phone rang. I put it to my ear automatically, not even checking first. And, of course, it was Mircea.

“Dorina?”

Wrong number, I thought, half hysterically, and didn’t say anything.

“Dorina?”

His voice was as mellifluous as always. He could do wonders with that voice. Could charm emperors and kings with that voice. Could persuade master vampires into agreements they didn’t want at all, which was a lot harder than talking to kings.

“Dorina?” It was becoming more insistent.

“Sorry. Butt dial,” I whispered, and hung up.

I sat there some more. I felt dizzy, in limbo, uncharacteristically numb. I didn’t know what to do.

Not that it was up to me, or to Mircea, either. For the first time, the ball was in Dorina’s court. She could do what she wanted, and I couldn’t blame her for whatever she chose. Like I couldn’t blame her anymore for the life we’d lived. Or for the life I’d lived, I corrected, which suddenly seemed like paradise in comparison.

So now what? The thought left me feeling sick and worried, and seriously off-balance. She hadn’t banished me, but I wasn’t sure whether that was a good sign or not. She might be testing these new waters, making sure that the mental tie we had wouldn’t drag her off along with me.

Or maybe she didn’t intend to do anything at all. It wasn’t like she needed to risk it. As she’d demonstrated twice now, she could emerge whenever she chose, and wrestle control away from me, because she’d always been stronger. And that was with the wall still partially up. What would happen when the last pieces fell?

What would happen when she could trap me in the same hell that she’d been forced to endure, or banish me entirely?

I turned the phone back on and punched in a different number. Because if I couldn’t talk to Dorina, I needed to talk to someone who knew her. And better than Mircea seemed to.

“Hello?”

“Uh, hello. I’d like to speak to Horatiu, please.”

“And who may I say is calling?”

I sighed, because this never went well. Mircea’s masters were better than most, better than the ones at the Senate, who usually hissed at me unless Daddy was around, but it was a matter of degree. Mircea’s masters looked like they wanted to hiss, but were manfully holding back because they had better breeding than that.

Unlike me.

“Dory,” I snapped, because didn’t he have caller ID? “And I don’t want a problem, okay? I just want to talk—”

“Lady Dorina, is that you?”

I paused, and looked at the phone. Not because of the words, which could have been sarcasm, but because of the tone. The guy, whoever it was, had sounded . . . delighted.

“Uh. Yeah.”

“How wonderful to hear from you!”

I stared at the phone some more. I resisted an impulse to shake it. And then I did it anyway, because happy little burbling noises were coming out of it and freaking me out.

“Can I speak to Horatiu?” I finally cut in.

The burbling stopped. And was replaced by a gushing, apologetic vamp explaining to me what I should have already known, because Horatiu wasn’t a master. He was barely even a vampire, since Mircea hadn’t gotten around to changing the old man until he was on his deathbed, and those sorts often don’t take properly. Leaving the family with a doddering, mostly deaf, and almost completely blind vampire, who because of Mircea’s huge fondness for him could do whatever the hell he wanted.

Including sleep in.

“What time does he usually get up?” I almost yelled, to be heard over the effusions of joy that speaking to me had apparently brought to this vamp’s life.

There were a lot of them.

“Thank you!” I finally yelled. “Tell him I’ll be by later.”

And then I hung up, and just sat there, staring at the phone some more.

What the hell?