Chapter Six

I woke up in a bed that smelled of butterscotch.

My favorite flavor, I thought, stretching. And rolled onto something muscle hard and skin soft that was taking up most of my bed. Like warm candy, I thought, my lips finding a nipple.

Strong hands gripped my waist.

“You aren’t up to this,” Louis-Cesare’s voice informed me.

“Neither are you, but give me a minute.”

I went back to the candy.

Until I was rolled over, which should have been pleasurable but which surprisingly . . . was not.

“Ow,” I said, my ribs protesting vocally.

“I told you.”

I opened my eyes to find a curtain of auburn hair falling on either side of my face, my favorite blue eyes looking down at me in concern, and my hands caught above my head to keep them out of trouble.

Damn, he knew I liked that.

It made for a challenge.

The blue eyes took on a rueful gleam, and the delicious chest moved back, just out of reach.

“I’m serious,” he informed me. “Doctor’s orders.”

“Dhampir,” I reminded him. “Don’t need a doctor. Unless he’s doctor luuuv.”

That got me a burst of laughter and an eye roll. Because Louis-Cesare seemed to like it when I was silly. Especially when I was naked and silly.

I slid along underneath him, and watched those gorgeous eyes catch fire. I’d never known blue could burn before I met him, I thought, right before warm lips caught mine. And, yes, they were very nice lips. And a very nice tongue. And very nice teeth, nipping at me gently.

I wrapped my legs around him, because that was more like it.

And suddenly found myself vertical, with hard hands under my butt and strong legs carting me off somewhere, which turned out to be the bathroom.

I can work with this, I decided, as my backside came to rest on the countertop.

He leaned over to start the shower, and I enjoyed a view of the world’s greatest ass for a moment. And then the world’s greatest chest, when he stood back up. Which was nice to look at but even nicer to rest my head against, the skin-to-skin contact just so . . . damned . . . good. Warm like the bed had been, and the shower would be—in half an age, because the ancient water heater took its time. Not that I minded, I thought drowsily, my hands sliding over intriguing dips and valleys . . .

And then spazzing out, when I was suddenly drenched by a warm waterfall.

“W-what?” I choked, staring around wildly—

At the inside of my bath.

It looked the way it always did: cracked blue and white tile on the walls, fat old porcelain fixtures on the claw-foot tub, eyelet shower curtain billowing out because my roommate had decorated the place and she’s a girlie girl.

And because of the steam.

The shower was hot.

“How . . . how did you do that?” I asked Louis-Cesare, who had turned me around to soap up my back.

“Do what?” he murmured, as I braced my hands on the tile and wondered, What the hell?

“The water.” I struggled to think past the rhythmic soothing of those callused hands. “It’s hot.”

“Isn’t it supposed to be?”

“Yes, but not now. It takes forever—”

“Almost fifteen minutes,” he agreed. “You need a new—what do they call it? The device that heats the water.”

“A water heater, and no, I don’t. I need to know what’s going on.” I twisted around, because all the stroking was making my brain fuzzy, and I needed to be sharp right now.

Louis-Cesare’s forehead wrinkled slightly. “I am helping you to bathe. The doctor said it would relieve some of your stiffness—”

“Not about that! About the time.”

“What time?” The wrinkle was starting to deepen.

“You just said we’ve been in here fifteen minutes—”

He nodded. “About that, why?”

“Because I don’t remember them. I don’t remember any of them!”

I stared around, suddenly feeling trapped. It felt like the curtains were closing in. Only it wasn’t the curtains, it was me, and how do you feel claustrophobic in your own skin?

I was finding out.

“Dorina—”

“Don’t call me that!”

“Dory, then,” Louis-Cesare said, his voice deliberately soothing. Like I didn’t know what that was. Like I wouldn’t pick up on a vampire suggestion after half a lifetime of them!

Exactly half a life, I thought, my skin going cold despite the hot water pattering down.

I had to get out of here!

“Dory!”

The sharpness of the tone suddenly snapped me back, and I looked dizzily up at a wet master vampire, water dripping off his now dark brown hair, and more drops trembling on his brows and lashes. Louis-Cesare clothed and dry was stunning. Louis-Cesare naked and wet could have stopped traffic for a forty-mile stretch. But my panic didn’t seem to care.

“What is wrong?” he demanded, somehow holding on to me, despite my current, soapy state.

“I told you! I don’t remember, and Dorina—” I stopped to stare around some more, like I expected to find her hanging off the ceiling or something. Like a bat.

I was losing it.

“She isn’t here,” Louis-Cesare told me, the wrinkle a full-on frown now.

“Well, she was a minute ago!”

“She wasn’t—”

“And how would you know?” I snarled, because he didn’t get it. I’d been told I was mad my whole life, but most of the time, it hadn’t felt like it. Most of the time, I’d moved through society—a lot of them—perfectly fine. I talked to people, I contracted work, I handled my shit.

Except when she showed up.

But even that hadn’t been so bad—okay, that was a lie; it had been fucking terrifying—but at least there were rules. Ones I’d learned to understand, to respect, to keep the scary thing inside me pacified and absent. It hadn’t been a perfect system, but it had worked.

Until now.

Because this wasn’t the rule, this wasn’t even close to the rule. I didn’t go around just losing fifteen minutes! Not with no threat in sight and when I wasn’t stressed, when I was the opposite of stressed—happy and warm and clueless, because of course the rules had changed.

Ever since that barrier in my brain went down, everything had.

I didn’t know how to control her anymore.

I don’t know what my face looked like, but Louis-Cesare’s suddenly altered. And then he was hugging me, carefully because of the damned ribs, which shouldn’t have helped. Which should have made the whole claustrophobic-in-my-own-skin thing even worse, but somehow didn’t. And I was holding on to him when I should have been getting out of here, but I somehow wasn’t.

“She was not here,” he murmured, after a moment.

“You can’t know that—”

“I can.” He pulled back, so that I could see his face. “I can feel when she’s here, instead of you. I don’t know how to explain it,” he added, when I started to say something. “But it’s unmistakable, the difference between a sunny day and a dark night. If she’d been here, I would know.”

“Then how do you explain those fifteen minutes? I don’t remember—” Anything, I realized. And not just from today. “What happened last night?” I asked, my voice suddenly soft and frightened. But I couldn’t help it. I was getting flashes, strange and skewed, that didn’t make sense. That wasn’t how it went!

Was it?

“You fell,” Louis-Cesare said, his mouth tightening like he wanted to say more, but was holding back.

I nodded. That much had been memorable. The dizzying fall into nothing, from a height that could turn even a dhampir into hamburger, but hadn’t because—

“Those things caught me.”

“The spriggans, yes. But not out of altruism. If you hadn’t had that gold, and been clever enough to use it—” He cut off, and then his arms tightened again, as memories whirled about my screwed-up brain. Memories of bouncing around on a sea of fey, like bodysurfing at a concert, only bodysurfers don’t usually get thrown about that much.

“And then a troll fell on us.”

“Two trolls,” he said, scowling. “They were fighting and fell together. I managed to brace somewhat, but I didn’t reach you in time to do a proper job. Your head still hit the floor. It’s likely why you’re having trouble remembering things.”

I shook the area in question.

That wasn’t why.

And I hadn’t forgotten everything, after all, because suddenly there were pieces, like of cut-up photographs, crowding my mind. Not of the crazy landing, but of other things: a huge troll, the biggest of them all, racing up a wall; an albino with long, white hair stepping through a brilliant portal, searing my eyes; a feeling of flying, soaring into the sky and then turning to look down at the temporary fairgrounds, trash strewn and windswept, with a few bonfires still burning—

I winced, and shut down the flow, because my head hurt.

And because I hadn’t done those things. I’d been passed out on a cracked subfloor under a couple thousand pounds of troll, with a ton of bouncy toys and a freaked-out boyfriend. I remembered Louis-Cesare yelling my name; hands lifting me, gentle as a baby; some confused shouting . . .

And rocketing through an intersection in a troll-laden truck, while a witch with cigarettes in her hair laughed and laughed.

Louis-Cesare’s fingers gently combed over my abused scalp. “The doctor said there should be no lasting damage, that dhampirs have the hardest heads she’s ever seen.”

“I’m fine,” I told him.

Physically, anyway.

“You won’t be if you don’t rest,” Louis-Cesare said. “You all but passed out on me a moment ago—”

“What?”

He nodded. “That’s why you don’t remember the last few minutes. You’re so tired you drifted off.”

“I did not!”

His lips twitched, the worry suddenly eclipsed by what looked like genuine humor. “You look so indignant.”

“I’m not,” I told him, and then thought about it. “Okay, maybe I am, but I don’t nap.”

Louis-Cesare’s lips twitched some more.

“Stop doing that!”

“Then explain to me what is so wrong with a nap? I recall quite liking them once.”

“They’re”—stupid, ridiculous, weak—“dangerous. To zone out in a fight—”

“But you weren’t in a fight. You were home, behind excellent wards, and I was here. It is hard to be safer than that.”

I ignored the smug comment, because he wasn’t wrong. About that, anyway. “I don’t nap,” I repeated.

“Not normally, perhaps. But it is as the doctor said: you need time to heal. Time you haven’t been taking.”

He turned me around again, and started lathering up my hair.

“I’m not hurt,” I said—and tried to put some heat behind it, because the magic fingers were doing a good job of making me forget how serious this was. “And that wasn’t a nap. Don’t you get it?”

“No,” he said simply. “Tell me.”

Yeah, like it was that easy. To compress a lifetime of fear and struggle and pain into a few sentences when I never talked about it, not with anyone. Because who would care? And because I didn’t know how.

Only I guess I did, because it came out in a rush. “I used to try all kinds of things to keep Dorina under control. They didn’t always work, but I got pretty good at it. Enough that I could tell when things were about to go bad and smoke some weed, or walk away from a conflict, or punch a tree until I calmed down. But now . . .”

“Now?”

Those damned fingers should be registered somewhere, I thought, unconsciously leaning back into the feel of them. “Now everything’s changed. Dorina couldn’t come out when I was conscious; the barrier prevented her. That was the whole point of it.”

I felt him nod.

“But now it’s gone, and without it . . . there’s nothing to keep her from showing up anytime she feels like it. And what if she feels like it all the time? What if—”

I stopped for a moment, because I didn’t do this shit. This touchy-feely, let’s all share our deepest fears shit. It made me feel uncomfortable and vulnerable and a bunch of other things I hated, made me want to run away or lash out at something, which usually worked pretty well to change the subject. But I couldn’t do that this time.

Louis-Cesare deserved the truth.

“What’s stopping her from just taking over my life,” I rasped. “All of it, all the time, and shutting me out? For good this time?”

Like I’d tried to do to her.

I’d always treated this as my life—all mine. Because of course I had; I hadn’t even known she existed until very recently. I’d spent years thinking that I just had fits sometimes, that it was the dhampir crazy coming out, and concentrated on finding ways to tamp it down, while hoping that someday, someone would find a “cure” for my “disease.”

Only to find out that I didn’t have a disease, I had a—

Twin.

The word floated through my mind suddenly, frighteningly, because I hadn’t put it there. Wouldn’t have, since I’d never thought of us that way. We weren’t twins, we weren’t sisters, I didn’t have a sister! I had a fucked-up mind thanks to Mircea and, yes, maybe it had been necessary to save my life, but I didn’t know that, did I? I’d been there, but I couldn’t remember any of it.

Like I couldn’t remember the last fifteen minutes.

Had I been asleep? Just nodding off in the warmth and security of my boyfriend’s arms, because I was that beat? Maybe. It had been a hell of a month, with things coming hard and fast, one after another, before I had time to blink sometimes, much less to heal. And although the family had some gifts in that area, with the war raging, most of them had been in need of help themselves. And, anyway, they could only do so much.

Sometimes, nature just had to take its course.

So, yeah, maybe I’d drifted off when I never did. But I didn’t know for sure. And neither did Louis-Cesare, no matter what he thought. He’d only met Dorina a couple of times, and both had been under duress. Would he feel that difference he talked about if she was just . . . there? If she was just . . . watching?

I shuddered, and didn’t manage to stop before he noticed.

Louis-Cesare’s hands stilled. “You truly think that is possible?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore! I just—” I twisted around, and my damned ribs rewarded me by shooting savage pain up my newly loosened spine. “Goddamn it!”

Louis-Cesare’s hands dropped unerringly to the source, sending warmth and relief coursing through me, despite the fact that I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to feel better. I wanted—

I didn’t even know.

Like I didn’t even know what he was still doing here.

“Why are you here?” I asked wearily, looking up at him.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Because, when you hooked your wagon to the crazy, it wasn’t this crazy?”

He just looked at me.

“I’m a disaster,” I told him plainly. “I always have been, and things aren’t getting better. You ought to bail while you can.”

It hurt, even more than the ribs, but it was the truth. I’d always known it, but I’d hoped to hold on a little longer, to hold him. But things were starting to fall apart—I could feel it—and Dorina—

Isn’t here, he told me mentally, because he could do that sometimes.

All vampires could. Even babies could talk to family, and masters could communicate silently with almost anyone they chose. Except for me, who wasn’t a vampire and who’d had exactly zero mental gifts for five centuries, until that wall started to fall.

And all of a sudden, I was hearing voices.

But not hers.

She had the mental gifts, not me. I had no idea how to contact her, but she could talk to me any time she wanted. But she hadn’t.

Why talk to someone who won’t even be around much longer?

Why get to know someone you plan to kill?

“Listen to me.” Louis-Cesare’s hands came up to frame my face, his eyes fiercer than I’d ever seen them. “I am here. I’m not going anywhere. And no matter what happens, we will find a way to deal with this!”

Looking into his eyes, I almost believed it. But I’d learned the hard way not to want what I couldn’t have, not to reach for things out of my grasp, not to hope . . . for anything. Or anyone.

Because who the hell would want to waste their lives on a crazy dhampir?

And for years, I’d been happy that way. Okay, maybe “happy” wasn’t the word, but content, at least. Once I’d thought that things were going pretty well if I had a full stomach, a place to sleep in safety, a job to do, and no frightening episodes for a while. That had been the good life; that had been all right.

So when had “all right” stopped being enough?

I had a feeling it coincided with meeting a certain blue-eyed vamp who had somehow retained a measure of innocence that was ridiculous, just ridiculous, in our world. He’d come out of nowhere with all these ideas, stupid, antiquated things like chivalry and nobility and decency, the stuff humans usually scoffed at, and that vampires . . .

Well, I doubted some of them even knew the words anymore.

I didn’t think some of them ever had.

And yet here was Louis-Cesare, a ridiculous contradiction of a creature, determined to ride or die when the latter was a lot more likely, not caring that his girlfriend had a split personality that could kill him, and just might for shits and giggles someday!

He was a naive fool, and I should have kicked him to the curb as soon as I met him.

But, instead, here I was hoping again.

So, who’s the fool now? I wondered, and pulled him down.