Fury's Kiss

by Karen Chance

  “Like eating with a fork.”

  “They were not common at the time, thankfully. Although you were no better with spoons, preferring to merely tip the bowl up and drink from it.”

  “You had a little barbarian on your hands,” I said, embarrassed. Although I wasn’t exactly polished today.

  “It was understandable. You had lived on your own, survived on your own, for years. It was not your manners that concerned me.”

  “It was that I was dhampir.”

  He was silent for a moment. “No,” he finally told me. “It was that you were dying.”

  I blinked at him. “What?”

  “I did not understand the problem, at first,” he said quietly, sitting on the hassock Ray had vacated. “I barely knew what a vampire was in those days, much less a dhampir. But something was clearly wrong. You were not eating. You were not sleeping. I woke more than once to find you missing, and had to scour the city for you. One time I found you, unconscious, surrounded by wild dogs. Had I arrived a few moments later—”

  “I was sick?” I asked, confused. Because I was never sick.

  “No. Or, rather, not in a human way.”

  He got up again, as if he couldn’t stay seated, and then sat down again, as if he didn’t find anything helpful in pacing. “I finally came to realize that the two sides of your nature were out of balance, and competing with each other. Your vampire half was growing in power as quickly as mine had, like one who was on the fast track to becoming a master. But your human side…was human. It was becoming swamped by the other half of you, subsumed, undermined. And, I was very much afraid, would soon be completely overcome.”

  “Why not let it be?” I said harshly. God knew, I’d tried, more than once.

  But he was shaking his head. “You are not vampire, Dorina. You are not human. You are both and neither. Just as the mages go mad trying to feed from only part of their nature, you cannot exist without your vampire half. And it cannot exist without you. You need each other. But you were also killing each other. Or, to be more precise, it was killing you. Not intentionally, but that did not matter. It was growing too strong, too fast, and you could not keep up.”

  “But obviously, I did.”

  Mircea got up again. I felt like yelling at him to make up his damned mind, because the constant movement wasn’t doing my nerves any good. But I didn’t. He didn’t look like he was having fun with this, either.

  “I tried to find help,” he told me. “But there was no one to help. No one who knew enough about dhampirs to tell me anything. Everywhere I went, the message was the same: she will not live. They never live. Do her a kindness and end her life, before the process drives her mad—and she ends the lives of everyone around her!”

  His eyes flashed amber bright, as they usually did only when his power was surging, and his face stuck on a snarl. He looked angry, suddenly, furious, as I’d rarely seen him. I didn’t envy whoever it was who had told him that.

  I didn’t say anything, but he turned on me anyway. “But you were Mine. My child. And I would not give you up.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I saved you. In the only way I knew how. You needed time. Time for your human half to mature, to catch up with your vampire side. But as things were, you would not have that time, would never get that chance.”

  “Mircea. What did you do?”

  He licked his lips, and then he came out with it. And it was nothing I’d ever expected and everything I’d always known. “I…separated you. Not physically, of course, the twin halves of your nature share a body. But mentally. I used my growing abilities with the mind to…put a barrier between the two parts of your nature, of your consciousness. So that you were not awake, not aware, at the same time. So that you did not interfere with each other’s development.”

  I stared at him, but he didn’t pause. Didn’t give me time to absorb it. As if he was afraid that if he stopped talking, he wouldn’t start again.

  “And then I erased the parts of your memory that were flawed. Where cracks had started to form because of your shared consciousness. At first, I thought that you would lose only a few months, the worst ones, when you had begun to deteriorate so quickly. But once I began, I realized that the mind is not so simple. That memories are not so simple. They are connected in strange ways, intertwined because of a myriad of things—a smell, a sound, a taste. I had to take out an entire month of your memories from when you were a child, because the sound of a ship’s bell, ringing outside during one of your fits, had had the same tone as a church bell in the city you had been passing through at the time.…”

  “You told me that you erased my memories because of Vlad,” I said numbly. “You told me—”

  “Yes, and that was not a lie. But removing your interest in gaining revenge on my brother was a relatively minor thing. It did not require erasing years of your memory. But gaining you an element of peace, of breathing space, did.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you never tell me?”

  “I thought of doing so, countless times—”

  “Then why didn’t you?” I asked, incredulous. “You didn’t think I deserved to know?”

  “Of course you deserved to know! Some of the memories I had had to remove were of your mother. I would never have deprived you of those! Never—”

  He turned away.

  “I was afraid,” he told me, after a moment. “I was…this wasn’t something I was taught how to do. I did not have a master whose advice I could ask. I had done what I had done out of desperation, and it had worked. But for how long remained in question. And the mind is resourceful. The more information it has, the easier it can build bridges around and between damaged areas. The faster it can put the pieces back together. The whole idea was to give you time—”

  “But I’ve had time. I’ve had five hundred years. Didn’t you think—”

  “Yes! I thought. A thousand times, I thought. But you were alive. You were sane. Not entirely happy, perhaps, but better by far than the vast majority of dhampirs who have ever lived. I was mortally afraid to do anything to upset that balance. But then you managed to find a way to do it yourself.”

  It took me a moment to understand what he had just said, because my mind—what was left of it—was still reeling. “Fey wine.”

  He nodded.

  I licked my lips. “Claire thinks…She said it was like shutting a valve on an engine, and letting pressure build up.”

  “An apt analogy. And one I realized too late. It was not until after the events on the wharf, when I went into your mind to retrieve your memories, that I understood…and the cracks are too wide, too large, for me to repair. I do not know how much longer the dam I put in place would have lasted, but…it is crumbling now.”

  “Crumbling?” I had been staring at my hands, but now I looked up.

  “But you did it once,” Radu interrupted. “Surely—”

  “She was a child then, Radu! She is one no longer, and she is powerful.”

  “Well, yes, but so are any number of others, and you’ve never had any difficulty with—”

  “Radu.” That was Kit.

  “Yes, well. Still.”

  “Dorina has inherited my abilities, to an extent,” Mircea said, meeting my eyes, and then looking away. “I do not know to what extent, for they have never been given proper expression. That requires a whole mind, something she has never had.”

  “That’s why I never…I didn’t gain anything…” I said, thinking of the master powers that all vampires acquired, if they lived long enough. Some more than one. But I had never developed any of them.

  “Yes. That is why, when cracks appeared in the separation between the two parts of you, you began to be able to mind-speak. You could not do it with your vampire half isolated, since it is that part of you which carries the ability.”

  I was silent for a moment, but it was useless. I couldn’t even begin to process it all, or even to form the right questions. Except fo
r one. “Why are you telling me this now?”

  Mircea didn’t say anything, but Marlowe spoke up. “You think this is why she can’t remember what happened after being attacked, don’t you? That she slipped into her vampire nature. That it’s that part of her that holds the memories we need.”

  Mircea nodded. And then he looked at me. “I do not wish to do this. I cannot repair the damage to the partition I put in place, but I can keep from causing more.”

  “And this will cause damage?”

  “I do not know. Neither does anyone I have asked. But even if not, there is the other part of you…” His eyes met mine, and they were grave. “And I do not think you want to meet this part.”

  “Why?” Louis-Cesare asked. “I have met her. She is Dory—”

  “She is Dorina,” Mircea corrected sharply. “She does not use the diminutive. Ever. And she is dangerous.”

  “What first-level master is not?”

  “First?” Marlowe said sharply.

  “My contact with…Dorina…has been limited,” Mircea said. “She does not trust me. I am what she preys upon. But yes. That would be my estimate of her power.”

  “A mad first-level master,” I murmured. “Haven’t we been here before?”

  “No.” That was Louis-Cesare.

  “Yes. I suppose I have more in common with Christine than I thought.”

  “You are nothing like Christine!”

  “Funny. That’s not what my victims say.”

  “What victims?”

  “Or, I guess I should say, Dorina’s victims. She piles up quite the body count.”

  “As do we all, when need be. If you had not ‘piled up’ the bodies last night, my Sire would be dead. You are efficient at killing; but that is not in itself an evil. Or else every nation on earth with an army is evil. Every police officer who has killed in the line of duty—”

  “Police kill to protect!”

  “And how do you know that she—that you—do not?”

  “Stop calling me that! I am not her! I don’t kill for sport.”

  “And again I ask, why do you believe she does? When have you seen her—”

  “I don’t see her! I’ve never…almost never…seen her.”

  “Then how do you know?” he persisted. “You wake up surrounded by bodies, but you were not awake when they were attacked. You do not know what the provocation may have been. Only that they are dead. Had Dorina suddenly woken in Central last night, after you went in, might she not have thought—”

  “That’s not the same! I had no choice!”

  “And perhaps neither did she. We won’t know until we speak with her—”

  “I’m not going to speak with her!”

  “Then I will,” Louis-Cesare said simply.

  “What?”

  “I have done it before. I have spoken with her once, perhaps twice—”

  “When—?”

  “The last time was in your garden, two nights ago. I made a mistake, and she was…displeased.…”

  “She wanted to attack those fey,” I said, remembering. “Wanted to…to find out if she could beat them.”

  “And who would not? Many of our people, given the chance, would like such an experience. So little is known of them…a new enemy, whose abilities are not entirely, or even mostly, understood. Whose skill set may equal our own, and whose lives are long enough to have been—”

  He stopped, probably because everyone was staring at him.

  “I did not say I intend to do it.”

  “That would be best,” Mircea said, drily. Then he looked at me. “It is your choice. We need the information, and it is possible that Dorina may have it. But I will not force the issue.”

  Marlowe started to erupt, and Mircea’s voice sharpened. “It is your decision. Your risk. It can be no other.”

  Radu cleared his throat. “There is, well, one thing,” he said, diffidently.

  Mircea looked at him.

  “I…have never met Dorina. She does not know me, doesn’t have any reason to trust me. And without trust, an anchor is useless.”

  Louis-Cesare looked at me. “I will go,” he said simply. “I will be your anchor, if you will permit it.”

  And then everyone looked at me.

  Again.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  I stayed in the chair. Mircea settled back on the hassock, facing me. I don’t know quite what I’d been expecting; probably something like last time, just falling off the world with no warning and no transition. But it didn’t work quite like that. I pulled my feet back to give him room, and then looked up.

  And found his normally dark brown eyes blown completely black.

  It threw me for a second, because the usual color change that comes with his power goes in the opposite direction—to bright, light-filled amber. But now it was more like looking into two inky pools. Except even ink reflects some light off the surface and his eyes weren’t doing that. It looked disturbingly as if they weren’t even there anymore, just dark, dark nothingness behind his lashes, like the fog boiling over the memory cliff in my mind.

  And then all up around me, as if the room had caught fire.

  And then closing over my head as he caught my wrists, to keep me from standing up in alarm.

  And then gushing out in front of me as I walked through it and out the other side.

  I stumbled slightly, having to adjust to suddenly finding myself standing instead of sitting, and to being on a dark wharf instead of in a cozy library. But it only took a second, and then I was looking at the same scene as before. Except for the fog.

  Instead of evaporating, it ruffled out over the ground, swirling around me and then surging outward, until the whole scene was covered with it, waist-high. Tendrils reached even higher, as if grasping at the dark, cloud-filled sky, the intermittant stars, and the yachts bobbing at anchor. Or at the pier, sitting quiet and blood-free.

  Obviously, the fun hadn’t started yet.

  “Looks like we’re early,” I said—to nobody. Because when I turned around, Louis-Cesare wasn’t there.

  But something else was.

  I blinked stupidly at it. And okay. Maybe I’d been a little hasty with that same-scene comment.

  Because that? Wasn’t the same at all.

  I was looking at a huge expanse of gray stone, smooth in places as if wind and rain had scoured the corners, and sharp in others where centuries-old chisel marks remained visible. It looked like a thousand walls I’d seen, edging roads or circling towns or doing wall-type things all over Europe. None of which had included slicing through the middle of an SUV on one end and a yacht on the other.

  But that’s what this one was doing, bisecting the harbor from parking lot to waterline and beyond. I stared upward, feeling dizzy because the top stones were maybe fifty feet high. I separated you, Mircea had said.

  Yeah. That was one way of putting it.

  Goddamn, no wonder I was crazy.

  But amazingly enough, the size wasn’t the strangest thing about the wall-that-shouldn’t-be-there. Neither was the gaping gully in the middle that looked like someone had driven a giant-sized bus through it. Or the jagged bits that had burst out ahead of the explosion, the interiors of which failed entirely to be gray and rocky and stone-like, opting instead for pink and pulsing and…alive.

  No, what had my skin tightening all over my body was the strands of something viscous and gooey and glistening that had burst outward with the wall, leaving a forest of vine-like pinkish filaments behind. Some were lying warped and twisted in the rubble, impossibly damaged. Others had looped back onto the nearest stone, attaching themselves to it and then sinking inside, only to jumble up underneath with nowhere to go, like varicose veins.

  Except for a few. They had neither died nor found a new foothold, but they were also unable to bridge the large gap in the wall. As a result, they were just waving about in the air like horrible seaweed in a nonexistent current.

  Or like clutching hands, I
thought, stumbling back a step.

  And straight into someone’s arms.

  “It’s all right,” Louis-Cesare told me, grabbing my arms preemptively.

  “All right?” I shook him off, and took a step backward. Because no way was anything about this all right.

  “It will be.” He looked past me for a moment, at the wall, but didn’t seem as horror-struck as I was. Maybe he’d been warned ahead of time; he’d said that he and Mircea had talked. Or maybe it wasn’t quite the same when it wasn’t your insanity on display.

  Bizarre, whacked-out, really gross display. I wrapped my arms around me, and told myself that the cold I was feeling was just the fog. Or my imagination, which seemed to be healthy enough.

  Glad something was.

  “Where were you?” I demanded, harsher than I’d planned.

  He looked back at me. “Quoi?”

  “You weren’t here. When I arrived,” I added, because he was staring at me blankly.

  “We left at the same time.”

  “Well, we didn’t arrive at the same time! I’ve been here for five minutes.” Maybe more. It felt like I’d been staring at that wall for a while.

  Louis-Cesare didn’t seem to like that response. “You are sure?”

  “Well, it’s not like I have a watch!” I said, only to have one appear on my arm.

  It was gold, with a little mother-of-pearl face, and it wasn’t mine. It sort of reminded me of one Claire owned, but didn’t wear anymore because the whole transformation thing was tough on jewelry. But that didn’t explain what it was doing here.

  “What the—” I began.

  “It is your mind. You can have what you like,” Louis-Cesare informed me. Which was great, except that what I’d like right now was a door out of here.

  “Is there a way for us to speed this up?” I asked tightly.

  He didn’t answer for a moment. His head was tilted to the side and he had a distracted look, like he was trying to talk and listen to the TV at the same time. “Your father says he is having…difficulties,” he finally told me.