by Karen Chance
“What kind of difficulties?”
“Maintaining the connection. He says we need to hurry.”
“That’s what I just said,” I pointed out. “How do I fast-forward this thing?”
“I…he…is not sure. He was trying to put you in at the time of the blackout that you experienced earlier. But as an observer. You should have been able to see and report back, without having to experience everything again. Or talk to anyone.”
“Sounds good,” I said fervently.
“Yes, but it did not work. He does not know why.”
“That’s…reassuring.”
“It is not, in fact,” he said, staring upward. And not looking happy. He was glowering at the sky as if Mircea was up there somewhere and could see him. I didn’t say anything because I kind of hoped he was right.
Unfortunately, that gave me no one to talk to, and my eyes got bored. And started meandering around. And they seemed fascinated by the sickly pinkish light coming from the gash that was flooding the dark landscape like a searchlight.
I don’t know why. It’s not like they could see anything. It was bright enough, but just like a real searchlight, it didn’t work so well in fog. Except to highlight strange bumps and coils and glimmers in the mist, sending Rorschach-like monsters rearing silently on every side.
I suddenly got a severe case of goose bumps, and jerked my head around, sure that I’d just glimpsed—
Nothing.
The only thing behind me was a long shadow of a streetlight, flickering in and out of sight in the churning mist.
I stared at it for a moment anyway, even after I’d identified it, because I suddenly found that I didn’t want to look around anymore. Didn’t want to see something more substantial than a shadow. Didn’t want to know what might have come through that gap.
Because something sure had. And given what the wall probably stood for in my not-so-original brain, it wasn’t hard to guess what. And even though that was kind of the point of this expedition, now that it came down to it, I found that I wasn’t so keen on meeting that other part of me. That baleful, warped, diseased part that I’d done my best to ignore and avoid and generally suppress the hell out of all these years.
And I was pretty okay with maintaining the status quo.
But my brain, my so-messed-up yet so-helpful brain, had other ideas. It kept showing me glimmers of something slouching through the mist, flickering at the very edges of my vision but staying low to the ground. Hiding. Taking cover, but still visible in glimpses, like the light post’s shadow. Hunched and misshapen glimpses that watched me with terrible, demon red eyes.
I couldn’t see it very well, since I couldn’t seem to force my eyes to focus. Or my head to turn; it suddenly seemed to like this patch of ground just fine, thank you. But what I could see didn’t look human.
Of course it doesn’t, I thought, feeling sweat drench the body we shared, and my skin start to ruffle. I wanted to scream and flinch and gyrate like someone who had had a horrible insect land on her arm. Only this insect wouldn’t come off because this insect was me, was part of me, was crawling through the mist like it usually crawled beneath my skin. Always stalking, never leaving, never letting me just live, just be, like a normal person because I wasn’t a normal person and thanks to it I never would be and I hated, hated, HATED—
“Augghh!”
I threw out an arm when something reached for me out of the fog, sending it staggering back.
And then belatedly recognized Louis-Cesare.
“Are you…all right?” he asked me warily.
“Of course I’m all right,” I snapped, staring around, angry because I wasn’t. Not enough, anyway. I could feel it, a warm, red tide simmering away somewhere in the back of my mind—or what was left of it. But it couldn’t reach me, couldn’t help, couldn’t even get close.
Because there was something in the way.
Something that was chilling my flesh and making my breath come faster.
Something that felt a lot like fear.
And I couldn’t afford that. Anger was heat and light and split-second, adrenaline-fueled timing. But fear was not. Fear was cold and dark and debilitating and paralyzing. People who were too angry in fights sometimes lost, but people who were too afraid always did. Curling up into a ball instead of attacking, begging for their lives instead of fighting for them.
And I wouldn’t go down like that. I wouldn’t lie down and just be absorbed by this…this thing. Just like I hadn’t centuries ago.
I wouldn’t let it win.
I’ll die first, I whispered viciously, too low even for a vampire’s ears. I’ll die and I’ll take you with me.
Louis-Cesare had glanced around again. But now he was back to looking at me. “I am not,” he told me flatly.
“What?”
“I am not all right. There is something wrong here.”
A laugh burst out of me before I could stop it, high and a little crazed. “You think?”
He frowned. “Yes, I think. I also think that I am taking you out.”
“You know what’s at stake.”
“I also know what is at stake for you.”
“How?” I demanded, bewildered. “I don’t even know.”
And I didn’t. I didn’t know what would happen if—when—I and my other half had a long-overdue reunion. Didn’t know what would change.
Maybe nothing. Maybe it would just be a repeat of that whole scene in the garden—scary for a few minutes, because yes, yes, I could admit now that Louis-Cesare had been right, I’d been scared to death that night. But I hadn’t died, hadn’t changed, hadn’t gone any more crazy—not that I’d noticed.
But then, I wouldn’t, would I?
Of course, that had been all of a few seconds, and this was likely to be a lot longer, but the idea was the same. If the other hadn’t hurt me, maybe this wouldn’t, either. Maybe I was getting all worked up about it for absolutely nothing.
Only it didn’t feel like nothing.
It felt like whatever was out there, whatever was stalking me through the mist, was malevolent. Hateful. Fearful. Like it didn’t like me any more than I liked it. Like it would like to remove me, kill me even.
Like it wasn’t any more comfortable with me inside its skin than the reverse.
And that wasn’t so surprising, was it? How many times had I thought, If only it would just die? If only it wasn’t there anymore, maybe I would be okay. Maybe in time I could learn to be normal, or could learn to fake it well enough for a regular life. My life, instead of the bastardized time-share we had going on.
Would it be so strange if it had thought the same?
“Dory!”
I jumped, and looked back around at Louis-Cesare, who was now a few yards off to the left. He’d either moved or I had, unconsciously following currents in the fog. And wasn’t that just a great thought to have right now?
“What?”
“I called your name several times; you did not answer.”
“I was…distracted.” And then I got a good look at his face. “What’s wrong now?”
“I don’t know why, but…I am having difficulty communicating with your father.”
I glanced around. “No shit.”
“What?”
I licked my lips and looked back at him. “Remember what Mircea said. I inherited his mental abilities, but they’re carried on her…on her side of the brain, so to speak. They’re under her control, not mine.”
“But what does that have to do—”
“Just that if she wanted to block him…”
“You believe she is more powerful than your father?”
“Not…necessarily,” I said, not feeling real sure about that. “But they’re almost the same age, and he’s had to divide his time between a lot of different things over the years. Had to wear a lot of hats. She hasn’t. She could specialize—”
“But even so—”
“—and it’s her brain. She knows it better t
han he does. She has to.”
“She—” Louis-Cesare stopped. “Why are we speaking of her as a separate person? There is no she. There is only you.”
“Sure about that?” I said, glancing around again.
“Yes! She is…you are…the same. In either form. You are—” He broke off, as if trying to put the impossible into words. And seemed to be having some trouble with it.
Join the club, I thought grimly. It was my head and I didn’t know what the hell was going on. And why did I think I wasn’t going to like it when I figured it out?
“Dorina…she is you as you would have been, had you been born fully vampire,” he finally said. “Therefore there are…variations…in approach, in the way you think, react, fight—”
“So, virtually identical, then.”
He frowned at me. “In essence, yes. In your sense of honor, your humor, your innate goodness—”
I laughed.
He frowned more. “It is true. In all the ways that matter, you are the same.”
Yeah. That was what I was afraid of.
“Now, please. Stay close while I attempt to contact your father again.”
“Okeydokey.”
I wasn’t going anywhere. But the thing was, I didn’t think I had to. I had the definite feeling that whatever was out there was coming for me.
And I guessed it shouldn’t have been a surprise.
I’d never thought about it before, but maybe I cramped her style, too. Maybe she resented being woken up in the middle of a nice rampage by someone too horrified to finish the job. Maybe she hated my weakness, my humanness, as much as I hated her vampire-ness, her viciousness. Maybe instead of a crawling bug, she viewed me as a more insidious kind—a leech, taking her strength, her energy, her prowess and squandering them. Living a life no master vampire would have considered for so much as a moment, with no family, no servants, no respect.
Yeah. That probably galled.
If there was one constant in vampire society, one thing that defined it more than any other, it was hierarchy. Everybody knew their place and they damned well stayed in it. Unless they were prepared to fight—possibly to the death—for a higher one.
Some people thought it was worth the risk, because status decided everything, from who you served to who served you. From who would consider you for an alliance to who would—or would not—marry you. From where you could live to what jobs you could get to who went through a freaking door first. Status was everything.
But dhampirs didn’t have status.
Dhampirs weren’t even on the scale.
I wondered how she’d felt about that. How she’d liked having even baby vampires look down on us, watching them insult us, denigrate us, relegate us to back doors and servants’ entrances “like the rest of the trash.” How she’d felt knowing that we—that she—were perfectly capable of destroying the lot of them.
And how long had it been before that resentment had bubbled over, from hatred of them to hatred of me? The cowardly, weak, human part of her that played by the rules others had set and scavenged around the edges of vampire society for whatever crumbs it would toss her, like a diseased dog? No wonder she went berserk from time to time, killing everything in sight out of sheer rage that she couldn’t kill the one she really wanted to.
Me.
Only she could now, couldn’t she? I took another look at that ruined wall or synapse tangle or whatever the hell it was, and realized intellectually what my crawling skin had known from the first glance. The fey wine had let a tiger out of the cage.
And it was hungry.
Chapter Thirty-four
All things considered, it really wasn’t much of a surprise when Louis-Cesare suddenly looked up, his face puzzled. “There is some—” he began, and stopped.
For a second, he looked like an old-fashioned TV signal going on the fritz. All the color drained out of his body and it blurred into jagged lines for a moment. And then he simply winked out.
It was almost a relief.
She’d taken enough from me, through the years. Family, friends, sanity. Any chance of belonging anywhere.
She wasn’t going to take him, too.
“He’s not like us,” I whispered, into the rolling fog. “He’s honest and stubborn and stupidly brave. And he thinks we’re the same. But we know better. Don’t we…sister?”
There was no response.
What a surprise.
I glanced at the wharf. I’d seen it as it was now, lying pristine and clean, waiting under the moonlight for the scene that was about to unfold. Louis-Cesare had seen it afterward, smeared with blood and ash and what remained of my onetime partner. What we needed was what had happened in the middle, and only one person I knew of had it.
I melted into the fog, circling around toward the wall’s bloody gash.
And the memories that lay on the other side.
There was no other choice. I didn’t know how to leave, and it wouldn’t have done any good if I had. Leaving would only postpone the inevitable. I was going to have to face her, sooner or later, on her turf or mine. Because I didn’t think that wall was going back together again. I didn’t know how to repair it, and Mircea had already said that he couldn’t do it, not at her power level.
Which meant that he’d already bought me as much time as he could.
And somehow, looking at the sheer size of the thing, of the freaking fortress he’d had to build to imprison her, I felt my anger at him evaporating. I might resent him for not telling me, for not giving me the choice, but for once, I understood. He’d said he’d been worried that telling me might weaken the separation, and that he wouldn’t be able to compensate. I didn’t doubt it.
I didn’t know how he’d built the damned thing at all.
I glanced up at the walls for a split second as I slipped into the gap. I couldn’t spare more than that, not and keep an eye out for ambush. But I didn’t need to. The size of them, the sheer weight, rose up around me, more massive even than I’d realized, towering over my head like cliffs and disappearing into the distance like a ravine.
There was no end in sight, the mist hiding everything more than ten, twelve yards ahead. But it didn’t matter. The cost in power, the only real coin of the vampire world, for what I could see must have been…
God. It must have been staggering.
No way had he done it all at once. Mircea had been on the fast track to master status, fueled by intelligence, ambition and sheer, unrestrained rage at a life that had been anything but fair. But no new master had done this, either.
Or even an old one. Not all at once. It must have taken years—centuries—of pouring strength into me. Of pushing back the power of a creature only a few decades younger than he, a trivial amount in vampire terms. Of constantly monitoring and adding to the protection he had built up, stone by stone, inch by inch, always knowing that one mistake might free her.
And destroy me.
The fog was thicker here, trapped between the sides of the rift, puddling in the middle to the point that it was almost exactly at eye level. Tendrils brushed my cheeks and curled around my face, making it hard to see, and the muffling quality wasn’t helping my hearing, either. But I was finding it hard to concentrate on the danger.
I was too busy concentrating on something else.
Why had he done this? It made no sense. No master vampire wasted that kind of power, particularly not when young and vulnerable. He’d said it, and I had no reason to doubt him: other vampires had been trying to add him to their collections. And why not? Such mental gifts were rare. Coupled with his looks and charm and name…he would have made an ornament to any court. It must have been a constant struggle to stay independent, to remain outside their grasp, to maintain a sense of self instead of being subsumed into someone else’s ambitions, someone else’s needs.
So why waste power that he needed so badly?
Why waste it on me?
“Dory!”
I heard something through
the mist, but it was faint, like a distant echo. Or possibly not there at all. The ravine trapped sound, diverted it, made it seem like it was coming from every direction at once. And the mist was getting thicker, almost like it was pushing back at me, trying to close my path.
“Stop fighting me!”
The voice came again, but it didn’t make sense.
“I’m not fighting you,” I murmured. And I wasn’t. I wasn’t doing anything, my mind reeling with fear and confusion and…and something else.
Something impossible.
But there was no other explanation. I had been a child, and one rapidly approaching insanity at that. I couldn’t have helped him. I couldn’t have been anything but a drain. He should have left me, should have done what any other master would have and cut me loose. Or followed the advice of those so-called specialists and humanely put me down before I tipped over the edge entirely.
But he hadn’t.
And try as I might, I could come up with only one explanation for that.
I ran a hand over the smooth, fleshy texture of the wall. It was already healing the damage, even if it couldn’t close the gap. And somehow, it didn’t seem so horrible anymore. Didn’t seem horrible at all, in fact.
Slick and warm, it felt like what it was: a healing scar. Not that I had a lot of experience with those. Dhampirs didn’t scar, for the same reason that we couldn’t get tattoos or piercings or so many other things. Our healing abilities wiped them away, erasing them off our skin in a matter of days or weeks, as if they’d never existed at all. Leaving only fresh, new skin behind.
But the mind didn’t heal like that. The skin might forget, but the mind…remembered. To the point that sometimes it felt like my head was full of scars. Others couldn’t see them, but I could.
And every time I got too close to someone, I tripped over one.
The fog was thicker now, cloying, choking. Not mist anymore, not even really like gas. More like waterlogged sheets slapping me wetly across the face, as if I were trying to push through a field of soggy laundry. And serving as the perfect backdrop for dozens of images.