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 than 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.