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“You’re not going crazy.”
“I just saw you morph into a dragon!”
“Well, you shouldn’t have startled me!” She opened the breadbox and stared at the mass of paper inside. “Don’t you keep any food in the house?”
“I got takeout.”
Her eyes latched onto the big white bags, which were spreading the smell of sesame chicken, veggie chow mein and fried rice around the kitchen. “It looks like you brought enough for three people,” she said hopefully.
“Yeah. I don’t know when we’ll get to eat it, though. What with all the commotion.”
Her eyes narrowed, and for a moment, she looked an awful lot like her alter ego. “Where’s this baby of yours?”
I grinned.
CHAPTER 3
I led the way upstairs and Claire followed with her own quiet, well-behaved little bundle. The decibel level increased with every step, until I was sure the walls would crack with it. We opened the door to my old office and even Claire, who had seemed remarkably unmoved, winced.
Then she went in and the screeching abruptly stopped. A small, hairy head popped up from a nest of quilts under the bed and stared at her with wide gray eyes. Its owner looked like a cross between a monkey and a little old man: long, furry limbs, tiny squashed face and wild Muppet hair.
The unshed tears trembling on his lashes seemed to distill the moonlight filtering through the curtains, making his irises gleam like polished metal for a moment. Then he blinked and the tears coursed down his cheeks—and the noise started up again. Until Claire calmly walked over and picked him up.
He’d opened his mouth for another scream, but closed it again with a pop. A tiny hand with long, stick-like fingers grasped the frilly strap of her apron and he looked at her beseechingly, like I’d been beating him or something. “Why is he under the bed?” she demanded.
“He likes it under there,” I said defensively. “Duergars live underground, and I think it makes him feel vulnerable, being in the open when he sleeps. I tried putting him on the bed, but he just drags everything down there anyway.”
Claire didn’t look like she thought much of that explanation, but she let it go. “What have you been giving him for the pain?”
“Everything. But he’s like me—drugs don’t work and whiskey only dulls it for a—”
“Whiskey?” Claire looked appalled. “Tell me you didn’t just admit to trying to get your baby drunk!”
“I was just trying to rub some on his gums!” I said, offended. “He’s the one who grabbed the bottle!”
“He’s just a baby, poor little thing!”
“I know that,” I said miserably. “And the alcohol didn’t have much effect, anyway—”
“Dory!”
“I know what you’re thinking! I suck at this motherhood thing!” It didn’t help that I hadn’t actually thought of Stinky as a “baby” when I took him on. Someone had been about to kill him, I’d objected and, the next thing I knew, he was mine.
I hadn’t been too worried about it at the time, as he’d been more in the “pet” category in my mind. But experience had shown that there was a definite intelligence at work there—a fact I tried not to think about too much because it freaked me the hell out.
“You don’t,” Claire said patiently. “You saved his life. You’ve given him a home. You just need time to adjust, that’s all.”
“I don’t think I’m going to last that long.”
She smiled slightly. “Everybody thinks that way at first. They’re these little people, with big, trusting eyes and an absolute confidence that we know everything, when most of the time, we don’t have a clue.”
Yeah, that was what worried me. I’d brought myself up, more or less, and look how that had turned out. I didn’t want to screw him up, too, but there didn’t seem to be an alternative.
There were damn few dhampirs in existence, since we could only be conceived in a very short window after a man was Changed. And despite what the movies would have people believe, most newly made vampires weren’t thinking sex. They were thinking blood.
Mircea had been a little different, because he was cursed, not made. He’d failed to realize that the old Gypsy woman who’d been ranting at him had been the real deal for a week, until some nobles tried to kill him and he didn’t die. In the meantime, he’d gone about his usual playboy ways, resulting in a bouncing baby abomination nine months later.
I could count on two hands the number of dhampirs I knew who were currently living, and I wouldn’t even need all the fingers. But as far as I knew, there were no other Duergar-Brownie mixes at all. Stinky was in a class by himself, and I knew from personal experience where that left him.
