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“What kind of problems?”
“The usual. I was a foreigner, and although Venice was a port city, there was a certain amount of prejudice in the human community. And among the vampires, there were always those wishing to add a lone, masterless vampire to their fold, if they thought he might be of use, whether he wished it or not. And then there was the difficulty of monitoring the situation back home from a distance, and health concerns with my old tutor, who was with me, and all of the things about my still relatively new condition that I had yet to figure out, and—” He looked up. “And then there was you.”
“What about me?”
“You were manageable, at first. Hostile at times, and suspicious, isolated in a new city where you did not speak the language, and resentful of the clothing I made you wear and the manners Horatiu was attempting to instill.”
“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.”
