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“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?”
