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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.
