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Wherever we were, it was freezing.
“You did what?” I finally managed to gasp, after being towed through what had to be a couple hundred people.
“Mircea sent me back in to get you out,” Louis-Cesare told me rapidly. “But it was not working and there was no time and you were—” He stared back at me, jaw clenched. “I had to do something.”
“So you pulled me into your mind?”
“No. I do not have your father’s skill.”
“Then what—”
I cut off because the crowd had suddenly gone nuts. We were on the deck of some kind of ship—a big one—surrounded by heavily muffled people in old-timey outfits. Who appeared to be having a collective fit. Because a bunch of them screamed, and a bunch more came stampeding from the opposite direction, threatening to run us down.
Louis-Cesare pulled me into a stairwell before they managed it, and I grabbed him. “What did you do?”
“I needed to get you away from that wharf, but I do not know your mind,” he explained rapidly. “I did not know where to go. I needed something more familiar…and there was only one thing available.”
For a second, I didn’t know what he was talking about. And then I remembered the metaphysical accident a couple months ago. And the fallout that had left me in possession of a piece of Louis-Cesare’s consciousness.
It was easy to forget, because it had remained where it had settled, in a hard little lump in a corner of my brain that I avoided like the plague. I didn’t poke at it, didn’t bother it. And for the most part, vice versa was true. Every once in a while I got a flash of something—people I’d never met, places I’d never been—but I blinked them away and forgot it. Because it wasn’t my business, and because I didn’t need anything drawing me closer to him than I already was.
But it looked like I was about to get the tour anyway.
“So we’re inside a piece of your mind, inside my mind?” I asked, feeling like my head was about to explode.
Which was possibly the case.
He nodded, looking around at the crowd.
“Why? Why not just help me? Together we could have taken her—”
“There is no her,” he said tensely. “There is only you. Anything that happens to one happens to both. If you hurt her, you hurt yourself. If you kill her—”
“But we’re inside your head! My head. Something. Anyway, none of this is real!”
“It is to your brain, and it will react accordingly.”
“Meaning what?”
“I do not fully understand all the implications myself,” he said, turning back to meet my eyes. The cold had whipped up some color in his face, and his hair had come loose from its confining clip and was flying everywhere. A strand blew into his mouth and he spat it out, before pulling it behind him and tucking it under the collar of the long coat he’d somehow acquired.
And then pulled off and put around my shoulders, when he noticed I was shivering.
He was wearing an old-fashioned tux underneath it—white tie and tails—but I didn’t bother to ask why. “Give it your best shot,” I told him.
“Your father did not have much time to explain. But it has to do with the fact that your brain controls your body—your breathing, your heartbeat, your autonomous nervous system—”
“Could I have the condensed version?”
“If your brain thinks you are dead, you are dead.”
I stared up at him for a moment, hoping this was a bad joke. But those sapphire eyes were doing that guileless thing again, the one that always threw me because vampire eyes didn’t look like that. Unless they were Louis-Cesare’s, which right now were open and honest and worried and utterly serious.
“Let me get this straight,” I said, clutching the fine wool of the coat. “If I die in here, I die. But if I fight her—”
“You also die.”
“Then what the hell—”
