AllFreeNovel
Share Us
And yet, if I’d seen her from across the room, I’d have sworn she was a vampire.
It was something in the way she held herself, so preternaturally still. Something in the way she squatted there, effortlessly balanced on just the toes of her feet, in a pose a prima ballerina would have tired of very fast. Something in the way she didn’t seem to breathe or blink quite the right number of times per minute.
Although the latter might have had something to do with the silent tears rolling down her face, unnoticed and unchecked.
I’d never seen a vamp cry before. And even though I wasn’t seeing it now, it looked like I was, and it threw me. Like this night, like this whole week, hadn’t done that enough already.
I was beginning to wonder if you could get so far off balance that you’d never quite make it back to true. I was starting to feel like that, and then she looked up. But not at me.
She was cradling something I hadn’t noticed because my eyes hadn’t left her face. Something with thin blond hair, soiled and tangled, a slight form, a dirty blue shirt or dress. Something—
Someone.
Child.
The images slammed into me, most of them too fast to process, but I got the gist. She’d found the girl; she’d lost the girl. And had been looking for her ever since. Searching the underbelly of the city, places like the one where she’d found her, places like this. And cutting a swath through an entire chain of slavers, smugglers and Black Circle members in the process.
There hadn’t been a civil war in the smuggling community. They hadn’t savaged each other and then thrown the bodies into the portals. That had been Dorina on a rampage, every time I went to sleep, looking for the child she’d lost.
And finally found.
“To
o late,” I mouthed along with her.
She clutched the girl harder, and her face was so open, so easy to read. More so than mine ever was. She didn’t mask her feelings, didn’t hide behind sarcasm or bad jokes. Didn’t pretend. She hurt; she cried.
And I felt the earth shift a little more under my feet, centuries of preconceptions crumbling beneath the foundations.
I didn’t know who I was anymore. Didn’t know who she was. It was strange to be facing the end of my life, and realize that I’d never really known myself at all.
Or the memory I was suddenly seeing.
The golden footsteps I had followed across the city ended at her body.
She was crumpled on the floor, near the line of cages where she must have collapsed. I did not know why she had come here. Perhaps hoping to free the others? If so, she had been too late.
Like us.
“Not quite,” the creature with me murmured, his long wings sweeping the ground as he knelt a few yards away.
And held out a hand.
And from the body rose…a golden child, happy and laughing and skipping over to the shining one, who opened his arms for her.
I stared as he picked her up, this creature made of light. Like him, I realized. I didn’t say it aloud, but he nodded.
“They stole her from my people.”
“Why?” I asked, my voice hoarse.
“For the same reason they stole all of these.” He glanced around. “They wished to make a weapon, to give themselves an edge in a war. They needed something that would work in Faerie and on Earth. But there are few things that walk the Divide well enough for their purposes.”
“The Divide?”
“Earth is the highest of the hells; Faerie is the lowest of the heavens. My people originated in one realm and…moved…to the other. Therefore our magic works in both.”
I didn’t understand. I just reached for the child, but he kept a hand on her arm. She looked up at him, bright-eyed, curious.
