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been a lot worse.
I sat on the side of the tub and put my head in my hands.
I felt like shit, but it wasn’t physical. I’d fought in worse shape than this—way worse. But I’d never hurt like this.
He’s okay, I told myself. What is wrong with you? Get up, get dressed, get busy! You only have about a thousand things to do!
I didn’t get up. And I already felt busy, like my head was sucking up all my strength, trying to sort out a mess that couldn’t be sorted. I didn’t have the skill set for this. I didn’t even know where to start. My thoughts just went round and round, until they made me dizzy, until they made me want to throw up.
If we hadn’t been attacked so ferociously, and thereby held up, would Dorina have drowned a theatre full of people? Would she have pressed that trigger if they’d still been inside? I didn’t know.
Like I didn’t know how well she’d been following the fight. With her mind literally elsewhere, had she realized how much danger she’d put us in? Did she care?
Or was she confident that she could get me—and therefore herself—out of there, and fuck everyone else? She’d saved the fey, people she didn’t even know, but what about the people I knew? What about Olga and Ray and—
If Louis-Cesare was anyone else, he’d be dead right now.
The thought intruded on my mental battle, loud and clanging, like a cymbal dropped on concrete. It made logical thought impossible, because every time I tried, there it was again, resonating. Over and over, louder and louder, that moment when he’d pushed me out of the way stuck on repeat in perfect clarity.
I could see the brilliant crimson of his blood, brighter than the acres of curtains; could feel the warm stickiness hitting me in great bursts; could smell it in the air, partially vaporized by the force of the bullets, and rich with power he could no longer use. Shook again as I hit the floor of the box, sliding painfully into the hard wood of the side, unable to stop with his weight on top of me. Felt her throw him off and jerk the weapon out from under him, like it was nothing, like he didn’t matter.
Because, to her, he didn’t.
I finally got up and took a shower. The water hurt the bruises, but it was a familiar, burning ache, almost comforting. I knew how to bleed; I knew how to heal. But this . . . I didn’t know how to do this.
The hot water ran out before I was finished, because we only had about a thousand people taking showers these days. I rinsed in cold, got out, dried off, and put on some clean sweats. I thought about combing out my hair, but it didn’t seem important. Neither did the hunger clawing in my belly, the ever-present cost of a dhampir’s metabolism. I felt it; I just didn’t care.
I wanted to call somebody, to report what I’d seen, but Louis-Cesare was already doing that. The only thing he didn’t know was what Dorina had overheard in that underwater room, but that seemed . . . really unlikely. The mage had told Curly that he was in charge, and it had sounded like he was talking about Geminus’ family. Only vampire families didn’t work like that.
Like really didn’t.
Vampires thought of themselves as a breed apart, better, smarter, longer-lived—basically an evolved sort of human. Homo superior, I’d heard one say once, and he hadn’t been joking. To take orders from a regular old garden-variety human, even a magical one, would be like . . .
Well, like your dog walking you.
It just didn’t happen.
And then there was the fact that what I’d heard, or thought I’d heard, had come from Dorina. She’d been riding that guard; she’d heard what was said, not me. So this was secondhand information, filtered through a wobbly link, and from a source I didn’t entirely—
Goddamn it!
I’d twisted wrong, picking up a dropped towel, and pain ripped through me. I stood there, panting by the sink for a moment, tamping down a desire to rip it out of the wall. Screw it. I couldn’t do this right now. Like I couldn’t heal if I didn’t eat.
I threw the damned towel in the bathtub and headed out the door.
And almost tripped over some fey drinking coffee.
I must have been in the bath longer than I’d thought, because Gessa and the boys had moved on. The fey were in their place, looking like they were taking a break from whatever fresh hell Claire had been putting them through. And eating their version of biscotti, with big mugs of steaming-hot brew.
Or, at least, they were until I showed up, when they abruptly scrambled to their feet.
Okay, that was . . . different.
Because another thing the fey didn’t do was to give a shit about their dhampir housemate. They’d always treated me as something between a high-ranking servant—because I traded protection for rent—and a friend of Claire’s. Which meant that I was well below them in the household hierarchy, but also not theirs to order around. That had worked out, leaving us on a casual, vaguely friendly footing, with no obligations either way.
Including whatever the heck this was.
“Good coffee?” I finally asked, when the silence stretched a little long.
