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“I didn’t think it was enough! But it was better than nothing—which is what I would have had otherwise!”
“What you would have had?” I felt my forehead wrinkle. “What about what she had? She could go flitting about, riding different people, but she wasn’t in control of any of them. She can’t just take over like that. Maybe in an emergency, but not reliably, and not for long.”
It hit me suddenly that Dorina had been left just . . . watching things. She could get out, see the world, watch other people’s families, lovers, children, but could never have any of her own. And wasn’t that almost worse than the reverse? To be left watching others live while you have no way to influence anything, decide anything, plan anything . . .
Even with me. I chose where we went. Dorina just went along for the ride.
And now, after five hundred years, what did she want? Had anyone ever asked her? Had she ever even asked herself?
Maybe part of the reason she hadn’t talked to me was that she didn’t know what she wanted yet. I could relate. Until I met Claire, and finally found some sort of stability, I hadn’t done a lot of planning, either. What was the point when you don’t see a future anyway?
But now, after all this time, Dorina could have one.
Damn, it was a miracle she hadn’t banished me already.
“Banished?”
Shit.
“Stay out of my head.”
“You’re projecting.”
“Don’t give me that. I couldn’t project shit right now. My head feels like a lead balloon.”
“Perhaps if you would cease beating it into hard things, it would not.”
Mircea turned me around, and ran practiced fingers over my scalp. The bump was in the back this time, where I’d almost cracked my skull against the hard marble of the consul’s wall, thanks to her sending me and everybody else in the area flying out of the way of her little storm. I couldn’t complain too much, since I’d be a skeleton right now otherwise, but damn, it hurt!
Until Mircea’s soothing fingers stole the pain away, better than a shot of morphine.
I drowsily watched Burbles, who was back at it again, I guess in the hopes of bettering interspecies relations. “What a lovely little molded salad, with all the tiny flowers in! Why, it’s almost too pretty to eat—”
The server plucked it out of his hand, halfway to his mouth. “Sir. Please do not consume the tray ornaments.”
“There’s another way,” Mircea murmured.
“Another way for what?”
“Out of this dilemma we find ourselves in.”
I turned around to look at him, because there was something in his voice. “What dilemma?”
He frowned. No, it was more like a full-blown scowl, which I guess he could risk, being currently hidden from the room. Doubly so, since the consul’s guards had also drifted over here, leaving us behind two walls of vamps and cut off from everything.
But it was still strange.
Like the small shiver that suddenly went up my spine.
“You and Dorina.”
It was my turn to frown. “What about us?”
Mircea suddenly gripped my arm. “Do you think to hide it from me? I know exactly how powerful she is, what she can do. I know what she can do to you.”
I shifted uncomfortably in my stiff, backless slippers. I wasn’t ready to talk about this right now. I wasn’t ready to talk here at all, where the walls had ears and Marlowe, damn him, was probably listening in no matter what Mircea said. Not that I thought I’d be any more prepared back home.
“We will discuss it now,” Mircea said grimly. “If she already has this much access to your mind, there’s no choice. We have to act, and act soon.”
