AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I look back,” Ray finally said, “at four hundred years of slavery. You know when Dory cut off my head that time?”
I nodded.
“We were nothing to each other then; never even met. I was just some loser she’d been sent after, just a paycheck. Yet she was more polite to my decapitated corpse than my old master ever was to the whole man. That fucking prick.”
I blinked.
“So you gotta weigh it out. On the one hand, sure, I don’t get any power boosts, but that miserly bastard never gave up much anyway. And on average, I’d rather have some goddamned respect than all the power in the world. You know?”
“No,” I said honestly. “I have never met a vampire who did not crave power.”
“Didn’t say I didn’t crave it,” Ray corrected. “Right now, I crave the heck out of it. I just crave something else more. You spend four hundred years being treated like nothing, just nothing at all, and maybe you’d understand.”
This time, I was the one who was silent.
“I did,” I finally said, and saw him blush.
Or maybe that was the fire. It was sending a cheerful glow over the flat stone beneath us, the rocks behind us, and the fingers above. It had also given Ray back his youthful appearance. There was
no gray in the shock of black hair, and the blue eyes, so startling against the tanned skin, were unlined. At a guess, I would have said that he was Changed young, no more than early twenties.
“Nineteen,” he said roughly, and looked away. But a moment later, those blue eyes were back and staring at me challengingly. “What about you?”
“I am not a vampire,” I pointed out. “I was not Changed.”
The eyeroll was back. “No, I meant what do you want? You asked me, so it’s only fair.”
I agreed that it was fair. It was also difficult to answer. I decided to take my time, as he had, and lay back against the warm stone to look at the stars.
Like everything else here, they were both familiar and not. The small, pinpricks of light were the same, but there were no familiar constellations. Orion, the Big Dipper, the Pleiades . . . they simply were not there.
Of course, they wouldn’t be, would they? I had heard that Faerie was in a completely different universe, connected to our own solely by a small breach in space-time. It was on the “heavenly” side, whereas Earth was part of the “hells”, although those terms did not have the same connotations that I had been taught as a child. They simply denoted the rules under which the two universes operated, acknowledging that their magic, and possibly even their physics, worked differently.
“They got constellations,” Ray suddenly said. “They’re just different from ours. See that line of four stars in a row, with three more curving up from it?”
I followed the line of his pointing finger, and nodded.
“That’s Gangleri, the Wanderer. Said to be the ship the gods came here in. The story is that they were like space Vikings, poor adventurer types searching for wealth, lands, people they could conquer—basically anything. They traveled all over their galaxy, plundering the shit outta everybody who didn’t beat them up first—”
“Beat them up? When they were so strong?”
He settled onto his back and put his hands behind his head. “Well, that’s the point. They weren’t that strong then. They were only overpowered when they came here, where the rules are different. They discovered that in our universe they were like, well, like gods. They could beat up anybody.”
“But they weren’t in our universe,” I pointed out. “Faerie is in theirs.”
“Yeah, but it’s the closest world to the rift on their side, like Earth is on ours. Both worlds are a little weird, ‘cause things bleed over. That’s how the gods found us; we’re not that far away, you know?”
I shook my head. I didn’t know. I had never heard this before.
“How did you come to know so much?” I asked.
He shrugged. “The fey. If you wanna do business, you gotta have a meal, drink some wine, smoke some herb. And while you’re doing that, you talk, so they can decide what kind of person you are. They been ripped off before, but it don’t happen often ‘cause they’ve been trading a long time. They’re pretty good at sizing a guy up. But anyway, eventually they talk back, usually telling stories.”
“What kind of stories?”
“Any kind. Every kind.” Ray grinned. “Bullshit, mostly: heroes and villains, epic journeys and daring deeds, damsels needing rescuing from ugly ogres . . . unless it’s the ogres telling the story. In which case it’s usually about light fey trespassers getting what’s coming to ‘em. And about roasting pretty fey princes over a spit until the juices run clear.”
I blinked. “You traded with the dark fey, too?”
