“Something that would not have been the case if you’d taken precautions!”
“We did! Those spells tore through them like they were tissue paper! Who the hell is making them? And how and why and where? I want to know and I will!”
I stopped listening. The master was wasting his time; the man didn’t know anything more than he’d said. I could see the bewilderment in his mind, along with fear and anger. The vampire would get no answers tonight.
But perhaps I would.
I followed the annoying niggle back down the corridor, to where a dining room lay behind a door. There was a fireplace in here, too, but not for heat. I pushed my head through the illusion and found what I’d expected: a secret passageway, a spy tunnel, and a way for she-who-saw-everything here to move her servants about quickly.
No one surprised her in her own home. Not even me. I would be spotted in moments by one of the masters I could feel roaming the pathways that snaked through this great house. I would never make it to her, not through all this.
Well.
Not without some help.
* * *
*
I woke up in a strange bed, with a familiar vampire. And in alarm, but not because Louis-Cesare was looking like a corpse. But because— What the hell?
Dorina, I thought blankly, and fell out of bed.
And then proceeded to go snuffling about, like my counterpart was currently doing. Because she wasn’t in my body anymore. She was— “Ew!”
“Dory?” Louis-Cesare peered at me blearily, from over the side of the bed.
It was the consul’s, or at least one owned by her, because we were in her house in upstate New York. The ants-on-skin feel of the place, the result of my dhampir senses being assaulted by the presence of hundreds if not thousands of vampires, all at once, was unmistakable. It literally made me want to scratch my skin off, and Dorina . . .
What the hell would she make of a place like this?
Shit.
Why did I think I knew?
“Dory?” Louis-Cesare said again, looking at me strangely.
I sat up, trying to ignore the taste of whatever my counterpart’s avatar had just found in a dark corner. It wasn’t going so well. And now it was on the trail of something else, scurrying about in the dust, because housecleaning was not a priority in secret passageways.
“Dory?”
“I’m fine.” I looked around. “Have you seen some clothes?”
“What clothes?”
“Any clothes!”
Louis-Cesare caught my arm. “What is wrong?”
For a moment, I didn’t answer, because I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t supposed to be able to do this, to feel Dorina when she was away, to know what she was doing. Except for that moment at the end of the car chase with Caedmon, when I’d had that terrible split-screen view of the world.
I didn’t have it now, but I had something.
“Dory, talk to me!”
“This might sound a little weird,” I warned him.
“Trust me, it already does.”
Louis-Cesare was looking at my nose. I grabbed it. It was snuffling again.
Goddamn it!
“I think there’s a chance Dorina plans to kill the consul,” I told him quickly.
“What?”
“I told you it was going to sound weird!” I broke away.
Louis-Cesare’s pants were on the back of a chair. I pulled them on. And then pulled them off again, because I’d do a Marlowe in the damned things and break a leg! Damn it, I didn’t have time for this!
I settled for a sheet, wrapped it sarong-style, and headed for the door.
“Wait.” Louis-Cesare was suddenly beside me, which wasn’t a problem. And leaning on the door, which was. “Explain this to me.”
“I already did!”
“Explain it to me again.”
“I don’t have time!”
“Then I’m coming with you.”
I looked at him. He should have been in bed. He had healing scars all over his body, and even a few seeping wounds. I could smell the blood, thick and strong, under all the bandages.
It should have been reabsorbed by now, like the wounds should have closed. Hell, they should have closed instantly! But there’d been a minute or so when he’d been fighting a whole coterie of mages all on his own, ones armed with weapons that killed most vamps on contact. How many times had he gotten hit?
“How many times were you hit?” I demanded.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters!”
“Why?” Blue eyes suddenly burned into mine. “I thought you no longer cared for me?”
I glared back at him. “This? This is the moment you take for that conversation?”
“Why not? According to Claire, there are things I do not understand.”
“The only thing you need to understand right now is, there’s the bed.” I pointed. “Get in it!”
“No.”
I glared at him some more.
It didn’t seem to help.
“I’m coming with you,” said the most stubborn creature on earth.
Make that the second-most stubborn. “No way in hell.”
“And why not?”
“Because I’m not sure you can take her!”
I opened the door; he shut it again. And splayed a hand over it to keep it that way. “That’s what this is about? You think she is stronger?”
“She’s a first-level master!”
He arched an eyebrow at me.
“And she has freaky abilities—”
“The same could be said of any of us.”
“Not like this!” I tried to open the door again, but it may as well have been cemented in place.
“Like what?”
“Let go of the damned door!”
“Answer the question. Like what?”
I turned on him. “Like inhabiting a rat scurrying through secret passageways, looking to kill the consul!”
Louis-Cesare blinked at me a few times. “I’m . . . going to call somebody.”
“Call Marlowe. He’s just down the hall. Or he was. He can get her away before Dorina finds her—”
“Get who away?”
I stared at him. “Are you listening to me at all? The consul!”
Louis-Cesare licked his lips. Then he pulled me into an embrace I didn’t want, but when a first-level vamp decides he wants to hug you, you just go with it. We stayed there for a moment.
I don’t know what he was doing, but I was debating eating some rat bait. The rat was in favor, but Dorina was trying to talk him out of it. They were still arguing when Louis-Cesare pulled me over to the bed and sat us down.
“One more time, with a bit more explanation?”
I sighed. “Dorina has some kind of weird master power. You know, the one Caedmon mistook for a fey ability?”
He frowned at Caedmon’s name, but didn’t comment on it. “But it is not.”
“No! It’s . . . Look, I just found out about it, so I don’t have a huge amount of info here. But she can separate from my consciousness and . . . tag along . . . with other people. And things.”
“Things?” He frowned. “You mean like a—”
“Rat, yes. She didn’t think she could make it to the consul in my body, so she borrowed another one.”
“But you’re a senator. You can go wherever you wish. She didn’t need—”
“But I don’t think she knows that. We’re having communication problems, and I don’t think she understands everything.” I sure as hell didn’t, I thought, feeling queasy.
Probably because my avatar had just eaten a bellyful of poison!
“Crap.”
“What?”
“Never mind. We just have to tell Marlowe—”
I started to get up, but Louis-Cesare pulled me back down. “Tell him what?”
“That the consul’s in danger!”
“Yes, I do not think we will be doing that,” Louis-Cesare said, grabbing his trousers off the chair.
I watched as the world’s best butt, bruised and bloody though it was, disappeared into the rumpled leftovers of a once-nice suit. “What are you doing?”
“I told you. Going with you to find Dorina.”
“Why? We’ll just tell Marlowe—”
Louis-Cesare turned on me. “What? That your alter ego is about to kill his Lady?”
I frowned. “Well, we won’t put it like that—”
“It doesn’t matter how you put it. He will very likely attempt to kill you to ensure her survival.”
“I’m not trying to kill her!”
“But you and Dorina share a body, do you not? He may well decide that killing one would dispose of both.”