He grimaced. “Eventually. I would have preferred to realize it before I spent quite so many nights in dissolute company.”
“And in dissolute beds?”
He raised an eyebrow. “More like playing cards in rough taverns. Sometimes I wonder what you think of me.”
So did I. But he’d been doing the good-father routine in the stuff Dorina had showed me, fighting to keep her—us—safe, and putting himself in danger to do it. I was about to ask how he’d got off that damned death boat, and if it was Dorina whose voice he’d heard, but I didn’t get the chance.
“What has she shown you?” It was idle—too much so. Mircea and I don’t make a lot of small talk.
“Why? What are you afraid of?”
“Nothing. But if you want to know about those days, you have only to ask. I could tell you—”
“But it would be from your perspective, wouldn’t it?”
He didn’t say anything, and his face—of course—gave nothing away. But, somehow, I knew I was right. “That’s it, isn’t it? You’re afraid of me seeing things through her eyes. Is that why you told her not to talk to me?”
“No.”
“Then why? Because it’s caused some damned problems, Mircea!”
“And could cause more, if you allow it to continue.”
His expression hadn’t changed, but his voice was clipped, the way it got when he was angry—or afraid. He didn’t process fear any better than I did; he just hid it better. We both had a tendency to lash out, to savage whatever was threatening us, even if that was each other. It had led to some truly spectacular fights in the past.
“I warned her to be careful,” he told me. “Now I am warning you. Give yourself time.”
“Assuming I have any.”
I’d spoken without thinking, because I was still half-asleep. But of course he picked up on it. And pulled me even farther away from the others—I didn’t know why. With the acoustics in here, and with most people’s hearing, we could be eavesdropped on from anywhere in the room.
Or maybe not.
“Explain,” he told me, but I was preoccupied, watching Burbles and the other guys suddenly start drifting this way.
“What are they doing?”
“Putting up a screen.”
“What?”
“Creating mental white noise.” Mircea’s voice was impatient. “No one will hear us.”
“No one but them.”
“They’re family.”
Maybe yours, I thought, watching Burbles flutter his fingers over a tray of hors d’oeuvres that was being passed around. “Are these fey?” he asked delightedly.
“Yes.” The blond fey holding the tray bent down a little, to provide better access, since he was tall enough to give Olfun a run for his money. And I suddenly understood why the consul had NBA-sized guards.
She was damned if anyone was going to tower over her people in her own house.
“Dory.” That was Mircea.
“I don’t know if I can explain,” I told him. “I don’t know what Dorina wants, since I haven’t been able to talk to her. But I’ve been getting mixed messages.”
“Such as?”
“On the one hand, she’s sending me dreams about that mission you were on back in Venice, to find the people murdering vampires for their bones. You remember?”
“Vividly.”
Yeah, I guessed so. “Anyway, I haven’t got the whole story, but I saw enough to realize that the same thing is happening now. Only with fey bones instead of vampire—”
“Yes, Kit told me what you said. So that’s how you knew what was in those weapons.”
“Partly. There were other clues, but I wouldn’t have made that connection without Dorina, and I think she sent it to me on purpose. Like she picked up something when we were at the fights a few days ago, and wanted me to know.”
“And the other?”
“What?”
“The other hand. I assume there’s also been a downside?”
“Yeah, well.” I thought about the last few days. “That’s one way of putting it.”
“So delicious,” Burbles was saying. “So, so good. What was that again?”
The fey waiter said a word I couldn’t pronounce.
“And what is that?”
“I do not know the equivalent in English. Stuffed . . . field mouse?”
Burbles turned slightly green.
“How exactly would you put it?” Mircea demanded.
I hesitated. I don’t claim any diplomatic abilities myself, but even I have limits. And telling somebody “There’s a chance your daughter might hate you and also me and has every reason to do so” is a bit much.
But as it turns out, I didn’t have to.
“I know what Dorina thinks of me,” Mircea said grimly. “I locked her away. It was meant to be temporary, until you stopped growing and caught up.”
“But it wasn’t,” I pointed out. “Why?”
The dark eyes glanced around the room, distracted—or disingenuous. “I’ve told you. I was afraid I couldn’t raise the wall again once it fell. If you weren’t compatible, and couldn’t live as one, I would lose you both.”
“As it was, you just lost her.”
“I didn’t lose her!” The dark eyes snapped back to me. “The situation wasn’t ideal, but as you’ve seen, she wasn’t trapped. Physically, yes, unless you were asleep or let your emotions get the better of you. But mentally she could go anywhere. Anywhere she could find an avatar, that is.”
“And you decided that was enough for her.”
It wasn’t harsh, or even inflected. I didn’t have the control over my voice that the vamps did, and right then I was too tired to try. But Mircea flinched anyway.
That must have really struck a nerve.
“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.”