That wasn’t why.
And I hadn’t forgotten everything, after all, because suddenly there were pieces, like of cut-up photographs, crowding my mind. Not of the crazy landing, but of other things: a huge troll, the biggest of them all, racing up a wall; an albino with long, white hair stepping through a brilliant portal, searing my eyes; a feeling of flying, soaring into the sky and then turning to look down at the temporary fairgrounds, trash strewn and windswept, with a few bonfires still burning— I winced, and shut down the flow, because my head hurt.
And because I hadn’t done those things. I’d been passed out on a cracked subfloor under a couple thousand pounds of troll, with a ton of bouncy toys and a freaked-out boyfriend. I remembered Louis-Cesare yelling my name; hands lifting me, gentle as a baby; some confused shouting . . .
And rocketing through an intersection in a troll-laden truck, while a witch with cigarettes in her hair laughed and laughed.
Louis-Cesare’s fingers gently combed over my abused scalp. “The doctor said there should be no lasting damage, that dhampirs have the hardest heads she’s ever seen.”
“I’m fine,” I told him.
Physically, anyway.
“You won’t be if you don’t rest,” Louis-Cesare said. “You all but passed out on me a moment ago—”
“What?”
He nodded. “That’s why you don’t remember the last few minutes. You’re so tired you drifted off.”
“I did not!”
His lips twitched, the worry suddenly eclipsed by what looked like genuine humor. “You look so indignant.”
“I’m not,” I told him, and then thought about it. “Okay, maybe I am, but I don’t nap.”
Louis-Cesare’s lips twitched some more.
“Stop doing that!”
“Then explain to me what is so wrong with a nap? I recall quite liking them once.”
“They’re”—stupid, ridiculous, weak—“dangerous. To zone out in a fight—”
“But you weren’t in a fight. You were home, behind excellent wards, and I was here. It is hard to be safer than that.”
I ignored the smug comment, because he wasn’t wrong. About that, anyway. “I don’t nap,” I repeated.
“Not normally, perhaps. But it is as the doctor said: you need time to heal. Time you haven’t been taking.”
He turned me around again, and started lathering up my hair.
“I’m not hurt,” I said—and tried to put some heat behind it, because the magic fingers were doing a good job of making me forget how serious this was. “And that wasn’t a nap. Don’t you get it?”
“No,” he said simply. “Tell me.”
Yeah, like it was that easy. To compress a lifetime of fear and struggle and pain into a few sentences when I never talked about it, not with anyone. Because who would care? And because I didn’t know how.
Only I guess I did, because it came out in a rush. “I used to try all kinds of things to keep Dorina under control. They didn’t always work, but I got pretty good at it. Enough that I could tell when things were about to go bad and smoke some weed, or walk away from a conflict, or punch a tree until I calmed down. But now . . .”
“Now?”
Those damned fingers should be registered somewhere, I thought, unconsciously leaning back into the feel of them. “Now everything’s changed. Dorina couldn’t come out when I was conscious; the barrier prevented her. That was the whole point of it.”
I felt him nod.
“But now it’s gone, and without it . . . there’s nothing to keep her from showing up anytime she feels like it. And what if she feels like it all the time? What if—”
I stopped for a moment, because I didn’t do this shit. This touchy-feely, let’s all share our deepest fears shit. It made me feel uncomfortable and vulnerable and a bunch of other things I hated, made me want to run away or lash out at something, which usually worked pretty well to change the subject. But I couldn’t do that this time.
Louis-Cesare deserved the truth.
“What’s stopping her from just taking over my life,” I rasped. “All of it, all the time, and shutting me out? For good this time?”
Like I’d tried to do to her.
I’d always treated this as my life—all mine. Because of course I had; I hadn’t even known she existed until very recently. I’d spent years thinking that I just had fits sometimes, that it was the dhampir crazy coming out, and concentrated on finding ways to tamp it down, while hoping that someday, someone would find a “cure” for my “disease.”
Only to find out that I didn’t have a disease, I had a— Twin.
The word floated through my mind suddenly, frighteningly, because I hadn’t put it there. Wouldn’t have, since I’d never thought of us that way. We weren’t twins, we weren’t sisters, I didn’t have a sister! I had a fucked-up mind thanks to Mircea and, yes, maybe it had been necessary to save my life, but I didn’t know that, did I? I’d been there, but I couldn’t remember any of it.
Like I couldn’t remember the last fifteen minutes.
Had I been asleep? Just nodding off in the warmth and security of my boyfriend’s arms, because I was that beat? Maybe. It had been a hell of a month, with things coming hard and fast, one after another, before I had time to blink sometimes, much less to heal. And although the family had some gifts in that area, with the war raging, most of them had been in need of help themselves. And, anyway, they could only do so much.
Sometimes, nature just had to take its course.
So, yeah, maybe I’d drifted off when I never did. But I didn’t know for sure. And neither did Louis-Cesare, no matter what he thought. He’d only met Dorina a couple of times, and both had been under duress. Would he feel that difference he talked about if she was just . . . there? If she was just . . . watching?
I shuddered, and didn’t manage to stop before he noticed.
Louis-Cesare’s hands stilled. “You truly think that is possible?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore! I just—” I twisted around, and my damned ribs rewarded me by shooting savage pain up my newly loosened spine. “Goddamn it!”
Louis-Cesare’s hands dropped unerringly to the source, sending warmth and relief coursing through me, despite the fact that I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to feel better. I wanted— I didn’t even know.
Like I didn’t even know what he was still doing here.
“Why are you here?” I asked wearily, looking up at him.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Because, when you hooked your wagon to the crazy, it wasn’t this crazy?”
He just looked at me.
“I’m a disaster,” I told him plainly. “I always have been, and things aren’t getting better. You ought to bail while you can.”
It hurt, even more than the ribs, but it was the truth. I’d always known it, but I’d hoped to hold on a little longer, to hold him. But things were starting to fall apart—I could feel it—and Dorina— Isn’t here, he told me mentally, because he could do that sometimes.
All vampires could. Even babies could talk to family, and masters could communicate silently with almost anyone they chose. Except for me, who wasn’t a vampire and who’d had exactly zero mental gifts for five centuries, until that wall started to fall.
And all of a sudden, I was hearing voices.
But not hers.
She had the mental gifts, not me. I had no idea how to contact her, but she could talk to me any time she wanted. But she hadn’t.
Why talk to someone who won’t even be around much longer?
Why get to know someone you plan to kill?
“Listen to me.” Louis-Cesare’s hands came up to frame my face, his eyes fiercer than I’d ever seen them. “I am here. I’m not going anywhere. And no matter what happens, we will find a way to deal with this!”
Looking into his eyes, I almost believed it. But I’d learned the hard way not to want what I couldn’t have, not to reach for things out of my grasp, not to hope . . . for anything. Or anyone.