But because Horatiu had been right: Mircea was afraid.
Not for himself; he could leave whenever he chose. But for his daughter, who couldn’t. She was trapped here, in this hellish place, until the fit passed, assuming that it did this time.
But what if it didn’t? The fits were coming closer together now, and were lasting longer. Yet six months after they’d first started, he still didn’t know what they were, or why they were happening. Or how to stop them.
Other than the obvious, of course.
Mircea slid down the mast, while the winds howled and the storm clouds flashed, unleashing lightning bolts that illuminated the rain-washed boards beneath his hands. The storm was worse now, like it knew what he was going to do, and maybe it did. Because the storm was her, the other part of her, who didn’t like being caged in this little body.
The one who wanted out.
But out of where?
It’s your body, he wanted to yell, to scream at the skies. There is nothing to escape from. What are you trying to do?
He’d never received an answer. He wasn’t sure that she had one, this other side of his daughter, the one he barely knew. She raged like a trapped god, like a force of nature entombed in flesh, who wanted nothing more than to rip her prison to shreds and break free.
He was terribly afraid that, one day, she would manage it.
But not this day.
Mircea gripped the boards, hard enough to feel splinters biting into his hands. He ignored them. They weren’t real, any more than the wind or the waves or the salt that burned his eyes was real. Just manifestations of her power, power that was overflowing her human body, but had nowhere else to go.
Until he gave it one.
The boards under his touch began to glow, first a faint luminescence barely limning his fingers in light. And then spreading outward, brighter and farther, lighting up the bones in his hands and the frayed edges of his sleeves, while he fought to stay in place. Because, yes, she knew what he was doing.
But she couldn’t stop him—not yet. They had a connection, the two of them, because of his mental gifts, or because he was both father and Sire in one, or for some other reason he didn’t know because he didn’t know anything. No one did, not about dhampirs. He’d learned that the hard way, these last months.
The same way he’d learned everything, he thought, as the ship suddenly turned almost perpendicular.
It threw him against the side, where the sea tried its best to drown him and debris to impale him, and a lightning burst almost succeeded in incinerating him but hit a flying barrel instead.
Shards of burning wood fell all around him as the ship slammed back down and rocked to the other side, and half the items on deck went airborne. But not Mircea. Because he’d wrapped his leg in a rope and braced, one arm on a railing and one on the deck. And, once more, the light under his hand began to spread.
He watched it creep outward, illuminating the stains and nails in the boards and the banding on casks and barrels, while the winds shrieked and the waves pounded the little craft, as if in anger. But the light flickered on, across the deck and up webs of rigging above tightly furled sails, turning them white-hot and gleaming. Until the vessel was covered in light, until it looked like he was kneeling on a ghost ship. And the farther the light reached, the more the waves lessened, the quieter the winds blew, and the more Mircea’s hand felt like it was about to combust.
And then did so along with the rest of his body when a lightning strike took him, the bolt coming out of nowhere and landing with a ferocity that tore him off the boards and sent him hurtling backward over the side, screaming—
And hitting something with his whole body, hard enough to bruise.
It took him a moment to realize that the hard object was his own front door, and that the soggy boards he’d landed on were his floor, where the wet had blown in. And that Dorina was quiet, lying exhausted in his arms as he fought for breath he didn’t need, and stared at Horatiu, still standing nearby. Who looked back at him with pride in the old eyes.
“It worked.”
“This time,” Mircea rasped, the power he’d drawn off his daughter thickening his voice and spilling through his skin, lighting the dim room as if someone had decided to burn a hundred candles.
She was getting stronger.
But he was not, at least not fast enough. There was going to come a time when he couldn’t drain her sufficiently, and he was desperately afraid that that day would be soon. He had to have help.
And there was only one way to get it.
Chapter Eight
I awoke for the second time with shards of memory poking the soft tissue of my brain. For a moment, weird images overwrote my sunny bedroom: rain laced with wind, huge waves, an old man with blood on his face . . . Shit!
I grabbed my head as a spike of agony lanced through it, courtesy of Dorina’s latest blast from the past. Or maybe my headache was food related, because I was also absolutely ravenous. I just lay there, fairly stunned, as the pains in my head and gut fought it out for dominance. Then I shoved them both aside with a snarl, threw back the covers, and headed out the door in search of breakfast.
And only succeeded in scandalizing Ymsi, who was sitting in the hall, just outside my room. The blond head with the incongruously baby-fine hair brushed the ceiling, and the massive hands were busy with something I couldn’t see over the broad expanse of back. Not even when he turned to glance at me over his shoulder, and let out a bleat of alarm.
I looked down and sighed, because of course. Louis-Cesare liked to dress me in frilly nightwear, but only when he was going to have the pleasure of removing it again. But since that hadn’t been likely this time, he’d left me as I was.
Buck naked.
Not that it should have mattered, I thought, heading back inside. The fey didn’t care much about bodily modesty. They felt that clothes were more for showing off than for covering up, and were therefore optional around the house. At least, that had been the attitude of the troll twins, who had been yelled at repeatedly by Claire when they first arrived for letting it all hang out, when the “all” in question was eye-poppingly huge and hard to miss.
In desperation, she’d bought out a fabric store of sturdy canvas cloth and sewn them cargo shorts, and they’d apparently decided that wearing them was better than dealing with my redheaded roommate’s famous temper. Although it was still a good idea to yell out a warning before entering their private sanctum in the basement, and the butt crack of doom was often to be seen looming o’er the yard when Ymsi was in the garden, kneeling over a tiny plant that he was encouraging to grow.
However, the same laissez-faire attitude did not apply to me. Not for Ymsi, not since he’d poked his head in my bathroom one day when I was bathing, and I’d been a little . . . stern with him. I’d apologized later, but it hadn’t helped. Once trolls get an idea in their heads, you may as well stop talking.
The result was a massive, lumbering teen with the scruples of a Victorian auntie. Who I could hear making weird crunching noises outside the door while I struggled to find a tee that didn’t make my eyes water. Damn, I needed to do laundry, I thought, crawling out from under the bed.
Only to see a basket of clean, perfectly folded clothes sitting in front of my closet door.
Uh-oh.