I decided to join her. For a while, we both just stayed there, watching a spider build a web across a Victorian curlicue in the top of the railing. Gessa could be heard telling Stinky to let go of something, and then wrestling him for it when he predictably declined. Aiden laughed. A horse we shouldn’t have had whinnied. I sighed.
The portal had a setting that let out into the garden, but for security reasons, it didn’t work the other way. The only entrance was in the basement. So, to get the illegal animal out of here, we faced the prospect of leading it through the house and down a narrow flight of stairs. And then across a crowded basement where the portal light would probably cause it to freak the hell out.
At least, that’s what had happened last time, and no one had thought it fun.
And since the troll twins didn’t trust the Light Fey in their sanctum, and the Light Fey didn’t trust the trolls with their precious horses, it was probably gonna be left to me again, and frankly—
“It’s getting worse,” Claire told me abruptly.
I rolled my neck over to look at her. “What is?”
“You know what. I think—” She swallowed but didn’t turn her head to look at me. “I think it’s getting stronger.”
I didn’t say anything for a minute, because yeah. I did know. Because Claire and I had a similar problem, if for totally different reasons.
I was stuck with a crazy other half because of a weird mental operation Mircea had done, once upon a time, without really understanding what he was doing. I didn’t blame him; nobody else had known what to do, either. Dhampirs were so rare that there was no money in figuring out how to help us. My condition, or whatever you wanted to call it, might have been around forever, but it hadn’t preoccupied the attention of anyone in the healing profession.
Until Claire. I hadn’t understood why she, who was mainly interested in the fey, would want to help a human/vampire hybrid. Especially a crazy one. But she had, cultivating some extra-powerful fey weed for me that calmed the beast when nothing else could. But, lately, I’d come to believe that maybe I did know why she’d given a damn. Even if she hadn’t known it then, we weren’t that different.
Because Claire was a hybrid, too.
Her mother had been human, with a tiny bit of Brownie in the mix somewhere. That wasn’t particularly odd for the magical community and hadn’t seemed to affect her. But her father . . . well, her father was something else altogether.
It was why Caedmon was here, trying to bum assistance for whatever he was up to in Faerie. It seemed that the fey had their own version of shape-shifters, just like our weres. Or, no, not just like. Because while weres could be terrifying, especially in large numbers, none of them held a candle to their fey cousins.
None of them morphed into a two-thousand-pound dragon.
Claire hadn’t realized that her mother’s lover—who had been in human form when they met, obviously—was anybody special. Nobody in the family had ever said anything, and she’d never shown any signs of peculiar abilities. Until she took a trip into Faerie with Heidar, and discovered the hard way that she was something known as two-natured among the fey.
The revelation had been a little traumatic, from what I’d heard. And apparently, things hadn’t improved since. Her other half was still an adolescent, because living on Earth had stunted its development, but lately, it had been making its presence known.
“Still craving rare steak?” I asked. Because Claire—the old Claire—was a strict vegan, something her other half was not on board with.
She waved the question away, with a flutter of long, white fingers.
“Yes, but I can handle that. I can’t—” She stopped, her throat working. And then she blurted it out. “How do you do it?”
“How do I do what?”
“Not explode!” She sat up, her face white, but her eyes bright. “I felt it, what you carry inside you—all that anger, all that rage—every time I pulled it off you. The first time, it was such a shock. That you could even function. And in the garden that night—it was amazing. Just amazing.” She shook her head.
Yeah. That was one word for it, I thought uncomfortably. She was talking about an incident a couple weeks ago, when Louis-Cesare said something that offended Dorina, and she’d almost gone ballistic, threatening not only him but everybody else we’d had over that night. Including the commune that lived across the street, and as far as I knew, were one-hundred-percent human. It had been terrifying, because I’d been fighting with everything I had, but I still couldn’t control her, and I didn’t know what she’d do if I let go.
Thankfully, Claire had been there, and even more thankfully, her human half is what is known as a null witch, someone capable of pulling magical energy off other creatures. That was how we’d met. She’d been working at an auction house after fleeing her homicidal excuse for a cousin, calming down the odd little items they had up for sale, some of which could be dangerous if a null wasn’t around to drink all that excess energy. I’d been shopping to bulk up the arsenal, and we’d started talking. And had ended up as roommates because our abilities complemented each other. I’d kept her safe from her weird-ass family, and she’d kept me . . . well, more or less sane.
Except for that night, when even she hadn’t been able to drink it all, because Dorina was pissed.
Luckily, Louis-Cesare had old-fashioned manners, and had apologized the way that one master did to another, by kneeling and offering his neck to her sword if she’d had one. It was archaic, but then, so was Dorina. And it had done what nothing else could, and sent her back to sleep.
Leaving the rest of us seriously weirded out, especially me, because I wasn’t used to being awake when she emerged. Not that she had entirely, but it had been close enough to shake me. And, apparently, it hadn’t been any better for Claire, and now I was kicking myself for not even thinking about that.
“I’m sorry—” I began.
But she was already shaking her head. “It’s okay. I just meant—you fought it, somehow. If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t have had time to do anything, and who knows what would have happened? I need to know how to do that. I thought I understood, that I could handle my . . . problem . . . like I did yours. But that was something from outside of me, someone else’s emotion. It was distant, you know?”
Not really, but she was looking at me hopefully, so I nodded anyway.
“But now . . .” She bit her lip. “Dory, I almost lost it in there. When they wouldn’t let Caedmon help, when they were just going to watch that child die, I almost—” Her eyes met mine, and there was genuine fear in them. “It wasn’t distant then. I wanted to kill them, to rend them, to hurt—” She put her face in her hands.
I sat there, feeling awkward. Because I wasn’t used to having friends—the fits had always made it too dangerous—much less to comforting them. I sometimes looked around at all the people in my life now with sheer amazement, and no little fear. That I wouldn’t know what to do in any of the roles I suddenly found myself in: parent, lover, best friend. Because I’d never played them before.
But Claire had been there for me when I really needed her, and she clearly needed something from me now. But I didn’t know what. So I just hugged her, remembering how much it had helped when Louis-Cesare had done the same for me. And after a startled second, she hugged me back.
“I wanted to eat them, Dory,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “I wanted it so . . . damned . . . much. And I just . . .” She hugged me harder, and it hurt, because my ribs were apparently never going to freaking heal, but I didn’t say anything.
She was hurting more.
“How do you do it?” she asked again, sounding fairly desperate. “I can’t turn into this thing. I won’t!”
I didn’t know what to say, because the truth wasn’t something she wanted to hear. The fact was, anger management had never been my specialty. I’d learned a few tricks, but it was always a crapshoot whether any would work. Mostly, I’d learned to live with it by letting my emotions out on a regular basis when I hunted, which helped to calm them the rest of the time.
And calm emotions kept the door locked on Dorina.