“More powerful. That’s what I meant.”
“Sure you did.” He didn’t answer, just kept scrubbing at his hands. “Jimmy, I think they’re clean.”
“I doubt that,” he murmured, but he lifted them from the water and dried them on his pants. I didn’t point out that beneath the shirt advertising happy puppets he also had blood all over his chest. If I did, we’d never get out of here.
Unable to stop myself, I moved closer, and when he saw me coming he tensed.
“What do you think I’m going to do?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” He rubbed his palm over his chest as if it ached. I knew the feeling. “I miss you.”
“I’m right here.”
He shook his head. “When I look at you I remember the other you. I can’t bear to touch you or have you touch me. It used to be whenever I was tired or sad or sick I could bring out my memories of us and I’d be . . . better. But the bad ones seem to have drowned all the good ones. Now any memories of you make me—” He swallowed I could fill in the blank. Memories of me made him sick.
“How did you get past it?” he asked. “What I did to you?”
For an instant what he’d done to me was right there—a kaleidoscope of horror. Then I gritted my teeth and I made it go away.
Lifting my chin, I met his eyes. “That wasn’t you.”
He snorted. “It is now.”
We weren’t getting anywhere. We might never get past what he’d done, what I’d done. So many people couldn’t, and they had less to forgive and forget than Sanducci and me.
“We should go,” I said.
“Lizzy,” he began, and I couldn’t help it; my heart lightened to hear him call me that again. “I’m sorry about before.”
At this rate we were going to be saying, I’m sorry, until the day that we died.
“I’m fine.” I lifted my wrist. “Healed right up.”
“I meant earlier. Out there.” He jerked his head at the opening of the cave, and his dark hair flew. “That thing inside me pretended to be . . . me, and I—”
“Your vamp fooled me,” I interrupted, not needing or wanting a replay. “I should know better. Not your fault.”
“You think that makes it easier on me? I can still see myself forcing you—”
“You didn’t force me; I wanted to.”
“You wanted me. This me.” He smacked himself in the chest again. He was really going to have to stop that. “But it wasn’t me.” He choked and stared at the ground where my blood still darkened the dirt. “That’s . . . fucked up,” he finished.
“What isn’t?”
His laughter was harsh, not quite vampire laughter but close. “It doesn’t bother you?”
To my amazement, it didn’t. I had so many other things to be bothered by.
“No,” I said, and his breath rushed out in a huff.
“Then you’re much more forgiving than I am.”
I doubted that. I’d held a grudge against him for a long, long time. Probably would still be holding one if I hadn’t been forcibly taught that there were a lot better issues to be angry about.
I crossed the short distance between us and reached for his hand. He flinched, but I took it anyway, then traced my thumb over the still-fading mark that circled his wrist.
Before I’d left, I’d seen what the Dagda would do to him, and it hadn’t involved any whips or chains. There’d been fire, I thought, perhaps a knife. Pain and blood, nothing was ever easy. But I hadn’t seen this.
I stroked my thumb over him again, breathed in, opened my mind . . . and I didn’t see anything at all.
I lifted my gaze. “What did he do to you?”
“Does it matter?”
It would always matter. There just wasn’t anything I could do about it. What had happened had happened. That I’d let it, that I’d basically ordered it, even if I hadn’t been the one to hurt him, did matter. I’d had the power to stop the horror, and I wouldn’t.
I understood that a lot of Jimmy’s anger, his inability to touch me and let me touch him, stemmed from the knowledge that if we had to do it all over again, I’d do the same thing.
Since I could practically feel his skin crawling beneath mine, I let him go. In this form, there was only so much torture I could stomach.
I had the ability to separate Vampire Jimmy and Dhampir Jimmy; I knew that what the first one did and said had nothing to do with the other. I thought Jimmy understood the same about Vamp Liz and Lizzy. I’m sure he did—in theory.
But men are visual, which is why porn really turns them on, and for women, who are emotional, not so much. So while I could separate the two Jimmys because of the way I felt about each one, even though they looked exactly the same, Jimmy might be having a bit of difficulty getting past his conflicting feelings over what appeared to be exactly the same woman.
The problem was that the Lizzy I’d been, the one he’d fallen in love with, was gone, and I didn’t think she was ever coming back. Which left a woman he didn’t know and one he didn’t like in the same package.