Oh, they had half of one. They knew how to break out of jail. They could do that pretty much whenever they wanted. They had some ideas about what to do next, but no good ideas. Nothing that made their breakout more than the preliminary to a baroque form of suicide. She needed her weapon, dammit. She could toss guards on the ground if they came at her one at a time, but for any real action, she needed her weapon. She needed Rule and Grandmother and some damn way to leave Dragonhome once they got the kids.
She’d tried to reach Rule again last night. And failed. Oh, she’d managed to brush his mind. But whether because of depletion, distraction, or pure weariness, she hadn’t been able to establish a solid connection. He was at the very limit of her range, even with the mate bond to help, even using the toltoi to give that bond a boost. It had been like standing on tiptoe, trying to turn a screw overhead with nothing but her bare hands when she could barely brush it with her fingertips.
What she needed was a damn screwdriver.
She frowned, wondering if that was possible. Not a screwdriver, but a mental . . . something. A construct. Was that how Sam and the other dragons could mindspeak lots of people at the same time? Did they keep bits of mind-stuff handy, already formed into something that could connect with other minds?
She couldn’t imagine how to do that. Her mindsense always collapsed back in on itself when she wasn’t actively using it. Fact is, she just wasn’t very good with it. She’d improved, sure, especially when it came to translating. She no longer had to give that process her undivided attention to get the gist of what someone was saying. But she couldn’t send words along that connection without concentrating hard. She’d had to trance herself to send it far enough to reach Rule.
He was coming, though. Headed her way. He’d be closer when she tried again—hopefully while taking that bath. If her day followed its usual pattern, she’d have some quiet time in the bath and could try again. She wanted that contact, needed it . . . and not just to make herself feel good. She didn’t suck at tactics, but Rule was better. He might be able to pull together a plan that gave them more of a chance.
Though too much of their chances depended on Reno. Surely he—
“I did not love my sister.”
Alice’s words startled Lily as much for the interruption of her thoughts as for their content, which took her a couple seconds to process. She replied with careful neutrality. “Families are complicated.”
“I was surprised by how difficult her loss was for me. I had expected to be relieved. Relief was present, but it was not the whole of my reaction.”
“Families are complicated,” Lily said again, “and not all bonds are based on love.”
“The bond between Helen and myself was based on her need. She was a vampire—metaphorically speaking, of course. She did not eat blood. She ate me.”
Lily did not know what to say to that. She fell back on an old interviewing technique. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“I understand that most telepaths do not come into their Gifts until puberty. This was not true for Helen. She was born telepathic, although at first only with me. Her tie to my mind kept her sane. By sane,” she added, “I mean that she did not devolve into catatonia.”
Which was the usual outcome for telepaths, Lily knew. “She used your mind to stay in touch with reality? How?”
Alice gave her a reproving look. “That is a personal matter.”
And the rest of this wasn’t? Alice puzzled Lily, puzzled her greatly. “So from the moment you were born, your twin was in your head?”
“Yes. This caused developmental problems for me. From my reading, I know that many twins have trouble differentiating, especially when young. To a young twin, ‘we’ is as important a pronoun as ‘I.’ Also, there is usually a dominant twin. Helen was certainly that. As far back as I can remember, she was in my head and feeling.”
“She was an empath as well as a telepath? A projective empath?” Empathy wasn’t a terribly unusual Gift. Projective empaths, however, were about as common as snow in the Sahara.
“The empathic element existed only with me—a quirk of our twinship, I believe. Helen felt very strongly. I do not. Her emotions, her desires, overbore my own. I conjecture that I failed to develop a normal range of emotions because my role in our conjoined sense of self was to balance Helen’s excessive emotions. However, the telepathic component exaggerated existing differences. It did not create them. Helen’s emotions were strong from the beginning, and mine were not. It is surprising, is it not, that two genetically identical beings could differ in important ways?”
“Such as in your Gifts?” Lily hazarded. She still hadn’t managed to touch Alice, learn what her Gift was.
Alice made a small, dismissive gesture. “It is impossible for twins to have the same Gift, so that is not surprising. Experts in your realm often cite environmental factors as the causative agents for the variations in personality, behavior, and skills in what are called identical twins. I consider that explanation accurate but insufficient. My opinion is based in part on my own experience, which of course is subjective and therefore difficult to quantify. But I believe that differentiation is caused by an innate drive to differentiate. That each sentient being is instinctively driven to establish an identity distinct from all other sentient beings. I wasn’t able to do so until I was thirty-two. That is when the Old One you consider your enemy formed her own bond with Helen, and Helen no longer needed her bond with me. So she broke it.”
A telepathic bond, she meant. The Great Bitch had had a telepathic bond with Helen . . . which had supplanted the one with Alice. And suddenly Lily understood. Alice hadn’t loved Helen. She’d been subsumed by her, then all of a sudden she’d been cut loose. “She ate you, you said. You mean that she ate your sense of self.”
“That is one way to put it.”
“But you had some sense of self. You must have, to survive having that tie destroyed.”
“If, as I propose, the drive to differentiate is innate, it must also be self-renewing. The effort to establish oneself as a distinct self would be continual and therefore could not be extinguished.”
“A drive you think is common to all sentient beings. Not just to humans?”
Another small, dismissive gesture. “That is a theory. I may be extrapolating too widely. I have not collected data on every type of sentient being.”
“But you didn’t want to limit yourself to speaking only about humans. Do you consider yourself human?”
“I am partly human, of course.” Alice stopped and glanced at Lily for the first time since they started this peculiar conversation. “Are you curious about my ancestry?”
“Yes.”
“I am willing to speak of that, but first you will tell me how you killed Helen.”
Shit. “You, ah, weren’t telepathically linked to her at the time, I guess.”
“No.”
“Well. Okay. She’d tried to open a hellgate to Earth so she could let the demons in and shove me back through that gate so the Great Bitch could wipe my mind. You know about that part?”
“I do not require context. I simply feel a need to know the exact manner of her death.”
“She and I fought. She was whacking me with an ancient staff, trying to kill me. I banged her head against the stone floor until she quit. It killed her.”
“You bashed her brains out.”