And felt him flinch.
I was still half-asleep, and groggy. The residuals of some of Claire’s hideous concoctions hung in the air, which probably explained why. Or the pain that was slivering through them anyway, from my nonexistent leg, like someone was poking at it with shards of glass.
I’d heard of phantom limb pain, but had never had a chance to experience it before. It was possibly the only pain I hadn’t previously experienced. Do I shout bingo? I wondered blearily, and sat up.
And found myself staring at a perfectly good, if seriously bruised and battered, left leg.
“What the shit fuck!”
I almost fell out of bed.
Louis-Cesare grabbed me, just in time, and hauled me back to the bed’s center. Which left me half underneath him, not that I minded. But I still didn’t know—
“What the hell is going on?”
He licked his lips nervously. For someone as naturally—let’s be kind and say confident—as him, it was a strange sight. “They found your leg.”
“I see that.”
“Mircea reattached it.”
“That was good of him.” Considering that I lost it on senatorial business, and the Senate didn’t have a medical plan. I glanced downward again, although I couldn’t see anything, having a rather large amount of naked vampire in the way. “Is it . . . likely to stay that way?”
“He thinks so. He is hoping there is no lasting nerve damage. He is having a specialist brought in from Paris to make certain.”
“That’s good.”
Louis-Cesare didn’t say anything else, and what he had said was stilted, unemotional. His body was likewise rigid, instead of the lean, muscular strength I was used to. He looked like a guy who would rather be anywhere else.
It hurt more than the damned leg.
“And that’s it?” I said flatly. “You don’t have anything else to say to me?”
The blue eyes had been focused somewhere on my left shoulder, but now they slid to mine. And then abruptly wandered off again. “I am sorry,” he told me.
“You damned well ought to be!”
He flinched noticeably. “I don’t blame you for being furious,” he said quietly. “They put me in here, while I recover, but I told Claire that it might be best if I were not here when you awoke—”
“What?”
“But she seemed to think otherwise. And she was right.” He manned up, and met my eyes. “I understand how you feel. I would not blame you if you never wish to see me again.”
“What?”
“I took your leg.” His fingers touched it lightly, almost reverently. “If they had not been able to find it—”
“Well, yeah. But they did find it. And if they hadn’t, think of all the neat attachments I could have gotten.”
It was his turn to say: “What?”
“Think of it: a peg leg, especially a sharp wooden peg leg, for a dhampir? It would almost be worth—”
I broke off, because Louis-Cesare was having a small fit. I wasn’t sure of what kind, and I didn’t think he was, either, because his face tried out a couple dozen expressions before settling on one. It was incredulity.
“I maimed you!”
“You tried to maim me.” I flexed my leg at him. “And you only managed it because I was already hurt when you showed up. If I’d been at my best, I’d have kicked your—”
He shook me.
“What?” I said again.
“You are angry with me! You hate me! You possibly even fear me!”
I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. It had been a very long week. And the sudden ability just to let everything out caught me by surprise, and then sort of swept me away, until I was lying there, crying with laughter.
Louis-Caesar looked at me in growing concern. “I—I will go find Claire—”
“I don’t need Claire!” I rolled on top of him. The leg, I was glad to notice, responded to commands, although it bitched at me about them. That was okay; I got that a lot.
Including from my lover, I thought, judging by his expression.
“You think that’s what I want an apology for?” I asked him. “For the leg?”
“Yes!”
“And you’ve been lying here, blaming yourself and getting more and more worked up about it?”
“As I should do! I hurt you! I could have—” He broke off, but it was obvious what he meant.
“But you didn’t kill me. Alfhild ordered you to, but you didn’t. And when you thought you might, that there was even a chance, you tried to kill yourself instead. And that,” I added, before he could interrupt me, “is why I’m angry.”
He looked at me, and he’d found a new expression. It was bewilderment. But he didn’t say “What?” again. He said “Why?” instead.
And looked like he genuinely didn’t get it.
“Because, when you’re part of someone else, you don’t get to make that call,” I told him quietly.
And then felt like cursing, because the damned man still didn’t get it.
I could see it in those shimmering blue eyes: confusion, awkwardness, more than a little fear. He, who wasn’t afraid of anything, was afraid of this. Of me. Of being sent away.
And there was one really good way to solve that problem, wasn’t there?
I felt my fangs pop. “I’m proprietorial about my things,” I snarled, and bit him.
And, God, yes, it was good! So good, so warm, so rich. I heard Louis-Cesare cry out, felt him grab my arms and try to push me off, but I knew his true strength now, and he wasn’t pushing very hard.
Not that it would have mattered. I wrapped my legs around him as my fangs sank deeper, and I felt it: the swirl of magic around us. It should have been a surprise, but it wasn’t. Maybe because it was so right, so good, so—
“Perfect,” I heard him murmur, and then he was drawing me close, and it was. It really, really was.
* * *
—
I awoke an indeterminate time later in a warm embrace, one that had ended up with me wedged into an armpit, with Louis-Cesare draped over top of me. Like he wanted to make sure I would still be there when he woke up. No worries, I thought, letting my fingertips ghost over the tops of the new little fang marks on his neck.
He shuddered slightly, and drew me closer, tightening the embrace even in sleep. But not so much that I couldn’t slide out from under, when I felt it again. A mental tug from above.
It was still dark, although on which day, I didn’t know. It felt like I’d been in bed awhile. I was stiff, to the point that it took me an embarrassingly long time to get the sash up on a window and look out. And then to clamber onto the roof.
Dorina was there, looking something like Mircea’s ghostly form, only paler, less distinct. But it was more than I’d ever seen of her before. “So you can materialize.”
“Not to anyone else. At least . . . I don’t think so.”
She sounded a bit unsure.
I knew the feeling.
“You let them go,” she said, as I settled beside her.
“What?”
Visuals came, instead of words. Mircea’s gloved hand picking up the glowing ward where Alfhild had kept her power, all those years ago in Venice; him arguing with Abramalin, who couldn’t do as he’d promised, after all, since he’d just made up the procedure to get Mircea to work for him; Mircea bending over me as I lay in my small child’s bed, his eyes glowing with stolen power . . .
And then there were two.
“So, that’s how it happened,” I said, my voice hoarse.
She nodded.
I didn’t know how to feel about that. It hadn’t sounded like it was possible to return the energy stolen from the bones, once it was extracted and made into something else. But even so. People had been destroyed for it, real people, with hopes and dreams and lives. . . .
It had been done at a megalomaniac’s command, to quench her thirst for revenge, not so Dorina and I could live. But it had given us life, all the same, and so it still felt weighty. Not like a burden, but like . . . a gift. And a responsibility, not to waste it.
I’ll try, I thought, staring up at the stars.
“I should have told you before,” Dorina said. “But I was afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“So much power, in those bones. Fey, even more than vampire. I knew what Mircea had done with it; I didn’t know what you would.”