“You don’t have to do this,” he told me shortly.

“Like hell she doesn’t!” Marlowe snapped.

“You don’t,” Louis-Cesare reiterated, and Marlowe suddenly went very still.

That was probably because Louis-Cesare had just made what could have been interpreted as a direct challenge. And it might have, had he so much as glanced Marlowe’s way. But his eyes were on me, and they were serious. I briefly closed mine.

When I opened them, he was still looking at me, still concerned. Still totally oblivious to the fact that he’d basically just challenged the Senate’s chief spy to a duel. It was days like this that made me wonder how, even with his fighting ability, the guy had survived as long as he had.

He was honest and honorable and ethical and generous, in a culture that was exactly none of those things. That didn’t even value those things, because “good” was a relative term and being a good vampire was to be like Marlowe: cunning, deceitful, ruthless, overwhelming. Or like Mircea: calm, patient, resourceful, relentless. “Kind” wasn’t in the job description; “compassionate” even less so.

Damn it, the man needed a keeper.

Yeah, sure he did. A dark-haired, dimpled, dhampir keeper, which wasn’t going to happen, so just shut up. Sometimes I didn’t think it mattered what Mircea did in my head, because I was already crazy anyway.

“It’s like someone invented you just to mess with me,” I said resentfully.

“Quoi?”

I sighed. “I’m fine,” I said, just wanting to get this over with.

“I see what you mean,” he told Claire drily, and she blinked at him in what looked like surprise.

There was no point in stalling, so I walked over and sat down, really glad that I’d had that drink earlier. Even with Claire’s presence leeching the manic energy off my skin, like some kind of supernatural magnet, I was still crawling with it. Any other time, I’d have been crawling the walls, too—or, more likely, punching through them. As it was, I wanted this done.

I cleared my throat. “Okay, so now what?” I asked…Radu, because just that fast everyone else was gone.

Chapter Eight

I don’t know what I’d expected, but it wasn’t that. Or having the lights go out. Or having the room suddenly be replaced by towering glass-covered skyscrapers on one side and rippling dark water on the other.

First-level masters, I reminded myself grimly. You never got anywhere underestimating them, and Mircea already knew my brain like the back of his hand. He ought to; he’d basically designed it.

But at least he hadn’t had any trouble finding the right memory. The ripples frothed against an embankment like lace on a hem. Or maybe a neckline, because a few dozen ships rode the waves, glowing under the moonlight like a string of pearls.

The wind was fluttering real lace at Radu’s throat and wrists when I looked back at him, and ruffling the long dark hair that he didn’t always keep as tightly confined as his brother did. “What are you doing here?” I demanded, half expecting to hear my voice echo, since we were talking inside my head.

Radu didn’t answer. He seemed a little preoccupied, possibly because the insanely realistic picture Mircea had conjured up had some holes in it. Literally, I realized, following ’Du’s gaze to where pieces of things—buildings, the far end of a road, whole swaths of the sky—simply weren’t there. The weirdest one was a nearby skyscraper that just disappeared halfway up, like King Kong had passed by and had a snack.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, gripping his arm.

“I…Nothing.” He looked a little paler than usual. “I suppose those are areas you simply didn’t notice.”

“What?”

“Well, we don’t, do we?” he asked, a little more forcefully. “Even when we’re on hyper alert, we can’t notice everything.”

“But my memory doesn’t look like this!” I gestured at the moon, which was visible in the water but noticeably absent from the sky. Or maybe it was just behind some clouds; I wasn’t enthusiastic about looking for it since the sky had the most gaps, with massive areas filled with nothing but boiling black mist.

“Well, it would,” Radu said. “But your brain usually fills in the blanks.”

“With what?”

“With guesswork. That’s why many optical illusions work. Didn’t you know?”

“No.” And I could have lived without finding out. “Then why aren’t I filling in the blanks now?”

Radu tilted his head slightly, like he was listening to something I couldn’t hear. “Mircea said you would be, but he’s cutting through all that. We can’t have fantasy or mental manipulation filling in areas when it may fill them in wrong, do you see?”

“Yeah.” I repressed an urge to hug my arms around myself. “Yeah, I guess.” I sure as hell didn’t want to have to do this again because I’d dreamed up the wrong information. I looked at him. “Why are you here again?”

“Mircea can’t maintain the connection and also serve as your guide. That’s my job.”

“Okay, guide,” I said, glancing around. “Where to?”

“Well, how should I know? It’s your memory. I’m just here to pull you out if anything goes wrong.”

I had been watching a nearby ship bobbing about on the waves, or should I say half a ship, since I’d apparently never gotten around to noticing the back half. But at that I turned my eyes on ’Du. “What could go wrong? I’m sitting in the living room. Right?”

“Well, yes, your body is. But it’s your mind we’re concerned with here, Dory.”

I took a moment to process that. “You’re telling me that something could go wrong with my mind?”

“No, no, not at all. Nothing like.”

“Good.” For a minute there, I’d been a little worried. I wasn’t exactly the poster child for mental stability as it was. The last thing I needed—

“Of course, there have been a few incidents.”

Radu was fiddling with the lace on his sleeve. “Incidents?”

“Of people who, well, went too far in. You can become lost, you see, wandering about from one old memory to the next, until you forget where you came in and—” He stopped, belatedly noticing my expression. “It almost never happens. And in any case, that’s why I am here. To see that it doesn’t.”

“And you’ve done this how many times before?”

…

“’Du—”

“I know the theory, Dory,” he said testily. “And I’m related to both of you, which makes me more…in sync…if you will, and a better bridge than anyone else could be. It’s safer to have me do this than some stranger, however experienced. Which is why Mircea brought me along.”

I stared at him. “That makes me feel so much better.”

“Yes, I thought it would,” Radu said. “But problems are more frequent when the subject is tired, and this sort of thing is fairly draining. We should get going.”

Great. So not only was I in Wonderland, I was on a freaking timer. “How long do I have?”

“I don’t know. That depends on you. A few minutes?”

“A few minutes? How am I supposed to find anything useful in—”

I stopped, because I’d just caught sight of the fairly odd image of myself, slipping through the shadows of the ships and pilings. I was wearing my usual work uniform of black leather jacket, black jeans and black boots, and managing to be almost invisible against the night. But I wasn’t doing as good a job as whoever was with me.

Try as I might, I couldn’t get a clear look at him. I couldn’t even manage to bring him into focus unless he was silhouetted against the ghostly outline of a hull. And even then he was just a vaguely man-shaped cloud, or a dim shadow of someone who wasn’t actually—

“There.” Lawrence paused, the particles coalescing enough to allow speech. “The black one.”

I looked at the ship in question, a long, sleek, ebony torpedo in one of the larger berths, melding into the night almost as seamlessly as Lawrence did, looking exotic next to the flock of clunkier, paler specimens moored all around. But I didn’t see anything else of interest. Or smell, since Lawrence had been following a scent trail.

“You’re sure?” I asked, because all I could smell was brine and fish and gasoline, and the lingering scent of the cologne the now sleeping watchman had been wearing.

“No.”

Lawrence sounded surprised, which made sense. Before he’d moved on to the illustrious heights of first-level master, he had been a Hound—a vampire gifted with even better olfactory senses than the norm, which were already pretty damned good. It was why he’d been chosen for this assignment, since it required tracing a tiny thread of a scent across half a city not known for the pristine quality of its air.

“What do you mean, ‘no’?” I whispered, even though we were using a sound shield. It was just that kind of place. “Varus is either in there or he isn’t.”

Lawrence didn’t answer, but he coalesced a little more, the misty particles of his being coming together into the shape of a tall, thin vampire with creepy red eyes. Not hay-fever red, not hungover red. Not even I-smoked-too-many-joints-tonight-oh-God red. They were the solid crimson of a stoplight, with the same faint glowing quality to them. Though stoplights didn’t send shivers up my back when I looked at them.

Most vampires can pass for human even without a glamourie, but Lawrence clearly wasn’t one of them. And he couldn’t use a glamourie and his special sparkly master power at the same time, which left me running around with what looked like the spawn of Satan. Which would have been fine—if Satan’s spawn had been able to do the job.

“He was,” Lawrence told me, tipping his head back and then to the side, following some scent too faint for me to detect. “And he did not leave.”