Right now I didn’t care all that much. I didn’t care about anything but the blood dripping onto the sofa. Unused.

“It wasn’t you,” Radu said softly, turquoise eyes meeting mine.

“Then who?” I asked, my voice weaker now.

Because I was bleeding, too. I’d barely noticed, but slippery trails were trickling from my ears, down my neck, soaking the once fine material of the suit. More was filling my eyes, along with something else that I blinked away.

“Then who?” I demanded, louder.

“Mircea didn’t know,” Radu said softly, gaunt hand covering mine, where I gripped his brother’s shoulder.

No. My father’s. Where I held my father’s shoulder, I thought angrily, grasping it tighter. And somehow managing to be furious at myself, at everyone, at no one, all at the same time.

“He said he thought someone was using you for an anchor,” Radu told me. “That they were narrowing in on you as if you were their guide. In order to attack you.”

“What? How?”

“He didn’t say. He was concentrating on finding you; his reports were…sporadic. I’m sorry, Dory; I don’t know any more. When he wakes—”

“If he wakes,” Marlowe said, and then stopped.

As if there was nothing left to say.

No. NO, I thought, and shook the limp body in my arms, causing the head to fall back onto my shoulder. Tears splashed his face, mingled with the blood, streaked the perfect features that were marble-like in their beauty. And in their coldness. The tears were mine; I didn’t care.

“Drink,” I begged him, as the room grayed out and the rushing in my ears got louder and he just lay there, draped across my lap, Radu’s blood cascading down his chin.

So much power, so much life, right there, and he wouldn’t take it.

My anger suddenly found a target, and it was the man bleeding on the sofa. “Marlowe’s right. He should have left me,” I said harshly.

“You know he wouldn’t do that,” Radu admonished.

“Then he’s a fool.” My head was spinning, my temples pounding, but I didn’t care. I only cared about the man on the sofa. And the anger. So much anger bottled up for so many years, and finally spilling over.

“Coward,” I spat. “Fool and coward!”

“Dory!”

“It’s the truth. Five centuries of life, of fighting and conniving and scheming and clawing and this? This is how it ends?”

Nothing.

And it utterly enraged me. Like all those years, loving him and hating him and being drawn to him but being afraid to get too close, because it always, always ended the same way. With him leaving. Either physically walking away, or withdrawing behind an icy facade until I did.

And now he was doing it again.

Now he was doing it permanently.

But the bastard wasn’t getting away with it this time.

I already had him in my arms, and now I shook him. A great clot of blood, his own by the color, fell from his lips, staining my already gory shirt. Like I gave a damn.

“Is this how it ends, Mircea? Is it?”

Nothing.

I threw him down on the sofa, straddled him, slapped him, hard. “Is it?”

“Security,” I heard Marlowe mutter, behind me.

Fuck him.

“I’ll kill the first one who touches me,” I snarled.

And then I slapped Mircea again.

“Five centuries, five fucking centuries, only to die a puling coward while this thing gets away. What about revenge? What about pride? Don’t you care?”

Nothing.

“So many years, and for nothing,” I told him scornfully. “If you were going to die like this, going to just give the fuck up, you should have done it then. You should have died with her.”

Radu was looking at me, horrified. And then he seemed to remember what he was doing, and stuck the bloody arm to Mircea’s lips again. Not that it mattered.

“She waited,” I said, staring down at him, the blood pounding in my ears. “You didn’t come. She bled out, on one of your own brother’s stakes, worse than a damned crucifixion, only it was your name on her lips as she prayed. And as she died, still calling for you. Sobbing, begging…but you weren’t there. You were never there!”

I shook him again, he and Radu together, because as terrified as he was looking, Radu didn’t move. “She needed you; you didn’t come. Now I need you. Are you going to abandon me, too? Are you going to leave me, too?”

Nothing, except the tick of the clock and my harsh breathing.

Nothing.

Until…a movement. Tiny, tiny. Just a tick in his throat.

Or possibly…a swallow.

“Mircea…Mircea, please,” I whispered, as the light in the room, brilliant only seconds ago, dimmed, narrowed to just his face.

Please.

And then nothing.

Chapter Thirty-nine

I tried to push him out, but the Scream had taken all my strength, not that I’d had much to begin with. And he was strong. So strong, this strange creature of light.

“Why are you doing this?” The voice was warm, deep, gentle. Inexorable. “You are hurt and exhausted. And at the moment, weaker than the things you stalk. This is not about the Senate…is it?”

I fought back, knowing it to be futile. I didn’t succeed in driving him out, but for the moment, he didn’t push any further. He was waiting for me to tell him.

I’d be damned if I told him.

But something must have leaked through, anyway.

“The child?” He sounded surprised. And then forbidding. “What do you know?”

I didn’t answer.

“Tell me!”

It was sharp, the tolerance completely gone from his mental voice. But I still said nothing. I couldn’t.

“Then show me,” he said grimly.

And the darkness became dazzling.

The ballroom was a swirl of light and color and sound, stunning, overwhelming. I was almost glad I couldn’t see much of it, yet I yearned for more. I dug my fingers a little farther into the lines of mortar between the bricks, hitched my toes a little higher on the faint edge of an ornamental frieze, and stared.

The pose left me clinging to the side of the palazzo like a barnacle on a ship, and hurt after only a very few minutes. But there were no other safe perches. Gaily costumed people were constantly coming and going on the balcony around the corner, or arriving in gondolas at the pier just below that. And there were lights in every window.

There were no lights here, the shade from another balcony directly overhead offering a wedge of darkness in which to hide. I liked the dark. It allowed me to see others before they saw me. It was cool, comforting, safe.

But the light…

The light was irresistible.

They were irresistible, the very things Mircea had warned me about. Terrible and beautiful, alien and hauntingly familiar, repellent and oh so seductive. I could never get enough of them.

And they had taught me things, things he wouldn’t. Or couldn’t, for I did not think he knew much about them, either. My favorite game was called Families, where I tried to guess how they all fit together.

At first I thought it was easy. Vampires of a single line all burned with the same unearthly fire. If the master wore green flames like a cape, then his Children did, too. Only in smaller, lesser, darker hues: moss instead of emerald, olive instead of jade.

But then I started to notice that that wasn’t always true. Sometimes there would be different colors, some jarringly so, within the same family line, and it confused me. Until I overheard a conversation, and realized that some vampires were adopted into families from other lines. Or traded or sold or acquired a hundred different ways.

And although the new master’s power bled over into the old, it never quite erased all of it. So some of the most formidable-looking vampires had halos of purple-striped green or red-dotted gray or, my favorite, a stern old man who walked about with a shining outline of pink-, blue- and brown-flecked orange.

At first it was funny. And then it made me wonder. My aura was blue. Mircea’s was white. Why was mine not white, too?

“And what did he tell you?” the voice asked softly.

“That I was part of his physical family, but not of the vampire. No dhampir ever is. Mircea could control me to a degree through his mental gifts, but there was no bond of blood. There was no formal tie.”

“And how did you feel about that?”

I didn’t answer.

“Vampires are, by nature, social creatures, some of the most I have ever encountered,” he mused. “They live in large, active families, constantly in the company of others, right down to the sharing of thoughts. I have never met a lone vampire. I do not think they exist, other than for revenants.”

“And dhampirs,” I said hoarsely.

The visits to the palazzos had become less and less frequent over time, not due to Mircea’s prohibition but to my own pain. The yearning grew as I aged, to the point that it became torture to watch them laugh and dance and scheme and belong in a way I never could. For I was not vampire; I could not make a Child. And the human part of me…

“Could not have a child, either,” he guessed softly.

“No.”

“And so you were alone. Vampires are family-oriented by nature, driven to unite with others, to form binding ties. But that is the one thing you could not do.”

I didn’t answer, but I didn’t have to. I felt him flip through my memories, like someone paging through a book. Scene after scene of failure, of watching lovers leave, friends flee—

“Even the other part of yourself,” he murmured. “Cut off. Walled away.”

I turned on him, impotent, furious. “Why are you doing this? Does your kind take pleasure in the pain of others?”

“Some do,” he admitted. “But I am not among them.”

“Then why?”

“I needed to understand you. To know why you wanted the child. And I am satisfied that it was not for a weapon, or for your Senate. But for family, connection…loneliness.”