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“She?”

“Morgan! In fear that, if she doesn’t end this, in a century or so, I will end her.”

And if he had ceased to be, she would not die well.

Louis-Cesare blinked. Perhaps because the measured voice I had been using had given way to something vicious. And yet it still fell short.

I hated Morgan, but not for the reasons that I should hate her. But for this, for knowledge I didn’t want about a future I would likely never have. And a past that I would never understand.

I’d had a life. I had accepted it. I hadn’t been happy, but what dhampir is ever happy? I had been content.

Now what was I?

Standing on a riverbank, dreaming about things that could never be, things she had inadvertently shown me and then ripped away. It was worse than not knowing anything. It was far, far worse.

“You were not content,” Louis-Cesare said, his forehead wrinkling.

“Are you reading my mind, vampire?” I snarled.

“You were not, nor was I,” he continued evenly, sitting up. “Both of us were wandering, rudderless, uncertain where we fit in in this world, or if we ever could—”

“And then we found each other?” I meant it to be sarcastic; I wanted to distance myself from him. I was too fond already, and it had been less than a day!

Until he looked at me with those guileless blue eyes, that open face that no vampire should have, that completely blind trust. And said a single word. “Yes.”

For the first time, I believed. Not some of it, all of it. Everything he’d said or implied.

And for a moment, I thought about what that meant. About having someone who loved me, who brought me sausages and wine and sticky cakes and did not run from what I was, or flinch back at the touch of my skin, as some of his kind were known to do. Someone who would always be there, whom I didn’t have to leave behind. Someone who was mine.

And not just him. He had let something slip about not being a part of Mircea’s family . . . yet. Meaning that he was at some point in the future.

Meaning that I was.

I didn’t know how to feel about that. My emotions where my father was concerned were all over the place, and didn’t even make sense to me. But maybe they would someday. Maybe they would become something different, something better. Maybe . . .

But not if Morgan won.

It suddenly crashed through me, like the bolt of lightning had done to that mage, exactly what she was trying to take away from me. And the operative word was trying, because it hadn’t happened yet. I was standing here, feeling sorry for myself, mourning a life I desperately wanted . . . and that I still had.

Not now, perhaps, but in some distant future it existed, everything I’d ever wanted in this world. And I could wait for it, oh yes, I could, as long as I knew that it was out still there, that this pervasive loneliness had an end. I could wait as long as it took . . .

But I couldn’t wait for her.

“Where are you going?” Louis-Cesare asked, when I abruptly strode off.

I didn’t answer—until he caught up with me, still trying to pull his trousers on. “To find a way out of this,” I said. “We have to get back to Morgan—”

“How?”

“I don’t know, but there must be another Pythia, here in this time, someone who can help us—”

“I do not believe it works like that—”

“Then we’ll make it work!” I rounded on him, and saw the compassion in his eyes. Compassion that I didn’t want right now; I wanted him to fight!

“From what I understand,” he told me quietly, “the Pythias cannot take someone to a time ahead of their own. Someone must come back—”

“Then we’ll come up with something else! We have to—”