Page 17 of Fortune's Blade

“You don’t like it here, do you?” Louis-Cesare asked me a few moments later.

We were waiting on Claire to check out the Great Hall, where everyone had gathered for dinner, and make sure that we weren’t about to be jumped as soon as we went in. In the meantime, she’d parked us in a nearby room that, judging by the dust on the various oversized weapons displayed in it, didn’t get used much. It was also dim, with no windows and the only light leaking in from the hall.

So, I wasn’t sure that he could see the incredulity in the expression I turned on him.

But vamp eyes are good, and he huffed out a laugh. “Fair enough.”

“Are you enjoying it?” I demanded.

He gave it some thought.

“It hasn’t been boring,” was the verdict.

“I could use a little more boring,” I said savagely, but kept my voice low, because I didn’t want to attract attention.

Attention around here got you killed.

“I have rarely seen you this tense,” Louis-Cesare said, laying hands on my shoulders.

“It isn’t that.” He gave me a look, one that said he knew I was lying. “All right, it isn’t just that. But it’s taken us forever to get here, meaning that Dorina has been lost for over a month, and being here . . . with these creatures . . .”

“Reminds you of how much trouble she’s in.”

I nodded. “I know she can take care of herself, but Faerie isn’t Earth. What if she finally came across something she couldn’t handle? This place is at war; the fey themselves are jumpy. And you know how she is—”

Louis-Cesare’s arm went around me. “I know she isn’t stupid. She’ll be careful. She’ll survive.”

I was glad that he was so sure. I wasn’t, even though Dorina was literally my other half. My soul mate, since half of my soul had been sheared off to create her.

I’d been whole once, and as normal as my kind ever got. Until I started having fits, the kind that kill most dhampirs before they have a chance to grow up. Nature’s way of stomping out a mistake, I suppose.

But father hadn’t cared about nature. He’d only cared about me. So, he’d used his vampire mental abilities to wall off the part of my nature that was literally killing me.

It had saved me, but it had trapped her in a prison of my mind. For centuries, she could only emerge when I was asleep or unconscious, the latter of which usually happened in battles that went wrong. Otherwise, she existed almost like a ghost, a disembodied consciousness that flitted about, observing the world but not truly living in it.

We’d only managed to break that cycle recently, and release her from perpetual confinement. I was no longer a child, and could handle my mental twin just fine. But while we were still trying to get to know each other, and to figure out how to share one body between us, the unthinkable happened.

She was kidnapped by some fey using an ancient relic that ripped us apart. But since Faerie didn’t treat souls the same way that Earth did, and clothed any free-floating spirits in flesh, she was currently walking around in a living, breathing body of her own for the first time ever. Which meant that she could be killed.

Louis-Cesare and I had therefore taken it upon ourselves to get a band together and go after her. It had seemed like a daunting prospect—until we got here. Now, it seemed insane.

The only hope we had was that Claire’s relatives could help us. Otherwise, I had no idea how we were supposed to scour an entire world, and one at war at that, without ending up as dead as I was starting to suspect that Dorina was. Because if she was okay, why hadn’t she come back?

And what would I do without her if she never did?

“It will be alright,” Louis-Cesare said, probably watching the emotions flitting across my face. “We’ll make sure that it is.”

I didn’t answer because Claire came back in.

And because I didn’t have one.

“I brought you something,” she said, handing us both identical looking gauze wrapped packages. “Your clothes were partly what triggered Tamris—”

“Tamris?”

“The woman outside.”

“The large green dragon,” Louis-Cesare clarified dryly.