Page 84 of Fortune's Blade

“No, the duck. But father gave the man a coin for making me laugh.” I found myself smiling at the memory, despite the tears still wet on my cheeks.

“You always do that,” Ray said, watching me.

“Do what?”

“Every time you’re sad, you go back to Venice. Even though it was so long ago, when you were just a girl.”

I didn’t deny it. “I’ve gone over each of those memories so many times, every day and hour and moment, that they are burned into my mind. They seem more real sometimes than anything else.”

His brow knitted and he looked puzzled. “But isn’t it painful?”

“No, it soothes me. Reminds me of . . . better days.”

And there were no more memories after that worth keeping. For as soon as Dory and I were separated, my life effectively ended. And I began to realize that it hadn’t been me that father had laughed with all those times, hadn’t been me that he’d carried on his shoulders, hadn’t been me that he had loved.

So, I’d clung to the illusion instead of the pain, and lived there, in those far off sunny days, with blue skies and laughter and a warm, loving touch that had never been for me.

“Maybe it was my fault,” I said, hugging my knees. “Some of it, possibly all of it.”

“What was?” Ray asked, his frown growing.

“What happened to Dory. I thought, if I was never dhampir, but something else, something created out of the gods’ tinkering, then I couldn’t have been the one to hurt her. Those night terrors weren’t me. The dhampir madness wasn’t because of me. And maybe it wasn’t.

“Maybe it was worse than that, worse even than what dhampirs experience, because I was worse. Father fought me, and he was strong even then. Yet he battled with me mentally and barely won. That’s why he feared me so much, feared what I could do to her.

“That’s why he locked me away.”

“Yeah.” Ray got up, went to get the bottle from the balcony, and brought it back inside, settling onto the floor alongside me. “Or maybe that’s bull crap.”

I looked up at him as he passed me the liquor. He hadn’t brought the glasses, but I didn’t need them. I took a large swig and felt it burn terribly on the way down.

But it helped to ground me, the sensation pulling me back from the edge of grief so black that I didn’t know how to deal with it. Forced me out of my head and back into my body in a stunning, abrupt sort of way. I was beginning to understand what humans saw in this stuff.

“It isn’t bull crap,” I told him, while my tongue burned.

“How do you know?” he demanded. “How do you know that it wasn’t the other way around?”

I looked at him blearily. The drink was having an outsized effect, or perhaps I was simply so vulnerable that it felt that way. But I suddenly wanted to burst into tears again, because he didn’t understand.

“Listen to me,” he said, taking my hand. “And think. You met a few dhampirs through the years, and heard about more. I heard about ‘em, too, and you know what I heard?”

I shook my head and tried to pull myself together, but didn’t manage it.

“I heard that they were crazy and therefore easy to kill, at least for a master. I heard that they picked off revenants and low-tier vamps who weren’t paying attention, but weren’t a real problem for anybody else. I heard that most of ‘em died before they had a chance to grow up, ‘cause they couldn’t control themselves well enough to stick to remnants, and instead would run straight at a master and, well, that was it.

“Was that what you heard?”

I nodded. I had observed some older dhampirs, when Dory decided to seek them out, to learn more about her condition. But there had been so few of them! And those that she did find could not tell her much, as they had only survived their fits by getting as far away from society as possible and living as hermits.

They didn’t have any advice to give.

“Yeah,” Ray said, following my thoughts. “So, you can imagine my surprise when a drop dead gorgeous dhampir shows up at my club and within about a minute has my goddamned head in a bag! Me, a master, and not a young one, either. And I ain’t sayin’ I’m the strongest around, but I’m not a weakling, either. I can hold my own in a fight.”

“You can,” I told him truthfully.

“Damned straight. Yet there I was, in a bag. Well, part of me. The rest was bumbling around, running into things, while that same dhampir took me in for her bounty. And she wasn’t anything like the old stories. Sure, she had a few fits now and again, but she was smart, and she’d learned how to handle them, and she was sane, something I didn’t think possible for her kind.

“She is mostly sane,” I corrected, because neither of us would win any awards in that area.