Page 9 of Fortune's Blade

“What is it?” I asked, pausing the motion.

“Put the skin down,” he said, sounding annoyed. I did not understand why he would ask me that, when he had just told me to drink, but I did it anyway. Which only seemed to annoy him further. “This is bullshit!” he said, and suddenly got up and strode away from the fire.

I watched him, feeling confused. And was even more so when he abruptly whirled around, came back and got in my face. “This. Is. Bullshit,” he repeated, taking my cheeks between his hands. “You get that, right? And it ends tonight.”

“What ends?” I asked, finding it hard to talk with my face sandwiched between two rough palms.

Ray was a vampire; he should not have had calluses. But he had not had an easy life before he transitioned. The product of a Dutch sailor—hence his blue eyes—and, as Dory had put it, “the slowest Indonesian woman in her village,” Ray had not been wanted from his earliest memory. He had been shunned by the other villagers and had been lucky to survive, and that was before he fell in with a bunch of vampire pirates and began a new existence on the bottom rung of yet another ladder.

He had never really gotten off it, despite eventually rising to the rank of master, partly because of those blue eyes. They made him an outsider wherever he went in Asia, like his scrawny frame, lack of height, and Indonesian features had made him stick out in the West. Ray didn’t belong anywhere, which was one reason I found him so relatable.

Neither did I.

That was truer for me even than Dory, who straddled the vamp and human worlds, but would never completely fit into either. She had a position now because the Vampire Senate needed her, but when they no longer did so? Neither she nor I thought that her lofty title was likely to be permanent. And if it was, it would be in spite of her nature, not because of it.

And of the two of us, she was the normal one.

I was still not quite sure what I was, as the longstanding belief that I was simply Dory’s vampire half had been challenged recently. Apparently, dhampirs did not have two easily separated halves as Dory and I did. Our dual nature was instead some kind of strange experiment, or so Nimue, one of the queens of the light fey, had told me shortly before her death. According to her, I was not something that was supposed to exist, being a weird amalgam of human, vampire, fey and possibly god blood, intended as an uber assassin.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. It had been my mother who had been engineered in the gods’ experiment, who had wanted to find something that could kill other gods in their incessant wars. She had been a failure as the hoped-for prototype, however; whereas I, a product of her affair with my father, a vampire in transition, had somehow solved the problem that even the gods could not. And become the weapon they had envisioned.

But a weapon was a thing, not a woman.

So, what was I?

And how did I live without my other half, who had always been there, navigating the world, dealing with all sorts of people, and making all the decisions? I had once looked forward to such things, had dreamed of the time when I might have some control over the one body that we both shared. But now that it came to it . . .

It was frightening.

Fortunately, I had Ray to help me.

Or perhaps not, I thought, seeing his scowl become even more pronounced.

“See? That’s what I was afraid of!” he accused.

I stared up at him, nonplussed, although I didn’t know why. He had shown a great ability to read my thoughts in the past. “Afraid of what?” I asked.

“That you’re making me a substitute for Dory! I’m not gonna do that; I’m not gonna make decisions for you, and you wanna know why?”

“Yes,” I said, because listening to him had been very useful so far.

“Listening ain’t the problem!” he said angrily. Before dropping his hands to my shoulders and shaking me a little. “Listen all you want, but you make the call. You make the decision. You got a good head on your shoulders; you don’t need to use me as a crutch. And given how dangerous Faerie is, you don’t want to. What if I’m suddenly not here anymore?”

I stared up at him, and felt an icy hand grip my heart. “Where are you going?”

“Down something’s gullet, like as not,” he said, glancing up, as a sound echoed through the forest from somewhere high above the tree tops.

Dragons. I scanned the darkened night sky while the haunting call etched its way across my skin, but saw nothing. We were near the territory of the wildest sort of beast, or so I had been told, although we had seen none up close.

So far.

“I will protect you,” I said, my eyes falling again to meet Ray’s.

His looked black in the night, with twin flames from the reflected firelight dancing in the pupils. For once, he looked like a vampire. “And if you can’t?” he said, and said no more, although I knew what he was thinking. And it didn’t take the mental connection we sometimes shared for that.

We had almost died a dozen times since our arrival here. Chased through an already hostile land by the creatures of a power-hungry queen, we had only been saved by the machinations of another one, by my own fierce nature, and by Ray’s seemingly unending resourcefulness, although he failed to see how much he had aided us. We had survived, but it had been a close thing.

I was used to thinking of myself as formidable, but Faerie was more so. Yet it couldn’t have Ray. It wouldn’t!