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Iawoke in the dimness of an unfamiliar room. It was lit only by a few low burning oil lamps and the starlight drifting in through some large, floor to ceiling windows. My sleep muddled brain finally recognized it as the suite that Louis-Cesare and I had been assigned at Hassani’s court, all golden stone, cream draperies, and medieval architecture that, in the low light, could have been mistaken for a pharaoh’s palace.

That was especially true in the lamplight, with the tiny wicks dancing in the soft breeze blowing through the windows, and throwing veil like shadows on the walls. This place had electricity, as well as all the other modern conveniences, or it had for the past week. The fact that it didn’t now informed me that the main wards were online, the big boys that didn’t play well with electrical systems, even before I felt the frisson of their power brush across my skin.

Hassani wasn’t taking any chances, I thought, and felt a bolt of pure rage shoot through me. No, he wasn’t taking chances now. Now when Dorina was gone and Louis-Cesare had almost died and Ray—

Ray was in pieces.

I sat bolt upright in bed, a scream building in my throat as I remembered that scene in the alley. Ray’s face, looking startled and then horrified when he realized what was happening, his eyes going to me for help I couldn’t provide. And the blood, so much of it, like a mist coating everything. I could still taste it on my tongue, smell it in my nose, feel it gunking up my eyelashes. Ray . . .

I felt Louis-Cesare move behind me. He was naked, with the lamplight sheening all that creamy skin, turning it to gold. He had been draped over me like a weighted blanket, only even more comforting. Now I felt his arms go around me, and his body sit up behind mine, preserving the closeness.

It didn’t help.

A strange, hollow feeling lay under my breastbone, like a gaping wound. It was so real that I slid a clumsy hand down there, to see if I had been put to bed half gutted. My hand met only smooth, sleep warm skin, without a cut or flaw. Yet I could still feel it: a deep, echoing nothingness, like my soul had been carved out of my body.

Or half of it, I thought sickly.

Dorina . . .

I could see her in that alley, too, as naked as the day we were born, because whatever had happened to us had not transferred over any clothes. She had looked newborn in other ways, too. Her face had been as soft and vulnerable as a child’s, her eyes huge and dark and startled, her body hunched and small, silhouetted for an instant before the manic green fury of the portal.

And then she was gone.

I had lost both of them in one night.

“Shhh,” Louis-Cesare murmured against my hair, his arms tightening around me. “You’re safe. You’re safe and it’s all right now.”

I wanted to scream at him that it wasn’t all right, that it would never be all right again. But I couldn’t. If I did, that horrible mewling cry I was barely keeping behind my teeth might escape and I couldn’t risk that. Couldn’t let him know weak I felt, how vulnerable without my other half.

Sister, I thought, and felt my face crumple.

A strong hand cradled my head, and pulled me against a chest that was warm, hard and comforting. I’d always felt safe in Louis-Cesare’s arms, peaceful and calm, like nothing else mattered. But not tonight.

Tonight, I was about to crawl out of my skin.

I knew he could feel it, could detect the minute tremble I couldn’t control. Could hear the rapid beat of my pulse, the fight or flight response kicking in with a vengeance. Could smell my emotions on the air: sweat, adrenaline, and all the unnamed chemicals that passed humans by without notice, but to a vamp . . .

Said more than I wanted them to.

But he didn’t try to pressure me to talk. Instead, a rhythmic massage of my scalp began, by fingers strong enough to punch through a wall. But with me they were gentle, so gentle, with just enough pressure to ground me and keep me from falling over the edge. I’d always been the excitable one, the fly-off-the-handle one, the impulsive, crazy one.

Or so everyone had said. Tonight, for the first time, I agreed with them. Tonight, I wanted to scream, to cry, to savage those who had destroyed my family.

Dorina, my sister, and lately, my friend. Louis-Cesare, my lover, and brand-new husband. And Ray . . .

Ray hurt worst of all, maybe because he was my direct responsibility. Or because I had seen what happened to him. Dragged through the portal, not by the fey, who had thrown him aside like so much garbage, but by the power of the vortex itself.

My stalwart defender, he’d had no reason to trust a dhampir of all things, had no reason to trust anyone after the life he’d lived, but he’d pledged himself to me nonetheless. Even without the usual blood bond, which I could not do, he’d been loyal, more loyal than anyone, and I’d lost him. I’d lost both of them. And now I was doing it, I was crying and screaming and clinging to Louis-Cesare, who I vaguely realized was rubbing my back in long strokes up and down the spine that did no more good than anything else. The pain was too great. I couldn’t think past it, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t—

I couldn’t bear it.

He held onto me when I tried to get up. I didn’t know where I was going, but the crushing guilt and anger and horror all set in at once, making me need to move. And when I couldn’t, to fight the very man who was trying to help me.

“Let me go. Let me go!”

Louis-Cesare did not let me go.

“I understand,” he said instead, his grip gentle but implacable. “It is the worst feeling in the world, when a master loses a Child. I have seen some go mad with grief, have felt the red claws of it shred my own soul. I have lost servants, too.”

“Ray wasn’t a servant,” I said harshly. “He was my friend. And he died because those bastards . . . those bastards . . . and I didn’t . . . I couldn’t—”

“You did everything you could have done.” He pulled back far enough to look at me, and his face tightened at whatever he saw. “This was not your fault, Dory. It was mine.”

“Yours?” I stared up at him, his image blurry through my furious tears. “How the hell was it yours?”

“You would not have been out there except for me. The fey dangled the bait in front of my nose, and I fell for it, utterly and completely—”

I stared up at him. He wasn’t making sense, or else I couldn’t think straight. Either could have been true right then.

“What bait? What are you talking about?”

“You didn’t hear me?” he frowned. “I called back to you, but then, the ballroom was deafening. I should have thought . . .”

I vaguely remembered seeing Louis-Cesare shout something, just before leaping through Hassani’s shield. I hadn’t been able to hear what it was, but it wouldn’t have mattered. There was nothing he could have said that would have kept me from following him.

“But I wasn’t thinking,” he continued, his voice ragged. “I was reacting, and stupidly so. I lost your sister, I lost Raymond, and I almost lost you.” His arms tightened, bruisingly hard.

I pushed at him until he let me go. “What are you talking about?”

“Jonathan,” he said, uttering the most hated name I knew, and one of the few that could focus even my currently jumbled thoughts.

“What? That’s impossible.”

Louis-Cesare shook his head, his jaw tight. “He was there, outside the ballroom, smirking at me. I went for him without hesitation. And in doing so, I endangered all of us.”

I stared at him, my head spinning. I was still half asleep, and what few faculties I had were stuck on horror—and that name didn’t help. It was even worse than the damned Svarestri, the silver haired bastards in jackal’s clothing that we’d fought tonight.

Jonathan was a nine-hundred-year-old necromancer who had been using stolen magic to unnaturally prolong his life. But taking other people’s magic into your system was like taking a drug. Yes, it could give you a high, as well as extra stamina for spell casting, but it also built up a dependency. One that required more and more over time to achieve the same result.

And that went double for anybody taking enough to elongate their life more than four times the average for magical humans. Jonathan wasn’t just addicted to magic anymore, he required it to live, and had become very creative at coming up with new ways to get it. Including trapping and draining a master vampire to the brink of death day after day after day.

Louis-Cesare had eventually escaped his imprisonment, but the experience had left him deeply scarred. I wouldn’t have blamed him for taking off after Jonathan tonight. Except for one thing.

“He’s dead,” I said harshly. “We saw the body—”

“And I know him! Do you understand?” The gentle expression of a moment ago was gone, and the blue eyes blazed. “All those days at his mercy, all those nights—” he cut off abruptly, his jaw clenched.

“A glamourie, then. A good one—”

“Do you know what Hassani’s master power is?” Louis-Cesare demanded. He was speaking about the unusual abilities that some of the very oldest vamps acquired. I’d assumed that Hassani had one or more; anyone able to hold a consul’s position practically required it. But I’d never heard what it was.

“No.”

“He sees through glamouries, including fey ones. They say there is nothing his eyes do not perceive truly, and many of his Children have this same gift. The fey did not want us to know that they had kidnapped Dorina. You have enemies; as does your father. If we did not see them, it would widen the field of our search considerably.”

“And slow us down.”

He nodded. “The fey could therefore not have used glamouries at this court and have expected them to work. And neither could Jonathan.”

I frowned, trying to think past the pain, and finding it hard going. “But it couldn’t have been him. We saw the body.”

“Yes, we did.” Louis-Cesare’s voice was grim. “But the Circle refused to release it.”

He was talking about the Silver Circle, the world’s leading magical authority and a frequent pain in my ass. They’d had Jonathan in one of the cells at their main headquarters in Stratford, until he had a little ‘accident.’ They’d made us travel all the way to England to see what was left.

“That’s my point,” I said now. “You thought it was him, said you were sure of it—”

“As sure as I could be. But the stench . . .”

My nose wrinkled in memory. The Circle’s HQ was underground, almost like an ancient vampire lair, with a maze of twists and turns and a thousand dark doorways. I’d stopped trying to memorize our path after I saw one suddenly fill in and another casually move itself further down a hallway. But instead of the fine furnishings and unctuous servants of a vampire abode, there had been the reek of potions, so thick that it had permeated the very walls, and cold-eyed war mages fingering their weapons as we slowly walked by.

The cell we’d been escorted to had been even worse than the rest of the place, being small and cold and vaguely damp, a miserable spot to spend any time at all. But Jonathan hadn’t been there long. Because the best security in the world won’t help you if you manage to seriously piss off a demi-goddess.

I didn’t know the whole story there, what exactly he’d done to deserve having his heart aged to powder even while it was still beating. Yes, he was a leading figure among our enemies, coming up with new ways to use old magic and giving us a series of migraines in the process. But you don’t risk alienating your allies in the middle of a war just to execute a guy who was already on everybody’s shit list.

No, it had been personal, whatever he’d done to her, just as it was for me. And despite everything, I hadn’t been able to suppress a vicious smile at the expression on the body draped over the thin cot. He’d been on his back, his arms flung out, his face caught halfway between surprised and apoplectic.

Even in death, he’d looked furious that anyone would dare to cross him.

Only now I had to wonder: had she?

“I couldn’t get a good scent read,” Louis-Cesare was saying. “The mages say we live like snakes in holes in the ground, but at least we clean ours. They had decayed protection wards like spider’s webs in every corner, with new ones merely layered over the top. There was potions’ residue, some of it going back centuries, like pepper in my nose. There were spells, crawling all over each other, and snapping and snarling everywhere I turned, or whenever a war mage passed too close to another . . .”

I nodded. The mage who had been chosen for our escort had been civil, at least, and had managed to keep a sneer off his face most of the time. But his damned coat had shocked me every time I got near it, which was difficult to avoid in some of those narrow tunnels. Not that I could have anyway. I’d initially thought that I was just being clumsy, having been thrown off my usual game by the level of creepy, but no.

I’d looked down after the fifth or sixth shock to see the damned coat reaching out for me with its hem. Like leather fingers ready to pinch. As a result, by the time we’d reached the cells, the only thing I’d been able to smell was my own searing flesh.

Damned mages.

“I couldn’t scent Jonathan through all that,” Louis-Cesare added. “But tonight was different. The taste of his blood on the air, the stench of corrupt magic—it was exactly as I remembered. I’ve never smelled it as strongly on anyone else, or in precisely the same combination. It may as well have been his signature cologne.”

I sat there, and despite the complete sincerity in my lover’s voice, I was having a hard time with this. “But I talked to her. She assured me—”

“You mean the Pythia,” he said, referring to the chief seer of the mages, who pretended to preside over the whole supernatural community.

I nodded. Despite her court’s claims, and my father’s best efforts to seduce her to our side, she mostly worked with the Circle. Of course, she’d lie if they asked her to. Rumor was she was even dating a war mage these days.

But I’d been in a business where judging people accurately was important for a very long time, and I remembered the intensity in those strange, too-pale eyes, when she’d told me what had happened. She’d shifted into my room at the consul’s court without warning—a demigoddess’s privilege, I supposed—and practically scared me to death. One second, there’d been nothing but air behind me, and the next—

A skinny blonde chick with weird eyes and weirder clay earrings had been standing there. She’d seen me notice the latter and said that some of the young initiates at her court had made them for her. They were supposed to be chocolate kisses, her favorite candies.

They’d looked more like poop emojis to me, but I hadn’t been dumb enough to say so.

She’d stood there awkwardly for a moment before blurting out that Jonathan was dead and she was sorry she couldn’t have saved him for me. And I’d promptly forgotten about terrible earrings and good manners and the fact that people who ruled whole countries were on a waiting list to see this woman. And just turned around and ran. New travels fast and I’d wanted to get to Louis-Cesare before he heard it from someone else.

I’d made it, if only just. And then we’d gone to see for ourselves, because neither of us could believe it, otherwise. And damn it, maybe I should have stayed and questioned her some more, but I still didn’t think she’d lied!

Yet it seemed equally unlikely that she could have been fooled. She was the damned Pythia. I just didn’t know anymore.

“You’re saying that the mages deceived us somehow,” I said.

Louis-Cesare shook his head. “I’m saying that it was Jonathan. How he came to be there I do not know.”

I frowned. My head hurt; my heart hurt. I wasn’t up for this.

And Louis-Cesare didn’t look any happier. “If I’d stopped, even for a moment,” he said, his eyes distant. “But there he was, leering at me from underneath one of those black masks, having evaded death yet again. He took off and I went after him—immediately, not pausing to think that of course it was a trap. But not for me.”

“Or for me.” I put my head on his chest. “They wanted Dorina. They left me lying in the street, while eight or ten of them shoved her through that portal.”

“I know. I saw. I tried to reach her, but I wasn’t fast enough.”

Neither was I, I thought, and shivered. His arms tightened. “I’m sorry,” he said roughly. “We shouldn’t be talking about this now.”

“Except that I want to talk about this now. I need—”

I stopped because I wasn’t sure what I needed. I hadn’t felt like this since I lost my mother, all those centuries ago. I’d found the village where she’d lived blackened and corpse-like, under a blanket of new fallen snow. Plague, they’d said. It had had to be burned.

They’d lied.

She’d been murdered, and I hadn’t been there to save her. She’d been lost to me, because I was too slow in tracking her down. I’d been nine at the time, a skinny, pale, dark eyed waif, but a dhampir nonetheless. The Roma, who had taken me in as a baby after she was forced to give me up, had known what I’d become: a predator, one who could fight off their enemies.

But I hadn’t been able to save them in the end, any more than I had her. I didn’t seem to be able to save anyone. And, suddenly, the torrent of emotions I’d felt then burned through my veins again: fear, anger, hatred, loss. I suddenly knew what I wanted, as I had all those years ago, and it wasn’t sitting here grieving uselessly.

I wanted a target.

And now I had one.