Page 64 of Fortune's Blade

The thought rocked me, along with the possibility that I had sustained some wound in battle that I didn’t recall that had drained me over time. Leaving me as nothing more than this . . . this thing, this disembodied remnant, who had no living form to go back to. Stuck forever as I had lived for so long, as a consciousness with no substance to it, no reality, no life.

The idea alarmed me to the point that I pelted headlong back through a wall and into the bedroom where my body lay, on an impressively sized, opulently draped bed.

It took me a moment of panicked examination to realize that it was breathing, a fact that I had to bend close in order to see, as my vision was really quite bad like this. But it was alive—I was alive. I even placed an incorporeal hand on my chest to make sure, feeling it rise and fall under the fine nightgown that someone had dressed me in.

I shouldn’t have been able to feel dizzy like this, yet I did, with the room spinning slightly around me. I clutched the bedpost for support, only to have my hand go right through it. And yet, I had a hand, right there on the bedcovers, with a little dried blood visible under the fingernails that whatever bath I had been given had failed to scrub off.

It was enough to stagger me, the overwhelming relief that I had survived. I was not accustomed to such thoughts. I had no fear of death, had not had in as long as I could remember, with my life never having seemed all that real to begin with.

Dory had caused me a few palpitations through the years, but when I fought, I fought for her, to keep her alive. To give her time to find a place in a world that would never have one for me. So, the fact that I could look down on myself and feel such concern, such emotion, such fear . . .

Was new.

And then someone spoke behind me, causing me to jump again and clutch at my chest, for I was not myself today.

Not at all!

“Yeah, that’s not gonna work. Like not even close, okay?”

It was Ray, I realized, and he was sounding crabby.

A tiny voice answered him, but I did not understand it, and neither, it seemed, did Ray. Because he sighed in that frustrated way I had come to know so well since we came to Faerie, where the merchants’ cant he spoke only got us so far. Faerie was like Earth, with a multitude of languages, and we knew almost none of them.

I turned to see him standing at the door, which was now open and framing a small pixie. She was hovering in the air, her tiny wings going a mile a minute, while four more were just visible in the hallway behind her holding up a large, silver tray. It had a dome over it, so I could not see the contents, and with my limited senses at the moment, I could not smell it.

But my body could, and I saw its nose twitch on the bed beside me.

“Look, I don’t know what you just said, but this,” Ray waved a hand contemptuously at the tray the pixies were straining to support, “is not gonna cut it. You ever see a dhampir eat? Specially after a fight, much less a fight like that? This ain’t even an appetizer.”

The pixies did not appear to understand him, and the one in charge—at least, I assumed so since she wasn’t carrying anything—gestured with her tiny arms for him to move out of the way.

Ray did not move. “Bigger,” he said, putting his hands together at the approximate size of the tray and then spreading them wide. “Much bigger. Do you get me? You’re gonna need a lot more.”

The pixie, who was a brunette with snapping lavender eyes, seemed to understand that, but she didn’t like it. She began chattering away and gesticulating at me, somehow conveying the message that I was not really very big for a human, and that she had brought enough for a platoon. Which was not true, but probably felt like it to her, considering that many pixies could have fit into the space under that dome.

“Yeah, I don’t care what she looks like,” Ray said. “She hasn’t eaten in two days and has had to heal besides. I’m gonna need—” He paused and held up a hand with the fingers spread wide. “Five, you get it? At least five times this much, and that’s assuming that plate is loaded for bear.”

The pixie stared from his hand, which he was waggling the fingers of to drive home his point, to me, to the tray. And then her tiny face flushed with outrage, and she began chattering even faster and at a much higher pitch. Meanwhile, Ray reached for the dome, lifting the silver cover to see if his estimate was accurate or needed to be enlarged even more and—

And I smelled that, I thought, as the wonderful aroma of spices and herbs and meat reached my nose, so wonderful, so heady, and so immediately overwhelming that, for a moment, it was all I could think about. And the next thing I knew, I was there, ripping a roasted bird’s leg off a carcass and stuffing it into my mouth.

And I had a mouth suddenly, although how I did, I didn’t know, as I did not recall rejoining my body. Nor was I entirely sure that I even knew how to do so as I still didn’t understand what was going on. But I didn’t need to.

I only needed this.

“Yeah, okay, we’ll take this as a start, but I still need five more,” Ray said, holding his hand up to the outraged pixie’s face, which was fast losing its expression as she saw how quickly the food was disappearing.

The tray was loaded for bear, but I was starving, so hungry that its contents seemed to vanish before my eyes. There was roast duck in some kind of sticky sauce, venison or some near equivalent, sausages of an indeterminant kind, several types of cheese, and on the tray alongside the covered dish was a whole loaf of bread glistening with butter and still warm from the oven. Not to mention a good-sized tureen of stew that I knew on some level was tasty, but that I drank down so fast, grabbing it up and gulping it in a moment, that I couldn’t truly appreciate it.

Then I stood there, in the midst of the carnage of a different kind of battle, with buttery fingers and greasy lips, and five shocked pixie faces staring at me.

My stomach rumbled plaintively.

“See?” Ray said, and held up his hand again. “Five, okay?”

The lead pixie nodded; her eyes huge. They took the empty tray away, tiny wings whirring, and Ray led me back inside. He was saying something, but I was finding it hard to concentrate with my appetite now awakened but not satisfied, and the fuzzy brained feeling I had had as a spirit now completely absent.

In its place were pains and strains and throbbing insistence from several wounds that distracted me, making it hard to grasp hold of his words. They seemed to slip away as meaninglessly as the pixie’s chatter. All I could think about was my stomach, that it hurt, that it wanted, that it roared—

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