Page 85 of Fortune's Blade

But Ray was shaking his head. “She’s okay. I known masters who were battier. Anyway, you think I woulda signed on as her Second—and yours, too—if I didn’t think I could trust you? And you can’t trust a crazy person. They might mean what they tell you one minute, then change their minds the next, or forget what they said entirely and then where are you?

“Nope, she’s not as nuts as she thinks. She’s just traumatized as hell from the life she’s lived, and if that’s true for her, it’s triple for you. But she does alright. That’s why she’s over five hundred years old, despite not being a hermit living in a cave somewhere. And that’s why this is bull crap.”

I blinked at him, having lost the thread of the conversation somewhere.

“What is bull crap?”

“What have we been talking about?”

“I’m . . . not sure.”

“You and Dory! Okay, okay. Try this. As I understand it, your mom was supposed to be some kind of uber strong, god-killing, super weapon, right? Crafted by one group of gods to take on another, using every dangerous creature they could find whose traits were compatible.”

“Supposed to be,” I repeated. “She was a failed experiment.”

“Yes, but she fled to Earth and hooked up with your dad, and the two of them made you and Dory. Only Mircea had already been cursed by then, and was halfway to turning into a vamp. So, Dory ended up as a dhampir, something that didn’t happen with you ‘cause I guess you were already so many things that it got lost in the wash.

“But nobody knew any of this, much less your dad, who was only told that you would eventually rip Dory apart. That that was what happened to dhampirs: they and their vampire half, which is what he thought you were, couldn’t co-exist and the battle between them was usually fatal. Yet that didn’t happen to her.”

“Because he separated us,” I reminded him, wondering what his point was. Both of us already knew all this. “He made sure that we were never awake at the same time, isolating my mind from doing further damage to her.”

“Yeah, that’s one possibility, and it’s obviously what he thinks to this day. And was dumb enough to say to your face ‘cause his diplomatic ability goes out the window where you two are concerned. But what if something different was going on? What if, instead of hurting Dory, you were actually helping her?”

“Helping her?” I felt my forehead wrinkle in confusion. “What—that doesn’t make any sense.”

But Ray seemed to think that it did, and he was enthusiastic about it. “Just think for a minute. You can do all kinds of stuff that a dhampir can’t, that nobody can. Like mentally possessing people and riding them around, or transforming into a big ass dragon and eating—” he broke off, probably at whatever was on my face.

“Sorry. But my point is, you can do all kinds of things thanks to all of those different beings that went into making up your mom, maybe even including some god blood. That was one reason Mircea never listened to you, right? You told me that you tried to talk to him by possessing other people and using their voices, even following him around Venice all afternoon once, but it only weirded him out.”

I nodded slowly, remembering. “It’s one reason he thought I was some kind of demon who had possessed his daughter. It’s why he never trusted me.” Not that he had before, but that had cemented his feelings in stone.

“So, would it be so weird if there’s something else unusual that you can do?” Ray asked. “Something that you employed instinctively when you felt threatened?”

“Like what?”

“Like those night terrors that Dory suffered. What if they were you, but instead of attacking her, you were attacking the dhampirism threatening you both? And ripping her brain apart in order to put it back together as something that worked? What if you attacked Mircea because you saw him as a threat to the job you were doing, and therefore to your and Dory’s whole existence?

“What if, instead of being her cancer, you were more like . . . like her malaria?”

I stared at him blankly. “Malaria?”

“Yeah.” Ray nodded. “Back in the day, they didn’t have a cure for syphilis, which killed a ton of people and killed ‘em hard. But some enterprising doc came up with the idea of fighting one disease with another. He’d give patients who had syphilis, a disease that nobody could cure, another disease—malaria—which they could. Cause they had quinine for that, right?”

“Ray, I don’t—”

“Just listen. So, the doc gave his patients malaria, which causes really high fevers. Higher, as it turned out, than syphilis could handle. The malaria killed the syphilis, which couldn’t survive the high temps, then the doc gave the patients quinine to kill the malaria. And they were fine!

“Well, those that survived, that is. Malaria did kill some of them, but they were gonna die a harder death from syphilis anyway, so what are you gonna do? But some survived who wouldn’t have otherwise, ‘cause malaria was less scary of a disease. And before antibiotics, it was their only real chance.” He smiled at me triumphantly. “You get it now?”

“No.”

He frowned and took my bottle away.

I didn’t protest; it was mostly empty anyway.

“I’m saying,” he continued, with the air of a man who is striving against overwhelming odds, “that Dory had an incurable disease—dhampirism. She was born with it, and it kills almost everybody who gets it, or wrecks their lives so bad that it may as well have done. And like syphilis all those years ago, there’s no cure.

“At least, there isn’t supposed to be. But Dory had an advantage. She had you. A second consciousness birthed alongside her from whatever weirdness the gods were doing, filtered through two very unusual parents and a pregnancy that wasn’t supposed to be possible, ‘cause dead sperm don’t swim.

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