Page 86 of Fortune's Blade

“But it was possible, ‘cause Mircea wasn’t totally Changed when he and your mom got busy. And she must have passed you most of the god-tinkered-with genes, because you were so strong that even dhampirism couldn’t defeat you. You were Dory’s malaria, the thing that would either kill her or save her, and ended up saving her.”

I just sat there, staring at him blankly. I knew I should probably say something, but my mouth didn’t seem to work. But Ray didn’t appear to mind.

“I know it’s a lot to take in,” he said. “But I’ve thought about it plenty, ‘cause I knew how much it bothered you, thinking that you were the one who hurt her. But I don’t think you did, or if you did, it was like the syphilis sufferers getting a bad time from the malaria. Yeah, it sucked for a while, but it also saved them.

“Like you saved Dory.”

“I saved her.” I repeated the words, but they still didn’t make sense. And I didn’t have many memories to help me understand.

Unlike the days in Venice, the nights were . . . cloudy, indistinct, and filled with so much pain, so much terror, that I couldn’t remember much about them. But what if, as Ray had said, I hadn’t fought father except when he tried to interfere? What if I had been battling the disease instead? And changing it, from something deadly to both of us to something . . . inconvenient.

No, it wasn’t possible.

“Why isn’t it possible?” Ray asked. “Nothing about your birth was normal, and frankly, if this is true, it wouldn’t be the weirdest thing about you.”

I couldn’t argue there.

“You think what you want,” he added. “But I don’t think it was Mircea who saved the two of you. I think he did the best he could with no real knowledge to go on and nobody to help him. But I think, if he hadn’t done anything at all, it would have worked out just the same. Cause he wasn’t battling the dhampirism, you were.

“And if there’s one thing I know about you; you always win.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

I sat there for a long time when he finished speaking, staring at the floor. Ray didn’t say anything else, just let me think. He knew me so well.

Better than I knew myself, it seemed. Because what he’d told me, which should have brought me relief, even joy, had only enraged me. I was glad that I was drunk, as I didn’t know what I would do otherwise.

Or who I would do it to, as this wasn’t father’s fault. He had locked me away because he thought he had no choice, and there had been no one to tell him he was wrong. It wasn’t Dory’s fault, who hadn’t known about me for most of her life, and when she found out, had tried her best to help me. And now I learned that it wasn’t even mine.

It wasn’t anyone’s fault, it just was, and I couldn’t seem to wrap my head around that. All those lost years, all that loneliness, all those tears with no one to wipe them away or even to hear my cries. All those days wanting so badly to kill myself, just for it all to end, but knowing I couldn’t because I owed her for the pain I’d caused when I never had?

What the hell had it all been for?

The gods did this, I thought.

It was their fault.

But the gods were gone, so who did I blame now?

And yet, I wanted someone to bleed for this. It was all I knew and the only way I had ever been able to express myself. Such a good little monster, just as the gods had made me.

I wished I could kill them all. Wished I could show them exactly what their rivalry and lust for power and disinterest in who they hurt had wrought. I wished that so hard that I could feel my nails cutting into my palms, making little red wounds and then worse, as blood began to drip onto the floor.

“Hey,” Ray said, alarmed, because if there was one thing that vampires didn’t miss, it was blood.

“I’m alright,” I told him, but he didn’t believe me, and forced me to show him my hands. And then made a sucking sound in between his teeth and got up, fetching a spare sheet that he tore into bandages, after splashing the remaining alcohol onto my wounds.

The pain felt good, something to distract my mind, and being fussed over felt better. To have someone care that I was hurting and want to alleviate it was a strange new thing. And he tried; he really did.

He carefully wrapped up my hands, taking his time, murmuring words to soothe me all the while, for he had realized that I wasn’t taking this well. He had thought to help by giving an alternate explanation for the wreck that was my life. But since it had done the opposite, he was trying to make it better.

I didn’t deserve him.

“Maybe you just need some new memories,” he was saying. “Venice was great and all, but that was a long time ago. And this isn’t Earth. It’s a new world, and you’re a new person. You have a life now, and you can do whatever you want, make whatever memories you choose.”

“After so long?” I met his eyes and let the uncertainty show in mine. “I don’t know how to be normal. I never did.”

He shrugged. “Who says you gotta be normal? I ain’t normal, and I do okay. Dory sure ain’t and she’s a senator. And this is Faerie, which is weirder than either of us, you know what I mean?”

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