It threw me for a second, because the usual color change that comes with his power goes in the opposite direction—to bright, light-filled amber. But now it was more like looking into two inky pools. Except even ink reflects some light off the surface and his eyes weren’t doing that. It looked disturbingly as if they weren’t even there anymore, just dark, dark nothingness behind his lashes, like the fog boiling over the memory cliff in my mind.
And then all up around me, as if the room had caught fire.
And then closing over my head as he caught my wrists, to keep me from standing up in alarm.
And then gushing out in front of me as I walked through it and out the other side.
I stumbled slightly, having to adjust to suddenly finding myself standing instead of sitting, and to being on a dark wharf instead of in a cozy library. But it only took a second, and then I was looking at the same scene as before. Except for the fog.
Instead of evaporating, it ruffled out over the ground, swirling around me and then surging outward, until the whole scene was covered with it, waist-high. Tendrils reached even higher, as if grasping at the dark, cloud-filled sky, the intermittant stars, and the yachts bobbing at anchor. Or at the pier, sitting quiet and blood-free.
Obviously, the fun hadn’t started yet.
“Looks like we’re early,” I said—to nobody. Because when I turned around, Louis-Cesare wasn’t there.
But something else was.
I blinked stupidly at it. And okay. Maybe I’d been a little hasty with that same-scene comment.
Because that? Wasn’t the same at all.
I was looking at a huge expanse of gray stone, smooth in places as if wind and rain had scoured the corners, and sharp in others where centuries-old chisel marks remained visible. It looked like a thousand walls I’d seen, edging roads or circling towns or doing wall-type things all over Europe. None of which had included slicing through the middle of an SUV on one end and a yacht on the other.
But that’s what this one was doing, bisecting the harbor from parking lot to waterline and beyond. I stared upward, feeling dizzy because the top stones were maybe fifty feet high. I separated you, Mircea had said.
Yeah. That was one way of putting it.
Goddamn, no wonder I was crazy.
But amazingly enough, the size wasn’t the strangest thing about the wall-that-shouldn’t-be-there. Neither was the gaping gully in the middle that looked like someone had driven a giant-sized bus through it. Or the jagged bits that had burst out ahead of the explosion, the interiors of which failed entirely to be gray and rocky and stone-like, opting instead for pink and pulsing and…alive.
No, what had my skin tightening all over my body was the strands of something viscous and gooey and glistening that had burst outward with the wall, leaving a forest of vine-like pinkish filaments behind. Some were lying warped and twisted in the rubble, impossibly damaged. Others had looped back onto the nearest stone, attaching themselves to it and then sinking inside, only to jumble up underneath with nowhere to go, like varicose veins.
Except for a few. They had neither died nor found a new foothold, but they were also unable to bridge the large gap in the wall. As a result, they were just waving about in the air like horrible seaweed in a nonexistent current.
Or like clutching hands, I thought, stumbling back a step.
And straight into someone’s arms.
“It’s all right,” Louis-Cesare told me, grabbing my arms preemptively.
“All right?” I shook him off, and took a step backward. Because no way was anything about this all right.
“It will be.” He looked past me for a moment, at the wall, but didn’t seem as horror-struck as I was. Maybe he’d been warned ahead of time; he’d said that he and Mircea had talked. Or maybe it wasn’t quite the same when it wasn’t your insanity on display.
Bizarre, whacked-out, really gross display. I wrapped my arms around me, and told myself that the cold I was feeling was just the fog. Or my imagination, which seemed to be healthy enough.
Glad something was.
“Where were you?” I demanded, harsher than I’d planned.
He looked back at me. “Quoi?”
“You weren’t here. When I arrived,” I added, because he was staring at me blankly.
“We left at the same time.”
“Well, we didn’t arrive at the same time! I’ve been here for five minutes.” Maybe more. It felt like I’d been staring at that wall for a while.
Louis-Cesare didn’t seem to like that response. “You are sure?”
“Well, it’s not like I have a watch!” I said, only to have one appear on my arm.
It was gold, with a little mother-of-pearl face, and it wasn’t mine. It sort of reminded me of one Claire owned, but didn’t wear anymore because the whole transformation thing was tough on jewelry. But that didn’t explain what it was doing here.
“What the—” I began.
“It is your mind. You can have what you like,” Louis-Cesare informed me. Which was great, except that what I’d like right now was a door out of here.
“Is there a way for us to speed this up?” I asked tightly.
He didn’t answer for a moment. His head was tilted to the side and he had a distracted look, like he was trying to talk and listen to the TV at the same time. “Your father says he is having…difficulties,” he finally told me.
“What kind of difficulties?”
“Maintaining the connection. He says we need to hurry.”
“That’s what I just said,” I pointed out. “How do I fast-forward this thing?”
“I…he…is not sure. He was trying to put you in at the time of the blackout that you experienced earlier. But as an observer. You should have been able to see and report back, without having to experience everything again. Or talk to anyone.”
“Sounds good,” I said fervently.
“Yes, but it did not work. He does not know why.”
“That’s…reassuring.”
“It is not, in fact,” he said, staring upward. And not looking happy. He was glowering at the sky as if Mircea was up there somewhere and could see him. I didn’t say anything because I kind of hoped he was right.
Unfortunately, that gave me no one to talk to, and my eyes got bored. And started meandering around. And they seemed fascinated by the sickly pinkish light coming from the gash that was flooding the dark landscape like a searchlight.
I don’t know why. It’s not like they could see anything. It was bright enough, but just like a real searchlight, it didn’t work so well in fog. Except to highlight strange bumps and coils and glimmers in the mist, sending Rorschach-like monsters rearing silently on every side.
I suddenly got a severe case of goose bumps, and jerked my head around, sure that I’d just glimpsed—
Nothing.
The only thing behind me was a long shadow of a streetlight, flickering in and out of sight in the churning mist.
I stared at it for a moment anyway, even after I’d identified it, because I suddenly found that I didn’t want to look around anymore. Didn’t want to see something more substantial than a shadow. Didn’t want to know what might have come through that gap.
Because something sure had. And given what the wall probably stood for in my not-so-original brain, it wasn’t hard to guess what. And even though that was kind of the point of this expedition, now that it came down to it, I found that I wasn’t so keen on meeting that other part of me. That baleful, warped, diseased part that I’d done my best to ignore and avoid and generally suppress the hell out of all these years.
And I was pretty okay with maintaining the status quo.
But my brain, my so-messed-up yet so-helpful brain, had other ideas. It kept showing me glimmers of something slouching through the mist, flickering at the very edges of my vision but staying low to the ground. Hiding. Taking cover, but still visible in glimpses, like the light post’s shadow. Hunched and misshapen glimpses that watched me with terrible, demon red eyes.
I couldn’t see it very well, since I couldn’t seem to force my eyes to focus. Or my head to turn; it suddenly seemed to like this patch of ground just fine, thank you. But what I could see didn’t look human.
Of course it doesn’t, I thought, feeling sweat drench the body we shared, and my skin start to ruffle. I wanted to scream and flinch and gyrate like someone who had had a horrible insect land on her arm. Only this insect wouldn’t come off because this insect was me, was part of me, was crawling through the mist like it usually crawled beneath my skin. Always stalking, never leaving, never letting me just live, just be, like a normal person because I wasn’t a normal person and thanks to it I never would be and I hated, hated, HATED—
“Augghh!”
I threw out an arm when something reached for me out of the fog, sending it staggering back.
And then belatedly recognized Louis-Cesare.
“Are you…all right?” he asked me warily.
“Of course I’m all right,” I snapped, staring around, angry because I wasn’t. Not enough, anyway. I could feel it, a warm, red tide simmering away somewhere in the back of my mind—or what was left of it. But it couldn’t reach me, couldn’t help, couldn’t even get close.
Because there was something in the way.
Something that was chilling my flesh and making my breath come faster.
Something that felt a lot like fear.
And I couldn’t afford that. Anger was heat and light and split-second, adrenaline-fueled timing. But fear was not. Fear was cold and dark and debilitating and paralyzing. People who were too angry in fights sometimes lost, but people who were too afraid always did. Curling up into a ball instead of attacking, begging for their lives instead of fighting for them.
And I wouldn’t go down like that. I wouldn’t lie down and just be absorbed by this…this thing. Just like I hadn’t centuries ago.
I wouldn’t let it win.
I’ll die first, I whispered viciously, too low even for a vampire’s ears. I’ll die and I’ll take you with me.
