moment I didn’t feel like laughing. This was going to be hard enough without backup who couldn’t follow orders.
“Then we have a problem,” I told him honestly. I looked back at Mircea, who was wearing an expression that on anyone else I would have described as petulant. “You know what’s at stake here. I know you don’t like me any more than I do you, but we have worked together before. I think it was luck, but maybe we’ll get lucky again. And you already know how I operate.”
Mircea was shaking his head before I even finished. “Normally that is the way I would choose to proceed. But not now.”
“Why not?” I thought my question was reasonable, but he suddenly looked angry.
“After all these years, can you not follow a simple command?”
“Not when it’s likely to get me killed, no.” I looked between the two of them, trying to figure out what unspoken communication was going on. For a brief moment I felt something—not anger exactly but something more elusive—that Mircea and this stranger could communicate so easily without words. Because that’s exactly what they were doing. A normal human wouldn’t have noticed the few, almost-too-quick-for-the-eye glances, but I did. That was one of the harshest parts of the dhampir experience: the fact that your senses never allow you to be oblivious, never let you for a moment fool yourself into thinking you belong.
Once, when I was very young and even dumber than I am now, I actually let a vamp try to turn me. I’d just reached the century mark and seen my mortal acquaintances age and die before my eyes, with the last one buried earlier that week. I was all alone and tired as hell of it. Not that I’d ever fit in with humans very well, but, God, how I had tried. So I figured, why not? I’m almost there anyway, why not cross over and actually be part of something for a change?
I knew it was a risk, of course: even if the vamp didn’t just bleed me dry and leave me to die, most vamps spend eternity tied to a master they can’t disobey. They are little more than slaves until they reach master status—which few ever do—and even then their responsibility to their master remains a debt that can be called in anytime. But at that moment, I didn’t much care. Turns out, though, I had chosen well, and he gave it his all, I guess hoping for whatever fame would come out of being the first on record to turn a dhampir. But the next morning I woke up exactly as I’d been before, a little light-headed from the blood loss, maybe, but not changed one iota. So add another rule to the books: dhampirs can’t be brought over. This meant that, after torturing me for a few days or weeks or whatever time he could spare, Drac wouldn’t even try to add me to his new stable.
“I’m risking a lot here,” I told them in what had to be the understatement of at least my last century. “I don’t think it’s asking too much to know why I can’t have decent backup.”
I never saw it coming. Despite the fact that I’ve survived longer than anyone would have bet by being unbelievably paranoid and very good at defense, I didn’t see a thing. I also didn’t hear, smell or otherwise have a clue what was happening. One second I was facing off with Mircea, and the next I was facedown on the ground, being pinned very effectively by the hard body pressing into mine.
My reaction was immediate and unthinking. When you’ve been in literally more fights than you can count, often against opponents much bigger than you who have no compunction at all about fighting dirty, you learn a few things. I used them all and then some, yet the face-to-the-carpet thing didn’t change. I was stunned almost into disbelief. This simply wasn’t happening. I would have believed that Mircea was helping out, except that he had moved off to lean against the bar. I could see the toes of his perfectly shined shoes and the knife-edge pleat of his trouser cuffs, meaning that I was, incredible as it seemed, being held by only one vamp.
Son of a bitch.
“We can continue this as long as necessary,” an infuriatingly calm voice said near my left ear, “but we are wasting time. Agree to my mastery and we can begin to plan how to