had all sorts of wonderful food, but we couldn’t always afford the better cuts of meat, or all the candy I would have liked. Which was just as well, or I’d have no teeth left.”
“And after?”
“Freedom. Being able to go where I chose, when I chose. I wanted to see so many things, but I could only go where Dory did.”
“But you were in control sometimes, too, right?”
“Yes, but never for long. Only when she was in serious danger, and her grip over her mind and emotions weakened. Panic was a conduit for me, and fear. But that meant that there was always a fight waiting when I emerged.” I rolled my head over to look at him. “I do not mind fights, but there were times . . .”
“Yeah?”
It was embarrassing. But he had been honest with me. “There were times when I wanted . . . to go shopping.”
Ray blinked at me. “What?”
I nodded. “Or to a café. We were in Paris once, long ago, and I saw this café. It was so beautiful, with a wisteria vine growing all over it. It was as big as a tree, as if it had been there for centuries. I remember wanting to sit at one of the tables and drink coffee and watch the people go by.”
“Why couldn’t you? Didn’t Dory ever do that?”
“Perhaps, but I was asleep then. I’d woken up that night because she was fighting a group of mages who had been stealing magic and making the deaths look like revenant attacks. They thought no one would notice that their victims had died from being drained of all their magic, if their corpses were also savaged. If you are missing much of your torso, people do not look far for another cause of death.”
“Yeah, I guess not.”
“Dory, who specialized in revenants, had been brought in by the French authorities to investigate and find the killer,” I added. “She had done so, and the mages did not like that. They ganged up on us and we were surrounded. I woke up in time to fight them off, but it’s strange. I don’t remember much of the fight at all. I was killing mages, but I was looking at that little café. It was closed, it being the middle of the night, but I was imagining myself in a pretty dress, sitting in the sunlight, drinking coffee . . .”
I trailed off. Ray didn’t say anything for a long time. That was all right. I found that I enjoyed his company even without speech. I did not entirely understand it, since he screamed and cursed a great deal, yet I found his presence soothing.
“And now?” he finally said. “Now that all this has happened. The fey and Faerie and—” he waved a hand around. “This. What do you want now?”
I stared at the flames for a minute. It did not help. “That is difficult to answer. I have not thought about it in so long, that it doesn’t even feel like the right question anymore.”
“What is the right question?”
I remembered what Mircea had asked, all those years ago, what I had once wondered and what Nimue had demanded tonight. Perhaps that was the question I should have been asking all along. Only I didn’t know the answer to that one, either.
“What am I?”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Dory, Cairo
We withdrew to Hassani’s personal chambers, to speak in private. And, despite his reputation, they were definitely the rooms of a scholar more than a warrior. The outer section was clearly an office, with a simple wooden desk at the far end and several chairs. But it was large enough and stuffed with enough antiquities to qualify as a small museum.
There were two large glass display cases with numerous shelves in the middle of the space, which acted as a sort of room divider. Hassani picked up a blue faience item from one of them and handed it to me. It was a shawabti, one of the thousands of small, human-shaped figurines that used to be buried with the pharaohs to serve as servants in the afterlife. I’d seen plenty of them in the Cairo Museum when we’d visited the day after our arrival.
But none so fine as these.
I found them fascinating, or I would have, if I hadn’t been so anxious to hear what the consul had to say about Dorina. But I knew old vamps, and pushing them rarely resulted in anything good. I had about a thousand questions for Hassani, but