best sauce, as someone once said, and I was very hungry. I ate all four of the fish, some of the dried fruit, and most of Ray’s crab. It had almost taken his nose off in an epic battle, so he had eaten some as a point of honor.
He had also drunk another pint of blood, reducing our stash to three, which told me how much healing he’d had to do earlier. A master shouldn’t have needed another feed so soon. Especially not with a family back on Earth to draw from.
“Can your family not supply you?” I asked, as I handed it over.
He rolled his eyes, which I was beginning to see as a favorite gesture, and poked our fire with a stick. He’d found some driftwood along the banks, so we had a good blaze. It was chilly now with the sun down, but the fire warmed not only us but the rock behind us. I thought we’d sleep comfortably enough.
“You seen my family, right?” he said, after a moment.
“Yes.”
“So, what do you think?”
I ate a fish eye. “I think they are too weak to help you, and that it is my fault.”
He looked up, the firelight splashing his face. “Why would it be your fault?”
“I am not a proper master. Neither is Dory. Your old master could give you power through the blood bond, but we cannot. As a result, your people draw from you, but you have no one to draw from in return. It weakens you.”
Ray picked at the mostly empty crab shell. “That’s one way of looking at it.”
“Is that not how you look at it?”
He shot me a look. “No.”
For a while, nothing else was said. The wood popped, the wind rustled through the treetops, and the water murmured over the stones. I looked up, and the rocky fingers seemed as if they were reaching out, to clutch the sky. There were stars visible, but no moon. I wondered if Faerie even had one, and felt a strange quiver at the thought that I didn’t know.
“I look back,” Ray finally said, “at four hundred years of slavery. You know when Dory cut off my head that time?”
I nodded.
“We were nothing to each other then; never even met. I was just some loser she’d been sent after, just a paycheck. Yet she was more polite to my decapitated corpse than my old master ever was to the whole man. That fucking prick.”
I blinked.
“So you gotta weigh it out. On the one hand, sure, I don’t get any power boosts, but that miserly bastard never gave up much anyway. And on average, I’d rather have some goddamned respect than all the power in the world. You know?”
“No,” I said honestly. “I have never met a vampire who did not crave power.”
“Didn’t say I didn’t crave it,” Ray corrected. “Right now, I crave the heck out of it. I just crave something else more. You spend four hundred years being treated like nothing, just nothing at all, and maybe you’d understand.”
This time, I was the one who was silent.
“I did,” I finally said, and saw him blush.
Or maybe that was the fire. It was sending a cheerful glow over the flat stone beneath us, the rocks behind us, and the fingers above. It had also given Ray back his youthful appearance. There was no gray in the shock of black hair, and the blue eyes, so startling against the tanned skin, were unlined. At a guess, I would have said that he was Changed young, no more than early twenties.
“Nineteen,” he said roughly, and looked away. But a moment later, those blue eyes were back and staring at me challengingly. “What about you?”
“I am not a vampire,” I pointed out. “I was not Changed.”
The eyeroll was back. “No, I meant what do you want? You asked me, so it’s only fair.”
I agreed that it was fair. It was also difficult to answer. I decided to take my time, as he had, and lay back against the warm stone to look at the stars.
Like everything else here, they were both familiar and not. The small, pinpricks of light were the same, but there were no familiar constellations. Orion, the Big Dipper, the Pleiades . . . they simply were not there.
Of course, they wouldn’t be, would they? I had heard that Faerie was in a completely different universe, connected to our own solely by a small breach in space-time. It was on the “heavenly” side, whereas Earth