so alone for so long that I was giddy with all the sights and sounds, the smells and colors . . . I felt almost drunk on them. Until I realized: I could look, but nothing more. I couldn’t interact with anyone.
No one heard me when I spoke or saw me when I passed by. It was like being a ghost, yet I hadn’t died! I went back home and there I was, asleep in my bed. I was perfectly fine—
“Except you weren’t,” Ray said, following the conversation I was having in my head.
“Except I wasn’t.” I hesitated, not sure that I wanted to share this next part, but nothing would make sense without it. “The following night, I tried to talk to Mircea.”
“Not that night? Because I’da wanted some goddamned answers!”
I shook my head. “Free flight—what I do outside of a body—cannot be sustained for long. It drains me terribly, to the point that I almost did not make it back to the house. I was panicked and exhausted, and could not think properly when I returned. But later . . . I thought he would help.”
“Let me guess,” Ray said cynically, and took the canteen.
“He did not hear me, either, when I spoke, but we share mental gifts. I thought I would talk to him that way, mind to mind, but . . . it did not go well.”
“How bad is not well?”
I didn’t answer.
I had entered father’s mind, expecting a reaction, but . . . not the one I received. He had thrown me out, as viciously as if I was a demon he was trying to exorcise. And when I stubbornly returned, he tore up the front room of the house, yelling and throwing things, and waking everyone—including Dory.
That had put me back to sleep, and the next night, I hadn’t dared to try again. But I had gone exploring. And had slowly discovered through trial and error what I could do.
Not everyone reacted like Mircea. I learned that the vampires often did, seeing me as an invading spirit, but the humans scarcely seemed to notice my presence at all. I found that I could suggest things to them, and they often took my suggestions. I could go anywhere . . .
Just not as myself.
But being inside a body, any body, renewed my strength. And allowed me to move about the city once again, as I had once done. Although only when the person I was starting to think of as a separate person from me, as a sister, slept.
Ray drank fey wine and scowled. “Okay, so, what you’re telling me is that your father didn’t explain anything to you before the separation? He didn’t tell you what he was trying to do or ask you what you thought or anything?”
I shook my head. “I was asleep and then I was alone.”
“Motherfucker!”
“He was afraid that I would fight him, if he gave me any warning. I wasn’t as strong then, but neither was he. And it was an experiment, a last-ditch effort to spare his daughter’s life—”
“His daughters. He has two daughters,” Ray said angrily.
“He does not see it that way.” My mind went to another memory, a far more recent one, before I could stop it.
“What? He wanted to lock you away again?”
I shifted uncomfortably. I had not intended to show him that. “He did not plan for the barrier he put in our mind to fall,” I said awkwardly. “He always refused to remove it, afraid that I would take over completely and that he would lose Dory. She is all he has left of our mother—”
“She is not all he has left! He has you!”
I did not answer immediately, wondering how to explain mine and Dory’s childhood, the bright, sunny days and the screaming, terror-filled nights. The nights were when the fits had come that had threatened to tear our mind apart, and when Mircea had fought battles with me for his daughter’s sanity, for her very life. I did not have the words.
Just as I did not have them to explain what came after.
“Ten of the sardele,” Mircea said, surveying the afternoon’s catch. “The same of the moeche. And . . .”
He paused and I saw him eye the mackerel, their black and steel blue stripes gleaming in the last rays of the afternoon sun. Their basket took pride of place on the slanted table top that showed off the fishmonger’s wares. More baskets sat around, although many were empty. It was