As she piled earth on top of the heap of the dead, she sobbed for them, even those who had considered her unclean because of her parentage. They had been her family, or as much of one as she had ever known. And now they were gone. Sweat and dirt mixed with her tears, and her nose started to run, but she didn’t wipe it away. She wasn’t finished yet.
She turned the horses loose and ran them away from the camp, since tradition allowed their continued survival. But everything else had to be destroyed. It was a laborious process, but she finally managed to break every remaining plate and glass, kill the two dogs and pile great armloads of brush around each wagon. She lit the fire and stood off to one side, watching everything she had ever known go up in flames. She would soon start to feel hungry and worry about how she was to survive when all the money and salable objects of her kumpania were now cursed and useless. She would wonder who would take her in, since the other Gypsy bands would certainly blame her for the tragedy, just as she was starting to blame herself.
She was not very old, but she knew what they whispered about her when they thought she couldn’t hear. She knew why they had taken her in, and what she could do. Killing the occasional vampyre who tried to hurt the kumpania was no more difficult for her than any of the other chores—gathering firewood or doing the wash—that were regularly demanded. She remembered nothing of the night before except going to sleep as usual, but there had been other odd periods of blackness in her life, and stories told of actions she had taken during them that she knew nothing about.
And one irrefutable fact stared her in the face: she was the only one left.
The fire spread to some nearby trees as she stood there, but she made no move to escape the heat. I felt again her despair, and knew she wouldn’t have cared much if the fire had consumed her, too. The kumpania had fed and clothed her for years, and all they had asked in return was protection. She was there to ensure that the ancient nightmares that walked abroad at night, the things that even the strongest Rom man couldn’t fight, did not decimate their small group. The group had not always been kind, but they had kept their bargain. What did it matter if she had to drink from a separate bucket or if they went out of their way to keep from touching her? They had seen to it that she never wanted for anything. And how had she repaid them? With the very fate they had been trying to avoid. She ought to let the fire take her. They were right—she was unclean, and her birth had ensured that she would never be anything else.
Chapter Eleven
I came around to find myself sobbing against a vast, hairy expanse, and vaguely realized that it was Olga’s beard. For a second, the grief continued to pound against me, hot and fierce. I swallowed and tried to concentrate enough to throw it completely off. I took a deep breath, then another. And as the sea of memory retreated, an odd thought occurred.
Whatever spell this was, it couldn’t manufacture such accurate memories, not of events that no one else had ever seen. It had to be pulling them from my own mind, and if that was true, what I had just seen had been created from what my eyes had recorded long ago. And that left me with a very important question.
“Where was the blood?” I croaked, sitting up.
Olga looked at me strangely, and I stared back at her. Of course, she hadn’t seen the vision, or at least, not the same one I had. But she didn’t ask any questions, which was good because my brain was already crowded with them.
I’d deliberately refused to relive those memories after I escaped from that cursed forest. They’d sat in the back of my mind like a fresh bruise, tender and unpleasant every time I touched them. But maybe it had been a mistake to shy away. If I was the killer as I’d always assumed, why had I not been drenched in blood? Everyone else had; even the dogs had looked like they’d been soaked in it. But when I smoothed my apron down that morning, there had been no sticky residue on my hands, no splotches of dried brown on my clothing. And even I couldn’t manage a slaughter like that without leaving traces, especially not in one of the berserker rages.
But if I hadn’t done the deed, I should have woken up during it. Even without enhanced sensory perception, it would be hard to sleep through something like that. But if there was no blood…
“You through?” Olga inquired patiently. “Lars will come soon if we do not return, and make much noise.”
I suddenly noticed that, unlike me, Olga had not broken down into a huddled mess. “Why isn’t the spell affecting you?” I demanded.
She looked at me levelly. “My husband die today and my business ruin. What could be worse?”
I started guiltily. I hadn’t known Benny had a wife. No wonder the spell didn’t work on her—she was already living her worst day. Any memory the spell brought up would probably be a relief if it blocked out the present. I, on the other hand, had five hundred years of nightmares for it to pick among. I could still feel tendrils of the spell trying to weave their way around me, but the shock that my biggest fear of all time might have been a lie allowed me to push them aside. Sometime very soon I was going to sit down and ask myself some hard questions about that night, but now was not the time.
I got a good look around and realized that someone else had been trapped by the spell. Louis-Cesare was huddled in a corner with his back to me. He must have been following right on our heels to have made it through the door before the spell blocked the way. It looked like he was wishing he’d been slower.
I saw him shudder, a slow vibration that started at the small of his back and ran up his spine. His once-pristine leather jacket and slacks looked like someone had been clawing at them, and one glance at his broken and bloody nails told me who. He didn’t appear to have enjoyed the show any more than I had.
He began slowly rocking back and forth, the muscles of his back clenched tight, only the graceful curve of his neck visible under the curtain of hair that hid his features. He was moaning softly, and said something, to some figure from his past, presumably. My French is adequate if not elegant, but he was slurring his words too much for me to understand. Then he began to laugh, a broken
, bitter sound, like glass under boots. It hit my raw nerves like fingernails on a chalkboard. I reached for him, not thinking, just wanting to stop that awful sound. The minute my hand touched his skin, I was dragged into his little corner of hell.
A darkened cell, where he lay helpless and bound. The jailers stripped him roughly, tearing at his clothes, the knife at his neck a silent threat. It didn’t stop him from trying to fight, from thrashing until they beat him almost senseless, fists and fingernails gouging mercilessly. Eventually his limbs refused to obey him and the taste of dust and straw and the metallic tang of blood filled his mouth. The hitching of his breath sounded far away; he could almost imagine that it came from someone else. Until a new pain started, something they had not dared before, that snapped him back into himself in horror.
Clamping his teeth on a scream, he panted in a red haze of pain and fury as his body flinched away from invasion, its desperation beyond his control. He couldn’t master the shaking in his limbs, the reflexive struggle or the half-choked gasps, but he wouldn’t scream. The humiliation settled like stone in his gut, blending with the agony as they took their turns and their time. One of them laughed, and he could feel it in his belly, letting him know this wouldn’t end anytime soon. Bile burned the back of his throat, but an icy calm settled over him. He would find a way out of here, he promised himself, and when he did, no one would ever make him a victim again.
I jerked away, shivering in a cold sweat, damning whatever mages had set this trap all to hell. After my breathing returned to something like normal, I borrowed a handkerchief from Olga and wrapped it around my hand. No more skin-on-skin contact, not here.
I squatted and tried to make eye contact, but I couldn’t see his face until I brushed a snarl of hair back from his forehead. His usual pale perfection had faded to chalk white and his eyes were bruise dark. I felt a surge of unaccustomed compassion. He looked so young, without the superior, closed expression he usually used around me. He didn’t look like Louis-Cesare, Senate member and arrogant bastard. He looked like Louis-Cesare of the auburn hair and the blue eyes and the devastating smile. I reached out, my finger tracing the line of a single tear down his cheek. Then I slapped him.
The first one didn’t have much of an effect, but by the fourth, I’d gotten into the swing of things and his head was thumping the wall each time it rocked back. A slender hand reached out and latched on to my arm before I could deliver a fifth. “Have you snapped out of it yet or should I hit you some more?” I asked. “’Cause I don’t mind. Really.”
His mouth curved into a painful expression that might have been a smile, except for the awful brightness in his eyes. “Dorina.”
“That would be me.”
“Thank you.” There was a quiet gratitude in his voice that made me grin like an idiot, and some of the bleakness in his expression faded.
“You know,” I said, glancing at another Shroud of Flame spell that blocked the door behind him, “you could really make my day and tell me you have something to counter that.”
He blinked at the thick wall of fire as if surprised to see it there. “No.”