“Mircea needs time. He has to find a way around the blockage, to get you back into the physical world.”
“And what do we do in the meantime?”
“We disappear,” Louis-Cesare said grimly. “I thought it would be easier to do that in my memories. She does not know them as she does yours. We merely have to avoid her until Mircea fixes this.”
I stared at the icy boards under our feet, and didn’t say anything. Because hide-and-seek wouldn’t work, not for me. Not with Marlowe probably putting two and two together right now. But then, there wasn’t only me to think about, was there?
Louis-Cesare had been so insistent, back in the consul’s library, that my victims hadn’t been victims at all. Maybe because he hadn’t been there. Hadn’t woken up surrounded by corpses time and time again. Hadn’t seen people flinch or in some cases run screaming as soon as I came into town.
Because they thought I was her.
He hadn’t been there; he didn’t understand. And even if he did, even if I could convince him that she’d kill him to get to me, it wouldn’t do any good. Would probably do exactly the opposite, in fact. Louis-Cesare wouldn’t just abandon me. I knew that, as much as I knew anything.
So I had to avoid her until Mircea brought us back. And I had to keep my mouth shut in the meantime. Because Louis-Cesare might be crazy enough to oppose Marlowe if he knew the deal, and that wouldn’t end well. Not when one man fought fair and the other…didn’t.
Get back, then deal with the fallout, I told myself.
Somehow.
“So it’s hide-and-seek,” I said, as the deck moved under our feet. Louis-Cesare didn’t answer. I looked up to find him leaning against a column, looking spooked, and vaguely ill. “Are you all right?”
“I…Of course,” he told me stiffly.
“Then why are you green?” It didn’t go so well with the hair.
He swallowed. “I…do not care for ships.”
“You’re a vampire. You can’t get seasick.”
“That is not the issue.”
“Then what is?” I asked, just as a heavily muffled woman decided to hell with the tour of the Arctic we seemed to be on and went back inside. And left a bare spot on the wall. Or what woul
d have been bare had a life preserver not been hanging there, taking up space.
A life preserver that said—
“We must go,” Louis-Cesare told me, taking my arm.
“Why don’t you like ships?” I asked shrilly, looking over my shoulder as he hustled me away.
“I had a bad experience once.”
“A bad experience?” I shrieked, just as the deck lurched, hard enough to cause a bunch of chairs and a guy in a sailor suit to go sliding by.
It rocked again before I could get my balance back, and Louis-Cesare lost his grip on my arm when a woman staggered into him. Which would have been fine if sailor-boy hadn’t grabbed me at the same moment, trying to get back to his feet. And ending up dragging me off mine.
And despite being only a memory or a figment of Louis-Cesare’s imagination or what the hell, he felt real enough, and his grip was hard with desperation. And the angle was steep and the deck was icy and once we started sliding, we just kept on going. Picking up momentum and knocking stuffy types out of the way left and right, heading straight for—
“Oh, shit.”
A churning mass of water, like waves breaking against a shore, boiled up beneath us, coming our way fast as the deck suddenly went from slanted to slanted. And I found myself being pelted by the avalanche of people now pouring down from above. They were screaming, and the frigid spray was drenching us, and the sailor was panicking and using me as a shield, with the arm he’d thrown around my neck threatening to choke me.
And then Louis-Cesare, who had somehow gotten ahead of me and grabbed a railing, flung out a hand. “Dory!”
I grabbed for it, and would have caught it, if three people going crazy fast hadn’t chosen that second to toboggan in between us. He jerked his hand back to avoid getting swept away and I went sliding by, elbowing the sailor and throwing him off and then wrenching back and reaching—
And finally grabbing Louis-Cesare’s hand because he had lunged for me at the same time, his feet hooked under the rail, his body dangling headfirst, like a lifeline.