I fought back, knowing it to be futile. I didn’t succeed in driving him out, but for the moment, he didn’t push any further. He was waiting for me to tell him.
I’d be damned if I told him.
But something must have leaked through, anyway.
“The child?” He sounded surprised. And then forbidding. “What do you know?”
I didn’t answer.
“Tell me!”
It was sharp, the tolerance completely gone from his mental voice. But I still said nothing. I couldn’t.
“Then show me,” he said grimly.
And the darkness became dazzling.
The ballroom was a swirl of light and color and sound, stunning, overwhelming. I was almost glad I couldn’t see much of it, yet I yearned for more. I dug my fingers a little farther into the lines of mortar between the bricks, hitched my toes a little higher on the faint edge of an ornamental frieze, and stared.
The pose left me clinging to the side of the palazzo like a barnacle on a ship, and hurt after only a very few minutes. But there were no other safe perches. Gaily costumed people were constantly coming and going on the balcony around the corner, or arriving in gondolas at the pier just below that. And there were lights in every window.
There were no lights here, the shade from another balcony directly overhead offering a wedge of darkness in which to hide. I liked the dark. It allowed me to see others before they saw me. It was cool, comforting, safe.
But the light…
The light was irresistible.
They were irresistible, the very things Mircea had warned me about. Terrible and beautiful, alien and hauntingly familiar, repellent and oh so seductive. I could never get enough of them.
And they had taught me things, things he wouldn’t. Or couldn’t, for I did not think he knew much about them, either. My favorite game was called Families, where I tried to guess how they all fit together.
At first I thought it was easy. Vampires of a single line all burned with the same unearthly fire. If the master wore green flames like a cape, then his Children did, too. Only in smaller, lesser, darker hues: moss instead of emerald, olive instead of jade.
But then I started to notice that that wasn’t always true. Sometimes there would be different colors, some jarringly so, within the same family line, and it confused me. Until I overheard a conversation, and realized that some vampires were adopted into families from other lines. Or traded or sold or acquired a hundred different ways.
And although the new master’s power bled over into the old, it never quite erased all of it. So some of the most formidable-looking vampires had halos of purple-striped green or red-dotted gray or, my favorite, a stern old man who walked about with a shining outline of pink-, blue- and brown-flecked orange.
At first it was funny. And then it made me wonder. My aura was blue. Mircea’s was white. Why was mine not white, too?
“And what did he tell you?” the voice asked softly.
“That I was part of his physical family, but not of the vampire. No dhampir ever is. Mircea could control me to a degree through his mental gifts, but there was no bond of blood. There was no formal tie.”
“And how did you feel about that?”
I didn’t answer.
“Vampires are, by nature, social creatures, some of the most I have ever encountered,” he mused. “They live in large, active families, constantly in the company of others, right down to the sharing of thoughts. I have never met a lone vampire. I do not think they exist, other than for revenants.”
“And dhampirs,” I said hoarsely.
The visits to the palazzos had become less and less frequent over time, not due to Mircea’s prohibition but to my own pain. The yearning grew as I aged, to the point that it became torture to watch them laugh and dance and scheme and belong in a way I never could. For I was not vampire; I could not make a Child. And the human part of me…
“Could not have a child, either,” he guessed softly.
“No.”
“And so you were alone. Vampires are family-oriented by nature, driven to unite with others, to form binding ties. But that is the one thing you could not do.”