And there were more of them—a lot more. I glanced behind me, trying to spot Lawrence, and saw bits and pieces I recognized, as well as a lot I didn’t. It looked like the memories were colonizing this new ground, washing in from both sides to jumble up in the middle, creating an obstacle course of ever-changing light and shadow.
A little too much light, all things considered, with the brighter scenes shedding a haze of illumination for several feet around them. But it was still better than outside. I darted behind the darkest one I could find, slammed back against the skin-slick wall of the rift, and watched a younger me crawling through a trench, knee-deep in muck.
The visual was stark, almost like a film shot in black and white, although it wasn’t. That’s just how the place had looked: dark coils of barbed wire pushing up into a washed-out sky. A dead tree. And an unburied bone, possibly animal, possibly human, poking out of the mud.
Flanders, First World War.
And no, no way was I hiding in that one.
Or in any of the rest of them. What had Radu said? Something about people getting lost in their own minds, wandering around aimlessly from memory to memory, trapped forever in their past?
I swallowed, feeling an involuntary shiver ripple over me.
My past hadn’t been that great, frankly.
“Nice try.” Lawrence’s voice filtered to me in strange echoes. “But bullets don’t have quite the same effect on me as on most of my kind.”
No, I didn’t guess so. Like it wasn’t a problem to fake death when you came apart anyway. Son of a bitch.
But there’d been more than just the one reason to suspect him. Mircea had told me that Lawrence had three master’s abilities, but I’d seen him use only two: the Hound senses and the dissolving trick. I had never thought to wonder about the third, despite Marlowe’s saying that mental abilities had gotten Lawrence out of trouble before.
And me into it.
“You may as well come out.” Lawrence’s voice came again, sounding so close that it had me whipping my head around violently. Only to see nothing there. “You can stall all you like, but you forget that we’re in the mind. Outside time is meaningless. Weeks could pass for you here before anyone even realizes you’re in danger.”
I didn’t answer. He could be telling the truth, for all I knew. But he could just as easily be lying. I didn’t know how this mental stuff worked. I just knew I needed to stay near the pier, or as close as I could manage, where Mircea might eventually come looking for me. If I went too far in—
“And then there’s the small fact that you don’t have a choice,” Lawrence informed me. “Neither of us does. I am your only way out, just as you are mine.”
Okay, that got my attention. But he didn’t elaborate. Even when I waited he didn’t. He was going to make me ask, going to try to use conversation as a way to zero in on my location.
I didn’t give much for his chances. The walls seemed to trap some sounds and magnify others. His voice was simultaneously nearby and distant, with some words so far off I could barely make them out, while others sounded like they were coming from only a few feet away. It was spooky as hell—but it might also be useful.
“Meaning what?” I demanded harshly, and heard my own voice coming back at me in receding echoes.
“That neither of us has a guide; neither of us has a way to resurface. Unless one of us dies.”
“And then the survivor wakes up.”
“Yes. As would have happened last time, if your father hadn’t cheated and come after you,” he said, sounding annoyed.
And for a second, all I could see was Mircea’s bloody face, stony and white and resolute as he let this bastard carve him up to give me time to get out. All I could see was Louis-Cesare lying on the floor, unconscious and worse, because he might be Europe’s champion but he didn’t know how to fight this way.
Neither did I, but I wanted to. I felt my fangs drop, and for the first time, it didn’t bother me. It felt good, like his flesh would feel under my teeth, the way his blood would taste on my lips, the way his screams would—
I swallowed and looked away.
“But it didn’t matter. He had to be removed in any case,” Lawrence added, and stopped again.
Baiting me.
I told myself to shut up. To concentrate on finding a way out of this. Only I didn’t see one.
Even if Lawrence was lying, and a competent mentalist could have brought me out, where was I supposed to find one? The only one I knew about was Ming-de, and I had no way to contact her. Or reason to believe that she would help if I did.
And say he was making that stuff up about time being perceived differently in the brain. I could still lie there in the rubble a long time before anybody noticed me. And even then, if my rescuer wasn’t one of the handful of people who knew me, he’d just assume I was one of the human guests and put me wherever they were keeping the others. It might be hours before anybody realized I hadn’t just been knocked out cold.
And I didn’t think I had hours.