“Yeah.” I repressed an urge to hug my arms around myself. “Yeah, I guess.” I sure as hell didn’t want to have to do this again because I’d dreamed up the wrong information. I looked at him. “Why are you here again?”
“Mircea can’t maintain the connection and also serve as your guide. That’s my job.”
“Okay, guide,” I said, glancing around. “Where to?”
“Well, how should I know? It’s your memory. I’m just here to pull you out if anything goes wrong.”
I had been watching a nearby ship bobbing about on the waves, or should I say half a ship, since I’d apparently never gotten around to noticing the back half. But at that I turned my eyes on ’Du. “What could go wrong? I’m sitting in the living room. Right?”
“Well, yes, your body is. But it’s your mind we’re concerned with here, Dory.”
I took a moment to process that. “You’re telling me that something could go wrong with my mind?”
“No, no, not at all. Nothing like.”
“Good.” For a minute there, I’d been a little worried. I wasn’t exactly the poster child for mental stability as it was. The last thing I needed—
“Of course, there have been a few incidents.”
Radu was fiddling with the lace on his sleeve. “Incidents?”
“Of people who, well, went too far in. You can become lost, you see, wandering about from one old memory to the next, until you forget where you came in and—” He stopped, belatedly noticing my expression. “It almost never happens. And in any case, that’s why I am here. To see that it doesn’t.”
“And you’ve done this how many times before?”
…
“’Du—”
“I know the theory, Dory,” he said testily. “And I’m related to both of you, which makes me more…in sync…if you will, and a better bridge than anyone else could be. It’s safer to have me do this than some stranger, however experienced. Which is why Mircea brought me along.”
I stared at him. “That makes me feel so much better.”
“Yes, I thought it would,” Radu said. “But problems are more frequent when the subject is tired, and this sort of thing is fairly draining. We should get going.”
Great. So not only was I in Wonderland, I was on a freaking timer. “How long do I have?”
“I don’t know. That depends on you. A few minutes?”
“A few minutes? How am I supposed to find anything useful in—”
I stopped, because I’d just caught sight of the fairly odd image of myself, slipping through the shadows of the ships and pilings. I was wearing my usual work uniform of black leather jacket, black jeans and black boots, and managing to be almost invisible against the night. But I wasn’t doing as good a job as whoever was with me.
Try as I might, I couldn’t get a clear look at him. I couldn’t even manage to bring him into focus unless he was silhouetted against the ghostly outline of a hull. And even then he was just a vaguely man-shaped cloud, or a dim shadow of someone who wasn’t actually—
“There.” Lawrence paused, the particles coalescing enough to allow speech. “The black one.”
I looked at the ship in question, a long, sleek, ebony torpedo in one of the larger berths, melding into the night almost as seamlessly as Lawrence did, looking exotic next to the flock of clunkier, paler specimens moored all around. But I didn’t see anything else of interest. Or smell, since Lawrence had been following a scent trail.
“You’re sure?” I asked, because all I could smell was brine and fish and gasoline, and the lingering scent of the cologne the now sleeping watchman had been wearing.
“No.”
Lawrence sounded surprised, which made sense. Before he’d moved on to the illustrious heights of first-level master, he had been a Hound—a vampire gifted with even better olfactory senses than the norm, which were already pretty damned good. It was why he’d been chosen for this assignment, since it required tracing a tiny thread of a scent across half a city not known for the pristine quality of its air.
“What do you mean, ‘no’?” I whispered, even though we were using a sound shield. It was just that kind of place. “Varus is either in there or he isn’t.”
Lawrence didn’t answer, but he coalesced a little more, the misty particles of his being coming together into the shape of a tall, thin vampire with creepy red eyes. Not hay-fever red, not hungover red. Not even I-smoked-too-many-joints-tonight-oh-God red. They were the solid crimson of a stoplight, with the same faint glowing quality to them. Though stoplights didn’t send shivers up my back when I looked at them.