I don’t know what he was doing, but I was debating eating some rat bait. The rat was in favor, but Dorina was trying to talk him out of it. They were still arguing when Louis-Cesare pulled me over to the bed and sat us down.
“One more time, with a bit more explanation?”
I sighed. “Dorina has some kind of weird master power. You know, the one Caedmon mistook for a fey ability?”
He frowned at Caedmon’s name, but didn’t comment on it. “But it is not.”
“No! It’s . . . Look, I just found out about it, so I don’t have a huge amount of info here. But she can separate from my consciousness and . . . tag along . . . with other people. And things.”
“Things?” He frowned. “You mean like a—”
“Rat, yes. She didn’t think she could make it to the consul in
my body, so she borrowed another one.”
“But you’re a senator. You can go wherever you wish. She didn’t need—”
“But I don’t think she knows that. We’re having communication problems, and I don’t think she understands everything.” I sure as hell didn’t, I thought, feeling queasy.
Probably because my avatar had just eaten a bellyful of poison!
“Crap.”
“What?”
“Never mind. We just have to tell Marlowe—”
I started to get up, but Louis-Cesare pulled me back down. “Tell him what?”
“That the consul’s in danger!”
“Yes, I do not think we will be doing that,” Louis-Cesare said, grabbing his trousers off the chair.
I watched as the world’s best butt, bruised and bloody though it was, disappeared into the rumpled leftovers of a once-nice suit. “What are you doing?”
“I told you. Going with you to find Dorina.”
“Why? We’ll just tell Marlowe—”
Louis-Cesare turned on me. “What? That your alter ego is about to kill his Lady?”
I frowned. “Well, we won’t put it like that—”
“It doesn’t matter how you put it. He will very likely attempt to kill you to ensure her survival.”
“I’m not trying to kill her!”
“But you and Dorina share a body, do you not? He may well decide that killing one would dispose of both.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but yeah. That sounded exactly like something Marlowe would do. And, bonus, I wouldn’t be besmirching his beloved Senate anymore, either.
“All right,” I told him. “We won’t say anything to Marlowe.”
“You don’t have to,” somebody said. And shot me.
Chapter Forty-five
I abandoned the dying avatar and flitted out into the air, before snaring a human servant who was moving quickly down the hall. He took a wrong turn, but I managed to jump to a low-level vampire who was going the right way. And who was too young to notice one more voice in his head.