But she didn’t say anything, just drank half the beer, like she could use it, then narrowed her eyes at the fey across the yard. “What are they cooking?”
I tried on an innocent look. “Couldn’t tell you.”
“Don’t lie.” She leaned forward a little, and the sharp eyes narrowed on a pile of something that I don’t think she got a good look at, because a fey flicked a cape over it a second later. She started to get up, then sighed and sat back down again. And drank the rest of the beer.
“Are you all right?” I asked, because Claire always took care of everybody else, while often forgetting to do the same for herself. And it was hard to remind her, because sensible people backed off when she said “I’m fine” in that certain tone, and her eyes flashed.
Of course, I’ve never had much sense.
“You don’t look fine,” I said idly, and passed over another beer.
She looked at it. “I’ll get drunk.”
“Off two beers?”
“Off an empty stomach and two beers.” She took it anyway. “And a truckload of stress!”
“Why are you stressed?” I asked, and immediately regretted it. If storm clouds could grow a face, that would be it. And, okay, stupid question.
“Oh, I don’t know, Dory!” she said, throwing out an arm. But she didn’t say anything else. Just chugged the beer in a way that would have won her another round in any campus bar, then set the bottle neatly by the porch post, where I’d been piling mine.
And lay back against the sun-warmed boards, her hair going everywhere, like she enjoyed the feel, too.
I decided to join her. For a while, we both just stayed there, watching a spider build a web across a Victorian curlicue in the top of the railing. Gessa could be heard telling Stinky to let go of something, and then wrestling him for it when he predictably declined. Aiden laughed. A horse we shouldn’t have had whinnied. I sighed.
The portal had a setting that let out into the garden, but for security reasons, it didn’t work the other way. The only entrance was in the basement. So, to get the illegal animal out of here, we faced the prospect of leading it through the house and down a narrow flight of stairs. And then across a crowded basement where the portal light would probably cause it to freak the hell out.
At least, that’s what had happened last time, and no one had thought it fun.
And since the troll twins didn’t trust the Light Fey in their sanctum, and the Light Fey didn’t trust the trolls with their precious horses, it was probably gonna be left to me again, and frankly—
“It’s getting worse,” Claire told me abruptly.
I rolled my neck over to look at her. “What is?”
“You know what. I think—” She swallowed but didn’t turn her head to look at me. “I think it’s getting stronger.”
I didn’t say anything for a minute, because yeah. I did know. Because Claire and I had a similar problem, if for totally different reasons.
I was stuck with a crazy other half because of a weird mental operation Mircea had done, once upon a time, without really understanding what he was doing. I didn’t blame him; nobody else had known what to do, either. Dhampirs were so rare that there was no money in figuring out how to help us. My condition, or whatever you wanted to call it, might have been around forever, but it hadn’t preoccupied the attention of anyone in the healing profession.
Until Claire. I hadn’t understood why she, who was mainly interested in the fey, would want to help a human/vampire hybrid. Especially a crazy one. But she had, cultivating some extra-powerful fey weed for me that calmed the beast when nothing else could. But, lately, I’d come to believe that maybe I did know why she’d given a damn. Even if she hadn’t known it then, we weren’t that different.
Because Claire was a hybrid, too.
Her mother had been human, with a tiny bit of Brownie in the mix somewhere. That wasn’t particularly odd for the magical community and hadn’t seemed to affect her. But her father . . . well, her father was something else altogether.
It was why Caedmon was here, trying to bum assistance for whatever he was up to in Faerie. It seemed that the fey had their own version of shape-shifters, just like our weres. Or, no, not just like. Because while weres could be terrifying, especially in large numbers, none of them held a candle to their fey cousins.
None of them morphed into a two-thousand-pound dragon.
Claire hadn’t realized that her mother’s lover—who had been in human form when they met, obviously—was anybody special. Nobody in the family had ever said anything, and she’d never shown any signs of peculiar abilities. Until she took a trip into Faerie with Heidar, and discovered the hard way that she was something known as two-natured among the fey.
The revelation had been a little traumatic, from what I’d heard. And apparently, things hadn’t improved since. Her other half was still an adolescent, because living on Earth had stunted its development, but lately, it had been making its presence known.
“Still craving rare steak?” I asked. Because Claire—the old Claire—was a strict vegan, something her other half was not on board with.
She waved the question away, with a flutter of long, white fingers.