He swore and took a drink.
He had apparently decided that there were better uses for the wine than the one I had found, and I agreed. He handed me the canteen and I had a small sip. Fey wine smelled like herbs and burned like flame, but I found that I did not mind so much tonight.
“But during the in between times, when the mind is neither asleep nor awake, I began to get glimpses,” I explained. “Enough to understand that I was somehow still moving about, was living in the same house, in the same room. There were sketches on the walls that came and went, which I did not recognize, but that looked like my work. And, eventually, a fine oil painting of a dog chewing up his master’s slipper. I recognized the brushstrokes, yet I had not done them . . .”
“Jesus.”
I nodded, remembering the surreal feeling of being an exile in my own body. “I slowly began to understand that my power grew at night. When the body I no longer controlled slept, I would awaken, although for a long time, I didn’t understand that I could go anywhere. I looked at things from under her lashes for weeks, perhaps months, before I learned that I could move about spiritually.”
“How’d you find out?”
“By accident. Horatiu came to rouse Dory one morning and startled me. I sat up but my body did not. Before I could figure out what had happened, Dory was awake and I lost consciousness. But the next night—”
“Freedom,” Ray guessed, his expression lightening.
“Not . . . quite.”
I gazed out at the water. The fire was sending orange ripples over the dark waves and gilding the rocks. It looked the way the Grand Canal had the next evening, when I’d gone exploring in my spirit form. I had been left shaking and amazed at the sights of handsome people laughing from gondolas, light splashing out of the fronts of palazzos, torches blowing in the wind. It had been the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and the most confusing.
It was only when I tried to speak to someone that I realized: they couldn’t see me. I didn’t know why that had so surprised me; I had flown over the city like a great black bird, seeing it from a completely new angle. Had I really thought that a creature who could do that would be visible? Or that people would react well to it if it was?
My only excuse was that I didn’t think. I had been so alone for so long that I was giddy with all the sights and sounds, the smells and colors . . . I felt almost drunk on them. Until I realized: I could look, but nothing more. I couldn’t interact with anyone.
No one heard me when I spoke or saw me when I passed by. It was like being a ghost, yet I hadn’t died! I went back home and there I was, asleep in my bed. I was perfectly fine—
“Except you weren’t,” Ray said, following the conversation I was having in my head.
“Except I wasn’t.” I hesitated, not sure that I wanted to share this next part, but nothing would make sense without it. “The following night, I tried to talk to Mircea.”
“Not that night? Because I’da wanted some goddamned answers!”
I shook my head. “Free flight—what I do outside of a body—cannot be sustained for long. It drains me terribly, to the point that I almost did not make it back to the house. I was panicked and exhausted, and could not think properly when I returned. But later . . . I thought he would help.”
“Let me guess,” Ray said cynically, and took the canteen.
“He did not hear me, either, when I spoke, but we share mental gifts. I thought I would talk to him that way, mind to mind, but . . . it did not go well.”
“How bad is not well?”
I didn’t answer.
I had entered father’s mind, expecting a reaction, but . . . not the one I received. He had thrown me out, as viciously as if I was a demon he was trying to exorcise. And when I stubbornly returned, he tore up the front room of the house, yelling and throwing things, and waking everyone—including Dory.
That had put me back to sleep, and the next night, I hadn’t dared to try again. But I had gone exploring. And had slowly discovered through trial and error what I could do.
Not everyone reacted like Mircea. I learned that the vampires often did, seeing me as an invading spirit, but the humans scarcely seemed to notice my presence at all. I found that I could suggest things to them, and they often took my suggestions. I could go anywhere . . .
Just not as myself.
But being inside a body, any body, renewed my strength. And allowed me to move about the city once again, as I had once done. Although only when the person I was starting to think of as a separate person from me, as a sister, slept.
Ray drank fey wine and scowled. “Okay, so, what you’re telling me is that your father didn’t explain anything to you before the separation? He didn’t tell you what he was trying to do or ask you what you thought or anything?”
I shook my head. “I was asleep and then I was alone.”
“Motherfucker!”
“He was afraid that I would fight him, if he gave me any warning. I wasn’t as strong then, but neither was he. And it was an experiment, a last-ditch effort to spare his daughter’s life—”