“Fear, resentment, bitterness, envy?” he persisted.
“No.”
“You must have felt something. It’s impossible to just feel nothing.”
“No. It really isn’t.”
He sat back and looked at me, and it was that look. That here’s-something-interesting-that-I-don’t-understand-but-I’m-going-to look. Only he wasn’t, not this time, and not merely because I couldn’t explain.
But because he wouldn’t get it anyway.
You learn some things when you grow up in the household of a psychotic vampire. Like not to interrupt a feed, unless you want to be dessert. And not to touch the boys’ gun collection, unless you want to play William Tell with real bullets. And that when Tony slammed through the house in that one particular way, it was probably time to go find a closet to hang out in for a while.
And how to be small, which helped with everything else.
Not physically so much, although I had tended to skulk around in corners, according to one of Tony’s gals, and I couldn’t argue with her. And not mentally, because if there was one thing you needed around Tony’s, it was to keep your eyes open. Just small.
To the point of being able to walk across a room and have nobody notice. To the point of being able to practically blend in with the furniture and have people forget I was there. To the point that sometimes, I’d started to wonder if I was really there, or if maybe I could see ghosts because I was one, too.
I’d eventually decided that anyone with as many scraped knees as me was probably human, but I’d never forgotten how to be small. In fact, I’d sometimes thought that the main reason I’d been able to avoid Tony’s guys for so long after I ran away was that I’d practically spent my life practicing for it. And in a household of creatures who read emotions almost as well as actual words.
Vamps wouldn’t like the comparison, but they were like dogs in how tuned in they were to their surroundings. The extra-sharp senses helped with that, but it was more than just better eyesight or whatever. It was the need of a predator to tell who is vulnerable and who is not. Who will make a good victim, and who will fuck your shit up. Vamps don’t make those kind of mistakes often, especially vamps who work as the foot soldiers for a vampire mobster.
Tony’s boys were good.
But so was I. And I’d figured out that a major part of staying small was being able to detach your emotions from your surroundings, to flip a switch and just go dim, there but not there in some vitally important way. Vamps didn’t notice me a lot of the time, because I didn’t fall into the category of either predator or prey. I wasn’t dangerous, but I wasn’t afraid, either. So I was invisible, or as close as anyone could be to creatures with that kind of eyesight.
I thought of Pritkin, that curious, stubborn, angry little boy at Tony’s, and shuddered.
And looked up to find him watching me.
“If I didn’t react, they didn’t notice me as much,” I said. “It was . . . easier . . . not to be seen.”
He looked away, at the still-running spectacle, and his jaw tightened. The changing orange-red light limned his profile and lit his hair. For a moment, he almost looked like his fire-self: a glowing sprite thrumming with barely repressed energy. Then he suddenly looked back at me. “I see you.”
You always did, I thought, watching sparks dance in his eyes.
And then I drank beer. “Did you ever find any fey?”
Pritkin looked frustrated, like he wasn’t ready for a change of topic yet. But in the end, he went with it. He sat back.
“No. But it didn’t matter. When they were ready, they found me.”
“What?” My head came up.
He nodded. “I was young, but I remember it perfectly. A group of them, dressed in fine clothes, like nobles, but with no horses. I thought that was odd. How did they get around with no horses?”
“How did they?”
“I found out later that there was a portal in the woods, not far from the house. They’d left their horses on the other side. It seems that, every time they brought them into our world, some damn human stole them.”
I grinned in spite of myself. “I’d have liked to see that. The mighty fey, sloshing through the mud.”
“There wasn’t any that day, I’m afraid. But you should have seen the Svarestri this morning. They’d found some old mule and loaded it up as part of their disguise. But it was having none of it. It’s why I gave them a second glance: a too-tall group standing around in too-fine clothes in the middle of the road, cursing a mangy old mule.”
“Did it help?”
“Quite the opposite. The creature had stopped to eat some weeds, but when they began cursing it, and then striking it, it bucked and reared, almost hitting one in the teeth.”