“I have some experience in these matters,” Dahlia said. “I know what such wounds look like.” Indeed, Drizzt suspected the same vampire, Dor’crae, who had attacked Bruenor in the anteroom to the primordial pit had been Dahlia’s lover.
Drizzt tried hard not to focus on the recollection of Dor’crae. He tried to wash that thought away with the image of the pretty elf walking into the camp, tried to bury it under the sheer attraction the woman elicited in him.
And when that didn’t work, he fell back on that pervading sense of detachment.
Drizzt drew out a scimitar and used it to flip the torn tent aside, revealing more goblins, or more accurately, goblin parts, strewn on the ground before him. He studied the garish vision, the jagged tears in the clothing and skin. These were wounds better known to Drizzt, who had traveled beside just such a fighter for so many decades.
“Battlerager,” he whispered, confused.
“No,” Dahlia said. “I’ve seen these fang marks before …” Her voice trailed off as she walked over to him, as she noted, no doubt, the very different carnage at this section of the broken camp.
“Vampire,” she insisted.
“Battlerager,” Drizzt replied.
“Must you always argue with me?” She asked the question casually, but Drizzt detected an undercurrent of true anger. How many times had that edge crept into Dahlia’s voice of late?
“Only when you’re wrong.” Drizzt tossed her a disarming grin—and he realized it was likely the first lighthearted look he’d offered Dahlia since they’d left the bowels of Gauntlgrym, or more accurately, since he had seen Dahlia and Artemis Entreri share a passionate kiss. “I suppose that might seem like always to you,” Drizzt teased, determined to push past his own negativity and jealousy.
Dahlia cocked her head. “Are you finished with your pouting at long last?” she asked.
The question threw Drizzt off balance for a moment, for it seemed to him to be a matter of Dahlia projecting her own foul mood on him. Or perhaps it was a matter of Dahlia admitting that her own pouting—or grieving, or shock, or whatever combination it might be—needed to end.
But the question teased Drizzt on a much deeper level, and likely more deeply than Dahlia had intended. Drizzt couldn’t deny the truth of her words.
To Drizzt, Dahlia remained this great contradiction, able to tug his emotions any which way she desired, it seemed, as easily as she changed her hairstyle. But to Entreri … nay, her tricks would not work for her with Entreri. For Artemis Entreri knew her, or knew something of her, that went past the hairstyles, the clear skin or woad, her clothing, seductive or sweet. Before Drizzt, she had stood naked, physically, perhaps, but before Entreri, Dahlia had been naked emotionally, stripped to the core trouble that so haunted her.
Drizzt had only glimpsed that briefly, in the form of a broken and twisted young tiefling warlock and Dahlia’s reaction to that creature, Effron.
“What about you?” Drizzt replied. “You have said little in the tendays since we left Gauntlgrym.”
“Perhaps I have nothing to say.” Dahlia clamped her jaw, as if she were afraid of what might come spilling out should she lose the tiniest bit of discipline. “I have the ears,” Dahlia said and began to walk away.
He followed her out of the camp and into the forest once more, moving slowly and bending low, looking for broken stems or footprints. For a long while she walked, finally coming to rest in a sunny clearing where a single, half-buried stone provided a comfortable seat.
Dahlia reclined, removed her hat, and ran her fingers through her hair, allowing the sunbeams to splash over her face.
“Come along,” he bade her. “We must learn who or what killed those goblins. There’s a vampire about, so you claim.”
Dahlia shrugged, showing no interest.
“Or a battlerager,” Drizzt went on stubbornly. “And if it is the latter, then we would do well to find him. A powerful ally.”
“So I thought of my vampire lover,” Dahlia said, and she seemed to take some pleasure when Drizzt grimaced at the reference.
“Will we never speak of what happened in Gauntlgrym?” Drizzt asked suddenly. “The twisted tiefling accused you of murder.” Dahlia’s expression abruptly changed. She snapped a glare over him.
Dahlia swallowed hard and did not turn her stare from Drizzt for an instant as he took a seat beside her.
“He claimed Alegni was his father,” Drizzt pressed.
“Shut up,” Dahlia warned.
“He called you his mother.”
Her eyes bored through him, and Drizzt expected her to reach out and claw at his face, or to explode into a tirade of shouted curses.
But she didn’t, and that, perhaps, was more unsettling still. She just sat there, staring. A cloud passed overhead, blocking the sunlight, sending a shadow across Dahlia’s pretty face.
“Implausible, of course, likely impossible,” Drizzt said quietly, trying to back away.
Dahlia held perfectly still. He could almost hear her heartbeat, or was it his own? Many moments slipped past. Drizzt lost count of them.
“It’s true,” she admitted, and now it was Drizzt who looked as if he had been slapped.
“Cannot be,” he finally managed to reply. “He is a young man, but you’re a young woman—”
“I was barely more than a child when the shadow of Herzgo Alegni fell over my clan,” Dahlia said, so very softly that Drizzt could hardly hear the words. “Twenty years ago.”
Drizzt’s thoughts spun in circles, very easily coming to the dark conclusion of Dahlia’s leading words. He tried to respond, but found himself sputtering helplessly in the face of a horror so far beyond him. He thought back to his own youth, to his graduation at Melee Magthere, when his own sister had advanced upon him so lewdly, forcing him to run away with revulsion.