The Last Threshold (Neverwinter #4)(9)

But Drizzt couldn’t wrap his thoughts around Dahlia in any cohesive way. Not now, not ever. He watched her walk into the camp, casually prodding a dead goblin with Kozah’s Needle, still formed into a thick walking stick, four feet in length. All at once, she seemed sweet, sexy, and vicious, like she wanted to kiss him, or kill him, and as if it wouldn’t matter to her which it might be. How was that possible? What magic surrounded her? Or was it in his mind, Drizzt wondered?

“Someone got here before us,” she said.

“It would appear so. Saved us the trouble.”

“Stole our fun, you mean,” Dahlia replied with a wry grin. She drew a small knife from her belt. “They are offering a bounty on goblin ears in Neverwinter.”

“We didn’t kill them.”

“That will hardly matter.” She bent with the knife, but Drizzt stepped over and caught her arm, and brought her back up to stand before him.

“They’ll want to know who, or what, did this,” the drow said. “Ashmadai? A Netherese patrol?”

Dahlia considered his words for a moment, then glanced back down. “Well,” she said, “I know what did it, if not exactly who.”

Drizzt followed her gaze to the dead goblin she had rolled. The way it had flopped had exposed its neck, showing two puncture wounds, as if made by fangs.

“Vampire,” Dahlia remarked.

Drizzt stared at the wound, seeking a different answer. Perhaps a wolf, he told himself, though he knew that to be ridiculous. A wolf would not have bitten a victim like that only to leave the throat intact. Still, the notion of another vampire was not something Drizzt wanted to embrace. He had seen more than enough of one such creature in the bowels of Gauntlgrym; indeed, Bruenor and Thibbledorf Pwent had been slain by just such a creature.

“You cannot be sure,” Drizzt replied, and not just out of a desperate hope, for something seemed amiss to him. He moved to the side, where a broken tent lay tangled around a small branch.

“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.