by Karen Chance
But I didn’t tell her that, and not just because of the noise. I didn’t think we were going to find Olga’s nephew, not in one piece, anyway. A scared slaver was a dangerous slaver; why risk keeping a witness to your stupidity when a knife through the eye would take care of the problem?
But Olga didn’t need to hear that right now. I didn’t know what troll life was like back in the old country, but here the community was tight-knit, leaning on one another for support in a world they found as frightening and strange as we did theirs. Every new arrival was valued as a reminder of home and a hedge against adversity, and every death was mourned as a tragedy that affected them all.
So, no, I wasn’t going to tell her that we weren’t likely to find him. Because maybe we could find the son of a bitch who’d killed him. He should be far, far away by now, if he had any sense, but people often didn’t.
Especially arrogant slavers used to calling the shots.
The thought made me smile. And then a glance at Louis-Cesare made me smile bigger, because the French aristocrat with the flashing eyes and dangerous temper and heart affixed quite firmly to his sleeve still liked to believe that he was Mr. Cool Under Pressure. Nothing rattled him, no sirree, not a chance. Except for this, apparently, because he was staring around, as discombobulated as me.
I needed to keep up with Olga’s bright red head, bouncing just ahead, so I had to content myself with catching glimpses here and there. Like of his wider-than-normal eyes, reflecting the firelight as he watched ponderous troll jugglers deftly spin torches into the air in amazing parabolas. Or his openmouthed astonishment at a group of Thussers—Norwegian fjord fey—going to town on some fiddles, wildly enough that the closest vendors had shut down their music in deference to the awesomeness. Or his brief smile at a massive troll serving as a “ride” for some diminutive troll children, who were being flung three stories into the air and then caught expertly while they screamed and giggled and demanded something I didn’t understand, but which was obviously “Do it again!”
Or the flush on his cheeks when a half-naked nymph tried to pull him into a dark tent, where sketchy things were happening in corners.
“Not a chance,” I told her, and draped an arm around his waist.
She pouted prettily. And while she didn’t appear to know English, or any other spoken language, the body was . . . expressive. It somehow conveyed the impression that a threesome was not out of the question if I’d stop being so selfish and learn to share.
“Maybe later,” I said, watching Louis-Cesare, who was manfully biting the inside of a cheek to keep from breaking the macho sangfroid he didn’t have anyway.
I pulled him off.
“For a moment there, you looked interested,” he murmured into my ear.
Olga had paused to round up a couple of the boys, who had been enticed away by some wasps’ nests on a stick—three for a dollar!—so we had a moment.
“Intrigued, maybe.”
Strong arms wrapped around my midsection. “Are you trying to tell me you’re kinky, Dorina?”
I shot him a look over my shoulder. “You’re a vampire dating one of the few things on earth capable of killing you, and I’m kinky?”
“Good point.” Warm lips found my neck.
They were nice lips. And the body pressed against mine was even nicer. Especially when a cloud of smoke from a nearby vendor’s grill billowed past, and the damned vamp took the opportunity to slide his hands under my jacket.
That was better than nice, because Louis-Cesare could have taught the nymph a thing or two. Or, at least, it should have been. Except for the fact that we were already a threesome, and that was without the girl.
Cut it out, I told myself, as those warm hands went roving in all the right places. Can’t you just enjoy something for once? Don’t think about her.
But it was kind of hard not to when the third in our little ménage wasn’t someone I could just walk away from. Because she was me—the other me, the monster to my Frankenstein, the Hyde to my Jekyll. The alter ego that, despite the fact that we shared cranium space, I didn’t feel like I knew at all.
It was a long story, but essentially boiled down to a stark truth about dhampirs: we’re all certifiably nuts. That’s why, despite having technically immortal creatures for sperm donors, we rarely end up with even normal human life spans. I suppose it’s nature’s way of compensating for the fact that we’re not supposed to exist in the first place, since dead sperm don’t swim.
But half-dead ones do, and rare vampires like my Sire, who was cursed rather than bitten, have a couple days’ leeway while the spell takes effect. A couple days in which they aren’t one thing or the other. And neither are any children they make in the meantime. Children who end up with greater strength, heightened senses, Olympic-athlete speed—and two natures that try their best to kill each other.
In my case, my vampire half had made a good start on that, growing faster and maturing quicker than my mostly human side, and threatening to tear me apart in the process. So Mircea, the sperm donor in question, who was talented at manipulating the mind even for a bloodsucker, put a wall between us—a mental wall. One that had allowed my two natures to develop separately, never occupying consciousness at the same time. It had saved our lives, and given us a chance to do what most dhampirs rarely manage and actually grow up. But it had also created some problems.
Big ones.
Like the fact that Dorina was pretty damned savage, as far as I could tell, adhering much more to the vampire nature than I ever had. Like the fact that Mircea’s wall had eventually crumbled, cracking recently thanks to my ingesting a fey substance that had been labeled a beverage, but acted more like a mind-altering drug. And like the fact that now, for the first time in five hundred years, Dorina and I were leaking through the wall, her into me or me into her—the jury was still out but the point was, there was contact. Small, intermittent stuff so far, dreams or maybe memories of places I’d never been and people I’d never known.
But how long would that last?
It was unsettling enough, the idea that all those times I’d passed out in my life, I’d just been living someone else’s. Someone who had done things I couldn’t remember, to people I didn’t know, who may or may not have deserved them, because how the hell would I know? But what was really causing me nightmares was worry about what was to come. Mircea had separated us because Dorina was stronger—was she still? And if she was, and if our brains were now blurring back together, what did that mean for me?
What did it mean if she decided that maybe I’d been in charge long enough, and it was her time in the driver’s seat?
“Dory?” I suddenly noticed that Louis-Cesare’s hands had stopped. Going vampire-still like the rest of him as he scanned the crowd for dangers he wouldn’t find, because they were all locked up in my crazy head. “Is something wrong?”
Nothing I want to try and explain, I thought. Especially not tonight. If I didn’t have much time left, I was going to enjoy the hell out of what I did.
I grabbed his hand. “No. Come on.”
“To where? Olga has stopped.”
“Yeah, to round up the boys, so there’s time.”
“For what?” His eyes flickered to the tent again, as if he was calculating exactly how long we had.
I smacked his arm. “To win a prize,” I said, and dragged him off toward a snarl of booths ahead.
This wasn’t the most organized place I’d ever seen, maybe because of the limited space the vendors had to work with. Or maybe because troll eyesight preferred the pretty lights all mushed up together. But we managed to forge a path through the tangle nonetheless, to a small booth almost buried in teddy bears.
Huge eye-searingly pink ones.
Now, I hate pink and could give a crap about stuffed animals, but I had a half-breed at home that loved them. Specifically, he loved to che
w the shit out of them because he was teething. And, with the number of teeth in that mouth and all of them coming in at once, it was a problem. I’d tried those amber necklace things, but the razor-sharp canines he was developing kept slicing through the string, and then he’d eat the beads. Which wouldn’t have been so bad except he crunched them up like candy, crunch, crunch, crunch, all day long, and the sound had been driving everybody crazy.
So we’d switched to softer stuff, but we were fast running out of pillows, and most of the stuffed animals I’d bought as a substitute hadn’t lasted ten minutes. Of course, they’d been normal sized and pretty flimsy, while these . . . I gazed up at them in satisfaction. That’s what I’d thought. These had been made for trolls.
They looked vaguely like Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear if he’d been made by somebody worried more about sturdiness than hugability. The main material seemed to be some sort of rawhide, with black embroidered eyes that couldn’t be crunched off and seams that appeared to have been quadruple stitched. Because troll babies were hard-core.
And there were tons of them, the lack of space having forced the vendor to pile them everywhere, including on top of his stall, where they remained, a trembling mountain of pink sturdiness just waiting to be savaged by my little heathen baby.
“What . . .” Louis-Cesare stood there, staring upward, seemingly at a loss for words. Perhaps at the fact that I’d dragged him away from the nymphs for this. Or perhaps because the bears looked like they might collapse on us at any minute.
“I want one of those.” I pointed.
Louis-Cesare blinked a few times, but took out his wallet.
“No, you can’t buy it,” I said. “You have to win it.”
“Win it?” He looked slightly confused.
The carny decided to help me out. “That’s right, good sir, step right up, we have a winner here, I can tell, we have a big winner!”
An aristocratic eyebrow went up at the man’s cant, and I swear it looked like Louis-Cesare had never been to a carnival before. Which was weird, because I knew France had them, although maybe not this kind. Definitely not this kind, I thought, as the man’s assistants popped up from beneath the counter.
And, okay, this was new.
Peering at us over the countertop were a line of wizened little . . . somethings. Grayish green and brown and vaguely hoary, had they been in a glade somewhere, I might have walked right past them and thought they were moss-covered stones. But here, under the bright lights of the carny’s booth, they were obviously . . . somethings.
“Spriggans, ride with trolls,” the carny said, seeing my surprise. He leaned in. “Don’t give them any money.”
“What?”
“They’ll go off and bury it somewhere, and then we won’t have a game, will we?”
“Do we have a game?” Louis-Cesare said, because he did not appear to be interested in things that ride with trolls. He appeared to be interested in the bears, eyeing them as if reevaluating his whole impression of me. “You truly wish one of these?” he asked, his eyes sliding to mine.
“Or two. Two is good.”
“Two.”
“And easy it is, sir, easy it is. Just take these,” the carny slid three spiky balls across the counter. “Fix ’em to the back wall there, just anywhere you please. Black circles get you a fine key chain, hand carved by some of the locals—truly stunning work. The purple areas get you a premium box of candy for the lady here,” he smirked at me. “And the green circles, well, those’ll get you one of these fine, handcrafted—”
“And the pink. Those are for the bears, yes?” Louis-Cesare asked.
“Uh, yes. Yes, indeed.” The carny broke off his spiel to nod at three tiny, bright pink circles amid the busy backdrop, which won the top prize. Still, the game didn’t look too hard to me. Both the balls and the backdrop were covered in a bunch of Velcro-looking stuff, and ought to stick together nicely—if you weren’t a troll with lousy eyesight. I glanced at Olga, who had started ambling this way, and wondered how many we could win before—
Pop!
Something went off like a gunshot, loud enough to make me jump. And then blink and do a double take, because the nearest little whatever was little no longer. In a split second, the spriggan had blown up to the circumference of an oversized beach ball. And in the middle of the stretched, mottled, knobby-looking hide resided a single off-white ball.
Okay, maybe this wasn’t going to be as easy as I’d thought.
“Olga’s coming,” I told Louis-Cesare, who had acquired a small frown in between his eyebrows.
“This will not take a moment,” he told me, and threw the remaining balls.
Pop! Pop!
More frowning.
“We can come back later,” I offered, as Olga came up behind.
“What you do?”
“Winning a bear.”
“Not here,” she said, chewing on something with tiny trailing feet and a tail. “He cheats.”
“I do no such thing!” The carny looked offended. “This is a game of skill, plain and simple.”
“Not with them,” Olga said placidly, as the little things watched her with shiny black eyes.
“He’s a vampire,” the carny said, passing over more balls. “With reflexes far faster than they’re used to. It’s more than fair—”
Pop! Pop! Pop!
“—why, it’s the easiest game anywhere!”
“You know, honestly,” I said, starting to wish I hadn’t brought it up. Because I’d been watching those little beggars, and they moved like lightning. And whenever they weren’t sure they’d be fast enough, they blew up like balloons, instantly covering so much space that there was literally no way to win. “It’s fine. Really.”
But Louis-Cesare was looking at me again, and he had that expression in his eyes. The one that said we weren’t going anywhere. “Three more,” he told the man.
“We could be here all night, and we have a match to—”
And then a bunch of things happened at once. The man handed over three more fool’s bets; a bunch of coins suddenly flashed in the air, a glittering wave not of silver but of gold, pure and shiny and gleaming under the lights; and a bunch of crusty beach balls deflated and scrambled like mad for the surprise treasure.
And three little Velcro balls landed in three little circles, each one smack-dab in the middle.
I stared at them.
And then at the ground, where the crazed somethings were scrapping and clawing and scuffling in the dirt.
And back up at Louis-Cesare, who was looking smug. “You just spent like . . .” I didn’t even know. “A couple thousand dollars on a bear.”
“Three bears,” he said complaisantly, and pulled them down from the row above our heads.
“That’s—you—wait—” the carny said. And then he said something else, but I couldn’t hear him. Because an eardrum-rupturing horn had just gone off, and I thought it possible I’d never hear again.
It time, Olga mouthed, as the whole field suddenly jumped up and started for the house.
Chapter Three
“You’re upset,” Louis-Cesare said, from amid a forest of bear.
He was carrying all three, one affixed to his belt where his sword usually went when he was somewhere he could wear a sword. The other two were under his arms, with the huge violently pink bodies lolling like drunken children. I frowned at them.
“I’m not upset.”
“We won,” he pointed out. “Most people enjoy winning.”
“We didn’t win. You basically bought them.”
“That is what is troubling you?” He looked surprised. “We can go back after—”
“No. The man was a shyster. I don’t—Why were you carrying gold?”
“Gold?” He blinked at me.
“The coins? The ones you threw?”
I stopped, hands on hips, to stare at him, because if I’d just thrown a handful of gold at somebody, I’d damned well remember it. And then I almost got run over. Because the whole staircase leading up to the building was moving. Seriously, it was like an avalanche in reverse.
Louis-Cesare pulled me against his chest, inside the blindingly pink buffer zone. “For tips.”
“What?”
I thought I’d misheard, because my ears felt like they were under siege. The loudspeakers were screaming instructions, people were jostling and fighting, and a group of inebriated dwarves behind us were belting out what I guess was a fight song. They were not among the more musically gifted of fey, something they were making up for with enthusiasm.
“Tips!” Louis-Cesare shouted, and just made things worse. But then he rubbed his fingers together in the universal sign for stubborn wheel grease and light dawned.
And still made no damned sense.
“For who?” I shouted back.
“The court.”
“What?”
He bent his head down to mine. “The servants at court. Whenever they do anything for you, it’s considered customary to tip them.”
“With gold?”
“It’s better than favors,” he replied, with more cynicism than I’d have expected from him.
Louis-Cesare wasn’t just a vampire; he was a senator, and therefore one of the ruling elite of the vampire world. But while most of the people who reached those lofty heights were manipulative, sneaky, and deviously clever, Louis-Cesare had reached them because somebody else fit that description. Namely, Anthony, the charming rogue in charge of the European Senate. Who’d realized that having a champion with Louis-Cesare’s fighting ability meant that no one in their right mind was likely to challenge him—ever again. Giving Anthony all but absolute power.
