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 chew 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.