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I shook the area in question.
That wasn’t why.
And I hadn’t forgotten everything, after all, because suddenly there were pieces, like of cut-up photographs, crowding my mind. Not of the crazy landing, but of other things: a huge troll, the biggest of them all, racing up a wall; an albino with long, white hair stepping through a brilliant portal, searing my eyes; a feeling of flying, soaring into the sky and then turning to look down at the temporary fairgrounds, trash strewn and windswept, with a few bonfires still burning—
I winced, and shut down the flow, because my head hurt.
And because I hadn’t done those things. I’d been passed out on a cracked subfloor under a couple thousand pounds of troll, with a ton of bouncy toys and a freaked-out boyfriend. I remembered Louis-Cesare yelling my name; hands lifting me, gentle as a baby; some confused shouting . . .
And rocketing through an intersection in a troll-laden truck, while a witch with cigarettes in her hair laughed and laughed.
Louis-Cesare’s fingers gently combed over my abused scalp. “The doctor said there should be no lasting damage, that dhampirs have the hardest heads she’s ever seen.”
“I’m fine,” I told him.
Physically, anyway.
“You won’t be if you don’t rest,” Louis-Cesare said. “You all but passed out on me a moment ago—”
“What?”
He nodded. “That’s why you don’t remember the last few minutes. You’re so tired you drifted off.”
“I did not!”
His lips twitched, the worry suddenly eclipsed by what looked like genuine humor. “You look so indignant.”
“I’m not,” I told him, and then thought about it. “Okay, maybe I am, but I don’t nap.”
Louis-Cesare’s lips twitched some more.
“Stop doing that!”
“Then explain to me what is so wrong with a nap? I recall quite liking them once.”
“They’re”—stupid, ridiculous, weak—“dangerous. To zone out in a fight—”
“But you weren’t in a fight. You were home, behind excellent wards, and I was here. It is hard to be safer than that.”
I ignored the smug comment, because he wasn’t wrong. About that, anyway. “I don’t nap,” I repeated.
“Not normally, perhaps. But it is as the doctor said: you need time to heal. Time you haven’t been taking.”
He turned me around again, and started lathering up my hair.
“I’m not hurt,” I said—and tried to put some heat behind it, because the magic fingers were doing a good job of making me forget how serious this was. “And that wasn’t a nap. Don’t you get it?”
“No,” he said simply. “Tell me.”
Yeah, like it was that easy. To compress a lifetime of fear and struggle and pain into a few sentences when I never talked about it, not with anyone. Because who would care? And because I didn’t know how.
Only I guess I did, because it came out in a rush. “I used to try all kinds of things to keep Dorina under control. They didn’t always work, but I got pretty good at it. Enough that I could tell when things were about to go bad and smoke some weed, or walk away from a conflict, or punch a tree until I calmed down. But now . . .”
“Now?”
Those damned fingers should be registered somewhere, I thought, unconsciously leaning back into the feel of them. “Now everything’s changed. Dorina couldn’t come out when I was conscious; the barrier prevented her. That was the whole point of it.”
I felt him nod.
