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Normally, finding the perp in my line of work is easy, since I’m mostly chasing things that go bump in the night amid crowds of humans. Find the supe and you usually find the bad guy, the needle in the proverbial haystack who shows up on my mental radar, all nice and shiny. Only here, half the haystack was made out of needles. And even that didn’t help me much, since, this time, they might be the good guys.
“Don’t worry,” Olga said, clapping a ham-sized hand on my shoulder and almost buckling my knees. “He albino.”
That seemed to settle things as far as she was concerned, because she took off, plowing through a gleaming stream of will-o’-the-wisps with a tchaa and some flapping of massive hands. They went swirling off in annoyed clouds, and I and my date went stumbling after her.
I didn’t point out that this albino, if he was behind the theft, wasn’t likely to be hanging around in full view. Or hanging around at all if he realized he’d grabbed the nephew of the widow of one of Faerie’s most notorious weapons runners. A widow who still had a lot of connections and a serious hate-on for losing more family members. Hell, he might not even be on the planet.
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.
