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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.
