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I laughed. “Oh, so I’m a spriggan, Olga?”
She shook her head. “Spriggan eyes. Send where you want to see, nobody notice. Like bird or animal.”
And then it hit me, a memory of cloudy night skies, beaks and feathers and blood, and a breathtaking fall, dizzyingly far, and ending in—
I jerked up, blinking, and swallowed. Because being in an animal when it dies is not fun. What the hell?
“Not spriggan,” Olga said gently, catching my attention again, and gently touching my forehead. “Vargr.”
I decided I needed to lie down again.
Chapter Twenty-one
An hour later, I stepped into the shower, which was much less fun without Louis-Cesare. And stayed there for a while, and not just because the hot water felt so damned good. But because I was trying to straighten out my head.
Part of that was easier than I’d thought. Memories of the attack last night were coming back, and were easier to parse than whatever had happened at the fights, I suppose because I’d been conscious this time. Or half-conscious, or superconscious, or whatever it was called when two minds are awake and acting at the same time.
I called it freaky.
Olga had another word.
The best I could figure out, vargar were some kind of fey shamans or mystics who could throw their consciousness into other creatures. They’d gotten the name from wolves, because their favorite ride had once been fast-moving wolf packs. Which was why they were shown on Viking monuments riding around on wolves like horses, and why some of the sagas had fey witches and trolls doing the same thing.
But, eventually, they’d noticed that mentally tagging along with wolves had its downsides. Like the fact that people tended to notice a pack of dangerous predators, which made spying difficult. And that wolves were easily distracted by game or threats, making them harder to control than other creatures. Like birds, for instance.
Which Claire had been quick to point out were Efridis’ favorite avatar.
She wasn’t alone. Like Odin, who had seen through the eyes of his pet ravens, plenty of vargar had moved on to birds or boars or other creatures for their rides. A guy named Bothvarr, an early Beowulf type, had liked mentally hitching a ride on a huge bear, especially in battle. It was said that he was never defeated until somebody interrupted his concentration one day, and he lost control of his avatar.
Because vargar weren’t weres; they didn’t become their creatures. They just . . . went along for the ride. Or mentally hopped from one to another, checking out the borders better than any spy cam, because spriggans could move wherever you wanted them.
Giving the fey literal eyes everywhere.
Or they used to. Vargar were few and far between these days, although nobody knew why. Just that fewer were being born. Which was why Olga had been so surprised to find one here on Earth.
Only she hadn’t.
That’s why we’d lost last night. I wasn’t fey, so I couldn’t be a real vargr, and neither could Dorina. We had—or, to be more precise, she had—Mircea’s mental skills, and from what I could remember she’d been getting inventive with them.
Unfortunately, our attacker had been better at it. And that was a problem, because we were obviously up against the real deal, a powerful vargr with a lot more experience than Dorina. Which raised the question, how were we supposed to catch it?
So, okay, maybe even the easy stuff wasn’t so easy. As for the rest . . . I soaped up my hair, which cracked with grit from the dust storm last night, and tried not to think about it. But my brain wasn’t having it. My brain was worrying the other GREAT BIG THING I’d remembered, like a starving dog with a bone, and wherever I turned, there it was again.
Looking at me.
Okay, I’d think about it. Once. And then that was it.
Because there was nothing I could do about it anyway.
Dorina’s thoughts were still a jumbled mess with big blank spots, probably where I’d had to concentrate on something else. But one thing stood out crystal clear: the idea of a scattered consciousness. She’d said that was what happened if you were in free flight for too long, that you might just drift away and never come back. That you might cease to exist—mentally, at least—if you couldn’t find an avatar fast enough.
Leaving, I assumed, a brain-dead corpse behind.
Unless, of course, you were a freak with two consciousnesses. Because that would leave . . . what, exactly? A brain-dead corpse that wasn’t brain-dead? But that was normal, with one consciousness, just like everybody else, for the first time ever?
It was that thought that wouldn’t leave me alone, that had me using up all the hot water and getting prune-y, instead of getting on with my day. It was what had me pressing my forehead against the tile, and thinking about what that could mean. For both of us.
For Dorina, the benefits were obvious: no more deadweight. I wouldn’t be a remora on her side anymore, an anvil around her neck, a useless thing that no one respected, and who she’d been carrying for five centuries now and was probably sick of it. Especially with the gleaming jewel of a Senate seat currently dangling in front of her. And with it, everything her abilities should have gotten her all along: wealth, respect, family, position. She could instantly be all caught up, at the pinnacle of the vampire world, and all she needed for that to happen was for me to just . . . disappear.
