Fledgling

That same night, Iosif flew Wright and me up to see the community that was to become our new home. As we arrived, we could see from the air five large, well-lit, two-story houses built along what was probably another private road. There were also two barns, several sheds and garages, animal pens, and fields and gardens, all a few miles north of the lights of a small town—Darrington, I assumed.

Iosif promised to fly Wright and me back to the ruin later that night so that we could pick up Wright’s car and go back to his cabin. If things went as Iosif intended, we would move in a week. He gave us each a card that showed his address and phone numbers and that gave directions for driving to his community. He said he would send a truck and two people to help load Wright’s things onto it. Anything that didn’t

fit in our temporary quarters could be stored in one of the barns until our house was ready.

“You live in such out-of-the-way places,” Wright complained. “This is even more isolated than the other one. I’m going to have a hell of a commute. I don’t know whether it’s going to be possible.”

Iosif ignored him. When we landed on a large paved area not far from the largest of the houses, he said, “You need to know that it’s best to avoid cities. Cities overload our senses—the noise, the smells, the lights . . . They overload us in every possible way. Some of us get used to it, but others just get sick.”

“That’s a surprise,” Wright said. “The movies I’ve seen and the books I’ve read say vampires like cities—that their large populations makes it easy for vampires to be anonymous.”

Iosif nodded. “Vampires in books and movies usually seem to be trying to kill people or trying to turn them into vampires. Since we don’t do either of those things, we don’t need cities. Fortunately.” Iosif turned and jumped out of his side of the helicopter, while Wright slid out the other side, then reached in and lifted me out. Then Wright quickly caught up with Iosif and stood in his path like a human wall.

“I want to know what’s going to happen to me,” he said. “I need to know that.”

Iosif nodded. “Of course you do.” He glanced at me. “How long have you two been together?” “Eleven days,” I said.

“My God,” Wright said. “Eleven days? Is that all? I feel as though I’ve had her with me for so much longer than that.”

“And yet you’re healthy and strong,” Iosif said. “And you obviously to want to keep her with you.” “I do. I’m not entirely sure that it’s my idea, but I do. What will I become, though? What have I

become? You said she’ll ... find a mate. What happens to me then?”

“You are her first symbiont, the first member of her new family. Her mating can’t change that. She’ll visit her mates and they’ll visit her, but you’ll live with her. No one could separate the two of you now without killing you, and no one would try.”

“Killing me . . . ? Why would I die? What would I die of?” “Of the lack of what she provides.”

“But what—?”

“Come into the house, Wright. I’ll see that you get all the answers you need. You might not like them all, but you have a right to hear them.”

We walked from the side to the front of the large house. Iosif ’s community was clearly nocturnal. The

Ina were naturally nocturnal, and their symbionts had apparently adjusted to being awake at night. There were lights on in all the houses, and people—human symbionts and their children, I guessed—moved around, living their lives. A red-haired woman was backing a car out of a garage. She had a small,

red-blond baby strapped into a special seat in the back. Two little boys were raking leaves, and pausing now and then to throw them at one another. They were my size, and I wondered how old they were. A little girl was sweeping leaves from a porch with a broom that was almost too big for her to manage. A man was on a ladder, doing something to the rain gutter of one of the houses. Several adults stood talking together in one of the broad yards.

Wright and I followed Iosif into the biggest house and found ourselves in a room that stretched from the front to the back of the house. Wright’s whole cabin might have filled a third of it. There were several couches, several chairs large and small, and several little tables scattered around the room.

Iosif said, “We meet here on Sunday evenings or when there’s something that needs community-wide discussion.”

There was a broad picture window on the backyard side of the great room;it ran across the top half the wall from one end of the room to the other. At one of the end walls, there was a huge fireplace where a log burned with much snapping and sparking. Books filled built-in bookcases on the two remaining walls.

In a corner near the fireplace, two men and a woman—all human—sat at a small table, their heads together, talking quietly. There were steaming cups of coffee on the table. There was no light in the room except the fire. Iosif walked us over to the three people.

“Brook, Yale, Nicholas.”

They looked up, saw me, and were on their feet at once, staring. “Shori!” the woman said. She came around her chair and hugged me. She was a stranger as far as I was concerned, and I would have drawn away from any possibility of a hug, but she smelled of Iosif. Something in me seemed to accept her. She smelled of someone I had decided was all right. “My God, girl,” she said, “where have you been? Iosif, where did you find her?”

Both men looked at me, then at Wright. One of them smiled. “Welcome,” he said to Wright. “Looks like

Shori was able to take care of herself.”

Iosif put his hand on my shoulder as the woman let me go. “Is any of this familiar to you? Do you know these people, this house?”

I shook my head. “I like the room, but I don’t remember it.” I looked at the three people. “And I’m sorry, but I don’t remember any of you either.”

All three of them stared at Iosif.

“She was very badly injured,” he said. “Head injuries. As a result, she’s lost her memory. And she was alone until she found Wright Hamlin here. I’m hoping her memory will return.”

“Don’t you have your own medical people?” Wright asked. “People who know how to help your kind?” “We do,” Iosif said. “But for Ina, that tends to mean someone to fix badly broken bones so that they heal

straight or binding serious wounds so that they’ll heal faster.”

“You don’t want to see what they mean by‘a serious wound,’” one of the men said. “Intestines spilling out, legs gone, that sort of thing.”

“I don’t,” Wright agreed. “Shori told me she had been badly burned as well as shot. But she healed on her own. Not a scar.”

“Except for not knowing herself or her people,” Iosif said. “I would call that a large scar. Unfortunately, it’s not one we know how to fix.”

“Did I have friends here?” I asked. “People who might know me especially well?”

“Your four brothers are here,” he said. He looked at the three humans. “Look after Wright for a while,” he said. “Answer fully any questions he asks. He’s with Shori now. He’s her first, but he knows almost nothing.” He took my arm and began to lead me away.

“Renee?” Wright said to me, and I stopped. It eased something in me to hear him call me by the name he had given me. “You okay?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yell if you need me. I’ll hear.”

He nodded. He looked as though my words eased something in him. I followed Iosif down a long hallway.

“These bedrooms belong to me and my human family,” he told me. “They’re the three you just met and five others who aren’t here right now. They’ve all been with me for years. Eight is a good number for me, although at other times in my life I’ve had seven or even ten. I’m wealthy enough to care for all of them if

I have to, and they feed me. They’re free to hold jobs away from the community, even live elsewhere part time, and sometimes they do. But at least three of them are always here. They work out a schedule among themselves.”

We went through a door at the end of the hallway and out onto a broad lawn. I stopped in the middle of the lawn. “Do they mind?” I asked.

“Mind?”

“That you need eight. That none of them can be your only one.” I paused. “Because I think Wright is going to mind.”

“When he understands that you have to have others?” “Yes.”

“He’ll mind. I can see that he’s very possessive of you—and very protective.” He paused, then said, “Let him mind, Shori. Talk to him. Help him. Reassure him. Stop violence. But let him feel what he feels and settle his feelings his own way.”

“All right.”

“I suspect this kind of thing needs to be said more to my sons than to you, but you should hear it, at least once: treat your people well, Shori. Let them see that you trust them and let them solve their own problems, make their own decisions. Do that and they will willingly commit their lives to you. Bully them, control them out of fear or malice or just for your own convenience, and after a while, you’ll have to spend all your time thinking for them, controlling them, and stifling their resentment. Do you understand?”

“I do, yes. I’ve made him do things but only to keep him safe—mostly to keep him safe from me—especially when Raleigh Curtis shot me.”

He nodded. “That sort of thing is necessary whether they understand or not. How many do you have other than Wright?”

“I’ve drunk from five others, but Wright doesn’t know about any of them.” I paused, then looked at him. “I don’t know whether they’ve come to need me. How will I be able to tell about the others? Will you look at them and tell me?”

“It isn’t sight,” he said, “it’s scent. Did you notice Brook’s scent?” “She smelled of you.”

“And Wright smells of you—unmistakably. The scent won’t wash away or wear away. It’s part of them now. That should give you some idea of how we hold them.”

“Something, some chemical, in our saliva?”

“Exactly. We addict them to a substance in our saliva—in our venom—that floods our mouths when we feed. I’ve heard it called a powerful hypnotic drug. It makes them highly suggestible and deeply attached to the source of the substance. They come to need it. Brook and Wright both need it. Brook knows, and by now, Wright probably knows, too.”

“And they die if they can’t have it?”

“They die if they’re taken from us or if we die, but their death is caused by another component of the venom. They die of strokes or heart attacks because we aren’t there to take the extra red blood cells that our venom encourages their bodies to make. Their doctors can help them if they understand the problem quickly enough. But their psychological addiction tends to prevent them from going to a doctor. They

hunt for their Ina—or any Ina until it’s too late.” “Until they die or until they’re badly disabled.”

“Yes. And even if they find an Ina not their own, they might not survive. They die unless another of us is able to take them over. That doesn’t always work. Their bodies detect individual differences in our venom, and those differences make them sick when they have to adapt to a new Ina. They’re addicted to their particular Ina and no other. And yet we always try to save their lives if their Ina symbiont has died. When I realized what had happened to your mothers’ community, I told my people to look for wounded human symbionts as well as for you. I knew my mates were dead. I . . . found the places where they

died, found their scents and small fragments of charred flesh . . .”

I gave him a moment to remember the dead and to deal with his obvious pain. I found that I almost envied his pain. He hurt because he remembered. After a while, I said, “You didn’t find anyone?”

“We didn’t find anyone alive. Hugh Tang, the man you killed, found you, but we didn’t know that.” “All dead,” I whispered. “And for me, it’s as though they never existed.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t even pretend to understand what it’s like for you to be missing so much of your memory. I want to help you recover as much of it as possible. That’s why we need to get you moved into my house and dealing with people who know you.” He hesitated. “To do that, we need to clear away the remnants of the life you’ve been living with Wright. So think. Which of the humans you’ve been feeding from has begun to smell as much like you as Wright does?”

I carefully reviewed my last contact with each of the humans who had fed me. “None of them,” I said. “But there’s one ... she’s older—too old to have children—but I like her. I want her.”

He gave me a long sad look. “Your attentions will keep her healthy and help her live longer than she would otherwise, but with such a late start, she won’t live much past one hundred, and it’s going to be really painful for you when she dies. It’s always hard to lose them.”

“Can she stay here?”

“Of course. There’s a large guest wing on the side of the great room opposite my family rooms. You and yours can live there in comfort and privacy until we get your house built.”

“Thank you.”

“You’ll need more than two humans.”

“I don’t like the others that I’ve been using. I needed them, but I don’t want to keep them.”

He nodded. “It goes that way sometimes. I’ll introduce you to others. I know adult children of our symbionts who have been waiting and hoping to join an Ina child. Some of them can’t wait to join us; others can’t wait to leave us. But before you meet them, you’ll have to spend the next week going once more to each of the ones you don’t want. You’ll have to talk to them, tell them to forget you, and become just a romantic dream to them. Otherwise, chances are they’ll look for you. They don’t need you, but they’ll want you. They might waste their lives looking for you.”

“All right.”

We began to walk again. He said, “I’m taking you to see your youngest brother, Stefan, because you were close to him. You spent the first twenty-five years of your life with him at your mothers’community. The two of you were always phoning each other after Stefan moved here. While you’re with him, though, don’t mention Hugh Tang.”

“All right.”

“Did you kill Hugh because you’d gone mad with hunger? Did you eat him?” “... yes.”

“I thought so. He was Stefan’s symbiont. He had met you several times, and Stefan chose him to be part of the search party because he knew Hugh would recognize you. I’ll tell your brother what happened later.”

We entered one of the smaller houses through the back door. In the kitchen, we found three women working. One was stirring and seasoning something in a pot on the stove, one was searching through a huge, double-doored refrigerator, and one was mixing things in a large bowl.

“Esther, Celia, Daryl,” Iosif said, gesturing toward each of them as he said their names so that I would know who was who. Two of them, Esther and Celia, had skin as dark as mine, and I looked at them with interest. They were the first black people I remembered meeting. And yet the genes for my dark skin had to have come from someone like these women. The women turned to look at us, saw me, and Esther whispered my name.

“Shori! Oh my goodness.”

But they were all strangers to me. Iosif told them what had happened to me, while I examined each face. I could see that they knew me, but I didn’t know them. I felt tired all of a sudden, hopeless. I followed Iosif into the living room where he introduced me to my youngest brother, Stefan, and to more of his

human symbionts—two men and two women. The symbionts left us as soon as they’d greeted me and heard about my memory loss. I did not know them, didn’t know the house, didn’t know anything.

Then I did know one small thing—something I deduced rather than remembered. I could see that Stefan was darker than Iosif, darker than Wright. He was a light brown to my darker brown, and that meant . . .

“You’re an experiment, too,” I said to him when we’d talked for a while.

“Of course I am,” he said. “I should have been you, so to speak. We have the same black human mother.”

I smiled, comforted that I had been right to believe that one of my mothers had been a black human. “Did

I know her?”

“You were her favorite. Whenever I did something wrong, she’d shake her head and say I wasn’t really what she had in mind anyway.” He smiled sadly, remembering. “She said I was too much like Iosif.”

“And someone murdered her,” I said. “Someone murdered them all.” “Someone did.”

“Why? Why would anyone do that?”

He shook his head. “If we knew why, we might already have found out who. I don’t understand how this person was able to kill everyone—except you. Our Ina mothers were powerful. They should have been .

. . much harder to kill.”

“Could it have happened because humans thought we were vampires?” I asked. “I mean, if they thought we were killing people, they might have—”

“No,” Stefan and Iosif said together. Then Iosif said, “We live in rural areas. People around us know one another. They know us—or they think they do. No one had died mysteriously in my mates’ home

territory except my mates themselves and their community.”

“I don’t mean that we have been killing people,” I said. “I mean ... what if someone saw one of us feeding and . . . drew the wrong conclusions?”

Iosif and Stefan looked at one another. Finally Iosif said, “I don’t believe that could have happened. Your mothers and sisters were even more careful than we are.”

“I don’t believe humans could have done it,” Stefan said.

“I was burned and shot,” I said. “Anyone can use fire and guns.”

Iosif shook his head. “I questioned several of the people who live near your mothers’community. There was nothing wrong, no trouble, no suspicions, no grudges.”

“When I went to the ruin today,” I said, “someone had been there. He was human, young, unarmed, and he’d walked all around the ruin. Did you notice?”

“Yes. He prowls. He lives in your general area but down toward the town of Gold Bar. He’s sixteen, and I suspect he prowls without his parents’knowledge.” He shook his head. “We combed the area very thoroughly. He was one of the people we checked. He didn’t know anything. No one knows anything.”

I sighed. “They don’t and I don’t.” I looked from one lean, sharp face to the other, realizing that they had

drawn away from me a little, and now they looked oddly uncomfortable. They fidgeted and glanced at one another now and then.

I said, “Tell me about my family, my mothers. How many mothers did I have anyway? Were they all sisters except for the human one? How many sisters did I have?”

“Our mothers were three sisters,” Stefan said, “and one human woman who donated DNA. Also, there were two eldermothers—our mothers’ surviving mothers. The two eldermothers were the ones who

made it possible for us—you in particular—to be born with better-than-usual protection from the sun and more daytime alertness.”

“They integrated the human DNA with our own somehow?”

“They did, yes. They were both over 350 years old, and biology fascinated them. Once their children were mated, they studied with humans from several universities and with other Ina who were working on the problem. They understood more about the uses of viruses in genetic engineering than anyone I’ve ever heard of, and they understood it well before humans did. They were fantastic people to work with and talk to.” He paused, shaking his head. “I still can’t believe that they’re dead—that someone would murder them that way.”

“Could their work be the reason they were murdered?” I asked. “Did anyone object to it or try to stop it?”

Stefan looked at Iosif and Iosif shook his head. “I don’t believe so. Shori, our people have been trying to do this for generations. If you could remember, you’d know what a celebrity you are. People traveled from South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa to see you and to understand what our mothers had done.”

“There are Ina in Africa, and they haven’t done this?” “Not yet.”

“Was anyone visiting just before the fire?”

“Don’t know,” Iosif said. “I hadn’t spoken to your mothers for a week and a half. When I phoned them in the early morning and told them I wanted to visit the next night, they said they would be expecting me. They said if I came, I had to stay a few days.” He smiled, apparently taking pleasure in his memories, then his expression sagged into sadness. “They told me to bring at least five symbionts. I took them at their word. The next night, I gathered five of my people and drove down there. Vasile had wanted to use the helicopter for something so I took one of the bigger cars. When I got there, I found smoke and ashes

and death.” He paused, staring out into nothing. “Once I’d seen it and understood it, I called home to get Stefan and Radu to come down with some of their symbionts to help clean things up, to hunt for survivors, and to keep our secrets secret.”

So that was how Hugh Tang had wound up at the cave looking for me. “What have you learned since then?” I asked.

He turned away from me, paced a few steps away, then the same few back. “Nothing!” The word was a harsh whisper. “Not one goddamned thing.”

I sighed. Suddenly, I’d had enough. “I think I need to go home,” I said. “Let’s go get Wright, and you can take us back to the ruin.”

“You are home.” He stood in front of me and looked down at me with an expression I couldn’t read,

except that it wasn’t an altogether friendly expression. “You must think of this place as your home.”

“I will,” I said. “I’ll be glad to come back here and learn more about my life, my family. But I’m tired now. I feel . . . I need to go back to things that feel familiar.”

“I was hoping to convince you to stay here until tomorrow night,” he said. I shook my head. “Take me back.”

“Shori, it would be best for you to stay here. Wright has hidden you successfully for this long, but if anything went wrong, if even one person spotted you with him and decided to make trouble—”

“You promised to give us a week,” I said. “That was the first promise you made me.” He stared down at me. I stared back.

After a while, he sighed and turned away. “Child, I’ve lost everyone but you.” Stefan said, “All of our female family is dead, Shori. You’re the last.”

I wanted more than ever to go home, to be away from them and alone with Wright. And yet they pulled at me somehow—my father and my brother. They were strangers, but they were my father and my brother. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I need to go.”

“We Ina are sexually territorial,” Iosif said. “And you’re a little too old to be sharing territory with the adult males of your family—with any adult Ina male since you’re too young to mate. That’s what’s bothering you.”

“You mean I feel uncomfortable with you and Stefan just because you’re male?” “Yes.”

“Then how can I live here?”

“Let’s go back to Wright. I think you’ll feel better when you’re with him.” He led me away from Stefan toward a side door. I looked back once, but Stefan had already turned away.”

“Is he feeling territorial, too?” I asked.

“No. He’s willing for you to be here because he fears for you—and for himself. And you’re not mature yet, so there’s no real danger ...”

“Danger?”

He led me through the door, and we headed back across the lawn. “Danger, Iosif?”

“We are not human, child. Male and female Ina adults don’t live together. We can’t. Mates visit, but that’s all.”

“What is the danger?”

“As your body changes, and especially as your scent changes, you will be perceived more and more as an available adult female.”

“By my brothers?”

He nodded, looking away from me. “By you?”

Another nod. “We won’t hurt you, Shori. Truly, we won’t. By the time you come of age, I’ll have found mates for you. I was already talking to the Gordon family about you and your sisters . . . Now . . . now I intend to sell your mothers’ land. That money should be enough to give you a start at a different location when you’re a little older.”

“I don’t think I want to live here.”

“I know, but it will be all right. It will only be until you look more adult. Your brothers and I have our genetic predispositions—our instincts—but we are also intelligent. We are aware of our urges. We can stand still even when the instinct to move is powerful.”

“You said I’m a child.”

“You are, now more than ever with your memory loss. You can play sexually with your symbionts, but you’re too young to mate. You can’t yet conceive a child, and you’re not yet as large or as strong as you will be. Your scent right now is interesting, but for us, it’s more irritating than enticing.”

We went back into his house. “You’ll take us back to the ruin tonight,” I told him. “You said you would. Were you speaking the truth?”

“I was, but I shouldn’t have said it. I’m afraid for you, Shori.” “But you’ll do it.”

There was a long silence. Finally he agreed. “I will.”

We went down the long hallway again and into the great room. There, Wright sat alone in one of the large chairs. The other three humans had left him. I went up to him, wanting to touch him from behind, wanting to lay my hands on his shoulders, but not doing it. I wondered what Iosif’s symbionts had said to him, what they had made him feel about being with me. I walked around and stood in front of him, looking down, trying to sense his mood.

He looked up at me, his face telling me only that he was not happy. “What happens now?” he asked. “We go home,” I said.

He looked at Iosif, then back at me. “Yeah? Okay.” He got up, then spoke to Iosif. “You’re letting her go? I didn’t really believe you would do that.”

“You thought I was lying to you?” Iosif said.

“I thought your . . . paternal feelings might kick in and make you keep her in spite of your promise.” “She’s tough and resilient, but I fear for her. I’m desperate to keep her.”

“So ...?”

“She wants to go . . . and . . . I understand why. Keep her hidden, Wright. Except for my people and hers, I don’t believe anyone knows she’s alive. I even got that boy, Raleigh Curtis, to forget about her.

Keep her hidden and bring her back to me on Friday.”

Wright licked his lips. “I don’t understand, but I’ll bring her back.” “Even though you don’t want to?”

“... yes.”

They looked at each other, each wearing a similar expression of weariness, misery, and resignation.

I took Wright’s hand, and the three of us went out to the copter. Wright said nothing more. He let me hold his hand, but he did not hold mine.

nine

Wright and I didn’t talk until we reached the car. We had flown all the way back to the ruin in silence, had said good-bye to Iosif and watched him fly away. When we got into the car and began our drive home, Wright finally said, “You have others already, don’t you? Other . . . symbionts.”

“Not yet,” I said. “I’ve gone to others for nourishment. I can’t take all that I need from you every night. But I haven’t . . . I mean none of the others . . .”

“None of the others are bound to you yet.” “Yes.”

“Why am I?”

“I wanted you.” I touched his shoulder, rested my hand on his upper arm. “I think you wanted me, too. From the night you found me, we wanted each other.”

He glanced at me. “I don’t know. I never really had a chance to figure that out.”

“You did. When I was shot, I gave you a chance. It was ... very hard for me to do that, but I did it. I

would have let you go—helped you go.”

“And you think I could have just gone away and not come back? I had to leave you lying on the ground bleeding. You insisted on it. How could I not come back to make sure you were all right?”

“You knew I would heal. I told you you weren’t bound to me then. I offered you freedom. I told you I

wouldn’t be able to offer it again.”

“I remember,” he said. He sounded angry. “But I didn’t know then that I was agreeing to be part of a harem. You left that little bit out.”

I knew what a harem was. One of the books I’d read had referred to Dracula’s three wives as his harem, and I’d looked the word up. “You’re not part of a harem,” I said. “You and I have a symbiotic relationship, and it’s a relationship that I want and need. But didn’t you see all those children? I’ll have mates someday, and you can have yours. You can have a family if you want one.”

He turned to glare at me, and the car swerved, forcing him to pay attention to his driving. “What am I

supposed to do? Help produce the next generation of symbionts?”

I kept quiet for a moment, wondering at the rage in his voice. “What would be the point of that?” I asked finally.

“Just as easy to snatch them off the street, eh?”

I sighed and rubbed my forehead. “Iosif said the children of some symbionts stay in the hope of finding an

Ina child to bond with. Others choose to make lives for themselves outside.” He made a sound—almost a moan. For a while, he said nothing.

Finally, I asked, “Do you want to leave me?”

“Why bother to ask me that?” he demanded. “I can’t leave you. I can’t even really want to leave you.” “Then what do you want?”

He sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know. I know I wish I had driven past you on the road eleven nights ago and not stopped. And yet, I know that if I could have you all to myself, I’d stop for you again, even knowing what I know about you.”

“That would kill you. Quickly.” “I know.”

But he didn’t care—or he didn’t think he would have cared. “What did those three people tell you?” I asked. “What did they say that’s made you so angry and so miserable? Was it only that I take blood from several symbionts instead of draining one person until I kill him?”

“That probably would have been enough.”

I rested my head against his arm so that I could touch him without looking at him. I needed to touch him. And yet, he had to understand. “I’ve fed from you and from five other people—three women and two men. I’ll keep one of the women if she wants to stay with me. I think she will. The others will forget me or remember me as just a dream.”

“Did you sleep with any of them?”

“Did I have sex with them, you mean? No. Except for the one woman, I fed and came back to you. I stayed longer with her because something in her comforts and pleases me. Her name is Theodora Harden. I don’t know why I like her so much, but I do.”

“Swing both ways, do you?”

I frowned, startled and confused by the terrible bitterness in his voice. “What?” “Sex with men and with women?”

“With my symbionts if both they and I want it. For the moment, that’s you.” “For the moment.”

I reached up to slip my hand under his jacket and shirt to touch the bare flesh of his neck. It was unmarked. I had only nipped him a little for pleasure the night before, then I went to one of the others while he slept. He had healed by morning. Tonight, I had intended to do something that wouldn’t heal nearly as fast.

And yet when we reached his cabin, we went in and went to bed without saying or doing anything at all. I didn’t bite him because he clearly didn’t want me to. I fell asleep fitted against his furry back, taking comfort in his presence even though he was angry and confused. At least he didn’t push me away.

Finally, some time later, he shook me awake, shook me hard, saying, “Do it! Do it, damnit! I should get some pleasure out of all this if I don’t get anything else.”

I put my fingers over his lips gently. When he fell silent, I kissed first his mouth, then his throat. He was so angry—so filled with rage and confusion.

He rolled onto me, pushing my legs apart, pushing them out of his way, then thrust hard into me. I bit him more deeply than I had intended and wrapped my arms and legs around him as I took his blood. He groaned, writhing against me, holding me, thrusting harder until I had taken all I needed of his blood, until he had all he needed of me.

After a long while, he rolled off me, sated for the moment in body if not in mind. “Did I hurt you?” he asked very softly.

I pulled myself onto his chest and lapped at the ragged edges of the bite. “You didn’t hurt me,” I said. “Were you trying to hurt me?”

“I think I was,” he said.

I went on lapping. There was more bleeding than usual. “Did I hurt you?” I asked.

“No, of course not. What you do ought to hurt, but except for that first instant when you break the skin, it never does.” He slipped his arms around me, and it was more the way he usually held me.

“It’s good to know we don’t hurt each other even when we’re upset.”

“I don’t know how to deal with all this, Renee ... Shori. It’s like being told that extraterrestrials have arrived, and I’m sleeping with one of them.”

I laughed. “That may be true, except that if we arrived, it must have happened thousands of years ago.” “Do you believe that—that your people come from another planet? I remember your father said

something about a theory like that.”

“According to Iosif, some younger Ina believe it. Some don’t. He doesn’t. I don’t know what to think about it. If I could get my memory back, then maybe I’d have an opinion that was worth bothering about.”

“Do you believe Iosif is your father?”

I nodded against his chest. Then the sweet smell of his blood made me go on licking at the bite. “Why? If he’s a stranger to you, why do you believe him?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s something about his manner, his body language. But more likely it’s his scent. I kept hoping to remember something while I was with him, any little thing. But there was nothing. He introduced me to my brother Stefan, and still, there was nothing. But I never doubted that they were who they said they were. And all their human symbionts recognized me.”

“Yeah,” Wright said.

“You talked to three symbionts. Do you think they were lying?”

“No, I don’t think they were lying.” He ran his hand over my head and down my back. “They said I was lucky to have you—lucky to be your first. That was when I realized that ... of course you’d have to already have others, even though I didn’t know about them. Then the woman, Brook, told me all Ina have several symbionts.”

“How much blood do you think you could provide?” “You . . . you taste me just about every day.”

“Just a little. I crave you. I do. And I enjoy pleasuring you.”

“That’s the right attitude,” he said. He rolled over, trapping me beneath him and thrust into me again. This time I was the one who could not let out a groan of pleasure. He laughed, delighted.

Later, as we lay together, more satisfied, more at ease, he said, “They’ll be coming for us next Friday.” “Yes,” I said. “I don’t want to go live with them, but I think we have to.”

“I was going to say that.”

“I need to learn how to set up my own household—how to make it work. When I can do that, when I’ve learned the things I need to know to do that, we’ll go out on our own.”

“How big a household?” he asked.

“You, me, five or six others. We don’t all have to live in the same house the way my brothers do with their symbionts, but we need to be near one another.”

“It’ll be rough to live together in your father’s house.”

“He says he’ll sell my mothers’ property, and when I’m older, the money will give me a start somewhere else.”

“And he’ll hook you up with a male Ina, or rather, with a group of Ina brothers. My God, a group of brothers . . .”

I said nothing. My mothers had lived together in the same community, shared a mate, and worked things out somehow. It could be done. It was the Ina way. “That will all happen in the future,” I said. “Next week, we’ll be in rooms at Iosif ’s house, you and I and Theodora. She’s one of our neighbors, a few doors down. You might know her.”

There was a long silence. Finally he asked, “Is she pretty?” I smiled. “Not pretty. Not young either. But I like her.” “Are you going to tell her to join us . . . or ask her?”

“Ask her. But she’ll come.”

“Because she’s already fallen so far under your influence that she won’t be able to help herself?” “She’ll want to come. She doesn’t have to, but she’ll want to.”

He sighed. “I think the scariest thing about all this so far is that all three of those symbionts seem

genuinely happy. What do you figure? Old Iosif told them they were living in the best of all possible worlds, and they bought it because as far as they’re concerned, he’s God?”

“He didn’t,” I said. “You asked?”

“He told me that it was wrong, shortsighted, and harmful to symbionts to do such things. I didn’t ask. I

had already figured that out.”

“So you believe that’s what he believes?” “I do, at least on this subject.”

“Shit.”

I kissed him and turned over and went to sleep.

During the next week, I visited each of my people, fed from them, and said good-bye. I became a dream to them, as Iosif had suggested, and I left them. Finally, on Thursday, I visited Theodora.

I paid attention to her house and waited until shortly after sunset when she was alone. Then I visited her.

I hadn’t seen her for a while, but as I looked at her large, handsome house, it occurred to me that in spite of what I had said to Wright, perhaps I should not ask Theodora to join me until I had a home, something more than rooms in Iosif ’s house to offer her. The thought surprised me. It occurred to me after I

reached her front door and rang the doorbell.

I heard her come to the door. Then there was a long pause while, I suppose, she looked out through the peephole and tried to figure out who I might be. She had never seen me before. I had visited her in darkness three times and had not allowed her to turn on a light. She must have gotten an idea of my general size, but she had never seen my face, my coloring, or the fact that I looked so young.

Finally, she opened the door, looked down at me questioningly, and said, “Hello there.”

“Hello,” I said, and as she recognized my voice, as her expression began to change to one of shock, I

said, “Invite me in.”

At once, she stood aside and said, “Come in.”

This was a bit of vampire theater. I knew it, and I was fairly sure she knew it, too. She had probably been brushing up on vampires recently. Of course, I didn’t need permission to enter her home or anyone else’s. I did find it interesting, though, that human beings made up these fantasy safeguards, little magics, like garlic and crucifixes, that would somehow keep them safe from my kind—or from what they imagined my kind to be.

I walked past her into the house. There was, near the front door, a broad staircase on one side and a living room almost as large as Iosif ’s on the other. The walls were a very pale green, and the woodwork was white. All the furniture was, somehow, exactly where it should be and exactly what it should be. Iosif

’s living room was more lived-in, more imperfect, more comfortable to be in. I began to feel even more uneasy about asking Theodora to come with me.

She came up behind me, and when I turned to face her, she stopped, staring at me with a kind of horror. “Is it my skin color or my apparent age that’s upsetting you so?” I asked.

“Why are you here?” she demanded.

“To talk with you,” I said. “To have you see me.” “I didn’t want to see you!”

I nodded. “It will make a difference,” I said, “but not as great a difference as you think.” I went to her, took her arm, tried to lead her into the perfect living room.

She pulled back and said, “Not here.” She took my hand and led me up the stairs into a room whose walls were covered with books. There was a sofa and two chairs also piled high with books and papers. In the middle of the room was a large, messy desk covered with open books, papers, a computer and monitor, a radio, a telephone, a box of pencils and pens, a stack of notebooks and crossword puzzle magazines, a long decorative wooden box of compact discs, bottles of aspirin, hand lotion, antacid, correction fluid, and who knew what else.

I stared at it and burst out laughing. It was the most disorderly mass of stuff I had run across, and yet it all looked—felt—familiar. Had I once had an equally messy desk? Had one of my mothers or sisters? I would ask Iosif. Anyway, it was the opposite of the living room downstairs, and that was a relief.

Theodora had been clearing books off a chair so that I could sit down. She stopped when I laughed, followed my gaze, and said, “Oh. I forget how awful that must look to strangers. No one ever sees it but me.”

I laughed again. “No, this is who you are. This is what I wanted to see.” I drew a deep breath, assuring myself that she was still free of me, still unaddicted. She was, and that was a good thing, although it felt like a flaw I should fix at once.

“I write poetry,” she said. She almost seemed embarrassed about it. “I’ve published three books. Poetry doesn’t really pay, but I enjoy writing it.”

I took some of the books off the sofa and piled them on the chair she had been clearing for me, then took her hand and drew her to the sofa. She sat with me even though she didn’t want to—or she didn’t want

to want to. I felt that she was teaching me about herself every moment. I turned her to face me and just enjoyed looking at her. She had waist-length, dark-brown hair with many strands of gray. Her eyes were the same dark brown as her hair, and the flesh at the corners of them was indented with arrays of fine lines—the only lines on her face. She was a little heavier than was good for her. Plump might have been the best word to describe her. It made her face full and round. She wore no makeup at all—not even lipstick. She had been at home, relaxing without her family around her.

After a moment, I leaned against her, put my head on her shoulder, and she put her arm around me, then took it away, then put it back. She smelled remarkably enticing.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“I don’t either,” I said. “But the things I don’t understand are probably not the same ones giving you trouble. How long do we have before your family comes home?”

“They’re visiting my son-in-law’s family in Portland. They won’t be home until tomorrow.” The moment she said this, she began to look nervous, as though she was afraid of what I might make of her solitude, her vulnerability.

“Good,” I said. “I need to talk to you, tell you my story, hear yours. Then I have something to ask of you.”

“Who are you?” she demanded. “What’s your name? What . . . What ...?” “What am I?”

“. . . yes.” She looked away, embarrassed.

I pulled her down to a comfortable level and bit her gently, then hard enough to start blood flowing on its own so that I could be lazy and just take it as it came. After a while, I said, “You told me I was a vampire.”

She had not objected to anything I’d done even when I climbed onto her lap, straddled her, and rested against her, lapping occasionally at the blood. She put her arms around me and held me against her as though I might try to escape.

“You are a vampire,” she said. “Although according to what I’ve read, you’re supposed to be a tall, handsome, fully grown white man. Just my luck. But you must be a vampire. How could you do this if you weren’t? How could I let you do it? How could it feel so good when it should be disgusting and painful? And how could the wound heal so quickly and without scars?”

“You don’t believe in vampires.”

“I didn’t use to. And I never thought they would be so small and ... like you.” “I’ve been called an elfin little girl.”

“That’s exactly right.”

“In a way, it is. I’m a child according to the standards of my people, but my people age more slowly than yours, and I have an extra problem. I may be older than you are in years. As far as my memory is concerned, though, I was born just a few weeks ago.”

“But how can that—?”

“Shh.” I started to get off her lap, and she tried to hold me where I was. “No,” I said. “Let me go.” She released me, and I sat beside her and leaned against her.

“Three, maybe four weeks ago,” I began, “I woke up in a shallow cave a few miles from here. I’m being vague about when and where because I don’t know enough to be exact. During my first days in the cave I was blind and in and out of consciousness. I was in a lot of pain, and I had no memory of anything that had happened before the cave.”

“Amnesia.”

“Yes.” I told her the rest of it, told her about killing Hugh Tang, but not about eating him, told her about hunting deer and eating them. I told her about Wright finding me and taking me in, and about finding my father and brothers. I told her the little I knew about the Ina and about what an Ina community was like. I told her I wasn’t human, and she believed me. She wasn’t even surprised.

“You want me to be part of such a community?” she asked. “I do, but not yet.”

“Not . . . yet?”

“My father is having a house built for me. Come to me when the house is ready. I’ll see to it that there’s

space for your books and other things—a place where you can write your poetry.” “How long?”

“I don’t know. No more than a year.”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to wait that long.”

I was surprised. I had been careful to let her make up her own mind, and I had believed she would come with me, but not so quickly. “I have nothing to offer you now,” I said. “I’ll be living in rooms in my father’s house. He says you can come, but when I saw what you have here, I thought you’d want to wait until you could have something similar with me.”

“I have no patience,” she said. “I want to be with you now.”

I liked that more than I could have said, and yet I wondered about it. “Why?” I asked her. I had no idea what she would say.

She blinked at me, looked surprised, hurt. “Why do you want me?”

I thought about that, about how to say it in a way she might understand. “You have a particularly good scent,” I said. “I mean, not only do you smell healthy, you smell ... open, wanting, alone. When I came to you the first time, you were afraid at first, then glad and welcoming, excited, but you didn’t smell of other people.”

She frowned. “Do you mean that I smelled lonely?” “I think so, yes, longing, needing . . .”

“I didn’t imagine that loneliness had a scent.” “Why do you want me?” I repeated.

She hugged me against her. “I am lonely,” she said. “Or I was until you came to me that first time. You’ve made me feel more than I have since I was a girl. I hoped you would go on wanting me—or at least that’s what I hoped when I wasn’t worrying that I was losing my mind, imagining things.” She hesitated. “You need me,” she said. “No one else does, but you do.”

“Your family?”

“Not really, no. This is my home, and I’m glad to be able to help my daughter and her husband by having them come live here, but since my husband died, all I’ve really cared about—all I’ve been able to care about—is my poetry.”

“You would be able to bring only some of your things to my father’s house,” I said. “A few boxes of books, some clothing, and I’ll be fine.”

I looked around the room doubtfully. “Wright and I will be moving tomorrow. I’ll need your telephone number so I can reach you. If you don’t change your mind, we’ll come back for you and your things the Friday after next.”

“Promise me.” “I have.”

“Will you stay with me tonight?” “For a while. Have you eaten?”

“Eaten?” She looked at me. “I haven’t even thought of eating, although I suppose I’d better. Do you eat regular food at all, ever?”

“No.”

“All right. Come keep me company in the kitchen while I microwave something to eat. I don’t think I

should miss very many meals if I’m going to be with you.”

“Exactly right,” I said, and enjoyed every moment of the flesh-to-flesh contact when she bent and kissed me.

ten

No one came for us on Friday.

When the night was half gone, Wright tried to phone Iosif—tried each of the numbers he had given us. At first, there was no answer, then there was a computerized voice saying that the number he was calling

was out of service. He made several fruitless attempts. “We need to go there,” I said.

He looked at me for a moment, then nodded. “Let’s go,” he said.

I grabbed a blanket from the bed, thinking that we might have to spend part of the coming day in the car. I didn’t want to think about why that might happen, but I wanted to be ready for it. Thoughts of the burned-out ruin that had been my mothers’community jumped into my mind, and I couldn’t ignore them.

Wright was not certain how to reach Iosif ’s community. His maps didn’t show the tiny community, of course. Iosif ’s card contained a sketch of a map that turned out to be hard to follow. We got onto what seemed to be the right side-road, but found no turn off where Wright had expected one. We tried another side road, then another, but still did not find the community.

Finally, I did what I hadn’t wanted to do.

“This is no good,” I said. “We’re in the right general area. Find a place to park, and I’ll go out and find the community. I can find it by scent if not by sight.”

He didn’t want me to go. He wanted to keep driving around or, if necessary, go home and try again during the day.

I shook my head. “Find a safe place and park. I need to go to them and see that they’re all right. And if

... if they’re not all right, if this is anything like what happened to my mothers, you can’t be there. If my father or my brothers are injured, they’ll be dangerous. They might not be able to stop themselves from killing you.”

“And eating me,” he said. He didn’t even make it a question.

I said nothing for a moment, stared at him. Had the human symbionts told him or had he guessed? I hated that he knew but clearly, he did know. “Yes,” I admitted finally. “That’s probably what would happen.

Park and wait for me.”

He parked on the highway at a place where the road’s shoulder was wide. “This will do as well as anywhere,” he said. “If anyone wants to know what I’m up to, I got sleepy and decided to play it safe and catch a nap.”

“If you have to move,” I said, “wait for me somewhere south of here along the road. I’ll find you. If you have to leave the area—”

“I won’t leave you!”

“Wright, hear me. Do this. If you’re in danger from the police, from an Ina, from anyone at all, leave me, go home. I’ll get there when I can. Don’t look for me. Go home.”

He shook his head, but he would do it. After a moment, he said, “You honestly believe you could find your way to my cabin from here?”

“I could,” I said. “If I have to, I will.” I took his hand from where it was still resting on the steering wheel. Such a huge hand. I kissed it then turned to go.

“Shori!” he said.

I had opened the door to get out of the car, but his tone stopped me. “Feed,” he said.

He was right. I was probably going to have to cover a few miles and face I-didn’t-know-what. Best to be at full strength. I shut the door and kneeled on the seat to reach him. He lifted me over onto his lap, kissed me, and waited.

I bit him deeply and felt him spasm and go hard under me. I hadn’t bitten him this way for a week, hadn’t taken a full meal from him. I had hoped we would share this night in our new quarters. I liked to take my time when I truly fed from him, tear sounds from him, exhaust him with pleasure, enjoy his body as well

as his blood. But not now. I took his blood quickly, rocking against him, then stayed for just a few minutes more, licking the wound to begin its healing, comforting him, comforting myself. Finally I hugged him and got out of the car. “Stay safe,” I said.

He nodded. “You too.”

I left him and began to run. We were in the right general area but were, I thought, south of our target. Wright had turned off too soon. I ran along the road, alert for cars and for a telltale wisp of scent. I was moving in a generally northerly direction through woods, alongside a river that sometimes veered away from the road and sometimes came close to it. I passed the occasional house, cluster of houses, or farm, but these were strictly human places.

After a while I did catch a scent. I didn’t bother about finding the side-road. I followed the scent

cross-country through the woods, past a house that had been almost completely hidden by trees. I didn’t care about private property or rugged terrain. All I cared about were the scents drifting in the air and what they could tell me. I stopped every now and then to take a few deep breaths, turning into the wind, sorting through the various scents. Running, I might miss something. Standing still, eyes closed, breathing deeply, I could sort through far more scents—plant, animal, human, mineral—than I wanted to bother with.

There was a gradual change. After a while, what I smelled most was smoke—old smoke, days old, and

ash clinging to the trees, stirred up by my feet, by the feet of animals, by cars on the narrow little roads I

crossed.

Smoke and burned flesh. Human flesh and Ina flesh.

When I found my father’s and brothers’ homes, they looked much like the ruin of my mothers’ community. The buildings had been completely destroyed, burned to rubble, and then trampled by many feet. My father and my brothers had been there, but they were gone now. I could smell death, but I could not see it. I did not know yet who had died and who had survived. Someone had come for my male family, and whoever it was had been as thorough as they had when they came for my mothers and my sisters.

The place that had been Iosif’s community was full of strange, bad smells—the scents of people who should not have been there, who had nothing to do with Iosif or his people. Whose scent was I finding? The arsonists? Firemen? The police? Neighbors? All of these, probably.

I stood amid the rubble and looked around, trying to understand. Was Iosif dead? And Stefan? I hadn’t even met my other three brothers and their symbionts. All dead? None wounded and surviving in hiding?

Then I remembered that some of Iosif ’s symbionts worked away from the community, even lived away from it part of the time. Did they know what had happened? If they didn’t, they would be coming back here soon. They would come, needing Iosif or one of my brothers. When they found out what had happened, they would have to find another Ina to bond with just to survive. Could I help? Was I too young? I was definitely too ignorant. Surely they would know of other Ina communities. If they had come home and found only rubble, they might already have taken refuge in some other community.

When had the fire happened? Days ago, surely. The place was cold. Even the freshest human smells I

found were all at least a day or two old.

Who had done this and why? First my mothers’community, now my father’s. Even Iosif had had no idea who attacked my mothers. He had been deeply angry and frustrated at his own ignorance. If he didn’t know, how could I find out?

Someone had targeted my family. Someone had succeeded in killing all of my relatives. And if this had to do with the experiments that had given me my useful human characteristics—what else could it be?—then it was likely that I was the main target.

I began to run again, to circle the community, stopping often to sample scents more thoroughly and hunting for fresh scents, any hint that some member of my family might be alive, hiding, healing. I found the narrow private road that led to where the houses had been, and I followed it out to a two-lane public road. There, I closed my eyes and turned toward where Wright was waiting. I could get back to him in half an hour.

But I didn’t want to go back to him yet. I wanted to learn all I could, all that my eyes and my nose could tell me.

I went back to the rubble—charred planks, blackened jagged sections of wall, broken glass, standing chimneys, burned and partially burned furniture, appliances, broken ceramic tile in what had been the kitchens and the bathrooms, unrecognizable lumps of blackened plastic, a spot where an Ina had died . .

.

I stood still at that place, trying to recognize the scent, realizing that I couldn’t because it was the wrong scent, that of a dead male whom I had not met, burned to ash and bone, definitely dead.

I had not known him. He must have been one of my brothers but one I had not met. He had died in one of the three houses I had not entered.

I stared at the spot for a long time and caught myself wondering what the Ina did with their dead. What were their ceremonies? I knew something about human funeral services from my vampire research. I had read through a great deal of material about death, burial, and what could go wrong to cause the dead to become undead. It was all nonsense as far as I was concerned, but it had taught me that proper respect for the dead was important to humans. Was it important to Ina as well?

What had been done with the remains of both my male and my female families? Had the police taken them? Where would they take them? I would have to talk to Wright about that and perhaps to Theodora. She worked at a library. If she didn’t know, she would know how to find out.

But if I somehow got the remains, what could I do but bury them or scatter their ashes after, perhaps, a more thorough cremation? I didn’t know any Ina rituals, any Ina religion, any living Ina people.

I found another place where someone had died—a symbiont this time, a female. I had not met her. I was grateful for that. After a while, I made myself go to the house that had been my father’s. I walked through it slowly, found two spots where symbionts I did not know had died. Then I found two that I did know—the two men I had met in Iosif’s huge front room, Nicholas and Yale. I stood for a long time, staring at the spots where the two men had died. I had not known them, but they had been healthy and alive only a week before. They had welcomed me, had been friendly to Wright. It did not seem possible that they were dead now, reduced to two smudges of burned flesh that smelled of Iosif and of their own individual human scents.

Then, in the remains of what must have been a large bedroom, I found a place that smelled so strongly of Iosif that it had to be the spot where he died. Had he tried to get out? He was not near a window or a door. I got the impression that he was lying flat on his back when he died. Had he been shot? I found no bullets, but perhaps the police had taken them away. And if there had ever been a smell of gunpowder, it had been overwhelmed by all the other smells of burning and death. Iosif had certainly burned. A small quantity of his ashes were still here, mixed with the ashes of the house and its contents.

He was definitely dead.

I stood over the spot, eyes closed, hugging myself.

Iosif was dead. I’d hardly begun to know him, and he was dead. I had begun to like him, and he was dead.

I folded to the ground in anguish, knowing that I could do nothing to help him, nothing to change the situation. Nothing at all. My family was destroyed, and I couldn’t even grieve for them properly because I remembered so little.

“Shori?”

I jumped up and back several steps. I had been so involved with my thoughts and feelings that I had let someone walk right up to me. I had heard nothing, smelled nothing.

At least I could see that I had startled the person who had surprised me. I had moved fast, and it was dark. She was looking around as though her eyes had not followed my movement, as though she did not know where I had gone. Then she spotted me. By then I understood that she was human and that she didn’t see very well in the dark, that she smelled of my father and that I knew who she was.

“Brook,” I said.

She looked around at the devastation, then looked at me, tears streaming down her face.

I went to her and hugged her, as she had hugged me when we met. She hugged back, crying even harder.

“Were you here when this happened?” she asked finally. “No. We were supposed to move in tonight.”

“Do you know if . . . ? I mean, did you see Iosif?”

I looked back at the place where Iosif had died, where a very small quantity of his ashes still remained. “He didn’t survive,” I said.

She stared at me silently, frowning as though I had said words she could not understand. Then she began to make a noise. It began as a moan and went on to become an impossibly long, ragged scream. She fell to the ground, gasping and moaning. “Oh God,” she cried. “Oh God, Iosif, Iosif.”

Someone else was coming.

Brook had come in a car, I realized. I had been so focused on my own distress that I had missed not

only the sound and smell of a person walking up to me, but the noise of a car as well. Now someone else was coming from the car—another human female. This one had a handgun, and she was aiming it at me.

I jumped away from Brook, ran wide around her, leaping through the rubble as fast as I could. I reached the woman with the gun before she could track me and shoot me, and I knocked the gun from her hand before she could fire and grabbed her. I absolutely did not want to spend another day and night recovering from a bullet wound.

This woman was also someone I’d met—Celia, one of Stefan’s symbionts. She had been in his kitchen with two other women whose scents I was glad not to have found.

“Celia, it’s Shori,” I said into her ear as she struggled against me. “Celia!” She lifted me completely off the ground, but she couldn’t break my hold on her. “It’s Shori,” I repeated in her ear. “Stop struggling. I don’t want to hurt you.”

After a moment, she stopped struggling. “Shori?” “Yes.”

“Did you do this?”

That surprised me into silence. Celia was one of the two black women in the kitchen. She had seemed friendly and interesting. Now there was nothing but grief and anger in her expression.

Brook came up at that moment and said, “Celia, it’s Shori. You know she didn’t do this.” “I know what she did to Hugh!” Celia said.

I let go of her. Hugh Tang was symbiont with her to Stefan. They were family.

Celia jabbed her fist up, clearly meaning to hit me. I dodged the first jab, then grabbed one fist, then the other. She tried to kick me, so I tripped her and took her to the ground.

She lay stunned for a moment, breathless and gasping since I fell on top of her. She glared up at me. I couldn’t think of anything helpful to say so I kept quiet. She and I lay on the ground. After a moment, she looked away from me and her muscles relaxed.

“Let me up,” she said.

I didn’t move or loosen my hold on her. “What do you want me to do, say ‘please?’”

“I truly don’t want to hurt you,” I said, “but if you attack me again, I will.” After a moment, she nodded. “Let me go. I won’t bother you.”

I took her at her word and let her up. “She says Iosif ’s dead,” Brook said.

Immediately, Celia confronted me. “How do you know he’s dead? Were you here when all this happened? Did you see?”

I took both their hands, although Celia tried to snatch hers away, and led them over to the place where Iosif had burned. “He died here,” I told them. “I can smell that much. I don’t know whether it was only the fire or whether he was shot, too. I couldn’t find any bullets. But he died here. A few of his ashes are still here.”

I looked at one woman, then the other. Both now had tears streaming down their faces. They believed me. “I don’t remember anything about Ina funerals or beliefs about death,” I said. “Do either of you know other Ina families—Iosif ’s mothers perhaps—who would be able to do what should be done?”

“His mothers were killed in Russia during World War II,” Brook said. She and Celia looked at one another. “We went to Seattle to shop and visit our relatives. That’s why we weren’t here. The only Ina phone numbers I know from memory are the numbers of several of the people who lived here and some of your mothers’ phone numbers.” She looked at Celia.

“I knew some of our community’s numbers and Shori’s mothers’ numbers too,” Celia said. “That’s all.” It occurred to me then for no reason I could put my finger on that Celia was much younger than

Brook—young enough to be Brook’s daughter. Brook was only a few years younger than Theodora but

except for very small signs, she appeared to be the same age as Celia. That, I realized, was what happened when a human became an Ina symbiont while she was still young. Wright would age slowly the way Brook had.

I pulled my thoughts back to the rubble we stood in. “When did you go into Seattle?” I asked. Celia answered, “Five nights ago.”

“I won’t be able to visit my relatives many more times,” Brook said. “My sister and my mother are aging a lot faster than I am, and they keep staring at me and asking me what my secret is.”

Celia and I both raised an eyebrow and looked at her in the same way. She noticed it, glanced at the spot where Iosif had died, and whispered, “Oh God.”

I took a deep breath, glanced at Celia, then left them and walked toward Stefan’s house. They followed, saying nothing. Then they stood out-side the site of the house while I walked through the rooms, finding

five symbionts, including the two I’d met when I met Celia. And I found a misshapen bullet inside a charred plank. I had to break apart what was left of the plank to get at it, but once I had it, I found a faint blood scent. One of the symbionts. The bullet had passed through the man’s body and gone into the wood.

Finally, I found the place where Stefan’s body had fallen and burned in one of the bedrooms near part of the window frame. Had be been trying to get out or . . . might he have been firing a gun at his attackers? I couldn’t be certain, but it seemed likely to me that he died fighting against whoever had done this.

I went back to Celia and shook my head. “I’m sorry. He didn’t survive either.” She glared at me as though I’d killed him—a look filled with grief and rage. “Where,” she demanded. “Where did he die?”

“Over here.”

They both followed me to the place where Stefan had died curled on his side, limbs drawn tight against his body.

“Here,” I said.

Celia looked down, then knelt and put her hands flat in the ashes, taking up some of what remained of Stefan. For a long time, she said nothing. I glanced to the east where the sky was growing a little more light.

After a while, Celia looked up at Brook. “He was shooting back at them,” she said. “He could have made himself do it, even if they came during the day. Days were hard on him, but he could wake up enough to shoot back.”

Brook nodded. “He could have.” “That’s what I thought,” I said.

Celia glared at me, then closed her eyes, tears spilling down her face. “You can’t tell for sure?”

“No. But I know there was shooting. I found a bullet that smelled of one of the other members of his household. And Stefan’s position . . . somehow it seemed that he might have been shooting back. I hope he hit some of them.”

“He had guns,” Celia said. “Iosif didn’t like guns, but Stefan did.” It hadn’t helped him survive.

“It’s almost dawn,” I said. “Will you drive me back to where Wright is waiting? I can direct you.” They looked at each other, then at me.

“Drive me to Wright, then follow us to his cabin,” I said. “Although we’ll have to find another place soon. The cabin is almost too small for two people.”

“Iosif owns—owned—a house outside Arlington,” Brook said. “Some of us used it to commute to jobs or to entertain visiting family members. There are three bedrooms, three baths. It’s a nice place, and it’s ours. We have a right to be there.”

I nodded, relieved. “That would be better. Could other symbionts be there already?” Brook looked at Celia.

“I don’t use it,” Celia said. “I haven’t kept up with the schedule.”

“I don’t think anyone’s there,” Brook said. “If there is ... if some of us are there, Shori, they need you, too.”

I nodded. “Take me back to Wright. Then we’ll go there.”

During the sad, silent trip back to Wright’s car, I had time to be afraid. These two women’s lives were in my hands, and yet I had no idea how to save them. Of course I would take their blood. I didn’t want to, but I would. They smelled like my father and my brother. They smelled almost Ina, and that was enough to make them unappetizing. And yet I would make myself take their blood. Would that be enough? Iosif had told me almost nothing. What else should I do? I could talk to them. What I told them to do, they would try to do, once I’d taken their blood. Would that be enough?

If it wasn’t, they were dead.

eleven

To get to the house that my father had bought for his symbionts and my brothers’, we followed the highway through dense woods, past the occasional lonely house or farm, past side roads and alongside the river. I asked Wright whether the river had a name.

“That’s the north fork of the Stillaguamish,” he told me. “Don’t ask me what ‘Stillaguamish’ means because I have no idea. But it’s the name of a local Native American tribe.”

Eventually we reached more populated areas where houses and farms were more visible, scattered along the highway. There were still many trees, but now there were more smells of people and domestic animals nearby. In particular, there was the scent of horses. I recognized it from the time I’d spent prowling around Wright’s neighborhood. Horses made noises and moved around restlessly when I got close enough to them to be noticed. My scent apparently disturbed them. Yet their scent had become

one of the many that meant “home” to me.

Wright and I followed the women’s car talking quietly. I told him what had happened to my father’s community and that Celia and Brook had survived because they were in Seattle.

He shook his head. “I don’t know what to make of this,” he said. “Your kind have some serious enemies. What we need to do is find some place safe where we can hunker down, pool information, and figure out what to do. There’s probably a way to tip the police to these people if we can just figure out who they are.”

As he spoke, I realized that I was willing to go further than that. If we found the people who had murdered both my male and my female families, I wanted to kill them, had to kill them. How else could I keep my new family safe?

My new family ...

“Wright,” I said softly and saw him glance at me. “Celia and Brook will be with us now. They have to be.”

There was a moment of silence. Then the said, “They’re not going to die?” “Not if I can take them over. I’m going to try.”

“You’ll feed from them.”

“Yes.” I hesitated. “And I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t remember anything about this. Iosif told me it had to be done when an Ina died and left symbionts, but he didn’t tell me much. He couldn’t know . . . how soon I would need the information.”

“Maybe Brook and Celia know.”

I turned away from him, looked out the window. The sun was well up now, and in spite of the threatening rain clouds, it was getting bright enough to bother me. I reached into the backseat, grabbed the blanket I had brought, and wrapped myself in it. Once I’d done that, except for my eyes, I was almost

comfortable.

“Look in the glove compartment there,” Wright said gesturing. “There should be a pair of sunglasses.” I looked at the glove compartment, decided how it must open, opened it, and found the glasses. They

were too big for my face, and I had to keep pushing them up my nose, but they were very dark, and I immediately felt better. “Thank you,” I said and touched his face. He needed to shave. I rubbed the brown stubble and found even that good to touch.

He took my hand and kissed it, then said, “Why don’t you want to ask Brook and Celia what they know?”

I sighed. Of course he had not forgotten the question. “Embarrassment,” I said. “Pride. Imagine a doctor who has to ask her patient how to perform a life-saving operation.”

“Not a confidence builder,” he said. “I can see that. But if they know anything, you need to find out.” “I do.” I drew a deep breath. “Brook is older. Maybe I’ll feed from her first and find out what she

knows.”

“She can’t be much older. They look about the same age.” “Do they? Brook is older by about twenty years.”

“That much?” He looked skeptical. “How can you tell?”

I thought about it. “Her skin shows it a little. I guess it’s as much the way she smells as the way she

looks. She smells . . . much more Ina that Celia does. She’s been with my father longer than Celia’s been with my brother. I think Celia is about your age.”

He shook his head. “Brook doesn’t have any wrinkles, not even those little lines around the eyes.” “I know.”

“No gray either. Is her hair dyed?” “It isn’t, no.”

“Jesus, am I still going to look that young in twenty years?”

I smiled. “You should.”

He glanced at me and grinned, delighted. “I think we’re here,” I said.

The car ahead of us had turned and pulled into the driveway of a long, low ranch house. There were no other houses in sight. We turned down the same driveway, and when Brook stopped, Wright said, “Hang on a moment.” He jumped out and went to speak to the two women. I listened curiously. He

wanted them to pull into the garage that I could see farther back on the property. It bothered him that this house was connected with Iosif ’s family. He thought the killers might know about it.

“You heard that didn’t you?” he asked me when he came back.

I nodded. “You may be right. I hoped we could settle here for a while, but maybe we shouldn’t. Even the police might come here to look for information about Iosif.”

He pulled the car into the garage alongside Brook’s. The garage had room enough for three cars, but there was no other car in it. “True,” he said. “But we won’t be able to use my cabin for long either. I already told my aunt and uncle that I was leaving.” He hesitated. “Actually, they sort of told me I had to go. They know ... well they think that I’ve been sneaking girls in.”

I laughed in spite of everything.

“My aunt listened at the door a few nights ago. She told my uncle she heard ‘sex noises.’ My uncle told me he understands, said he was young once. But he says I’ve got to go because my aunt doesn’t understand.”

I shook my head. “You’re an adult. What do they expect?”

He pulled me against him for a moment. “Just be glad they haven’t seen you.”

I was. I got out of the car and stood waiting, wrapped in my blanket, in the shadow of the garage until Brook had opened the back door, then I hurried inside. There was, even from the back, not another house in sight. There were other people around. I could smell them. But they were a comfortable distance away, and the many trees probably helped make their houses less visible.

Inside, the rooms were clean, and there were dishes in the cupboard. There were canned and frozen foods, towels, and clean bedding.

“The rule,” Brook said, “is to leave the place clean and well-stocked. People tend to do that. Tended to do that.”

“Let’s settle somewhere,” I said to Celia and Brook. “I need to talk with you both.”

Wright had walked down the hallway to look out the side door. Now he was wandering back, looking into each of the bedrooms. He looked up at me when I spoke.

I shrugged. “I changed my mind,” I told him.

“About what?” Celia demanded. I looked at her and noticed that she was beginning to sweat. The house was cool. As soon as we got in, Brook had complained that it was cold. She had reset the thermostat from fifty-five to seventy, but the house had not even begun to warm up. Yet Celia was hot. And she was afraid.

I waited until we’d all found chairs in the living room. “About our becoming a family,” I said. Both women looked uncomfortable.

“If you know any other Ina, and you would prefer to go to them, you should do it now, while you can,” I

said. “If not, if you’re going to join with me, then I need your help.”

“We’re here,” Celia said. She wiped her forehead with a hand that trembled a little. “You know we don’t know anyone else.”

“And you know I have amnesia. I have no memory of seeing or hearing about the handling of symbionts whose Ina has died. Iosif told me a little, but anything either of you know—anything at all—you should tell me, for your own sakes.”

Brook nodded. “I wondered what you knew.” She took a deep breath. “It scares me that you’re a child, but at least you’re female. That might save us.”

“Why?” I asked.

She looked surprised. “You don’t know that either?” She shook her head and sighed deeply. “Venom from Ina females is more potent than venom from males. That’s what Iosif told me. It has something to do with the way prehistoric Ina females used to get and keep mates.” She smiled a little. “Now females find mates for their sons, and males for their daughters, and it’s all very civilized. But long ago, groups of sisters competed to capture groups of brothers, and the competition was chemical. If a group of sisters had the venom to hold a group of brothers, they were more likely to have several healthy children, and their sons would have a safe haven with their fathers when they came of age. And their daughters were more likely to have even more potent venom.”

“The sons would have more potent venom, too,” Wright said.

“Yes, but among the Ina, the females competed. It’s like the way males have competed among humans. There was a time when a big, strong man might push other men aside and marry a lot of wives, pass on his genes to a lot of children. His size and strength might be passed to his daughters as well as his sons, but his daughters were still likely to be smaller and weaker than his sons.

“Ina children, male and female, wind up with more potent venom, but the female’s is still more potent

than the male’s. In that sense, the Ina are kind of a matriarchy. And a little thing like Shori might be a real power.” She took a deep breath and glanced at Celia. “Ina men are sort of like us, like symbionts. They become addicted to the venom of one group of sisters. That’s what it means to be mated. Once they’re addicted, they aren’t fertile with other females, and from time to time, they need their females. Need . . . like I need Iosif.”

She knew more about Ina reproduction and Ina history than I did. She should, of course, after so many years with Iosif. But still, hearing it from her made me uncomfortable. I tried to ignore my discomfort. “You were with Iosif a long time,” I said.

“Yeah.” She blinked and looked off into the distance at nothing. “Twenty-two years,” she said. She covered her face with her hands, curled her body away from me on the chair, crying. Like Celia, she was a lot bigger than I was, but for a moment, she seemed to be a small, helpless person in deep distress. Yet I didn’t want to touch her. I would have to soon enough.

She said through her tears, “I always knew that I would die before him and that was good. I was so willing to accept him when he asked me. God, I loved him. And I thought it meant I would never be

alone. My father died when I was eight. I had a brother who drowned when he was seven. And my sister’s husband died of cancer when they’d been married for only two years. I thought I had finally found a way to avoid all that pain—a way never to be alone again.” She was crying again.

“I’m Iosif’s daughter,” I said. “I hope that my venom is strong and that you’ll come to me. It won’t be the same, I know, but you won’t be alone. I want you with me.”

“Why should you?” Celia demanded. “You don’t know us.”

“With my amnesia, I don’t know anyone,” I said. “I’m getting to know Wright. And there’s a woman named Theodora. I’m getting to know her. And, Celia, I’m only beginning to know myself.”

She looked at me for several seconds, then shuddered and turned away. “I hate this,” she said. “Damn, I

hate this!”

And this was the way a symbiont behaved when she was missing her Ina. Or at least this was the way Celia behaved—suspicious, short-tempered, afraid. Brook and Celia were both grieving, but Celia must have been longer without Stefan than Brook had been without Iosif.

I got up and went to Celia, trying to ignore the fact that she clearly didn’t want me to touch her. She was sensible enough not to protest when I took her hand, drew her to her feet, and led her away into one of the bedrooms.

“I hate this,” she said again and turned her face away from me as I encouraged her to lie down on the huge bed. She smelled more of Stefan than she had before, and I truly didn’t want to touch her. Where I would have enjoyed tasting Theodora or Wright, I had to force myself to touch Celia.

She turned back to face me and caught my expression. “You don’t want to do it,” she said. She was crying again, her body stiff with anger.

“Of course I don’t,” I said, and I slid into bed next to her. “Stefan has posted olfactory keep-out signs all over you. Didn’t you ever wonder why Ina can live together without going after one another’s symbionts?”

“It happens sometimes.”

“But only with new symbionts, right?”

“You have amnesia, and yet you know that?”

“I’m alive, Celia. My senses work. I can’t help but know.” I unbuttoned her shirt to bare her neck. “What I don’t know is how this will be for you. Not good, maybe.”

“Scares me,” she admitted.

I nodded. “Bear it. Bear it and keep still. Later, when I can, I’ll make it up to you.” She nodded. “You remind me of Stefan a little. He told me I reminded him of you.”

I bit her. I was more abrupt than I should have been, but her scent was repelling me more and more. I

had to do it quickly if I were going to be able to do it at all.

She gave a little scream, then frantically tried to push me away, tried to struggle free, tried to hit me . . . I had to use both my arms and my legs to hold her still, had to wrap myself all around her. If she’d been any bigger, I would have had to knock her unconscious. In fact, that might have been kinder. I kept

waiting for her to accept me, the way strangers did when I climbed through their windows and bit them. But she couldn’t. And strangely, it never occurred to me to detach for a moment and order her to be still. I would have done that with a stranger, but I never thought to do it with her.

She managed not to scream anymore after that first strangled sound, but she struggled wildly, frantically until I stopped taking her blood. I had only tasted her, taking much less than a full meal. It was as much as I could stand. I hoped it was enough.

I gave her a moment to understand that I had stopped, and when she stopped struggling, I let her go. “Did I hurt you?” I asked.

She was crying silently. She cringed as I leaned over to lick the bite and take the blood that was still coming. She put her hands on my shoulders and pushed but managed not to push hard. I went on licking the bite. She needed that to help with healing.

“I always liked that so much when Stefan did it,” she said.

“It should be enjoyable,” I said, although I wasn’t enjoying myself at all. I was doing what seemed to be my duty. “And it helps your wounds heal quickly and cleanly. It will be enjoyable again someday soon.”

She relaxed a little, and I thought I might be reaching her. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe you’ve got some kind of keep-out sign on you, too—as far as I’m concerned, I mean. I panicked. I couldn’t control myself. Your bite didn’t hurt, but it was . . . it was horrible.” She drew away from me with a shudder.

“But do you feel better?” I asked. “Better?”

“You’ve stopped shaking.”

“Oh. Yeah. Thanks . . . I guess.”

“I don’t know exactly how long it will be before we can take pleasure in one another, but I think it’s important that you do feel better now. Next time will be easier and more comfortable.” Now that I’d bitten her, it would. It seemed best to tell her that.

“Hope so.”

I left her alone in the huge bed. She wouldn’t have been able to sleep if I’d stayed. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep if I’d stayed.

I went to the bathroom, washed, and then just stayed there. I knew I had to go to Brook soon. The longer I waited, the harder it would be. Maybe Brook would have an easier time since she hadn’t seemed so needy. Or perhaps it would be worse because she’d been with Iosif for so long. Was

twenty-two years a long time when she would live to be maybe two hundred? If only I knew what I was doing.

I sat on the side of the bathtub for a long time, hearing Celia cry until she fell asleep, hearing Wright moving around the kitchen, hearing Brook breathing softly in one of the bedrooms. She was not asleep, but she was not moving around either. She was sitting or lying down—probably waiting for me.

I got up and went to her.

“I thought you could wait,” she said when she saw me. “If you wanted to, you could wait until tomorrow.

I mean, I’m all right now. I’m not getting the shakes or anything.”

I didn’t sigh. I didn’t say anything. I only went to the bed where she lay atop the bedspread and lay down beside her. Her scent was so much like my father’s that if I closed my eyes, it was almost as though I were lying in bed beside Iosif, and even though I had begun to trust Iosif and even to like him, I had not found him appetizing in any way at all.

“We will get through this,” I said. “What you feel now will end.” She sighed and closed her eyes. “I hope so,” she said. “Do it.”

I did it. And when I was finished, I left her crying into a pillow. She was no more able to take comfort from me than Celia had been, and there was no comfort for me in either of them. I went out, hoping to find the comfort I needed with Wright. He was in the living room, eating a ham sandwich and a bag of microwave popcorn and watching a television that I had not noticed before. He aimed the remote and stopped the program as I came in.

“No cable,” he said, “but movies and old TV shows galore.” He gestured toward the shelves of tapes and DVDs in the cabinet. Then, after a moment, he asked, “How are things?”

I shook my head and went to sit next to him on the arm of his chair. I had worried that he would draw away from me, resent my bringing two strangers into our family, but he reached up, lifted me with a hand under one of my arms, and put me on his lap. I made myself comfortable there, his arms around me. I sighed with contentment.

“Things were horrible,” I said. “But they’re better now.”

That was when I heard the people outside, first two of them, then, as I sat up and away from Wright’s chest and the beat of his heart, I heard more. I couldn’t tell how many.

Then I smelled the gasoline.