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 leas
t 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?”
Fledgling Page 9
