Fledgling

by Butler, Octavia

  He sighed. “Even in the most savage of times, when there were Ina family feuds that were like small wars, it almost never happened that we wiped out whole families. What is happening now, what happened to your families, Shori, is rare and terrible.”

  “And by coming here, I’ve brought it to your family,” I said. “I’m sorry for that. I just . . . didn’t know what to do or where else to go. And I was afraid for my symbionts.”

  Hayden nodded, watching me. “I don’t believe my sons’sons would have wanted you to go to anyone else, although you’re already making Daniel’s life uncomfortable.”

  I wasn’t surprised, but I didn’t know what to say. He smiled. “You didn’t know, did you?”

  “I thought I might be. I’m sorry.”

  “You needn’t be. It’s normal. Daniel apologizes for his behavior. He knows you’re much too young to make the kind of commitment he’s thinking of. And your efforts and warnings have kept us safe so far. No one is seriously hurt. What we do next, though . . . well . . .” He sighed. “I suppose we will do what we must. These murders must be stopped.”

  He wouldn’t talk about what he and his family meant to do next. He only told me to keep the books as long as I needed them and to come to him when I wanted more or if I wanted to talk about what I’d read.

  When he was gone, instead of reading more, I went up to where Wright lay sleeping. I undressed and climbed into bed beside him. He awoke enough to curl his body around mine.

  “You okay?” he asked, his chin against the top of my head. “Better,” I said. “Better now.”

  “Do they know who killed your family or, rather, who’s idea it was?”

  “They know one family name, and where they live. The two injured captives can’t be questioned yet.” “Is Victor alive, Shori?”

  “He is.” I swallowed. “Even though he remembers helping to murder both of my families. He even remembers attacking the house at Arlington where you and I and Celia and Brook could have died.”

  “But it wasn’t his idea.”

  “It wasn’t. So far, the Silk family seems to be guilty of all three attacks.” “Silk,” he said. “Interesting name. I wonder if you knew them before.”

  “I don’t think so. None of the Gordons mentioned any connection between them and me, and I think at least one of them would have.”

  “What will be done to them?”

  “I don’t know. Hayden wouldn’t tell me. But I don’t think anything will be done until the other two prisoners are questioned.”

  “You bit them.”

  “I did. It will help them heal quickly.”

  He moved me so that we lay eye-to-eye and took my face between his hands. “It will help you question them.”

  “Of course it will.”

  “What will happen to them after that, to Victor and the other two captives?”

  “When we’ve finished questioning them, I’ll help them forget us because I’m the one who bit them. Then they’ll be sent back to their families.” I rubbed his shoulders. “They’re not anyone’s symbionts, Wright. They’re only someone’s tools. People who never wanted them, never cared about them, kidnapped them and used them to kill my families.”

  He nodded. “I understand that, but . . . they did what they did.” “The Silks are responsible, not Victor and the others.”

  He nodded again. “Okay.”

  He didn’t sound happy. “What?” I asked.

  “I don’t know exactly. I guess I’m just learning more about what I’ve stumbled into and become part of.” I was silent for several seconds, then asked, “Shall I let you alone tonight? I can go sleep with one of the

  others.”

  “Not with Victor?”

  I drew back, staring at him.

  “Where is he?” he asked.

  “At Daniel’s house. Daniel had room for him, and Theodora will be here soon. And ... I didn’t want him here.”

  After a while, he nodded. “Shall I go?”

  “Of course not.” He pulled me against him. He caressed my face, my throat. Then, as he kissed me, he slipped his free hand between my thighs. “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  I shook my head against him. “No, but I want to be close to you anyway.” “Do you? Good. If you taste me, I want you to do it from my thigh.”

  I laughed, surprised. “I’ve heard of doing it that way, although I don’t know whether I ever have. You’ve been talking to someone!”

  “What if I have?”

  I found myself grinning at him. A instant later, I threw the blankets off him and dove for his thigh. He had nothing on, and I had him by the right thigh before he realized I had moved. Then I looked up at him. He looked startled, almost afraid. Then he seemed to catch my mood. He laughed—a deep, good, sweet sound. By touch and scent I found the large, tempting artery. I bit him, took his blood, and rode his leg as he convulsed and shouted.

  The next night, the Gordons and I questioned the other two prisoners. Hayden and Preston questioned them while I prodded and reassured them. I had bitten each of them twice. They trusted me, needed to please me.

  They, too, told us about what sounded like members of the Silk family abducting them at night. One had been in downtown Los Angeles, looking for one of his girls—one of the prostitutes who worked for him. He was angry with her. He didn’t think she was working hard enough, and he meant to teach her a lesson. Hayden had to explain this to me, and at last I found out what a pimp was. The explanation made me wonder what other unsavory things I didn’t remember about human habits.

  The other captive had been on his way to the Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena to pick up his mother who was a nurse there and whose shift was ending. Her car had stopped running the day before, and he had promised to meet her and give her a lift home.

  One prisoner was a pimp. The other was a college student keeping a promise to his mother. Both had been collected by members of the Silk family and sent north to kill my family and me. Neither had any information beyond what Victor had already told us.

  When both captives were unconscious, much stressed by being made to talk about things that they had been ordered not to talk about, the Gordons and I looked at one another. Again, except for the captives, the company was all Ina.

  “What can we do?” I took a deep breath and looked at the younger Gordon males—men who might someday be the fathers of my children. “These people have killed my family. Now they’ve come after you. They’ll probably come after you again.”

  “I believe they will unless we stop them,” Hayden said.

  Daniel nodded once. “So we stop them.”

  “Oh my,” Preston said, his head down, one hand rubbing his forehead. “What else can we do?” Hayden demanded.

  “I know.” Preston glanced at him sadly. “I’m not disagreeing. I’m just thinking about what it will mean, now and in the long run.”

  Hayden made a growling sound low in his throat. “They should have thought about what it would mean.” Wells, one of Daniel’s fathers, said, “I’ve been thinking about it since yesterday. We need to start by

  talking to the Fotopoulos and Braithwaite families, and perhaps the Svoboda and the Dahlman families as

  well. The Dahlmans are related to the Silks through Milo, aren’t they? All these people are related in one way or another to the Silks and to Shori.”

  And I thought, I still have relatives. I didn’t know them, didn’t know whether they knew me. But they were alive. What would that mean?

  “Don’t phone the Dahlmans yet,” Preston said. “Make them your eighth or ninth call. Try the Leontyevs and the Akhmatovas, and perhaps the Marcu and Nagy families.”

  “You believe we’ll have time to bring together a Council of Judgment before they try again to kill us?” Daniel demanded.

  Hayden and Preston looked at one another—the two elderfathers of the Gordons. Apparently they would decide.

  “As soon as we get agreement from seven of the thirteen f
amilies, I’ll call the Silks,” Preston said. “I know Milo Silk, or I thought I did. How he and his sons have gotten involved in all this, I can’t imagine. Anyway, once they’ve been notified that we’re calling a Council of Judgment, that we have the first seven families, they won’t instigate another attack.

  They won’t dare.” “Why not?” I asked.

  Everyone looked at me as though I’d said something very stupid.

  I stared back at them. “My memory goes back a few weeks and no further,” I said. “I ask because I don’t know, and I don’t want to make assumptions about anything this important.” And because I was annoyed. I let my tone of voice say, You should all realize this. I’ve explained it before.

  Hayden said, “If they attack us after we’ve called for a Council, the judgment will automatically go

  against them. Our legal system is ancient and very strong. That part of it in particular is absolute. It’s kept feuds from getting out of control for centuries.”

  “And what does that mean?” I asked. “What would happen to them if they attacked you again?” “The adults would be killed, and their children dispersed among us to become members of other

  families.” He stared down at me. “We would bring the adults to you. You are the person most wronged

  in all this and the only surviving daughter. I think you could manage it.” “Manage . . . I would be their executioner?”

  “You would be, yes. You would bite them and speak to them, command them to take their lives. I

  suspect that you would grant them a gentler death than they deserve.”

  For a moment, I was shocked speechless. Of course I knew I could kill humans directly by destroying their bodies or indirectly by biting them and then telling them to do things that were harmful to them, but kill Ina just by biting them and ordering them to die?

  “I was almost tempted not to tell you,” Hayden said. “Your youth and your amnesia make you both very attractive and very frightening.”

  “I can really do that? Bite another Ina and just ... tell him to kill himself?” They all looked at one another. Preston said, “Hayden, damnit—”

  Hayden held up both hands, palms outward. “She needs to know. We’ve had a chance to see what sort of person she is. And let’s face it, it’s too dangerous for her not to know. If not for the crime that took her memory, she would know.” He looked at me. “When you’re physically mature, you’ll take blood from your mates, and they’ll take blood from you. That’s the way you’ll bond. The only other reason for you to take blood from an Ina male would be to kill him.”

  I thought about that for several seconds, then asked an uncomfortable, but necessary, question: “It wouldn’t work on an Ina female?”

  “It might. Your handling of the human captives says you’re strong. But if you go against another Ina female, you might die. Even if you manage to kill her, you might die, too.”

  I thought about this. It dovetailed with what Brook had told me. “Do you know,” I said, “I have no memory of ever having seen or spoken to an Ina female. I’ve only seen my father, one of my brothers, and you. I try to picture a female, and I can’t.”

  “They learn early to be careful of what they say,” Hayden told me. “It’s one of their first and most important lessons. I believe that’s a lesson you’ve remembered in spite of your amnesia.”

  I nodded. “I was always careful with my symbionts, even before I understood fully why I should be. But now . . . I might have to kill the Silks?”

  “Probably not,” Hayden said. “That kind of thing hasn’t happened in living memory. The Silks will respect the call for a Council of Judgment.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “What can I do now to help?” They were beginning to get up. Some of them took phones from their pockets. Daniel went to the kitchen and brought back a cordless phone for Hayden.

  “Nothing yet,” Hayden told me. “You’ll have to speak at the Council.”

  “All right. But shouldn’t we keep the three captives? Shouldn’t they speak, too?”

  He shook his head. “Who would believe them? By now you could have taken them over completely and taught them to say—and to believe—anything at all.”

  “All right. But why should the Council believe me—or you for that matter?”

  He smiled. “I don’t think they would believe me. I’m 372 years old. I think they might feel that someone my age might be able to lie to them successfully. You’re a child. They’ll assume that they’ll be able to read your body language well enough to know whether or not you’re lying.”

  “Will they be your age?” “Some will be older.”

  I sighed. “They’re probably right then. It doesn’t matter. I haven’t felt inclined to tell lies. So far, my problem is ignorance, not dishonesty.”

  nineteen

  There was a great deal of telephoning, conference calling, faxing, and e-mailing.

  First, what Hayden called “the rule of seven” had to be satisfied. Seven families with whom both the Silks and I share a common ancestor within seven generations of the oldest living Silk or Matthews had to

  agree to send representatives to Punta Nublada for a Council of Judgment that would judge the accusations that I and the Gordon family were making against the Silk family. Once that was done, Preston phoned the Silk family. First Russell Silk, one of the elderfathers, denied all responsibility for

  wiping out my families, denied any knowledge of it. Then Milo Silk, the oldest living family member, came on and he denied everything, too. They had both heard of a mass murder in Washington State but had

  not realized that it involved two Ina communities. They were very sorry for me, of course, but none of it had anything to do with them.

  Preston put the call on speaker phone and let all of us hear it.

  “Nevertheless,” he told Milo Silk, “we’ve heard evidence that your family is responsible, and we’ve called for a Council of Judgment. We’ve met the rule of seven.”

  “This is madness,” Milo argued. “We didn’t do it, Preston. I swear to you. Look, we don’t care for the genetic engineering experiments that the Matthews and Petrescu families have been carrying out, and we’ve made no secret of it, but—”

  “Milo,” Preston said, “this is the required notification. The first seven families are Braithwaite, Fotopoulos, Akhmatova, Leontyev, Rappaport, Nagy, and Svoboda. We will also be asking the Dahlmans, the Silvesters, the Vines, the Westfalls, the Nicolaus, and the Kalands. Do you object to any of these?”

  “I object to all of them,” Milo said angrily. “This is insanity!” “The rule of seven has been met,” Preston repeated.

  After a moment of absolute silence, Russell’s voice replaced Milo’s. “I object to the Vines,” he said. “They are not friends of the Silk family, even though they are related to us. During the ninth century, their family fought ours in a long feud.”

  Preston stared at the floor, thinking. “Will you accept the Marcus?”

  There was another silence, longer this time. Then finally, “Yes. We accept the Marcus. We also object to the Silvesters. Three of my sons had a financial dispute with two of them five years ago. It was not settled amicably.”

  Preston looked at Hayden. Hayden asked, “Will you accept the Wymans?”

  “No!” a third voice said. “Not that pack of wolves. Do you realize—” Then the voice was cut off, and

  there was a long silence. Finally Milo came on again.

  “We will not accept the Wymans,” he said. And after a pause, he said, “Individual animus.” He had a deep, quiet voice that somehow made everything he said sound important.

  “The Andreis?” Preston asked, looking at his own family as though he were asking them. His family offered no objection.

  There was a silent pause from the Silks. Finally, Milo said, “Fine.” “Are you content with the list now?” Preston asked.

  More silence.

  “The Kalands,” Russell said. “We would prefe
r the Morarius.”

  Preston stretched out a long forefinger and pressed the button on the phone marked “hold.” “Objections to the Morarius?” he said.

  The Gordons looked at one another.

  “I don’t like them,” Daniel said. They’re proud people with not that much to be proud of. But I don’t suppose that’s reason enough to object to them.”

  The others shrugged.