Fledgling(32)

“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 goodbye. 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.