Fledgling(48)

“Were all Ina originally based in Romania—Transylvania?”

“No, they’ve been scattered all over Europe and the Middle East for millennia, or so their records say. They claim to have written records that go back more than ten thousand years. Iosif told me about them. I think he believed what he was saying, but I never quite believed him. Ten thousand years!” She shook her head. “Written history just doesn’t go back that far. Anyway, now Ina are scattered all over the world. You just happen to be descended from people who lived in what Iosif used to call ‘vampire country.’ I think some of your ancestors there were outed and executed as vampires a few centuries ago. Iosif used to joke about it in a bitter way. He said that, physically, he and most Ina fit in badly wherever they go—tall, ultrapale, lean, wiry people. They usually looked like foreigners, and when times got bad, they were treated like foreigners—suspected, disliked, driven out, or killed.”

“He told Wright and me that there is an Ina theory that claims the Ina were sent here from another world.”

“Yes, that’s something young Ina have come up with. They read and go to movies and pick up and adapt whatever’s current. For a while, there was an idea that Ina were angels of some kind. And there’s the old standby legend of the Ina being sent here by a great mother goddess. You’re all supposed to be stuck here until you prove yourselves,” she said. “Did Iosif tell you that one?”

“He did,” Wright said. “It’s a little like Christianity.”

“It isn’t, really,” Brook said. “They’re not supposed to go home in some spiritual way after they die. Some future generation of them is supposed to leave this world en masse and go to paradise—or back to the homeworld. It might be mythology or it might be that you and I have finally found—and joined—those extraterrestrial aliens that people keep claiming to spot on lonely back roads.”

Wright laughed. Then he stopped laughing and shook his head. “There’s another intelligent species here on Earth, and they’re vampires. What am I laughing at?”

I took his hand and held it, looking at him. He looked at me, put his head back against the seat, and curled his fingers around my hand.

“Didn’t other Ina visit Iosif?” I asked. “Did you ever meet others?”

She nodded. “That was scary sometimes.”

“Why?”

“Because not everyone treats symbionts as people. I didn’t realize that until I’d been with Iosif for a few years, but it’s true. I remember one guest—actually, he came back recently to negotiate with Iosif for an introduction to you and your sisters. You weren’t old enough yet, but he hoped to win all three of you for himself and his brothers when you came of age. That was never going to happen because your father was smart enough to see what he was.”

“There were three of us?” I said, my mind latching on to this new bit of information about my past, about my family. “I didn’t know that. I asked Iosif, but I was asking him so many questions … he never got around to answering that one.”

“There were three of you. This was not a man Iosif would ever have introduced to you or your sisters. This man liked to … amuse himself with other Ina’s symbionts. He was very careful and protective of his own, but he liked sending them among us with instructions to start trouble, raise suspicions and jealousies, start fights. He liked to watch arguments and fights. His symbionts were so good, so subtle that we didn’t realize what was happening at first. It excited the hell out of him when two of Radu’s symbionts almost killed one another. He got something sexual out of watching. The symbionts would have died if they hadn’t been symbionts—but then, they never would have been endangered if they hadn’t been symbionts.”

“Radu,” I said, remembering that Iosif had mentioned the name.

“Your brothers were Stefan, Vasile, Mihai, and Radu. It was your father’s right to name them, and he named them for the dead—his two brothers and two of his fathers who died in Romania. Your mothers liked plainer, American-sounding names. Your sisters were Barbara and Helen. You were lucky. Your human mother claimed the right to name you.” She smiled. “‘Shori’ is the name of a kind of bird—an East African crested nightingale. It’s a nice name.”

“Oh,” Wright said. We looked at each other, then I reached into my shirt and pulled out the gold chain with the crested bird.

“Was this mine before?” I asked, showing it to her. “Wright found it in the rubble of my mothers’ houses.”

She turned the car’s interior light on and looked at the bird, then looked at me. “Your human mother gave you this. I think she loved you as though she had given birth to you herself. Her name was Jessica Margaret Grant.”

Jessica Margaret Grant. I shut my eyes and tried to find something of this woman in my memory—something. But there was nothing. All of my life had been erased, and I could not bring it back. Each time I was confronted with the reality of this, it was like turning to go into what should have been a familiar, welcoming place and finding absolutely nothing, emptiness, space.

After a moment, I said, “I wouldn’t want to meet the Ina you described. What about others? Who’s visited Iosif or one of my brothers recently?”

Brook frowned. “There was one a few months ago. He and Vasile owned some sort of business together. He was interested in joining with you and your sisters, and Vasile thought it might be a good match. Iosif was willing to be convinced so this man—what was his name? One of the Gordon family … Daniel Gordon! He had his brothers come to see us. Their ancestors were English, I think. They immigrated first to Canada, then to the United States. All the symbionts of Iosif’s community were told to notice them, notice their behavior, talk to their symbionts, and listen to them. We did, and no one spotted anything bad. They seemed to be good, normal people. Shori, you met them yourself and liked them, even though it was way too soon for you to mate. They had heard about you and they wanted to meet you. Iosif went down, collected you, and brought you to stay with us for a few days.”