“She accomplished what I commanded her to do. She cut a gate through the spirit fence the creatures of this part of your world have erected to stop my Hunt from entering these lands. Now I have even more fields in which to hunt.”
“Let us say that is true. If you truly had no more use for her, you would have no reason to take me. I heard you tell her I was the leash you would use to keep her tied to you. So you do wish to keep her bound to you. If you’d stop pretending otherwise, we might manage a productive conversation.”
“I find your arrogance intriguing. I can do what I want to you, and you know it. Yet you speak this way to me.”
“I think you cannot kill me. Not until next Hallows’ Night. You might be better asking yourself, how can we be allies?”
My sire laughed. “You are entirely delightful. More arrogant than the male who was with Tara Bell, but just as talkative and defiant. The difference is that he had never touched Tara Bell while you have had sex with my daughter. You realize, of course, I will have a claim on any children you sire on her.”
Blessed Tanit! I hadn’t thought of that!
Judging by Vai’s suddenly pinched expression, he hadn’t either.
We knew the mansa of Four Moons had a claim on any children we might have until we could find a way to release ourselves from clientage. To condemn our children to the chains my sire had already shackled me with was unthinkable. Yet to gauge by the narrowing of his eyes and the tension in his jaw, the idea of never having children was to Vai unendurable.
“Ah, now I have trapped you,” said my sire with a pleased smile. “That wasn’t nearly as difficult as I feared it might be.”
Horribly, as they had in my dream, his body and face melted, flowing into another face and another body. He became a creature who looked exactly like me, with my thick black hair pulled into a braid. I saw Vai’s gaze drawn as by a spell down the length of the braid to the span of her hips. The creature’s lips were slightly parted as if she was thinking of eating or speaking, and I couldn’t be sure which, but either way she looked as if she was inviting a kiss. She was dressed exactly as I had been when in the coach with him, in a faded length of cloth wrapped to make a skirt and in a damp lawn blouse so thin and threadbare where it clung to the curve of her breasts that the shadow of her nipples showed through the cotton. Was that how I had looked when I had stepped down out of the coach on the ballcourt on Hallows’ Night?
Vai inhaled sharply.
Desperately, I tried to open the door, but the numbness in my lips had infested my whole body. All I could do was watch through gremlin eyes.
The creature who looked like me leaned closer to Vai. The neck of her blouse gapped open to reveal no bodice beneath, nothing but bare skin. Vai pressed back against the seat.