me. “Your first doesn’t want any other life, girl, no more than
Joel does. The only difference is Joel knows it. Wright is still finding out.” “You’ve talked to him?”
“Yeah. He’ll be all right. How’s he getting along with Joel?”
“When he can, he pretends Joel isn’t there. When he can’t do that, he’s civil.”
“It’s rough on him. Rough on both of them, really. Ease their way as best you can. This Council of
Judgment should help a little—distraction, excitement, new people, plenty to do.” “It scares me a little.”
“The Council? Sensory overload for you and the other Ina. That’s why Councils are only three days long.”
“No, I mean . . . having Wright and Joel as well as Brook, Celia, and Theodora. It scares me. I need them. I care about them more than I thought I could care about anyone. But having them scares me.”
“Good,” he said. “It ought to. Pay attention. Help them when they need help.” He paused. “Only when they need help.”
I nodded. “I will.” I looked into his broad dark face, uncertainly. “Do you want your son to be with me?” “It’s what he wants.”
“Is it all right with you?”
“If you treat him right.” He looked past me at nothing for several seconds. “I wanted him to live in the human world for a few years, get more education than we could give him here. He did that. But to tell the truth, I wanted him to stay out there, make a life for himself, forget about vampires. Then he comes back, and all he wants to do is find himself a nice vampire girl.” He smiled, and it wasn’t an altogether happy smile. “I think he’ll want to do more once he’s been with you for a while. He’ll want to write or teach or something. Too much energy in that boy for him be to just some kind of house-husband.”
“Theodora wants more, too. Once this Council of Judgment is finished, I’ll have to decide what to do, how best to build a home for us all. When that’s done, my symbionts will be able to do what they want to do.”
“Good girl.” He took a deep breath and started toward the nearest building of offices and studios. “Now let’s go figure out how many people can be jammed into these studios. Thank God the weather hasn’t
gotten cold yet.”
The night before the Council was to begin, members of the Leontyev family arrived. I didn’t know them, of course, and until they arrived and Martin mentioned it, no one had bothered to tell me that Leontyev was the name of my mothers’male family—the family of their fathers, elderfathers, brothers, and brothers’ sons.
The Leontyevs and their symbionts arrived in two cars—a pair of Jeep Cherokees—while I was coming back from showing the very cool and distant Zoe and Helena Fotopoulos and their symbionts to their rooms in one of the office complexes. Martin had given me a list of who was coming and where they were to sleep. He said, “If you want to learn, you might as well help. This will give you a chance to meet people.” He was, I had noticed, good at putting people to work.
The Leontyevs were older males, Konstantin and Vladimir, each with three symbionts. Martin intended them to stay with Henry Gordon. I came to get them, introduced myself, and realized from their expressions that something was wrong.
“I’ve had a serious head injury,” I told them. “As a result of it, I have amnesia. If I knew you before, I’m sorry. I don’t remember you now.”
“You don’t remember ... anything?” the one Martin had pointed out to me as Konstantin asked.
“Not people or events. I remember language. I recognize many objects. Sometimes I recall disconnected bits about myself or about the Ina in general. But I’ve lost my past, my memory of my families,
symbionts, friends . . . The people of my families who are dead are so completely gone from me that I
can’t truly miss them or mourn them because, for me, it’s as though they never existed.”
Konstantin gazed down at me with almost too much sympathy. A human who looked that way would surely cry. After a moment, he said, “Shori, we’re your mothers’ fathers. You’ve known us all of your life.”
I looked at them, took in their tall leanness, trying to find in them something I recognized. They looked more like relatives of Hayden and Preston Gordon—just two more pale blond men who appeared to be in their mid-to-late forties but who were actually closer to their mid–four hundreds.
And suddenly, I found myself wondering what that meant. What had their lives been like so long ago? What had the world been like? I should ask Martin who had once been a history teacher.
The faces and the ages of these two elderfathers—my elderfathers, my mothers’ fathers—triggered no memories. They were strangers.
“I’m sorry,” I told them. “I’ll have to get to know you all over again. And you’ll have to get to know me. I can’t even pretend to be the person I was before the injury.”
“I’m grateful the Gordons were able to take you in and care for you,” the one called Vladimir said. “How did they find you?”
I stared at him, surprised, suddenly angry. “I found them. I’ve survived three attacks, and twice helped fight the attackers off. I helped to question the surviving attackers who came here a few days ago. Only my memory of my life before I was hurt is impaired.”
They looked at each other, then at me. “My apologies,” Vladimir said. He lifted his head a little and smiled down his long nose at me. He managed to look more amused than condescending. “Whether you remember or not, you still have my Shori’s temper.”
I took them to the rooms that Henry Gordon had set aside for them in his house. Before I left, I showed them Martin’s list and asked one more question. “Are any of these people close female relatives of mine?”
They looked at the list, then looked at one another, each of them frowning. In that moment, they looked almost identical. Then Vladimir said, “I believe your closest surviving female blood relatives are too young to be involved it this. They’re children or young women busy with children. For instance, your brothers were mated and had two girls and a boy, all of whom are still very young children. Your mothers’ brothers have adult female children, but those children are too young for Council duty.”
“Wouldn’t they be around my age or older? Some of them must be adults.”
“Yes. They’re mated so the youngest of them is years older than you. But, unless they’re directly involved, people aren’t usually called to Councils of Judgment unless their children are adult and mated.”
That explained why everyone I’d seen so far seemed to be around the ages of Hayden and Preston.
“All right,” I said. “I’ve been told that all Council members are related to me in one way or another. Who among the women members are my closest relatives? And did any of them know me before?” I asked.
Again the two paused to think. At last, Konstantin said, “The Braithwaites. The Braithwaite eldermothers are Joan, Irene, Amy, and Margaret. Two of them will be coming. They’re the daughters of your second elderfathers.”
I frowned trying to understand that.
“They are the daughters of your father’s father’s father,” Vladimir clarified. “They know you, knew you before. You can talk to them. But, Shori, you can talk to us, too. We are your family. We’ve come here to see that your interests are protected and that the people responsible for what happened to you and to so many of our relatives pay for what they’ve done.”
I remembered hearing from Hayden that Joan and Margaret Braithwaite would be coming. In fact, they were arriving tonight. “Thank you,” I said. “I ... I just need to see and talk to an Ina female. I have no memory of ever doing that before today. I’ve met several males since my injury, but until I met Zoe and Helena Fotopoulos this morning, no females. It’s very strange to be an Ina female and yet have no clear idea of what Ina females are like.”
Konstantin smiled. “Talk to the Braithwaites then. Elizabeth I was on the throne of England when Joan and Irene were born, so I’m not sure you’ll learn much from them about being a young Ina woman now. But all four sisters have met you, Shori, and I think they like you. Go ahead and talk with them when they come.”
I kept watch for the Braithwaite women, pestering Martin to look whenever female Ina drove in. The Braithwaites arrived just after midnight. Before I could ask Martin about them, Daniel came out to welcome them. I heard him call them by name. I watched as he stood talking with them.
Joan and Margaret Braithwaite were a head shorter than Daniel, but still taller than Celia or Brook. They were very straight, very pale women in white shirts and long black skirts. Their hair was twisted and pinned up neatly on their heads. One was brown-haired—the first brown-haired Ina I’d seen—and one
was blond. Their chests, beneath their clean, handsome, long-sleeved shirts, were as flat as mine. I suspected that that meant I would not be growing the breasts Wright liked on women. Yet as ignorant as I was, even I wouldn’t have mistaken these two for men. There was something undeniably feminine and interestingly seductive about them, even to me. Was it their scents? Did my scent make me seem interesting to other people?
I realized that I wanted Joan and Margaret to think well of me, to like me. That was important somehow. Their scent was definitely influencing me. Was it something they were doing deliberately, I wondered. Could they control it? Could I? I would ask them if I could manage to be alone with one of them.
“Shori?” the brown-haired one said to me as I stood off to one side, almost hiding in the shadows, watching them. Daniel had called the blond woman Joan, so this one must be Margaret.
I was immediately ashamed of myself for hiding and staring.
