The boy looked at Doro, unafraid, then started toward the house. Doro kept a grip on his shoulder, though he did not doubt that the boy could have gotten away easily. Doro was wearing the body of a short, slight Frenchman while the boy was well-muscled, powerful-looking in spite of his own short stature. All Anyanwu’s children tended to be short.
“What happened to your arms?” Doro asked.
The boy glanced at him, then at the foreshortened arms. “Accident, massa,” he said softly. “I tried to bring horses out of a stable fire. ‘Fore I could get ‘em out, de beam fell on me.” Doro did not like his slave patois. It sounded false.
“But …” Doro frowned at the tiny child’s arms on the young man’s body. No accident could cause such a deformity. “I mean were you born with your arms that way?”
“No, sir. I was born with two good arms?long as yours.”
“Then why do you have deformed arms now!” Doro demanded exasperated.
“ ‘Cause of de beam, massa. Old arms broken up and burnt. Had to grow new ones. Couple more weeks and dese be long enough.”
Doro jerked the boy around to face him, and the boy smiled. For a moment, Doro wondered whether he was demented?as warped of mind as he was of body. But the eyes were intelligent?even mocking now. It seemed that the boy was perfectly intelligent, and laughing at him.
“Do you always tell people you can do such things?grow new arms?”
The boy shook his head, straightened so that he met Doro’s eyes levelly. There was nothing of the slave in his gaze. When he spoke again, he ceased to make even his minimal effort to sound like a slave.
“I’ve never told any outsider before,” he said. “But I’m told that if I let you know what I can do and that I’m the only one who can do it, I’ll stand a better chance of living out the day.”
There was no point in asking who had told him. Somehow, Anyanwu had spotted him. “How old are you?” he asked the boy.
“Nineteen.”
“How old were you at transition?”
“Seventeen.”
“What can you do?”
“Heal myself. I’m slower at it than she is, though, and I can’t change my shape.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I suppose because my father couldn’t.”
“What could he do?”
“I never knew him. He died. But she says he could hear what people were thinking.”
“Can you?”
“Sometimes.”
Doro shook his head. Anyanwu had come almost as near to success as he had?and with far less raw material. “Take me to her!” he said.
“She’s here,” the boy said.
Startled, Doro looked around, searching for Anyanwu, knowing she must be in animal form since he had not sensed her. She stood perhaps ten paces behind him near a yellow pine sapling. She was a large, sharp-faced black dog, standing statue?still, watching him. He spoke to her impatiently.
“I can’t very well talk to you while you’re like that!”
She began to change. She took her time about it, but he did not complain. He had waited too long for a few minutes to matter.
Finally, human, female, and unself-consciously naked, she walked past him onto the porch. In that moment, he meant to kill her. If she had taken any other form, become anyone other than her true self, she would have died. But she was now as she had been over a hundred and fifty years?a century and a half?before. She was the same woman he had shared a clay couch with thousands of miles away, lifetimes ago. He raised his hand toward her. She did not see it. He could have taken her then and there without further trouble. But he lowered the hand before it touched her smooth, dark shoulder. He stared at her, angry with himself, frowning.
“Come into the house, Doro,” she said.
Her voice was the same, soft and young. He followed her in feeling oddly confused, suspended in time, with only the watchful, protective young son to jar him to reality.
He looked at the son, ragged and shoeless and dusty. The boy should have seemed out of place inside the handsomely furnished home, but somehow, he did not.
“Come into the parlor,” he said, catching Doro’s arm in his child-sized hands. “Let her put her clothes on. She’ll be back.”
Doro did not doubt that she would. Apparently, the boy understood his role as hostage.
Doro sat down in an upholstered armchair and the boy sat opposite him on a sofa. Between them was a small wooden table and a fireplace of carved black stone. There was a large oriental rug on the floor and several other chairs and tables scattered around the room. A maid in a plain clean blue dress and white apron brought brandy and looked at the boy as though daring him to have any. He smiled and did not.
The maid would have been good prey too. A daughter? “What can she do?” Doro asked when she was
