She ignored his tone, stared up at the picture. “She was only sixteen when I married her. If I hadn’t married her, I think she would have been put in an asylum eventually. People spoke about her in the way you just said my name.”
“I don’t blame them.”
“You should. Most people believe in a life that goes on after their bodies die. There are always tales of ghosts. Even people who think they are too sophisticated to be frightened are not immune. Talk to five people and at least three will have seen what they believe was a ghost, or they will know another person who has seen. But Denice really did see. She was very sensitive; she could see when no one else could?and since no one else could, people said she was mad. I think she had had a kind of transition.”
“And it gave her a private view into the hereafter.”
Anyanwu shook her head. “You should be less skeptical. You are a kind of ghost yourself, after all. What is there of you that can be touched?”
“I’ve heard that before.”
“Of course.” She paused. “Doro, I will talk to you about Denice. I will talk to you about anyone, anything. But first, please, tell me what you plan for my son.”
“I’m thinking about it. I’m thinking about you and your potential value to me.” He looked again at the portrait. “You were right, you know. I came here to finish old business?kill you and take your children to one of my settlements. No one has ever done what you did to me.”
“I ran from you and lived. Other people have done that.”
“Only because I chose to let them live. They had their freedom for only a few days before I caught them. You know that.”
“Yes,” she said reluctantly.
“Now, a century after I lost you, I find you young and well?greeting me as though we had just seen each other yesterday. I find you in competition with me, raising witches of your own.”
“There is no competition.”
“Then why have you surrounded yourself with the kinds of people I seek out? Why do you have children by them?”
“They need me … those people.” She swallowed thinking of some of the things done to her people before she found them. “They need someone who can help them, and I can help. You don’t want to help them, you want to use them. But I can help.”
“Why should you?”
“I’m a healer, Doro.”
“That’s no answer. You chose to be a healer. What you really are is what’s called in this part of the country loup-garou?a werewolf.”
“I see you’ve been talking to my neighbors.”
“I have. They’re right, you know.”
“The legends say werewolves kill. I have never killed except to save myself. I am a healer.”
“Most … healers don’t have children by their patients.”
“Most healers do as they please. My patients are more like me than any other people. Why shouldn’t I find mates among them?”
Doro smiled. “There is always an answer, isn’t there? But it doesn’t matter. Tell me about Denice and her ghosts.”
She drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, calming herself. “Denice saw what people left behind. She went into houses and saw the people who had preceded her there. If someone had suffered or died there, she saw that very clearly. It terrified her. She would go into a house and see a child running, clothing afire, and there would be no child. But two, ten, twenty years before, a child would have burned to death there. She saw people stealing things days or years before. She saw slaves beaten and tortured, slave women raped, people shaking with ague or covered with smallpox. She did not feel things as people do in transition. She only saw them. But she could not tell whether what she was seeing was actually happening as she saw it or whether it was history. She was slowly going mad. Then her parents gave a party and I was invited because I seemed young and rich and handsome?perhaps a good prospect for a family with five daughters. I remember, I was standing with Denice’s father telling lies about my origins, and Denice brushed past. She touched me, you see. She could see people’s past lives when she touched them just as she could see the past of wood and brick. She saw something of what I am even in that brief touch, and she fainted. I didn’t know what had happened until she came to me days later. I was the only person she had ever found to be stranger than herself. She knew all that I was before we married.”
“Why did she marry you?”
“Because I believed her when she told me what she could do. Because I was not afraid or ridiculing. And because after a while, we started to want each other.”
“Even though she knew you were a woman and black?”
“Even so.” Anyanwu stared up at the solemn young woman, remembering that lovely, fearful courting. They had been as fearful of marrying as they had been of losing each other. “She thought at first that there could be no children, and that saddened her because she had always wanted children. Then she realized that I could give her girls. It took her a long time to understand all that I could do. But she thought the children would be black and people would say she had been with a slave. White men leave brown children all about, but a white woman who does this becomes almost an animal in the eyes of other whites.”
“White women must be protected,” Doro said, “whether they want to be or not.”
“As property is protected.” Anyanwu shook her head. “Preserved for the use of owners alone. Denice said she felt like property?like a slave plotting escape. I told her I could give her children who were not related to me at all if she wished. Her fear made me angry even though I knew the situation was not her fault. I told her my Warrick
