run, but I was not going to run this time from those chains.
“Vai, I want you to understand-”
Ice weight choke dread throat closing mask blinded. I couldn’t breathe. I was slipping below the surface of the water without a sound as my sire dragged me down.
“Catherine! I have you! Don’t faint.”
I sucked in air, holding on to him as if to my life. “I have to get away from the water.”
He eased me away from the rocks and, once we reached the edge of the boulevard, looked me over carefully. “Catherine, I’ll never let you drown, if that’s what you fear. After I lost you in the well, I swore I would not let go again. Not if you wanted me.”
I had my breath back. And I thought: The time to decide about a man is before you sleep with him, not afterward.
“And if I didn’t want you?”
He smiled in the most aggravating way. “How could you not want me, Catherine?”
I laughed, because only Vai could have spoken those words in a way that made it seem he completely believed them while at the same time he was making light of his own vanity in needing to believe them. “How much time do I have to answer the question?”
“My sweet Catherine, I suggest we go to this untimely meeting so we can get it over with, the sooner to go home to our bed. And then…then you have as long as you need.”
Quite the most reckless surge of feeling swept through me. Before I could kiss him, he slipped out of my grasp.
“We can’t start that or I won’t get through the evening and neither will you. Let’s keep walking.”
Walking warmed the cold right out of me and loosened the chains that had been strangling my tongue and my heart. His long stride matched well with mine. I felt comfortable with his silence even if my thoughts wandered all over his body, wondering just exactly how long it would be before we could return to the room and what on Earth we were meant to do with Kayleigh. Being Vai, he had surely already arranged something. Honestly, I could not imagine otherwise.
“Vai, there’s one thing, though.” I had to say it. “I don’t want to get pregnant right now.”
“Of course. We’ll take precautions. We want no children until we’re free of clientage.”
“Blessed Tanit! You’ve already thought about this, haven’t you?”
His fingers squeezed mine as he smiled without looking at me. “I’ve done a lot of thinking about this, if you must know. But besides that, I also suspected…it was something you were worried about before.”
Before, meaning Drake. I did not want to discuss Drake with Vai.
“If he hurt you, I wish you would tell me.”
I really did not want to discuss Drake with Vai, but I owed him an explanation. “He got me drunk. And he lied to me. He implied he could only heal me if I had sex with him. I suppose that is a form of harm.”
“I’d call it harm,” Vai muttered.
“Did he force me? No, I was willing. I won’t lie to you. It was nice.”
“ Nice??” He laughed in a way that made me flush straight through the center of my body. “I would pity the man you said that of, if I didn’t know he’d gotten you drunk and lied to take advantage of you. Because I promise you, Catherine, that afterward you won’t say it was nice.”
The air changed not as with anger but with a force so primal I felt I’d been turned inside out and every part of me tuned to him. I had no words, but I did have an overpowering foreboding that the next hour or two was going to advance like molasses down the shallow slope of a platter.
At length and with the grace of a man shifting directions in a dance, he said, “You did a remarkable job piecing that skirt together.”
“I am a seamstress of rare and unexpected potency. Vai, when are you going to tell me what you are doing with the trolls?”
“I’ll bring you along next Jovesday. And teach you a better thing to call them than trolls, which is a human word. Here’s a simplified version of what they call themselves.” He whistled something short but grand.
“That’s not a word.”
“It’s not a word as we think of words. But it makes you wonder if they dislike being called trolls as much as Kena’ani dislike being called Phoenicians.” He tugged me to the left. “Here we are.”
Gas lamps burned on the old city walls. We turned aside before we reached the wide plaza, the main batey courts, and the harbor. The boardinghouse was the one I had noticed before, a sprawling edifice raised on squat stilts, its main floor a huge open-air wooden deck flanked by two-story wings. I smelled pepperpot, rum, and urine.
Folk packed the place, many young and plenty male, although more women than I had expected plied their way into the crowd with men on their arms or their arms on men. It was an agitated press lit by cobo hood lamps set along the railing of the outer deck. A burly fellow stood on a box shouting over the noise.
“Yee mean to say yee shall serve in an army overseas for a scrap of pay, the hope of loot, and a dram of rum each night? While meanwhile yee brothers and sisters at home still don’ have the right to vote on the Council? That same Council who claim to govern us as citizens but who act to rule us as subjects? Is yee so easily bribed? Shall yee not stand here and fight for the rights we shall hold here? Do yee know what they mean for yee to earn there, in they Europan war? Death! Death, for the merchants to get fat off. ’Tis not worth it, lads! ’Tis past time to fight at home.”
Vai pulled me close as if to make sure he wouldn’t lose me. Rising voices swelled like a gust of wind over us as the one fellow stepped down and another bounded up to take his place.
“I say different! I say, this is opportunity! Yee really believe people shall not be fooled or they vote bought in this thing yee call elections? They who talk of Assembly is either witless or cunning. Let the Council have they triumph now, for I tell you, the Taino shall come soon enough to claim we factories. Them who want to remain free must get out of Expedition-”
Still holding on to me, Vai cut a path through the seething crowd with his stare and, perhaps, a pinch of cold magic.
A wide formal staircase led to a series of upstairs rooms, private parlors whose windows looked over the deck and the sea. He headed for the serving counter in the back, which was mobbed with drinkers. Kofi was leaning over the bar, talking to one of the men pulling drinks.
Appreciative whistles erupted from the area around the crate as the two speakers began talking over each other.
“-These vexatious laws put in place by a Council for which we cannot vote. Why shall we listen to them tell us what to do?”
“Would yee rather have beggars and layabouts rule yee?”
Kofi turned away from the bar with four brimming cups in his big hands as he steered toward a pair of sour- looking men who were scanning the crowd. Were they looking for fire banes? The man behind the bar looked our way, and nodded at Vai.
“Fight! Fight! Punch him in the nose!”
Excitement gripped the crowd as a boxing match broke out at the speaker’s crate. Kofi spilled the cups over the two men, who sputtered and shouted. We ducked under the counter and behind a curtain into a corridor that let out into a courtyard in back. The gas lamp burning at the far end of the corridor wavered as Vai paused beside a second curtain.
“This is the servers’ stair,” he said, pulling the curtain aside to reveal a narrow stairwell illuminated at the top by one of the cobo hood gas lamps. The curtain slithered down behind us just as the lamp’s flame was sucked dead by Vai’s presence. Shrouded in the darkness of a stifling, windowless space, I halted to let my eyes adjust.
A wan spark of light caught and expanded like blown glass to the size of a fist.
“Oh!” I breathed, for the cold fire he could call never ceased to dazzle me.
Concentration creased his brow. He shaped the light until it appeared as a pewter holder with a candle framed by glass. Even the flame had a pulse and ripple.
“So beautiful,” I said in wonderment.
“Yes,” he murmured, brushing fingers lightly down my cheek, for he was now looking at me, not at the
