Cold Steel

“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.

Her hands wandered up the front of his dash jacket.

“Sire a child on me,” the creature said in a voice like mine but nothing like mine, because its whisper was cruelly seductive, “and I’ll leave any children you sire on her alone.”

Vai spoke in a hoarse murmur. “You can’t bear children. You’re a man.”

“Do I feel like a man?”

Her lips brushed his. Her knee eased between his thighs and her hands spanned his shoulders to draw him into her kiss. Breasts brushed his chest. Vai became as rigid as if he had turned to ice. I guessed he was angry at himself for being aroused.

I could scarcely blame him. If I hadn’t known I was me, I would have thought I was her.

If I’d had a body and an axe, I would have smashed in my sire’s head.

“No,” Vai said against its lips, his mouth unyielding.

“But you want me,” the Master of the Wild Hunt said in my voice, like a purr of desire.

Her voice, her hands on him, were claws digging into my flesh, yet I could do nothing.

“No.” Vai’s voice was clear and cold. “I want her. There is a difference.”

“What difference would that be?”

“The shape you wear is an illusion.”

“When she comes for you, as you and I both know she is trying to do right now, how will you know if it is she or I who grasps you close and whispers words of hope and love?”

Vai relaxed. My sire did not know the secrets of the djeliw and bards, with their wholly human magic. He did not know about the way our marriage had bound us. He did not know I wore a locket.

“I admit I can tell no difference between you and her,” Vai said, a cunning statement that had the advantage of being truth because words can have two meanings. “But right now I know you are not her. I will not do this.”