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By that evening my father was dead over a decade — he had died when I was six, my mother a hundred and seventy. They had lived together a century anyway, were already tired of each other, and had taken other lovers from our community. But that made his death worse, apparently. Ever since, every seventh evening, she would go into the little shrine she had made to him, cut one of her fingers, and let go a drop of blood in the vase below his photograph. Her name is Juno, my mother, after a Roman goddess, and I’d called her by her name since I was an adult.
“She should be here,” snapped Tyfa, irritated. He too was Juno’s occasional lover, but generally he seemed exasperated by her. “Locked in that damn room,” he added sourly. He meant the shrine.
I said nothing, and Tyfa stalked off along the terrace and started pacing about, a tall, strong man of around two hundred or so, no one was sure — dark haired as most of us were at Severin. His skin had a light brow
Marten had closed the boot. Casperon had gotten into the driver’s seat, leaving the car door open, and was trying the engine. Its loud purring would no doubt penetrate the house’s upper story, and the end rooms that comprised Juno’s apartment.
Abruptly she came sweeping out from the house.
Juno has dark red hair. Her skin is white. Her slanting eyes are the dark bleak blue of a northern sea, seen in a foreign movie with subtitles. When I was a child I adored her. She was my goddess. I’d have died for her, but that stopped. It stopped forever.
She walked straight past the others, as if no one else were there. She stood in front of me. She was still an inch or so taller than I, though I’m tall.
“Well,” she said. She stared into my face, hers cold as marble, and all of her stone still — this, the woman who trembled and clutched me to her, whispering that all would be well, when I was three years old.
“Yes, Juno,” I said.
“Do you have everything you need?” she asked me indifferently, forced to be polite to some visitor now finally about to leave.
“Yes, thank you. Kousu helped me pack.”
“You know you have only to call the house, and anything else can be sent on to you? Of course,” she added offhandedly, “you’ll want for nothing, there.”
I did not reply. What was there to say? I’ve “wanted” for so much here and never gotten it — at least, my mother, from you.
“I wish you very well,” she coldly said, “in your new home. I hope everything will be pleasant. The marriage is important, as you’re aware, and they’ll treat you fairly.”
“Yes.”
“We’ll say good-bye then. At least for a while.”
“Yes.”
“Good-bye, Daisha.” She drew out the ay sound; and foolishly through my mind skipped words that rhymed — fray, say. prey.
I said, “So long, Juno. Good luck making it up with Tyfa. Have a nice life.”
Then I turned my back, crossed the terrace and the drive, and got into the car. I’d signed off with all the others before. They had loaded me with good wishes and sobbed, or tried to cheer me by mentioning images we had seen of my intended husband, and saying how handsome and talented he was, and I must write to them soon, email or call — not lose touch — come back next year — sooner — Probably they’d forget me in a couple of days or nights.
To me, they already seemed miles off.
The cream limousine of the full moon had parked over the estate as we drove away. In its blank blanched rays I could watch, during the hour it took to cross the whole place and reach the outer gates, all the nocturnal industry, in fields and orchards, in vegetable gardens, pens, and horse yards, garages and workshops — a black horse cantering, lamps, and red sparks flying — and people coming out to see us go by, humans saluting the family car, appraising in curiosity, envy, pity, or scorn, the girl driven off to become a Wife of Alliance.
In the distance the low mountains shone blue from the moon. The lake across the busy grasslands was like a gigantic vinyl disk dropped from the sky, an old record the moon had played, and played tonight on the spi
The journey took just on four days.
Sometimes we passed through whitewashed towns, or cities whose tall concrete-and-glass fingers reached to scratch the clouds. Sometimes we were on motorways, wide and streaming with traffic in spate. Or there was open countryside, mountains coming or going, glowing under hard icing-sugar tops. In the afternoons we’d stop, for Casperon to rest, at hotels. About six or seven in the evening we drove on. I slept in the car by night. Or sat staring from the windows.
I was, inevitably, uneasy. I was resentful and bitter and full of a dull and hopeless rage.
I shall get free of it all — I had told myself this endlessly since midsummer, when first I had been informed that, to cement ties of friendship with the Duvalles, I was to marry their new heir. Naturally it was not only friendship that this match entailed. I had sun-born genes. And the Duvalle heir, it seemed, hadn’t. My superior light endurance would be necessary to breed a stronger line. A bad joke, to our kind — they needed my blood. I was bloodstock. I was Daisha Severin, a young female life only seventeen years, and able to live daylong in sunlight. I was incredibly valuable. I would be, everyone had said, so welcome. And I was lovely, they said, with my brunette hair and dark eyes, my ci
Zeev was blond, almost snow-blizzard white, though his eyebrows and lashes were dark. His eyes were like some pale, shining metal. His skin was pale, too, if not so colorless as with some of us, or so I’d thought when I watched him in the house movie I’d been sent. My pale-ski
And by now “I shall get free of it all,” which I’d repeated so often, had become my mantra, and also meaningless. How could I ever get free? Among my own kind I would be an outcast and criminal if I ran away from this marriage, now or ever, without a “valid” reason. While able to pass as human, I could hardly live safely among them. I can eat and drink a little in their way, but I need blood. Without blood I would die.
So, escape the families and their alliance, I would become not only traitor and thief — but a murderer. A human-slaughtering monster humanity doesn’t believe in, or does believe in — something, either way, that, if discovered among them, they will kill.
That other house, my former home on the Severin estate, was long and quite low, two storied, but with high ceilings mostly on the ground floor. Its first architecture, gardens, and farm had been made in the early nineteenth century.
Their mansion — castle — whatever one has to call it — was colossal. Duvalle had built high.
It rose, this pile, like a cliff, with outcrops of slate-capped towers. Courtyards and enclosed gardens encircled it. Beyond and around lay deep pine woods with infiltrations of other trees, some maples, already flaming in the last of summer and the sunset. I spotted none of the usual workplaces, houses, or barns.