Butler, Octavia - Fledgling

Ina child to bond with. Others choose to make lives for themselves outside.” He made a sound—almost a moan. For a while, he said nothing.

Finally, I asked, “Do you want to leave me?”

“Why bother to ask me that?” he demanded. “I can’t leave you. I can’t even really want to leave you.” “Then what do you want?”

He sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know. I know I wish I had driven past you on the road eleven nights ago and not stopped. And yet, I know that if I could have you all to myself, I’d stop for you again, even knowing what I know about you.”

“That would kill you. Quickly.” “I know.”

But he didn’t care—or he didn’t think he would have cared. “What did those three people tell you?” I asked. “What did they say that’s made you so angry and so miserable? Was it only that I take blood from several symbionts instead of draining one person until I kill him?”

“That probably would have been enough.”

I rested my head against his arm so that I could touch him without looking at him. I needed to touch him. And yet, he had to understand. “I’ve fed from you and from five other people—three women and two men. I’ll keep one of the women if she wants to stay with me. I think she will. The others will forget me or remember me as just a dream.”

“Did you sleep with any of them?”

“Did I have sex with them, you mean? No. Except for the one woman, I fed and came back to you. I stayed longer with her because something in her comforts and pleases me. Her name is Theodora Harden. I don’t know why I like her so much, but I do.”

“Swing both ways, do you?”

I frowned, startled and confused by the terrible bitterness in his voice. “What?” “Sex with men and with women?”

“With my symbionts if both they and I want it. For the moment, that’s you.” “For the moment.”

I reached up to slip my hand under his jacket and shirt to touch the bare flesh of his neck. It was unmarked. I had only nipped him a little for pleasure the night before, then I went to one of the others while he slept. He had healed by morning. Tonight, I had intended to do something that wouldn’t heal nearly as fast.

And yet when we reached his cabin, we went in and went to bed without saying or doing anything at all. I didn’t bite him because he clearly didn’t want me to. I fell asleep fitted against his furry back, taking comfort in his presence even though he was angry and confused. At least he didn’t push me away.

Finally, some time later, he shook me awake, shook me hard, saying, “Do it! Do it, damnit! I should get some pleasure out of all this if I don’t get anything else.”

I put my fingers over his lips gently. When he fell silent, I kissed first his mouth, then his throat. He was so angry—so filled with rage and confusion.

He rolled onto me, pushing my legs apart, pushing them out of his way, then thrust hard into me. I bit him more deeply than I had intended and wrapped my arms and legs around him as I took his blood. He groaned, writhing against me, holding me, thrusting harder until I had taken all I needed of his blood, until he had all he needed of me.

After a long while, he rolled off me, sated for the moment in body if not in mind. “Did I hurt you?” he asked very softly.

I pulled myself onto his chest and lapped at the ragged edges of the bite. “You didn’t hurt me,” I said. “Were you trying to hurt me?”

“I think I was,” he said.

I went on lapping. There was more bleeding than usual. “Did I hurt you?” I asked.

“No, of course not. What you do ought to hurt, but except for that first instant when you break the skin, it never does.” He slipped his arms around me, and it was more the way he usually held me.

“It’s good to know we don’t hurt each other even when we’re upset.”

“I don’t know how to deal with all this, Renee ... Shori. It’s like being told that extraterrestrials have arrived, and I’m sleeping with one of them.”

I laughed. “That may be true, except that if we arrived, it must have happened thousands of years ago.” “Do you believe that—that your people come from another planet? I remember your father said

something about a theory like that.”

“According to Iosif, some younger Ina believe it. Some don’t. He doesn’t. I don’t know what to think about it. If I could get my memory back, then maybe I’d have an opinion that was worth bothering about.”

“Do you believe Iosif is your father?”

I nodded against his chest. Then the sweet smell of his blood made me go on licking at the bite. “Why? If he’s a stranger to you, why do you believe him?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s something about his manner, his body language. But more likely it’s his scent. I kept hoping to remember something while I was with him, any little thing. But there was nothing. He introduced me to my brother Stefan, and still, there was nothing. But I never doubted that they were who they said they were. And all their human symbionts recognized me.”

“Yeah,” Wright said.

“You talked to three symbionts. Do you think they were lying?”

“No, I don’t think they were lying.” He ran his hand over my head and down my back. “They said I was lucky to have you—lucky to be your first. That was when I realized that ... of course you’d have to already have others, even though I didn’t know about them. Then the woman, Brook, told me all Ina have several symbionts.”

“How much blood do you think you could provide?” “You . . . you taste me just about every day.”

“Just a little. I crave you. I do. And I enjoy pleasuring you.”

“That’s the right attitude,” he said. He rolled over, trapping me beneath him and thrust into me again. This time I was the one who could not let out a groan of pleasure. He laughed, delighted.

Later, as we lay together, more satisfied, more at ease, he said, “They’ll be coming for us next Friday.” “Yes,” I said. “I don’t want to go live with them, but I think we have to.”

“I was going to say that.”

“I need to learn how to set up my own household—how to make it work. When I can do that, when I’ve learned the things I need to know to do that, we’ll go out on our own.”

“How big a household?” he asked.

“You, me, five or six others. We don’t all have to live in the same house the way my brothers do with their symbionts, but we need to be near one another.”

“It’ll be rough to live together in your father’s house.”

“He says he’ll sell my mothers’ property, and when I’m older, the money will give me a start somewhere else.”

“And he’ll hook you up with a male Ina, or rather, with a group of Ina brothers. My God, a group of brothers . . .”

I said nothing. My mothers had lived together in the same community, shared a mate, and worked things out somehow. It could be done. It was the Ina way. “That will all happen in the future,” I said. “Next week, we’ll be in rooms at Iosif ’s house, you and I and Theodora. She’s one of our neighbors, a few doors down. You might know her.”

There was a long silence. Finally he asked, “Is she pretty?” I smiled. “Not pretty. Not young either. But I like her.” “Are you going to tell her to join us . . . or ask her?”

“Ask her. But she’ll come.”

“Because she’s already fallen so far under your influence that she won’t be able to help herself?” “She’ll want to come. She doesn’t have to, but she’ll want to.”

He sighed. “I think the scariest thing about all this so far is that all three of those symbionts seem

genuinely happy. What do you figure? Old Iosif told them they were living in the best of all possible worlds, and they bought it because as far as they’re concerned, he’s God?”