The genets did not wake when I saw Chester away, still marveling at the ease with which I was able to escort him out. On returning, I paused, leaning on the door to the sitting room, and regarded them; even having spent the entire day with them, I could not quite believe them. The fur, the delicate little limbs, the extravagant tails, the ridiculous and ominous collars. I went to sleep, not entirely sure they would be there in the morning.

But they most certainly were. And in fact, they were both in my bed. Their bodies, so much hotter than human ones, had trapped me between them, tails draped over my legs and hips, tiny hands resting on my chest. That perfume, musk and lilacs... and the heat, and the softness... I let my head drop back onto the pillow and sighed.

The tip of a little tongue scraped against one of my ribs, and so deep was my relaxation that I didn’t flinch. Almond cuddled more tightly against my side, slipping one furred leg around mine. It was like being enrobed in summer sunlight.

I drifted off again. I thought I could sleep forever thus, outside of pain, warm to the core.

It was in this state of complacency that I became aware of being licked again along the inside of my arm. It began as a tickle, but the longer the sensation persisted the clearer it became: the rasp of the center of that tiny tongue, the slight prick and drag of the sharp lower teeth, the moist heat of the mouth, the cool damp leather of the nose. Whiskers brushing against my skin. The flush of warmth and cold as she panted on the slick spots she left behind.

Disturbingly sensual. I thought to move away—

Hands seized my arm and held it down and teeth shoved into the meat near my elbow, piercing, bright streaks of pain, the revulsion of skin being violated and then: wet streamers running down my arm, fever-hot. Blood always seemed hotter than polite, than possible.

I was bleeding.

I was being drunk.

I bolted from the sheets, jerking my arm away, tumbling onto the floor in a tangle of cotton and fur and surprised yelps. Almond had fallen beneath me... it was Kelu who was crouched on top of the bed, tail twice its width, claws flexing on the edge of the mattress and lower jaw dripping scarlet. That she never blinked was magnified by my lack of glasses; all I saw were those blots of molten orange.

“Almond!” I said, staring up at Kelu.

She squiggled out from beneath me, panting. “Master!”

I clutched the wound on my arm, fingers skidding across blood-slick skin. “What’s wrong with her!”

“Master, she needs blood to stay calm,” Almond said. “Please, Master, let her drink. You’re the only elf here….”

“You must be mad!” I exclaimed, pushing away from the bed as Kelu poured off it and prowled toward me, a blur of gray and black. “She bit me, Almond!”

“It will pass, please, Master,” Almond said, slipping behind me and wrapping her arms around my waist. “Please, please. She will go insane, Master, she needs you. Feed her, she’s broken without you.”

“Almond!”

“Please,” Almond said, petting my untouched arm and licking the back of my shoulder. “I’ll distract you, Master, it won’t hurt—”

Kelu was almost on me then. This close I could see her pupils were fixed no matter where she turned her gaze, and the blindness of that stare disturbed me even more than her predatory slink.

“I’m not an elf, Almond!” I whispered, and then it was too late. Kelu’s mouth was on me, licking the veil of heat and life off my skin, and with Almond pressing against my back I felt caged. I watched, mesmerized, as she lapped my skin clean and then tensed as she approached the ragged holes near my elbow.

“Sssh,” Almond whispered, nuzzling the nape of my neck beneath my hair, then behind my ear. I shuddered. “Sssh, Master.”

Kelu began whimpering. I felt her drawing the blood from my arm and trembled. Tender kisses, soft words, and the gnawing dizzy suction, violent and revolting... between the two of them I could no longer think or act, only hang in shock, waiting to faint or die.

Waiting...

Wait—

—ing—

When I woke next I was contorted on the ground, limbs still trammeled by blankets and covered in purring genets. They were petting me, smooth palms against skin, little tongues on my collarbone, near my neck. I thought to struggle, to sit up, but when I tilted my head the room kept moving long after I stopped.

I felt like weeping and knew not why.

“Thank you, Master,” Almond was whispering. “So kind, you are so kind, thank you, so good, so kind...”

My wounded arm throbbed almost to the shoulder, my fingers stiff and unwilling. That the rest of my body was fluid-hot and painless made the contrast all the more heinous. I lifted my head and found the greatest weight on me was Kelu, draped on my chest and abdomen like a gray blanket. The white fur on her chin had a pink stain, but other than that and her expression of great contentment one would never have known she had transformed into a furry vampire.

“Kelu,” I said.

Kelu cuddled closer.

“Kelu,” I said, louder.

She shifted her head on my chest so she could look at me, eyes slit in bliss, almost glowing.

“Fetch me my glasses, please,” I said.

Without complaint she slid off me and up to the bedstand, bringing my spectacles back with her. I set them on my nose and stared at the ceiling a moment, struggling for composure. Half-naked, bloody and covered in happy animals. I could not overcome the surrealism.

“So,” I said. “Having exsanguinated me, you are sane now, is that right?”

“Yes,” Kelu said, and though she didn’t call me ‘master’ as Almond did her voice was less grudging than usual. “Thank you.”

“Tell me, how often do you need this feeding?” I asked. Surely I was not this calm.

“It depends on the potency of the blood,” Kelu said. “You... “ She licked her teeth. “I am sorry. Do you... I don’t want to upset you.”

Showing signs of caring about my feelings? Something was very wrong with her. “Continue, please.”

Kelu flipped her ears sideways and looked away. I couldn’t tell if this was contemplation, puzzlement, or sheepishness. “The magic in you is very strong, but it’s... twisted.”

Magic was ridiculous enough. Twisted magic... “For God’s sake,” I said, letting my head fall back. The ceiling was reassuringly normal. “Twisted.”

“Yes,” Kelu said, subdued. “Like it’s gone rotten or sick. There’s a lot of it, but it... you have to take a lot to get what you need out of it.”

Ridiculous. “When will you need it again?”

A pause. I could almost sense them looking at one another. Then, Kelu: “Maybe two days?”

“Two days!” I exclaimed. “How did you get here if you need elf blood every two days?”

“I said it depends,” Kelu said, ears flattening now.

“Before she left she had a draught from a very potent sorcerer,” Almond said. “It lasted her a very long time.”

“It’s always lasted the entire time we’ve been away,” Kelu added, ears still sagging. “I don’t know why it hasn’t this time. Unless it’s the smell of you.”

“You are to have me believe that I am so tantalizing that my mere presence is enough to stimulate your hunger.”

Kelu at least had the grace not to answer, and even Almond looked stricken.

“So, then. Granting that I have re-awakened your appetite. If you don’t have this taste of me periodically—”

“—every few days.” Kelu was looking down.

“—every few days,” I said, “what exactly will happen to you?”

“Master...” Almond began, but Kelu shook her head at the smaller genet.

“Without it,” Kelu said, “I’ll become rabid, lose my intelligence, and finally die in convulsions.” At my stunned silence, she said, “I saw it happen in one of the experiments, the ones they made while they were trying to fix what failed in me.”

I had thought her to be exaggerating her need for blood to justify the enjoyment she’d evidently had in taking it from me. But their countenances were both too dire, and the report too extreme, for me to disbelieve. As outlandish as it sounded, I couldn’t imagine such shame and bitterness had they not truly feared the lack.

“And this doesn’t happen to you,” I said to Almond, puzzling at the problem.

“No,” she said. “Our makers wanted to create us, Master, and did the best they could. Kelu was their first design, but when they were unable to make her work, they consulted a sorcerer of great power. The enchantment he designed allowed the creation of all the genets, and that enchantment had no flaws. We are not as smart as Kelu, but we are less aggressive and require no magical maintenance.”

“They subsist,” Kelu muttered.

“And you?” I asked.

“I suffer,” Kelu said. “I was created to suffer, because the elves think suffering is beautiful in everyone but themselves.”

Another one of those chills ran down my body. Not solely foreboding, either, but the flesh’s reminder that it had been compromised and would not mind remedy. I sat up, and again the room whirled around me, smearing.

“Master!” Almond exclaimed, steadying me. “You need care!”

What I needed was a doctor, but how would I explain this to Stirley? Oh, yes, I was out in the woods when I was attacked by a beast, who ripped through my coat and blouse and chewed the body of muscle just above my elbow while sucking half the blood from my arm. Oh, I know I am no outdoorsman and not at all given to hunting, it was a whim, I just happened to have startling bad luck.

Yes, Stirley would believe that. “Yes, Almond. I need care.”

And as I expected, she said, “Lie down, Master. We will take care of you.”

I told her where to find water and soap and linen and let her go. Perhaps having servants had its advantages.

It was while lying thus, with Almond gone and my mind barely tethered, that Kelu said, “You know what this means.”

“Pray do tell.”

“No matter what you look like,” she said, “you’re an elf on the inside. If you can feed me, you have the blood ladder magic, the birthright of all elves.”

“For all I know you also attack and suck blood out of humans,” I said, still staring at the ceiling.

“But I don’t,” Kelu said. “Look at me.”

I did. With my glasses on I could see the signs of repletion in her, the lassitude, the dilated pupils. I couldn’t imagine drinking blood without gagging, much less deriving such bliss from it. And as much as I tried to bar the thought, it came anyway: that perhaps it was not the blood, but what traveled on it, that she craved. Blood ladders, she called it, as if one could climb them to heaven. Perhaps there was magic in me. Twisted magic, she said. To match my twisted body.

Surely not.

“Ask your parents,” Kelu said. “Go today. Ask them if you’re adopted.”

“Preposterous,” I whispered.

She said nothing... but the idea took root and festered.

I walked to my parents’ house... by myself, without aid, without pausing to rest, without calling a carriage. I walked. The butler took my coat and I proceeded to the sitting room and there I settled on one of the chairs and accepted tea and waved off a plate of scones and then waved it back when I realized I was hungry. Me, hungry.

When I set the plate aside I found my eyes wandering to the portrait hung above the mantle. I remembered how long we’d posed for it, or how long it had seemed to me then as a child of nine: interminable confronted by the stink of linseed, the stiffness of my dress clothing and the hard discomfort of the chair. But it had produced a lovely painting, the three of us, Father so stern and proud, Mother serene and pleased. The painter had even managed to make my wan complexion a thing of purposed contrast with the sleek darkness of my hair, more artistic than I imagined it had been in person.

But for the first time I truly looked at my parents. My mother with her golden curls and light brown eyes, with pink on her cheeks... my father with his brown thatch, bronze skin, and earth-brown eyes, and a stocky and powerful body, short where I was tall. They had been rendered in smoky ochers, sienna browns, and bright cadmium yellows, touched with pink and caramel. Against that overwhelming warmth, I was a small blot of alabaster and lamp black, my gray eyes with their black rims seeming too large and solemn, exposed without my spectacles.

I looked nothing like them.

My mother entered then. She had not changed much since the portrait; a few more lines in her face, perhaps, a little more silver in her hair, her edges softer. But she retained a grace born of modesty, and the simple powder blue day-gown she’d chosen flattered her. I rose to greet her, gathered her smooth, dry hands in mine and leaned down to kiss both of her cheeks.

“What a pleasant surprise,” she said. “I thought you would be in school, love.”

“I’m in retreat, working on my dissertation. I thought I’d stop by as I am likely to be too busy to for the next few weeks,” I said, letting her draw me back down to a seat, this time on the couch. “Have you had any word from Father?”

“The usual weekly letter,” she said with a smile. “He finds this time of year trying, as always. Spring makes him long to be home with us.”

I thought of my youth as she poured me a new cup of tea. “Spring was always when it seemed interminable, the waiting for him to come home on leave.”

She laughed, soft. “It still is. For me, anyway, now that I find myself with too much leisure.” She studied me a moment. “You look well, love.”

The bandaged arm was hidden beneath my blouse, though I was surprised she hadn’t noticed it anyway. “Thank you,” I said. “I feel well today.”

“Then... has there been... any news?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Stirley is just as confused as always. But I do have good days.” I nodded toward the portrait. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it.”

She twisted to look at it and smiled, and all the joyful memories of our family were in that gaze. “Long enough. I’m glad I had that done, though. It’s good now that you’ve left the house. A comfort.”

How does one ask one’s parents if you are really their son? I stared at the portrait, the warmth of the tea caressing my fingers through the thin porcelain wall of the cup. The eyes of my child-self met mine, so grave, already too well-acquainted with the durance of suffering. “Mother,” I asked. “Was I adopted?”

Her cup paused on its journey back to the table; she set it down carefully before lifting her gaze to mine. In a motion as old as my memory, she touched my hair, brushed it back from my face. “Does it matter?”

I closed my eyes. That was answer enough.

“Morgan,” she said. When I remained silent, she framed my chin in her fingers and gently angled my face downward to meet her gaze. “How did you come to the question?”

I should have anticipated that she would ask, but somehow I hadn’t. I didn’t know what to say. My eyes lifted to the portrait again, and she followed them and sighed a little, releasing my face.

“Ah,” she said. “Sometimes it is the small clues.” She folded her hands in her lap. “Your father and I had... problems. But we dearly wanted a family. We brought you home from Saints’ Graces as a baby and we have never regretted it. We love you, Morgan. We could not love you more if you had come from our own flesh.”

“I see,” I said.

She gathered my hand in hers and squeezed it. “It’s immaterial, love. Let’s say nothing more about it.”

I smiled at her, let her draw me into conversation, the aimless pleasantries that belong to the visitor’s hour. It would have been a pleasure any other day; perhaps it was a pleasure on this one also, save that I did not remember feeling anything, anything at all. When it ended, I found myself outside the house with no memory of how I’d gotten there. Shading my eyes and squinting up at the sky gave me no hint as to how much time had passed, for I seemed incapable of making sense of the position of the sun. My eyes watered, tiny lash-sized droplets flicked on the inside surface of my glasses. I took them off and cleaned them on the edge of my vest, mechanical, without attention. In similar fashion I hailed a carriage.

“Where would you, sir?” the driver asked.

No answer. I had no answer. Where would I go? Where did I belong?

“Sir?”

“Ah... the university, please,” I said blindly.

The carriage lurched into motion. I stared at the buildings as they scrolled past and did not see them. I did not count the money I paid the driver; I did not feel the sun giving way to the clouds as I walked onto the campus, my gait stiffer than it had been in the morning.

How well I knew this place. So well I could find the loveliest park in it without paying attention to myself, my feet or my surroundings. My head rested against the trunk of a tree; my eyes on the clouds knotting together in the sky, their gray edges cut from one another with incandescent golden rims. My breathing felt tight and strange, and I could not seem to calm it.

I didn’t question their love for me. I couldn’t. But I’d always believed...

A tremor ran through my body. Best not to finish the thought. Best to drift in comfortable numbness. Best to stop thinking—

“Morgan?”

I jerked my face up and then staggered to my feet out of courtesy, out of habit, my knees protesting. I steadied myself on the oak. “Ivy... I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“I could say the same of you,” she said, smiling at me, head dipped a little so that her light brown curls fell before her face. She had two books balanced against her hip and her free hand was occupied with a spray of wildflowers. “I heard you’d gone on retreat... what are you doing here?”

“Clearing my thoughts,” I said, stunned by her. She’d always had that effect on me. That delicate, warm coloring, the peach softness of her skin, the charm of the freckles scattered over her nose. Her spirit shimmered beneath her surface, like the sun behind the clouds gathering over us.

“May I?” she asked, pointing at the ground beside me.

“Of course,” I said, and hastily pulled my coat off and spread it for her. She laughed and sat on it, smiling up at me.

Ah God, God. She was so lovely. I sat gingerly beside her, forgetting the ache in my joints.

“We’ve missed you at the chocolates,” she said. “It’s not the same with just Guy and Radburn. I am fond of them, but... you and Chester belong with us.”

“It won’t take us long, the retreat,” I said. “The work is going well.”

“It was sudden,” she said. “The decision. It seemed... well, precipitous. Was there any reason?”

So hard to lie to her, and so easy. “Eyre gave me an unbelievable find from Vigil’s athenaeum. A trove. I wanted more time to study it.”

“And Chester?” she asked. “Radburn said he’d found a new topic. Something about the evil of kings.”

I laughed. “We thought it would be appropriate given the patriotic bent of his parents.”

“I can’t imagine he’s enjoying it,” she said, shaking her head and twirling the flowers in her fingers. “He was so happy with the language work.”

“I’m sure he’ll return to it,” I said, smiling. “You can’t keep someone from what they love, not for long.”

She glanced at me with an impish grin. “Philosophy or poesy?”

I laughed. “Observation.”

“A pretty sentiment all the same,” she said, smiling. She lifted her eyes. “Do you think it will rain?”

“Maybe,” I said, just before a distant rumble replied. We both laughed.

“And here I was hoping to spend my free period picking flowers,” she said. She looked at the ones in her hand. “Morgan... have you ever wondered... what next?”

“What do mean?”

“After we’re done with all this,” she said. “What will you do?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t. My sickness had narrowed the focus of my life to day-to-day survival, and the surcease of learning, the escape of knowledge and books. Some part of me hadn’t been certain I’d live to finish the work. But because she deserved an answer, I said, “I suppose I’d follow my father’s footsteps. Or try, anyway. I don’t know that I’m suited to the career. I fear I want the patience necessary to serve as an ambassador anywhere.”

She laughed as she stroked the petals of the flowers, making them tremble, as I trembled to watch. “I think you’d make a very respectable ambassador. You have the gift of making others see reason.”

I grinned. “Given that my father tells me that what’s needful in the career is rather an ability to listen to the pomposity of fools…”

She flashed me a grin. “Perhaps you wouldn’t do very well in that, then.”

I tried to imagine it, found the idea risible, smiled… not without some pain. I wanted very much for my father to be proud of me. “Local politics, perhaps. Or even the university. It might be pleasing, to teach.”

“Reasonable,” she said. “Even respectable.” She sighed. “Better than anything open to me.”

“Some would argue that to be a wife and mother is to have more time for contemplation,” I said, not looking at her but oh so aware of her warmth at my side.

“Those someones have never raised children, then,” she said with a huff. She pursed her lips, then rolled the lower one beneath her teeth. I hadn’t thought she could be any more endearing until then. “It’s not that I don’t love children, or want family. It’s just that... I feel... well, there must be something more than this. Do you ever have that feeling?”

“All the time,” I said. Her own world of health and life was that something beyond my reach. I couldn’t imagine what she imagined beyond hers, but gray melancholy brushed me at the thought that there was apparently never any respite from desire, even when one was so blessed.

“I’ll be sad when it’s over,” she said.

“I’ll still call on you,” I said.

She smiled at me, and there was something regretful in her eyes, and fond. “I hope so.”

Greatly daring, I reached for her hand. Her fingers laced in mine and squeezed.

She leaned toward me just as the first ripples of nausea washed down from my head to soak my body in sweat.

Not here. God, not in this moment.

Thunder.

The first scintillant wave of pain.

Her voice, muffled by the sudden noise in my head. Was that my name? Was I still holding her hand? Were those my fingers jerking in hers, uncontrolled? Were those her screams or the sound of the rain?

The pain overtook the nausea and threw me to the earth. I tasted bitter soil and bile and grass. It mixed with the convulsions and the nausea and the pain, and the hallucinations wiped the sky from my eyes and everything condensed into a knot of suffering and ending, a grand killing culmination...

...and I survived. I survived and sat up to find myself slicked in cold mud in a groove made by my flailing limbs, alone in the rain beneath an oppressive gray sky. A spray of wildflowers had wilted, just out of reach, forgotten on the ground. They were out-of-focus, smears of steel-gray and purple. I righted my glasses, but the lenses were streaked, distorting everything.

Ivy. God, God, Ivy.

I stumbled to my feet and fell again, the mud sucking at my clammy hands and aching knees. There were limits to the flesh and I seemed to have found them. My second attempt to rise, like the first, dumped me onto my elbows and knees. The pendant detached from my wet skin and dropped past my collar, falling with a squelch onto the mud. It glinted there, sullen and accusatory, the rain spilling into the gullies between the raised symbols and shimmering there.

Thunder again, heavy over my curved back. I twisted my head painfully to one side and curled my lip at the sky. Bad enough for my world to separate at the seams... was the mud really necessary? How pedestrian. How trite. Before I could stop myself, I yelled at the clouds, “CAN’T YOU DO ANY BETTER?”

And then my voice broke and I gagged on my first sob. Another, just as bitter. They burned coming up, like vomit, wrenched me so hard my ribs ached. Everything had gone cold except my throat and eyes. Cold clothes. Cold skin. Cold wet slime beneath my clenched fingers. Cold world.

I had to escape.

How long it took me to totter to my feet and into a carriage home I couldn’t say, not with my body knotted and my memory raddled with holes. How many times I fell I couldn’t count. The mud was bad enough. Collapsing up the stairs to my flat... white shock up my knees, sparks from my wrists. Trying to catch myself. Failing. Smacking my head at least once against the edge of a step and losing my vision, conscious only of the relentlessness of the rain.

I clawed the door open and fell inside.

A ray of sunlight spilled warmth over my body. Gentle hands, small and delicately clawed, peeled my clothing from my skin. Worried whispers, a furred cheek rubbing against mine, comforting. The lumps of ice in my joints began to melt. The nausea subsided. My vision cleared. I was in Almond’s arms on the floor by the fire, Kelu sitting at my head and untangling my hair.

My first attempt at speech came out as a croak. Almond looked up at me, and I managed intelligible words on the second. “H-how long?”

“Three hours,” Kelu said behind me. “Since you staggered in. What possessed you to go out in the rain?”

“It wasn’t raining when I left,” I said huskily.

“You were gone so long.” Almond rubbed her nose against my chest. “Master, we were worried. You’re not well.”

Not well. What a... what a marvelous understatement. I could barely encompass the magnitude of it. Not well. “How long is this voyage to your home?” I asked.

They both looked at me then. At each other and then back at me. Kelu said, “It’s a month or so. We’d have to get to the port, though, that’s another week.”

I drew in a long breath, pressed my arm to my brow. My entire body felt raw, abused. I thought of wildflowers wilting in the mud. “I should pack.”

“M-master?” Almond whispered, ears slowly rising. “You’ll come home?”

“We’ll leave tomorrow,” I said. “I’d say we should leave tonight, but...”

“Tomorrow is fine, Master,” Almond said, lapping at my collarbone. They hadn’t dressed me, I realized, only thrown a blanket over my hips and legs.

“I’ll start packing for you,” Kelu said, rising.

“I should—” I began and then trailed off. As if I had the energy to follow her. Had I only a few days past been priding myself on my lack of self-deception?

“Sssh, Master,” Almond said, licking my neck. “Rest. We will take care of everything.”

Will you, Almond? I wanted to say. Will you give me my life back? My health? A future with a wife and children and family and friends who didn’t pity me?

But I didn’t say those things. I let her tongue tranquilize me, let the heat of the fire and the heat the genets seemed to spread beneath my skin lull me, and I slept there before the fire, clasped in furry arms.