Chapter Eleven

At home that night, Damien came out onto the porch with a bottle of his homebrew in hand. Grandmamma was working with me on seeing auras and the unlabeled bottle seemed to shine a bit brighter than Damien. I lost the aura Sight and looked up at my father with concern.

"What happened?" I asked.

Damien took a moment to settle himself on the rocker before stating, "I hate answering to families."

"Huh?" I asked, earning a tap on the head from Grandmamma.

"You know how to articulate better than that, child! No need to sound like the wind got knocked out of you before it has."

I bit my lips and rolled them back out through my teeth while shooting Grandmamma a wary glance. She seemed to be in a bit of a temper and I wasn't sure exactly why.

"What do you mean, Damien?" I rephrased my question.

He gave me a long look, stormy melancholy in his gaze. "Your schoolmate, Dallas, she called just now because her brother's gone out. She didn't take much comfort in being told how the liege had summoned his sire and him. Got down right panicky and managed to get her folks attention. They didn't know that she'd been harboring him and while her father was grilling her, her mother was grilling me. I feel like I've been raked over the coals right about now."

"Did you say as how he might not come back?" I asked, soft voiced.

I got a flat look in return. "No, I did not mention that and I won't, seeing as how there's a lawsuit pending that might just clear up whether it's a crime for a preeter to kill another preeter."

The State of Kansas vs. Benworth had just gone to the U.S. Supreme Court, Mr. John Benworth, a newly risen were-lion pride king, being accused of murder for killing the former pride king. Mr. Benworth's attorney, Ted Nixon (no relation to the former president), worked an interesting legal defense to get them that far along. The laws as written defined a legal difference between Natural and Preternatural creatures, with Man on one side trotting along with the domesticated critters while the human-kin, like therians and vampires, paced the other side with the unicorns, ogres, spotted bottlewhips, and – most importantly – the fey. Nixon, citing the Human-Fey treaty to which the U.S. of A. was a principal signer, successfully argued that in matters solely involving Preternatural citizens the common laws of the Preternatural community held jurisdiction, including those laws that defined the succession of power within said Preternatural communities. The Court, after an exhaustive review of the hundred-odd year-old treaty, decided that Nixon was right. However, that was yet to come.

Several of the states have gotten tangled up in legal battles while attempting to alter the definition of "Preternatural citizen", earning the animosity of the Council of Indian Elders, the fey, most all of the human-kin, and about two-thirds of the conservatives constituencies. The first two are looking out for themselves because if the states are successful in redefining one recognized treaty party then they might try a similar tact to exclude other treaty members from the provisions of other treaties. The majority of human-kin recognize that there are fundamental differences between who they are as Preternaturals and who they were as Naturals. The capabilities of rogue preeters are definitely more … attention-grabbing than those of rogue Naturals. As for the conservatives, well, they just don't want to be in the same category as any of the preeters.

"Oh," I said, feeling stupid. I guess I must have looked rather chastened because Damien leaned his head back, blew a loud breath out of his nose, and then looked back at me with more patience tempering the melancholy.

He reached out and ruffled my hair, saying, "You're young yet and you've got a lot to learn, and most all of it ain't magic. I know you're feeling fretful. Waiting's always the hardest part."

That night it felt like truer words were never spoken.  I may have never met Benjie York, may have only had a passing acquaintance with his sister, but that didn’t matter to my nerves.  I worried for Benjie York because I worried about my own actions, about my decision.  I had a part in whether he lived or died come morning and I didn’t know which outcome was the better one.  Most of that worry came from Aunt Antoinette’s and her vampire prince’s involvement.

Damien I trust. I trust Damien with the kind of faith that Poppa talks about placing in the big-G, his YHWH Elohim.  Ok, maybe not quite the same.  Damien is flesh of the earth and he has been known to be wrong a time or two while Poppa insists that his God is beyond such a fallible state.  However, if Damien told me to jump off a bridge I trust him enough to know that I’ll survive the fall – and the landing – in a happier state than I would if I stayed on that bridge – and not to question him until we’re sipping tea at home again.

I’d be questioning Aunt Annie like a son of a gun and, at that point in my education, I probably would have tried to parboil her amerte before he closed his lips on the last word.  Even to this day I don’t really trust them.  The world they live in punishes selfless acts unmercifully and, together, they have risen quite far within that world.  Aunt Annie and Andre are utterly ruthless.  They do not allow sentiment to stay their hand if decisive action is required, or even if it is simply the more promising course.

None of these thoughts roused in me any particular sense of serenity.  At the end of the day, it was my choice to help Dallas by bringing in my father and that choice had brought about the young man’s current peril.

An hour later and we were still waiting on the back porch. Grandmamma gave up on our lessons and got out her pipe whistle. When the lonely notes started dancing over the night breeze, Damien went back into the house and emerged with his acoustic guitar. I amused myself with fancies of watching the notes glide back and forth between them, appreciating the polish that decades of practicing together gave their improvisations.

The act of creation is, in my mind, the most fundamental magic of all. It may require no direct manipulation of the Quickening, but without that spark of potential there would never be a need for Quickening in the first place.  Some mages disagree with me, thinking that the term "magic" should only ever be applied where mages wrap, bend, and twist the Quickening by our rather overt means. Others, like Grandmamma and I, find that magic is inherent in every act that changes the Quickening, from the magic of science that channels lightening into "usable" electricity to the magic of the hosts crossing the Void.

I drifted for a while, lost in the music. Without quite realizing it, I dropped into a trance, not quite leaving my body. With the music filling my ears I saw flashes of stories untold, heard whispers of songs unsung, and felt the caresses of paths not taken. I felt my body rise from the porch and begin to dance, pulled by the music and my own need to create with my family. Those untold stories needed some way to be told and the unsung songs needed a voice to sing them. The paths-not-taken were open before me and would remain that way. They were the paths of my future and it was not yet time to tread them.

The guitar abruptly cut off, but the pipe whistle played on and I danced with the notes I had fancied before swirling around me. I danced, thinking of Benji York, thinking of his story so far untold and his song as yet unsung. I danced, thinking of Dallas, both so fragile and so brave. Regardless of this night's doing, her song would continue. I danced, thinking I couldn't bear it if more sorrow wound its way into her song.

The sound of the pipe whistle softened, growing fainter as Grandmamma's playing came to a close. I thought I felt a touch, like a comforting hand laid across the back of my neck, and slipped back from my trance Dream to wakefulness. Then I felt hands, reaching up and wrapping around my waist. I opened my eyes and the languorous peace born of the dancing and that phantom touch scattered like buck shot out of a short-barreled shotgun. I let out a short little squeak and fell out of the air into Damien's waiting arms.

Grandmamma let out a short, quick laugh and brought my quilt over. "So, it looks like you have your aunt's light feet," she commented, her eyes gleaming over the top of my head at her son.

"I was in the air!" I cried. Damien gave an all over shudder and Grandmamma laughed again.

"I never would have guessed, child."

"No, Grandmamma, I was in the air! I was, like, flying! How did I do that?" I asked, still too surprised to figure out if it was a good surprise or a bad one. Damien's arms squeezed tighter around me and that brought my head around to look at him. He was pale and I could feel the fear rolling off him. It didn't make much sense to me because there was Grandmamma, laughing and with no fear whatsoever to her.

"I expect the same way your aunt does - one step at a time and with the right piper piping," she answered. Then, pointedly to Damien, "And you thought I was over reacting the first time I saw Annie in mid air, dragging you along!"

With a last convulsive squeeze, Damien released me, setting me gently down. Grandmamma casually draped my quilt over my shoulders, high enough not to drag on the ground.

"Gods above! Why the hell didn't you kill us both then?" he asked, looking rather round-eyed. "We could have killed ourselves!"

"At the time, you rather thought the tanning I gave your hides wasn't all that deserved, if I recall right," she pointed out, her voice deceptively mild.

"That was before I realized how damn scared you had to have been! Sacred horns! If I live to be nine hundred, I don't think I'll ever forget this!"

"Come along, mageling, let's go get your father a cuppa. I'll add a bit of Irish to it and maybe he'll calm down in a year or two." With that, Grandmamma placed a guiding hand on my back and off we trooped to the kitchen. Damien looked up for a moment before he followed us in.

I looked at the kitchen clock, rather surprised to see that another hour had passed. Grandmamma set about putting on the kettle while I folded my quilt up and hung it off the back of my chair. I got out the step stool and studied the tea selection. I took a bit of time at it, too, still scatter brained from the excitement of dancing on air.

Damien walked up behind me and reached around me to grab a canister of Irish Breakfast tea. I chose Orange Spice and he steadied me while I stepped down. We both took our seats while Grandmamma, humming and still laughing inside, set down mugs and honey.

Grandmamma went to the restricted cabinet, the one over the refrigerator that held all sorts of things I wasn't allowed to touch. I knew what was in there – though neither Grandmamma nor Damien would have told me if I was younger – and I could also see the bright, shiny tell-me ward that Grandmamma had set around it. She pulled out a bottle of Irish whiskey, pushing some of the emergency potions to the side to reach it.

Most families have a first aid kit in the house. Ours just happened to have "extras". The bandages and commercial ointments were in the cupboard below the public bathroom's sink. We even had the nifty steel case with the big blue cross on the front to hold the, ah, standard items. The extras were in the restricted cupboard.  If you needed the extras then nothing in the standard kit would be worth the seconds it would take to get it.

The extras, on the other hand, were very nice extras. Grandmamma let me assist in brewing a few of them and she doesn’t believe that ignorance and magic go together very well. Quite often intent manipulates the final outcome of any given magic, which means that ignorant helpers can hurt far more than their help is worth. The potions I helped to craft were for wound healing. While the household inhabitants were all rather good at healing on our own, the potions gave a concentrated boost. The red ones stop bleeding, the green ones seek and destroy “foreign” matter (like invasive bacteria, viruses, dirt, and metals), and the yellow are an all around boost to the immune system.

If it’s all in the crock, out comes the blue potion; it causes stasis. A stasis potion is by no means lightly used. The mid-spirit will flee if a body lies in stasis too long and no one really knows just how long "too long" will be in any given situation. That doesn’t mean that the body dies – the primal spirit is bound too tightly to the flesh. As long as flesh or bone survives, traces of the primal spirit remain – that’s what answers when necromancers raise zombies. No, the mid-spirit is closer to what Christians think of as the “immortal” soul, even though that’s not quite right either.

I'll be nice and call what I'm about to explain "theory" even though mages - and especially healer mages - work this "theory" every day. I'll even concede that it is magic, which is Art and not Science, and therefore subjective. Ce la vie. There are several types of spirits, or soul essences. The most basic is the body spirit and it is intrinsic to matter. In point of fact, it is both the location and the method through which Quickening primarily interacts with the material plane.

I find body spirits to be absolutely fascinating because they stack up. To give you an idea, each cell in your body has a body spirit. Each cell belongs to a cellular unit, like tissues or marrow or blood. Each cellular unit has a body spirit that each of the individual cells contribute to. Each cellular unit also belongs to an organ, which belongs to an organ system, the sum total of which is your physical body. Your body spirit contains contributions from every organ system, and therefore every organ, and every tissue, and every cell inside your body.

Stepping backwards just a moment, those tissues and organs are also located in physical areas – arms, legs, hands, feet, abdomen, torso, neck, head … I'm pretty sure you get the idea by now. Those organs, and tissues and cells are all contributing to a regional body spirit, which also contributes to your body spirit. This chain of contribution continues at the very least to the planet level. I'm not sure if we'll know if the body spirit stack continues past individual planets until we can get the perspective to see it.

The second spirit is often called the primal spirit. It's the Spark of Life and it only comes into existence when there is enough of the right mix of body spirit stacks. It is an inherited spirit. In humans, you get a little bit from your sperm donor and a little bit from your egg donor. These inheritances contain instinct. A baby starts out with just the inherited primal spirit, but the primal spirit is constantly learning. As it learns, it adds to the inherited instincts, sometimes over riding them, sometimes supplementing them. For most living beings, that’s where the spirit-gathering stops.

Physical forms capable of sustaining rational thought attract rational spirits. The rational spirit is probably the closest any of the spirit forms come to the Christian ideal of the immortal soul. It bonds with a primal spirit and feeds off it until the body spirit stack is no longer capable of supporting both spirits. For humans, that's usually when the person dies, but it can also be when the body sustains too much damage. If that damage is repaired quickly enough then the rational spirit can return. If not, well, primal spirits bond with only one rational spirit. When a rational spirit is present, the primal spirit learns through the filter of the rational spirit and it may not know how to direct the body left behind. Rational spirits are capable of existing without a body to draw on. Primal spirits are not.

The mid-spirit comes into being when the primal and rational spirits first come together. It is the bridge between the two, and some mages theorize that it is the child of the rational spirit (it's an interesting idea on where new rational spirits come from, but the proof is hard to come by). Where the rational spirit is the seat of thought and the primal spirit the seat of instinct, the mid-spirit is the seat of emotion (just because those are the seats does not mean that those are the only spirit forms that can contain them). The mid-spirit is also what makes or breaks being a mage. The body spirits link to the Quickening and draw the energy needed to continue holding material form. The rational spirit has some indirect connections to the Quickening, too, or it wouldn't survive without hooking up to a body spirit stack. On occasion, the mid-spirit also ends up as the faucet of a direct connection to Quickening.

All of which brings us back to the stasis potions. When the potion takes effect, the primal spirit enters stasis with the body. The rational spirit may comprehend what's going on, but the mid-spirit either feels the retreat of the primal spirit from the bond or goes with the primal spirit into stasis. If the later happens, that's all to the good as the rational spirit follows the mid-spirit. In that case, the stasis can be semi-permanent with no lasting harm. If the former happens (which is far and away more likely) the mid-spirit will only remain as long as the rational spirit holds on to it. Once it goes, so goes the rational spirit.

As Grandmamma pulled down the Irish whiskey, I saw the blue potion set aside and had a thought. "What happens when a vampire gets 'put on hold', like, with one of the blue potions?"

Grandmamma paused for a moment as if struck by the question. She continued pulling down the whiskey, but with a look passed the question to Damien. I followed the look and let the weight of my thoughts fill my gaze.

Damien studied my face for a moment before answering. "Vampires – true vampires and not the demons raised by Infernalists or the poltergeists that try to draw life out of blood – well, vampires die a small death every morning and … well, it's not really being reborn so much as resuscitating when they come out of stasis at night. So, in a way, they already get 'put on hold'. Whether they come out under their own juice or with the assistance of their sire or liege is the dividing line between lesser and master. If you gave the potion to a master vamp then he'd probably be up and running by the next night fall, latest. The lesser vamps, well, you might just kill them all the way dead, like never coming back at all."

"What do you mean, they die? I mean, I thought it was like the shifter viruses?" I asked.

"Eh, yes and no. Yes, it's a virus. Unlike a shifter, though, vamps are very rarely ever made by mistake. Small bits of the virus make small, reversible changes. Someone who gets smacked with a large dose over a short time, it's like crack cocaine – too much too fast kills you. The big difference is that if you build up a goodly tolerance for the virus, you wake up between three nights and a week later with sharper teeth and a bigger Beast."

"But if they wake up then doesn't that mean they aren't dead?"

Damien leaned back in his chair, tipped his chin toward the ceiling, and blew out a big breath. After a moment, he sat back up and said, "I know you and Momma have talked about spirits and how that affects your aura Sight. Has she explained about how the primitive and the reasoning spirits are connected? She has? Good."

He paused for another deep breath. "When the vamp virus hits critical mass, it kills off the mid-spirit and uses what's left over to make a new one that feeds the virus. It doesn't just change it; it flat-lines the mid-spirit, suspends the body's immune system, and it remakes the flesh. The older a vamp gets, the more powerful it gets because every day when the vamp dies the virus goes to work making him stronger."

Damien took the cup of spiked tea Grandmamma gave him and used the moment to pull his thoughts together. He took a careful sip of the hot liquid and resumed the lecture.

"A danzupyr - a person who's being fed vampire blood to make the change easier - has a lot of the faster changes already starting. The viruses, shifter and vamp both, they're retro-viruses; they get into the cells of your body and insert their own special codes into your DNA, so that as your cells reproduce, the new cells carry that viral code. That code does something that gives the magic in the viruses something to latch onto. Shifters get a second primal spirit and that primitive spirit binds them tighter to the Quickening. The new primitive spirit is in charge of that bond and it uses it the way it knows best – to make the body faster, stronger, healthier and to keep it that way.

"The vampiric viruses, on the other hand, once they spread out all over the body, they focus almost entirely on making the vampire hard to destroy. It's far and away easier to take out a rogue therian than a rogue vamp. Vamps don't get a second primal spirit, even if they do get the Blood Hunger. Both viruses are curses, and every curse has some sort of nasty effect. The vamp viruses, once they get spread out over the body, can't work with too much energy going on around them. That's why vamps die for a portion of the day and why sunlight kills vamps, flash fries 'em, really. The body's constantly powering itself and, while we may not soak up light quite the same as a plant, it is still energy that powers through our bodies."

Damien paused to drink his tea. I guess my confusion must have shown because Grandmamma stepped in. "That's the short version. The long version involves nuclear physics or some such like that. It's not quite as bad as atom splitting; Lady's horns, but I don't think anything's as bad as atom splitting! Still and all, the vampiric viruses channel Quickening very differently, even from how you and I do it."

Something was ringing a rather dim bell in the back of my head. I turned more toward Grandmamma and started working my way toward that bell. "Vampires are always channeling Quickening?" I asked.

Grandmamma nodded.

"And channeling Quickening means you need elements to channel it with, right?"

Another nod.

"And food, we don't eat it but to keep the body going. I mean, veggies are almost all minerals and earthy elements and bodies only keep the earthy and watery elements when they die, so meat doesn't really help that much. So, that's why they take blood, isn't it? Living blood, it has air from the lungs and it's made of water and earth and it's got fire in the heat of a body, but it's also got spirit, too, cause the body's still alive. Right?"

Damien and Grandmamma both gave me considering looks, but all Grandmamma said was, "That is so."

Damien added, "The spirit, really, that's the most important part. Vampires are dead and alive and not dead and not alive all at the same time. The rational spirit, a lot of times it fights and it fights hard to get away. It takes Spirit bonds to keep it from high-tailing it out at the first chance, especially with new vamps."

I had an awful thought. "How long does it take a danzouppiyer to get ready for being made into a vampire?"

Serious eyes met mine. "It varies with the kindred line, with the traditions of the line and the variation of the virus. Most traditions proscribe three or four months of small, daily feedings and then at least two weeks of a pint a day until the danz-upyr dies, and then the new vamp's sire gives him the Bite. I'm not sure if part of that is making sure the new vamp is well and truly bound to his sire."

"What does it mean that Benji was changed so fast?" I asked.

"Accidental embraces have occurred in the past, where no blood was exchanged, vampires turned with only the Bite. If the young York is lucky, he survived because his will to exist is that strong, his rational aversion to being vampire that slight, and his sire actually did manage to feed him blood before the Bite. If he's not as lucky, his sire has a potent Bite along with his own Will. If he isn't lucky, he has no real will power, his psyche broke during the embrace, and he's only still walking around because the vampiric essence won't let him go."

He reached over and laid his hand on my shoulder before finishing. "If Benjamin York is really, really not lucky, he's one step up from a revenant. If that's what he is, he's more dangerous to himself than to others, and dangerous enough to everyone around him that the safest thing to do for everyone is to let him finish dying."

I felt my bottom lip start quivering and the pressure of tears build, trembling, on my lashes. "Isn't there, isn't there some way to fix it, to make him safe in himself?" I asked, wanting so much for my father or Grandmamma to make it all better.

Grandmamma came up behind me and laid her hand in comfort across my neck. Damien's hand tightened on my shoulder as he silently shook his head, no. The tears spilled over and I leaned back into Grandmamma's touch. Damien started to move forward, like he would have gathered me up, but Grandmamma waved him back. He stopped, but he didn't retreat. He may not have played macho games, but my father never really had a lot of back-up in him. Grandmamma had a reason for preventing him from trying to shelter me, but that didn't mean he was going to just walk away, either.

I noted all this in the back of my head. The front of it was consumed with Consequence. That isn't the word I would have chosen back then.  Back then, I thought Consequence was this rather balanced thing, cause and effect. I was clueless to its significance. After all, you do one thing, another thing happens, and that's it, right?

Wrong. Consequence, with the big C, is the entire forward moving chain of consequences, those little "this from that"s which make the world go 'round. Small-c consequences chain together. Do A, B happens. B happens then C doesn't happen, which paves the way for D to go on through. I outted myself as a preeter-go-to gal, I encouraged Dallas to confide in me, I went to Damien with her confidence and he put it before the two people I trusted the least in the city. I was looking for where I could have changed things, if I would have changed things.

The decision to be open and up front about whom and what I was couldn't be taken back; none of the choices already made could be undone. But that choice, that was the one decision that I wasn't sure of, that I couldn't in all honesty say I would have made again while waiting to hear of Benjamin York's fate. So my mind latched onto that decision and I started picking it apart.

Somewhere in the circling of my thoughts, the phone rang. After a momentary staring contest with his mother, Damien got up and answered it. I didn't bother listening to his side of the conversation when my own internal dialogue was turning so … gruesome.

I reached the point in my circling where I was starting to second-guess everything. The decision to be up front about who I was, what I was, seemed so necessary at the time. After all, I was the child of a somewhat infamous preeter hunter and the grandchild of a local preeter celebrity. I was a budding mage in my own right and magi attract strangeness like flames draw moths. Trying to hide where I came from wouldn't have worked, would it?

Or was I just happy to accept that rationale at face value? Did I embrace that thought because somewhere deep inside I wanted to stand out? Did I set myself up to be this big deal, this nine-day wonder for the fame, for the attention? Were the fear and the nervousness I felt when I chose to be vocal about being a preeter myself, were they a warning that I knew I shouldn't have spoken out? Did my own self-aggrandizement create the situation?

But as I thought that last thought, a part of me jumped on it, pointing out that Benjamin York had been vampire for longer than I had even known Dallas York existed. I could not have created the situation – Benji York's sire created it by embracing Benji. If Benji was little more than a revenant, how could Dallas not have seen it? If a new vampire is drawn to embrace his family, how could Dallas have kept him secret from her parents? She had sheltered him for months, not just a day or two, but longer than your average addict could have resisted a temptation staring him in the face.

And if I hadn't been there for Dallas to come to, what would Dallas have done when her parents did finally find out that she was sheltering Benji? I mean, yeah, they knew as of tonight, when he was away from the house, when those stronger than he were in a position to keep his newly-turned vampire instincts in check. What would have happened if he was in the house when they found out?

The thought of his parents convinced that they were doing "right" by him as they dragged his day-corpse into the light of the sun filled my imagination for a moment before the imaginary shrieks and imagined smoking, ember-glowing flesh made me flinch back from the thought.

And then, what if his Will finally gave? Who would stop him from trying to turn mother and father and baby sister? Damien's fresh words, that it took months to make a vampire, made me wonder, if I hadn't been open enough for Dallas to come talk to me, to ask her questions, to see what could be done to help her brother, would I have found myself attending her funeral?

Damien's voice cut through my thoughts. "Mr. York, why don't you come on over, then? I've found face-to-face talks avoid a lot of confusion and there's a lot to be confused about. At the least, I've got some books you can borrow. They'll give you a starting point, some solid facts, to base your decisions on. Yes, I also have some things that'll keep vampires out of the house, off the property in fact. … I've got a call on the other line, I'll be right back, okay? …"

I looked up at Grandmamma and mouthed, "They're coming here?" She just shrugged at me and kept on rubbing the back of my neck.

"Hello? … Hi, Annie, how did the meeting go? … Really? So you're keeping him? … What about his sire? … An Espanozan? He's a bloody Espanozan and you're letting the fledgling live? … I see … By Will and Word, your hand before the Sovereign, do you swear it? … Holy … No-no, that's, that's, wow! … Tch! Not likely. You're keeping him so I know where to start if I end up getting a Writ for him. Now what about his sire's fate? … Invite me and I might accept it. … Okay, love you, too, Annie. Thanks for the update. … I'll think about it. … Okay, goodnight."

Then there was a click as Damien switched off call waiting and, "Mr. York? That was one of the city's Liege's representatives. The Liege has agreed to accept Benji into his household and they are currently hunting for his sire. … Eh, that's a gray area, come on over and I'll give you the full run down. It might be best to bring the whole family." After another pause, Damien gave out directions to our home, said his farewells, and came back into the kitchen.

Grandmamma and I just stared at him. He went over to the fridge, pulled out another bottle of his homebrew, came back to the table and sat down. We waited while he un-corked his bottle and took a long pull on it. With a deliberate air, he set the bottle down. Staring hard at the bottleneck, he said, "Benji York is an Espanozan fledgling, a one Bite turn, and naturally immune to mind games. Andre blood-oathed him blind to get past his defenses and the boy is, quote, potent."

At Damien's words, Grandmamma's hand stilled on my neck. "An Espanozan, with immunity, and Andre took him into his kiss? Andre?" she asked, her voice fierce with surprise.

"Furthermore, the sire managed to take off running. Andre's called the Hunt on him and notified the California and Nevada Lieges to be on the lookout for him. Depending on whether his folks notified the police when Benji was turned, the sire might be running up against a Writ of Execution, too."

Grandmamma blew out a long, shivery breath. She pulled out a chair and sat down heavily. "But, Andre blood-oathed the fledgling? Blood-oathed him and took him into his kiss?"

Damien started turning the bottle, still not taking his eyes off it. "According to Annie, the boy's lineage wasn't apparent until after the blood oath and during it, she rode with Andre to test the fledgling." Damien's hand stilled and he finally met his mother's eyes.

"Annie swears that she cannot find any delusion within Benjamin York. She swore, hand to the Sovereign, that as far as she could determine he is as sane as any vampire could hope to be. Furthermore, despite his sire being Espanozan, she can detect no trace of demon-rider anywhere attached to the boy."

"Demon?" I asked, latching on to the part that seemed most important.

Damien and Grandmamma ignored my question. Grandmamma stated, her voice hard and flat, "Then he's not Espanozan or she's not as capable as she believes herself to be."

"It is a quandary, now isn't it? And Annie did not say that he wasn't demon-ridden or that he had no dementia, merely that she could not detect either to the extent of her abilities. Another thing to think on is, who's ever seen an Espanozan fledgling before? It's my understanding that they keep their Kindred close until it's time to cast them out."

Grandmamma gave Damien a hard look. He raised his hands with a don't-blame-me look on his face. "Grand-père pointed that one out a few years ago."

"And when did you start talking to Grand-père?" she asked, looking upset.

Damien brought his hands down, a somewhat cynical look I couldn't quite figure out sinking into his features. "I didn't. He started the sleep-talking thing shortly after I got back from the War. He wouldn't talk about family matters, but he fed me information on the preeter communities when I couldn't get the knowledge from any other source. One of the rogues I had to serve Writ on was an Espanozan. The chroniclers are very happy to write about Juan Gustavo Espanoza y Guatama de Madrigara, but I couldn't find any who acknowledged that he started his own kindred line with the power he got from associating with Infernalists. The chronicles only mention that he hunted down every other Kindred in his lineage, killing the last one in the early 1400's; they won't even state what that lineage was. Neither would Grand-père."

"For good reason, too. Espanoza didn't kill his Line's Kindred Fount. Most know only that he disappeared around the time of the last crusade, but he placed his body in the hands of his only trusted ally. Above all, Grand-père knows that he has not faded. So far, we have been blessed that that one's Dark Night has held for so long, but if you speak the name of the line, you speak his name and there is a fear that it will wake him. Let him rise from his Night or not, but if he is dragged from it, he may wake in Rage and it is doubtful if there are many on this world who would survive that one's Rage."

"Demons?" I asked again.

Damien gave me the "wait" look that parents the world over perfect. I bit my lips and looked from him to Grandmamma and back. I fought it, but I couldn't help it. "Demons?" I asked again, on the edge of panic.

Grandmamma's hand gently squeezed the back of my neck. "Demons," she stated, then turned her attention back to Damien. "So you've been in contact with Grand-père for over fifty years without telling me a word of it and angry at he and Grand-mère the entire time?"

Damien shrugged, no discomfort on his face. "Like I said, he wouldn't talk about family matters. He totally ignored my questions if they weren't about preeters in general or my case in particular. I'm not too proud to take help when I need it, but like I told him, helping my work doesn't make up for the family matters he and Grand-mère let slide."

"And now you know better, right?" she asked, her voice taking on a hard tonality.

"And now I know a bit more than I did. I am not convinced that their choice was the best one, but I am willing to concede that there are more politics going on than I can keep up with."

Grandmamma closed her eyes and grimaced. She stood up and started fussing around the kitchen. Damien watched her for a moment, then turned to me. "Go wash up a bit, sweetie. Our guests should be over in a short bit."