“Good,” he said. “It ought to. Pay attention. Help them when they need help.” He paused. “Only when they need help.”
I nodded. “I will.” I looked into his broad dark face, uncertainly. “Do you want your son to be with me?”
“It’s what he wants.”
“Is it all right with you?”
“If you treat him right.” He looked past me at nothing for several seconds. “I wanted him to live in the human world for a few years, get more education than we could give him here. He did that. But to tell the truth, I wanted him to stay out there, make a life for himself, forget about vampires. Then he comes back, and all he wants to do is find himself a nice vampire girl.” He smiled, and it wasn’t an altogether happy smile. “I think he’ll want to do more once he’s been with you for a while. He’ll want to write or teach or something. Too much energy in that boy for him be to just some kind of house-husband.”
“Theodora wants more, too. Once this Council of Judgment is finished, I’ll have to decide what to do, how best to build a home for us all. When that’s done, my symbionts will be able to do what they want to do.”
“Good girl.” He took a deep breath and started toward the nearest building of offices and studios. “Now let’s go figure out how many people can be jammed into these studios. Thank God the weather hasn’t gotten cold yet.”
Twenty
The night before the Council was to begin, members of the Leontyev family arrived. I didn’t know them, of course, and until they arrived and Martin mentioned it, no one had bothered to tell me that Leontyev was the name of my mothers’ male family—the family of their fathers, elderfathers, brothers, and brothers’ sons.
The Leontyevs and their symbionts arrived in two cars—a pair of Jeep Cherokees—while I was coming back from showing the very cool and distant Zo? and Helena Fotopoulos and their symbionts to their rooms in one of the office complexes. Martin had given me a list of who was coming and where they were to sleep. He said, “If you want to learn, you might as well help. This will give you a chance to meet people.” He was, I had noticed, good at putting people to work.
The Leontyevs were older males, Konstantin and Vladimir, each with three symbionts. Martin intended them to stay with Henry Gordon. I came to get them, introduced myself, and realized from their expressions that something was wrong.
“I’ve had a serious head injury,” I told them. “As a result of it, I have amnesia. If I knew you before, I’m sorry. I don’t remember you now.”
“You don’t remember … anything?” the one Martin had pointed out to me as Konstantin asked.
“Not people or events. I remember language. I recognize many objects. Sometimes I recall disconnected bits about myself or about the Ina in general. But I’ve lost my past, my memory of my families, symbionts, friends … The people of my families who are dead are so completely gone from me that I can’t truly miss them or mourn them because, for me, it’s as though they never existed.”
Konstantin gazed down at me with almost too much sympathy. A human who looked that way would surely cry. After a moment, he said, “Shori, we’re your mothers’ fathers. You’ve known us all of your life.”
I looked at them, took in their tall leanness, trying to find in them something I recognized. They looked more like relatives of Hayden and Preston Gordon—just two more pale blond men who appeared to be in their mid-to-late forties but who were actually closer to their mid–four hundreds.
And suddenly, I found myself wondering what that meant. What had their lives been like so long ago? What had the world been like? I should ask Martin who had once been a history teacher.
The faces and the ages of these two elderfathers—my elderfathers, my mothers’ fathers—triggered no memories. They were strangers.
“I’m sorry,” I told them. “I’ll have to get to know you all over again. And you’ll have to get to know me. I can’t even pretend to be the person I was before the injury.”
“I’m grateful the Gordons were able to take you in and care for you,” the one called Vladimir said. “How did they find you?”
I stared at him, surprised, suddenly angry. “I found them. I’ve survived three attacks, and twice helped fight the attackers off. I helped to question the surviving attackers who came here a few days ago. Only my memory of my life before I was hurt is impaired.”