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“Forgive me, Scribe Virgin…ah…” He cleared his throat and reminded himself that if you pissed Her Holiness off, they’d need barbecue tongs to pick up your steaming pieces. “I mean no offense, but I will take no female as my own—”

“You will. And you will lay with her in the proper ritual and she will bear your young. As will the others.”

Visions of getting trapped on the Other Side, surrounded by females, unable to fight, unable to see his brothers…or…God, Butch…snapped the hinge on his mouth. “My destiny is as a fighter. With my brothers. I am where I should be.”

Besides, with what had been done to him, could he even sire young?

He expected her to hit the fan at his insubordination. Instead she said, “How fearless of you to deny your station. You are so like your father.”

Wrong. He and the Bloodletter had nothing in common. “Your Holiness—”

“You shall do this. And you shall submit of your own volition.”

His reply shot out, hard and cold. “I’d need a good goddamned reason.”

“You are my son.”

V stopped breathing, his chest going concrete on him. Surely she meant that in the broader sense.

“Three hundred and three years ago you were born of my body.” The Scribe Virgin’s hood rose off her face of its own volition, revealing a ghostly, ethereal beauty. “Lift thy so-called cursed palm and know our truth.”

Heart in his throat, V brought up his gloved hand, then ripped the leather off with messy tugs. In horror he stared at what was behind his tattooed skin: The glow in him was just like hers.

Jesus Christ… Why the hell hadn’t he made the connection before?

“Your blindness,” she said, “afforded your denial. You did not want to see it.”

V stumbled away from her. When he hit the mattress, he let his ass go down and told himself now was not the time to lose his mind—

Oh, wait…he’d already lost it. Good deal, or he’d be totally freaking out right now.

“How…is this possible?” Sure, that was a question, but who the fuck cared at this point?

“Yes, I think I shall pardon your inquiry this one time.” The Scribe Virgin floated around the room, moving without walking, her robes unaffected by the trip, as if they were carved from stone. In the silence she made him think of a chess piece: the queen, the one among the others on the board who was free to move in all directions.

When she finally spoke, her voice was deep. Commanding. “I wanted to know conception and birth physically, so I assumed a form sufficient to perform the sexual act and went to the Old Country in a fertile condition.” She paused before the glass doors in front of the terrace. “I chose the male based on what I believed were the most desirable masculine attributes for the survival of the species: strength and cunning, power, aggression.”

V pictured his father and tried to imagine the Scribe Virgin having sex with the male. Shit, that must have been a brutal experience.

“It was,” she said. “I received exactly what I had gone out to find in full measure. There was no going back once the rutting started, and he was characteristic to his nature. At the end, though, he withheld himself from me. Somehow he knew what I was after and who I was.”

Yeah, his father had excelled at finding and exploiting the motivations of others.

“It was perhaps foolish of me to think I could pass for something I was not with a male like him. Cunning, indeed.” She looked across the room at V. “He told me he would give me his seed only if a male young would be placed with him. He had never successfully begotten the live birth of a son, and his warrior loins wanted that satisfaction.

“I, however, wanted my son for the Chosen. Your father may have understood tactics, but he was not the only one. I knew well his weakness too, and had it within me to guarantee the sex of the young. We agreed that he would have you three years after the birth for three centuries, and that he could train you to fight on this side. Thereafter you would be for my purpose.”

Her purpose? His father’s purpose? Shit, didn’t he get a vote?

The Scribe Virgin’s voice got