Black as Blood Read online

  His family looked at me with blank eyes, enthusiasm draining away. Christine was the first to speak, offering me a hesitant, “Hi, Istas. I’m Christine.”

  “It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” I said gravely. “Ryan tells me you may be coming to join us in New York for a time. I would be happy to take you to the Fashion District, should you decide to go shopping while you are there.”

  “Oh.” Christine sounded surprised. Then she smiled a little, uncertainly. “Thanks.”

  “I appreciate any excuse to visit the Fashion District,” I assured her.

  Mikey was still eyeing me with blank wariness. “So Ryan tells us you’re a waheela,” he said. “That true?”

  “It has always been so, and I do not feel any different for having entered your home, so I assume that it is true,” I said. “I was born to waheela parents, at the top of the world, where the wind is ever-present and the thaw is ever-wished. Ryan informs me that you are a tanuki. Is that true?”

  “Do you doubt the parentage of my children?” Chiyako’s voice was like the snap of a whip.

  I blinked slowly, feeling as if I had just walked, with eyes open, into a trap I could not recognize. “I was asked a question, and I echoed it. Is this somehow offensive? Have I somehow offended?”

  “Watch she doesn’t eat you, Mom,” said Mikey, and now there was a note of distinct malice in his tone.

  The urge to growl rose in my throat. I swallowed it back down. “I mean no offense,” I said carefully. “I am here at Ryan’s request. He wanted me to meet his family. He said it was important to him that I meet his family, and that his family meet me.”

  “Why?” asked Chiyako. “It’s not as if we were ever going to approve of you.”

  “Mom!” Ryan sounded scandalized. His grip on my arm did not waver, and while I was grateful for this sign of solidarity, I also wished he would let me go. At some point, I would either fight or flee, and I did not think he would take kindly to my attacking his family. “Istas is my guest, and my girlfriend. Why are you being so rude?”

  “Why are you bringing us a monster and pretending she can be tamed?” Chiyako narrowed her eyes. “No waheela has ever been trained to be anything other than what it is. A beast. A destroyer of men.”

  “Mom.” Now Christine sounded disapproving. “This isn’t what I agreed to.”

  “Wait—agreed to? Are you telling me you invited me here because you wanted to stage an intervention about my girlfriend? I love her. You’re the ones who told me to find a mate, because we can’t afford to lose our breeding adults. Well, I found one I actually care about. Istas is funny and kind and…and she tries so hard to be gentle with the world. I don’t think people understand how difficult it is to live in a place where everything seems breakable, all the time.” Ryan looked at me, finally letting go of my arm. “She’s perfect. She’s just what I need.”

  “She’s a beast and she will devour your children without thinking twice, because that’s what she is; that’s where she comes from.” Chiyako’s voice was cold, as cold as the north wind. “We didn’t expect you to bring her.”

  “You said—”

  “I know what we said, Ryan. I never thought you’d get her on the plane.”

  I looked past Chiyako to Paul, standing still and silent at the back of the group. He looked away. Ah.

  “Thank you for your hospitality,” I said, and turned, and walked away before any of them could say a word. The front door was unlocked. I left my parasol on the porch. Midway down the driveway, with the sound of raised voices following me like accusations, I paused to unzip my boots and daintily roll down my stockings. I tucked them into the space where my toes had been only a moment before, and then, fleet as the wind across the tundra, I ran.

  *

  The forest is never far from the surface in Seattle. I undid buttons as I fled across the city, my fingers following their familiar paths as my feet did the same: it has always been in me to run for safety, to seek the dark wood and the places no man goes. When the trees loomed before me like a promise I dove into them, and my frilled dress and lacy panties—the trappings of the civilization I aspired to and might never claim—fluttered behind me, caught on the branches of the guardian evergreens. I struck the forest floor like an attack, my hands and feet already stretching into paws, and still I ran.

  Waheela leave no scent behind us in either our human or great-forms; we smell of clean water and nothingness, as befits the tundra’s greatest predator. When I had fled far enough that the angry yearning was no longer clasped in iron bands around my heart I slowed, flanks heaving, muzzle drooping low, and curled myself into a ball. I felt no cold, for my fur was made for colder climes than these. So I lay there, and I breathed in the scents of the forest, and I tried to push away the pain.

  I had not been looking for a mate. Ryan needed to breed to keep his species alive, and he had pursued me, and I had not been averse to the idea. If I bred with Ryan, I could be a mother without being a mother to waheela; tanuki were special, somehow, on what our friend Verity called “a genetic level,” and any children Ryan sired would be tanuki, although they would borrow certain traits from a non-tanuki parent. Our children would be large for his species, and dark-furred, with muted scents that would keep them safer. But they would not be waheela, and they would not know the north wind. That had been so appealing. The idea that I could be a better mother than my mother was, just by freeing my descendants from the north wind’s call…

  But that was not to be. Ryan’s family was his world, and they would not have me. We would return to New York together, and then we would become separate again. Perhaps his family was right; perhaps I would never be tamed, but would always be a beast from the top of the world, waiting for the day I must return there.

  A deer walked by, tail flipping idly, unaware of my presence. My stomach grumbled, but I did not move. I just watched the deer. It lived here, in the woods on the verge of the city, and it did not fear, for it knew what it was and where it belonged. It fit into this wood, into this place. It lived as it wished. There was power in that, and I was not so hungry that I needed to take that power away.

  I raised my head. The deer went bounding away, startled by the motion, and was gone. I could have pursued it, but I did not. I was hungry, but I controlled my hunger. Could a beast have done that? There was a time when I could not have controlled myself. There was a time when all I would have been was hunger, and not a thinking creature at all. I could not be tamed, because I was already taming myself.

  Lumbering back to my feet, I turned, and began the slow, thoughtful walk out of the wood. There were things yet left for me to do.

  *

  Ryan was sitting on the porch when I came walking up the driveway, his head bowed and his hands dangling between his legs. My boots were on the step next to him. The small shushing sound they made when I picked them up caused him to lift his head. He gasped, taking in my muddied appearance, my hair falling free and tangled with pine sap and needles.

  “Istas—”

  “In a moment, please.” I rang the doorbell.

  Christine answered the door. Her eyes widened. “You came back.”

  “Get your mother, please,” I said politely, still holding my boots in one hand. My bare feet ached with the pleasurable memory of running.

  Christine nodded, eyes still wide, and withdrew. I heard her call her mother’s name. Seconds passed, and Chiyako appeared, her own eyes narrowed in wary suspicion.

  “Greetings,” I said. “My name is Istas, of the high tundra, daughter of the north wind, and I am going to stay with your son whether you approve or no. I will not eat my children. I will not be driven away by cruel words or unthinking superstition. I fled my own family rather than allow myself to be devoured. I hope you will not put me to the same decision, because if you do, I will not run. But I will love your son, and I will keep him safe, and your grandchildren will be better protected than any other tanuki in this world. I do not
think we have anything else to say to each other tonight. Perhaps later, when the wind has blown a little more for both of us.”

  Then I turned, leaving her staring after me, and walked back down the porch steps to where Ryan was waiting. I offered him my hand. He took it.

  Behind us, Chiyako called, “See you tomorrow night for dinner?”

  “Sure thing, Mom,” said Ryan, and led me to the rental car. He opened the door for me. I slid silently inside, and watched as he walked around the front to the driver’s side door.

  Once he was seated, I said, “I require a hairdresser, a manicurist, and a steak the size of my torso.”

  Ryan smiled. “You got it, honey,” he said, and started the car.

  We drove silently away into the cool Seattle night.