Horribly, as they had in my dream, his body and face melted, flowing into another face and another body. He became a creature who looked exactly like me, with my thick black hair pulled into a braid. I saw Vai’s gaze drawn as by a spell down the length of the braid to the span of her hips. The creature’s lips were slightly parted as if she was thinking of eating or speaking, and I couldn’t be sure which, but either way she looked as if she was inviting a kiss. She was dressed exactly as I had been when in the coach with him, in a faded length of cloth wrapped to make a skirt and in a damp lawn blouse so thin and threadbare where it clung to the curve of her breasts that the shadow of her nipples showed through the cotton. Was that how I had looked when I had stepped down out of the coach on the ballcourt on Hallows’ Night?

Vai inhaled sharply.

Desperately, I tried to open the door, but the numbness in my lips had infested my whole body. All I could do was watch through gremlin eyes.

The creature who looked like me leaned closer to Vai. The neck of her blouse gapped open to reveal no bodice beneath, nothing but bare skin. Vai pressed back against the seat.

Her hands wandered up the front of his dash jacket.

“Sire a child on me,” the creature said in a voice like mine but nothing like mine, because its whisper was cruelly seductive, “and I’ll leave any children you sire on her alone.”

Vai spoke in a hoarse murmur. “You can’t bear children. You’re a man.”

“Do I feel like a man?”

Her lips brushed his. Her knee eased between his thighs and her hands spanned his shoulders to draw him into her kiss. Breasts brushed his chest. Vai became as rigid as if he had turned to ice. I guessed he was angry at himself for being aroused.

I could scarcely blame him. If I hadn’t known I was me, I would have thought I was her.

If I’d had a body and an axe, I would have smashed in my sire’s head.

“No,” Vai said against its lips, his mouth unyielding.

“But you want me,” the Master of the Wild Hunt said in my voice, like a purr of desire.

Her voice, her hands on him, were claws digging into my flesh, yet I could do nothing.

“No.” Vai’s voice was clear and cold. “I want her. There is a difference.”

“What difference would that be?”

“The shape you wear is an illusion.”

“When she comes for you, as you and I both know she is trying to do right now, how will you know if it is she or I who grasps you close and whispers words of hope and love?”