General Camjiata stood with his hand on a door latch. Behind him, the view out an attic window overlooked a town square and a stone castle tower rising above green trees. His hair was tied back with an incongruously bright-green ribbon that matched the old-fashioned bottle-green dash jacket he wore, its cuffs trimmed with lace. He addressed me with a serious look that quite disarmed me. Who would offer such a direct and confiding gaze to an enemy?

“I need you to kill him. You’re the only one who can.”

Golden spears of late-afternoon sunlight lanced into my eyes, blinding me as he opened the door into a lamplit chamber beyond. Darkness smoked up on all sides.

I did not want to be a killer. If only the Master of the Wild Hunt had not been my sire, I would not have had such dreams. Yet if he had not sired me, I would not be what I was. If I had not been what I was, I would not have escaped the mansa. I would have been dead long before I had been forced to make the choice that had killed the cacica. We are bound to our ancestors and to those who made us, whether we want to be or not. What matters is what we make of what we are.

I opened my eyes, back in the belly of the beast. Bee and the cacica were still conversing.

“Do you wish Caonabo had thrown away his honor merely to please you?” Queen Anacaona spoke not with anger, not with pity, but as if pressing Bee to find the answer to a riddle.

“I didn’t say that! But he ought not to have gone after Cat in that way. He shouldn’t have cooperated with James Drake and the general.”

“Open your eyes, selfish girl. It isn’t about you. There are greater battles awakening in the world. Those who have developed a thirst for blood cannot easily be turned aside from their insatiable appetites, no matter whom they harm. The old ones move slowly, but they fight to protect their young.”

“You speak in riddles,” Bee said. “What does that all mean?”

I slid into the fog of dreams as if in the belly of Leviathan I, too, became a dragon dreamer. Streaming rivers of mist welled up from the deep, currents flowing in vast circles that penetrated close to the gleaming surface before pouring away into darker, smokier depths. Swimming shapes brushed me, hot and cold by turns, rough to the touch and then slickly smooth like eels slithering in coils around and around me.

I startled awake, shuddering, to find myself lying in Vai’s arms on the bed he had built for us. His embrace was so strong and comforting that I could have reclined in its orbit forever and not missed the world.