Dane. Elizabeth Amber
them around her hand without comment. They, too, would be stowed in the cabinet and Eva wouldn’t see them again until next Moonful.
“Really, I’ll do all that,” Eva insisted again. Her lashes fluttered as she battled sleep.
“No shame in this, cara. It’s your nature,” Odette soothed.
Eyes drifting closed, Eva shook her head on the pillow. She knew better. Fantine and Odette had loved her, but they’d considered her a freak. Their refusal to discuss her “nature,” and the strict secrecy they insisted upon with regard to it, had taught her that there was shame in this, at least for a woman. Satyr males were revered in ElseWorld, but she—the lone satyr female—was quite simply defective.
Yet they had always arranged for her comfort during the ritual she performed each Moonful. And Odette continued to aid and abet it in every way after Fantine’s death, in spite of the fact that she scorned the satyr species in general. By the time Eva woke again, the cylinders on the bedside table would be cleansed and returned to the cabinet. The phallus at the foot of the bed would be polished and rotated back to its former position among fanciful vines and clusters of grapes carved from olivewood.
“I don’t know what I would do without you, Detty,” Eva murmured dreamily, hardly noticing she’d used her childhood nickname for the serving woman. Upon the first Moonful after Eva had turned eighteen, Fantine had been confronted at last with undeniable proof that her daughter was truly satyr. A faraway, longing look had come into her eyes. One that said she was remembering Eva’s father. But all she’d said was, “Well, we must make do.” But it was Odette who had done the practical things that had helped Eva to survive undetected.
“Dear Maman.” Eva sighed, her eyes drifting closed. “I miss her.”
A gentle hand adjusted the coverlet over her. “Sleep now. Dream of that rich husband you gonna get soon.”
Eva nodded into her pillow. She’d marry well into the ranks of this human society, and somewhere in heaven her maman would know and be proud of her success. But for herself, Eva wished for only one thing. To find her father. In heaven, she hoped her maman would understand it was something she needed to do.
A smile touched her lips. One like that of the beautiful Fantine, who’d felled half the men in Rome and then gone on to do the same in ElseWorld’s French Enclave.
“Pretty smile like that. You’ll have your choice of men. But you’ll marry human, not a satyr like ruined your poor maman,” Odette said, satisfaction coloring her voice. “You show these Roman curs who the Delacortes are. You make them pay.”
It was a maxim Eva had been weaned on. From childhood, she had been groomed to avenge the wrongs this world had done her mother.
“Rest, bebe. Odette’s gonna keep you nice and safe.” She lapsed into voces mysticae then, the chants and protection spells that she’d whispered over Eva for as long as she could remember. It comforted Eva to hear her familiar words, and she drifted off into a drug-induced sleep.
“That’s it.” Bending closer, Odette gently pulled back the coverlet, then stared down at her for a long moment. She curved a palm along Eva’s cheek almost reverently, then slowly ran her hand downward, over her throat, a breast, ribs, until finally her hand came to rest on her belly. “That’s my good girl. Dream of babies. And revenge.”
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