Xcor linked his hands and placed them on the glossy tabletop. Beside him, Throe was speaking in low tones; he himself had remained quiet since they had taken the weight off their feet in these matching oxblood armchairs.

"This certainly seems persuasive." His soldier flipped over another page in the set of documents that had been proffered. "Very persuasive, indeed."

Xcor looked across at their host. The glymera solicitor was built like a pamphlet, so thin that one wondered when he lay out flat whether he presented any verticality a'tall. He also spoke with an exhausting thoroughness, his verbal paragraphs of small font and crowded, complicated wording.

"Tell me, how comprehensive is this brief?" Throe asked.

Xcor's eyes went to the bookshelves. They were crammed with leather volumes, and he quite believed that the gentlemale had read each and every one. Mayhap twice.

The solicitor launched another well thought-out, well-articulated cruise through the English language. "I would not have turned it over to you both without ensuring that all efforts were made to..."

In other words, yes, Xcor filled in in his head.

"What I do not see here" - Throe turned more pages - "is any notation of counter-opinion."

"That is because I was unable to find any. The term 'full-blooded' has been used in only two contexts - that of lineage, as in a full-blooded offspring of a given sire or a dam, and that of racial identity. Over time, there has been some minor dilution of the wider gene pool, some contamination from humans - and yet individuals with distant Homo sapiens blood ties have as yet been construed by law as being full-blooded provided they go through their transitions. Now, of course, that is not the case of the direct offspring of a human and a vampire. That is a true half-breed. And those individuals, even if they survive the change, have historically been held to a different standard by the law, with lesser rights and privileges than other civilians. The concern is thus - if the king's shellan is a half-breed, there is a chance that any male offspring of theirs may not go through the transition."

Throe frowned as if considering the implications. "But within twenty-five years, we shall know one way or the other - and the royal couple could always attempt to have multiple young."

Xcor interjected dryly, "You assume we will still be on the planet in two and a half decades. At this rate, we are nearing extinction as it is."

"Precisely." The solicitor inclined his head in Xcor's direction. "From a practical standpoint, being a quarter human could be enough to prevent the transition from occurring - there have been documented incidences of this, and I'm sure Havers could give even more examples. Further, there is among many people of my generation a fear that an offspring with that close a nexus to the human race could in fact prefer a human mate - i.e., go out and seek one unaffiliated with our kind. In which case, we could have a human queen, and that is" - the male shook his head with distaste - "absolutely untenable."

"So there are two issues," Xcor said as he sat back, the chair creaking under his weight. "The legal precedent and the social implications."

"Indeed." The solicitor once again pulled a head bob. "And I believe that the social fears could be properly leveraged to fill in the gray areas around the relevant portion of the law concerning the king's offspring."

"I concur," Throe murmured as he closed the papers. "The question is how to proceed."

As Xcor opened his mouth to speak, a strange vibration went through him, cutting off his thought process, his body becoming a tuning fork struck by some unseen hand.

"Would you care to review the documentation?" the solicitor asked him.

As if he could, Xcor thought grimly. Indeed, one had to wonder what this learned male would think if he knew the decision maker in all this was an illiterate.

"I am persuaded." He got up, thinking mayhap a stretch would cure whate'er ailed him. "And I believe this information should be shared with members of the Council."

"I have sufficient contacts to call the princeps together."

Xcor went over to a window and looked out, letting his instincts roam. Was it the Brotherhood?

"Do that," he said with distraction as that hum in his gut increased, creating an urgency he found impossible to ignore....

His Chosen.

His Chosen had breached the compound and was close by -

"I must needs go," he said in a rush as he headed for the door. "Throe, you wrap up here."

There was a certain commotion behind him, conversation sprouting up from the pair of males in his wake - about which he cared naught. Breaking out through the front entrance, he regarded the farmland around him....

And located her signal.

Between one heartbeat and the next, he was gone, his body and will drawn to his female sure as a dying thief to redemption.

At the Iron Mask downtown, Qhuinn went over to the bar and parked it on one of the leather-topped stools. All around, the music was pounding, and sweat and sex were already curling into the hot air, making him feel claustrophobic.

Or maybe that was just his headspace.

"Haven't seen you in a while." The bartender, a nice-looking female with a rack and a half, slid a napkin in front of him. "Same as usual?"

"Double."

"You got it."

As he waited for his Herradura Seleccion Suprema to arrive, he could feel the eyes of the humans in the club lingering on him.

Come out? Like I'm gay...

You fuck men! What the good goddamn do you think it means!

Shaking his head, he really could have used a break: That happy little exchange had been banging around his head, just underneath the surface of his consciousness, ever since shit had gone down a week ago. On the whole, he'd done an outstanding job of sublimation...unfortunately, that winning streak appeared to be over. As his tequila arrived and he downed one shot glass, and then the other, he knew that there were no other distractions he could bring into play, no more putting the introspection off.

Oddly - or maybe not so oddly - he thought of his brother. He still hadn't shared anything with Luchas about the young. It all felt too tenuous: Even though the pregnancy was hanging in and continuing to look good, it just seemed like an extra layer of drama the guy didn't need at this point.

And he most certainly hadn't mentioned anything about his sex life or Blay. For one thing, his brother was still a virgin - or at least, that had been Qhuinn's understanding: The glymera were far more restrictive about what females could do before mating, and certainly if Luchas had banged a female casually, it would have been tolerated as long as he didn't hook up with her long-term. But all of Luchas's feedings after his transition had been witnessed, so there had been no opportunity there, and the guy's nights had been heavily scheduled with learning and studying and chaperoned social events. No chance there.

Somehow going into all the shit Qhuinn had done didn't seem appropriate. It also, in Blay's words, wasn't that interesting.

Qhuinn scrubbed his face. "Two more?" he called out.

As the bartender hopped right on that, he thought, damn it, he'd assumed the sex he'd had with Blay had been really interesting. And Blay hadn't seemed bored when it was happening....

Whatever. Back to Luchas. In all those bedside chats he'd been having with his brother, females hadn't come up - and males certainly weren't on the menu. Back before the raids, Luchas had been hetero like their father - which was to say strictly the female you were mated to in the missionary position on your birthday and maybe once a year after a festival.

Males, females, men, women, in various combinations, sometimes in public, rarely in a bed at home? Not something Luchas had any frame of reference for.

When Herraduras three and four were slid in front of him, he nodded a thank-you.

Reaching down deep, even though he hated that expression as well as what it meant, he tried to see if there was anything else in and among his reticence to talk to the remaining member of his family about his life. Any shame. Embarrassment. Hell, maybe a little rebellious gotcha that he didn't want to inflict on his crippled brother...

Qhuinn squirmed in his own clothes.

Well. What do you know.

If he was brutally honest? Yeah, he was a bit tetchy. But it was on the level of not wanting to be looked at funny for yet another reason...as his conservative, probably-virgin of a brother would no doubt do if he was told about the males and the men.

That was it.

Yup. That was all.

I don't know how to explain it. I just see myself with a female long-term.

He'd said that to Blay a while ago, and had meant every word -

Some kind of emotion curled up inside his gut, twisting things down there, rearranging his bowel and his liver.

He told himself it was the hooch.

The sudden fear he felt suggested otherwise.

Qhuinn swallowed his third shot in hopes of getting rid of the sensation. And the fourth. And meanwhile, the faces and breasts and sexes of the many females and women he'd fucked flashed through his mind -

"No," he said out loud. "Nope. No."

Oh, God...

"No."

As the guy next to him gave him a weird look, he shut up.

Wiping his face, he was tempted to order more to drink, but held off. Something seismic was trying desperately to break through; he could feel it trembling around the foundation of his psyche.

You don't know who you are, and that's always been your problem.

Fuck. If he got more tequila, if he kept swallowing, if he stayed his avoidance course, what Blay had said about him was always going to be true. The trouble was, he didn't want to know. He just really fucking didn't want...to...know....

Jesus, not here. Not now. Not...ever.

Cursing under his breath, he felt the geyser of realization start to really bubble, a loud-and-clear from the middle of his chest threatening to break out - and he knew that once it was free, he was never going to get it back underground again.

Damn it. The only person he wanted to talk to about this wasn't speaking to him.

He guessed he was going to have to man up and deal with it on his own.

On some level, the idea that he was...well, you know, as his mother would have said...shouldn't have affected him. He was stronger than the glymera's condescension, and, shit, he lived in an environment where whether you were gay or straight, it didn't matter: Long as you could handle yourself in the field and you weren't a total asshole, the Brotherhood was down with you. Look at V's sexual history, for fuck's sake. Black candles used as something other than a light source in the dark? Hell, just being into males was a cakewalk compared to that stuff.

Plus, he did not live in his parents' house anymore. That was not his life.

That was not his life.

That was not his life.

And yet even as he told himself that over and over again, the past that no longer existed was right behind him, staring over his shoulder...judging and finding him not just wanting, not simply inferior, but utterly and completely unworthy.

It was like phantom limb pain: The gangrene was gone, the infection cut out, the amputation complete...but the horrible sensations remained. Still hurt like a bitch. Still crippled him sure as a limp.

All those women...all those females...what was the true nature of sexuality, he wondered suddenly. What counted as attraction? Because he'd wanted to fuck them, and he had. He'd picked them up in clubs and bars, hell, even that store in the mall where they'd gone to get John Matthew some real clothes after his transition.

He'd chosen the women, singled them from the crowd, applied some kind of data screen that had weeded out some and highlighted others. He'd had them blow him. He'd sucked them off. He'd ridden them from behind, from the side, from in front. He'd grabbed their breasts.

He'd done all of that by choice.

Had it been different with the guys? And even if it had been, did he have to label himself at all?

And if he didn't slap a definition on himself, did that mean he wasn't something that his parents, who were goddamn dead and who had hated him anyway, hadn't approved of?

As the questions fired through his brain, pelting him with precisely the kind of self-analysis he had always stabbed out of his thought processes, he came to an even more shocking realization.

As important as all that shit was, as Christopher Columbus as he was getting, none of it came close to the most critical issue.

Not in the fucking slightest.

The real problem that he discovered made all that crap look like a walk in the park.