Chapter 10

The Claiming, as practiced by the Blood of Thorne, is not the rite from Earth legend that turns a human into one of their kind.

It is closer, in accurate terms, to a mark of ownership.

You leave your own toothmarks and your own pheromone on a chosen object, and thereby announce that this thing belongs to you.

In the same way children fight over an apple in kindergarten, and the one who wins it bites it first, so the toothmarks and the spit will establish that the apple now has an owner.

Mary was currently the apple with the bite out of it.

When she woke, her body felt considerably warmer, but the surface under her was hard and cold and nothing whatsoever like a comfortable bed.

Also, it was pitch dark.

Mary spent a long time feeling around before it registered that she appeared to be shut inside a sealed box-shaped space.

Connecting this to vampire legend, she deduced that she was most likely lying in a coffin.

In the center of the room, from a coffin built of costly Titan Wood, came a faint rustling and some clumsy knocking, which interrupted the academic discussion the other two people in the room were having.

"Oh? Has our delicious female woken up?" From a high-backed chair, a woman in a pure white dress who nonetheless looked every inch a sensual queen — Patricia Allen — uncrossed a pair of long legs in black stockings with great elegance. She pushed a hand through her striking long gray hair, wearing a smile with something playful in it, and walked toward the coffin.

Long fingers rested casually on the heavy lid and lifted, and the lid Mary had been entirely unable to shift came up in one piece.

"Good evening, delicious food." Patricia smiled beautifully, showing two bright, sharp fangs.

Mary, delivered abruptly into the light, was still frozen in the posture of shoving hard at a coffin lid.

Her eyes focused slowly. It took several seconds before she could properly see the woman in front of her, and the very noticeable pair of fangs in her mouth.

Oh. A beautiful woman.

Mm. A vampire.

The beautiful vampire in front of her cleared her throat and said:

"Hark, let proper acquaintance first be made. I am called Patricia Allen. Henceforth, I shall attend thee as leech and tutor in tongues. 'Tis my hope we shall find good fellowship... I perceive thou wonderest how I speak the tongue of thy sphere. In truth, 'twas a marvel to us also, to find it doth share such close kinship with a dialect of our own elder days—"

Those lovely red lips opened and closed, producing a stream of fluent English as ornate as poetry.

Mary should have been able to follow it.

Instead it arrived as though through several centuries of fog.

Every word had the shadow of Shakespeare on it. Hark. Thee. Thou. Doth.

Archaic forms she had barely encountered in a literature class were being deployed here, fluently, in ordinary conversation.

The pronunciation carried an unfamiliar rhythm too, very nearly a chant.

Her brain labored, trying to render this antique poem into modern speech she could actually process — and by the time she had hold of a few recognizable roots, Patricia had long since finished talking.

So the two of them stared at each other and the whole thing came to a stop.

"What's the matter?" Getting no reaction at all, Patricia frowned and pulled up the archive of Earth's common languages she had compiled overnight, long fingers moving fast across the pale blue light-screen. "Why is there no response? According to the pitifully thin records in the cosmic archive, Earth's common language was definitely English. That archaeological team from Archiole-G ten thousand years ago kept notes that were chaotic and thoroughly amateur, admittedly, but the linguistic sampling portion was reasonably solid. Unless too much time has passed and Earth's language system has evolved into an entirely different version—"

"Ahem. That, ah—" Mark Anderson, the butler, who had been standing silently in the background, helpfully offered an alternative hypothesis. "Is it possible, Miss Patricia, that the issue is your pronunciation? Whatever else may be true, three days and two nights of emergency cramming on an unknown language couldn't produce a perfect accent immediately."

The delicate blue light-screen developed a crack under those long fingers with an audible crunch.

Through the small hiss of a shorting circuit, Patricia turned around slowly and let her voice drift, very darkly, toward Mark. "Mark. Are you questioning my professional competence as a linguist, and my academic dignity?"

"No. I wouldn't dare."

Mark's outline appeared, under the force field Patricia was generating, to shrink backward very slightly and without drawing attention to itself.

"Heh heh heh. Never mind a simple language family with this much in common with our own tongue — even Laguiz, which contains both uvular and alveolar trills and double plosives, I mastered in three days and was fluent in within a week. There is no language in this universe capable of defeating me."

Which was, in fairness, true.

As a first-rate linguist, xenobiologist, folklorist and archaeologist, Patricia genuinely was fluent in an uncountable number of languages.

The problem was that the number of languages capable of defeating Mary was very large indeed.

As a native of Earth, she couldn't manage the archaic forms or the standard pronunciation of her own mother tongue as fluently as an alien could.

Mary felt, briefly, that she was doing very badly.

Fortunately, Patricia, being a genius linguist, arrived quickly at the distinction between a common tongue and a regional variety.

She abandoned the translator she'd broken by pressing on it, turned around, and pulled several heavy volumes off the shelf — dictionary-like antiques with yellowed paper and disintegrating corners.

Amid the sound of pages turning at high speed, she searched entries, reassembled grammar and learned in real time, muttering continuously, occasionally lifting Mary's face in one hand and even gently prying her mouth open to examine the structure of her oral cavity.

And Mary, in her capacity as a living specimen, thought only that at page-turning speeds like that she personally wouldn't be able to make out individual words. How was this woman processing that much information at once?

"By the limited record, English became the dominant language on your planet fairly recently. Earlier records show Latin, Hebrew and other major languages coexisting on Earth at that time. The record is fragmentary, but it's worth attempting."

Patricia closed the book and looked at Mary again.

Then she adjusted her pronunciation and said, clearly, in a tone closer to the modern and still carrying a certain deliberate precision:

"I am Patricia Allen. What is your name?"

This time it was standard modern English, and grammatically correct.

Congratulations to Mary. From this point forward she would begin a surreal daily existence composed jointly of vampire nobility, aliens, and a linguist armed with a dictionary of archaic English.