Dearest Virgin Scribe, what was she going to say?

Selena looked up and down the corridor, as if the perfect little monologue might obligingly march on by, at a pace leisurely enough so that she could memorize it.

For all she knew, he had forgotten their time together. By his own admission, he was well versed in finding female diversions of the human variety.

No doubt he had wiped the slate well clean.

And then there was the reality of him being promised to another.

She dropped her head into her hands. For her entire life, she had taken comfort and purpose from her sacred duty—so it was a shock to discover that as she drew closer and closer to her demise, the one thing she was driven to get right was her departure from a male who was not her own. With whom she had had an affair of the very shortest duration.

There had been many nights that she had spent in her bedroom up at the Great Camp, attempting to convince herself that what had happened with Trez was pure folly, but now, as time was running out? A strange clarity was focusing her. It mattered naught the why. Only that she accomplished the goal of telling him how she felt before she died.

She did not want to approach him too soon, however—rather embarrassing to pour out her soul to a potentially indifferent vessel and then linger for nights, weeks, months.

If only her expiration came with a date, as if she were a carton of milk—

Qhuinn emerged from the hospital room, and the tight expression on his harsh face cleared away her tangle of preoccupation.

“I’m so sorry,” she murmured. “He is refusing again?”

“I can’t get through to him.”

“The will to live can be complicated.” She reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. “Know that I am here for you both. If at any time he changes his mind, I shall come.”

“You are a female of worth, you really are.”

He gave her a quick, hard embrace and then stalked off down the corridor, as if he were leaving the facility. But then he paused in front of the closed door to Doc Jane’s main examination room. After a moment, he pushed through.

As she prayed there was a solution for the two brothers, another wave of exhaustion, the bigger brother of the one that had swept her off-kilter in front of Tohrment, shambled through her body, making her throw out a hand to the wall lest she fall down.

Panic o’ertook her, her heart beating wildly in her chest, her head flooding with do this, do that, run away. What if this was an attack? What if this was her final—

“Hey, are you all right?”

Training her wild eyes toward the sound, she found that Tohrment was coming out of the exam room.

“I . . .”

All at once, the whirling sensation receded unexpectedly, as if she had been approached by a mugger who, having been confronted by the Brother, had reconsidered his attack.

Beneath her robing, she lifted one leg and then the other, finding none of the deadly resistance she was so terrified of.

“Selena?” he said as he strode toward her.

Leaning back against the wall, she went to brush over her chignon, and discovered that her forehead was damp with sweat.

“I believe I shall tender myself up to the Sanctuary.” She blew out her breath. “I shall refresh myself there. It is needed.”

“That is a great idea. But are you sure you’ll be able to—”

“I’m just fine.”

Closing her eyes, Selena concentrated and . . .

. . . with a twirl of the world and a spin of her molecules that her brain, rather than something in her body, initiated, she was relocated up to the Scribe Virgin’s sacred, peaceful place.

Instantly, sure as if she had taken a vein, her body was both eased and strengthened, but her mind did not follow suit—in spite of the lovely greens of the tree leaves and the blades of grass, the pastel colors of the tulips that were perpetually in bloom, the resplendent white marble of the dormitory, the Treasury, the Temple of the Sequestered Scribes, the Reflecting Pool, she felt pursued even though she was in arguable safety.

Then again, having a mortal disease of indeterminate duration made it difficult to tell the difference between symptoms that were on the “normal” spectrum, and ones that had greater portent.

She stayed where she arrived for quite some time, fearing that if she moved, she might trigger the expression of her disease. But eventually, she went upon a wander. The temperature of the still air was perfect, neither too hot nor too cold, and the sky overhead glowed a blue that was the color of a cornflower sapphire, and the baths gleamed under the strange ambient light . . . and she felt as though she were alone in a dark alley in downtown Caldwell.

How much time? she wondered. How many more promenades did she have left?

Shivering, she pulled her robing closer to her body as a familiar sense of sadness and impotence barged into her, crushing her chest, making it difficult to breathe. But she did not give in to tears. She had cried them all out some time ago, the why-me’s, what-if’s, and need-more-time’s over now—proof that even boiling water could be gotten used to if you stayed within it long enough.

She had come to terms with the reality that not only had she not been granted a full life, she had not really lived much a’tall—and so, yes, of course she must tender a good-bye to Trez. He was the closest she had gotten to something that was hers, something private rather than prescribed, attained, for however briefly, rather than assigned.

In saying farewell to him, she was acknowledging that part of her life that had been her own.

She would approach him on the morrow.

To hell with pride . . .

After a while, she discovered that her feet had taken her to the cemetery, and given the direction of her thoughts, she was not surprised.

Chosen were essentially immortal, brought into existence long ago as part of the Scribe Virgin’s breeding program where the strongest males were mated to the most intelligent females to ensure the survival of the species. In the beginning, the female breeding stock were quarantined up here, with the Primale serving as the sole male for insemination. As millennia passed, however, the role of the Chosen evolved such that they served the Scribe Virgin spiritually as well, recording the history of the Race as it unfolded upon the Earth, worshiping the Mother of the species, and serving as blood sources for unmated members of the Brotherhood—for whom some broke rank, and accepted mortality in exchange for love, freedom, the chance to bear young who would not be condemned to rigid roles.

And then the current Primale had come along and relaxed even further the roles.

Selena looked in through the graveyard’s arched trellis; the marble statues of her sisters managed to loom o’er her in spite of the fact that they were quite some distance away and sequestered within their verdant bordering.

For all the good the ancient breeding program had done, there had been one treacherous result from it, one prison that, however modern-thinking this Primale was, he could not exempt Selena and her sisters from.

Deep in the cells of the Chosen, there lay dormant a critical weakness, a defect that came about precisely because of the limited pool of breeding that was supposed to make vampires invincible.

A sacrifice to the intention of strength. Proof that the Mother of the Race could, and would, be curtailed by Mother Nature.

The statues beyond filled her with terror. The elegant figures within the encircled acre were not actually made of stone—not in the sense that they had been carved from blocks. They were the frozen bodies of those who suffered from the same disease she had.

These were dead bodies of her sisters who had walked the path her own feet trod upon, frozen in poses that they had chosen, sealed in a fine mineral plaster that, coupled with the strange atmospheric properties of the Sanctuary, preserved them for eternity.