The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

“Prove yourself," he said, and I thought he was talking about something sexual.

Although I couldn’t guess what there was left that I hadn't already done, I gasped, “Tell me what you want.”

He buried his face in my shoulder. His teeth grazed my neck and found a spot, but they didn’t go in yet; he was playing with me. “Prove yourself,” he murmured again, “or leave the scholomance. Now.”

I stiffened with fear and outrage and frantic desire. I tried to wrap my arms and legs around him, but my stomach was too big, the baby was between us, and Dracula was moving down my body. I spread my legs and waited for his sharp tongue, but he stopped at my navel and I felt his teeth.

“You are not the Tenth Scholar,” I heard him say.

“Why not? Who is? Harlequin? Shit, I thought you were smart enough to see through him—”

“The baby is the Tenth Scholar.”

A fang went into my belly button and withdrew again. There was the suggestion of pain.

I struggled weakly to get out from under him. Of course I couldn’t, and, anyway.

I didn’t know where I’d go if I got free. “You mean I can’t stay?”

“I have taught you as much as it is possible for you to learn.”

Betrayal made me light-headed, as though he’d already bitten through. “No,” I cried foolishly. “Please.”

His voice came up to me singsong, seductive, and cold as immortal blood. “If you give me the baby now, you may stay to raise it until it can take its place at my side. Twelve years, perhaps, or ten years, or fourteen, depending on its nature and inclinations. If you do not give me the baby, you will leave. Tonight. I have lost interest in you.”

“Take it,” I said.

A vision of the dog with the butchered throat came into my head. A vision of my grandmother, dying when I’d been sure she’d never die, leaving me. I bit my lower lip hard to drive the visions away.

At first there was no more pain, really, than during any normal bite, except that the nerves in my abdomen were exquisitely sensitive. He sucked and drank a lot of blood. Before he was done I was so dizzy I could barely see, and he, obviously, was stoned.

His hands went all over my body—cold skin, sharp nails. His tongue went all over my body. He had started to sing as if to himself, to croon, and his laughter was sweet and smooth. Unable to fathom what I’d be like in fourteen years, what the city would be like when I had to go back into it alone, I paid attention only to him, only to the perforations his teeth were making from my navel to my pubic hair, only to his promise that if I did this he would let me stay.

Now pain and blood gushed. I lost and regained consciousness and lost it again; stars fell. When I awoke, the light was the same blue-gray it had been, but I was sure time had passed. There was a terrible, wonderful emptiness in my abdomen, and the wound had already started to close.

I heard Dracula’s odd crooning and the gurgling of an infant, but for a while I couldn’t find them. The colors in the room—chartreuse, mauve, blood-red— gave around me like living tissue. Then I saw the tall thin form by the window, blackened by my blood and the baby’s and the rich nourishing blood of the placenta and afterbirth.

“It’s a girl,” he told me.

I was dizzied by a peculiar kind of pride: I’d borne a healthy daughter who would be the Tenth Scholar, even if I could not be. I’d carried on my grandmother’s line. I’d given Dracula something he’d wanted, something that, apparently, no one else had ever given him. And fourteen years was a long time.

It was, of course, a trick. Go now,” he said, almost casually, staring at the baby in his arms.

“What?”

“Leave. The scholomance is filled.”

“You said I could stay. You said—”

“I saw no point in exerting myself to take my daughter by force when you would give her to me out of love.”

“She’s my daughter!”

The baby in his arms curled and stretched. Somehow, she was feeding. “I am her father,” he said, and I understood that it was true. He looked at me then, green gaze forking like lightning, and said, “Go. You have no place here.” ’