Again surprise flickered across her almost ageless features. Werewolves tended to be a long-lived race, but Mom was also a clone—lab-created and enhanced—and, by rights, she should have been dead by now. Every clone who'd been created at the same time as her had died, most of them taken by a defective gene that either accelerated aging or caused their organs to fail inexplicably. In Mom, that gene had—for some reason—flipped. It rejuvenated rather than destroyed. No one was sure if I'd inherited that gene, and Mom had never allowed such tests—as much as the Directorate had pressed her for them.
"No," she said slowly, "I've never seen him since that night. Why?"
"Because I've had a barrage of people insisting that he's going to contact me. I was just wondering if maybe he'd contacted you instead."
"No, and I wouldn't expect him to. We both got what we wanted out of that night."
And what they'd both wanted was me—the daughter she'd longed for, and a continuation of his genes.
"Is there anything at all about him that you haven't mentioned?"
She frowned. "I think I've told you everything I could about that night, Ris."
"So you never really talked about what he was or what he did for a living?"
"Not really. I knew he would give me you; that's all that really mattered to me."
"You knew he was Aedh, though."
"Yes, but that was not something he mentioned. It was more an information leak from our merging."
I blinked. "Merging? That's an odd way of putting it."
"Having sex with an Aedh is an interesting experience, Ris. The first meeting—the first kiss—is very explosive, and designed, I think, to ensnare completely. After that, it's pure functionality. But"—she paused, as if searching for the right words—"while the actual sex is mundane, for those of us who are psychic there can also be a melding of minds. It's not a very deep connection, but it's a connection nevertheless—and I suspect it goes both ways."
I frowned. "So when this connection happened—did you happen to catch whether he was a priest or not?"
"No." Something flickered across her eyes. Uneasiness, perhaps. "But there was something about being a member of the Raziq. I have no idea what that was, but I got the distinct feeling he was troubled by something involving them."