The Dread: The Fallen Kings Cycle: Book Two by Gail Z. Martin Page B

in his. “Dying once was bad enough. I can’t imagine what you’ve been though, reliving all those deaths.” He paused. “What can I do to protect you? Are there charms, talismans that would keep out the ghosts? Can a mage help ward your chamber? Tell me, and I’ll make it so.”
    Aidane squeezed his hands in appreciation before moving away to wrap her arms around herself. Although the fire was warm and the autumn night was not yet wintry, she felt a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. “Yes, I’d like to be free of the dreams. Of course. But… I think there’s a reason the ghosts are trying to contact me. I don’t know what it is yet, but I’m afraid that if they can’t reach me, something worse will happen. They’re angry. So angry.”
    “So you’ll let them consume you instead?” Aidane heard anger in Kolin’s voice, and his eyes blazed. “Maybe they’re jealous that you’re alive and they aren’t. Maybe they intend to take you with them.”
    The thought had occurred to Aidane. “I think that if they meant to kill me, they’d have done it already. Maybe they just want me to carry a message.”
    “Do you get a choice?” he asked, and his eyes met hers with a gaze that was difficult to elude.
    A sad smile crossed Aidane’s face. “I’m just a ghost whore, Kolin. No one worries much about my choices.”
    Kolin’s eyes darkened. “Even as a
vayash moru
, we choose how and where to slake our thirst.”
    Aidane turned away. “You wouldn’t understand,” she said quietly.
    “No? What part of not having a choice do you think is beyond my experience?” There was an edge in Kolin’s voice Aidane had not heard before. “It was not my choice to be brought across. When I was new in the Dark Gift, the hunger that drove me to kill like a wild thing didn’t obey my choices until many years later. It was not my choice to submit to the will of my maker for a hundred years until Lady Riqua purchased my freedom. It certainly wasn’t my choice to lose Elsbet to her father’s rage.” He struggled to temper the anger in his tone. “And it is not my choice to be denied the chance to ever walk in the sunlight again.”
    “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
    Kolin looked at her as if he were debating with himself. “You have a dark gift of your own, I think. Why are you ashamed of it?”
    Aidane looked up defiantly. “Who said I was?”
    “If you really believe that with your gift you are ‘just a whore,’ in Principality of all places, where they worship Athira the Whore and even the temple oracles join their bodies with the supplicants, then yes, I think you’re ashamed. And I wonder, why?”
    Aidane’s heart was pounding. No one had ever questioned why she felt shame. Everyone, from her parents to the Crone priests to the other whores, all made it clear to her that being a
serroquette
was even worse than the common strumpets who sold their bodies but did not permit their entire being to be possessed for coin. “You, of anyone here, know what I am.”
    “You’d be hard-pressed to find a virgin in Principality, with the exception perhaps of our queen,” Kolin replied. “They worship the Lover and the Whore, and the kingdom is full of mercs. ‘Experience’ isn’t shameful here, Aidane. You’re not in Nargi anymore.”
    Aidane wanted to flee the room. This was not a conversation she had ever imagined having with anyone, certainly not Kolin. And although she had told him that she retained no memory of the reunion between Kolin and the spirit of his dead lover whom she had channeled, she had remembered almost everything. It had been easy, over the years, to block out the awful experiences, the beatings, the enraged clients, the betrayed lovers bent on revenge. Those she could honestly say blurred into a jumble.
    But Kolin’s reunion with Elsbet had been so tender and his love for the ghost so sure that the memory burned brightly.
None of those feelings were actually for me
, she