The Only Man in the House

Chapter 14: The First Welcome

Six months went by the way the house did everything, all at once and then in a rush. The master bedroom had been dressed for it: fresh silk on the great bed, the lamps turned low, the jasmine at the window in full bloom and pushing its sweetness through the cracked glass. On the nightstand sat a single glass of Celeste's milk, waiting its turn.

Jordan stood at the foot of the bed dressed, because the rule of the night was that he would be undressed by her. Katherine presided from the headboard in a green robe, hair up, silver streaks catching the lamplight. Celeste sat at her right hand, robe already open, her heavy breasts bare and full and beading at the tips, ready. On the carpet the thirteen other sisters sat in a wide half circle, all eighteen, all watching the door.

It opened on the second knock, the soft one.

Becka's daughter came in barefoot, sun-bleached hair loose down her back, wearing a white cotton shift that stopped at mid-thigh and nothing else she would keep on. The freckles stood out on her nose in the lamplight. Her hands were steady. Jordan had watched her carry water buckets at the stables with hands less steady than that.

She stopped at the foot of the bed and looked up at him.

"Happy birthday to me," she said, and the half circle laughed, and the laugh broke the last of the room's held breath.

"Say the custom," Katherine said from the headboard.

The girl recited it, looking at Jordan the whole way. "My nineteenth year opens tonight. The family arranged it. My father administers it. I came to this bed of my own want and nobody's else's." She swallowed once, the only crack in the certainty. "That's the custom."

"Then take your welcome," Katherine said.

She reached for the buttons of his shirt. Her fingers were calloused from tack and reins, and they worked the small circles the way she'd practiced, on shirt fronts, on nothing, for months. She pushed the cotton off his shoulders and laid it over the dresser stool, deliberately, the way her mother laid tack over a stall door. Then she knelt to his belt.

"Breathe," Jordan said quietly.

"I am breathing." She drew the belt free. "I'm just doing two things at once."

The jeans went down and his cock came free into the lamplight, already hard, and a sound went through the thirteen on the carpet, thirteen small shifts of weight. She stood, looked at him bare, and grinned her mother's grin.

"Okay," she said. "The stories were understated."

"We'll take that as flattery," Celeste said.

The girl pulled the shift over her head and let it drop. Eighteen years old, lean from stable work, her small nipples already tight, a faint tan line at her hips from riding in the sun. She climbed onto the great bed in front of everyone and lay back on the silk in the center, where the rule of the house put everyone, and looked at Jordan with her heart hammering visibly at her throat.

"Teaching starts now," she said. "Dad. Start teaching."

Jordan knelt between her knees. "First lesson. We don't start with what you think we start with." He bent and pressed his mouth to the inside of her knee.

"Oh," she said, in a small voice entirely unlike her own.

He worked his way up her inner thigh with his mouth, unhurried, feeling the muscle jump under his lips, and the carpet was absolutely silent, thirteen girls learning the pace of it. Katherine's voice came from the headboard, low, instructional.

"Watch him. He never rushes the approach. That's the first thing every one of you writes down."

"Aunt K is narrating," the girl said, breathless.

"Aunt K is correct."

Jordan reached her. She was already slick, the soft folds flushed dark and wet, and he parted her with his tongue and took one long slow stroke up that made her hips lift off the silk. He held her hips down with both hands, the way he'd learned eighteen years ago, and licked her again, slower, circling the small hard bud at the top until her breath came apart.

"That's the second lesson," Katherine said. "He reads you while he does it. Tell him what you want. Out loud. That's not shyness in this house, that's custom."

"More," the girl said, immediately, loud, and the sisters laughed, and she laughed too, and then his tongue pressed in and the laugh turned into a long low moan that she made no effort at all to quiet. Her hands found his cropped hair and gripped. She talked through it, because she was her mother's daughter, words breaking up as he worked her. "Oh, that's, okay, that's what Liana was going on about, oh my God."

Jordan found the rhythm she gave him and stayed on it, tongue flat and firm, two fingers sliding into her and curling against the front wall, and inside a minute she was climbing, hips straining against his palms, breath coming in short punched sounds. She came with a shout that reached the hallway, thighs clamping around his head, and he held her through it, licking her gently through the aftershocks until she pushed at his forehead, oversensitive and gasping.

She lay flat, chest heaving, staring at the canopy.

"The stories were so understated," she said again.

"First one's free," Celeste said. "The rest of the night costs effort."

The girl propped herself on her elbows and looked down at Jordan kneeling between her thighs, his mouth and chin shining with her. She reached out, hooked a hand behind his neck, and pulled him up over her, and kissed him, open-mouthed, tasting herself, completely unhesitating.

"Now," she said against his mouth. "The main part. I've waited six years for the main part."

Jordan fitted himself against her. He was rigid and heavy, the head of him sliding through her wetness, and he stopped there, pressed to her entrance, and looked at her.

"Say it," he said. "It's custom."

"I want it," she said, loud enough for the whole room, eyes locked on his. "Dad, put it in me. I want the whole family to hear me take it."

He pushed in slowly. Her body opened around him inch by inch, tight and scalding, and she made a sound halfway between a gasp and a groan and gripped his shoulders hard enough to leave marks. He fed it into her with patience, watching her face, until he was seated to the root and her breath was shaking out of her in little waves.

"It's all of it," she whispered. "It's all of it and I feel every inch."

"That's the third lesson," Katherine said, and her voice had gone rougher than instruction. "The first time only happens once. He knows that. Let him lead."

Jordan began to move. Long, slow strokes, almost leaving her and sinking back to the hilt, and she wrapped her legs around his hips and met him on every one, clumsy at first and then finding the timing, learning his rhythm the way she'd learned everything else in this house, by watching and then doing. The silk creaked. Her voice broke loose again, moaning his title and then just moaning, and the thirteen sisters on the carpet sat forward on their knees, none of them blinking. Celeste lifted the glass from the nightstand and drank, patient, milk ready for after.

"Harder," the girl gasped. "I'm not made of glass. Mom did it in a stall."

"Not in front of Aunt K," Katherine said, "she'll never let me hear the end of it," and Jordan drove deeper, and the room filled with it, the slap of his hips and her rising cry, her first night beginning exactly as she had claimed it, in the master bed, with everyone watching.

Her climax came the second time on a downstroke, hips bucking off the silk, and Jordan felt the first flutter of his own rising behind it, deep and inevitable. She was gripping his forearms now, heels digging into the mattress, talking in broken pieces.

"Don't stop, don't you dare stop, I'm right there again."

"Then take it," he said, and drove deep and held there, and his orgasm tore through him with his name in her mouth.

He spilled into her in long pulses, pressed to the hilt, and she felt it, the heat of it, and the feeling broke something open in her. She came around him harder than the first time, a convulsion that arched her whole back off the bed, and the cry that came out of her was raw and startled, nothing performed in it at all.

Then the impossible thing. Her breasts, small and tight-nippled and never once fed a child, let down. Milk welled at both tips in the space of a heartbeat and sprayed in two thin arcs across her own collarbones as her body seized, white on sun-browned skin, catching the lamplight.

The room went absolutely still. Thirteen girls on the carpet froze mid-shift.

"Oh my God," the girl gasped, staring down at herself, milk still beading and running down her ribs. "What is, Mom didn't, nobody said it does that."

"Not to most of them," Celeste said, already off the headboard with the glass forgotten, kneeling at the bed's edge, her voice warm and low. "But the house has a sense of humor. Mara will want to write this down too."

She bent and licked a stray line of it off the girl's shoulder, unhurried, proprietary. "It's the droplets in your tea this morning, mixed with your first finish. Some bodies answer the call early. Yours heard it and decided to perform." She looked up at Katherine. "She'll feed the way I do, if she keeps it up by choice."

"Keep it up," the girl said instantly, still panting, and the sisters laughed, the tension breaking over the room in a wave.

Jordan stayed where he was, seated deep, unwilling to move yet, feeling the small pulses of her around him. He had felt it happen. Eighteen years and thirteen conceptions had taught his body the difference between a finish and a planting, and this had been a planting, the flutter of her cervix taking what he gave, the little involuntary clench of a body making a decision before its owner knew anything about it. He kept his face still. He looked at Katherine.

She was watching him from the headboard with the expression she saved for knowing things before the room did. Her eyes went from his face to the girl's stomach, flat and lactating and utterly unaware of itself, and back. She said nothing. She would say nothing for weeks, he knew. She would simply watch, and count days, and smile her old smile at breakfast.

"Is he still hard," the girl asked the ceiling, wondering.

"He is still inside you," Jordan said, "and you'll feel everything I have left."

"Then give me the rest." She pulled her knees up, taking him deeper, and reached for Celeste's hand. "Nobody leaves this room until I've had all of it. That's my amendment for the year."

"The apple," Katherine said, settling back, "does not fall from the tree," and Jordan began to move again, slow, her milk still slicking her chest, the glass of Celeste's milk sweating untouched on the nightstand, the whole night still ahead of them and a secret already growing in the dark under his daughter's heart.

Celeste let the glass alone and climbed onto the bed behind them, and as she knelt close her own body answered the room. Her milk let down all at once, freely, without a mouth on her, thin white lines running from both dark nipples down the heavy curve of her breasts and dripping onto the silk. Eighteen years of practice had taught her control, and tonight she gave it up deliberately, let it run, because the girl's body had called to hers and she wanted the room to see it.

"Look," she said, and the thirteen on the carpet looked.

White threaded down her bronze stomach and pooled in the sheet against Jordan's knee. She caught some on two fingers and painted it across the girl's collarbone, over the drying spray already there, marking her the way the house had always marked its own.

"That's the fourth lesson," Celeste said. "When it comes without asking, don't waste it."

The girl lifted her head and stared. Her hips had never stopped moving under Jordan, small greedy circles, his cock working slow and deep in her while her attention split three ways. "You're leaking. Just from watching?"

"From him finishing in you," Celeste said. "From the room. From wanting to feed you since you were born, if I'm honest." She leaned in and took one of the girl's small nipples into her mouth, and the girl cried out at the pull of it, the first mouth she'd ever had there, and her milk came harder, a fresh surge that ran down both sides of her ribs and onto the sheets.

"Oh," she said, wrecked. "Oh, that's, keep doing that."

Jordan drove into her deeper on the next stroke and felt her clamp around him, the suction at her breast and the fullness in her cunt stacking into one sensation she had no name for yet.

"Liana," she managed, "are you writing this down?"

"Writing it on my brain," came the voice from the carpet, and the sisters laughed, high and shaky.

Celeste released the nipple, wet and shining, and turned her attention to the other, and the girl's back arched. Katherine shifted forward on the headboard, robe fallen open, one hand resting low on her own stomach out of pure memory.

"She'll spray when she comes again," Katherine said. "They always do, the early ones. Celeste did it on her first family day and soaked six women."

"I did," Celeste said, mouth full, shameless, and the room laughed at her, and she laughed too, milk running down her chin where the girl's had dripped from her lips.

Jordan felt his second rise building slow, the deep drag of her, the way her body had stopped guarding anything. He changed his angle and found the spot that made her toes curl, and she grabbed his wrists, exactly the way her mother grabbed stall doors.

"There. Right there, don't you move off it."

"Then do the work," he said. "Ride it."

She took the instruction the way she took everything, both hands on his chest, pushing him back onto the silk, and she rode him the way Celeste had demonstrated six months ago to the breath, slow at the top, deep on the downstroke, squeeze. Except she squeezed without being told, her body inventing it, and the sensation dragged a groan out of him that every sister on the carpet heard and filed away.

Celeste knelt behind her and wrapped both arms around her, hands full of small bouncing breasts, milk foaming between her fingers. She pressed her lips to the girl's ear.

"When it hits you, let everything go. Milk, voice, all of it. Nobody in this room has ever once thought less of a woman for making a mess."

"I'm going to make such a mess," the girl said, and her rhythm broke.

She came apart on the third finish of her life with a sound that started as his name and dissolved into something rawer, hips slamming down to take him to the root, and her milk let go in true spray, two white arcs that caught the lamplight and spattered Celeste's arms, the sheet, Jordan's stomach, the girl's own open mouth. She swallowed without thinking and her eyes went wide at herself.

Jordan went with her, driven over by the clenching of her around him, and he pressed up into the heat and pulsed, a second spend into her, thick and slow, and she felt every shot of it and sobbed once, low.

They stilled. The room smelled of milk and salt and jasmine. Celeste held her through it, rocking her slightly, her own breasts still dripping steadily onto all three of them.

"Somebody," Katherine said, "bring the water pitcher. And the towels. Celeste has christened the silk."

"I christen it every year," Celeste said, and milked herself deliberately, a slow express into her own cupped hand, and offered it to the girl. "Open."

The girl opened her mouth and took it, swallowed, and made a sound like coming home.

"Yours tastes different than mine," she said, dazed.

"Everyone's does. That's lesson five. You'll learn yours by feeding the sisters who want it, and in this house that's all of them."

Three of the thirteen were already moving. The bronze girl crossed the carpet and knelt at the bed's edge, and when she looked up her face held nothing but want, six years of it. "Aunt Celeste. I'd like some now. If it's on offer."

"It's always on offer in this room," Celeste said, and guided the girl's head down to her dripping breast, and the room went soft and wet with the sound of her nursing, the loudest thing in it.

Katherine came down the bed on her knees, unhurried, and pressed her palm flat to the girl's stomach, over the place where Jordan's spend sat deep in her. The girl went still under the hand. Katherine left it there a long moment, reading.

"Well," she said, and her smile was the old one. "Somebody fetch more towels. This bed is going to see a great deal of use this year."

"I knew it," the girl whispered. "The way you looked at him. What did you feel?"

"What every mother in this room has felt," Katherine said. "And what you'll tell no one until you're ready, because that's also custom." She kissed the girl's forehead. "Happy birthday. Now lie down and be fed. Your father has twelve more lessons after this one, and so do you."

Celeste settled the girl against her shoulder, still leaking, and Jordan stretched out on the soaked silk beside them as the sisters began, one by one, to move onto the bed.

The bronze girl came first, climbing off Celeste's breast with her lips shining and swinging a leg over Jordan's hips. She sank onto him in one motion, still slick from the birthday girl's spend, and rode him with her mother's rhythm, slow at the top, deep on the downstroke.

"She was right," she gasped. "About the squeeze."

Her milk let down on the fourth stroke, thin white threads running down her bronze chest to where her hips met his, and when she came she did it loudly, head back, spraying in short pulses with every clench around him. Jordan held her hips and gave her a finish deep inside, and she laughed while it was still happening.

"Next," she said, rolling off, and the sundress girl took her place.

They came in age order because Jordan had decreed it six months ago and the house honored his decrees now. The sundress girl rode him with her sundress still bunched around her waist, laughing golden, her milk hitting his chin when she finished. The small blonde came with a squeal and an arc of white that soaked Katherine's robe sleeve. Katherine did not appear to mind. The twins took their turns back to back, one on his cock and one on his mouth, their milk crossing in the air over his chest, and Liana, loud to the last, announced her own orgasm to the room three seconds before it arrived.

"He's still hard," she reported to the carpet, gasping. "Thirteen women and he's still hard."

"Droplets," Mara said from the foot of the bed, where she had appeared with her notebook and a small brass bowl. "And discipline. Roll over, Liana, you're dripping on my notes."

The room had filled while the rotation ran. Rosa knelt between Vanessa's thighs with her mouth busy. Maren had Alexa against the chaise, both of them laughing, Alexa's enormous breasts swaying with every push of Maren's fingers. Elena rode Priya's hand in a heap of tangled limbs, and Sable, who had arrived smelling of hay and said nothing about it, was pulled onto the bed by Becka's daughter and made to sit on her face.

The silk was ruined. Nobody in the room had any opinion about that.

When the last of the fourteen sisters slid off him, milk-slicked and shuddering, Jordan lay in the center of the great bed with his cock aching and wet, fourteen finishes spread across him like a map. Katherine looked down the length of the bed at the wreckage of the welcome.

"Now," Mara said.

She had cleared a space on the dresser. The brass bowl sat in it, filled with something dark, and beside it lay a chalk stick and a page torn from a book much older than her notes.

"Mara," Katherine said, in the voice that meant explain.

"The droplets came from somewhere," Mara said, kneeling at the dresser. "My notes had a source appendix nobody reads. The formulation was distilled from something that isn't a plant." She struck a match and touched it to the bowl. "I've been curious for twenty years."

The flame burned black. The lamplight bent toward it.

The room's sounds stopped, even the wet ones. The flame rose a hand's length off the bowl, black and steady, and the jasmine scent went out of the air and something older came in, hot stone and myrrh. The chalk circle around the bowl began to glow a red you felt on the skin.

"Everybody off the circle," Katherine said. "And off the bed is fine too."

The chalk flared. The air over the dresser split like a seam in silk.

She stepped through it. She was tall, taller than Alexa, with skin the color of cooling lava, cracked fine with veins of ember light, and horns sweeping back from a crown of black hair. Her eyes were molten gold. A tail moved behind her with its own opinions. Her breasts were enormous, heavy and round, their nipples wide and dark and already beading with something thick and pearly that caught the lamplight as it welled.

She looked at the room, fourteen girls frozen on the carpet and thirteen women tangled on the bed, and her gaze stopped on Jordan.

"Twenty years I've smelled this formula on your world," she said. Her voice went through the chest like low thunder. "And now somebody has finally lit the right bowl. Which of you is the one I can taste through the smoke?"

"He is," Katherine said, and there was not one flicker of hesitation in her. "And he's ours. You'll mind the custom."

"I always mind the custom." The demon crossed the carpet, and the ember cracks in her skin brightened with every step, and her tail curled around the nearest bedpost and gripped it. She looked Jordan up and down the way Celeste had once looked at him across a kitchen. "Droplets, milk, fourteen conceptions, and he hasn't aged a day. You've been keeping a stallion in silk and never once showed me. That's rude."

"What are you called," Jordan asked.

"Cecil." She knelt on the bed over him, and the heat of her came off her skin like a banked fire. "And you're the reason I was summoned. That means you get me first. That's a custom too, and it's older than your mother's."

She took him in one molten hand and guided him into her, and the heat of her cunt was unbelievable, a slow scalding that gripped him in rings of muscle no human body owned. She rode him from the first stroke at full depth, her breasts swinging heavy above his face, milk running freely down the ember-veined skin, thick and sweet-smelling, and her tail released the bedpost and wrapped his ankle to hold him in place.

"Move," she ordered, and he did, and the sound she made was thunder rolling uphill.

The room watched. The room watched the way it always watched, and then the room moved, because the house did everything all at once. Katherine climbed onto the bed and took Celeste's mouth. Elena's daughter put her face between the bronze girl's thighs. Rosa and Maren and Alexa collapsed into a knot of limbs at the foot of the bed, and the birthday girl, milk still leaking, wriggled forward on her knees to get closer to the demon, because she was her mother's daughter and the best parts of this family happened with everyone in the room.

Cecil rode Jordan through three of her own climaxes, each one announced by a flare of the ember light in her skin and a gush of her milk that sprayed hot across his chest. When she finally came around him she ground down to the root and pulsed, inner muscles rippling in a rhythm no woman in the room could copy, and he spilled into her, and the heat of her took it, and she groaned like the summoning fire burning down.

"Now the good part," she said. "For the girls."

She rose off him, milk running down her stomach, and turned and sat against the headboard, beside Katherine, as though the master bed had always had room for her. Her breasts were full to overflowing. She cupped one and pressed, and a thick stream of pearly milk arced out, heavier than Celeste's, sweeter on the air.

"First drinker," she said. "Custom."

The birthday girl got there first. She knelt at the demon's side and took the dark nipple into her mouth, and Cecil's hand came up and cradled her head, and the girl made the sound of coming home again, deeper this time.

"Oh," she said, pulling off, milk on her chin. "Oh, that's not fair, that's so much better than mine."

"Yours will get there. Feed a generation or two." Cecil looked down the bed. "Line up. All of you. There's plenty and I don't tire."

The sisters came to her in a row, kneeling at her sides, and she fed them by hand when her breasts emptied, expressing thick streams into waiting mouths. The bronze girl drank with her eyes closed. Liana came back for seconds and thirds. Celeste drank from her other side and pronounced it better than wine, and Katherine watched all fourteen girls drink from a demon's breast in her own bed and said, quietly, to nobody in particular, "Well. The source appendix."

Cecil's tail uncurled from Jordan's ankle and settled across his lap, warm as a sun-warmed stone. She looked down at him, still wrecked on the soaked silk, and her gold eyes were amused.

"The bowl burns until dawn," she said. "I don't leave before my fire does. So tell me, stallion. What does this house do with the rest of the night?"

"Again," Jordan said. "The way we do everything."

Cecil's grin showed too many teeth. "Good answer."

She swung over him and took him back into her heat, grinding slow, her tail tightening on his thigh. He reached up and filled his hands with her breasts, and she shuddered, milk spilling hot over his knuckles. "Deeper," she growled. He hooked his heels under her and drove up, and her ember veins flared bright.

Her inner rings closed on him and rippled, and his spend poured into her, and he felt it happen the way he had felt it in the birthday girl. The flutter. The taking. A planting in that impossible furnace.

Cecil stilled. Her gold eyes went wide, then sly.

"Well," she said, pressing her own hand to her lower belly. "It took. A girl. I can always tell."

Katherine leaned over from the headboard. "Then she sits at my table," she said, "and welcome to the house."

The bowl burned for three more nights before Cecil mentioned it.

"Five days," she said on the third dawn, sprawled across the master bed with her tail coiled around Jordan's ankle again, one hand idle on her ember-veined stomach. "That's how long I carry. Your women take nine months. Mine take five days. Then the fire does the rest."

"The rest," Katherine said, from the headboard, in the tone she reserved for information arriving without permission.

"Growth. Knowledge. Everything she needs to sit at a table and hold her own in it." Cecil pressed down, and something under her skin shifted, a small rolling weight. "You'll want the crib moved closer. I don't do nurseries."

Mara, who had not slept in four days because she'd been writing everything down, looked up from her notebook. "Five days. Full gestation. Does the fetus, does the child, arrive with"

"Everything," Cecil said. "Language. Memory. Manners, if I'm lucky. She'll know this room before she's an hour old. That's the fire's price and the fire's gift."

The belly grew fast. By the fourth evening it stood out round and hard from Cecil's lava-colored torso, the ember veins around it brightening hour by hour, and the household reorganized itself around the fact the way water reorganizes around a stone. Alexa, seven years into a veterinary practice and eighteen years into this family's impossibilities, examined Cecil with her hands and pronounced the heartbeat strong and the rate of development "beyond the notes, Mara, so far beyond the notes."

On the fifth day the black flame guttered.

It happened in the late afternoon, the light going amber through the heavy curtains, and Cecil felt it before anyone saw it. She stood up off the lounger on the pool deck where she'd been lying in the sun like a boulder, and her tail went rigid, and she said, "Now. Somebody get me to a bed."

"The master," Katherine said instantly, and it was a procession, Cecil striding through the hallway with Jordan and Katherine on either side of her, Celeste ahead clearing the way, and behind them a growing knot of sisters and mothers, because in this house nobody had ever once missed a birth.

Cecil did not labor the way the thirteen had labored. She knelt on the silk, gripped the headboard with both hands, and the ember veins along her belly blazed to white heat, and the heat came off her in a wave that made the lamplight shiver. She made one sound, low thunder rolling downhill this time, and it was done. The child came into Celeste's waiting hands slick and hot, and she cried with a voice like a struck bell.

A girl. Lava-pale, a dusting of black hair, tiny nubs of horn at her temples. Her eyes opened almost at once, and they were molten gold.

"She's beautiful," Celeste said, and meant it, and the room agreed in a murmur.

"She's hungry," Cecil said, and took her, and the newborn fastened onto a breast that had been full since the summoning and drank like a creature twice her size.

The change began within the hour.

Jordan watched it from the foot of the bed and could not look away. The infant nursed, and grew, visibly, in the space of a feeding. By dusk she was the size of a toddler, still nursing, gold eyes tracking the room and its people one by one, cataloguing. By full dark she stood, on legs that had not existed at sundown, and looked down at her own hands and flexed them.

"Better," she said. Her voice was low already, her mother's thunder scaled down. "The hands are the slowest part."

The sisters on the carpet did not breathe. Mara's pen had stopped.

By midnight the girl walked the room. She was small still, willow-slim, the horns grown to curved half-circles sweeping back from her black hair, and she moved through the master bedroom the way Katherine moved through it, reading property, reading people. She stopped at the dresser. She looked at the dead chalk circle. She touched the cold brass bowl and turned to the room, and she was eighteen, fully grown, ember cracks fine as hairline veins across her collarbones, and her gold eyes went around the bed and found every face in it.

"Mara," she said, and Mara started. "Your source appendix is wrong on two counts. The distillation needs a copper vessel or it scorches. And the flame responds to intent, not to the formula. That's why it summoned the way it did." She looked at the notebook. "May I?"

Mara handed it over wordlessly.

The girl read for a moment, unhurried, then closed it and gave it back. "The rest is accurate. You did well with nothing. That's rare."

"Who," Katherine said, from the center of the bed, "told you the house's customs. Your mother? The fire?"

"Neither. I was born knowing everything I need to be standing here." The girl turned to Katherine and something in her stance changed, a daughter measuring a matriarch, and finding her worth the measure. "You run this table. She said you'd say she sits at it. I'm telling you I do. That's not a request."

"Bold," Katherine said. "Also familiar. This house breeds it." She looked at Cecil, who was watching her daughter with an expression Jordan had never seen on her, open and unreadable at once. "Name."

"Name," Cecil said, "was the one thing the fire doesn't give." She looked at Jordan. "That's yours. That's the older custom. The one who planted her names her."

The room went quiet. Fourteen sisters sat up on the carpet. The birthday girl, who was now merely the eldest of fifteen, leaned forward with her milk-slick chin on her hand.

Jordan sat on the edge of the bed, next to the cold bowl, and looked at the girl in front of him. Lava-pale. Gold-eyed. Eighteen in a day, and knowing it.

"Ember," he said. "Ember Daly."

"Ember." She tried it once, and something settled in her face, the way a key settles into a lock. "Good. It's accurate."

"It's done, then," Katherine said, and rose from the headboard in her robe, silver-streaked hair still down, and crossed the carpet to stand in front of the girl. She took Ember's chin in one hand and tilted it up, the gesture she'd used on Jordan his whole life, and studied her for a long moment. "Fifteen daughters sit at my table now. You'll learn the customs by living them. There's a kitchen full of food Rosa made two days ago that nobody's eaten, and there are thirteen sisters in this room who will want to know you. Start with breakfast."

"I know what's in the kitchen," Ember said. "I was born knowing that too."

"Then you know the seating order is not negotiable."

"I know," Ember said, and her grin arrived, too many teeth, her mother's exactly, "that the seat at your right hand has been empty for eighteen years, and I know whose it is." Her gold eyes slid to Jordan. "I'm not taking it. I just wanted everyone to hear that I know."

The room laughed, the whole impossible house, and Katherine released her chin, and Celeste was already pouring warm milk into glasses from her own breasts because the newest daughter of the house had not yet tasted the family's version, and Mara was writing again, pen flying, on a fresh page.

Ember looked down at Jordan once more before she followed the crowd toward the door. The ember veins in her skin pulsed once, slow, like something deciding.

"The bowl," she said, quietly, just for him. "It can be lit again. Any time. Now that someone in this house knows how to light it properly."

Then she turned and walked out into the hallway with her sisters, leaving Jordan sitting beside a cold brass bowl and a chalk circle, and the door closed, and Katherine looked at the bowl for a long moment before she looked at him.

"Mara keeps that in the clinic," she said. "Locked."

"For now," Jordan said.

"You're both thinking about the bowl," Celeste said, pulling her robe on. "I can hear it."

"I'm thinking about breakfast," Katherine said. "Ember can wait a day before she learns the rest of the customs."

"She doesn't want to wait," Jordan said. He had watched her pause at the door. He had watched her pulse. "And she's right. It's a custom too."

Katherine looked at him for a long moment. Then she nodded, once, the nod she gave when a decree became his.

The hallway outside was loud with sisters. He followed the sound of it to the end room, the one with the bed nobody used, and Ember was already there, sitting on the edge with her tail coiled around her own ankle, watching the door as though she'd heard his footsteps coming from three rooms away.

"I was born knowing you'd come," she said. "It's less fun than it sounds. Knowing things. You never get the surprise."

"You'll get plenty here," Jordan said. He closed the door. "This house surprises everyone."

"Then show me one."

He crossed the room. She was warm the way her mother was warm, heat coming off her skin in slow waves, the ember veins along her collarbones brightening as he came close. Her horns caught the hallway light leaking under the door. She looked up at him, and her gold eyes were her mother's, and the hunger in them was new, untested, hers.

"You're nervous," she said.

"A little."

"Good. That's a surprise. Keep it."

He reached down and untied the wrap of cloth she wore, and it fell away from her, and she was lava-pale and willow-slim and perfect, the hairline cracks glowing faintly down her stomach to the place between her thighs. Her breasts were small still, high and round, her nipples wide and dark like her mother's, and they were already beading with something pearly. Not milk. Something thicker, warmer-smelling, sweet like the fire's smoke made liquid.

"You have that already," he said.

"The fire doesn't wait. Taste it and tell me what you think."

He knelt in front of her. Her skin scorched gently under his mouth, a heat like standing near an open oven, and when his lips closed on her nipple the first mouthful flooded his tongue, thick and sweet and impossibly rich, and it went through him like the droplets did, warmth spreading down his chest and into his belly. She made a sound above him, low thunder scaled small.

"Oh," she said. "So that's what it's for."

"That's what it's for."

He moved her back onto the bed and followed her down, kissing the ember cracks one by one, down her sternum, over the soft plane of her stomach, to the crease of her thigh. She was hot there, hotter than any woman he'd ever opened, and wet, and when he spread her with his thumbs the light inside her was faintly visible, a glow like coals under ash.

"You were born knowing everything," he said against her. "Do you know what this feels like?"

"I know the theory." Her voice had gone rough. "The theory is insufficient."

He put his mouth on her and proved it. Her clit was a hard coal under his tongue, and she arched off the bed with a sound that rattled the window in its frame, and her hands came down and gripped the sheets and the silk began to smoke very slightly where her fingers dug. He worked her with his tongue, slow, then faster, learning her by her sounds, the way he had learned this house by its sounds for twenty-four years. She climaxed the first time with her heels drumming the mattress and a flare of light running down her veins like a fuse, and her spend was hot as tea and flooded his chin.

"Theory," she gasped, "was insufficient."

"Keep up."

He rose over her. She was panting, watching him, her gold eyes gone wide and dark, and she reached between them and took him in her hand and her grip was warm as a stove.

"Deeper than the theory," she said. "Now."

He pushed into her and the heat closed around him in rings, softer than her mother's, new muscle learning him, and she cried out at the first inch and clamped her ankles behind his back and pulled him the rest of the way in one motion that made them both groan. She was scalding and velvet and impossibly tight, and the glow inside her spread up her belly where their bodies joined, lighting her from within.

"Move," she ordered, her mother's word, and he did.

He drove into her in long strokes, and she met every one, her tail wrapping his thigh and gripping, her nails scoring lines of gentle heat down his back. The bed smoked under them in small brown rings. She climbed fast, he could feel it, her inner rings beginning their ripple, and he reached down and pressed his thumb to her clit and she came apart around him with a flash that lit the whole room gold for a half second.

"Don't stop," she said, wrecked. "The book says don't stop."

"The book is right."

He kept going, slower now, deep, and she rolled through the aftershocks and pulled his mouth down to her breast and fed him while he moved in her, the thick pearly milk flooding his tongue with every stroke, and the warmth of it and the heat of her built in his spine like a struck match burning down.

"Ember," he said, warning.

"I know. I can feel it coming. Give it to me." Her tail tightened. "All of it. It's mine."

He spilled into her, and the furnace of her took it, and he felt the flutter again, unmistakable now, the taking, a planting in that young impossible heat. She went rigid under him, and then her whole body glowed, every vein alight, and she laughed, a bell of a sound, low thunder struck bright.

"Well," she said. "That was not in the book either."

He collapsed beside her, chest heaving. She pressed her hand to her lower belly, and the glow there pulsed once, slow, deciding.

"Already?" he asked.

"Already. A girl. I can always tell." She turned her head and looked at him, and her grin arrived, too many teeth. "You planted me and now I'm planted. This house is efficient."

"Five days?"

"Five days. Then the fire does the rest." She rolled against him, warm as noon. "And this time I won't be born knowing everything. Not all of it. You'll have to teach me some things."

"That's the custom," Jordan said. "Nobody's a repeat."

Down the hall, faintly, Liana's voice: "Are they done? Because Rosa made pie."