Makeda laughed and poked at the earthen ceiling. “We’d better go. I should train with Kato tonight, and you need to talk with Saba about donating stem cells.”

He groaned and hid his face in her hair.

“Just get it over with,” Makeda said. “Your dreading it is probably worse than the actual conversation.”

“I don’t think she’s going to like this.”

“How do you know?” She looked up. “She’s scheming something right now. I’m certain of it.”

“What makes you say that?”

“It’s the look on her face. My mother gets the same look. Like… frustration and resolution all at once. When I was a child, my mother got that look right before she turned the car around and took us all home for being brats.”

“Well, she is a mother. She considers herself a mother to all vampires, in fact. No doubt she’s plenty annoyed with us right…” The realization hit him so hard he stopped breathing. Stopped talking.

Oh. Saba was planning something all right.

“Shit,” he muttered. “We need to go.”

“Oh?” Makeda rolled to the side and Lucien lifted his arms, spreading the ground above them as if opening a curtain. “What’s so—”

“She’s ready to turn the car around,” Lucien said. “You’re right. She’s fed up with the lot of us, and she’s deciding what she’s going to do.”

Makeda climbed out of the hole and shook out her hair. “So what’s the emergency?”

“Have you ever heard of the Axumite Dynasty?”

“It ruled Northern Ethiopia from the first to the ninth century,” Makeda said. “Of course I know it.”

“An Axumite emperor took one of Saba’s daughters for a lover. Then that emperor abused her trust and locked her in a sunny room as she rested.”

Makeda gasped. “What did Saba do?”

“She killed him, laid waste to the countryside, and ended a nine-hundred-year dynasty,” Lucien said, remembering the blackened churches and bloody stones as he climbed out of the earth and grabbed Makeda’s hand. “She didn’t hold back, Makeda. No one with any relation to the power structure survived. Women. Children. She wiped them from the face of the earth. Thousands of innocents were caught in the backlash of her rage.” He headed back up the hill and toward the river that would lead them to Lake Tana.

“But why would Saba—”

Lucien stopped and spun around, putting his hands on her shoulders. “I love my mother, Makeda. But she’s not… good. Or bad. Not in any way that modern people understand. When I say Saba is debating what to do about the future of the vampire world, it is very much an emergency.”

They were only a few kilometers from the island when Makeda stopped, forcing Lucien to halt alongside her. He surfaced and wiped the water from his eyes. “What’s wrong?”

“You need to calm down,” she said. “If I can feel your nerves, she’ll be able to as well.”

“Saba is probably planning wide-scale destruction as a way of wiping out the Elixir problem and rebuilding immortal society. That’s what all the travel was about. That’s why Kato is here. She doesn’t see history in centuries, but millennia. Do you realize how many people that would affect? Some people think she’s a benevolent earth mother, but those people also forget the earth can be an uncontrollable bitch when it’s roused.”

“I know that, but you approaching her when you’re angry won’t help her to calm down. If you want her to calm down, you need to be calm too. Think. Don’t just react. Plan. Are you certain she wants to rebuild immortal society? You told me she didn’t like politics.”

“That’s why she goes the ‘razing empires and laying waste’ route.”

“So give her another option,” Makeda said. “Lucien, we have the cure. Don’t you think she’d rather donate a few stem cells rather than destroy entire societies and geographical areas?”

He paused and really thought about it… and he honestly didn’t know what Saba would prefer.

But he did know what Kato would prefer. And Ziri. They were moderates.

Arosh would vote for wholesale destruction.

“We’re asking her to donate stem cells that would change her family structure in massive ways,” Lucien said. “We’re asking her to basically adopt any infected vampire whose sire is no longer living. She’d be responsible for them. Stuck with them even if she didn’t like them. She stopped siring vampires long ago, Makeda, and she had her reasons.”

“So give her new reasons,” Makeda said. “Figure out how all these new children can help her or benefit her or… something.”

“Like how?”

She threw her head back in frustration. “I don’t know! You know this world far better than me. You’ll think of something. Just figure out a way that everyone becomes a winner—the infected, Saba, the world as a whole—and present that option to her. At least it may make her think twice about the wholesale destruction.”

He felt a smile threatening. “Just reason with my sire, stop world destruction, and make everyone a winner? Is that all you want?”

“Yep.” She smiled and pressed a quick kiss to his mouth. “That should do it.”

“Great.” He started swimming toward the island again. “I’ll get started on vampire sunscreen right after that.”