Ankyra Sound Remember, lads and lassies, fairy tales weren't fun stories. They were warnings.

He watched her in the dark as best he could, but the glimmering of her lovestruck gaze was swallowed by the shadow. His eyes could not focus yet, could not make sense of the shapes that shifted in the mire. He saw more than he could understand. His brain made connections that were almost like memories - something ancestral - and the dark stirred, became faces and scenes playing out as a pantomime of grey-light against the dark recesses of the den, taking facets of his mother's shape and morphing them, or the blaze of gold from Erzulie's shifting form and adding to the cacophony. The babe would not remember this.

He sighed and reached for one shape or another and smacked at his mother's nearby nose, kicked his heels and somehow stretched to touch toes against toes (pawing his rear feet); he laughed breathily and cooed, rolled, fell against the plush of his mother and drifted in her warmth.