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a
cold night, and the snow was thick on the ground. Our breath made
little clouds in the night air, as her tail flashed before me. The
dance is old as time, and long after the moon had set did we return
to the Hall. When the time is right, we know our Mates, and that
night, the time was right for me to realise that Lili was the one
with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life.
    Goddess, the
rest of my life. That’s what we thought we had that night: the rest
of our lives. We thought we had time aplenty to spend together, on
that night when we confirmed our Mating through sharing the Mating
Bond. In the winter of 1940, that was when my Lili and I realised
that the Goddess had chosen the other to be the one soul in the
universe to offer support and succour. It also meant that, as a
male Cŵn Annwn, I could take a more active part in the soul
harvests, now that I had my Lili to help me with the taint of evil
that was part and parcel of our duties to our Goddess.
    But now we
come to the reason why I mentioned the Roma people who worked on
the Negrescu lands. By 1940, these were the grandchildren of those
whom we had known when we had first come to the Carpathian region.
Their grandparents may have been born into virtual slavery, but the
generation living in the time that saw Western Europe engulfed in
war once more, they knew a different life. It was still not
freedom, but they and their parents knew that those who made up the
Negrescu tribe, as they chose to see us, would not hold them in
bondage as their grandparents had been. Aaleahya had maintained
friendships with members of her blood tribe, even if her own
father’s death had meant that she had had to flee, until Gavril
‘married’ her, and her new rank assured her safety. It mattered not
if they thought that it was Aaleahya’s rank which gave them the
protection of her husband, and the greater level of freedom that
they enjoyed compared to others. They were free, and that was
important. Of course they knew that we were not normal, or at least
not in the way that others of rank might be.
    But all that
would change. We both had many friends amongst the Roma
communities, and as it became clear that the government were siding
with the Germans and the Nazi party, so their attitudes towards
particular nationalities started to become apparent. We heard
stories of pogroms, of attacks on Jewish communities, and the
number of harvests that we had to carry out started to increase.
Each time I returned, having delivered the souls I carried to
Gavril, my Lili would lie with me, and her gentle light would clear
the despair that might otherwise prove overwhelming. Lili feared
for her friends amongst the Roma community and it was good reason
that she did, for they, too, became a target for the authorities,
keen to show their German allies that they shared the same disdain
for those populations not seen to be pure.
    We had to be
careful ourselves, as Cŵn Annwn. Rumours started to spread, of how
there were elements of the Nazi party who were interested in
anything which might give them an advantage. Fears were kindled,
deliberately, so that those with whom we might have done business
in saner times, saw an opportunity to gain by guile what they could
not gain honestly. Gavril instructed us to be cautious, and with
good reason. We were but one Mated pair, but there were many more
in the Pack, and each might be targeted: threaten one Mate to gain
the co-operation of the other. So we were careful. We dealt with
those whom we knew we could trust, and only because we had the
advantage of being able to read souls.
    It was not the
best time for us to bring a child into the world, but these things
happen. We hoped that despite all that was happening around us,
that Lili was expecting our first child might mean that the war
would end soon, that the hatred and intolerance, the belief that
whole races should be exterminated would be consigned to history.
We hoped, because we were young, and we