by L E Royal
My throat was dry, so I swallowed.
“If I didn’t…” I couldn’t even say I didn’t want her; it sounded so cruel.
“Honestly, I don’t know. Perhaps Scarlett could raise her alone, perhaps Camilla and Jade. They’re both worried about you but beside themselves to be aunties. If none of that worked, we could look for a family in the Midlands perhaps.” All of it sat wrong with me. “You’ve had a lot to take in, why don’t we head home? The others will meet us later. Just take a few days to think it over, sleep on it maybe?”
Half of me wanted to jump on the offer and disappear back to Pearce Tower and away from the madness that had descended over my life in the last half an hour. The other half of me didn’t want to leave.
“Can I see her?”
It was a quiet request, and Helena looked at me with so much love, so much longing and the same quiet hope I had felt from Scarlett that I almost bolted again.
“Let’s go and find out?”
I nodded, keeping careful control on my breathing as I followed her back down into the bunker. The others were talking animatedly in the foyer, crowded around River. My eyes fell on Scarlett who was pacing, chewing her thumbnail and looking tortured.
“Darling…” Helena stayed between us, and I was grateful to her for managing the interaction, still not feeling capable, still shy somehow, scared. “Rayne wants to see her. Can we arrange for that?”
She nodded and when she opened her mouth to speak, she had to stop and clear her throat.
“Yes, of course, I’ll just… I’ll…” She gestured over her shoulder, already walking backward. “Maybe River can answer some questions for you or something until I’m back.”
She fled.
“Hey, Rayne,” Cami beckoned us over, and I went as Helena took me, still holding tight to my hand. Cami squeezed my shoulder and Jade gave me a tentative smile.
“River, why don’t you explain to her what you told us about how this all came to be?”
Helena squeezed my hand, and the scientist began.
“From the file it seems Wilfred used hair samples to obtain the DNA. The child was conceived in the lab and implanted into a human. The woman was then aged up to complete the pregnancy and disposed of.”
I saw Jade look away. I knew River didn’t mean to be cruel, but her words were so clinical, like the invasion of our privacy and the loss of a life were just another day at the office. Perhaps for her, they were.
She skimmed her finger further down the page on her clipboard before she flipped to the next.
“The child was aged up again after birth. I believe physically she’s four years old now. There’s limited information on her development. I’m not sure who the lead on the project was; the only note I see is that she displays limited social skills and doesn’t speak… Yet unsure as to the connection between age advancement and retardation of social and verbal skills, no existing studies to compare data on child age advancement.” She broke into reading right from the file.
“It’s not legal in Vires to age up a child,” Helena explained. “So they had no precedence to know really what to expect.”
I wondered if it was bad that I was relieved she wasn’t a baby. Before I could ask, the door at the back of the room opened and Scarlett reappeared.
I was vaguely aware of our family around us, Helena letting go of my hand, Jade holding her breath, but all I could see was Scarlett, Scarlett and her worried dark eyes, a little body in her arms, smaller than I had expected, her face obscured by thick mahogany hair that matched the vampire’s.
“Sweetheart…” Scarlett’s voice was rough and thick with nerves and emotion. I ached to feel it too, to taste the moment from her side as well as mine. She sat on a seat, leaving one conveniently empty beside them, an invitation, and I moved on autopilot to sit down.
The girl clung to her, her face tucked into the vampire’s neck.
“Does she have a name?”
I wanted to touch her, to have her raise her head so I could see her face. I needed it somehow now.
“Well, the lab project…had a name. My father called it Dahlia.” There were tears in Scarlett’s eyes. “Many years ago, I had a doll with the same name. It was very precious to me before he destroyed it.”
She loved her already. Her sorrow and love and fear that I wouldn’t understand began to leak, quiet at first, touching the tips of my fingers, and I wasn’t afraid.
Scarlett moved the child gently, lifting her and turning her around before setting her back on her lap facing me. The difference in their skin tone struck me first. Dahlia was paler than Scarlett, but tanner than me. I watched her tiny hands fist in that leather jacket I knew so well, something old and something new, but suddenly, they were both equally a part of me.
Beneath dark hair and thick eyelashes two large eyes studied me, one a shade of blue I recognized as my own, the other a deep green that was undeniably Scarlett’s.
“It’s genetic… The heterochromia…” Scarlett’s words almost sounded like an apology and I found myself irritated.
“It’s beautiful… She’s beautiful.”
Overwhelming hope crashed over me, still careful, a place uncharted, but Scarlett wanted this, and my heart swelled. Nervous as I was, I wanted it too.
The little girl clung to the vampire, more still than I thought a child ought to be, her cheek pressed to Scarlett’s chest, her face half obscured by her hair. She watched with wary eyes as I reached out to touch her, but when my hand brushed soft over hers where it held the jacket she didn’t pull away.
I smiled, hardly able to tear my eyes away to look into those of the woman I loved. Scarlett was crying, the sight not as jarring to me as it once was.
“You just keep on surprising me, Princess. Every time I think I couldn’t possibly love you more.”
I reached up and touched her cheek, conscious of the small body between us.
Seeing her there, tears in her eyes, happiness and hope and a hundred emotions I knew she had never dreamed she was meant for, our daughter clinging to her chest, the feeling was definitely mutual.
Epilogue
“OKAY, MAMA, OPEN the door!”
Somehow over the past two weeks, that title had come to belong to me.
I pulled open the door to the newly redecorated room and let Scarlett and Dahlia step inside, our family crowding into the doorway behind them.
“What do you think, baby?”
I crouched down, and she ran to meet me, laughing when we collided. Her hair was pulled back into a long braid down her back, neater but matching mine—Scarlett’s handiwork.
The walls were a darker gray than I had liked, everything accented with a rich royal purple in the once guestroom now bedroom, right beside ours. Scarlett had insisted on letting her pick the colors.
“Do you love it? Are you sure you picked the colors and not Mommy?”
Scarlett made a face at me, happiness shining in her eyes, as beautiful as ever in loose jeans and a thick sweater, and I wondered if I would ever tire of this.
Dahlia still didn’t speak, but she smiled and laughed and interacted with us more every day. Helena monitored her progress and we hoped soon she would catch up to what was expected for her as a four-year-old.
“Okay, enough waiting, let the fabulous aunts take a look!” Camilla dragged Jade into the room and they took Dali around, inspecting everything from the new wood furniture to the designer sheets that were of course Camilla’s doing.
The room had been a family project. Even Shikara had helped, and as much as she grumbled about being called “Gramma,” she’d spent countless hours already making Dahlia a collection of jewelry fit for a princess, after her first offering of a blunt ornate dagger was thankfully vetoed by an anxious Scarlett.
“As much as we want to stay, Grams has to take Gramma and run some errands. We’ll be back tonight, just going to check on the new development and my cultures.”
We all told them goodbye, and Dahlia w
aved. This far we’d kept all talk of the Fringe, even of vampires away from her, unsure how much she knew and what her short life in the bunker had been like. Scarlett and I had decided to let her get back on her feet and settle before we added more uncertainty to her world.
A hand reached down for me and I let Scarlett pull me to my feet, surprised when she pulled me into her arms.
“She chose the colors from the swatches…”
Lately she had been so light, free and open and whole in a way I had never known her. I knew running the city, picking up the pieces of her father’s crooked regime was hard, but increasingly she was letting all of us share the burden. Many nights were spent after Dahlia was in bed discussing her problems with Cami and Jade, Helena and Shikara in the living room.
“Right, because if you had there would be less gray, more black?”
She laughed against my lips when I kissed her.
There were still dark days, nights she came home having already showered on another floor, her clothes in a trash bag by her side and some of Shikara’s sweats too long around her ankles. There were still moments of uncertainty; the first time Dahlia fell on the hard tiles in the kitchen, Scarlett had been moody and full of self-loathing for two days afterward. She was Scarlett, beautiful and imperfect, but mine, ours.
“I never thought I could have this.”
Both our eyes were on our daughter, wedged between Jade and Cami on her new little bed listening to Jade tell her a story about the dream catcher that hung on her wall, and the family of Native American vampires in the Midlands Helena had asked to make it for her.
She kissed me, softly at first before her tongue pushed into my mouth. My mind flashed pleasantly back to the night before when it had done the same thing, mixing my blood that coated it with her blood in my mouth. Things were good, better than they had ever been, and somewhere between all the change in Vires and finding Dahlia, underneath we were still ourselves—I was still in love with her as much as I ever was.
“Okay, moms, keep it PG.”
Jade made a face, twirling the new engagement ring that shone her left hand.
“Mommy…”
The word was clear, her voice was soft and so unexpected, and in the silence that followed, I heard nothing but her breath and mine.
“Mama…”
Dahlia didn’t say anything else, she just smiled, and I wondered if she knew she held the heart of every single one of us, vampire and hybrid alike, as we all beamed back at her, Scarlett’s hand tight in mine.
About the Author
L.E. Royal is a British born fiction writer, living in Texas. She enjoys dark but redeemable characters, and twisted themes. Though she is a fan of happy endings, she would describe most of her work as fractured romance. When she is not writing, she is pursuing her dreams with her champion Arabian show horses or hanging out with her wife at their small ranch/accidental cat sanctuary.
Email: [email protected]
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/le.royal.writes
Twitter: https://twitter.com/leroyalwrites
Website: https://leroyalauthor.com/home/
Other books by this author
Blood Echo
Also Available from NineStar Press
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