"Karl?"
Jeremy nodded.
"I'll get on it," I said.
"That leaves the spell," he said. "I'll verify that."
"Spell?"
"Xavier claims this letter is protected by a spell that will stop anything in human form. I want to be sure such a spell exists--or that it could exist. Paige or Lucas should be able to tell us that, or find someone who can."
Diversion
WHEN WE FINISHED OUR RESEARCH, JEREMY HAD ME CALL Xavier to accept his offer and get David Hargrave's new address. Clay and Antonio took care of Hargrave right away. And no, that didn't mean they took him aside and gave him a stern talking to. Sometimes that's all that's required, but if a mutt catches the Pack's attention, it usually means he's gone beyond the "occasional slip-up" stage, and needs more than a warning.
They found Hargrave right where Xavier had told us he'd be. So we were ready to uphold our end of the deal. Yet it seemed that wouldn't happen anytime soon. When I called Xavier, things weren't going well on his end. Although he assured me he was just working out some kinks, I got the impression the buyer was waffling. When a month passed, with no word from Xavier, we figured the deal had fallen through.
Two more months passed. Spring became summer, then headed toward autumn. I was racing through the forest, hot breath billowing smoke signals into the cool night air. Adrenaline rippled through me with each stride. A glorious late summer night, capped off by a perfect run.
I lunged through a stand of trees and launched myself. In midflight, pain ripped through my abdomen, and I crashed sideways to the forest floor. When I tried to get up, machine-gun bursts of cramps doubled me over and pushed me back down.
I lay on my side, moaning, claws scrabbling against air. A burst of wetness under my tail. The smell of blood filled the air. Still racked by cramps, I managed to twist around. Blood pooled in the leaves under my backside. Fur clotted the blood; fur too dark to be my own.
Oh, God, no. Please--
A tremendous wave of pain ran through me, so intense I thought I was spontaneously changing back to human form. Then a horrible wet plop, as something fell onto the leaves.
At first I saw only a dark lump, black against the blood. Then in a flash, I saw everything--the tiny limbs contorted by their own Change, the head nearly perpendicular to the body, neck snapped, broken by me, by my Change, my selfishness, my thoughtlessness.
I screamed.
"Shhhh." The wind whistled through the trees overhead. "Shhhh."
I tried to move, but something held me fast, something warm and solid. My eyes flew open and I saw the full moon overhead, bright blue against the night. A full moon? Hadn't it been a quarter moon earlier? I blinked, and saw two moons hanging over me.
"Elena?"
Another hard blink, and the blanket of sleep fell away. Clay's face, twisted with worry, hovered over mine.
"What did you dream?" he whispered.
I opened my mouth, but only a whimper came out. His arms tightened around me. I started to relax, then the images from the dream flew back and I jerked away. I ran my hands over my rounded belly. Still there. So big. Too big. I was barely past the halfway point, and already people were stopping me in the supermarket to ask how many weeks--or days--I had left.
Jeremy insisted it was the wolf blood accelerating my pregnancy, but he was only guessing. No one knew. I ran my fingers over my stomach again, trying to feel a heartbeat or a kick, but knowing I wouldn't. For as far along as I seemed to be, my baby was strangely quiet. Jeremy assured me he heard a heartbeat, though, and I kept growing, so I had to tell myself that was good enough.
Clay laid his hands over mine.
"I can't Change anymore," I whispered. "It isn't safe for the baby. It can't be."
"If it wasn't, then you wouldn't need to Change while you were pregnant. You can't have a species physically incapable of reproducing--"
"We are not a species!" I said, pushing myself up. "They are a species, not us. They inherited it. We were bitten. Don't you get that? You're infected, I'm infected, and no sane person with something like that intentionally tries to reproduce!"
I took a few deep breaths and concentrated on hearing that voice of reason in my head, telling me I was overreacting again, that everything would seem better in the morning. But my pounding heart drowned it out.
Goddamn it! Why couldn't I get past this? After I'd Changed that first time, everything had seemed fine. But every Change since had been just as nerve-wracking.
Logically, as my pregnancy progressed without complications, my fears should have eased. Instead, they grew worse, like a shipwreck survivor swimming to an island, with each stroke thinking, "Oh, God, I've made it this far, please, please, please don't let me fail now."
As hard as I tried not to, every day I made new plans for our child--"I can't wait to show him this" or "I have to remember to teach her that." If something went wrong, I'd lose hopes and dreams and plans, and a baby that was already as real to me as if he or she were lying in a bassinet beside my bed.
"You'll be okay," Clay murmured. "You're doing great so far, right?"
I took a deep breath. "I know. I'm sorry. I'm so--"
He put his hand over my mouth. "You're worried. Nothing wrong with that." He lowered me down to the bed. "What did you dream?"
An image flashed. The blood, the clotted fur, the--
Heart hammering, I crushed my face against his bare chest and took a deep breath, grounding myself with his scent.
I pulled back, not looking up at him. "I just want--I need to sleep."
A slight tensing of his shoulder muscles, as if fighting the urge to prod. After a moment, he relaxed, pulled me against him and, eventually, I fell back to sleep.
I woke up the next morning to the sound of Clay's snoring. I eased out of bed so I wouldn't disturb him, then leaned over to brush my lips across the top of his curls, too light a touch to wake him.
As I headed downstairs, I heard Jeremy in the kitchen. When I smelled what he was cooking, I knew he'd heard me wake up screaming last night. I leaned against the wall and cursed my performance, knowing even as I did that it wouldn't be the last. No matter how embarrassed and guilty I felt the next morning, in the darkness of night all my fears and insecurities came out to play.
I took a deep breath, pushed open the kitchen door and looked at the tottering stacks of pancakes and sliced ham on the counter.
"You don't need to do this," I said.
Jeremy fished the bottle of maple syrup from the back of the fridge. "The plates are already in the sunroom. Can you carry the pancake platter for me?"
"Really, you don't need to do this. I'm being silly, and what I need is a swift kick in the rear, not comfort food."
"What you need is baby furniture," he said, handing me the platter. "Plus a nursery to put it in, but I thought we'd start with the furniture and choose the decor from there. I'm sure Syracuse has fine stores, but I propose a trip to New York. We'll spend a couple of days, stay with Antonio and Nick, make a trip out of it. We'll leave today."
I shook my head. "I'm not ready, Jer."
"We'll go whenever you are. We have to wait for Clay anyway, although if we're lucky, we'll be able to leave him with Nick while we go into the city and shop."
"I don't mean--I'm not ready for a nursery. If something went wrong--I'm not ready."
Jeremy laid down the ham and looked at me. "That's why this is exactly what you need. Everything is going fine, and the best way for you to recognize and accept that is to keep moving forward, making plans and preparing." A quarter-smile. "At the rate you're progressing, we'd better get cracking, or we may end up with a baby and no place to put him. We'll be fashioning diapers out of dishcloths."
I tried to return the smile, but my lips wouldn't budge. I looked away. "I can't. Soon, I promise. Just...not yet."
The kitchen door opened before I got to it. Clay popped his head in.
"Look who smelled breakfast," I said.
>
As I brushed past him, I dipped my hand to his and squeezed it. An awkward apology for last night.
"I'll take that ham," he said to Jeremy.
I didn't turn, but I knew more than the platter passed between them. After I'd fallen asleep again last night, they'd probably snuck downstairs to devise "distract Elena" plans. Option one: baby shopping in New York. Jeremy would have signaled Clay that the idea had been torpedoed, so they'd have to find a way to segue to option two over breakfast.
I turned into the sunroom and put the pancake platter down, then reached for the coffee urn and started filling mugs.
"We should invite Paige up," Clay said as he rounded the doorway. "For a visit."
"No segue required," I murmured. "Silly me."
I exchanged his ham platter for a steaming mug of coffee, and sat down to fix my own. Decaf of course. Every bit of coffee in the house was decaf. I tried telling the guys, really, you can drink regular coffee in front of me, but they were having none of it. If I sacrificed, they sacrificed. A communal pregnancy. It was starting to drive me a little bonkers.
"Invite Paige here? Your desperation is showing."
He shrugged and slid into his seat. "We've had her up before."
"At my invitation. With you gritting your teeth the whole time."
"I was never gritting my teeth. I'm fine with Paige. And if Lucas can make it...All the better. Maybe they'll be working on a case, something to get your mind--Something to talk about."
I'd rather take a trip to Portland to visit them, but I knew that was out of the question. Having Paige here would be nice, and if Lucas came along, Clay would enjoy the distraction just as much as I did.
Lucas had filled a space in Clay's life that I'd never realized had been empty. Logan used to tell me how, when he'd first joined the Pack, Clay would drive him nuts with "lessons," always showing him how to fight better, train better, Change better. He'd figured it was just Clay's way of reminding Logan that he was the newest and youngest member, keeping him in his place.
When I saw Clay with Lucas, I realized there had been more to it than that. Clay had genuinely wanted to teach Logan, to assume the role of mentor to a younger werewolf. Maybe that was the wolf in him, instinctively wanting to pass on his life experience to the next generation. In the Pack, though, there was no next generation...not yet. With Lucas, Clay had found a substitute after Logan's death--if not a werewolf, at least an intelligent, thoughtful young man who not only accepted Clay's counsel, but sought it out.
Most of Clay's ideas for dealing with problem mutts weren't the kind of thing Lucas would ever use on rogue sorcerers. He didn't have the personality--or the stomach--for that. Yet he was astute enough to take Clay's teachings and pick out the principles that worked for him. In seeing them together, I'd realized that Clay's desire for a child had to do with more than pleasing me. For the first time, I'd seen him in the role of father...and not been scared shitless by the image.
After breakfast, I waited until it was a reasonable time to call Oregon. Then I phoned Paige. As I listened to her answering machine, my hopes plummeted. I didn't bother leaving a message. The one on her machine told me Paige was off on an investigation with Lucas. Of course, the message didn't say that, but it was one she used to let her fellow council members and supernatural friends know she was out of town, and they should call her cell phone instead.
"We'll try again next week," Clay said. "She's never away long. Not with Savannah in school...or, I guess, Savannah isn't in school right now, is she?"
"Summer break," I mumbled.
That reminded me that this was the first summer in four years that Savannah wouldn't be spending a week with us. We'd planned on it, but then my nightmares started, and I'd been afraid of spooking her. The last thing any teenage girl needs is to see something like that--might scare her off having kids herself someday. Savannah had been understanding, and we'd promised to make it up to her at Christmas, but I knew she'd been disappointed, which only made me feel guiltier, as I screwed up another person's summer...
"Jaime," Clay said.
"Invite Jaime? I'm sure she's too busy--"
"What about that documentary work you two were talking about? Not really your type of writing, but you seemed interested when she brought it up."
I hesitated, then nodded. "Sure. Work. That'd be good. Something new might be just what I need."
I grabbed the phone book from the drawer, opened it and dialed. Again I got an answering machine. This time I left a message, just a vague "give me a shout when you get a chance." I suspected it would be days before I heard back--Jaime spent most of her year touring, a few days here, a week there. God only knew when she'd get the message.
"She might have just stepped out," Clay said.
"Sure. Maybe."
"You want to give Nick a try?"
I shook my head, murmured a "maybe later" and slid from the room.
Strategy
THE PHONE RANG EARLY THE NEXT MORNING.
"I'll get it!" I said.
I rocketed from the table so fast that I temporarily forgot my new center of gravity and nearly landed face-first on the floor.
"You expecting someone?" Clay called after me, as I righted myself and hurried to the study.
"Work," I said. "A...job assignment."
Like I ever moved so fast to get work. The sad truth was that I wasn't expecting a call--I just wanted contact with the outside world. Any contact. At this point, a vacuum cleaner salesperson would do.
Just last week, when our tenacious local Avon lady had dropped a catalogue in our mailbox, as she'd done for the last four years without ever getting an order from me, there had been a moment when I'd thought, "Huh, maybe I should give her a call, get a makeup consultation." It didn't matter that I hadn't bought new makeup since the nineties. Even when I recalled Jeremy's story about the last Avon lady that showed up at Stonehaven, I wasn't deterred. After all, Clay had been only seven or eight years old, and even if he did terrorize the Avon lady again, as bad as I would feel about that, it certainly would liven up an afternoon.
The phone hit its fourth ring. I dove for the answering machine, and hit the off button, then glanced at the caller ID as I reached for the receiver. A pay phone tag flashed past. A pay phone? Maybe Jaime calling back or Paige checking in.
"Hello?"
"Elena!" a voice boomed.
"Xavier!"
Silence. A bit too enthusiastic on my part, I guess. He was probably trying to figure out whether that was a happy shout of greeting or a warning snarl.
"Good to hear from you," I added.
Silence. Then, "What'd I do?"
"Nothing. It's just...good to hear from you."
Clay appeared in the doorway. I mouthed "Xavier." He scowled. I turned to face the wall.
"So what's up?" I said. "Have you heard anything about that letter? Or do you have something else you need us to do? We still owe you for the Hargrave tip, don't forget."
He paused, certain a trap lurked behind my enthusiasm. "Uh, no, I haven't. It's the letter. Things have fallen back into place--"
"So we're on? Great! When do you want it?"
"The, uh, buyer would like it within the next couple of weeks, but if that's not enough notice, I can probably swing something--"
"A couple of weeks? Perfect. Just send us the updated plans and we'll be on it. Do you still have my fax number?"
He did. We discussed a few final details, then I hung up and turned, beaming, to Clay.
"Absolutely not," he said. "So don't even ask."
"Ask? Since when do I need your permission?"
I bounced past him out the door.
"He's going to say the same thing," Clay called.
We'd see about that.
Wrangling a day pass from Jeremy...take two.
Since I'd started showing, Jeremy and Clay hadn't wanted me leaving Pack territory or meeting with any supernatural who wasn't a good friend. As overprotective as that sou
nded, there was logic behind it. They wanted to keep my pregnancy a secret from the werewolf world for as long as possible.
Being the only female werewolf always made me a target. Becoming Clay's mate had upped the ante. There were plenty of mutts who wanted to get to him, and wouldn't mind doing it through me. But we'd learned to deal with that...or I'd learned to deal with it, and Jeremy and Clay had learned to trust that I could deal with it.
But now I was carrying Clay's child, and my growing belly already hampered my ability to fight, or to run from a fight. So they'd laid down the law. I was to stick to New York state--Pack territory. As much as I wanted to argue with that, I knew what mutts were capable of. Maybe I was willing to take the risk, but I had no right to subject my unborn child to it.
But Xavier wouldn't have to see me. I could conduct all arrangements by phone and courier. Plus, it was mere larceny, with no violence or personal threat involved.
"The plan will stand as we decided two months ago," I said. "I'm not arguing with that. Jeremy takes the letter and Clay stands guard. My job will be to escort Jeremy into the house, so he doesn't have to worry about opening doors in wolf form."
"And what if--" Clay began.
"The doors are rigged with deadly gamma ray trip wires?" I bit back the sarcasm. "Sorry, I mean, what if it's not safe for me to go inside the house? Then I don't. Jeremy, you wanted Karl to go over the plans. I agree. If he has any safety concerns, then I won't go in."
"That's any concern," Clay said. "Not a high risk or a moderate risk. Karl even brings up a potential risk, you don't go, right?"
"Right."
"And anything goes wrong, we get out of there."
"Absolutely."
"And it's there and back, just an overnight trip."
"Fine by me."
"And you stay in my sight or Jeremy's sight at all times, the entire trip."
"Except for bathroom breaks."
He hesitated. I glared.
"Fine," he said. "Except for bathroom breaks."
We looked at Jeremy.
"All right," he said. "Let's get this over with, then. Elena? Call Karl, and see how soon he can look at those plans."
Karl Marsten arrived two days later. Prompt for Marsten, who had spent the last three years dragging his heels on another matter: joining the Pack. Five years ago Jeremy had granted him territory for helping us when a group of mutts tried to overthrow the Pack. Since he'd been part of that group, though, his last-minute change of heart had only won him territory in Wyoming, which I'm sure is a lovely state...if you aren't a cosmopolitan jewel thief.
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