His face went still. “What? Did I say she?”
I turned on him, grabbing his tie in my hands to yank him forward. “Do you have some magical baby gender knowing power? Because you just spoiled a nine month mystery.”
He tried to look innocent and bat at my hands. “Noo-o-o?”
“You are so dead!”
5. Surprise
The cat was out of the bag.
With my public display of barfiness, everyone knew or suspected that I was pregnant. The popular theory was either I was having Othello’s baby or Knight’s. I would’ve preferred the latter, and caught myself sometimes wishing she was his. She’d come out with his dark tanned skin and black hair, and his beautiful brown eyes. Every time the image came to me, I wept alone in my room for the child I was certain I’d never have.
The next day, I sat in the castle hospital wing with Arthur, waiting to see the vampire baby doctor. As every second passed, what started as a nice moment was quickly becoming a guilt fest. What kind of love did I have for Knight if I got pregnant with someone else, not even a year after losing him? Yes, I was trying to move on, and I didn’t regret that, but I’d jumped into it with someone else so fast. Wouldn’t I expect Knight to mourn me longer than a few months? What if I was in a coma for two months and woke up to find him with some blonde tart? I’d be so upset he didn’t wait longer. Not that me being in a coma was the same thing as him being executed, but still.
It was good that Knight was dead. He would never want me now.
Arthur was in the chair next to me, arms folded over his chest, staring at a painting across the room. I’d only needed to tell him I had to come here and he brought me, no questions asked. He sat next to me quietly without comment. Who knew I’d legitimately appreciate his company for once.
“Thanks,” I said after we’d been sitting for a few minutes. Not like there were other patients here or anything. I was the only pregnant vampire at our Order. Maybe the doctor was finishing up a level of Pong.
“Funny, I think you said thanks in the direction of my face. You must be delirious.”
I picked up a very old edition of Highlights magazine and whapped him on the head with it. “That’s for clipping my ear at the hearing.”
He grabbed a copy of Vogue that looked like it was from the 80’s and flipped it against my forehead just lightly enough that I didn’t feel pain. “That’s for being an incorrigible butt face.”
My mouth dropped and I twisted to stare at him. “I am not a butt face.”
He tossed the magazine and missed the coffee table so it slid onto the carpet. “Maybe not. But that is something you would say to insult someone, is it not? My insult skills are… slim to none.”
I settled back into my chair and put my feet onto the coffee table. “I’m curious why you would need to learn such things. Considering you suck at them.”
“Before I came here, I was alone for many years. One hand.” He held one palm outspread in front of him. Each knuckle had scar tissue, like the harsh scars on his face. He could’ve only gotten those fighting a vampire or a Lycan. If the one thing that can harm us is each other, we leave scars behind. “I only need one hand to count the number of times I spoke aloud between when Olivier left me and I arrived to hunt you.” His hand fell back to his lap. When I’d first heard him speak on that first day we met, the raspiness of his voice made me wonder if he rarely spoke. Now I had my answer.
I folded and unfolded my hands around my stomach. “Why would you do that? Not speak for so long.”
He shrugged and his shirt crinkled against the wall. “It’s easier to sort out your thoughts when you’re not prattling about useless things.”
“Do I need to hit you with the Highlights magazine again?”
The nurse finally came into the waiting room, apparently she was playing Pong too, and called my name. I stood up and followed her to the examination room with Arthur on my tail. Walking through the open door, I sat down on the examination table, Arthur stood in a corner, and we waited for a few minutes before the doctor came in. He wasn’t very old, only a century or so, and I didn’t know him very well, as we’d never interacted before then for obvious reasons.
“Lisbeth,” he said brightly, checking the chart I’d filled out as if he didn’t know my name. Everyone knew my name even if I didn’t know theirs. I was infamous now, the vampire that broke a law and ran away and then got knocked up after smooching a werewolf. Try living that down. “So, there’s a little one on the way, I see?” No I’m here for a flu shot. What a cock. “Now, I mean no offense, but I have to ask since you left it blank on the form. Who is the father?”
I gripped the edge of my shirt so tightly my knuckles turned white. “That’s private.” It almost ended as a question but I stopped myself just in time. The facade had to continue. Not even the doctor could know who the baby’s father was. It was probably short sighted of me, considering the cross-species circumstances, but I stuck to it and gave him a determined look.
“You’re not mated?” he continued, probing me like the Spanish Inquisition. Single mothers were extremely uncommon amongst Born vampires, so it wasn’t unfounded for him to be curious. We tended to only bump uglies when there was a ring involved. Or bonding ceremony, since we didn’t wear wedding rings. I shook my head as an answer and continued staring right at him so he’d back down. “Right.”
He wrote a few things on my paper and walked up to me to lean in close. “It’s not his, is it?” He casually motioned to Arthur, trying to be discreet. Uh, what the fuck? My look of utter confusion, and dare I say disgust, made him straighten and step away. Arthur was hot, don’t get me wrong. But hard pass. “Alright then. No father. That’s not a problem. Good. Good.” I rolled my eyes as he tried to pretend it wasn’t a big deal.
After instructing me to lie down on the examination table, the doctor rolled some equipment over to me. It looked weird, not like the typical ultrasound machines I’d seen on television. “Special vampire ultrasound machines,” he explained when he saw my confusion. “We only have the best here.”
One of the machines had an arm on it, like the kind used for x-rays, with a digital display screen on top. He rolled it closer to me until the arm was over my stomach. A flip of a switch and the machine turned on, covering my belly with light. There was a tiny display screen on the side near my face so I could see what the doctor was seeing on top of the arm.
A baby.
I’d felt it inside me, and now I could see it as clearly as a photograph. Little fingers, little toes. My little one. She twitched, her oddly shaped body moving around in her little sac, and she stuck a tiny finger into her newly formed mouth. I reached a hand out and ran my fingers over the display. Over my baby’s image.
“She’s so tiny,” I said out loud. My hands clenched and unclenched against my shirt, and I wished I had someone’s hand to hold besides my own. Knight’s hand. Tears came, from the baby or from Knight’s face in my mind, I didn’t know which. Both.
“You’re about nine weeks along,” the doctor told me, and punched more buttons so the machine made clicking noises like a camera taking a picture. Then he flipped the switch again and the image of my baby went away. I wanted to protest, but he handed me some photos he’d just taken and printed of her. They weren’t black and white, they were full color images like he’d reached inside me and snapped a picture. “Come back next week and we’ll take more.”
With that done, he showed us out of the hospital wing, leaving me alone with Arthur, who was still silent like something had shifted his mood.
“You disapprove?” I asked him, tapping the photos against my hand.
He shrugged. “It’s not against the law to get pregnant.”
“You and law breaking. I could torture someone in front of you and as long as it wasn’t breaking the law, you wouldn’t blink an eye at me.”
The beginnings of a smirk flashed across his face before it disappeared. “I’ll talk to Othello,” he said, shifti
ng the subject smoothly like always. “You’ll need to feed from humans while you’re expecting. Bagged blood will just make you throw up again. Let’s go.” He started walking down the hallway, expecting me to follow.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” he said blankly, and continued down the hall.
In all my 400+ years, there was a very small number of things that I had not experienced, and most of them were things that I wasn’t interested in like bungee jumping, fucking the president, or being launched into space. Pregnancy was as foreign to me as an alien species.
Knowing the mortal species we shared the planet with as I did, being pregnant was something human females looked forward to and were expected to do. Female vampires, not so much. We were not expected to have children, our culture simply wasn’t designed the same way. If we chose to live out eternity without ever giving birth, that was our choice. Sure, having progeny was great, but there was more than one way we created life. We could either have a child of our own or turn humans in the turning ceremony.
I had sired more of the turned than I could count, and I had never kept in touch with a single one of them. I created them, I trained them, and I forgot about them. The child inside me wasn’t someone I could just give birth to and send on its merry way. He or she (most likely she, fuck you, Balthazar) would be with me for the rest of my existence, assuming I’d be destroyed before my child was. That was the preferred outcome.
And beyond that, I didn’t know how to raise a child. I’d never had parents, I grew up as a ward of the Order. The Order didn’t tuck me in to sleep at night, and they didn’t teach me how to ride a bike, or whatever it is that humans viewed as parenting. Hell, I recalled times when I was a very small child and they let me play with knives like they were toys. There was a lesson in there somewhere about the Order sucking as a parent. Not like the knives could’ve hurt me, but still.
Being an orphan eliminated one thing humans worried about. Most humans had hesitations about being a parent because their parents were horrible at it. They thought that because their parents yelled at them, they’d become a parent that yells. And that’s partly true because you learn from what you see.
I had never seen anyone be a parent.
With vampire children as rare as they were, in our Order one vampire was born about every ten years, and that was not an exact number. Sometimes the gap was much longer. So, with the number of babies in our population, and considering none of the Born I was close to had yet to become parents, I was in uncharted waters. Couple that with the fact that the child I was carrying was the spawn of an Incubus, I had more than enough reason to freak the fuck out.
All of this was running through my head after Arthur had left me in my rooms. He was always silent, but this silence felt different. Something in my face must’ve exposed the turmoil underneath because Arthur returned twenty minutes later with a tray of tea. He came in without knocking, as always, not caring that I could’ve been changing, and set the tray down on the coffee table in front of the sofa I was sitting on. On it was ginger cookies, a bottle of bubbling water, and tea that smelled like peppermint.
Without speaking, he sat down next to me and carefully poured the tea into a teacup which he passed to me. He poured some for himself, took a sip, and picked up the saucer with cookies. I took some and he put it back on the coffee table.
Having tea with Arthur was a twist, but I sipped my tea, a peppermint vanilla blend, and felt it creep in like a soothing balm. I took a bite of the soft ginger snaps and relaxed against the sofa as the flavor soaked into my mouth.
“These are good,” I said, trying not to moan out loud. He’d already heard enough of my erotic noises. “People usually add peppers to ginger snaps. I don’t like that.” I took another bite and grabbed more from the tray.
“I remember,” he said simply. I recalled me telling him early on in my imprisonment that I hated peppers. He remembered it. I mean, he had a perfect memory just like all of us did, but having it didn’t mean we always remembered things every second of every day. My spaciness was proof of that. Or maybe I was just a special kind of weird. Plus, not even a perfect memory can make you remember details about a specific person. You have to pay attention. Somehow, him thinking of my comfort made me smile, though I couldn’t say why. I still managed to be snippy for sarcasm’s sake.
“Wow. My captor cares. Color me silly.”
He sipped his tea and ignored my comment. “You are scared to be pregnant.”
I bit into a second cookie and studied the wall in front of me. “Didn’t know you were a mind reader.” Someone needed to get a life. I.E. One that did not involve living outside my doorway and trying to sort out my feelings. No one paid him to be my therapist. Even if they had, I’d expect a refund.
Setting his teacup down, he leaned into the couch to relax, like this was his house or something. “Olivier is judging you, so I don’t think you want to talk to her about this. We are not friends, yes, but I have experience in these matters.”
You are shitting me. Him, knowing about pregnancy? I’d have been less shocked if I’d discovered he liked macramé.
“You have experience with pregnant vampires?” I asked him in disbelief. It was emphasized with my mouth opened as wide as the Panama canal.
“I had an unbonded mate before Olivier joined the Hunters. She became with child, and I was there for her pregnancy. She was scared, like you, at first. She had also been an orphan and didn’t know how to be a parent. I may not be the perfect person to help you, but I will if I can.” He had displayed only the barest hint of emotion during his speech, leading me to wonder what the outcome of his mate’s pregnancy had been. I had a feeling it wasn’t good, since she wasn’t here with him. He didn’t seem like a ‘wham bam thank you ma’am’ type of guy.
“Did she have the baby?”
His face went blank again, but it was not hiding every expression that tried to come out. “No. She went blood crazy from not feeding enough and attacked humans. We had to kill her.”
Holy fucking shit.
Every word that passed up my throat seemed inappropriate. We sat in the silence and I dared a glance at his face. Still blank. Damn him. Did he feel anything? Did he even love her?
“You loved her?” He looked away before I could see the cracks. Yes. He had. “Why would you do that? Is your love of the law so extreme?” My forehead wrinkled in sadness and confusion. To say I was shocked was an understatement. I’d thought the Council had some amount of leniency, but apparently, I was wrong. Not to mention, Arthur was way more devoted to his job than I’d originally thought. To have killed his own pregnant mate just because the laws demanded it, ending her life and the life of his child before it could be born. That wasn’t right or fair. I thought I knew him. I suppose I never had.
When he finally spoke, he took a loud breath to compose his face. “The pain of doing my duty was greater than the punishment for disobedience would have been.”
My hands scratched against my legs though I wasn’t itchy. “I take it you didn’t bring me tea so we could have a heart to heart?”
He snorted, his version of laughing. “Absolutely not.”
I poured us another cup of tea and dropped a sugar cube in mine. “Your momentary lapse of feelings aside, I’ll ask you a question, and when you answer, pretend that I care about what you say.” Being prickly towards him was such second nature, I almost felt bad considering the topic of conversation. His following silence was permission to ask. “Would you kill her again, if you could go back and re-do it?”
His scarred knuckles clenched and then relaxed against his jeans. “Every day I wish I hadn’t done what I did.”
“That’s not an answer.” I shouldn’t have been let down, but I was.
“My idea of loyalty is repulsive, I know,” he admitted while he tapped his boot against the coffee table leg. “My offer of help still stands. No one else at this Order can, or will, give you the same assistance.”
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“I don’t need help from you.” I felt a small twinge of remorse. Remorse over being mean to Arthur. What was wrong with me?
He stood and left without looking back at me again.
6. Technicalities
Now I was on my own. No boyfriend, no baby daddy, no best friend, and the only person who was offering moral support was a man who had killed his unborn child out of principle, no matter how he felt about it now.
Fucking awesome.
The good news was Othello quickly approved the request for me to be assigned two human companions. I didn’t get to choose them, and they wouldn’t be staying in my rooms since I was still under house arrest. My new companions were both big and burly, towering over me with their height. I had no doubt who had chosen them as Arthur had zero taste and probably viewed the process like picking a sheep instead of a cat. We didn’t choose the companions based on the fact that they had blood in their veins, there was a certain connection we looked for. You wouldn’t want to get stuck with someone for ten years and be bored to death whenever they opened their mouth.
My morning companion was named Benjamin. He was Italian and spoke with an accent that would have made human women weak at the knees, but it barely registered on my radar. His plan after his tenure was to use his severance money to start a restaurant outside of Venice, which he would be able to afford with the amount of money he’d be getting. I loved restaurants as much as the next girl, but he made it sound as boring as potato farming. Not that potato farming was boring, but it wasn’t painting the Sistine chapel, I’ll tell you that.
My evening companion was named Alfred. He was African, and I only called him Alfred because he refused to tell me his name. He was very cold towards me, which I assumed was because he didn’t want to fraternize with a prisoner. I could see him and Arthur being best friends. If Arthur had friends, that is.
Not surprisingly, both of my new companions were former military as their looks suggested, and were most likely under Arthur’s command, so they put my prisoner status above my needs. They let me feed, and they left. I only knew so much about Benjamin because he liked to talk while I fed, which as I mentioned was boring as hell. Still, it was conversation. Though, if I tried to respond to anything Benjamin said, he would get up and leave whether or not I was finished.
The Born Vampire series: A Reverse Harem Paranormal Romance (The Complete Series, NSFW Edition) Page 22
