by Amira Rain
However, when Hayden emerged from the trees around eight, disaster struck. My resolve crumbled, and my self-doubt became like some enormous, growing, living thing. And it was all because of Hayden’s face.
Bathed in moonlight while he walked toward me, the expression on his face was one that could only be described as rapturous. I’d never seen anyone look so happy to see me in my entire life. And this look of rapture on Hayden’s face seemed completely genuine, and really, not even seemed; it just was. I couldn’t deny it. He was thrilled to finally be seeing me again. He had missed me terribly. And that obviously wasn’t something that he likely would have been doing if he was really serious about killing me.
Maybe the note was just some kind of a really bizarre joke, I thought, burying my face in my hands. Maybe Hayden, Sam, and Trevor just have a really twisted sense of humor with each other.
Crying, I was soon wrapped in Hayden’s arms, and he held me tightly, telling me that he’d missed me so much, too.
“It’s all okay now, though…I’m home for good now. You don’t have to cry.”
I suddenly lifted my face from his chest. “Yes, I do…because I was just about ready to kill you! And I mean, literally kill, with a special poisoned knife that kills vampires!”
Looking absolutely stunned, with his eyes as wide as I’d ever seen them, Hayden said nothing, and I broke free from his arms, and pulled the note he’d written from my pocket. I’d brought it because it had seemed like it would be poetic justice somehow, to kill Hayden with the note he’d written about his plans to kill me right in my pocket.
“Here. Look. Look, Hayden. This is why. This note. You shouldn’t have made this sick joke about planning to kill me!”
Still looking absolutely stunned beyond belief, Hayden took the note from my hand, unfolded it, and looked at it briefly in the moonlight before speaking in a low, slightly shaky sort of voice that betrayed his shock.
“Sydney…whatever you’ve been thinking about this note…it’s wrong.”
Just then, my lower back suddenly began hurting so badly that I braced it with my hands, cringing.
“Oh. Oh my gosh.”
I’d been having a lot of lower back pain that had been coming and going seemingly at random the day before, but it hadn’t been as painful as it currently was. Also, within a second, it now seemed to spread from my back to my stomach, making me move my hands to my well-rounded waist.
“Oh, gosh. It hurts so bad.”
Hayden suddenly scooped me up gently, held me to his chest, and began striding over to the hayride path with me. “Let’s get you to the clinic. I think you might be in labor.”
*
Unable to believe what Hayden had said, I shook my head. “No. I can’t be in labor. It’s still too soon. My due date isn’t for two more weeks.”
The pain that had seemed to encircle my back and waist like some sort of an incredibly painful, tight, invisible rubber band had lessened, but just as I said the word weeks, it returned in full force, painful enough to make me moan.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I braced my stomach with my hands, not that it actually did anything to help. “Oh…oh, Hayden. It hurts so bad.”
Striding up the path even faster, he planted a kiss on my forehead, telling me to just hang in there. “Your due date may not be for two weeks, but I think our baby has other plans.”
I still kind of couldn’t believe it, but by the time we arrived at Nora’s clinic, it was crystal clear to me that I was definitely in labor. The pain was coming in waves that were very close together, maybe one every forty-five seconds or so.
Soon, while I cried out in pain, I found myself wearing a hospital gown in a special “birthing bed” that could be adjusted flat for examinations, or tilted with the foot of the bed pointing slightly downward, to allow gravity to assist in birth.
After quickly examining me, Nora put my gown back down over my legs, and said that I didn’t even have time to get in the birthing tub. “This baby’s coming now. You’re already fully dilated and crowning, and you need to start pushing.”
Standing at the head of the bed, paler than I’d ever seen him, Hayden held my hand, stroking my hair, while I moaned through another contraction.
“That’s it, sweetheart. Just squeeze my hand if you want to.”
Immediately taking Hayden up on his offer, I began squeezing his hand probably hard enough to break it.
Two contractions later, Nora said that I really needed to start pushing, but I said that I couldn’t yet.
“Not until I talk to Hayden for just a minute. Just one single minute, Nora.”
She protested, but I insisted. “Just sixty seconds, Nora. Just please go stand outside the doorway for just sixty seconds. That’s it. I’m not pushing until I can talk to Hayden.”
Seeming to sense that I was very serious, Nora quickly left the room with a sigh, and I rolled on my side to look at Hayden.
“I made a huge mistake. Obviously. When I read that note, I thought you were seriously planning to kill me.”
Hayden said that that hadn’t been the case at all, and that he’d actually written that note at least a year earlier, at a council meeting with his most trusted family members and fighters. Mark had been giving a speech, trying to convince everyone to simply move a Warren vampire named Cassandra to a different vampire community rather than kill her, like everyone else wanted to do, because she’d been openly killing humans in a small town and probably wasn’t going to stop.
During Mark’s speech, while he argued that Cassandra could just be kept under guard, essentially in prison in a new vampire community for the rest of her life, Hayden made up his mind that Cassandra had to be killed in order to keep humans and other vampires safe. However, wanting to let Sam and Trevor know what he was thinking but also wanting to let Mark say his piece without being interrupted, Hayden had jotted down the note on a sheet of scrap paper and had passed it down the council table to Sam.
Hayden finished his quick tale by saying that after the meeting, he’d seen Trevor toss the note in an open file cabinet drawer, probably just not wanting to take it home, where Mark might see it. Exhausted after a long, stressful day, Hayden hadn’t bothered to fish the note out of the drawer, simply not caring.
Experiencing another contraction, I said through gritted teeth that Carla must have broken into the council lodge at some point and gone through the file cabinet to try to get something that would help her manipulate me. “And when she found your note, she probably thought she’d hit the jackpot.”
Now, in hindsight, I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid as to just accept the note without question, even though Hayden had written that he’d decided to kill “her,” without specifying who, exactly, “her” even was. Carla had clearly gotten into my head, though, and I’d just naturally assumed that by “her,” Hayden had meant me.
Frowning, Hayden asked what Carla had to do with anything. Still experiencing the tail end of my last contraction, I continued gritting my teeth for a few moments, wincing, before speaking.
“Carla doesn’t even matter right now. She tried to get me to kill you for some reason that I have no clue about…but I’ll explain it all later. Right now, before I push this baby out, I just need to know if you can forgive me. I just want us to be okay before our baby comes into the world.”
Hayden said that there was nothing to forgive, but I insisted that there was.
“I was going to try to kill you, Hayden.”
“But you didn’t. You didn’t even try. So, to me, there’s nothing to forgive.”
“Then, just say that you still love me.”
“I still love you, Sydney…more than you can possibly even know.”
Beginning to cry, from relief, pain, and joy all at once, I attempted a smile. “Good. Then….”
Suddenly, a contraction hit me with a wave of pain so intense that I couldn’t even speak anymore. In fact, I felt like I could barely even breathe. I could only make a half-
strangled moaning sound, squeezing Hayden’s hand the hardest I had yet, feeling like I couldn’t not push anymore. Hayden called for Nora, and she came flying back in the room. I began bearing down, trying to push the baby out, knowing that my life was about to change forever.
*
As far as deliveries went, mine had been pretty easy. After I’d done just two mighty pushes, Hayden and I had welcomed our brand-new, beautiful, healthy daughter into the world with tears and exclamations of joy.
Now it was around midnight, and in the dimly-lit birthing room, I sat in bed, holding our sweet, sleeping Christine Alexandra in my arms while Hayden sat in a chair bedside with one of his hands covering one of my own. A few months earlier, I’d proposed Christine’s name to him, saying that whether we had a boy or a girl, I wanted to honor my cousins, Christopher and Alexander, who hadn’t had a chance to live life beyond toddlerhood.
Somewhat to my surprise, because I’d thought that he might find the idea morbid or something, Hayden had said that he loved the name Christine Alexandra for a girl, and Christopher Alexander for a boy. “I’m starting to really feel like we’re having a girl, though,” he’d said. “So, I think it’ll be Christine Alexandra.” Proving that a mother’s instinct could be fallible, I had been thinking that we were going to have a boy.
After giving Christine and me a few kisses each, Hayden left the clinic not long after midnight, leaving me in the care of Nora, because he wanted to go find Carla, first to demand an explanation as to why she’d tried to get me to kill him, and second, to banish her from the farm.
However, when he returned to the clinic around one in the morning, finding me still awake, he reported that he hadn’t been able to find her. “She’s just gone. Sam, Trevor, Mark, and I searched the entire property. We looked everywhere. My best guess is that, feeling confident that you were going to go through with your plan, she decided to flee the area, not wanting to stick around for the fallout.”
I told Hayden that no matter where she’d went, we needed to find her. “I need to know why she tried to get me to kill you.”
Hayden said he needed to know as well, because he had a feeling that once she realized that her plan to use me to accomplish what she wanted had failed, she would try again herself, or maybe with help from the Warrens. “Which, of course, will bring danger right to our doorstep…and I refuse to let that happen. I’m going to keep you and Christine safe. No matter what.”
Still holding a still-sleeping Christine in my arms, I said that I knew he’d always keep us safe. “I’d be lying, though, if I said that I didn’t hope that all this Carla business is over as soon as possible. I don’t like the Warrens possibly having yet another reason to hurt Christine, when they already wanted to kill her and me in the first place. Not to mention that Carla could want us both killed simply out of revenge now, just because I failed to follow through with her plan. She’ll probably be enraged when she finds out.”
Hayden agreed, but then repeated what he’d said about always keeping me and Christine safe. “I’ll never, ever let anything happen to the two of you, no matter what. I promise.”
Again, I said I knew, then planted a kiss on Christine’s sweet, soft little forehead. “I know you’ll always keep our little pumpkin safe.”
We’d decided to nickname her “pumpkin” because it only seemed fitting, being that she’d been born on Halloween. I’d also started calling her Chrissy, too, just liking the sound of it.
Soon, my eyes began to close, and I told Hayden that maybe it was finally time for me to get some sleep. After giving me a kiss, he sat back in his chair, saying that he was going to take a catnap himself, then sit with me all night in case I needed anything.
Smiling at his sweetness, I closed my eyes and soon nodded off and began dreaming of something hazy and pleasant. However, later in the night, this dream morphed into something ugly and horrible, and I dreamed I was running with Christine in my arms, desperately trying to get away from Carla and the Warrens, who were chasing me with their fangs bared. After awaking with a start, I told Hayden about this nightmare, and he began smoothing my hair with his hand strong and steady.
“That nightmare will never happen in real life, Sydney. I promise you that.”
I nodded, praying he was right.
To Be Continued.....
* * *
Ready for the next part of the story?
Dear Reader,
I want to personally thank you for taking your time to read “The Vampire's Special Baby” I really hope you enjoyed it and you are hungry for the next part in the story.
This is the first book of a TRILOGY and you can get the next book at the link below. See what happens next!!
Book 2 - The Vampire's Special Child
Book 3 – The Vampire's Special Daughter
See you in the next book :)
Samantha x x
*
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