I could not hear anymore. I grabbed a shirt, and turned to her. “Watch over Anna. I will be back soon.”
Rene was waiting for me when I arrived at her cottage, and so was Ravel. “We set up a warning spell, so we knew you were coming,” he said, looking at me with a grin. “What is the matter?”
“I must speak with Rene,” I said in a cracked voice.
Ravel shot me an uneasy look, but he left. When he was gone, Rene faced me, silent in her cloak.
“I want to have a child,” I said haltingly. “Can it be done?”
“Is it you that wants it really?” she said softly. “Or is it Anna?”
“She does. I love her and want her to be happy.”
“I see,” she said, again going to the fire and poking through the ashes to stir it.
Could she not leave it alone? Women.
“It can be done, I think,” she said. “But there will be pain for you, and there is no small risk to Anna.”
I felt my heart skip a beat. “What risk?”
“Women who try this usually die,” Rene said flatly. “Do you think you are the first vampire and human to fall in love? It is true your relationship has lasted much longer than is usual, so perhaps it might work for you.”
“Perhaps? What does that mean?”
“It has never worked, to my knowledge,” Rene said. “A pregnancy just never occurs. The woman dies in a short time from the influx of vampire that overloads her system.”
“We have shared blood almost every other night for several years, and had sex more often than that,” I replied. “She has not turned, Rene. She only begins turning if she drinks a large amount of my blood. After stopping she reverts quickly, within a day, to her normal scent.”
“Interesting. Possibly she is resistant, or there is faerie blood in her veins. We and werecreatures are the only races that cannot become vampire.”
“Would that help us have a child, or be a hindrance?”
“I can’t say. But the danger I speak of is not of turning, Devlin. It is of dying.”
“The old ones can turn humans into vampires, can’t they?” I said quickly. “Why does the woman die and not turn?”
“Some have,” Rene replied. “But not all who have tried this are powerful enough to withstand the potion to make this possible. It is no easy thing, to make what has been held in one single moment for hundreds of years able to change enough to put forth life again. It is no easy thing to make a vampire mortal enough to make a child, and yet immortal enough to keep being a vampire.”
“What are you saying? Speak plainly!”
“You could die, doing this. Anna could die, doing this. Is it worth the risk?”
It was not, not to me. But maybe it was to Anna.
“Dalcon, there is much I do not understand about this potion, why it works, or how it is made, or even what kind of side effects it might have.” She paused. “I wish you had asked for something else.”
I was wishing that, too. But there was nothing for it but to go back to Anna, and tell her everything and see what she said.
* * * *
I told Anna all of it the next day. Instead of wild hope, or hysterics, she was calm, and thoughtful “I want to try,” she said calmly.
“Are you sure?” I said seriously, odd feelings stirring in me.
“Yes,” she said, and then she looked at me a little in longing. “I want your baby, Devlin. I want our baby.”
I looked at her, and in that moment, I think I loved her more than I had ever loved anything in my entire life. Something changed in me in that moment forever, because when I thought of her, and her having my child I felt as if I’d never wanted anything before as much as I wanted that. Why had I not wanted a child before this moment? Because I hadn’t known it was possible? Because I hadn’t known how much she wanted one?
I held her to me, marveling at how I was feeling. Where had these feelings come from? Had they been inside me these last two hundred years? I had not wanted offspring when I was mortal. It must have been because I loved her.
I went to Rene that afternoon, and told her Anna wanted this, and so did I. She nodded, and said she would contact a potion-maker she knew. A week later, she delivered it to me. The bottle which held the proposed key to Anna’s happiness and mine was a simple clear glass half-pint jug, the potion inside it shimmering slightly, like sunlight in water. It had no smell, and the taste was very close to simple water, with a slight aftertaste of bitterness. .After I downed the whole of it, I asked Rene if I should go to Anna, to try at once.
“The potion-maker said it would take a while,” she replied. “He did not say how long.”
“Bring him here,” I growled.
A few minutes later, he was standing before me, trembling a little. He said the same as she; that he didn’t know how long it would take.
“It’s never been done, what you’re trying to do. All the book says is that to be successful, you must keep taking the potion until you are as warm as a human. When you are warm, the book says that the ‘life spring is renewed, and life can now spring forth.’ There is a much less potent mixture that will keep you warm and fertile, once you reach that point.”
I grated my upper and lower fangs against each other. “Approximately how long, would you guess?”
“Maybe two months?” he offered. “Even then, your lady may not conceive. She may take a while to ‘catch,’ so to speak.”
I did not like him talking of Anna as if she were a goat. “Fine. Make more of the potion, enough to last six months.”
“That is doable, Lord. But I’ll need payment in advance.”
“How much?”
“For all of it…I’m guessing fifty thousand dollars.”
My eyes popped wide. “Fifty THOUSAND?”
He nodded. “The ingredients are expensive.”
“I’ll bring you the first payment tomorrow,” Rene said. “Please leave.”
The potion maker nodded, and disappeared.
“Damn demons,” Rene said. “I know it would not cost so much if he was not charging us ten times the going rate for his damned demon blood.”
Demon blood? I was drinking demon blood? I felt queasy. Then I felt surprised, as Rene was making a kind of attempt at humor. I had never heard her curse before, or even act upset.
“Go to Quentin,” Rene said. “Have the money ready, and tell me where to pick it up. I will deliver it.”
“I cannot get it that fast,” I said, sitting down heavily. “Truthfully, I don’t know if I have enough. My investments have grown, but not to that extent. We need money for our house—”
“What is more important to Anna,” Rene said softly. “A house or a child?”
I got up and went to talk to Quentin.
He was dismayed, and incredulous. “Have you lost your mind? This is what you want to spend your fortune on? This is dreams and nonsense!”
“Think that if you will, but do not speak of it, not within Anna’s hearing,” I said sternly. “Just get me the money.”
He grumbled, but he began getting it. He sold off the bulk of my investments that week, and Rene delivered the cash to the potion-maker. In return, I received little vials to drink every day of more of that shimmering clear fluid.
Ravel asked me if I felt any side effects, but there were none, not even any pain. Anna acted the same, too. By the third month, she was still not pregnant, even though I had turned warm almost a month before.
“Have patience,” the potion-maker said, as he gleefully took my money. “From the books, it could take years—”
I grabbed hold of him. “I will not pay for years of nothing,” I said, baring my fangs. “Do you understand?”
“I do,” he said haughtily. “If nothing happens, the next two months after that the demon blood is on me. But I don’t advise trying longer than that, Vampire. There is a limit to how much of yourself you can share with a human without harming her, even a resistant one, as your Lady seems to be.�
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I stalked away from him, wanting to kill him, and knowing I couldn’t, as he was too important to Anna’s dream of a child.
Time passed, month after month. Anna became silent, and withdrawn, and the hope that had been so strong in our hearts felt now like a millstone around our necks. We kept trying every night, though there was little pleasure now in the act for me, as it had become a kind of test, a test I was failing the longer no child formed within her. It was easy to see Anna had begun to feel the same way.
Uther, Eva, and Quentin said nothing to us, though by now word had spread about what we were trying to do. Somehow, it was harder to be around them after they knew, as it was something that could not be mentioned. In response, Anna and I kept to ourselves more.
Then the inevitable happened.
Eva came to me, and told me she had decided to leave. The wolf pack was leaving, as humans were moving into the area, and already, two of the pack had been shot. She wanted my permission to go with them.
“You’ll likely die,” I told her seriously. “There are more humans heading west. There are no forests in the Great American Desert.”
“We are heading west and then north,” she replied. “It doesn’t matter, Devlin. I have had enough of the vampire world and the human one. It is easier with the wolves. I will miss Anna a great deal, but I cannot stay here in this place just for her.”
“Go then,” I said, giving her a chaste kiss as I removed her choker. “You are released from your oath.”
Eva gave me a grateful smile. Later that night, Ravel removed her oathing marks, and she hugged us all goodbye. As I watched her walk naked into the woods for the last time, and change, I found myself admiring her lithe body and lamenting that I had never slept with her. Then I put the thought out of my head, embarrassed.
A week later, Quentin left. He came to me, bag in hand to say he was going south. “There is nothing for me here,” he said a little sheepishly. “You know I like city life. You, Anna, and the bats are happy here, but I’m not. It’s okay if you want a rural life, but I must seek my own elsewhere.”
“Go,” I said, shaking his hand. “You are right, its better this way.”
He took a train south the next day, arriving in Charleston in a week’s time. For a few months we got letters from him, telling us of all we were missing, and how much fun we’d have, if we only came down to visit.
A month later, the letters stopped. Worried, I sent Ravel to investigate.
He came back with sad news. Quentin had been careless and bitten a human who was niece of the mayor of that city, causing her to fall ill. The Lord of that city had had him hunted down and killed.
I thought for many months afterward on Quentin’s life and his death. To have come through all the scrapes he had in Europe, to have arrived in this country and suffered through months of living in the sticks, as he called it, and then finally to make it back to the city life he loved, only to be killed a few months later…it seemed horribly unfair. Quentin might have been boorish, but he was no killer. The woman he’d attacked hadn’t even died; she’d most likely been willing. It grated on me, because I kept thinking to myself if I’d had control of this northern state as I knew I should then maybe I could have interceded on his behalf, and stopped him from being killed.
I hadn’t really missed Quentin, sure somehow in time he’d return. Realizing that this would never happen now, I began to feel lonely, as my trips to town were and would now always be solitary ones. Quentin hadn’t been my close friend, but he had been someone to talk to that was male, and the only vampire I’d ever really known. I was reluctant to try to strike up another friendship with my kind. There were only two others I knew of in Plymouth besides the Vampire Chief, and they were not the sort I wanted to make the acquaintance of anyway.
As a result, my friendship with Uther deepened. He came and sat with me sometimes, now that Quentin was gone. It was a brief respite to talk to him, as protecting Anna took up most of my time, and it was true we grated on each other’s nerves with Eva also gone. One night I told him of how I’d met Anna, and my life, and even about Danial, and how we’d been attacked and become vampires. He didn’t say anything about it, ever. But he shared some of his past with me too, over the following months, and it felt good to have a best friend again.
* * * *
Finally, the following spring of 1820, our luck changed for the better. We learned that Eva was alive, that she had found a werewolf mate of her own, and that they were living in what would be Wisconsin one day.
Rene heard a week later that Louis was dead, killed in his home Department of Ille-et-Vilaine by an assassin who had also killed Anthony, and a slew of his vampires. Suspicion was on his successor, a vampire called Martin. Nothing else was known. I was just glad that bastard was dead.
A week after that, Anna came to me and told me she was pregnant.
Chapter Twenty
I wish my tale ended here. But I must go on to the bitter end.
Those months while Anna was pregnant were wonderful. She did almost nothing, as I waited on her hand and foot. As the doctor I took her to via Ravel’s teleportation said all was well, I still made love to her as much as she would let me, but very carefully and tenderly, with none of my usual roughness. We did not share blood, worried it might hurt the baby. I quoted her poetry, as I had not for so long, and I sang to her sometimes, as I held her sleeping in my arms.
There were difficulties. Anna seemed to want me to bite her more than she had before. I did as she asked, as I did not scent her turning, and I was careful not to take her blood, using more of the paste concocted by Ravel to heal her wounds. Yet it worried me that she asked for that.
Rene was no help, nor was Ravel. “We can’t advise on what we know nothing of,” Rene said patiently. “Do as you think best, and as Anna wishes.”
Uther did help, him and his people. By now our large home was built, and ten of his batmen patrolled it at all times. This was small comfort, as I worried about Anna constantly, that we would be attacked and she would be hurt. It was irrational, but I began to fear that hunters would come, or another vampire, and take her. The more her belly grew with our child, the more intense my fear became, until I dared not sleep, for fear I might wake up and not find her next to me.
In that, I made the worst mistake of my life. I went to the Chief Vampire in New York, and told him of what was happening, and asked for his protection for Anna.
He did not believe me at first. When he finally did, greed filled his eyes. “Are you sure it is yours?” he said. “Are you sure?”
“I am.”
“Then she must be protected at all costs,” he said seriously. “I will have to let my superior know, as law requires.”
I felt the first warnings of danger. “Do not let anyone else know. The fewer who know, the better.”
“I cannot keep this kind of information from Joshua,” he said. “His wrath would be terrible. And you would be wise to have his protection in this. He can spare a regiment of guards to send to you, when I cannot. He will be honored you asked him for his help, that he could be part of this.”
That was a lie; I’d seen he’d wanted Anna for himself. But there was nothing for it now but to accept.
A week later, ten werebears showed up at our home. I marveled at the size of them, and marveled still more, when I saw them become bear. They were the largest and most powerful weremen I’d ever seen, a type of Western native bear called a grizzly.
“We are Joshua’s men,” their leader said. “My name is Cavedweller.”
I expected something like that. These were all native men, too, by their human forms.
“We will protect the woman,” Cavedweller said. “We know what to do. Tell your men to stand aside in there is an attack, as it is our lives if anything happens to her.”
I brought them to Anna. After that, they became her shadows.
She hated it, of course. But when a trio of vampire hunters came that next week,
I was grateful they were there.
Uther and his men dispatched two of them easily as they slunk in the windows. But a third found the secret passage to our room, followed it upstairs, and made it close enough to Anna to make her scream.
I was in my study, working on my ledgers and swearing at the cost of things, when I heard it. I was at her side a moment later. But the hunter was dead by then, and his remains had already been taken outside.
I thanked Cavedweller. He just nodded, and said that was what he was there for.
More hunters came that next week, and he killed them too, though I drained one myself in a fit of pique.
The week after, a young vampire came to the house. He said he was just curious when we caught and interrogated him. He had heard there was a woman pregnant by a vampire and wanted to see if it was true, that he meant no harm. Cavedweller, who said his reasons didn’t matter, that any strange vampires were to be killed on sight, dispatched him.
I lay next to Anna that night, thinking of all she was to me, and congratulating myself that I’d done everything I could to protect her, to make sure she wasn’t stolen from me. I told myself I could relax, that surely now, she was safe.
* * * *
A month later, Anna was outside picking flowers when I heard her scream. A second later, she was being carried inside by two of the werebears, who were frantically calling for me. I ran to her side. She was groaning in pain, blood seeping through her dress.
“Uther!” I screamed. “Uther!”
He was at my side a few moments later. By then, Anna had slipped into unconsciousness.
“She is losing the child,” he rasped. “We must get help!”
“Take her to Rene,” I said, running for my coat. “I’ll meet you there!”
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