by Eden Beck
The survival of the species.
I guess being pregnant, if it turns out to be true, might have its perks.
As soon as we get inside, Romulus puts the whole house on lockdown in order to protect me. Those fringe members of his pack that made it back with us are set to guard every entrance to the house.
The level of tension in the air is higher than it has ever been because now there is something even more important to protect.
And it’s growing inside me.
18
Sabrina
Pregnant.
Just as I’d started to come to terms with the fact that I’d never be able to have children … I find out that I’m actually already carrying one inside me.
Or, at least, supposedly am. Though now that I’m thinking of it, I could kick myself for not noticing any of the signs.
The nausea. The exhaustion. The inability to eat.
More than that, my growing stomach despite all of that should have signaled to anyone that something was happening. But I’d just chalked that all up to the poison. The failed turning.
But now … now …
Now I wonder how I’ve been so blind.
Once word gets out that I’m pregnant, Remus’ pack won’t be the only one coming for me. All of the packs that have aligned themselves with Remus vision of pure-blooded wolf shifter lines will be come to try and kill me as well. And they won’t hesitate to kill everyone that stands in their way, even if it means decimating Romulus’ entire pack and family in the process.
There might be some law keeping them from killing me before the pups are born … but I doubt that will stop them after the fact. If it even keeps them at bay that long.
Remus doesn’t seem like the type to let this little surprise get in his way. It’s not him that needs convincing, but his pack. And there will be others that feel the same way as him.
This is no longer a personal pack-on-pack battle between Romulus and his brother. This is now much, much bigger.
As Romulus lays me down and the boys lay Kaleb down beside me on the bed, Lydia runs to go and get supplies to help treat Kaleb’s wounds. Kaleb reaches out his hand next to me and touches his fingers to mine. I reach back and wrap my hand around his. I can hear his struggling breathing as he tries to deal with the pain of the injuries he’s sustained.
“Is he going to be okay?” Marlowe asks as soon as Lydia gets back into the room with bandages and an armful of the tinctures that she had been making earlier.
“Yes,” she says. “But I’m not going to lie. It’s going to take him a while to recover.”
“What are we going to do now?” Rory asks his father.
Rory, Marlowe, and Romulus are all standing around the bed, with Kaleb and I lying between them and looking up at their stressed expressions as Lydia tends to us both. No one seems ready to address the main issue here.
They can barely bear to look at me, to show the mix of concern and excitement playing out on their faces until they’re certain all of this isn’t just some other nightmare.
No one, that is, except Romulus.
“There are going to be many more joining in this fight now,” Romulus says. “My brother will have hundreds come to his aid as soon as the word spreads about Sabrina’s pregnancy. We are going to have to look for help elsewhere or we won’t stand a chance.”
Romulus’ work over the years has forged many friendships … but made just as many enemies. It isn’t just Remus and his pack who will have waited for a chance like this to strike.
“Elsewhere?” Rory asks.
“I’ll write to all of the packs in the alliance,” Romulus answers. “It will take Remus time to calm and regroup his pack. Longer still to convince them to attack before the birth. Fortunately, time is on our side with that. He will not try to attack at full force until the discord in his pack has been settled and the confusion and shock has been managed. Even then, he will likely wait until he has others rallied to his side. He will want to make sure that we are not just outnumbered the next time, but that we are greatly outnumbered, so he will wait. He will not allow what just happened to happen again.”
Twice now, Remus has allowed his brother to slip from his grasp.
“How much time do you think we have?” Lydia asks as she looks up at him.
I know what she’s thinking. She’s thinking about how much time Kaleb will need to heal, but more than that, how much time I have. The smile on her face has been replaced with a soft look of panic because she knows that we don’t stand a chance unless we have time.
Time.
The one thing never on our side.
“I don’t know.” Romulus looks at me for a moment, and his look is soft in contrast to the look of battle that wore just moments ago. “But I doubt he’ll wait the months Sabrina would need to give birth first.”
I look down at my swollen body and feel a heavy weight settle on me.
Months. Months more of this.
This is only the beginning, and I already feel like I’ve been used up. I won’t have the strength to run into battle again, not like this.
His thoughts already turned to the task ahead, Romulus doesn’t linger. He turns to leave so that he can begin reaching out to all of the other packs in the alliance that might give consideration to his call for help.
“Will they come?” Marlowe asks him, just as Romulus has reached the door.
Romulus turns to face him with a weary and uneasy expression on his face.
“Will the others in the alliance come to help us?” Marlowe asks again.
“I don’t know.”
At least he’s honest.
And at least this time while I am bedridden and healing, I have company. The wounds that Kaleb sustained put him off his feet for several days and as we lay there in the bed together, we try to talk about things that make us laugh instead of things that make us cry.
Unfortunately, anything that serves as a momentary distraction doesn’t last long. We spend most of the time just holding each other in silence as our bodies work to repair themselves.
There’s none of the usual joy that comes with news of a pregnancy, even an unexpected one.
As much as they boys try to hide it, I can’t hide from myself.
All I feel is dread.
Dread that I won’t make it, that I’m not physically capable. Dread that we’ll be interrupted before the baby is born. Dread that even after, I might still lose everything.
Once Kaleb has recovered enough to get up, I once again find myself feeling like I’m trapped to a state of feeling sick and weak and alone. As much as the boys try to dote on me, they are also trying to prepare to protect me.
That means that I find myself alone in my bed almost as often as I find myself throwing up or trying to stand unsuccessfully. Surely pregnancy isn’t supposed to feel this awful. And even with all of the other things going on that are quite literally life or death scenarios, I find myself struggling with something completely unexpected.
I find myself wanting my mother.
But every single time that I go to reach for the phone, I stop myself before I can dial the last digit.
I want my mother, a mother, to be here with me or at least to talk do while I am going through this. But I just can’t bring myself to complete the call knowing that she abandoned me to run back to my abusive father.
Again.
Never did I imagine that I would be turning into a wolf shifter and finding myself pregnant just weeks after my eighteenth birthday. Either one of those events would make any girl want her mom to be with her … and here I am, dealing with both at the same time, and I can’t even seem to bring myself to call her. She was the one person, the one parent that was supposed to always be there for me, and she wasn’t.
It seems a cruel twist of fate that I should want her now, that I should need her.
She never needed me.
She never put me first.
Or, at least, not long enough for it to
matter.
In her absence, I find myself growing increasingly close to Lydia. While not the mother that my biology calls out for, she’s the actual mother that I always wished that I had.
You’d think that would make me feel better, having Lydia here and by my side; treating me as if I were one of her own children. But ironically, all it does at first is make me miss my own mother more.
It’s funny how your brain tries to trick you into wanting things that you know are bad for you. Maybe that’s what happened to my mom. Maybe that’s why she went back to my dad.
It’s the only logical explanation.
A trick of the mind … when anyone on the outside could see him for what he was.
As the days pass by, I see less of the boys even as I hear their whispers through the walls. My wolfish senses are returning to me as the next full moon approaches. Though I can’t hear most of what they say, I know what’s happening.
They’re preparing for the inevitable. They’re preparing for the next onslaught—one where we won’t be gifted the element of surprise in which to slip away.
But all this planning leaves me alone, tucked way alone with only my own thoughts—and the growing life inside me.
It’s a strange sensation, this.
It’s not at all what I expected, not that motherhood was something I’d considered often. In the moments that I thought I’d lost this opportunity, this chance to rear children that would be born—I suppose—as shifters, I’d mourned that loss.
But even then, I’d abstained from the painful thought of what I’d lost. Of what it would have been like if that hadn’t been taken from me.
And now that I’m here, now, experiencing it … it doesn’t exactly fill me with joy.
In fact, as the days drag on one by one, I instead find myself filled with more and more dread.
I find myself slipping into a depression that exhausts even my own patience. Honestly, I don’t know how or why Lydia continues to be so wonderful with me, even when every visit turns sour—my own gloom overshadowing every kind gesture. I don’t know how she and the others haven’t grown so entirely sick of me, especially when I’ve long since grown sick of myself. I rub my swollen stomach as I lay in bed and think about what is inside there.
About who’s child it is.
We were only together once, that one single day, before everything else started going to hell. It could be any one of theirs.
It’s strange to think back on it now because I seem to recall somehow feeling that the day was a special one, besides the obvious reason of it being the first time I made love to the boys.
If that wolf-girl hadn’t howled and stopped the battle, we would have never known that I was pregnant at all. I wouldn’t have had the chance to bring this life into the world, to carry on Romulus’ line.
Or, at least, I wouldn’t have had the chance to. I very likely would have been slaughtered right there on the spot.
Now I find myself wondering how things will change, if things will change, depending on who the child is born to. Will Romulus recognize a son of Marlowe or Kaleb the same as a son by his blood descendent, Rory? Will the rest of the pack?
And ultimately, will it matter?
I don’t know enough about this life to reassure myself of anything.
Now, I have gone from feeling hopeless and grieving the fact that I could never mate with Rory, Marlowe, and Kaleb; to carrying one of their precious babies within me. And the boys have gone from being distraught over never being able to breed, to being even more fiercely protective and driven to protect me and this unborn pup.
Even more so than me.
If only I could just get over how awful I feel, both mentally and physically, then I might be able to find some hope at the end of this and not be completely consumed with the fact that this is all likely going to end badly for everyone, including my unborn baby.
It’s thoughts like that which make me both pick up the phone again to call my mom, and then set it back down again without completing the dial.
Over and over it goes, even as I slip further away from myself.
19
Marlowe
I knew we were getting in over our heads when we asked Sabrina to marry us, when I asked her to marry me, but I was never prepared for this.
For the poisoning, the illness … then thinking she was barren.
And then, even before that could fully settle in as our new reality, suddenly … she’s pregnant.
And not exactly happy about it.
But try as I might to keep the peace, I can’t help but find myself wondering why it is that even I haven’t been able to bring myself to try to convince her of the joy of all this. God knows Lydia’s been trying, but even she’s been going about it differently than I expected.
It’s like no one dares to believe it’s actually true. After the earlier scare, we’re all just …
Just holding our breath. Waiting to see what happens next.
Because there’s always a next.
“Marlowe?”
I keep staring straight ahead, not paying any attention to the soft flickering light playing across the faces turned in my direction. Not that I notice them either, not really.
Not at least until Rory has repeated my name for what must be the sixth or seventh time, his hand waving an inch in front of my face until I suddenly snap out of my daze.
“Earth to Marlowe, hello?”
I start a bit, falling back in my seat and blinking rapidly as I slowly readjust to my actual surroundings. To my left, Kaleb tries to hide his grin as Romulus glares at me from across the table.
We’re in his study, the table strewn with what feels like endless charts and diagrams; everything from battle plans to floor plans to maps of the surrounding forests marked with every possible direction of attack. No matter how much we try to plan for Remus’ inevitable attack, there always seems to be another thing we haven’t yet accounted for. There always seems to be one more blind spot.
And the plans, these evenings spent pouring over maps and endlessly talking and talking and just talking …
Rory lets out an annoyed sigh. “And … there you’re about to go again.” He pushes back up against his chair, causing it to rock back on two legs as he looks determinedly away from me out of annoyance. “I don’t know why I bother trying to get you to focus on this anymore, not when you just zone off every time one of us looks away.”
“But can you really blame me?” I ask, surprising myself even as the words roll off my tongue.
Even Kaleb’s grin wavers slightly.
I look around at each one of them in turn, working my way between Romulus and Kaleb before settling back on Rory.
“What’s the point of any of this anymore?” I ask. I reach into the center of the table and pluck a random sheet of paper up from the middle of the pile, waving it in the air a moment before slapping it back down. “It’s always more charts. Always more maps. But we’re not actually getting anywhere, are we?”
I know I must look wild when I glare around at the three of them. I can feel the color rising in my skin just as surely as the hair has started to prickle as it stands on end on my forearms.
“Well, what else would you have us do?”
Rory’s voice is surprisingly quiet. He doesn’t look at me, but rather at the strewn-out papers on the table. The look on his face … it mirrors how I feel inside.
Overwhelmed. Deflated.
My eyes drop down to the table too, then to my hands fiddling where they’ve settled on top of it.
“I … I don’t know,” I admit. I avoid looking at any of them now, especially Rory and Kaleb. “But what we’re doing now, it doesn’t seem to be helping her.”
Her.
No one needs elaborating on who I mean. The only other woman in any one of our lives is Lydia, and she’s as steadfast and sane as ever.
But Sabrina on the other side.
Just thinking of the anguish she’s been in these la
st weeks, it drags a dark cloud back into the study. It sits over each one of us, the weight of it causing our shoulders to slump and the whites of our eyes to grow red with exhaustion.
When Rory repeats himself, that exhaustion has dragged his voice down even deeper.
“What else would you have us do, then? Marlowe?” He glances up at me then, his eyes boring into me until I’m forced to look up and meet them. “I mean, can you blame her for … for being the way she is lately?”
To my left, Kaleb squirms uncomfortably in his seat.
These last weeks have been especially difficult for him. He’s used to being able to make her smile, for a kiss and a joke to be able to break any tension.
Now, it just seems to give Sabrina a headache. Or ends in her staring off into a corner like I’ve found myself often doing myself … only her glances more of than not end up streaked with tears.
“Pregnancies are supposed to be happy,” I blurt out, my voice nearly breaking in the middle of it. I have to clear my throat. “And this, Sabrina, all of us … we’re not happy.”
Rory opens his mouth, but no sound comes. He sits like a fish gulping for water, drowning in his own air, until Romulus glances between the three of us and jumps to his rescue.
“I don’t have much to say in regard to the rest of this situation,” Romulus says, “but I can say this. Pregnancy is … complicated, even a normal one. Sabrina may just need time to adjust to these changes, but maybe you boys could just, I don’t know, help her along?”
All three of us stare at him with blank expressions.
It’s Kaleb who finally sits forward a bit, his knees bouncing with nervous energy. “Well?” he asks. “How are we supposed to do that?”
Romulus looks between us with a growing look of annoyance on his face. “Aren’t you three supposed to be more in tune with the human’s traditions?” he asks. “Isn’t there something the females do when they’re expecting? Like, a ritual or … or something.”
