I WOKE UP IN THE infirmary the next morning, in a small hospital–type room. There were clean bandages on my wrists, and my skin had been scrubbed clean of blood. Ryan sat next to the bed where I lay. A thin plastic tube carried his blood from his arm into mine. He looked terrible, and I wondered how much blood he had given Clair before arriving to bleed a little more for me. It was as if he had aged ten years in the space of a day.
I sat up and ripped the cannula and needle from my arm. It hurt, but not as much as ripping my wrists open with a razor dipped in asphodel root had. The small hole in my arm disappeared almost instantly.
So I’m healing again. I must be all better. Goddamn it and fuck it all to hell.
I couldn’t bear to think about the fact that a creature had taken up residence inside of me. I didn’t think of it as an innocent child. I didn’t even think of it as mine. It was an invader, a parasite clinging to my insides and sucking the life out of me. It was evil. How could anything good come from a vampire like Ryan?
I wondered if Ryan knew yet. Of course he did. Through the bond, I felt his fear, his need to protect me and whatever it was growing in my barren womb.
I immediately put up the walls inside my mind, refusing to let him probe my thoughts any deeper. He jerked back, obviously feeling my rejection like a slap in the face.
“How are you?” Ryan asked, breaking the tense stand–off. “Do you need water? Something to eat?”
“I’m fine,” I replied icily, tossing the plastic tubing on the floor at his feet. I decided to get straight to the point. “Why are you even here?”
Ryan scowled and shook his head. “Because I care about you.”
I laughed coldly. “You don’t care about me,” I said. “You don’t care about anyone, or anything, except yourself.”
“I do care about you,” Ryan argued. “I want to know why you felt like you had to …” He stopped mid–sentence, apparently having difficulty speaking.
“… do this,” he said finally.
I just stared at the scuffed linoleum floor.
“Why would you do that to a baby?” he asked finally. “An innocent child who hasn’t even lived yet?”
I whipped my head up and glared at him with every ounce of rage that I could muster. I wanted to reach out and rip his heart from his chest.
“Nobody’s truly innocent,” I said quietly. “Isn’t that what you told me?”
“A child,” Ryan pleaded, “is the most innocent thing in the world!”
I shook my head. “I want an abortion. I want it out of me. Then I’m going home.” I said the last part with plenty of emphasis.
“You’re insane,” Ryan said, his face getting redder. “You want to kill the first born vampire in hundreds of years?”
“You did this to me,” I accused.
“Jesus, Mia,” Ryan seethed. “I didn’t do anything to you. We did this together. The fact that this is happening is kind of impossible.”
And then, just to be an asshole, he added, “You threw yourself at me, remember?”
I shook my head in disgust. “Just go away and leave me alone.”
“No,” he argued. “Your wrists won’t stop bleeding, and I want to know why. What did you do?”
“Get out!” I snapped.
Faster than a human eye could follow, Ryan was standing over me, both hands on my head. I felt that familiar drag and tried to push him away. “No!“ I yelled, struggling against his fiercely strong grip. But it was useless. He was my maker and, therefore, had a direct link to my mind. I swallowed back tears as I felt him probe into my memories, finding the one at the motel, where I had cut my wrists. It was sickening.
“Stop,” I begged. I wailed. “You’re hurting me!”
He ignored me, surging deeper, until the whole horrific scene had played itself out again. I jerked back, and he finally let me go. My crying bordered on the hysterical. I had never felt so violated in my entire life.
“Asphodel,” he breathed. “You could have killed it!”
I glared at him through salty tears. “You mean, like you killed Clair? I bet it wasn’t like she thought it would be. I bet she hates what you’ve done to her.”
“I saved her life,” Ryan said quietly, furiously.
“You ruined her life. It’s what you do.”
“No, sweetheart, the cancer she was dying from ruined her life. I was merely trying to prolong it. I owed her father a favour after he saved my ass years ago. That’s why Clair is a vampire. Not that it’s any of your goddamn business.”
That knowledge slammed into me like a freight train. He wasn’t lying. I thought that he was dooming her, when in fact he had saved her from dying a painful death.
I think I’ll keep you. I wasn’t convinced of his chivalry, not for one minute.
“You ruin everything you touch,” I said. “Get away from me. I don’t ever want to see you again.”
The sullen smirk across his face made me want to stab him in the eyes. “You’re having my child, dear. I’m not going anywhere.”
I growled. I hated him, despised him, just wanted him out of my space and out of my mind. “I’m not keeping this baby. You can’t make me!”
Faster than I could react, a hand whistled through the air and Ryan’s fist struck my cheek. I flew back, off the bed, and my skull slammed into the wall behind me. I staggered to my feet, blind with white-hot pain, feeling like my head was going to topple from my shoulders.
When my vision cleared, it was him, still there, trying to compose himself, trying not to beat me to death. “Just do it,” I slurred, wiping blood from my mouth with a clumsy palm. “Kill me. Go ahead, hero.” And I started to laugh. I felt like I had finally gone insane, finally hit absolute rock bottom, and that it was okay because I truly couldn’t sink any further than this.
“I’m not going to kill you,” Ryan said, with a look of disgust on his face.
“Doesn’t matter” I shrugged, still smiling the wretched grin of insanity. “I’ll kill myself. You can’t watch me forever.”
His eyes flashed black and stayed that way for several seconds. I’d never seen him do that before, only Caleb. It scared the shit out of me. And I had his offspring inside me?
“You wanna bet?” He snarled. “I will lock you up and throw away the key, Blake.”
I snapped. Before he could stop me, I leapt forward, clearing the bed between us with ease. I lashed out with my hands, grabbing his shirt collar and throwing him at the closed door. He slammed into the door, his skull smashing the rectangular glass window and his shoulders splintering the wood. I had gone from weak and pathetic to strong and murderous in the space of minutes after being transfused with fresh vampire blood. The feeling of swift recovery and supreme invincibility left me hungering for more. I lunged forward, snapping at Ryan’s exposed throat.
The look in his eyes was priceless—he realized that I was stronger than him, even if it was only temporary, and that scared him. I doubted very much that he had ever been scared of me before. He fought with me as my mouth got closer to his neck, and he held me off with dying strength that I knew I could outlast.
“Stop!” Ryan shouted, using our bond to send shockwaves of pain through my head.
“Ow!” I yelled. It hurt. A lot. That pissed me off. A lot. I summoned all of the pain and rage that was swirling in my chest and my stomach and I directed that through the bond, back at him. I wasn’t sure if it would work, I had only ever tried communicating via the bond using words and pictures, but it worked alright. Ryan dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes. He clutched at his head and began to scream.
I smiled.
Ivy rushed into the room. I guessed straight away that she had been listening to everything. She stopped dead in her tracks when she saw my face, and I imagined how I must have looked—electric blue eyes, wild raven hair in bloodied tangles, mascara and tears streaked down my cheeks and blood under my fingernails where I had scratched deep gouges into Ryan’s face.
“Stop it,” she pleaded. Worried, all of them worried about me and what I might do to the precious monster that he had cursed me with.
Ryan continued to twitch and moan.
“Or what? What will you do?” I asked. I was genuinely curious, and a little bit crazy. Would she strike me down with powerful magic? Her eyes darted between Ryan and I.
“You won’t do anything, will you?” I was pleased. “You can’t hurt me without risking hurting this parasite inside me.”
Her face confirmed my suspicion.
Suddenly Sam appeared in the room, and I jumped. Another worried face. “Mia.”
“Sam.” I mimicked his pitiful tone.
“Stop it.” He gestured to Ryan, limp and moaning on the ground. “He deserves it, but not like this. You’re better than this. Stop whatever it is you’re doing to him.”
I tried to stop the flood of black waste that was pouring through the bond from me to him, and choked. “I can’t.”
It was true. Whatever gate I had opened, I couldn’t close it. Hate and rage poured through the bond, making me shiver and making Ryan suffer. The black sludge that was pouring from me into him was starting to make my head hum as well. Panic rose in my throat like bitter bile. “I can’t stop it!” I cried. I clawed at my own throat as it started to close and I was gasping for air. Air might not have mattered to me, because I was a vampire and vampires didn’t need to breathe, but it still felt like I would smother if I couldn’t suck in lungfuls of the stuff.
“You can,” Sam said firmly, squeezing my shoulder hard, not enough to hurt but enough so that I had to look at him. “What is it you’re thinking about? Is it Caleb? Is it Ryan?”
I shook my head no. Sorrow engulfed me then, and shame. Oh, the shame! I was blaming Ryan for all of this, and he was hardly innocent, but he hadn’t forced me to do anything except get in that van three long months ago. And he’d been apologizing for it ever since. Only I’d never been able to forgive him.
It was hate, I realized. All the hate I felt, for Ryan and Caleb and myself—it was killing me. And right now, it was killing Ryan.
“You can stop it,” Sam said urgently. “Tell me what’s happening in your head right now. What you’re feeling.”
“I hate them,” I responded. “I hate this life. I miss everything that I used to have! He’s taken it all from me. And now –”
“And now what?” Sam pressed.
“And now I just wish I could die,” I said numbly, the fight going out of me. The black sludge disappeared, replaced by a hollow ache that settled in my womb like a cold, heavy stone. I stumbled back, returning to the bed. There was no fight left in me. Ryan scuttled away, still holding his head with both hands, without so much as a backwards glance. Ivy followed, casting a worried look at Sam before she closed the damaged door.
“I want to show you something,” Sam said quietly, once we were alone. I didn’t argue. He wheeled a large portable machine next to the bed. I realized immediately what it was and baulked.
“You can trust me,” Sam said. “I promise.”
Part of me did want to see what could possibly have developed inside me over a few short weeks. And knowledge was power.
“Alright,” I said dejectedly. How much worse could it get?
I sat on the bed, waiting patiently as Sam fiddled with buttons and switches. “Do you even know how to use that thing?” I asked.
He smiled, as if to say, There you are. I didn’t smile back, though, instead focusing on the grainy screen in the centre of the machine.
“Shirt up,” Sam instructed. I reluctantly pulled my t-shirt up to expose my bare stomach. The gel he squeezed onto my skin was cold and felt gross. He made one final adjustment to the machine and then placed a plastic probe on my stomach.
Neither of us breathed as the contents of my uterus came into focus on the display screen. At first, I couldn’t see anything other than a blur of movement, but it very quickly became apparent what I was looking at—a set of arms and legs moving about, a torso and a head.
A baby.
My baby.
I turned my head, horrified and intrigued. “Why is it bouncing up and down like that?” I asked Sam.
He smiled. “Your baby has the hiccups,” he said gently.
I have a vampire baby in me and it has the hiccups. The goddamn fucking hiccups.
For what seemed like the thousandth time that day, I buried my face in my hands and cried.