She paled, and I did not know if it was because she recognized the word, or if it was because I had mentioned the High Prince of Hell’s name. It tended to have a frightening effect on people.
“What will that do to a child of mine?” I asked her.
She looked at me with eyes wide and lost. “I don’t know.”
“Neither do I. That’s why…Hannah. Could you ease the pregnancy from me?”
“Kill it?” Her face lost every ounce of its color.
If she could speak the plain truth, so could I. “Yes. Could you do that for me?”
“Oh, milady,” she whispered, those warm brown eyes stricken. “You do not know how hard it is for our women to get pregnant. And what it is you are asking of me. I am a healer, milady.” And I was asking her to take a life.
I remembered that terrible pain that I had felt when I had killed Barrabus.
“Never mind, Hannah, I do know. And I shouldn’t have asked, not when I have other means at hand.” I looked down at the innocuous looking purple box. Putting it back inside the white bag, I stood up.
Hannah rose also, gripped my hand. “Milady. Please—”
I interrupted the healer’s plea. I knew what she was going to ask—that I not do this. That I not abort the precious life growing in me.
“Hannah, will the medicine work on me with my Monère blood?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know.” She shook her head helplessly.
I wanted to say: It’s all right, Hannah. But it wasn’t. Everything was far from all right.
“The baby could be normal. It may not be affected by your demon condition,” Hannah offered.
“I know. I thought of that. But what if it isn’t normal, Hannah? What if it isn’t? You and I both know that a demon-human-Monère offspring would be feared by all, belonging to none. It would be seen as a monster, and they would try to destroy it as such. Even if I managed to protect it from everybody, it would still be sought after, persecuted all its life. Either that or shunned. How can you ask me to bring a child into this world, facing such a fate?”
There was nothing she or I could say to that. With a sweep of her hand, Hannah deactivated the charm, and we walked back to the house in weighty, sorrowful silence.
SIXTEEN
I STARED AT the cup of water and the white pill laid out beside it on the desk before me. I was in my room. Alone. Aquila was downstairs, struggling with the secret I had burdened him with. I was sorry for that. I knew full well the weight of it. It was enough to crush even the most valiant heart.
He hadn’t looked at me when he left, and I couldn’t blame him. I could hardly look at myself either. Killing, taking an enemy’s life in the heat of battle, was one thing. Taking the life of your unborn child…that was another completely different act. I wondered if he’d ever forgive me. I wondered if I’d ever forgive myself.
Energy slid over me, a light familiar feel. A part of my mind processed it, remembered when and where I had just recently felt it. The privacy charm. Though I couldn’t see the intruder, I knew who had my arms pinned and secured behind the chair I sat in. The hands were too big to be Hannah’s.
“Do you have a death wish?” a cool and dangerous voice asked.
“Dante,” I whispered, though I could have shouted it and no one would have heard me. “Hannah told you.”
He didn’t answer me; his presence here in my room was already an answer. His energy signature—what all Monère sensed in one another, how we usually knew when another was near—was spiky, vibrant with strong emotion despite the coolness of his tone.
The feel of warm metal closing about my wrists, locking with a click, was almost anticlimactic. As soon as his hands left me, I pulled, holding back none of my greater strength. To my shock, the restraints held.
“They are not silver chains or demon chains,” Dante said. “They are something that will hold even a demon…something my mother tells me you are becoming.”
He turned me to face him then, and I saw that the calmness of his voice was terribly deceptive. The naked fury I glimpsed on his face, making it almost masklike in its ferocity, made me gasp and lean involuntarily back from him.
Danger! Danger! my body shouted. No need. I could see it clearly enough. His eyes glittered with primitive anger, hardening his otherworldly eyes to shards of pale ice. Sharp enough to cut me to pieces. The amulet he wore about his neck sparkled as if it blazed beneath the sun—a privacy charm. How he had come upon me unawares. A different one, I realized, than the one Hannah wore. The orange of this stone was speckled with black instead of being completely clear.
“Did you take it yet?” he demanded in a voice harder than even the stone he wore around his neck.
“Wh-what?”
“The pills,” Dante spat out. I recoiled from him, almost toppling over my chair in my effort to get away. It teetered precariously for a moment on two legs, before he set it back down gently. And that gentle, deliberate maneuver, that one point of calmness in the face of the incipient violence threatening to spew over me, unnerved me even more than if he had slammed the chair back down, expressing some of the anger harshly carved on his face.
He leaned that face down into mine, and repeated slowly, calmly, dangerously, “Did you take the pills?”
I shook my head wildly, my teeth chattering beyond my control. I had never felt such awful, overwhelming fear before. “No, I d-didn’t take them yet.”
“Is this it?” he demanded, looking down at the opened packet. I had taken out one pill and laid it on the desk. The other still resided in its little plastic window.
“Yes, just the two pills.”
“Do not lie to me,” he said in a low and terrible voice that trembled with violence barely leashed. “Not now. Not when I’m like this.” It was part threat, part plea, as if he was asking my help to keep him in control.
It only served to spike my fear higher.
“I’m not lying, I promise you. It was just two pills, you can read the instructions. One to take now, the second one twelve hours later.”
“Mona Lisa.” He closed his eyes and said my name in a swirling mix of agony and hatred. As if it meant both redemption and despair to him.
Those pale blue eyes opened again, focused on me, and I felt something wash over me as they drew me into their cold and furious depths. His eyes turned completely silver, and didn’t just gleam brightly at me. They began to actually glow.
“Sleep,” he said.
His words traveled from the surface of my ears down into the vortex of me, penetrating deep inside like an echoing, expanding wave sweeping to the center of my being. And I was unable to resist his command, though I tried. My eyelids lowered as if a heavy weight bore them down. And I slept.
When I came to awareness again, it was on a silent scream. Pain throbbed my neck, and I tried to put a hand there, expecting to find it hacked open, with a fountain of blood gushing from it, as in my dream. A dream that had been mine, and yet not mine. But I couldn’t move. My hands were restrained behind my back, secured to the bed I was lying on.
I blinked, disoriented, ripped from the past and thrown back into the present. Had I dreamed of my death before, from that other lifetime? I couldn’t remember. And was thankful for that.
Hours had past. It was daylight now, with the sun at its highest point in the sky, just past noon. I turned my head and became aware of the fact that I was in a cheap motel room. And that Dante lay beside me, asleep. He was adrift in peaceful slumber, gentle in repose. And I realized that I wasn’t afraid of him like this. In sleep he was relaxed, free of all strain, all burdens of the past. He had an interesting face: not perfect, not stunningly handsome, not blindingly beautiful. An interesting face, as I said. Strong, aggressively molded with a sharp beak of a nose and a square, firm jaw. The lips, though, were soft and full—generous lips. It was a face of character. And so it should be, having lived so many lifetimes.