Black Lament
Page 25

“He’s not a monster,” I said angrily. “He’s Gabriel’s child, and Gabriel was not a monster.”
“But he had monster in him,” Beezle said.
So do I, Samiel signed, his face stony. Ramuell was my father, too.
“You’re a known quantity,” Beezle said impatiently. “The baby isn’t.”
“I refuse to believe this child will be like Ramuell,” I said. “Gabriel was the gentlest person I ever knew.”
“Regardless of what the baby is or is not,” Jude said, “we have to acknowledge that it comes from the bloodlines of immortal creatures, and you are mortal. You will not experience a normal human pregnancy.”
“Okay,” I said. “So I’m losing weight. Although my pants don’t feel any looser, so I’ll have to take your word for it. What am I supposed to do about it?”
“Eat more,” Jude said. “When a wolf goes through many changes in a short period of time, he can lose a lot of weight because of the energy required for the changes. Even a straight human pregnancy would mean extra calorie intake. Given that the child has a magical bloodline, you’ll probably have to add in a significant amount of food.”
“Food I can’t afford,” I muttered.
“All of us will help you. And I’m certain some of us can go without if necessary,” Jude said with a meaningful glare at Beezle.
“You have no idea how much food I need to get through the day,” Beezle said.
“Need and want are not the same thing,” I said, going to the kitchen to get paper plates.
Beezle had already gotten into the chicken wings by the time I returned. There was a large pile of bones next to him.
“I hope you placed a double order,” I said to Jude, who was watching Beezle in fascination.
“I had no idea something so small could eat so much so quickly,” he said.
“Where’s Nathaniel?” I asked.
Samiel shrugged as he placed a couple of slices of pizza on his plate. He went downstairs to clean up, he said.
“Is he getting a spa treatment?” I asked. “I had more blood on me than he did.”
I’ll go and see what he’s up to, if you want.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Just leave him alone. He obviously wants to be there.”
I didn’t need Nathaniel around reminding me that he’d saved my life in the faerie court by ridding me of the poison. Every time he was kind to me, it was harder and harder for me to remember that he had an agenda that did not correspond with mine.
After lunch I went to call J.B.
“Black,” he barked when he picked up the phone. “Why did you miss your pickup today? And what the hell happened to Jayne Wiskowski yesterday?”
I explained about the mantis attack, the disappearance of Wiskowski’s soul, and my little adventure in Titania and Oberon’s court. There was a long silence at J.B.’s end when I finished.
“Are you still breathing?” I asked.
“Yes, although I’m not sure why I bother,” J.B. said. “Do you know how much trouble you’ve gotten yourself into now?”
“I have a good idea,” I said.
“I’ll talk to you later,” J.B. said. “I need to go and see how much fallout there is from this in my own court.”
“I’m sorry,” I said helplessly.
“You keep saying that,” J.B. said, and hung up.
I was sorry. I was sorry that I caused J.B. so much pain. But I wasn’t sorry for what I had done in the court, and I think J.B. knew that.
I put my phone on the bedside table and crawled under the blankets. It was the middle of the day, but I was wiped out. On the heels of that thought came the memory of Beezle’s voice.
You’re a known quantity. The baby isn’t.
“You are not a monster,” I whispered.
The baby fluttered inside me, and I closed my eyes. And, sleeping, I dreamed.
I flew above the world, all the worlds that were, and I could see everything. I could see what had been, and what was, and what would be.
And I could see the path to the person that my heart longed for.
It was a green place, and peaceful, and he sat beside a river that ran as clear and bright as the sun that sparkled upon it.
He turned as I approached, and his face was wreathed with joy.
“Madeline,” he said.
The sound of his voice pierced me to the heart.
“Gabriel,” I said, and ran to him.
I was complete in his arms, and I wept for everything we had lost.
“Madeline,” he said again, and he crooned it over and over until my tears stopped. “I should have known.”
“Should have known what?”
He smiled down at me, his hands framing my face. “That you would do something unexpected. How have you come to be here? It is not allowed.”
I looked around. There didn’t seem to be anything distinguishing this place from any other pleasant green valley. “I thought I was dreaming.”
Gabriel shook his head. “Somehow you have defied the order of the universe, of time and space itself. And if anyone would, it would be you.”
“I was never very good at following the rules.”
“I am not certain you even know what the rules are.” His face sobered. “But this is a place of the dead, and you do not belong here.”
I took his hand in mine. “I want to stay with you.”
Gabriel reluctantly pulled his hand away. “You cannot. You are not meant for this. Not yet.”
“Don’t send me away,” I said. “I need you.”
“Madeline,” Gabriel said, and his eyes were so tender. “My love will always be with you.”
He kissed me, and into his kiss he poured his happiness, his grief, his regret.
“Don’t,” I begged.
“You cannot stay,” he said.
He seemed to grow smaller before my eyes, and I realized he was not growing smaller. He was getting farther away. I was leaving, being pulled by some outside force, by the order of the universe righting itself.
“Gabriel!” I cried out.
He turned away.
“Gabriel!” I repeated, and went into darkness.
And in the darkness I was not alone. His mouth was on the back of my neck, his hands were on my chest, and I smelled cinnamon.
I opened my eyes in my own bedroom, and felt Gabriel moving in the bed beside me.
12
“GABRIEL,” I BREATHED, AND ROLLED OVER TO FACE HIM.
His lips covered mine, and that was when I knew something was wrong. I tore away, pushed out of the bed, tumbled to the floor.
“You’re not Gabriel,” I said, and called nightfire to my hand. “Who are you?”
The ball of flame that hovered above my palm lit the room in an eerie blue light. The person on the bed smiled Gabriel’s smile at me, and then it dissolved into the merry, impish smile of Puck.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded.
“Enjoying the company of a beautiful woman,” Puck replied, giving his eyebrows a suggestive wiggle.
“Wrong question,” I said, and realized I was on the verge of losing my temper. Puck had come into my home and pretended to be Gabriel. He’d manipulated my grief for his own purpose. He’d better have a damned good reason or I’d blast him back to Faerie, despite the fact that he’d helped save my life there. “How did you get here, and why?”
“Which question would you like me to answer first?” Puck asked.
“Don’t you dare toy with me, or I’ll blow you into a million pieces.”
“Temper, temper,” Puck said, rising from the bed and approaching me. “That attitude of yours will get you into trouble.”
“It already does,” I said shortly. “Now tell me why you’re here and how you got into the house without waking Jude and Beezle, or so help me I’ll—”
“You have my jewel,” Puck said, nodding at the blue sapphire he’d given us for safe passage. “I can come and go wherever it is.”
I grabbed it off my dresser and held it out to him. “Take it back, then. I don’t want to wake up to find you impersonating my husband again. Is that how you got the queen pregnant? By pretending to be Oberon?”
Puck nodded. “It helped them maintain the fiction they needed—that Titania had been loyal to him, and that he had sired a child.”
“Does she know that it was you, and not him?”
He shrugged. “It is not what she knows, but what she will admit to herself.”
“Why can’t you just answer a question in a straightforward manner?”
“Now, what is the fun in that?”
He still hadn’t taken the jewel from me. I waved it in front of him. “Take it back.”
“I’d rather not,” Puck said. “I might want to visit with you again.”
“If you don’t take it with you, I’ll throw it in the garbage can, and next time you come through you’ll find yourself caressing rats at the city dump.”
“I think you’ll find that if you throw it away, it will return to you,” he said with a small smile.
I dropped my hand at my side. “What do you want from me?”
Puck wandered around the room, picking up things here and there—the book on my bedside table that I never had time to read, some little silver knickknacks that had belonged to my mother, the plastic hairbrush that Gabriel had used to comb my hair on our wedding night. “I may want to ask a favor of you sometime in the future.”
“Really,” I said flatly.
He looked up at me, a gleam in his eyes. “Is a favor so much to ask, after I aided you in court?”
“It is a lot to ask if I don’t know what the favor is,” I said. “And I was under the impression that you helped me out for reasons of your own.”
“What would you say if I told you those reasons included wanting you indebted to me?” Puck said.