We sat in silence for a few minutes.
“Who’s the little sweater for? Are you going to have a bundle of joy?” I asked in my wheezy, whispery new voice. I was trying to sound teasing, but instead, I just sounded creepy.
“Yes,” she said, raising her head to look at me. Her eyes were glowing. “I’m going to have a baby. A pure fairy child.”
I was startled, but I tried to cover that with the biggest smile I could paste on my face. “Oh. That’s great!” I said. I wondered if it would be tacky to inquire as to the identity of the father. Probably.
“Yes,” she said seriously. “It’s wonderful. We’re not really a very fertile race, and the huge amount of iron in the world has reduced our birthrate. Our numbers decline every century. I am very lucky. It’s one of the reasons I never take humans to bed, though from time to time I would love to; they are so delicious, some of them. But I’d hate to waste a fertile cycle on a human.”
I’d always assumed it was her desired ascension to angel status that had kept Claudine from bedding any of her numerous admirers. “So, the dad’s a fairy,” I said, kind of pussyfooting around the topic of the paternal identity. “Did you date for a while?”
Claudine laughed. “I knew it was my fertile time. I knew he was a fertile male; we were not too closely related. We found each other desirable.”
“Will he help you raise the baby?”
“Oh, yes, he’ll be there to guard her during her early years.”
“Can I meet him?” I asked. I was really delighted at Claudine’s happiness, in an oddly remote way.
“Of course—if we win this war and passage between the worlds is still possible. He stays mostly in Faery,” Claudine said. “He is not much for human companionship.” She said this in much the same way she would say he was allergic to cats. “If Breandan has his way, Faery will be sealed off, and all we have built in this world will be gone. The wonderful things that humans have invented that we can use, the money we made to fund those inventions . . . that’ll all be gone. It’s so intoxicating being with humans. They give off so much energy, so much delicious emotion. They’re simply . . . fun.”
This new topic was a fine distraction, but my throat hurt, and when I couldn’t respond, Claudine lost interest in talking. Though she returned to her knitting, I was alarmed to notice that after a few minutes she became increasingly tense and alert. I heard noises in the hall, as if people were moving around the building in a hurry. Claudine got up and went over to the room’s narrow door to look out. After the third time she did this, she shut the door and she locked it. I asked her what she was expecting.
“Trouble,” she said. “And Eric.”
One and the same, I thought. “Are there other patients here? Is this, like, a hospital?”
“Yes,” she said. “But Ludwig and her aide are evacuating the patients who can walk.”
I’d assumed I’d had as much fear as I could handle, but my exhausted emotions began to revive as I absorbed some of her tension.
About thirty minutes later, she raised her head and I could tell she was listening. “Eric is coming,” she said. “I’ll have to leave you with him. I can’t cover my scent like Grandfather can.” She rose and unlocked the door. She swung it open.
Eric came in very quietly; one moment I was looking at the door, and the next minute, he filled it. Claudine gathered up her paraphernalia and left the room, keeping as far from Eric as the room permitted. His nostrils flared at the delicious scent of fairy. Then she was gone, and Eric was by the bed, looking down at me. I didn’t feel happy or content, so I knew that even the bond was exhausted, at least temporarily. My face hurt so much when I changed expressions that I knew it was covered with bruises and cuts. The vision in my left eye was awfully blurry. I didn’t need a mirror to tell me how terrible I looked. At the moment, I simply couldn’t care.
Eric tried hard to keep the rage from his face, but it didn’t work.
“Fuckingfairies ,” he said, and his lip curled in a snarl.
I couldn’t remember hearing Eric curse before.
“Dead now,” I whispered, trying to keep my words to a minimum.
“Yes. A fast death was too good for them.”
I nodded (as much as I could) in wholehearted agreement. In fact, it would almost be worth bringing them back to life just to kill them again more slowly.
“I’m going to look at your wounds,” Eric said. He didn’t want to startle me.
“Okay,” I whispered, but I knew the sight would be pretty gross. What I’d seen when I pulled up my gown in the bathroom had looked so awful I hadn’t had any desire to examine myself further.
With a clinical neatness, Eric folded down the sheets and the blanket. I was wearing a classic hospital gown—you’d think a hospital for supes would come up with something more exotic—and of course, it was scooted up above my knees. There were bite marks all over my legs—deep bite marks. Some of the flesh was missing. Looking at my legs made me think of Shark Week on the Discovery Channel.
Ludwig had bandaged the worst ones, and I was sure there were stitches under the white gauze. Eric stood absolutely still for a long moment. “Pull up the gown,” he said, but when he realized that my hands and arms were too weak to cooperate, he did it.
They’d enjoyed the soft spots the most, so this was really unpleasant, actually disgusting. I couldn’t look after one quick glance. I kept my eyes shut, like a child who’s wandered into a horror film. No wonder the pain was so bad. I would never be the same person again, physically or mentally.
After a long time, Eric covered me and said, “I’ll be back in a minute,” and I heard him leave the room. He was back quickly with a couple of bottles of TrueBlood. He put them on the floor by the bed.
“Move over,” he said, and I glanced up at him, confused. “Move over,” he said again with impatience. Then he realized I couldn’t, and he put an arm behind my back and another under my knees and shifted me easily to the other side of the bed. Fortunately, it was much larger than a real hospital bed, and I didn’t have to turn on my side to make room for him.
Eric said, “I’m going to feed you.”
“What?”
“I’m going to give you blood. You’ll take weeks to heal otherwise. We don’t have that kind of time.”
He sounded so briskly matter-of-fact that I felt my shoulders finally relax. I hadn’t realized how tightly wound I’d been. Eric bit into his wrist and put it in front of my mouth. “Here,” he said, as if there was no question I’d take it.
He slid his free arm under my neck to raise my head. This was not going to be fun or erotic, like a nip during sex. And for a moment I wondered at my own unquestioning acquiescence. But he’d said we didn’t have time. On one level I knew what that meant, but on another I was too weak to do more than consider the time factor as a fleeting and nearly irrelevant fact.
I opened my mouth and swallowed. I was in so much pain and I was so appalled by the damage done to my body that I didn’t think more than once about the wisdom of what I was doing. I knew how quick the effects of ingesting vampire blood would be. His wrist healed once, and he reopened it.
“Are you sure you should do this?” I asked as he bit himself for the second time. My throat rippled with pain, and I regretted trying a whole sentence.
“Yes,” he said. “I know how much is too much. And I fed well before I came here. You need to be able to move.” He was behaving in such a practical way that I began to feel a little better. I couldn’t have stood pity.
“Move?” The idea filled me with anxiety.
“Yes. At any moment, Breandan’s followers may—will—find this place. They’ll be tracking you by scent now. You smell of the fairies who hurt you, and they know now Niall loves you enough to kill his own kind for you. Hunting you down would make them very, very happy.”