Tossing away the other brown bag, I left clutching a new white one, even guiltier in its content. It was not taking life, the pharmacist had emphasized kindly, simply preventing it from taking hold in your womb.
I got into the car feeling numb and shell-shocked.
Aquila didn’t speak until after we had pulled out onto the freeway. “My first thought was that you were upset because you were not pregnant.”
When I didn’t say anything, he continued softly, “A child would be celebrated by our people, milady. You would not even have to raise it. Others would gladly do so.”
I flinched. “Milady” once more, instead of “Mona Lisa.”
“I cannot risk a child, Aquila.” How to explain what I could not explain. “There’s something wrong with me. And my greatest fear is that it will affect the…” I stopped, took a deep breath. “I just can’t.”
“Before you take the pills, you should see the healer,” Aquila said, “for your own safety. So that she will at least know what is happening should things go wrong.” The pharmacist had listed a bunch of things. Adverse side effects, he had called them. Things like nausea, abdominal pain, fatigue, headache, menstrual changes, dizziness, breast tenderness, vomiting, and diarrhea, to list a few.
“If I’m going to be taking a life”—preventing it, the pharmacist had insisted, but I knew what I was doing—“then it’s only right that I suffer a little discomfort.”
“Mona Lisa.” My name once more. Bringing another round of tears to my eyes. “You are mostly Monère. Human tests and medication may not work on you the way they are meant to. Before you put yourself through this, and risk harming yourself, you should ask the healer to determine if you are even with child first.”
With child—such an old-fashioned phrase. One that made me want to weep.
“Mayhap you can even ascertain from her if this thing you believe is wrong with you will even affect a child should you carry one.”
Putting aside all my fears, it made a lot of sense. I leaned back in the seat with those two destructive pills sitting like a hundred-pound weight in my lap, and nodded. “It’s a good suggestion, Aquila. I’ll talk to Hannah first.”
The relief on his face was palpable. We didn’t talk anymore. Just drove the rest of the way home with both of us lost in ponderous thought.
The pharmacist’s words that the pills had to be taken in the first five days and were most effective if taken early worked like a ticking clock in my brain. Chances were, the life growing in me was seeded by Amber. But I remembered my body’s sudden undeniable craving for Dante’s seed. Surely my body would not hunger like that had its need already been met. If it was Dante’s…and a part of me strongly thought that it was…then we were still in the first two days. A better chance for the pills to work.
“Aquila, could you find Hannah for me?” I asked as we parked in front of Belle Vista. “See if she can speak with me now.”
Seeking out Hannah proved an easy matter. Resourceful man that he was, Aquila asked Rosemary. She promptly directed us to the infirmary, which, I learned to my surprise, was set at the rear corner of the house. We returned outside and made our way around to the back.
Belle Vista, when translated, meant Beautiful View. It was a huge mansion, so big that I still had not viewed all the rooms. No surprise, then, to find Hannah and two housemaids cleaning up a large room in a separate, detached building almost hidden away in the back. It looked as if it had originally been a four-car garage. Some time in the past, though, the wide garage doors had been taken down and replaced with regular doors, and it had been converted into an infirmary. The front half of the room was set with eight cots: four lined up in neat order along one wall, another four along the opposite wall. The second half of the room was separated by curtains, which were currently drawn back, and looked to be the medicinal storage part of the infirmary, the healer’s workroom—what Hannah was in the process of presently setting to order.
“Milady,” Hannah said with a welcoming smile as she caught sight of me.
“Do you have a moment to speak with me?”
“Of course, Mona Lisa.” Her smile faded as she noted the tension tightening my eyes as she washed and dried her hands. “Let’s walk outside, shall we?” she suggested.
Aquila trailed forty feet behind us, far enough to lend us a semblance of privacy, close enough to still guard. We didn’t speak until we reached a burbling stream with small boulders lining its edge, and found comfortable seats on two rocks set near each other. I opened my mouth to speak, but Hannah drew a shushing finger to her mouth and took out a necklace that had been hidden beneath her dress. It looked like a very old piece of jewelry, a plain and simple dark gray stone that hung from a gold chain. The stone was the size of a robin’s egg, but much less pretty. She touched it with a gentle thrum of power, and that ugly gray stone turned a startlingly beautiful orange color. As it started to glow and resonate, I felt a light field of energy expand and encircle us.
“What’s that?” I asked. “What did you do?”
“It’s a privacy charm,” Hannah explained. What had no doubt allowed Nolan and Quentin to come so near the house without detection when they had snatched me. “Now we can speak without others hearing us.”
“How did you know that I needed privacy?”
“Your face, your body’s tension. Tell me what troubles you.”
She was so kind, so motherly in her manner and expression that those stupid tears stung my eyes once more. “I need to know if I’m pregnant. It’s only been a few days. Can you tell this early?”
“Sometimes, not always. May I lay my hands over your belly, touch your skin?”
I drew up my T-shirt. She leaned forward, spread her hands over my lower abdomen, and I felt that slight buzz of warmth as her energy sank into me, going deep in a searching foray. It felt like forever, though it must have been only a second or two, before she lifted her hands away.
“Yes,” she said with a trembling smile, her voice thick. “You have life growing in you.”
She said something else, but I didn’t hear it. A pounding roar had filled my ears. My drumming heartbeat, I realized, and dimmed down the sound.
“Can you…can you tell how many days old it is?” I asked.
Hannah shook her head. “No. Only that it is as you say, very early in its being.”
“Your hands are trembling.”
She laughed. “Can you blame me when a part of me knows that it may be my grandchild I am sensing?”
Seeing my visible distress, her eyes grew somber. “You are not happy.”
“No, Hannah, I am not happy. Far from it.”
I opened the white pharmacy bag and took out the small purple box the pharmacist had given me. PLAN B was neatly emblazoned across the top of it.
“What is this?” Hannah asked.
“It’s emergency contraceptive. Helps rid you of an unwanted pregnancy if you take it within the first five days.” I lifted my eyes. Met the healer’s soft brown ones. “Hannah, if I told you that I have somehow taken demon dead essence into me, and that it was changing me, could you assure me that this demon taint…” I hesitated over that word, but could find none better. “Could you tell me with certainty that it would not affect my child?”
She shook her head, taking the news more calmly that I could have imagined. Making me wonder what had she seen that she could accept something like this so readily.
“No, I cannot tell you that. Nor have I ever heard of anything like it happening before. Mona Lisa, are you sure about the demon taint? That it is true fact and not something you are, perhaps, imagining?”
“I grew fangs, Hannah, in my human form, and drank down a stag’s blood. It’s not something I’m imagining.”
“Demons cannot have children,” Hannah said, frowning. “They are of the dead, and you bear new life in you.”
“Halcyon said that I was becoming Damanôen. Demon living.”