FIFTEEN

ALL I CAN say is thank God for Safeway. That was one of the wonderful things about this country. That no matter where you went in the United States, even to the littlest rinky-dink, no-name town, you could always find the basics like a gas station, a bank, a McDonald’s. A supermarket.

It was the latter I found myself being driven to, with Aquila as my driver. I was lucky to have only the one guard. The rest of the men had sort of turned red when I’d baldly announced that I had to buy some feminine products at the grocery store. Aquila had been nominated to go with me, and he was not a bad choice. I knew I could depend on Aquila for discretion. Still, I felt bad about the knowledge—the possibility—I was going to burden him with.

“Aquila,” I said, when we were a short distance from the town, “what you see and what you hear tonight, you cannot tell anyone else.”

He glanced at me curiously, but nodded readily. “As you wish, milady.”

I guess that was better than saying, “As you command, my Queen.” But barely. I still squirmed over the absolute power given to me over my men, my people. The power that came with my mantle as Queen. I was more used to free will, and decided to treat his answer as that. Because he’d chosen to do so.

“Thank you, Aquila. And I apologize ahead of time.”

“For what?”

“For making you highly uncomfortable.”

He smiled, and his neat beard and small mustache shifted with the movement of his lips. I think it was the first time I’d ever seen him smile. He was one of the oldest among my men, and the most serious. Not somber like Tomas, but more proper, more severe in his demeanor.

“Being in your company can only be a pleasure,” he said, as relaxed as I’d ever seen him.

“Are you happy here, Aquila?”

“Yes, milady. I am the happiest I have been in a very long time. Your guards’ betrayal turned out to be a blessing for me.”

Not long ago, Aquila had been a rogue bandit under Sandoor’s command. My lover Gryphon had bartered himself in return for four of Mona Louisa’s guards to protect me during the vulnerable time before I was officially acknowledged as Queen. It had been a poor bargain, because those guards betrayed me into the hand of outlaw rogues at the very first opportunity. Aquila had been one of the rogues. He’d had a perfect opportunity to molest me, but had held strict discipline over himself and the rest of the bandits.

“I never thanked you, Aquila.”

“For what, milady?”

“For your kindness before, when I was doused with the witch’s brew.” An aphrodisiac that had set me on fire. “The other rogues with you would have raped me had you allowed it, I saw it in their eyes. But you…all I saw in your eyes was compassion. Not lust.”

“I do not enjoy seeing a woman abused, much less a Queen,” he said in a sad voice. How tough it must have been for him, then, because Sandoor’s outlaw group of rogues had used and abused a Queen for ten long years—Sandoor’s former Queen, who everyone had thought dead. It struck me now, as it had then, how different Aquila was from the rest of the bandits. Even dressed in rags, he had been a gentleman.

“I have to thank you for now, as well. For managing all the business details for me.”

“That truly has been a pleasure for me,” he answered, smiling. “And your brother has been wonderful assistance. Young Master Thaddeus has a natural flair for commerce.”

“A gift I don’t seem to have inherited,” I said ruefully. That part of my responsibility was quite daunting, actually, since I knew next to nothing about money—vast amounts of it, anyway. Or how to manage it profitably. “Do you have time tomorrow to go over the financial records with me? I’ve shirked this part of my duty long enough. I need to familiarize myself better with my holdings.”

“Of course, milady.”

“Call me Mona Lisa, please. I like that better.”

He dipped his head. “Mona Lisa, then. Do you have any time tomorrow, after dinner?”

“All night. Though I hope it doesn’t take us that long to go over everything.”

“It might be better if we pace ourselves, spread it out over several days,” he said seriously.

“Several days?” I squeaked. “I only expected it to take one night. Cripes. How detailed are those records?”

Amusement shone briefly in his eyes, but his voice was his normal serious tone when he spoke. “I was thinking that we could look over the books of a few businesses, then go visit them. You will get a much better understanding of each place that way.”

It was a smart suggestion. I nodded my agreement as we pulled into Safeway’s parking lot. Pushing aside the duties of tomorrow, I concentrated on my quest for tonight.

I found my answer not in one of the aisles as I had initially thought, but from the pharmacist I happened to stop and seek advice from. It was one of those stores that had a full pharmacy, open until eight o’clock at night, according to their posted sign. Twenty minutes until closing time, I saw, glancing at the clock, with no one in line. The pharmacist was a kindly looking older man, a grand-fatherly type. One you found easy to approach and ask questions of. Even difficult ones like the one I hit him with.

“Excuse me,” I said, feeling my face flame with embarrassment. “Could you tell me which pregnancy test would be the best one to get here? One that’s good in early detection.”

He rattled off a few brands, mentioned how early they could detect pregnancy—“As early as eight days after conception”—and threw in something complicated about things called Human Chorionic Gonadotropin and false negative tests, which went completely over my head. All I retained were the brand names he recommended.

“Which aisle?” I asked.

“Aisle eighteen.”

I thanked him and headed there. A quick glance at Aquila showed his face to be carefully free of all expression. He considerately stayed at the end of the empty aisle, keeping me in sight, but affording me a small measure of privacy as I looked over the home pregnancy kits. The store carried four different brands. The ones the pharmacist had recommended did indeed have the earliest detection capacity. With the others tests, you needed to be further along, at least two weeks into your pregnancy. I was already freaking out after a few days. Forget waiting two more weeks. I snatched up two brands, paid for them, and went immediately to the ladies’ room.

“Wait here,” I told Aquila tightly.

Yeah, I knew it was too early. Even with Amber, it would have only been four days, not eight. There was also the fact that a human pregnancy test might not work for a mostly Mon`ere, only-one-quarter-human woman. But something in me needed to know right now. I needed to do something, even if that something was to pee on two plastic sticks and see if a blue line appeared in one, and a smiley face on the other.

They did. One blue line and one smiley face.

Oh shit. White dots hazed my vision. I had to put my hands against the stall walls and wait until it passed. Until I could see once more without little white dots floating in my field of vision. I took a deep breath and looked again, sure I had to be wrong.

A blue line was in the center window of the first plastic stick. Not faintly blue, but distinctly and solidly blue. A very strong positive blue. A smiling happy face peered up at me from the other pregnancy test.

With trembling hands, I opened up both instruction booklets and read all the tiny print, especially the parts about accuracy. I had to read them three times. If I understood it correctly, most of the inaccuracies rested with false negatives, meaning that the test read inaccurately as negative when you were actually pregnant. They recommended repeating the test when you were further along, if there was any question. False positives, on the other hand—having the test read as positive and not being pregnant—were very rare.

I stuck the plastic testers back in their boxes, shoved them into the brown paper bag, and left the ladies’ room. Aquila immediately came to my side and took my arm in a supporting grip. I guess I must have looked as pale and shaky as I felt.

“Do you wish to go home?” he asked—not if I was okay, or if I was pregnant or not. Just whether or not I wanted to go home. For some reason, his tact and consideration brought tears to my eyes. Me, who rarely cried. Those tears, more than anything else, really scared me. Made me wonder. Oh my God, can I really be pregnant?

“I need to speak to the pharmacist again,” I said.

Without another word, Aquila guided me back to the pharmacist, then wandered over to a nearby aisle, pretending to browse the items there.

The pharmacist smiled when he saw me again. “Did you find what you needed?”

I nodded and took out the two boxes, opened them, and solemnly showed him the results. I should have felt a little awkward presenting him with something I had just peed on, but I was pretty much numb to all embarrassment at this point.

“What does this mean?” I asked.

“It means you’re pregnant, ma’am.”

“But I can’t be,” I said desperately. “It’s too soon. Way too soon. Only a few days. Four at the most.”

The pharmacist looked from me to the glaringly positive tests, then back again. “If these tests were negative, and you just told me it had only been a few days for you, I would tell you to repeat the tests in two weeks. But with not just one but two positive results, how early you are doesn’t matter. It pretty much means that you should be expecting a little one nine months from now.”

He glanced down at my hand, took in the lack of a wedding ring. In a compassionate, nonjudgmental tone he added, “Unless you don’t want it. If that’s the case, then you’re early enough that you have some other options open to you, like Plan B.”

“What’s that?” I asked, carefully putting all the incriminating contents back in the bag.

“Pretty much what the name says. It’s an FDA-approved, emergency contraceptive. A second chance for a woman to prevent an unplanned pregnancy. You have to use it within five days of intercourse, though it’s most effective if taken within the first twenty-four-hour period. And you have to be eighteen or older. If you’re younger, you’ll need a doctor’s prescription for it.”

“I’m twenty-one.”

“Then I can offer it to you without a doctor’s script. Would you like it?”

My throat closed up. Words wouldn’t come out. I nodded instead.

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 Mon`ere. 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 Daman^oen. Demon living.”

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 Mon`ere 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-Mon`ere 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.