Melted By The Vampires: A Paranormal Menage Romance (18 page)

“I’ll be back before you know it. Just close your eyes and rest.”

He planted a hasty kiss on my forehead, took off, and leaped through my open bedroom window, and I did as he’d told me to, unbelievably actually soon falling asleep.

Some time later, I wasn’t even sure how long, I awoke to find Abbott lifting me out of bed.

“Just keep resting. I’m taking you to the hospital.”

Instantly fully alert, I searched his blood-smeared face for signs of serious injury, but I didn’t see any. “And what about you? Are you okay?”

Telling me that he was even before he spoke, he cracked a small grin. “I will be in just a few hours. Vampires heal much faster than humans. Noah’s going to be just fine, too, thanks to you, and same with the rest of the city’s vampires. Everyone is going to be okay. Even the collapsed floor of the new building will be easy enough to repair. So, you just close your eyes again and rest now.” Moving through my apartment at a rapid clip, Abbott planted a quick kiss on my mouth. “We’ll be to the hospital soon enough.”

Immeasurably relieved that everyone was okay, I did close my eyes, resting my face against Abbott’s hard chest.

But in the elevator down to the ground floor, I suddenly remembered what I’d done and experienced a mini-surge of adrenaline, flicking open my eyes. “Abbott. I didn’t know I had that in me... that level of fearlessness. I never dreamed I did. I actually walked across the whole length of the steel beam just because I was so desperate to help you, not knowing that you wouldn’t even need help in the end. It wasn’t even all me, though; it was some funny, subconscious part of me, I think. I actually blacked out for a little bit, I think, but not in a fainting sort of way; it was in a way like my brain just shut down but took over at the same time, like it just felt like it needed to do that in order for me to do what I had to do, but without completely collapsing or freezing from fear.” With my recollections making my heartbeat accelerate, I paused for a second. “I guess sometimes a witch discovers powers she never knew she had, powers that aren’t even supernatural. I feel like
this
special power must have just come from love.”

Startling me, Abbott planted a few fast, forceful kisses all over my face, then pulled away to look at me with his eyes just slightly pink and shiny. “As terrified as I am in hindsight, if that makes any sense at all, about you going out on the steel beam, and as much as I wish you hadn’t put yourself in danger like that, I understand why you did it, because love was what was driving me today, too. Just pure love for you, this city, and everyone who lives here. And now... after what you just said, I think I love you a hundred times more. You’re everything I’ve always wanted in a woman, and I just want to spend the rest of my life with you and make you happy.” After planting a few kisses all over my face yet again, Abbott continued. “As for your actions today, and what you did that probably saved Noah’s life... I just want to tell you that you were beyond strong, and brave, and brilliant. You were phenomenal.”

Thrilled with his praise, I smiled. “Thank you. And you were, too.”

Exiting the elevator, he smiled in return. “I felt the strongest today that I’ve ever felt in my entire life as a vampire, but what you did for me and Noah is something in a league all its own.”

I smiled again. “Well, I am pretty proud of myself that I didn’t faint at any point today, even though I have been in incredibly stressful situations before, sometimes even if I forget to eat and my blood sugar gets too low. I guess I’m just getting tougher or something. Maybe it’s just...”

The bright lights of the building lobby had suddenly seemed to dim, and my dizziness had returned in a pretty major way.

“Abbott, I think I spoke too soon. I only had coffee for breakfast this morning, and now I just feel sort of like... it’s just a funny dizziness that’s making me feel...”

I didn’t get to fully express how it was making me feel, because I’d passed out.

When I came to, I had the feeling that at least an hour or two had passed. I was sitting up in a hospital bed, or at least more or less sitting up, with the head of the bed partially raised, and what felt like a thick stack of fluffy pillows behind my head. All around me, machines were beeping, and an IV line was in my left arm. On my right, Abbott was sitting in a metal folding chair, holding my hand. His strong-jawed handsome face was a perfect picture of concern.

“How do you feel?”I thought about the question for a moment or two before responding. “Good. I actually feel fine. I’m not dizzy at all anymore.”

Abbott heaved a sigh of relief. “Thank God. You had me a bit worried for a minute. You went so pale, and you still are, just a touch.”

“I really feel okay, though. I feel like I probably just need a good meal and a little more rest. But, first... I just thought of something. Earlier, you told me everyone is okay, but I didn’t ask you how Dan and The Saints fared. I’m hoping you’ll tell me at least some of them are dead.”

“I’ll tell you something better than that. Every last one of The Saints is dead. Dan is as well. He and Dedrick I killed myself... and it might sound strange, but the whole thing was so easy it was kind of anticlimactic. After taking out Dan and Dedrick, I even dispatched several other Saints in less than a minute.”

“But... you’ve been fighting them for centuries. How was that possible that it was so easy to deal with them today?”

Abbott just looked at me briefly with an inexplicable twinkle in his dark gray eyes. “
You
made it possible.”

I sat up a little straighter in bed, thoroughly confused. “What? How? What do you mean?”

“You made it possible by giving me increased strength. Well... you and our baby made it possible.”

THE FINAL
CHAPTER

Just staring at Abbott, incredulous, I couldn’t respond right away. “What?”

“You’re pregnant with my baby.”

Again, a moment or two ticked by before I could respond, which I did with a funny little tremor in my voice. “Abbott, I... I just don’t understand why you’re doing this to me, and saying these things. I don’t know why you’d... why you’d want to play some kind of a...a sick joke on me like this, or...”

With a huge lump rising in my throat, I couldn’t continue.

Shaking his head, Abbott picked up my hand and kissed it, then looked at me and spoke in a voice thick with emotion. “I don’t know why you’d ever think I’d want to, but I’d never play a joke on you. I’d never intentionally hurt you or lie to you. I’m telling you the truth, Harper. You’re pregnant. With my baby. When you arrived here at the hospital, the doctor performed a series of routine tests, and one of them revealed that you’re pregnant. Then, more blood was taken to do an immediate paternity test. Unlike back in ‘your’ day, we now have the technology possible to determine paternity as early as—”

“But I
can’t
be pregnant. For one thing, I got my period this morning.”

“Well, the doctor said that it appeared that you
had
maybe had some spotting, but she said that’s normal very early in pregnancy. Same with the dizziness and fainting you experienced. Those things probably weren’t just from what you went through on the beam and at the fight.”

“Well... well, I still
can’t
be pregnant. See... the truth is that I’m infertile. After the nuclear disaster, they tested me and told me there was no way I could ever get pregnant. Dedrick falsified my fertility papers in order to have me frozen. And I meant to tell you this sooner, but every time I tried—”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t care.”

“But
how
could I have become pregnant? It just doesn’t make sense.”

“Well, half the things that happened after the nuclear blast don’t make sense. How were some men changed into shifters? How did most women on the planet become infertile? Other than a guess at nuclear fallout, no one has ever been able to determine how those things happened for sure. And then there’s the question of what your body went through when you were frozen. It obviously changed your body chemistry in
some
way, because you weren’t able to recover your supernatural abilities right away. It’s possible that being frozen also changed your body chemistry in a way that ‘fixed’ whatever it was that had made you infertile in the first place. Or, it’s also possible that maybe you
weren’t
ever infertile in the first place. Living in the decades after the nuclear blast, I heard tales of women who’d supposedly been declared infertile giving birth to many children. It’s possible with the number of fertility tests that were performed back around the time yours was, maybe the doctor was in too much of a rush and didn’t perform the test properly. Or, it could have gotten switched; who knows. But like you not being able to tell me that you were supposedly infertile, none of that even matters anymore. All that matters is that somehow, you became pregnant, which is what surely gave me the strength to kill Dan, Dedrick, and some of the other Saints, and help my men to kill all the rest. But even more than that, you becoming pregnant has made all my dreams come true. Now we can be a family, Harper. Now we can spend the rest of our lives together.” Looking deeply into my eyes, Abbott paused. “If you want that, that is.”

With tears welling in my eyes, and the lump in my throat becoming even bigger, I could only nod for a few moments. “Yes. That
is
what I want. More than anything. I want you. I want a family with you.”

Abbott kissed my hand again, grinning. “Well,
that
, future-Mrs. MacIver, is a good thing, because that’s exactly what you’re going to have. The doctor did an ultrasound scan while you were still out, and she says that the baby looks just perfect. Tinier even than a grain of rice at this point, but just the right size and shape he’s supposed to be at this stage. The doctor says he looks to be about three, maybe three-and-a-half weeks post-conception, which sounds just about exactly right.”

“‘He?’ Do you mean there’s a test to tell the baby’s sex this early on?”

“Oh. No, there’s not, but I’m just thinking of him as a
he
already; I don’t know why. I’d be equally as happy with a girl, but just a feeling I have. I think it’s a boy.”

Suddenly overcome, I finally let my tears fall, covering my face with my free hand. “A baby. I just can’t believe this. Me. Pregnant. Us... having a baby. It just doesn’t seem real.”

With his eyes a little pink for the second time that day, yet twinkling with what appeared to be amusement, Abbott pulled a small scrap of pale blue fabric from his pocket and handed it to me. “Maybe this will help things seem real. It’s a tiny newborn cap one of the nurses gave me. And in a little over eight months, we’ll be placing it on our tiny newborn son’s head.”

Abbott’s words just made me cry harder, though with tears of absolute joy, pressing the pale blue cap to my cheek.

Several hours later, after I’d had a hearty meal and had been examined by the doctor once again, Abbott reentered the room and took his spot in the chair by my bedside. “I’ve been a little too busy to do any shopping lately, but before you wake up tomorrow morning, I’m going to have a Christmas tree set up in our apartment with more presents beneath it than you’ll probably be able to open in one sitting. And by the way, I said
our
apartment, because I’d love for you to move into mine right away if you want to.”

“I do.”

“Well, then, I’ll have your things moved in overnight while you’re sleeping, and while I’m shopping for your presents.”

I stifled a chuckle. “You just told me today that I’m soon going to have the greatest gifts imaginable... a baby and a family with you... and you really think I need any additional Christmas presents?”

Abbott grinned, taking my hand. “I hope you can get used to being spoiled. It’s going to happen a lot over the next several hundred years we spend together.”

A few weeks after the most blissful Christmas I’d ever experienced, Abbott and I had Maria and Noah over for dinner at our apartment. Maria and I had dinner anyway; our vampire men just sipped Scotch.

After the meal, Abbott thanked Noah for coming to his aid during the fight with The Saints, which he’d already done before, but this time he added that he wanted to extend an offer to have Noah become co-leader of the city. I’d known he was going to do this, and I’d thought that Noah would probably accept right away. But, to my surprise, and from what it looked like, Abbott’s and Maria’s, too, Noah just shook his head after a long pause.

“Thank you so much for the offer, Abbott, but I can’t accept it. I know myself too well to accept it. I know I could be a strong leader myself, and I know I can be second-in-command to a strong leader. But I can’t be a co-leader. It just won’t work. I think it might bring out Dan tendencies in me, and that’s something I never want to happen. I think this city has been through enough with just Dan himself.”

Everyone had to agree about that, and Noah thanked Abbott again for the offer anyway, adding that he would, however, accept a position as head of Abbott’s council if it was ever offered to him. This position had been previously held by a vampire who’d turned out to be loyal to Dan, so now the seat was open. Abbott immediately extended his right hand to Noah, saying that a handshake would make it a done deal.

Maria popped open a bottle of champagne, grinning but with misty eyes at the same time.

Champagne flowed again that February, when Abbott and I were married on Valentine’s Day, which, like Christmas, had seen a resurgence of popularity in New Detroit in recent years. At our reception, which was held at a ballroom that had been constructed specifically for the occasion, Abbott and I danced until midnight, when he carried me off the dance floor, kissing me, to the sound of wild cheers from the several hundred guests in attendance.

That September, our baby was born, and it
was
a boy. A healthy, screaming, eight-pound boy we named Landon Abbott MacIver. I thought everything about him was absolutely perfect, from his tiny fingers and toes, to his round little belly, to his gorgeous eyes. Dark gray with flecks of light gray within them, they were exactly like his daddy’s.

Not content to help care for just little Claire anymore, when Landon was a few months old, Sylvia asked if she could babysit him, too. I’d already been approached by at least a hundred other vampire women in the community, but knowing what a loving, dedicated caretaker Sylvia was, I said yes to her request right away, making her grin from ear-to-ear.

However, the first day she came to watch Landon, she cried, explaining that she’d given all the money, jewels, and gold she’d amassed over her centuries of being a vampire to Maria, as payment for the privilege of babysitting Claire. “And now I have nothing to pay
you
with.”

After trying numerous times, unsuccessfully, to give some of Sylvia’s wealth back to her, I knew that Maria had recently broken into Sylvia’s apartment and had stuffed an enormous bag of loot in the back of her closet. This just didn’t feel like the right time to tell Sylvia that, though.

Instead, I sat her down at the kitchen table, got her a tissue, and then sat down beside her before taking one of her small and wrinkled hands in mine. “I want to tell you something, Sylvia. I know that around here, babysitters feel compelled to pay for the privilege of watching children, and that’s the cultural tradition, and that’s fine. But to me, grandmothers should never have to pay to take care of children, and that’s what I’d like you to be to Landon... his grandmother. And I’ll just come right out and make it crystal clear that I will be highly insulted if you ever try to pay me to take care of your own grandchild. In fact, I don’t think I can let childcare continue if you insist on paying me.”

After a quick dab of her red-rimmed eyes with the tissue, Sylvia looked at me like I’d just spoken a foreign language. “You really want me to be Landon’s grandmother?”

I smiled. “I absolutely do. I know Noah and Maria have considered you to be Claire’s grandmother for quite a while now, and I know what an excellent grandmother they think you are. I’d be honored to have you be Landon’s grandmother, too.”

With her chest seeming to be suddenly puffing out a little, and her lower lip trembling, Sylvia just looked at me for a long moment. “Just one pearl. Just let me buy you—”

“No, Sylvia. Though I suppose I
would
accept a few pairs of knitted baby booties if you’d like to give Landon a gift. Do you know how to knit?”

Not even a week later, Landon owned no fewer than ten pairs of knitted baby booties and five knitted blankets. On one of the blankets, a pale blue one, Sylvia had sewn a pink fabric heart in the center, and inside the heart, just a single word had been embroidered.
Family
. As I ran a finger over the word with Abbott by my side, I began sniffling, realizing that somehow, improbably, after the loss of my coven family, I once again had a family of my own, complete with husband, baby, and grandmother. I even felt like I had a sister in Maria, and a brother-in-law in Noah.

When six years passed and I didn’t become pregnant again, despite having lots of fun trying, Abbott and I acknowledged that it had probably been an incredibly lucky, fluky thing that I’d become pregnant even once, and we decided that maybe it was time I be transformed into a vampire, so that we could spend centuries together, and not just the few decades or so of the rest of my natural human life. Also, by this point, I was the same age as Abbott, or at least his age in terms of how old he’d been when he’d been turned into a vampire; and the prospect of me getting any older and having to spend several hundred years
looking
older than him just didn’t appeal to me very much.

Maria, who’d become my best and dearest friend by this time, had already been turned into a vampire after giving Claire two siblings, and to the surprise of both of us, she actually loved being a vampire, even the
drinking
part. Like Noah had promised, her squeamishness when it came to blood pretty much disappeared after she was changed. She’d even come to love “hunting” trips. I was more than a bit grateful that Maria had been the vampire “guinea pig” for us both.

Abbott turned me into a vampire himself, though not in our home, like I’d wanted, but at the hospital, where I could be monitored in case of anything going wrong before I’d been fully changed into a vampire. It turned out this was wise. Despite Maria’s assurances that everything would be just fine, I got a severe case of nerves when we entered the hospital lobby. In pretty typical fashion for me, I fainted just past the double doors, collapsing right into Abbott’s arms, pulse pounding. And when I woke up in a bed however long later, it was all over. My vision was unusually sharp, and colors were unusually vivid, and I knew Abbott had turned me into a vampire while I’d been out. Having a hunch I might develop some serious nerves, it was exactly what I’d told him to do in the event of me fainting.

Just like he had after the battle with The Saints, he sat by my bedside, holding my hand, and after I’d looked around the room for a few moments, he asked me how I felt. “Not sick in any way, I hope. Though there are herbs we can blend with whiskey you can drink of you do feel a little ill.”