Rebel (10 page)

“Why?” Allie asked from her spot at the head of the bed, like a Gypsy queen with her subjects. Her belly was a nice, healthy bulge beneath the covers, and her color was good. Not that I was worried. I knew she and the child were safe. Were blessed.

“We keep training and training.” Tory dropped the tangle of yarn into her lap. “And nothing happens. We haven’t seen or heard from Uriel and his armies since the attack months ago. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

“I would think Michael could help you work off that tension,” Allie said with a wicked grin.

Tory grinned back. “He does his best. But even an archangel doesn’t have that much energy twenty-four hours a day, and there are two hundred and sixty-five souls to train.”

“I’m not sure we have souls,” I said. “Not to be depressing about it.”

But Allie just laughed. “Probably not. I’m dead, Tory’s a goddess, and you’re a human who turned herself over to the unholy, if Uriel is to be believed. And I gather the Supreme Being stripped the Fallen of any chance of an afterlife, so I would expect they’re soulless as well.”

“Don’t be pedantic. You sound like Metatron,” Tory muttered.

Allie sighed. “Yes, he is a bit literal, isn’t he? He’s been here long enough—I’d have thought he would have lightened up by now.”

“I don’t think ‘lighten up’ is in Metatron’s vocabulary,” I said. I didn’t like Metatron. His granite features were incapable of smiling, and he seemed to consider the women of Sheol a subspecies unworthy of conversation. I had trained with him—everyone in Sheol eventually sparred with everybody else—and he had beaten me quickly and efficiently. I hadn’t even been able to get in one sharp blow before he’d slammed me to the floor pad, my breath and my pride knocked out of me. We needed his strength, his ruthlessness. Didn’t mean I had to like him.

But Allie was thinking about something else. “Are there really only two hundred and sixty-five of us? Counting Cain?”

“I’m not sure that we should count Cain,” I said darkly, “but yes, I think that’s the number. When you give birth, that will make two hundred and sixty-six.”

“Yeah, and he’s going to pop out and pick up a sword first thing,” Allie scoffed. “In fact, when it comes to our fighting force, we’re a man—or more precisely a woman—down. I can’t do much to defend myself, much less Sheol.”

“You’ll be fine,” I said with a reassuring smile.

“Yeah, yeah.” Allie waved her hand dismissively. “What do you know?”

“Everything,” I replied with a serene smile.

Tory hooted with laughter, and I couldn’t blame her. My incomplete visions had almost killed her. “Sorry,”
Tory said. “It’s not your fault your gift is . . . imperfect.”

“My gift is a disaster,” I said, truthful as always. “Unfortunately, it’s the closest thing we have to a glimpse into the future, and we just have to interpret it the best we can.”

Tory nodded. “The ancient Romans and Greeks had to interpret signs. Reading the future has never been easy.”

“At least I don’t have to poke through the entrails of a slaughtered goat.”

“Please!” Allie suddenly looked green, and I resisted the impulse to smile. Even at this late point, Allie was still having morning sickness, another thing to worry her. I rejoiced in it. The stronger and more long-lasting the morning sickness, the stronger the baby. It was an old wives’ tale, but who should know better than old wives?

I turned back to Tory. “If you want to lure your mate from the training floor and work off some of that energy, I’ll stay here. I have nothing better to do.”

“Gee, thanks,” Allie said wryly.

Tory jumped up. “It’s not that I don’t love you, Allie,” she said, “but when it comes to a contest between you and Michael’s delicious, er, arms, Michael wins every time.”

“Yeah, it’s his arms you’re enamored of,” I drawled. “Go away, and we’ll talk behind your back.”

It didn’t take any more encouragement. Tory was gone in a flash. Allie sighed gustily. “I hate to say it,” she said, “but there’s one really bad thing about pregnancy. Oh, it’s still completely worth it, and I’m not complaining. But . . .”

“You’re allowed to complain. You can bitch about the morning sickness and the hemorrhoids—”

“I don’t have hemorrhoids!” she protested, shuddering. “And it’s not the physical stuff. That’s kind of cool. Watching the changes, feeling them. Did you know I have a third more blood moving through my body than normal?”

“Raziel must like that.”

Her face fell. “That’s the problem,” she said in a low voice. “We don’t have sex, and he barely touches my blood. When he feeds, he does it like one of the other Fallen, from my wrist, chastely.” She looked woeful, pathetic, and very beautiful. Pregnancy had given her a glow that was almost Madonna-like. All those Renaissance masters had probably used their pregnant mistresses as models for their Virgin Mary paintings, to capture that glow.

“Well, you know there’s no reason you can’t have sex. You’re only on bed rest because you’re nervous and need to be coddled, not because you require it. If you’re worried, try out something less . . . traditional to help you get over the dry spell,” I said judiciously. “And Raziel is being ridiculous not to take
your blood. I don’t know how many times I’ve told you, but you and the baby are going to be fine. I doubt there’s anything either of you could do to hurt the little one.”

“You want to take Raziel aside and talk to him?” She laughed. “I can tell by your horrified expression that you don’t. And there’s no obstetrician to reason with him—we have to make do with your visions combined with Rachel’s healing expertise and power. It’s not black-and-white, and Raziel is . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“He’s afraid,” I said. “For the first time in his endless existence, he’s afraid of something, and he doesn’t know how to deal with it.”

“So what am I going to do?” Allie demanded in what was close to a wail.

“Do about what?” Raziel said from the doorway.

I kept my face slightly averted, afraid my expression would give it away.

Trust Allie. “Do about our lack of a sex life,” she said bluntly.

Silence, and now I didn’t dare look at him. After a moment, he spoke. “And did the seer come up with any solution?”

I didn’t move. I wanted to disappear, crawl into a corner. But Allie was looking at me expectantly, her eyes a mix of misery and hope, and I couldn’t let her down.

So I turned and met his fulminating gaze squarely. “I know a lot about pregnancy and babies,” I said. “I helped my mother through three, I delivered one, and I helped her friends as well. I’ve seen a lot of children born into the world, and I know what I’m doing. And I know, I
know,
that the Source is strong and healthy. And . . . er . . . marital relations are part of a healthy pregnancy.”

“And did your father have sex with your mother when she was pregnant?” he countered.

Okay, I was definitely blushing, but I couldn’t back down now. “I read everything I could on pregnancy and delivery, because my mother and her friends didn’t have obstetricians or midwives either. You can have . . . er . . . traditional sex up until the eighth month, as long as the mother is comfortable. After that, you should indulge in . . . in noninvasive alternatives.”

To my embarrassment and relief, Raziel choked with laughter. “‘Noninvasive’? You make it sound like cancer.”

I met his gaze fully, irritation winning over my discomfort. “You know what I’m talking about.”

“ 
No penetration
is the term I think you wanted,” he said coolly.

“Yes.”

“But you never answered my question.”

“What question?” I demanded, harassed. I’d already
answered far more questions than I was comfortable with.

“Did your father have sex with your mother while she was pregnant?”

The pain-filled memories pushed at me, the misery and deep, bleeding shame that I kept as well hidden as the scars on my body. I was tempted to tell him it was none of his damned business, but even in my distress I knew you didn’t say that to the Alpha. And suddenly I was tired of it all.

“My mother was a whore, and I have no idea who my father was. We lived in a tenement apartment with a bunch of petty criminals and drug dealers and prostitutes, and when the women didn’t abort the babies, I helped them give birth. I would help them through pregnancy, make sure the babies were taken safely to a hospital rather than be abandoned by the mothers, and try to keep the mothers off drugs while they were pregnant, but I couldn’t keep them from earning a living. So trust me, those unborn babies were subjected to a steady battering, and they all survived, without a doctor’s care or a midwife to help. In the last month or two, most of the women were too uncomfortable to sell more than a blow job, and of course their sexual pleasure was immaterial. I doubt any of them knew what sexual pleasure was like by then. But the point is, they survived, and
when . . . penetration”—I said the word defiantly—“was uncomfortable, they practiced alternatives. And your wife needs to get laid!”

The two of them stared at me in shocked disbelief. Allie reached out her hand to touch mine, but I snatched it away. I rose, stalking to the door, and Raziel—big, scary Raziel, ultimate leader of all the Fallen—wisely moved out of my way. “So get over yourselves,” I said as a parting shot, “and get fucked.”

I made it down the first flight of stairs, out of sight, before I began to run. Allie and Raziel lived at the very top of the huge, ungainly, beautiful house, and there were flights and flights of stairs to get to the ground floor.

“What’s the hurry?” Tory was heading back upstairs.

I made the mistake of pausing. “If you’re going to visit Allie, Raziel is up there. I think we can leave them alone for a while.”

“Raziel’s getting over his fear of touching her?” Tory inquired. “We’ve all tried to tell him she’s fine, but he’s a stubborn bastard. Like most men.”

“Yes.”

“So what did you say that made him listen? I thought you were afraid of him.”

I shrugged. “I managed to convince him, at least for now, that Allie isn’t made of glass. She’s going to have delicious sex.”

Suddenly it washed over me again, the pleasure of that too-real erotic dream, reminding me of something I could never have, except in dreams. I was a woman without a mate in a world of mated people. I had no man, no sex, and the Fallen were innately sexual. I was a widow, a figure of loss, and an oracle with broken powers.

“I have to go,” I said in an unexpectedly rough voice, turning away. I was the calm, unruffled one as far as anyone else knew. I wasn’t about to demonstrate just how thin that veneer actually was.

But Tory knew me too well, and she was having none of it. She took my arm in an unbreakable grip. “No you don’t,” she said. “I think it’s time we have a talk.”

“I’m tired of talking!” I wailed. I needed to go hide long enough to pull myself together.

“Too bad. You‘re too wound up, and you’re going to talk to me whether you like it or not. Come on.”

She wasn’t giving me much choice. She and I could have a fight in the middle of the winding stairs that led to the upper reaches of the big house, but she was six inches taller and presumably stronger, and I didn’t think the two of us rolling down the stairs would help anyone, though it could provide a certain level of amusement.

To my surprise she pulled me into a room one flight down, and I realized this was the other empty
apartment at Sheol. It was even more cell-like than mine—a small window looking out over the horizon, the sea barely visible, a narrow bed, and a dresser. “Sit,” she said sternly, pushing me toward the bed.

I sat. Not that I had much choice.

T
ORY TOOK THE CHAIR, SPINNING
it around and straddling it like a man, resting her arms on the back as she watched me. “So you decided to come clean about your childhood,” she said abruptly. “Why now?”

I was sitting cross-legged on the sagging bed. I wasn’t really in the mood for this. My momentary weakness had abated. “They were both miserable, afraid to touch each other and about to explode from sexual frustration, and neither of them would really believe it was safe. My word wasn’t good enough, so I told them of the pregnancies I had seen, the abuse they’d taken. Allie’s baby is strong and healthy and the delivery will be fine for both of them, but they won’t believe it.”

Tory nodded. “So you decided the things you witnessed would shock them into doing the deed? And it worked?”

I closed my eyes, listening to my unreliable senses, and then I smiled. “It worked.”

“That was pretty nice of you,” Tory said.

I shrugged again. “No need to make such a big secret out of it. It was a rotten childhood. Thomas rescued me, and I lived happily ever after. Until he died.”

“He died,” Tory said gently. “You didn’t.”

I didn’t move, but I felt frozen inside. “I don’t want to leave here.”

“You’re afraid to leave here,” she corrected me. “That’s a different thing. You need a husband, a mate, sweetie. Someone to care for you and love you and push you when you try to hide.”

“No,” I said stubbornly. “Thomas was the love of my life. I don’t want anyone else.”

“From what I’ve heard, Thomas was a gentle, sweet angel who was more of a father to you than a lover. I know he never took your blood. Did he even take your body?”

“Of course he did,” I said sharply, regretting how much I’d told her. “And it was very nice.”

“
Very nice
?” she echoed with a sharp laugh. “Honey, you need to get laid. Even more than Allie, and that’s saying a lot.”

“I told you, I don’t want anyone else.”

She wasn’t convinced. “And have you ever looked into your own future? Do you know what life holds
for you? Are you going to spend the rest of your life as a ghost?”

She knew me too well, knew that I was an empty shell wandering through the world I had once inhabited. “I tried,” I said. “My gift doesn’t work that way.”

She looked at me, then nodded, accepting. “I want you to find someone,” she said. “That’s no secret. But that someone isn’t Cain.”