Black Spring

Jack bent and stretched his arm. “Nah, it feels great. I feel great, as a matter of fact. Like I just drank a lot of coffee. Wow. Magic is incredible.”

He started doing jumping jacks in his cell, almost like he couldn’t help himself. I noticed that even though I’d tried to pinpoint the fracture, my magic had still spread to other parts of his body. The bruises and cuts on his face were rapidly healing while I watched.

“Okay, I guess there are some side effects,” I muttered as Jack began jogging in place. “Apparently magic makes you high.”

I was about to tell him to quit it when I felt a sudden cramp in the side of my abdomen. The pain seemed to recede for a moment; then it twisted through me again. Something wet ran down the inside of my pajama pants.

“Oh, damn,” I said. “The baby’s coming.”

14

Jack stopped with his exercise-video routine and stared at me. “The baby? You’re having the baby now?”

“Yes,” I said.

The pain was not intense, but it was definitely there. I could feel the baby moving inside me. I didn’t know if normal human moms could feel that when they were about to give birth, but I certainly could.

“Damn,” I said. “Damn, damn, damn, damn.”

This was exactly what I had not wanted. I didn’t want to give birth under Lucifer’s roof. I especially didn’t want to give birth while I was “imprisoned” on a murder charge. Lucifer would use my incarceration as an excuse to whisk my son away from me, which was what he had wanted all along.

I staggered toward the stone bench in the cell. I needed to sit down for a minute, to breathe, to think. It was all becoming clear.

It didn’t matter, really, if Lucifer was the shapeshifter’s master. He had seen the opportunity given by my look-alike’s murder of Evangeline. Once I was locked up, I was under his power, and he could keep me locked up until I had the baby.

Once the baby was born, Lucifer would have everything he wanted. Two new heirs—my child and Evangeline’s—and no rebellious granddaughter or jealous wife to get in his way. He could execute me without even having to justify his actions before the court of the Grigori. No one would question that he would want his fiancée’s killer to receive justice.

And I had made all his plans easier by passively agreeing to be locked up in the basement. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but as usual I’d been outmaneuvered by a master.

Now I needed to get out of Lucifer’s house before this labor progressed any further. And to do that I needed Nathaniel.

I could easily fly to the top of the long flight of stairs. But once I got to the top, there was sure to be more security than there was down here. There was no way Lucifer would leave me in a cell with a door that I could easily unlock with magic.

My second problem was Jack Dabrowski. The moron had followed me here and gotten himself locked up by the Prince of Darkness even though I’d warned him about a thousand times about interfering in the lives of supernatural creatures. It would serve him right if I left him where he was, but my conscience unfortunately would not allow me to do that. So I’d have to take him with me. And he was going to be deadweight in a fight. Completely manic high-with-magic deadweight. He’d gone back to exercising, and was now doing squat jumps from the bench on the wall to the floor and back again.

I tried not to think about how completely terrified I was. It wasn’t just the prospect of trying to fight my way out of the mansion while I was in labor. It was the possibility that my son was a horrific monster like Evangeline’s child. He could rip his way out of me, kill me before I ever had a chance to see his face.

Even if he was a completely normal adorable little cherub, I was still scared. Because I didn’t know how to be a mom, and I didn’t know how I would keep him safe from my own family members, never mind the multitude of enemies I had. Many of those enemies were staying right here in Lucifer’s house for the wedding that would now never happen, all of them conveniently placed for snatching my baby away or murdering me before he could ever be born.

I took a deep breath. The cramping feeling had intensified, although it was nothing like the way birth looks on television, with the mom all sweaty and screaming her head off with every contraction. It just felt like I had the worst menstrual cramps ever.

I stood up gingerly, using the wall as a brace. No matter what, I was not going to get far without Nathaniel, and I wouldn’t leave him or Beezle or the others behind anyway. So I reached for the connection between us. We weren’t able to send messages, per se, but I hoped that he would feel my need and my distress and find me.

The darkness inside me opened its eyes, lurking, waiting for me to drop my guard so that it could take over again. I ruthlessly put a lid on that part of my power. I didn’t need to deal with an internal struggle for my personality and sanity right now. As usual, I had more than enough to deal with.