The homestead has been eerily silent since we returned. There’s been a strange atmosphere in the whole place, and even the village out back seems still and devoid of noise. Everyone is home licking their wounds, absorbing the reality of what we did and went through, and homes are filled with warm reunions and an aura of hope. The air is lighter and brighter, and the fog is completely gone. It feels like something huge is now settling to dust, yet spirits are high despite the need for peace.
Colton is sitting on the bed drying his hair after the third shower he took to rid himself of a weeklong buildup of debris, grime, and of course, Vampire blood. Something he does when he needs to think for a while, and I know he probably wanted space from me to let the remainder of his anger fizzle a little. Even though now I’m laid on the bed behind him, he seems so much calmer than before.
I’m resting after a soak in the tub in our other bathroom, where I took time to rid myself of all the vileness of our wild adventure. It was weird taking time apart to get clean, but he’s been reserved since we came home. Simmering from anger to sadness and many up and down mood swings. I know he’s probably going through every memory a dozen times to take in the fact he lost days of his life when to him, it was seconds of a blink of an eye. I know he’s processing and thinking it all through, and I’m waiting for him to come out of his head before I approach him again.
He stayed close, even though he needed space, and he hasn’t been cold or anywhere near as mad as he was on the walk home, but I can tell he still has so much brewing, and for my own sanity, I am leaving him be.
Meadow is avoiding him too, as the two are no longer talking. On returning home, they had a huge showdown in the study. Venting, arguing, stubborn meeting fire, and I know it was his way of letting everything out. His self-guilt, his feelings of failure, and the knowledge of everything we have done without him here to protect us.
I know that seeing how he hurt me is killing him. His obvious distress and pain are overwhelming me. No matter how hard I tried to reassure him that he couldn’t control what happened. He hasn’t said much about my pregnancy since things diffused again, but I guess given everything he must process, maybe he doesn’t know how to react. What could he say after the doctor checked me over and said I was perfectly fine? He looked relieved, held my hand, and then silently brought me up here to clean up and rest, ensuring I was brought food even if he was still inwardly raging my way.
It’s hardly great timing, and with my abilities held back and making me vulnerable, it only adds to his worry that I might get hurt or that worse could have happened out there. I get why he’s like this, I do, but it has me so on edge and not how I thought he would be when I got him back. I guess knowing how overprotective and anal he is about my always being safe and pampered is confirmed by how much sulking he’s doing and how much he yelled at his mom and Meadow. Colton has always aggressively lashed out when he was in the most emotional turmoil, even my way, and now he’s brooding. I hope it doesn’t last long, given how much I want to curl up and be like we were before any of this happened.
I know him only too well, and as I watch that muscular body, now in sweats and fresh as a daisy despite being topless, I can still see how tight and rigid his muscles are. Carrying his tension and stress, I want so badly to smooth them out and roll up in his arms to relieve him. He’s avoiding touch too, to punish me for putting myself in danger, lugging my ass to another state, and heading a war against our own warriors. I’m majorly in the doghouse, even though he did admit out there that the spell being broken wouldn’t have come about any other way.
Every one of the sub-pack has gone to their rooms to clean up after a brief emotional reunion downstairs. Now they’ve gone to eat and rest before the arranged grand hall meeting, where Colton intends to debrief the pack and tell them what happens now. Time out is where we are at, and then we come together to talk about the pack's future and the possibility that this might be nearing the end of the Vampire battles. There’s just so much.
“You’re never this quiet for this long. You’re scaring me.” I finally break when he rests back on the edge of the bed, away from me. My nerves and anxiety are too much to bear anymore. I lift my foot and nudge him gently in the butt, pulling his attention back to me with a coy smile on my face that I hope tugs at his heartstrings. Full on puppy dog eyes and pouty lips because he’s so distant and quiet, and I don’t like it.
He turns and looks at me for a moment, making me hold my breath, and I tense, wondering what’s to come next, but he sighs, and I find myself doing it with him. A sense of letting go in the air as his emotions finally merge with mine, and some of that wall comes down a little, making me relax. He pulls himself up, instantly crawls up the bed, and lies beside me, making the mattress dip, so I roll towards him.
Stretching out to meet my position, he gently puts his palm on my abdomen. A calmness to his manner and I hold still and wait for him to make the moves because I’m unsure how he’ll react. His eyes move to where he’s holding, yet his face is so hard to read, and he feels me looking at him and avoids my eye contact. He pushes his face towards me, ducking down so I can’t see him, nuzzling in against my shoulder as his breath plays softly over the skin on show from my light nightdress. His presence alone warms me to my core and calms some of my inner anxiety, sinking against him and exhaling heavily, even though I know he’s unwilling to uncurl fully.
“There’s a lot……. My head’s a little fried. I’m also sort of shell-shocked about this.” He gazes at my stomach, blinks back the instant damp sheen on his eyes, and exhales heavily. My heart skips a beat or two with the slightest worry that maybe babies are not something he’s happy about, and that’s why he’s being evasive and strange. We have never really talked about it and were using precautions to avoid this.
My heart flutters with the very real possibility that this isn’t just down to his guilt gnawing at his soul, but the fact he’s going to be a father, and maybe it was never in the plan for him. I swallow heavily and try not to dwell on the slight chance he’s devastated about it.
“Talk to me.” I nudge him, needing something more than quiet, and nuzzle closer. Inner anxiety is growing as my insecure self shows face. My heart rate increases, and my palms get clammy as I try and appear neutral emotionally. I don’t want to burden him with a spew of feelings when he’s having difficulty deciphering his own, but it’s hard.
The spell had fallout for sure, and Leyanne did warn me that he may need an adjustment period to get his head straight when we got home. That mind control and being trapped somewhere in a state of timelessness would affect them on some level, even if it only lasted a week. I don’t know how much of that is this.
I smile impulsively when he lets go of my belly and wraps his arm around me instead, gesturing for me to lift my head so his other one can slide under it and giving me his bicep as a cushion. A familiar Colton move. One that soothes me a little, and I try not to overthink this and instead focus on his touch. I snuggle in greedily, needing him more than air. His legs wrap around mine until every inch of us touches intimately, and he buries his mouth in my hair and tucks my head under his chin.
“Where to start…. You went to New Mexico. You found your brother, brought back a witch…… Lead our people into a crazy dangerous battle that might have ended all of us. Had a one-on-one fight with me where I tried to kill you more than once. And that’s just to start….” He lets out a long, strained breath and squeezes me closer, his surge of chaotic emotions finally seeping through to me, and I can feel just how messy his brain is.
“I know,” I mumble guiltily in a low voice and stretch my arms around him as much as I can, clinging on needily.
“We’re also going back to the mountain to deal with that chaos; now, finally, we have reason to believe the vampires are receding… and you’re pregnant…. we’re pregnant! I’m going to be a dad.” He breathes out heavily as though this fact is still taking its time to filter through and is the major one for him that’s giving him a hard time. The woosh of words, the extra hard exhale as he got to the final point, and yet I cannot read a single emotion accurately to tell if it’s a bad sigh or a shocked one.
“I know, I know… Carmen imprinting on Jasper… meeting a vampire, finding out my dad’s not my dad…. I know there’s a lot. I get it. I lived through it and still haven’t absorbed any of it. I just hate when you clam up, and I can’t tell what you’re thinking while your emotions are not helping me any. I can tell you’re sort of shocked, but there’s a lingering something I can’t decipher. I can feel it. It’s making me nervous and uptight, yet I don’t know what it is.” It comes out in a ramble, my heart pounding as my feelings get the better of me and turn me into a jittering wreck. I want to ask him so badly if he hates the fact I’m pregnant, but I’m too scared to hear the answer. My heart is literally hanging by a thread, terrified of what pain he can cause with one simple rejection of what grows inside me.
“Disbelief…. that’s what that is. It’s not one thing. It’s many… Like, are we really ending a war that’s plagued us our entire lives? Are we going to be parents in the midst of all this? Is this all going from a never-ending threat to nothing in the blink of an eye? And what about you? Your father is royalty among … God, our enemy, Lorey. You’re a freaking vampire Princess, and that blows my mind. I’m not trying to close you out. I’m just… overwhelmed.”
Which I guess is exactly how he has me feeling. Overloaded, anxious, and weighed down with a thousand emotions all at once. Sometimes sharing that is too much, and it’s hard for me to swallow even though I know he’s trying so hard to shield me from the worst of it.
“Leyanne thinks that me being alive will pull Varro back from attacking our people, so I guess, yes, the threat is going to end. We just haven’t had any word from Jasper or Darrius to confirm it, but the mountain had fewer vampires than we both knew were there before. So, where did they go? And him….. once he knows I’m alive, what if he wants to see me?” I dodge the baby topic, sticking to something less traumatic to my soul.
It is something I’ve thought about, my father, and honestly, I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to face the reality that my dad, the one who raised me for ten years, the father I loved, was not even my blood. That some lord, some creature out there, that I’ve never met who waged wars because of me is who I belong to. I can’t absorb it. I can’t get my thoughts in order to accept it.
“I did think it was half empty considering how many we’ve chased through that infernal forest for months. Or maybe there was always less of them, and we assumed more. Maybe they just spread out and used the same patrols over and over. God knows. We defeated them so fast. It’s like they weren’t even trying to hold us off.” Colton sighs and instinctively squeezes me again, inhaling me as though he’s glad to be home, even though his reality meant he never left me. It’s odd. I guess him having my memories now means it’s messed up his timeline, and he shouldn’t miss me because it was only today he left me, but his memories are making that confusing.
“Leyanne said that when vampires lose leadership when their coven lord abandons them…. they become useless. Like they have no direction, and their abilities are stumped or something. She thinks whoever the lord was, left them, and the one you killed had tried to take place as coven master.”
She told me all this downstairs when we returned in a hurried conversation while Colton issued orders to the pack and dispersed them to their homes until eight pm. Then went nuclear at Meadow and Sierra and ended up storming off to the study.
“That suggests your father… the vampire one, is pulling them back, but why leave any at all? Surely he would take them if this was over.”
“What else is he going to do with them? They were made to fight and excess to needs if he no longer wanted to. He probably took the strongest and left the rest behind, knowing eventually the wolves would deal with them and get rid of his problem.” I got the impression from Leyanne’s conversations that vampires see halflings as dispensable and worthless, and a lord wouldn’t think twice about leaving them to die, not like wolves.