Skye
Five months later…
My office at the University of Moonrise is in a spire overlooking the back half of the sprawling, ancient city of gold and the lake, which shines a deep turquoise in the mid-summer sun. I juggle several books as I move like a snail up another spiraling staircase, pausing several times to catch my breath and wave away the curious, concerned looks and pleas to help that my fellows throw in my direction. I’m due at the end of the week, and while joining the university as a fellow and researcher with plans to start lecturing again next year has been the best kind of distraction, this pregnancy has been awful, and I am so ready to be done.
It’s been a marathon, and I’m not a runner by any means. Lately, I've been desperate to shift, but I’m too far along to risk that now. So, I walk around the lake. I hike up and down the staircases in the palace, where I’ve recently taken a suite at Kenna’s urging because, according to her, I could give birth any day, and it feels like it.
But I refuse. I’ll keep my thighs locked until Alex returns.
It’s just… been so long.
“Hello?” I lean against the wall on the landing at the top of the staircase. My office is just down the hallway, and I have grand plans of sitting down and not moving again until the sun sets and I have to leave before I accidentally get locked in, which has happened a handful of times in the past few weeks. I’m doing anything I can to keep myself from thinking about Alex and my father. We haven’t heard from them in months, which we anticipated. There’s been no news, and Maeve keeps telling me that that’s a good thing. Vampire armies haven’t invaded Lunaria and the north territories of Celestoria, so whatever they’re doing must be working.
I’ve tried to scry. I have every available mystic looking for them at the orrery to no avail.
I’m weak, and my powers are fully dedicated to keeping this giant hybrid baby healthy. So be it. I give up.
“Are you still at the campus?” Mom asks, her voice bright and excited through the speaker of my cell phone.
“Yeah. I have a few hours of work I’d like to do before I come over for dinner, if that’s still the plan.”
“You sound exhausted.”
I look behind me at the stairs winding into oblivion. “Just getting my exercise.”
“Kenna’s been throwing a fit for the past week about your inability to follow her directions about rest, sweetheart. I know the university has been pressuring you to take leave. Why aren’t you listening?”
“Because I can’t–” I bite back my sharp tone and start over. “I just need something to do. I can’t sit around doing nothing. I’ll go crazy.”
Mom sighs heavily. “I understand, but I’ve told you this before. Your father is the only person I trust to actually do what he says he’ll do, no matter what. He came back to us once, Skye, and he’ll do it again. With Alex in tow. I promise you that.”
Music drifts down the hallway, carrying whispered voices. I squint in the direction of my office, finally catching my breath.
“I’ll come to the palace for dinner, so you can just go home tonight and rest. We’ll eat in your suite. It will be fun. Maeve and the girls are getting along right now, so it should be a quiet night.”
“That sounds good, Mom,” I say, and she tells me she loves me and to keep my chin up, but I’m heavily distracted by the music now, which sounds a lot like it’s coming from my office.
I creep toward the door, juggling my books and shoulder bag, and turn the knob.
Confetti explodes through the air, and shouts of “Surprise!” nearly deafen me.
The air clears of multicolored paper, revealing the entire astronomy department crowded into my office, which is thankfully big enough to not only house a dozen people, but two tables full of food, and a table packed full of blue and pink presents.
“Oh, wow,” I whisper, smiling widely while resting a hand beneath the massive swell of my belly to keep myself upright. “You didn’t have to do this!”
“Well, you’ve insisted on working until the baby arrives, so it was the least we could do,” says Chancellor Greta Fielding, taking the books from my hands and tucking them under her arm. “We’re so excited for you, Skye.”
I’m overwhelmed, to say the least. My desk chair has been transferred into a throne of pink and blue taffeta, and a sash is forced over my shoulders, stretched to its breaking point over the curve of my stomach.
“All of this and no crown?” I laugh, but I’m effectively shut up by a plate piled high with food. Someone brought a chocolate cake with black cherry icing, which is my favorite, and promised to send the leftovers to the palace, which means I now have plans for the rest of the evening… stuffing my face. I suppose I get a pass. I already weigh a thousand pounds and can barely fit through doorways without knocking my stomach on everything in my path, but this is fun. Laughter rings through the room while my colleagues tell stories about their own pregnancies, births, and experiences raising children. I’m the youngest by far but in good company because my department is mostly women–a sharp contrast to the mostly male-dominated physics department in Lunaria.
Halfway through my third slice of cake, I notice more people funneling into the office–which includes several heads of different departments and even the shifters who run the absolutely unreal advanced warrior training academy attached to the university. It’s suddenly a huge party–full of sound and conversation that overlaps and pings from wall to wall.
I’m leaning into a conversation with two women from faculty administration when I feel a shift in the air.
My powers skitter then settle. The activity of the party seems to fade, like everyone is suddenly moving in slow motion. A man parts the crowd mingling near the doorway, stopping to bob his head in greeting to the men who turn to him. Dark hair–so black it’s nearly blue–catches the summer sunlight streaming through the stained glass windows as he turns to face the room.
Ocean blue eyes scan the room before locking on mine.
“Alex?”
His smile is so bright, so unburdened and radiant. Several people turn to look at him, dropping mid-conversation as my husband moves across the room to me.
“This must be the husband,” someone says in the background, but I’m wholly focused on escaping my chair, my body betraying me every step of the way.
Alex grabs my hands and eases me out of the chair. His eyes are wide and bright as he takes me in, shaking his head in muted shock, but then I’m crushed to his chest. He’s warm.
“Gods, I missed you,” he says into my hair and then leans back, caressing my face. “Look at you.”
“How are you here?”
“I just got back.” He presses his lips to mine, breathless. He’s so warm. His skin has lost that pale vampire pallor over the past months. I take his hands, turning them over, tracing thin blue veins.
I look up into his eyes. “It worked.”
He smiles, and… his fangs are still there.
“So, you must be Dr. Alex Scarlet,” says Henry Alcot, another senior-level administrator at the university, who vigorously shakes Alex’s hand and immediately drops into conversation about his availability to talk to a few of his friends in the apothecary sciences department.
I’m in a trance, however, my fingers intertwined with Alex’s, as the party moves on. Before I know it, I’m walking across campus, arm in arm with Alex, shuffling in direct sunlight like this is what we’ve always been able to do together.
When I used my powers on him, I wasn’t sure if it worked. Nothing seemed to happen. We spent that night tucked in my bed, whispering promises, dreaming of an unsure future where we could be together like this–out in the open and safe.
I let my powers travel through his biology, pinpointing his differences, moving and shifting parts of him to fit into a new biological design–something unique to him. If I did it right, I thought he might be able to tolerate sunlight, that his survival wouldn’t just be based on his need for the blood of others. Selfishly, I didn’t do away with that entirely because I like being bitten… but otherwise, I left him unchanged, until…
I did something I prayed he wouldn’t regret asking me to do.
He left the next morning on a snowy winter day. I watched him and Dad get into a car with plans to go to the orrery, where Dad would perform the jump, and that was that.
But I had an hour alone with Alex that morning before the sun rose and painted the city of Moonrise with silver light. I asked him if he was sure he wanted to give this up–an eternal life. Immortality. Others in our history would have, and have done, terrible things to have it.
He kissed me and told me nothing in the world could change his mind.
So I made him a tether and fixed it to mine.
Mates of our own design–forcing the hand of the Goddess.
I made him mine as long as I live because, when it’s my time to go, he’ll come with me.
Then, he left, and I didn’t know if I’d succeeded. Now, in the present, walking in the sunlight as the palace comes into startling focus, it’s clear.
We did it.
We’re free.
Alex walks me through a side door in the lower levels of the palace near the loading docks. No one pays us any mind, but his grip on my arm grows tighter with every step we take from campus to here, where he’s pulling me into a small room near the massive palace kitchen. We didn’t speak the entire walk. There was, I realize now, far too much to say and ask.
He caresses my face again, searching my eyes for the answers to what I know are millions of questions. How am I? How have I managed for so long without him? How can he possibly make this up to me?
I rise on my toes with effort and kiss him, clawing his shoulders to bring him to my level, and cry against his mouth–but finally, after months of torment and months before that living in uncertainty, he’s here.
And he’s home.
“How did it go?” I ask tearfully, breaking from the kiss.
He laughs against my mouth. “There’s a million things I need to tell you,” he says, pressing another kiss to my lips, “but there’re also some people who would like to meet you. They’re upstairs. Your mom told us you were on campus, but I couldn’t wait to see you. I had to come.”
“Who’s upstairs?”