All Roads Lead to Rome (The Praetorian Series Book 4)

by Edward Crichton

  ***

  Thirty Nine Weeks and Four Days Later…

  The wait was killing me.

  No, it was destroying me.

  Who tells someone that a simple procedure with only a slight risk of severe complications would take twenty five minutes, but then let it go on for over an hour without providing an update to all concerned parties? Me, for example. Me, alone, actually. These nurses walked around here like they were on some kind of power trip, lording information over the rest of us like…

  I noticed that my right leg was bouncing up and down on the ball of my foot uncontrollably, so I placed a hand upon it to get it under control. It took a moment, but finally it went still, and I breathed deeply. Reaching a hand into my pocket, I retrieved a slim, rectangular slate of glass that the kids these days used as a communication device. Calling it a cell or smart phone would raise many eyebrows among the youth of today’s world, but despite its slick appearance and fancy interface… it was basically just a phone. As it had been for the previous two decades, innovation seemed to revolve around simply updating appearance as opposed to any actual innovative breakthrough.

  Little had really changed.

  I pressed a thumb to the screen and it unlocked, revealing and endless stream of text messages from two names in particular, sporadically interrupted with a sensible one or two inquiries from other individuals.

  “Status.” “Update.” “Sitrep.” “Report.” “Who does he look like?” “Does he look like me?” “Did you finally agree to name him after me? Remember? Wang Hunter?’”

  Obviously I had no need to look at the names to see who ninety nine percent of the over three hundred messages were from, but I had to scroll through them none the less to individually eliminate the notification icons that annoyed me beyond measure. It seemed like such a regressive function considering how easy it used to be to do the same task in the past, but it was just like “innovation” to take four enormous steps backward for every single step forward.

  Once the notifications were under control, I found the one I was looking for. My dad had texted thirty minutes ago saying he was picking up my sister and would be in D.C. in five hours. I sent him a quick message indicating I’d received his head’s up and that there wasn’t any news yet, blanked my phone, and placed it back in my pocket. A nurse not long out of her teenage years shook her head at me from behind her large reception desk and I knew she was judging me for my phone.

  Fancy as it was, it was already years out of date.

  Some things really never changed.

  But at least the relationship with my father had. I didn’t know if it had something to do with his four years spent thinking I’d been killed, or something to do with Helena, who he liked immensely, or maybe it was more because of my newfound disposition, but life with my dad had become somewhat functional recently. I wasn’t sure, but I, for one, certainly wasn’t about to let bygone grudges from a whole other lifetime keep me from repairing the one relationship I could really use in this world.

  That had been enough for me.

  “Jacob Hunter?”

  The voice was monotonous but pleasant, a voice well practiced at calling random names that would soon be forgotten. I lifted my head and saw an older, heavyset nurse holding a data slate, her head scanning the few gathered individuals in the waiting room at two thirty in the morning. I rushed to my feet and jogged in her direction with a slight limp that I’d carry with me for the rest of my life. She looked surprised at how spry I was and shocked that I was suddenly in her face.

  “Everything all right?” I asked quickly. “She’s been in there over an hour. They said the procedure would only take twenty five minutes.”

  “She’s fine, Mr. Hunter,” the nurse said with little emotion. “The anesthesiologist was delayed in another room and it took some time for her to arrive. Your wife is fine.”

  I released a long, loud breath that I’d been holding for what must have been this entire time, and the veteran nurse winced at what wafted in her direction.

  “Sorry,” I said, noticing her reaction. “Can I see her?”

  “Please,” she said, a bit of insistence in her voice.

  Not that I needed her permission. I was already bounding down the hall well before she’d finished the word, hanging a quick left down another hall, and finding Helena’s room seconds later. Taking a moment to settle myself, I opened the door and walked in. Inside were a pair of doctors, one I immediately recognized while the other, I assumed, was the anesthesiologist. A nurse was also present, a lovely, older woman named Louise who had been with us from the beginning. And finally, there was Helena, seated in the hospital bed, her belly huge and her face full of smiles as she chatted aimlessly with Louise.

  I walked to her side and gripped her hand. She wasn’t rushed to acknowledge my arrival, but after a while, she looked up at me and offered a smile, and I leaned down and kissed her.

  “That took forever,” I said as I pulled away.

  “Aw, poor baby.” She gave me a sarcastic frown, her voice slightly loopy. “I’m the one who had to wait with the blinding pain, remember?”

  “Oh, I remember,” I said, thinking back to an hour earlier when Helena and I had been pacing the hallways for what seemed like time immemorial, Helena doubled over during most of it, barely able to continue near the end. “Feel better?”

  Her eyes widened excitedly as she answered. “Unbelievably better. It’s like magic.”

  I raised an eyebrow, risking a quick glance at Louise, who’d walked away and wasn’t paying us any attention. “They didn’t have any problems putting it in, right?”

  Helena shook her head. “Everything seemed to go fine. Who knows how my body works anymore.

  I winked at her. “I’ve got a pretty good idea.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You’d better grow up, Jacob. We’re about to have a baby.”

  “Never,” I said, leaning in to give her another kiss on the forehead before turning to our doctor. “So how long until cigars?”

  Dr. Garvey turned a face that seemed too youthful for his chosen profession toward me and shrugged. “Who’s to say? Since we manually broke her water a few hours ago, the process has certainly sped up, but it could be anywhere from two to twenty hours. We’ll just have to wait it out. First time pregnancies are always difficult to pred…” He trailed off for a second and shook his head. “Apologies, I forgot this is your second. I’ll never understand how that’s possible. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have other miracles to perform.”

  “Don’t go too far,” Helena called after him.

  When Louise left as well, along with the anesthesiologist, I took a seat in the nearest armchair and looked at Helena. “I still can’t believe how nothing ever shows up on your blood work. I still wonder what it was Merlin actually did to you.”

  “I wonder about it all the time too,” she said, “but I never worry about it. It’s just… there, and apparently knows better than to show up on a test.”

  I shook my head. “I still don’t like it.”

  “You don’t like that I’m a model of perfect health, can bench press more than you, and can heal basically any wound in seconds? Jealous much?”

  Her joking tone took all the sting out of her words. I knew she was just kidding. We’d spoken about Merlin’s healing elixir many, many times. It wasn’t that I was frightened of her or thought she was some kind of freak or mutant; the exact opposite, in fact. I was simply worried about other side effects, or whether there was more to what he’d done to her than what had already been revealed. On the other hand, it could have just been the miraculous gift it appeared to be, and I should simply accept it.

  Helena must have noticed my facial contortions agreeing with this last thought.

  “Don’t worry about it, Jacob,” she said. “I’ll be fin…”

  She winced and I jumped to my feet immediately.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Fine, Jacob,” she said with a
quick laugh after a little time had passed, holding her enormous belly. “Just another contraction. This little guy is ready to claw his way out.”

  “That’s my baby girl,” I said with a smile, reaching out to grip Helena’s hand. She took it and smiled too as she leaned back, grew comfortable, and prepared to play the waiting game. I scooted my chair closer and did the same, never letting go of her hand as I leaned my head back and closed my eyes.

  ***

  Four Hours Later…

  “Another successful miracle,” Dr. Garvey said jokingly as he tended to Helena while Louise placed a tiny, alien looking creature against Helena’s chest seconds after the doctor had extracted it from its lair. The room had been a textbook display of pure chaos for the last hour, and while the intensity seemed to have passed, the room was still spinning. Helena was crying, I was on the verge of crying, Louise was laughing, and the doctor was suddenly completely serious, doing whatever it was that still needed doing.

  After what we’d just gone through, I didn’t want to know.

  There wasn’t much noise in the room at the moment, but then came the squeals, the cutest little screams I’d ever heard in my entire life. Louise placed a blanket over our squirmy little baby and took a step back, allowing me to step in and get a better look.

  Helena, tears still flowing, looked up at me. “She’s beautiful!”

  I craned my head to the side as I looked into my baby’s bellowing face, all blue, wrinkly, and with a mop of dark hair that rivaled even Helena’s. My first thought was to ask, is she really? But I’d learned at least one lesson or two in the past few years, and thought better of it.

  I reached out and placed a hand on my baby girl’s tiny, little back. “She really is.”

  Helena laughed again and looked back down at our daughter, and now I couldn’t help but laugh as well at the sheer insanity of the last hour, when things had really started to heat up, Helena doing all the work in less than forty five minutes. The whole thing had been a blur, over in the blink of an eye, and had been an adrenaline rush more intense than even the most insane battle I’d ever been in. And now that everything had calmed down, like in war, emotions were blindsiding me.

  Trying to focus on something to keep myself from breaking down completely, I turned to Dr. Garvey, who was still tending to Helena. “Everything all right, Doc?”

  “Well,” he said. “There seems to be some bleeding. Quite normal. Let me… no, wait, everything looks good. Odd.”

  I glanced at Helena knowingly but she was hardly paying me any attention.

  I turned to Louise. “Can I hold her?”

  Louise stepped up and took our little girl in her hands. “Let me get her cleaned up and measured first, Jacob.”

  “I guess I can let you do that.”

  Louise smiled and stepped away, performing duties she’d probably done a million times before, but the smile on her face as she tended to our daughter proved that she loved every second of every opportunity she had to help bring new life into this world. I smiled and let her work. A second nurse had arrived at my request, and was taking a few pictures of the procedure so that I could stay with Helena.

  She couldn’t take her eyes off of our daughter, so I kept myself out of her line of sight as I leaned down and kissed her forehead. “You did great, Helena.”

  “We did great,” she corrected, never breaking eye contact. “I must say, Jacob. I’m impressed you held it together.”

  I flicked my eyebrows in the air nervously and nodded. “You and me both.”

  She smiled and finally looked up at me. “I guess we’ll finally have to pick a name.”

  We’d opted out of knowing the sex of our baby, wanting it to be a surprise. Had it been a boy, we’d had a name ready for him since day one, but we’d gone back and forth on girl names the entire pregnancy. There were too many to pick from, and the selection criteria was ridiculous. A unique name but not obscure. Known to others but not too popular. A name that nobody we knew already had. Etc, etc…

  We’d considered Diana, but something about using it seemed too much like a memorial. It implied a loss of hope, and despite all the wonder and joy the last year of my life had given me, I still hadn’t given up on her.

  In any case, there was only one name completely off the table.

  Agrippina, of course.

  “I still like Sophia,” Helena said.

  “Eh…” I muttered with a shrug.

  This was it. The moment I’d been waiting for. I’d known what name I wanted for my first daughter for years, but hadn’t wanted to overplay my hand until the very last second, right when I could manipulate Helena when she was at her most emotional, as any good father and husband would.

  “What…” she said, her voice suspicious in a way that suggested she was growing aware of my ploy.

  I held off, waiting for Louise to hurry up and bring me the baby. She was just now swaddling her up nice and tight and warm while the other nurse placed a little stocking cap over her head.

  “Jacob…”

  I stalled just a little longer by taking a step toward Louise as she finally finished, holding my hands out and waiting as she slipped my beautiful daughter into my hands. Eight and a half pounds and twenty one inches long, she was long, lean, and solid, but still she felt like a feather in my arms. I looked down into her scrunched face that now seemed peaceful after she’d gotten all that crying out of her system, her closed eyes and set mouth making her look almost grumpy, old, and all too serious.

  I laughed at the sight of her and returned to Helena, who now had her hand over her mouth, her eyes full of joyful tears again at the sight of us.

  Perfect.

  But instead of digressing further, I simply came out with it. “What about Penelope?”

  Helena’s hand didn’t move but her eyes narrowed in anger. “After your stupid gun??”

  “No!” I said sharply but not angrily or too loudly. “Of course not. It was my mother’s name first, remember?”

  Helena probably would have shot her hand to her mouth in surprise had it not already been there, and I knew my plan was working. Helena had known Penelope had been my mother’s name since the very beginning of our relationship, except my mom had always gone by Penny, and that’s how I had referred to her in the few times I hadn’t just called her “mom”.

  Never Penelope.

  Helena seemed to consider for a few moments, each and every second of introspection lifting my spirits. Finally, without saying anything, she reached out and beckoned for her little girl. Obediently, I gently passed her off to Helena, who took her in her arms. Louise came over and put a hand on our still nameless daughter’s head and her other hand on Helena’s shoulder.

  “Ready to trying feeding, mom?”

  Helena looked at her, smiled, nodded, and the two got to work. I watched patiently, not really knowing or understanding what was going on, but interested all the same. It took a good fifteen minutes, but something seemed to have worked, because Louise finally pulled away and walked past me, gripping and squeezing my arm as she passed. I stepped up, noticed everything seemed to be in order, and placed a hand on Helena’s shoulder.

  She leaned her head down and kissed my forearm before lifting it to look at me, her lips still puckered. I leaned down and kissed her gently, not wanting to disturb the tenuous situation below, and pulled away.

  Helena smiled and looked down again.

  Precious time, as it never ceased to do, passed.

  “Penelope,” Helena finally whispered, her eyes still on the baby. She lifted her head, her eyes never happier, and smiled. “It’s perfect.”

  The En…

  …d?

  But why does it have to end here? Why does it have to be over? Do people simply up and vanish when certain chapters in their lives come to a close? Do individuals cease to exist when nothing of interest happens to them? When they’re old and boring? The simple answer to these questions is: no.

  We persist. We
live. We find new adventures to go on and new stories to weave.

  And such is the case with me.

  My story isn’t over. There’s still more to tell.

  Far more…

  I guess now should be a good time to clarify that this isn’t Jacob Hunter, nor Diana, but Edward Crichton. No, I haven’t implanted myself into my own story – not really, anyway – but this is where I normally add my Note from the Author section, so bear with me for a moment. I intend to do something special here. It’s not unique or particularly ground breaking, but it’s different and will add something to the story that I think most of you will appreciate.

  That is, if you choose to continue reading.

  You see, you don’t need to go any further. Let me emphasize this here: my Praetorian Series has come to an end. It’s over. It certainly was a long journey (this book especially), and I’m happy with where it ended. Jacob’s time in Rome is over, and I’m pretty sure he’s quite content with that as well. The story is complete, the characters have found some semblance of peace and happiness, and all seems right with the world.

  But there’s more.

  There’s always more

  The Praetorian Series may be over, but these characters still have more to experience.

  So, if you’ve read this far, allow me to take a moment to thank you again. Thanks for hanging on till the end. I hope you enjoyed it. But… if you didn’t enjoy it or feel unfulfilled, feel free to close your book or shut down your e-reader now. If you have no intention of ever reading another Edward Crichton novel or have absolutely come to hate me or these characters, then please see yourself out. Please understand, I am not bitter. Everyone has their own unique tastes, thoughts, and opinions, and you’re certainly entitled to your own, even if they lead you to dislike my work.

  However, if it’s all the same to you, let’s just part ways now and move on.

  There’s nothing for you here.