The Changeling

by H. P. Mallory

  “Everyone’s making an effort, Sinjin. Even Dureau and Rand. I even heard Mercedes saying she’d like to try out the caber! Why can’t you join in?”

  He shrugged. “Because everyone else is making the effort. Someone has to remain vigilant, and in the absence of anyone else, that someone is me.” He fixed his eyes on me, and, as it always did, his gaze melted me. “I will not let anything happen to you, my tempest. There is danger out there, and if I must endure your scoldings to protect you from it, then I shall.”

  It was sweet, sort of. “Thank you.”

  He laid a hand on my belly. “Is the sprog enjoying things?”

  I often felt like my unborn baby picked up on my moods. When I was happy, the shape of its feelings were bright and bouncy.

  “Loving every second.”

  He smiled. “Go back to your games, my pet. If Mercedes really is going to toss a caber, then you would not want to miss it.”

  For all Sinjin’s misgivings and his refusal to join in, the day went well, and from that day on, the Daywalkers became more integrated into our community. As they competed together, new friendships were forged that continued after the sun had set on our Highland games. It made me happy to know my plan had worked.

  We’d done the right thing by inviting the Daywalkers here. They made us stronger as they made Luce weaker. More importantly, we’d freed them from that wretched existence, and given them the right to enjoy life. There was no denying it; things were good.

  Right up until they weren’t…

  #

  I started awake, bolt upright in bed, gasping in shock, eyes wide open to take in the darkened room. Sinjin lay, sleeping beside me, the room was calm and cool. Ever since Sinjin had routinely taken my blood, his hours had begun to change. He walked in the daylight and found himself tired in the night.

  I looked around myself and realized there was nothing to be frightened of. So what had awoken me? It took me a few seconds to put my finger on it. But, once I did, cold fear gripped me.

  I couldn’t feel my child.

  TWO

  Bryn

  My cry woke Sinjin instantly.

  “What’s wrong?”

  At first, I struggled to tell him, my words coming out in a babbled incoherent stream. But as soon as he understood, I saw the same horror on his face that was still clutching at my stomach. Vampires can’t turn pale, they don’t have enough color in their faces to begin with, but I watched the blood drain from Sinjin’s lips, his blue eyes widened, and his hands balled into tight fists.

  In the next instant, he sprang from the bed and ran at the wall, dematerializing before he hit it, traveling in leaps to get help.

  At another time, I might have been amused by the fact that he hadn’t bothered to put any clothes on, but my mind was filled only with worry for my child. I reached out with my mind again, searching but finding nothing. Almost afraid to do so, I placed a trembling hand against my swollen belly.

  “Please… please…” I whispered.

  I didn’t expect to feel anything—if I couldn’t sense the baby, then what hope was there? But a moment later, to my astonishment, I felt movement inside me. I let out a choking cry of relief as fresh tears, this time of happiness, sprang to my eyes.

  The baby was alive.

  But then another troubling thought seized me: if the baby was alive, why couldn’t I sense it?

  #

  Jolie shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry, Bryn,” she said as doubt clouded her expression. “I can’t sense her anymore, either.”

  “But she’s still alive,” Mathilda reassured me.

  “Yes,” Mercedes added.

  “Then what is wrong?” Sinjin, now dressed, stood behind the three women who stooped over my bed. His arms were folded, his face grimly set.

  Mercedes threw up her arms. “As far as I can tell, there’s nothing wrong.”

  “Something is wrong,” I insisted.

  “I believe you.” Mercedes could be sharp and antagonistic, and we hadn’t always gotten along. But at times like this, all the pettiness went out of her, and there was no one better to have in your corner. “All I can say is there’s nothing I can find wrong with your child. The baby seems healthy and content.”

  I couldn’t argue with the prophetess, but I looked desperately over to Mathilda for a second opinion. No one knew magic like the powerful Fae, but she could only give me a helpless smile from her old yet somehow young-looking face.

  “The child’s heart is beating, dear,” she said. “The baby’s limbs are moving, her blood is flowing, and her spirit is strong. There is no spell on you, no curse, no glamour, no flux, no charm laid across you or the child. No magic has been used here that I can feel. I don’t know why you can’t sense the baby anymore, but I must agree with Mercedes.”

  Clearly, Mathilda was of the same belief as Jolie that my baby was a girl.

  Sinjin snorted contemptuously. His respect for the old magics wavered with his moods, and with whether or not they agreed with him.

  “You should see a doctor,” said Jolie, firmly.

  Mercedes drew herself up, looking haughtily down her nose. “A mortal? What can they tell you that we can’t?”

  “This may not be a problem of magic,” replied Jolie. “There may be some medical problem that might not be obvious to your skills.”

  She worded it carefully, but that wouldn’t stop Mercedes from being offended at the idea that a mortal could do something she couldn’t. “The child is the product of an Elemental and a Vampire

  – the first of its kind as far as I’m aware. And you think the problem might not be magical in nature?”

  “I think it might be worth checking.” Jolie didn’t like to flex her royal authority unless she had to, but I could hear a hardness creeping into her voice.

  “And what, pray, will Bryn tell the doctor ?” Mercedes spat the word. “That she’s unable to sense the baby’s feelings?”

  “We shall tell him that something feels wrong,” Sinjin interjected in a voice that allowed for no further discussion.

  “That will be enough.”

  “It may just be that the baby has learned to cloak its thoughts,”

  said Mathilda, comfortingly. “After all, she may have your abilities, Bryn, and Sinjin’s strength. We have no way of knowing what this baby will be – what she is capable of now or what she may be capable of in the future.”

  That was true, and I wanted to believe that was all that was wrong. But with my child’s voice suddenly silenced within me, I couldn’t help feeling a dark cloud hanging over me.

  “I’ll go to the doctor’s,” I said, meekly. I hadn’t joined in the discussion thus far, it seemed distant and irrelevant, like an argument happening somewhere else. All the strength had gone out of me to be replaced by a cold brick of fear, sitting heavy in the pit of my stomach.

  “Would you like me to charm you?” asked Mathilda, kindly, stroking my hair. “Something to take the anxiety away?”

  “No… Thank you. Not yet. I want the doctor to examine me as I am.”

  As the others left, Sinjin leaned over me to kiss me as I started to cry again – I’ve never been a crier, but right now, I couldn’t stop myself.

  “You heard what they said; the sprog is healthy.”

  “But…”

  “He is my babe and yours, my Tempest. That makes him the strongest child there has ever been. If there is something wrong, then I have faith our child will fight it and win.” Sinjin was of the belief the baby was a boy. I thought he felt more comfortable with a boy than a girl, such that I did.

  Maybe Sinjin was just trying to make me feel better, but it worked. I wouldn’t let my child down by weakening now. I wiped away my tears and sat up resolutely.

  Sinjin forced a smile. “That’s my girl.”

  #

  Sinjin

  Of all the wonders of the modern age that I have seen during my six hundred year existence, the mobile phone is the one which I vi
ew with the most ambivalence. It has its uses, of course (besides the ludicrous aps one could acquire), but it was also a curse. At a time like this, both sides of that equation were displayed. On the one hand, it was good to know that as soon as there was news from the doctor, Bryn would be able to let me know. On the other hand, the phone’s silence told me there was no news and kept me tense and frustrated.

  Naturally, I had wanted to accompany my love and my unborn child into town, but it was daylight now, and it had been some time since I had last drunk the blood of my Hellion that enabled me to walk under the sun. And in the current circumstances, I did not dare to drink her blood more than once a day.

  So I remained in our little house, sitting alone with the black-out shutters closed and my mobile phone beside me. Time hung heavy. For a vampire, a year is a short time, but today each second seemed slow and clumsy as I waited for news with nothing to do but think, and with only one thing to think about.

  Could it be my fault?

  The thought had occurred to me more than once since the little party had set out for the doctor’s. Perhaps vampires and Elementals were not meant to breed? Vampires were not even supposed to be able to father children – and yet, by some miracle, Bryn and I were soon to be parents.

  In general, vampires reproduced the old-fashioned way, by biting someone, drinking their blood, then letting them drink ours and so on. Clean, easy, and quietly romantic in its way I have always felt.

  Had Bryn and I overstepped some unseen boundary by conceiving a child together? It was possible that we had offended the natural order.

  Or perhaps it was the blood-drinking. When we discovered Bryn was pregnant, I had shied away from drinking her blood—an intimacy we both enjoyed—for fear of harming the babe, which was, after all, also in need of his mother’s blood. But Bryn had insisted I continue to drink from her, somehow knowing it would not hurt the sprog. She was quite certain that if my partaking of her blood did cause the child distress, she would know. Had she been wrong?

  Had I taken too much? Perhaps the child had reached a size where it needed more blood, and I had deprived it?

  Oh, fate, shame me now!

  But the thought that haunted me most came from a less logical direction. Perhaps I simply deserved this? Perhaps it was some karmic punishment directed at me personally. I was a vampire; we were not by nature ‘nice.’ Nowadays, I lived differently (some might even say well). I was, for want of a better word, good. Or, as good as I was capable of being. Some might have said I had been ‘tamed’ or even ‘castrated,’ but let any of them say that to my face, and they would find out how ‘tame’ I was. What I was now I had become by choice. And for the first time in my obscenely long life, I was also happy.

  But the shadows of my past still loomed. I had killed, as a vampire must, to survive, but I had killed for other reasons too.

  In times past, there had been places on this earth where the name Sinjin Sinclair struck fear into hearts. Of course, those were more violent times, and mortals were more than capable of hurting each other—I had seen the Inquisition at work, after all. I was a product of the times in which I had lived and surely could not be blamed for that. But all those mortals doing each other harm were now long gone, punished by time, while I, Sinjin Sinclair, Master Vampire, endured, thrived, and had found an undeserved happiness.

  Time inflicted no punishment on me, so perhaps something else had…

  I did not believe in karma – a concatenation of New-Age nonsense.

  But one thing I had learned in my six hundred years was that, just because I did not believe in something, did not mean that something did not exist.

  The phone rang. All that waiting, and now that it rang, I found myself unable to pick the blasted thing up and answer.

  Come on, you coward.

  I grabbed the phone. “Hello? Bryn?”

  “It’s Jolie,” said the familiar voice at the other end.

  “Is Bryn alright?”

  “She’s fine, Sinjin.”

  “And the child?”

  The slight pause told me all I needed to know. “The baby is fine, Sinjin. The doctor said the same as Mercedes and Mathilda.

  Physically the baby is as healthy a baby as the doctor had ever seen – he was quite complimentary. Strong, healthy, clear heartbeat, everything you could ask for.”

  I felt numb—a cold blank sensation stealing through me. I had faced many enemies in my life, more than I could count, and I had defeated them by strength or by guile. Or, sometimes, they had defeated me by the same means, because not even I could win every fight. But this was an enemy I could not fight and did not know how to face.

  “Sinjin? Are you still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “The child is healthy,” she repeated, but there was something in her voice—a certain deepness to the sound which alerted me.

  “Nothing is wrong, except that something is wrong.”

  THREE

  Sinjin

  Given the choice, Bryn and I would have preferred to keep this matter private, between ourselves, as any couple would have. But the truth was this might yet prove to be bigger than us. By the time the four women had returned from the doctor, Jolie had told Randall , and he, in turn, had consulted with Odran, the buffoon, and Chevalier, the fop, and so on and so on, word spreading with the obscene speed of gossip as a new concern took hold.

  In hindsight, it had only been a matter of time before someone raised the possibility that there was nothing physically ‘wrong’

  with Bryn, but that she had been attacked by some malign agency.

  And there was only one name that sprang to mind.

  “If you ask me,” Randall held the floor in the Queen’s council chamber, “this has got Luce’s fingerprints all over it.”

  I was reminded afresh of what a complete fool the man truly was, announcing what everyone was thinking as if it were his own stroke of inspired genius,

  “Nae man wi’ any honor would make sooch an attack!” bawled Odran, smacking a meaty fist onto the table. Perhaps it was my imagination or the fact that I found the King of the Fae an irritating presence, but he seemed to be almost enjoying this –

  men like Odran are happier at war than at peace.

  “But what does it get him?” asked Jolie, the voice of reason as a Queen should be.

  “He wants revenge on Bryn,” said Chevalier.

  “By that logic, he should be after you too,” said Klaasje. “It’s just as likely that whatever is happening to Bryn’s baby is of natural causes. We don’t know how a vampire/elemental baby might develop.” She took a breath. “Maybe this is just… how it goes?”

  “Klaasje makes a good point,” nodded Mercedes, pragmatic as ever.

  “Vampires and elementals have very different powers, and we cannot know how they would manifest in the child. Vampire abilities and elemental traits may be doing battle inside it as it grows.”

  “The baby doesn’t need to be a sensitive for Bryn to be able to feel its mind,” corrected Jolie. “She can sense vampire minds as well—less clearly, but she would still be able to feel the baby such as she always has to this point.”

  “But elementals can shield their thoughts, can’t they?” Klaasje continued in her Texan accent. “And vampires can too to some extent—the more powerful ones. I’m not saying…” she hastily turned to Bryn, who sat silently beside me, staring out ahead of her, barely in the room. “I’m not saying, Bryn, that this isn’t an attack, I just think we ought to be sure what we’re dealing with before we get you all freaked out.”

  “Bryn understands what you mean,” Jolie said, kindly. I could see she and Bryn were in telepathic communication while the others talked around them. It seemed to be the only way in which my love was willing to communicate at the moment. I felt a momentary pang she was able to talk to her sister in such a way, but not me. I wanted to be there for Bryn, above all others.

  “Well then,” Klaasje went on, “isn’t it possib
le that the baby is using its elemental ability to cloud its mind and just doesn’t know what it’s doing yet? Maybe it’s all just an accident.”

  Mathilda pulled a face. “I suggested that myself earlier, but now I’ve thought more about it… I’m no expert on elemental abilities, but I don’t think that would be normal. Developing babies don’t have that sort of control over their mental faculties yet. It would be like asking a fetus to juggle.”

  “I agree,” Bryn barked out, at last. All heads turned to her.

  “But this isn’t a normal elemental baby,” Klaasje continued.

  “Maybe an elemental – vampire hybrid is different? Maybe the vampire contribution makes the baby develop faster?”

  “That’s a lot of maybes, cheri ,” said Chevalier, his familiarity with Klaasje making my palms itch. “Luce sees Bryn as a traitor –

  we all know that. We all knew he’d likely be looking for revenge.

  It seems far more probable that this would be his doing than some genetic abnormality. We should be preparing for an attack or making our own first.”

  “And how would that help Bryn?” snapped Jolie.

  Chevalier looked crestfallen, which might have pleased me in other circumstances.

  “This is not an ordinary attack,” Jolie held the floor. “If it’s an attack at all. We can’t simply fight back because we don’t even know what’s happened. Our first – our only concern is helping Bryn and her baby. And attacking Luce when we don’t even know if he’s responsible doesn’t achieve that.”

  “I don’t see how it can be Luce,” Mercedes shook her head.

  “However much he wants revenge. He may have power, but not like this.”

  “If it were Luce, I would have felt his magic,” agreed Mathilda.

  “And I sensed nothing.”

  “If this is magic, then it’s more powerful than anything Luce can muster,” Mercedes spoke again.

  “Older too,” nodded Mathilda, thoughtfully. “Birth magic is the oldest there is; primitive and raw.”