Black Spring

by Christina Henry

  I reached through the bars, put my hand on his shoulder. He winced when I brushed my fingers across his arm.

  A little pulse of magic flickered through me and into his arm. I was trying to find the precise point where the arm was broken, so that I wouldn’t have to overload him with power. I used my ability to locate the fracture and then sent gentle waves of magic through to heal it.

  Jack watched me with wonder in his eyes. “You could do so much with a power like this. You could heal cancer. AIDS. Kids with rare diseases. Why do you hide yourself from the world?”

  “This power isn’t an endless well, you know,” I said. “Whenever I use too much magic, it takes something out of me. Can you imagine what would happen if everyone in the world knew that I could heal people? Thousands would descend upon my house, each of them with a story sadder and more horrible than the last one. And I wouldn’t be able to say no. I’d help them, and I’d heal them, and eventually I would be too sick and exhausted myself to help anyone else.”

  “But what if you could just help the really needy?” Jack asked as I pulled my hand away.

  “Who decides who’s really needy?” I asked. “Does your arm hurt? Do you feel any aftereffects, like nausea?”

  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.

  But I could feel the black energy seeping around the edges of my connection to Nathaniel, looking for an opening, looking for a way in.

  “Nathaniel,” I said aloud. I thought I felt him respond, but I wasn’t sure.

  Maybe we were, as I’d suspected, in another dimension here in the basement. When I’d been on that strange planet far away in time and space, I hadn’t been able to feel Nathaniel. Which meant that I would have to at least get back up into the mansion before I could call him to me.

  “I’m not Nathaniel. I’m Jack,” Jack said.

  He was soaked in sweat. He looked like one of those people from the P90X commercial, jumping around all over the place and seeming superhappy about it. I don’t get those people. I’m not quite as lazy as Beezle, but how can anyone be that happy when they’re expending that much energy?

  “Come on, exercise boy,” I said. “We’re busting out of this joint.”

  I waddled over to his cell and waved my hand over the lock, opening the door.

  “Yes!” Jack said. “What do we do now? Sneak out of the house?”

  “I doubt there will be any sneaking,” I said. “As soon as we get to the top of the stairs, there will be guards. And we will have to dispatch those guards before they raise an alarm if we want to have any chance of escaping at all. So I need you to calm the fuck down and stop acting like a toddler who just ate a bag of Halloween candy. Because if everything is blown because you’re acting insane, then I will personally throw you to the bottom of these stairs.”

  “No, you won’t,” Jack said, swinging his arms back and forth. “I know all about you now. You talk tough, and it’s cute, but you’re just a big softy.”

  I wanted to list off all the big, dangerous creatures I’d battled and defeated, but it sounded too much like bragging, and I didn’t really like to brag about the murders I’d committe
d, however justified. Plus, there was not enough time to convince a half-crazed human that I was a hell of a lot tougher than I looked.

  “Just stay close to me and don’t make any noise. Got it?” I said as I started up the stairs.

  It would have been significantly faster to fly, but I would have to carry Jack. Under normal circumstances I would have plenty of strength for such a task, even though Jack was about ten or twelve inches taller than me. But it took a lot of work to remain calm in the face of increasing contractions as well as maintain control over my lurking dark side. I didn’t have much left over for carting around the wayward blogger. So it was climbing the stairs for us.

  Jack immediately pushed ahead of me and started jogging up the stairs.

  “Hurry up, won’t you? Why are you so slow?” He started to sing the chorus from an old Duran Duran song.

  “I am going to kill you when I catch up to you,” I mumbled. “I have tried so hard to forget the eighties.”

  I fluttered up to the step behind him. There was no reason for me to trudge up the stairs and get out of breath chasing him if he wanted to run the whole way up.

  We were about halfway to the top by my estimation when Jack suddenly ran out of gas. He slumped against the wall, sliding down until his butt hit the step. His face was white and pale, and he looked like he might boot.

  “Don’t you dare throw up on me,” I said. “I’m the one who’s about to give birth here. I should be falling down and getting sick, not you.”

  My hands were wrapped around the shifting bulge in my belly. I was trying to slow my son down, trying to keep him from emerging into the world at that very moment. I didn’t want to reach the top of the stairs and have the baby pop out right there, into Lucifer’s waiting arms.

  “I feel like crap,” Jack moaned. “I don’t think I can climb another step.”

  “Serves you right for behaving like a lunatic,” I said, trying to pull him to his feet. “No one made you run up the stairs like you were in the Olympics.”

  “Go on without me,” Jack said. “I’m going back to the cell to take a nap.”

  “Get up, you idiot,” I said. “If you stay here, you’re going to be executed by Lucifer in front of his whole court.”

  “Says you,” Jack said. “Maybe he’ll keep me as a performing monkey.”

  “I can’t believe you would consider that a viable alternative,” I said. “Now, get your ass up and moving before I have this baby right here on the stairs.”

  After much grumbling he rose to his feet and started moving again, albeit much slower than before. On the upside, he was much less likely to alert the guards of our presence when he was in his current (and much mellower) state.

  I continued flying behind him. It took a lot less energy for me to fly than to try to climb. My whole stomach now felt like a sponge that was being wrung, and my breath came in pants. Sweat trickled around my face, and I imagined that I now closely resembled those movie moms in labor.

  Jack glanced back at me. “You don’t look so good. How are you holding up?”

  “I just need to get to Nathaniel,” I said.

  “That tall black-haired guy who always stands near you and glowers?” he asked.

  “Yes, him,” I said.

  “Is he the baby’s dad?” Jack asked.

  “No,” I said.

  I didn’t want to explain that I had been married only a few short months before, and that my husband had been killed by my father. It seemed like the sort of thing that might end up on Jack’s blog—if he ever lived to blog again, that was.

  We rounded a curve of the staircase and suddenly there was a small landing and a door directly in front of us. It looked like a plain, ordinary metal safety door, like the kind that are in emergency exits in tall buildings. But there was something different about it. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I put my hand on Jack’s shoulder.

  “Wait a second,” I said.

  I landed on the stair behind him and then nudged my way past. I reached out with my power, looking for a trace of a magical signature.

  And boy, did I find one.

  “That’s no ordinary door,” I said. “It’s booby-trapped with magic.”

  The doors downstairs had been so easy to open because of this. I knew that Lucifer wouldn’t have allowed anyone he considered a threat to be locked up with so little security.

  I just hadn’t thought there would be quite this much security elsewhere. Right away I could tell that the spell on the door would trigger at the slightest touch. There had to be a way to disable the trap from the other side so that the prison guards could come and go.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to wait for Lucifer to decide to give us bread and water. We needed to get out of this stairway immediately. My contractions were getting closer together and more painful. However, I wasn’t certain I could break down the spell without making everything go kablooey. It was a complex work of magic, and a highly dangerous one.

  “I need Nathaniel,” I said again. “Life would be a lot easier if I wasn’t wearing pajama pants.”

  Jack stared at me, his eyes blank and tired. He was coming down hard from the effects of the magic. “What do pajama pants have to do with anything?”

  “If I wasn’t wearing pajama pants, I would have my cell phone,” I said. “And if I had my cell phone, I could just call Nathaniel and have him come and get us out of here instead of trying to rely on a very tenuous emotional link through magic.”

  “I still don’t understand what that has to do with your pajamas,” Jack said.

  “Never mind,” I said. I concentrated hard on Nathaniel, on the connection between us. Now that I was out of the depths of the mansion, I was hoping it would be easier to sense him, and for him to find me.

  Nathaniel, I thought. I didn’t know if it would work or help, but I tried to send a mental picture of where I was and what I needed. It felt slightly silly. Even with all of the things I had seen and done that involved magic, telepathy seemed like it was still an “out-there” concept.

  After a few minutes I had to stop. It was hard to concentrate on sending Nathaniel an S.O.S. when it felt like my stomach was being ripped in two.

  And as soon as I stopped, I heard him.

  I’m coming.

  “Wow, I can’t believe that actually worked,” I said.

  “Can’t believe what actually worked?” Jack asked.

  He had sat down on the stairs with his back against the wall while I did my human-telephone act with Nathaniel. His face was white and covered with sweat, and he was shivering. I probably did not look much better. It was a struggle to stay upright, and a couple of times I saw black dots in front of my eyes, like I was on the verge of fainting.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “The cavalry is on its way. Unless I’m hallucinating Nathaniel’s voice in my head. Which is entirely possible.”

  “You know, I’m starting to wonder how you have such a powerful reputation,” Jack said, his eyes closed. “You seem like kind of a flake.”

  “You’d seem like kind of a flake if you were trapped in a stairwell with an unhelpful blogger while you were in labor,” I said.

  I wondered whether I had really managed to reach Nathaniel, and whether he would understand where I was and how to get rid of the booby trap on the door. I wasn’t really sure what our options were otherwise. There was not nearly enough time for me to try to take apart the spell from this side. If I tried blasting through the wall that surrounded the stairwell, I would most definitely alert Lucifer and his goons. I was still hoping that we could find some way to sneak out of the house.

  How long should I wait, though? I thought. How long could I wait? I didn’t really know anything about having a baby (somehow I’d never gotten around to reading the pregnancy book that Beezle and I had bought a billion years ago), but it seemed to me that the whole process was moving pretty fast. I should have expected this, since the baby had grown unusually large in a short amount o
f time. In fact, I wasn’t anything close to a normal term for a human pregnancy, and yet here he was, on his way.

  Suddenly I felt a surge of emotion inside, and I realized that two things were happening at the same time. One, Nathaniel was coming for me. I hadn’t hallucinated his voice in my head. The bond between us, forged in magic when I’d released his legacy from Puck, had penetrated the barrier of the door and whatever dimension we were in.

  Two, Lucifer had just discovered something that made him angry. I’d felt Lucifer’s emotions occasionally in the past, though not often with clarity. Usually I could just feel him approaching, blood calling to blood. I wondered what had pissed him off this time, and fervently hoped it had nothing to do with me.

  Another contraction hit me hard, and it was a struggle not to cry out. I didn’t know how soundproof that door was, or if there were guards on the other side. If I started screaming, then they would come running—

  I smacked myself in the forehead. “What a dope I am.”

  I opened my mouth and started screaming as loud as I could. A moment later there was an audible sound of fingers punching a keyboard, and the magical shield dropped away from the door. That was interesting. I’d never seen magic that could be programmed with a computer before.

  The entrance swung open, and one of the big guys who’d escorted me into the oubliette stood there. I blasted him in the face with nightfire and he fell to the ground without making a noise, which was mighty convenient.

  Jack had opened his eyes when I started screaming, but was still sitting on the steps with a dazed look.

  “Come on, dummy,” I said from the doorway. “We’re busting out of here.”

  He came to his feet like a two-thousand-year-old man and climbed the steps at a pace so glacial that I almost screamed again in frustration. I cautiously moved into the passageway to scope things out while Jack shambled along behind me.

  We definitely seemed to be in some kind of back hallway, away from the action of the mansion. That was good. It increased the probability that we would be able to sneak away out the servants’ entrance or something like that. This particular passage was lit dimly with just one small bulb on the ceiling. There were two ways to enter it—from the basement and from the opposite end of the hall. There was an open doorway to the right, and yellow light streamed from it.