Child of the Outcast

by Elizabeth Dunlap

  “Mine?” he asked. I nodded. “I’m sorry, Lisbeth. I should’ve said no to you. I had no idea this could happen.”

  I shook my head. “You wouldn’t have said no to me so don’t pretend otherwise. I was dying inside and I didn’t care. I took advantage of you.”

  He chuckled. “That’s never happened to me before, and it still hasn’t so don’t feel bad.” He walked closer, respectfully, and kissed my forehead. “Lisbeth. I realized something after that night, and I hope it doesn’t hurt your feelings.” He hesitated, scared of how I would react to what he was about to say. “I don’t love you like that. I thought that I did, all these years, but I was confusing the love I felt for you with the love I felt for your…“ I raised my eyebrows, shocked that he was about to confess how he knew me. He bit down on his lip to stop himself from saying too much. “My point is…”

  “Okay, A. One day you are going to finish that sentence.” He rolled his eyes at me. “B. I don’t love you like that either. That one night, I didn’t care. I’ve regretted it ever since. I risked our friendship and I’m sorry.”

  He hesitated, and then he pet my hair, the same way he always did. “You could never lose my friendship. I promise that.”

  My hand moved to my stomach. “I can’t tell anyone you’re the father. They might try to take the baby. They’ll be afraid of it.”

  He put his hand on mine. “The child of a vampire and an Incubus. We have no idea what she’ll be.”

  My eyebrows raised. “She?”

  His face went still. “What? Did I say she?”

  I poked him. “Do you have some magical baby gender knowing power?”

  He tried to look innocent. “Noo-o-o?”

  “You are so dead!”

  CHAPTER 5

  I SAT IN THE CASTLE hospital wing with Arthur, waiting to see the doctor. As every second passed, I felt more and more guilt. What kind of love did I have for Knight if I got pregnant with someone else not even a year after losing him? I didn’t love Balthazar like I loved Knight. I’d been so alone and so broken that I’d clung to Balthazar like a piece of glitter. And now I was paying the price. A price I’d have with me forever, a constant reminder that I was unfaithful to the man I loved. It was good that Knight was dead. I would never be able to face him after this.

  Arthur was in the chair next to me, arms folded over his chest, staring at a painting across the room. I’d only needed to tell him I had to come here and he brought me, no questions asked. He didn’t even offer up a ‘How’d you get someone past me?’ complaint. And now he sat next to me quietly without comment. Who knew I’d legitimately appreciate his company for once.

  The nurse finally came into the waiting room, not like she had anyone else to give her attention to, and called my name. I stood up and followed her to the examination room with Arthur on my tail. Since vampires didn’t get hurt, this hospital wing was for one purpose only: babies. If you were seen in the hospital wing, that was it. Everyone knew you were expecting, or suspected you were which wasn’t much better in my case.

  I sat down on the examination table, Arthur stood by the door, and we waited for a few minutes before the doctor came in. He wasn’t very old, only a century or so, and I didn’t know him very well.

  “Lisbeth,” he said brightly, checking the chart I’d filled out. “So, there’s a little one on the way, I see?” Ugh. Doctor small talk. “Now, please don’t be offended but I have to ask since you left it blank on the form. Who is the father?”

  I gripped the edge of my shirt tightly. “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “You’re not mated?” he asked. Single mothers were extremely uncommon amongst Born vampires. I shook my head. “Right.” He wrote a few things on my paper and walked up to me to lean in close. “It’s not his, is it?” He casually motioned to Arthur, trying to be discreet. I grimaced at the prospect, so the doctor straightened up. “Alright then. No father. That’s not a problem. Good. Good.” I rolled my eyes as he tried to pretend it wasn’t a big deal. He laid me down on the examination table and rolled some equipment over to me. It looked weird, not like the typical ultrasound machines I’d seen on television. “Special vampire ultrasound machines,” he explained when he saw my confusion. “We only have the best here.”

  One of the machines had an arm on it, like the kind used for x-rays, with a digital display screen on top. He rolled it closer to me until the arm was over my stomach. A flip of a switch and the machine turned on, covering my belly with light. There was a tiny display screen on the side near my face so I could see what the doctor was seeing on top of the arm.

  A baby.

  I’d felt it inside me, and now I could see it as clearly as a photograph. Little fingers, little toes. My little one. She twitched, her oddly shaped body moving around in her little sac, and she stuck a tiny finger into her newly formed mouth. I reached a hand out and ran my fingers over the display. Over my baby’s image.

  “She’s so tiny,” I said out loud.

  “You’re about nine weeks along,” the doctor told me. I already knew. He punched more buttons and the machine made clicking noises like a camera taking a picture. Then he flipped the switch again and the image of my baby went away. I wanted to protest, but he handed me some photos he’d just taken and printed of her. “Come back next week and we’ll take more.” He showed us out of the hospital wing, leaving me alone with Arthur, who was still silent.

  “You disapprove?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “It’s not against the law to get pregnant.” I got the feeling the only thing he cared about was rule breaking. You could torture someone in front of him and as long as it wasn’t breaking the law, he wouldn’t care. “I’ll talk to Othello,” he said. “You’ll need to feed from humans while you’re expecting. Bagged blood will just make you throw up again. Let’s go.” He started walking down the hallway, expecting me to follow.

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me,” he said blankly.

  In all my 400+ years, there was a very small number of things that I had not experienced, and most of them were things that I wasn’t interested in, like bungie jumping or being launched into space. Pregnancy was in that number.

  Knowing humans as I did, it was something human females looked forward to and were expected to do. Human vampires, not so much. Sure, having progeny is great, but there’s more than one way we made life. We could either have a child of our own, or turn humans in the turning ceremony. The former creates lifelong ties, the latter does not.

  I had sired more of the turned than I could count, and I had never kept in touch with a single one of them. I created them, I trained them, and I forgot them. I hadn’t always wanted that, but it was expected, so you can imagine how much being pregnant scared me. The child inside me wasn’t someone I could just give birth to and send on its merry way. He or she (most likely she, thank you, Balthazar) would be with me for the rest of my existence, assuming I’d be destroyed before my child was.

  I didn’t know how to raise a child. I never had parents, I was a ward of the Order. The Order didn’t tuck me in to sleep at night, and they didn’t teach me how to ride a bike, or whatever it is that humans view as parenting (Not that we had bikes in the 16th century).

  Most humans have hesitation about being a parent because their parents were horrible at it. They think that because their parent yelled at them, they’ll become a parent that yells. And that’s partly true, because you learn from what you see.

  I had never seen anyone be a parent.

  Vampire children were rare. Like I said, we didn’t necessarily feel the need to reproduce. In our Order, one vampire was born about every ten years, and I’m approximating with that. Sometimes it’s longer. So, with the number of babies in our population, and considering none of the Born I was close to had yet to become parents, I was in uncharted waters. Couple that with the fact that the child I was carrying was the spawn of an Incubus, I had more than enough reason to freak out.


  All of this was running through my head after Arthur had left me in my rooms. His attitude towards me was different somehow, gentler. Not gentle in the way of attraction to me, just gentle. I wasn’t sure he could even feel attraction.

  Something in my face must’ve exposed all my random thoughts, because Arthur returned twenty minutes later with a tray of tea. He came in without knocking, apparently not caring that I could’ve been changing, and set the tray down on the coffee table in front of the sofa I was sitting on. On it was ginger cookies, a bottle of bubbling water, and tea that smelled like peppermint.

  He sat down next to me, not speaking, and carefully poured the tea into a teacup which he passed to me. He poured some for himself, took a sip, and picked up the saucer with cookies. He offered it to me, let me take some, before putting it back on the tray.

  I sipped my tea, a peppermint vanilla blend, and felt the soothing mint help my churning stomach. I took a bite of the soft ginger snaps and relaxed against the sofa.

  “These are good,” I told him gratefully. “People usually add peppers to ginger snaps. I don’t like that.” I took another bite.

  “I know,” he said simply. He knew? “You never eat the food I bring if it has peppers. I made sure the cookies did not have any.”

  “Wow. My captor cares. Color me silly.”

  He sipped his tea and ignored my comment. “You are scared to be pregnant.” First he knows I hate peppers, and now he can read my thoughts? Someone needed to get a life. I.E. One that did not involve living outside my doorway.

  “That’s not really something I want to discuss with a non-friend,” I informed him, trying to only be a little frosty.

  He set his tea cup down. “Olivier is judging you, so I don’t think you want to talk to her about this. We are not friends, yes, but I have experience in these matters.” That floored me. Him, knowing about pregnancy? I’d have been less shocked if I discovered he liked macramé.

  “You have experience with pregnant vampires?” I asked him in disbelief.

  “I had a mate before Olivier joined the Hunters. She became with child, and I was there for her pregnancy. She was scared, like you, at first. She had also been an orphan, and didn’t know how to be a parent. I may not be the perfect person to help you, but I will if I can.” He had displayed only the barest hint of emotion during his speech, leading me to wonder what the outcome of his mate’s pregnancy had been.

  “Did she have the baby?”

  His face went blank again. “No. She went blood crazy from not feeding enough. We had to kill her.”

  To say I was shocked was an understatement. I’d thought the Council had some amount of leniency, but apparently, I was wrong. Not to mention, Arthur was way more devoted to his job than I’d originally thought. To have killed his own pregnant mate just because the laws demanded it, ending her life and the life of his child before it could be born. That wasn’t right or fair, and I had a feeling he hadn’t cared at all.

  Any tenderness I’d felt for him was now gone. I set my tea cup down and stood up.

  “Thank you for the tea, but please leave.”

  He also stood up and glanced at me before he walked to the door. I could tell he knew exactly why I was upset. “My idea of loyalty is repulsive, I know,” he admitted. “But my offer still stands. No one else at this Order can, or will, help you.”

  I stared at him coldly. “I said leave.”

  He left without looking back at me again.

  CHAPTER 6

  NOW I WAS ON MY own. No boyfriend, no baby daddy, no best friend, and the only person who was offering support was a man who had killed his unborn child out of principle.

  Yay.

  The good news was Othello approved me for two human companions. I didn’t get to choose them, and they wouldn’t be staying in my rooms since I was still under house arrest. My new companions were both big and burly, towering over me with their height. I had no doubt who had chosen them (Arthur had zero taste).

  My morning companion was named Benjamin. He was Italian, and spoke with an accent that made women weak at the knees. His plan after his tenure was to use his severance money to start a restaurant outside of Venice, which he would be able to afford with the money he’d be getting. I loved restaurants as much as the next girl, but he made it sound as boring as potato farming.

  My evening companion was named Alfred. He was African, and I only called him Alfred because he refused to tell me his name. I hoped wasn’t prejudice towards me, so I assumed he just didn’t want to fraternize with a prisoner. I could see him and Arthur being best friends.

  Not surprisingly, both of my new companions were former military as their looks suggested, and were most likely under Arthur’s command, so they put my prisoner status above my needs. They let me feed, and they left. I only knew so much about Benjamin because he liked to talk while I fed, which as I mentioned was boring as hell. Still, it was conversation. Though, if I tried to respond to anything Benjamin said, he would get up and leave whether or not I was finished.

  Oh, the company I keep.

  Cameron came to find me a few days after the news had circulated around the castle of my scandalous visit to the baby doctor. I was playing mah-jongg on my floor and Arthur swung my front door open, shoved Cameron in, and closed it behind him.

  It still jarred me to see Cameron as a vampire, but he looked genuinely happy. I couldn’t stay upset with him for it if he was happy.

  “Onee!” he said happily, grabbing me in a hug. “I heard you’re expecting! That’s so awesome, high five!” I high fived him and he joined me on the floor.

  “Yeah, it’s umm… unexpected. To say the least.” I worried my hands in my lap. “I’m scared. A little.”

  “What, you? Scared? Pffft. Don’t be stupid. You’re gonna rock this. You’ll be such a cool mom that everyone else will be like, ooo I wish Lisbeth was MY mom!” A dam of all my repressed emotions broke free and I started crying. “Woah, hey, I was just kidding. Being a cool mom sucks. You’ll be as uncool as a pocket protector.” He lost his funny edge and grabbed me again to pull me into his arms.

  I couldn’t speak over the sobs coming from my mouth. I’d kept myself together over the months, only breaking that one moment with Balthazar, and I couldn’t do it now. Not over this.

  “What’s wrong, sweetheart? Can you tell me like you used to?”

  Like I used to when he was human.

  “I lost him,” I breathed finally, my voice scratchy with tears. “I waited four hundred years to find him, and I lost him. And then what did I do? I got pregnant with someone else. I betrayed all that time spent waiting for him. I might as well have had my sights only on ‘someone for now’ instead of ‘someone forever.’ I hate myself so much. I’ll never escape this.”

  Cameron chuckled and kissed my hair. “Silly girl. You’re not supposed to escape mistakes. You’re supposed to learn from them.” He rubbed my arm and sat there with me while I got my tears under control. “One time, when I was still a teenager, someone said something to me. I never forgot it. Know what it was?” I shook my head. “Everyone has regrets. It just depends on what kind. A decision you should have never made, or being denied the chance to say goodbye.”

  I’d said that to him.

  “I had debts from my times on the street, and I didn’t tell you about them,” Cameron continued. “They caught up with me. My debtors had me broken and bloody in an alley, and you fought them off, you protected me. I felt like I didn’t deserve your protection because I’d brought it on myself. It was my fault. And then you said that to me. You made me understand that everyone makes mistakes. No one is above them.”

  I smiled at the memory, and frowned again. “But I moved on. I moved on from my soul mate. What does that make me?”

  “It makes you…” He broke off, laughing to himself. I pulled away to look at him.

  “What?”

  He was still laughing when he said, “I was going to say it makes you human.” I couldn
’t help but laugh with him, and I felt some of the pain lessen.

  “I’m still scared,” I confessed. “I’ve never been a parent before. I never had parents. I don’t know what to do.”

  “I doubt that. I was so young when I came to you, just 15, and you stood by me, Lisbeth. You were more my mom than my big sister. You raised me.”

  I hadn’t thought of it like that, but he was right. I’d counselled him, given him boundaries, and made sure he stayed healthy. I loved him. That’s what parenting was, right?

  “Then you should be calling me okaa-san, mother,” I said with a sarcastic smile.

  He grabbed my arm and whined in Japanese, “Okaa-san, buy me a popsicle!”

  Not two weeks later, the Council called me back again.

  Arthur came to get me, and with his hand firmly on my arm, we went down to the bigger drawing room. The Council sat at the spiffy new Council of Evil table, all business and no smiles.

  My pregnancy had begun to show. I was a bean pole, so it looked bigger than it actually was. More than a few of the Council members stared at my belly as we approached them, with unmasked distain. Othello ignored me completely.

  Castilla stood up when we’d reached the center of the large room. “Elisabeth. It is nice to see you again. I see you are with child. Congratulations.” Her words were nice, but she had about as much excitement as someone picking out a tomato.

  “Thank you,” I responded. Arthur let go of my arm and stepped back a little. He was still close enough to grab me if I felt like killing anyone, or whatever he thought I was going to do. Wildcard Lisbeth, that’s me.

  “Elisabeth, you stand accused of disregarding your duty to slay any Lycan found within our borders.” If my memory served correctly, which of course it did, she was using her exact wordage from the first time I had been before them. “This is the second in our most sacred laws. To ignore it is punishable by death. Do you understand this?” Yep, she was repeating herself. Maybe it was a protocol thing? Like, read him his rights before we slap him in chains!