by T. S. Ryder
She had to admit, it was a good feeling. Kendra was proud of her strength, but it was nice to know she didn’t have to be strong all the time anymore. She had someone she could rest with and know she would be safe and loved, no matter how strange the way that love came to be was.
With Sebastien at her side, she knew she could survive anything and come out a winner.
Epilogue
Three weeks later, she stood barefoot and dressed in red in the center of the Clan Home back lawn with Sebastien, also barefoot but dressed in dark green, facing each other as they waited for the Clan Priestess to perform the Bonding rite. The elder vampire woman, in elaborate formal robes, suddenly looked at Kendra and proclaimed with a huge smile on her wrinkled face, “You’re pregnant.”
Shocked by the statement, Kendra looked at Sebastien, who seemed just as confused as she was, and then back to the Priestess.
“I beg your pardon?” she asked, and the woman laughed.
“You’re pregnant, child! I can smell the change on you!” The Priestess confirmed her diagnosis, much to the loud joy of everyone present.
Kendra looked at the man who, by the end of this night, would be her husband. He was the only person other than herself who wasn’t cheering, but the smile on his face spoke more of how happy the news made him than all the noise everyone else was making.
“Is she for real?” she asked him, skeptical, and wondering if she’d be criticized for it, but Sebastien just laughed.
“She’s for real,” he confirmed, nodding. “She’s trained to sense such subtle changes. No one else could’ve possibly caught it, not until way longer into the pregnancy.”
Still a little dazed by the revelation, Kendra looked down to her stomach... and then back to the Priestess because a terrifying thought crossed her mind. “The baby... the rite, will it harm it?” she asked, almost frantic, remembering too many stories in which mixing magic and pregnancy resulted in tragedy, but the old woman just smiled and patter her shoulder.
“Don’t worry,” she assured Kendra. “It might be uncomfortable for you, but the baby will be just fine. It’s too small for the rite to affect it. It’s just a cluster of cells waiting to grow into a son or daughter.”
That calmed her well enough, but she still felt an enormous amount of excitement and anxiety mixed together.
A baby.
She was going to have a baby.
She was getting married, doing strange and inexplicable things to her body to make her life as long as her vampire husband’s was, and she was going to have their baby.
If someone had told her all this a month ago, she would’ve had them committed in less than an hour.
Yet it had all happened, and was no less real than the life she was about to leave behind.
Sebastien took her hands in his and smiled that special, warm smiled reserved just for her.
“Ready?” he asked, and Kendra felt her heart overflow with love and hope for the future that lay ahead.
She smiled back and entwined her fingers with his.
“Ready.”
*****
THE END