“We’re getting married on Beltane!” I shrieked. “I can’t be six months pregnant at our wedding! I won’t fit into your mother’s gown!”
And I’d have to deal with the pictures of me with a big ole belly for, like, eternity.
Not…
Gonna…
Happen!
“Darling.”
His lips were twitching.
Twitching!
“This is a disaster!” I shouted.
“It is so far from that, it’s not funny,” he said calmly, though with humor, so obviously on some level he thought it was funny.
“I’m on the Pill. How did your swimmers beat the Pill?” I demanded to know.
“Oral contraception is not full-proof.”
This was true.
However, I studied him closely.
Yup.
And yes, I knew my man so I knew what I was seeing.
Something was up.
That was when I gave him the side eye.
“What aren’t you saying?” I kept demanding to know things.
“Right. I have good news, and interesting news,” he announced.
I gave him the full-on eye and crossed my arms in front of me.
His lips started twitching again.
Ack!
“The good news is, we conceived while I was in full Fae so our child will have Fae in him, or her.”
Okay.
That wasn’t good news.
That was awesome news.
A cute little Ash baby boy with cute little wings?
(Yippee!)
I didn’t give that to Ash, however.
I stayed silent and stared at him.
“The interesting news is, human contraception is entirely ineffective when I’m in full Fae while we’re having sex.”
Uh-oh.
“How is that possible?” I asked. “Fae can’t get humans pregnant.”
“There’s two parts to the answer to that.”
“Well, obviously, I want them both,” I snapped.
“One, I’m Fae, but I’m also human.”
“Mm-hmm,” I hummed impatiently.
“Two, the lineage of the Fae in me is Dark Fae and they can impregnate humans. So I’m sorry, darling, your current condition was inescapable.”
What?
Dark Fae can impregnate humans?
“Did you know this when you were in full Fae and we were having sex?” I asked.
“Cystien did mention it.”
Uh-oh!
“And you didn’t think to mention it to me?”
“Mathilda, I had other things on my mind the first time we had sex when I was full Fae.”
Huh.
This sucked.
Because he did and those things were weighty.
“And once I remembered, the deed was done,” he carried on.
And done and done and done since his wings popped out every single time we had sex.
Mostly because I requested it.
Though, there were a few times when Ash was in the zone where it was spontaneous.
Those were the best.
Ahem.
“Ash,” I said warningly.
“Darling, do you want me to keep my wings folded when we make love?”
I one hundred percent did not.
They were all strong…
And velvety.
“Huh,” I muttered.
“More importantly, do you have an issue with being pregnant with my child?”
I one hundred percent did not.
“Of course not.”
“Then why the drama?”
“A,” I started, lifting my hands up in front of me and grabbing the pinkie of one with the fingers of the other, “we’re getting married on Beltane and I’m wearing your mother’s dress, which is important to you and to me, and I cannot do that if I cannot fit in it, and B,” I grabbed my (engagement) ring finger, “I’m Mathilda. I do drama. And I’m pregnant.”
“Come here,” he ordered.
I went there and don’t give me any guff about it.
I had long since learned it wasn’t worth the hassle and back and forth, bickering with an alpha who tells you to come there.
You just go there because usually when you get there he either touches your face, your hair, holds you, kisses you, a combination of some or all of those, sometimes ending with him fucking you, and all of those (especially the last) are worth being the one to walk there with Ash.
This time, it was a combo of holding me and kissing my nose.
See?
Totally worth it.
“We’ll push the wedding back to Samhain,” he murmured.
“I haven’t had a lot of luck with Hallowe’en,” I reminded him.
“Well, we’ll turn that luck, shall we?” he asked me.
“Huh,” I puffed out, relaxing into him.
“Aren’t you happy about the baby?” he asked carefully.
“Do I love you more than life?” I asked back, not carefully.
He smiled down at me. “Yes.”
“Then of course I’m happy. I just was…surprised.”
“And needed some drama,” he teased. “Things have been lacking in that for about a week.”
I rolled my eyes.
Whatever.
He gave me a squeeze.
“She’ll be beautiful,” he said.
Goddess, this guy.
“He’ll be gorgeous,” I returned.
He smiled at me again.
Then he bent his head and gave me another kiss, this one longer, deeper and way more awesome.
After that, we got busy.
And yeah, when we did, his wings popped out.
Not entirely at my request.
But I totally didn’t complain.
So Ash just left and that was what happened before he did.
I’m pregnant with Ash’s Fae baby.
Yippee!
Now, on to what happened after The Battle of Poet’s Walk.
And brace, because it’s a lot.
Obviously, Mavis (as with the rest of us) was beside herself with grief at the loss of Babs and Pandora, and we had to lay them to rest, and witch funerals were kinda productions (in good, but sad ways), so we were pretty preoccupied with that at first.
And, you know, during all that, people kept saying it should help, knowing they’d put themselves in the path of Zombie Darling and Dark Lord Bligh, which meant, although a couple of our customers lost their lives at the hands of Darling, five others escaped who wouldn’t have if Babs and Pandora hadn’t stepped in.
And people could say this should help in the struggle with grief until they were blue in the face.
But this did not help.
Not even when the people they saved spoke about it at length, and very widely, to the media.
No.
That didn’t help at all.
Because Babs and Pandora were lovely. They were our sisters. The kind who would put themselves in the path of danger and certain death to save others.
And now they were gone.
And nothing helped that.
Now, you may or may not remember, when the public statements were made after Maithieliel did her thing, the existence of vampires wasn’t part of that.
Unless you lived in a cave through all of this, you also know that it wasn’t military helicopters that hovered over the action that night.
They were television helicopters.
So from this came a lot.
I’ll break it down:
1. I looked like hell for all the world to see (and all the world saw) because:
I had not been in any decent frame of mind to put a good outfit together prior to flying in to face evil, so my cords did not go with my sweater, or my scarf, or my boots, or my hat, or any of that going with the other at all, so to all who saw me (and all saw me) I looked like a dotty witch with no fashion sense whatsoever.
(Fate worse than death? No. Sucky? Hell
yes.)
Gluh.
Although Bligh protected my life with his magic in order to continue to toy with me after he blasted the forest (and my tree), he did not protect my hair, so about an inch of it all around got singed off, and trust me, that was not a good look.
Side note: the coven, along with half the population of Clevedon, have replanted the forest with saplings. It was a solemn day, but there was something remarkable about it, witches and humans together, working to restore nature. Sure, it’s going to take about twenty to thirty years before it’s anywhere near its former glory. But it had been a good day.
And I got to replace my tree.
I’d lost track of my bloodied nose, what with all that came after me slamming face first into a wall in the Dungeon, so I had blood all over the lower half of face and all down my sweater, it was pretty gruesome, and did not in any way enhance my overall look (understatement).
However, all of this, and all the wand flinging, magical explosions and me being hurled about (etc.), had the effect to the viewing public that I was a warrior in battle, battling for their lives, which meant looking like hell was embarrassing, but not earth-shattering.
In fact, it had a positive effect, in the end, because all who watched the show saw a witch battling for their lives, nearly dying for them, and not even the biggest bigoted asshole could have anything negative to say about it. Or if they did, they didn’t, because no one would hear a word of it.
And I will admit that I sometimes (okay, a lot), watched the footage because even if he was kicking my ass, in the end, I won and that was the way it went. The hero got an ass-whooping, but always managed to save the day.
In other words, I was totally Jason Bourne.
Yes, my part in saving the world had been highly lauded, but as yet, I did not have an International Day of Celebration (Including Requisite Wearing of Glitter) named after me.
But I hoped that would be forthcoming.
2. Fane, Dad and Gabe showing with their vampire brethren in bat form and out of it, and all of them being hot, seriously outed the vampires (including a vampire in the United States Senate, which caused a sensation, natch).
As an aside: Castle Noapte now had an even larger number of no-name submissives for the boys to bend to their will in happy ways for all.
Truth be told, the vamps being outed wasn’t taken by everyone as real great. I mean, they drank human blood, no getting around it. And that flipped people out, no getting around that either. But, no surprise, because even with the world being on the brink of a semi-certain fall to sheer evil, assholes would be assholes. And there was no preventing that either, even with magic.
So, whatever.
It would be what it would be.
And as ever, it was.
3. On the other hand, a bevy of hovering witches on broomsticks, allied to save the world, streaming their magic, and helping to bring down the Big Bad had a positive effect.
And now in any given place on any given day (or night), you could look up and see a witch flying hither or yon on her broomstick.
And straight up, that was pretty rad.
4. Dark-haired Fae were back, not that the human populace knows what that means, and I didn’t even know what it meant, until now.
So yeah, as previously noted, Ash had Dark Fae in him, seeing as his Fae came from Cystien through BecBec, and Cystien was Dark Fae. Also as previously noted, unlike Light Fae, Dark Fae could mate with humans. Like, successfully. Like, making babies without all the loss, pain and heartbreak. Case in point, Ash knocking me up while full Fae.
So, uh…make of that what you will as pertains to Dark Fae being back, and a number of them staying on the surface, setting up sex cults.
As for me, what my man and I made of it was a baby.
Though, I suspected soon, a lot of that was going to be going around.
5. People knew who I was, by face, and name (in fact, I was now totally famous, like People and Hello! magazine famous, and so was Ash—but I was happy famous, and he was broody famous, which made us both more famous) and my publishers weren’t morons. They put Lucy and my cookbook up for preorder about two days after The Battle of Poet’s Walk.
We’d already earned back our humungous advance and the book wasn’t even out yet.
Yay!
So all of that was, well…
I guess no other way to put it…
That.
The good, the bad…
And the awesome.
Ash and I had elected to stay in England because I was intent to learn every inch of The Dungeons like the back of my hand (okay, a little PTSD, but is that a surprise?).
And because the BBC also weren’t morons, so they wanted me and Lucy in front of a camera in the Witches Dozen tout de suite.
I did not want this because I wanted to close it down for a mourning period, to honor Babs and Pandora and the patrons we’d lost there.
(I was thinking a year, and prior to understanding I was up the duff, that year I had intended to spend on a beach in a bathing suit with my hot fiancé, who would also wearing a bathing suit (or, more accurately, board shorts)).
Mavis told me to stop thinking crazy, both Babs and Pandora would be angry if any of us put any part of our lives on hold because they’d lost theirs.
So onward we went.
And by onward I mean we were going to start shooting our cookery program in the new year, and our first season was airing, beginning on Valentine’s Day.
(As yet, Paul Hollywood had not agreed to appear, but he was a busy guy, our schedule had been accelerated, and Lucy hadn’t given up.)
So I was famous before becoming famous.
And, well, positive side effect to saving the world…
World Cookery Domination was in sight.
Quick Update of Other Supernaturals:
The League of Werewolves—Still hidden.
The Troll and Goblin Union—Still hidden.
The Banshee Nation—Still hidden.
The Magi—Now out to the public.
The Guild of Sorcerers & Sorceresses—Now out to the public.
The Fellowship of Wizards—Now out to the public.
The Elders of Le Société de Mathilde—Covert, known only to supernaturals and those with appropriate clearance in governmental agencies.
The Directors of The Royal Institute of Psychical Research—Now a recognized governmental entity with parliamentary oversight (real reason why Dr. Bennett was retiring (see following section)? Possibly).
The Unicorn(s)— Still hidden.
The Headless Horseman—Still hidden.
Whirling Dervishes—Totally still hidden (I hadn’t even seen one!).
In other words, if you happen to read my grimoire, please be cool.
If they’re still not known, don’t make them known.
It’s up to them to decide.
Not you.
Quick Update of Magickal Relics Stolen by Bligh and Darling:
With Agatha gone and no longer cloaking them, it didn’t take long before I managed to locate them all.
We collected them and Ash demanded that our Elite Team would be the only ones to touch them, which meant we were the ones who transported them back to Area 666.
I suspected he did this not because he didn’t trust anyone else (or not solely because of that).
I suspected he did this for me.
This means yes, I have now seen the Ark of the Covenant (though we absolutely did not open it).
And the Holy Grail.
And Excalibur.
Also Pandora’s Box.
The Book of Thoth.
Etcetera.
And I knew the route to the lost city of Atlantis.
So yeah, outside of near-guaranteed World Cookery Domination, there were some kickass benefits to saving the world.
You know, uh…outside actually saving the world.
As an aside to this: Before they re-crated it and took it away, I totally spelled the fuck o
ut of Sorcha Mac Gearailt’s Book of Shadows.
Although it was not erased, no one could read that thing because no one could open that thing unless they could break the Prophesied One’s magic and I made it so that just wasn’t gonna happen.
I couldn’t say that another Dark Lord was never going to cometh.
But I could say that Aidan told me that The Mathilda Prophesies didn’t mention that shit happening, should I succeed in saving the world, which I did.
So I had a feeling I kicked that spell’s ass.
Quick Update of My Posse:
Viv and Mack—Totally an item. Totally (and annoyingly) still keeping it under wraps for reasons unknown. (Whatever.)
Su—Still wears Birkenstocks with socks. (Ugh.)
Gabe—Was asked, and has accepted, a place in the Vampyre Dominion so now lives at Castle Noapte (Yippee! Another reason to visit!)
Dad and Mom—Dad retiring from the Senate so he can move full-time back to Denver to be with Mom (this makes me happy because this makes Mom and Dad happy, another yippee!)
Gran—Yoga workshops at full capacity, raking in the dough, giving it all to Greenpeace (in other words, not a lot of change there, as in none).
Aidan and Josie—Totally going to get engaged any day now, I can feel it. And I totally better be a bridesmaid, even if they tie the knot before Ash and me and I’m super-extra pregnant. Because, as everyone knows, it doesn’t matter if you have a big ole belly in a bridesmaid’s dress.
Rory—Likes Aidan now because he’s often on telly as an expert on supernaturals and has fan clubs devoted to him due to the fact he’s super-hot (oh, and because Aidan is also super awesome, treats Rory’s mum like gold, and loves Rory a lot).
Lucy—Is back with me at the Dozen. Is still studying to be a witch. Is dating a cute guy that looks a lot like Paul Hollywood (but with brown eyes). Is still awesome (as usual). And is still beating me in the Battle of the Wooden Spoons (as usual).
Marcus—Still Elder of Le Société, but now the Elder of Le Société, as in the Head Honcho (this makes me happy because he’s enjoying it, so if he’s happy, Ash and I are happy).
The Rise of the Dark Lord Page 31