Falter Page 24

  I shoved the phone back in my pocket and turned back to Claire.

  I stroked her cheek. “Claire, you’re going to go back to sleep, okay? When you wake up, you’ll be back where I found you, and this will all have been a bad dream.”

  “What?” She looked so confused. There was blood all over her face.

  I brandished another syringe.

  She cringed.

  * * *

  ~azazel~

  “I rushed to get here, and you weren’t even here,” I said as Jason came into the bedroom.

  Jason shrugged out of his coat. “Sorry, I guess I lost track of time.”

  I folded my arms over my chest. “Where the hell were you, anyway?”

  “I was doing stuff for Imri,” he said. “Surveillance stuff.”

  “You’re doing stuff for him a lot these days,” I said. “I didn’t think you liked him.”

  He threw his coat down on the bed. “I thought you liked him. You’re the one who’s been gung-ho about helping him hunt down all these vampires. I’ve barely seen you this month.”

  I uncrossed my arms, studied my fingernails. “I know. I’ve been avoiding you. I know you’ve noticed.”

  He crossed the room to me and sat down on the corner of the bed. “What? You’ve been avoiding me?”

  I looked up at him. He hadn’t noticed?

  He shrugged. “You know, I’ve been busy too. Mina’s got that new job, and I’ve been wrangling Chance in the mornings and after school. I just figured it was normal life stuff. Why have you been avoiding me?”

  I gulped. “I have something I want to tell you.”

  “Yeah, that’s what you said when you asked me to meet you here.” He furrowed his brow. “But when you said it, I didn’t think it was a bad thing. Now you’re starting to get me nervous. What’s up?”

  I twisted my hands together. “It’s not going to be easy for you to hear.”

  He straightened his posture. “You’re scaring me here, babe.”

  A lump formed in my throat. “I’m pregnant.”

  He didn’t say anything for a second. He gave me a funny look, a confused look. And then he broke into a baffled grin. “That’s good, isn’t it? I mean, I didn’t think… It’s like a miracle.” He reached over for me.

  I got up out of my chair. “Maybe it’s good. Maybe it can be.”

  He pulled back, his expression wary. “It’s the miracle part that’s the bad part, isn’t it? Some weird screwy supernatural thing is happening to you. I mean, you’re technically dead, right? You can’t age normally for more than a month. You need blood to heal you, so—” He paused. “We haven’t been doing that, have we? Where have you been getting blood?”

  “Well, that’s how I figured it out,” I said. Jason was an immortal, and his blood had healing properties. I’d had my neck snapped with immortal blood in my system, and the blood healed me and kept me alive. But the blood wore off after about a month, so I always had to have more, or else I died for real. “We were both crazy busy. Different directions. I was off with Grace and Boone doing that job out west, and I realized that I hadn’t had blood in over a month, but I wasn’t dying, and I didn’t know what was going on. I also thought I was getting the flu or something because I was nauseous all the time and—”

  “So the baby’s keeping you alive.” Jason stood up. He came over to me and took me by the shoulders. “You think it’s like a monster, don’t you? We spawned something nasty that’s going to destroy the world or something.”

  I pulled away from him. “Why would you say something like that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just that you’re not happy about it, and, considering our history, you know, I figured…” He turned away from me. “Didn’t you have a dream once? About us having a kid and it was, you know…”

  “I did,” I said, flashing on the image of that worm-like thing with rows of sharp teeth that had clawed its way out of my womb in a dream I had back in Italy, years and years ago. “And a lot of those dreams were prophetic, but I don’t think it was meant to be taken literally. I think it was only about the destruction that we’d cause together in the future. I think it was about the solar flare. Like the fruit of our union was blood and death and all of that shit.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Look, it doesn’t matter, anyway, because this baby isn’t our baby.”

  He gave me a sharp look.

  “To be more accurate, it’s not… yours.” I wrapped my arms around myself.

  “What?” He was stunned.

  Shit, this was going worse than I’d meant it to. He’d thrown me for a loop with all that monster-baby talk. “Look, Jason, I need to tell you about something, and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it before, but—”

  “What do you mean, it’s not mine?” His jaw twitched. “Whose is it then?”

  “Look, I just—I did this all wrong. I need to start over, okay?”

  “Whose?”

  “Babe, it’s not like what you’re thinking. Not exactly.”

  “What I’m thinking is that you had sex with someone else.” He looked stricken. “Did you?”

  “Jason—”

  “Is that what you’re trying to tell me?” His voice was getting louder. “Is that why it would be hard for me to hear?”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “So, you didn’t have sex with someone else?”

  “Look, can I just go back and—”

  “What? Was it immaculately conceived? Is that why it’s the miracle baby keeping you alive?” He raised his eyebrows.

  “Jason—”

  “Tell me it’s that, please.” His voice cracked. “I would try to find some way to believe that.”

  I dragged my hands over my face. “Sit down, okay?”

  “Just answer me, Azazel. Did you have sex with someone else or not?”

  “Would you let me explain?”

  He spread his hands. “Yes or no?”

  “Kind of,” I said.

  “Kind of?” He thrust his hands into his hair and turned in a tight circle. “What the fuck does that mean? You can’t ‘kind of’ have sex. You either do it, or you don’t.”

  “I had sex with someone, but I didn’t want to.”

  “What, like you were raped?”

  “Kind of.” And it came out as a sob.

  He turned on me. “Well, excuse me if I find that very hard to believe. I can’t even count the number of times you’ve been almost raped, Azazel, and you’re pretty fucking good at fighting people off, so I kind of doubt that suddenly—”

  “Fuck you,” I spat at him.

  He glared at me.

  I looked down at the carpet of the bedroom.

  “Shit.” His voice wasn’t steady.

  “Jason, please listen to me.”

  He shook his head. He walked over to the other side of the room and pulled the curtains aside. He rested his forehead on the window. “I don’t believe this.”

  I was going to start crying. I could feel the tears fighting up inside my chest, and I shoved them down. I needed to try to get through this without crying. “Okay, let me start over. One night, Jude and I were in headquarters, and we got hungry—”

  “Jude?” He turned away from the window, and his entire body was shaking.

  “No, you’re not listening.”

  “You said so many times that I was crazy for being… jealous… and all this time you were…” He grimaced. He stalked over to the door and threw it open. “I can’t hear this.”

  I ran after him, grabbing him by the arm. “You have to hear it. Wait. Please, wait.”

  He shook me off. “Azazel, you’re killing me here.” His eyes were glittering with tears.

  That was it. I started to cry too. “No, Jason, you don’t understand. It was the fucking aphrodisiac, okay? We heated up some of those old frozen meals they had there because we didn’t feel like ordering food, and then the next thing…”

  H
e took a shuddering breath. He shut the door.

  I scrubbed at my tears.

  He leaned back into the door. “Oh.”

  “We didn’t mean for it to happen,” I said. “We tried not to do it, but you know what that stuff is like. It just… it happened, and it was awful. I mean, it was like being violated, but by my own damned body, you know, and…”

  He stared dully at his shoes. “When?” he said softly.

  “Two and a half months ago.”

  “And you didn’t tell me?”

  “Jude begged me not to. He said you’d kill him.” I looked up at him. “I thought maybe you might.”

  He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “You wanted to protect Jude?” He buried his face in his hands. “You always want to protect him.”

  “I…” I put my hand on his shoulder.

  He recoiled from my touch. “Don’t.”

  “I guess if I’m honest, I didn’t keep quiet to protect Jude,” I said. “I didn’t want to hurt you. It was an accident, you know, and I didn’t think you ever needed to know.”

  Jason didn’t say anything. He took several deep breaths and then he walked over to the bed. He started straightening the covers. “But it’s Jude’s baby. You know that for sure?”

  “I had a DNA test.”

  He turned to look at me. “If it had been mine, would you have told me what happened with Jude?”

  “Jason…”

  He laughed bitterly. “Hell, why tell me at all? Jude and I are brothers, how likely is it that I’d ever have guessed?”

  I bit my lip.

  “Would you have done that? Would you have lied to me?”

  “I—”

  “You already were lying to me, weren’t you? What made you stop?”

  “Well, the baby, and I didn’t think I could hide—”

  “He knows, doesn’t he?” said Jason. “He knows that you’re pregnant with his child.”

  I hung my head. “I needed his blood for the DNA test. It was easy to get yours, but I didn’t know how else to… Besides, he was already suspicious, because he saw how I was having really bad morning sickness, and he confronted me about it, and—”

  “What?” Jason’s face twisted. “How long has he known?”

  “Look, I know it isn’t easy, but—”

  “This isn’t fair,” he said, his voice quiet. He touched his chest. “I missed all this with Chance. I was an ass, and I missed it all. And you weren’t supposed to be able to get pregnant.”

  “I know.”

  “And now you are, but it’s not…” He shook his head again. “Fuck.”

  I wanted to touch him, but when I got close, he backed away.

  “I can’t,” he said, holding up his hands to ward me off.

  “Jason, please. This is shitty. I know it’s shitty, but it’s not like I wanted this. I didn’t mean for it to happen this way. I didn’t…”

  He headed for the door again. “I can’t be here. I need to go… somewhere else.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  He opened the door. “Don’t worry about your precious Jude, either. I won’t lay a finger on him.”

  “Jason—”

  He slammed the door in my face.

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