Chapter Twenty
She sighed softly and stretched when Jacob began to stir, she thought she’d miss waking up, but she felt well rested and alert.
“Good morning.”
Jacob asked, “Sleep well?”
She laughed, “Something like that. I don’t think I do that anymore. Sleep I mean.”
Jacob’s eyes widened, and then he started to laugh.
She tilted her head and raised an eyebrow in question.
Jacob held up a hand, and he got control of his laughter.
“Well, it’s just… this morning is the first morning we could’ve slept in.”
She giggled.
He pulled her close, and he gave her a soft lingering kiss that sent tingles down her body to her toes.
“Are you alright? This has to be weird for you.”
She nodded, “I think so. Is it weird for you?”
He shrugged, “It’s amazing actually. It should be intimidating, since you’ve changed on me again and are even more powerful, but it isn’t.”
She concentrated for a second, just to make sure she wasn’t hitting him with magic, unintentionally. She felt a surge of relief when she was sure she wasn’t.
“That’s good to know.”
He tilted his head, “Are you hungry?”
She frowned in thought, “I could eat. But… not sure if I have to.”
Come to think of it, she hadn’t used the bathroom since she’d changed yesterday morning and passed out, besides voiding and cleaning up after coitus that is. She did feel a little weird about that, was she even human at all anymore? No sleep, no need for food though she could eat, and no bathroom? She didn’t know, but she knew she wanted him badly after being in his arms all night while her mind had roamed the city.
They also didn’t have to be anywhere, there was no more emergency, and DC was clear of supernatural predators.
“We could stay in bed a little longer?”
He grinned, “I’d like that.”
He kissed her breathlessly, and pulled her on top of him…
It was about an hour later when they walked out to breakfast together. Carl and Allison were at the table, and she could hear the others moving around but they hadn’t made it out yet. They sat down at the table, and they started to load their plates with food.
Allison teased, “Glad you could make it out of there,” then blushed.
She tilted her head, and then remembered Jacob had promised they’d be out of there soon. Since then they’d done nothing but have sex, talk, sleep, and take a couple of showers, for almost a full day.
“Thanks. I feel great.”
Carl looked at her for a moment, “We all talked and decided last night we’d keep it a secret, but as you said we won’t lie about it. It’s bound to get out eventually, but it will give you time to adjust.”
She smiled, “Thanks.”
She took a sip of coffee, and a bite of eggs and bacon. It tasted as good as ever, even if she never needed the food or the coffee to wake up in the mornings ever again. Although in truth, she supposed she hadn’t needed coffee to wake up at all once she was recovered enough for her old powers to kick in. It’d just been those six months of recovery. Still, it was a habit now, and she didn’t think she’d give up her morning cup, or food for that matter.
The others came out to join them, first Meri and Daniel, and less than a minute after that Cinna and Jace. If there was anything strange about breakfast that morning, it was that her team, her family, didn’t seem to have any fears, awkwardness, or doubts about what happened. She felt safe and loved, and any doubts were her own. Of course, at the moment she looked like herself, Lily, so she supposed it was only her that was really able to feel how different she was.
She also hadn’t forgotten her sudden and overwhelming desire last night, but she hadn’t wanted to bring up the idea of children just yet. She would, could, conceive whenever she wanted to, and that wasn’t a new thing, it was a shifter thing. She decided to talk to Jacob about it later that night.
Meri asked, “So what’s the plan boss?”
Daniel interjected, “I’ll be around for a while, while this thing gets worked out.”
Jacob nodded, “You’re always welcome Daniel. Plan? There isn’t one. I was thinking of doing the tourist thing though, hitting the Smithsonian buildings and all that? I imagine you’re all free to make your own plans that way, or join Lily and I. Consider us all on vacation until the government decides what to do about us and we can get back to Chicago.
“Of course, we should keep up with our morning workouts in the hotel gym, and if any rogues show up Lily will tell us. But I have a feeling any rogues have probably been paying attention, and they’ll avoid the area like the plague.”
Jace asked, “Vacation? We get those?”
She snickered, “Not really, vacation is our job now. We want to be in the public eye, and we’re on assignment to stay in the area until things shake out. Still, it’s a matter of perspective, our job is to be visibly on vacation, now that it’s safe we want people to know we don’t constantly run around killing people, even if that’s kind of what we do.”
Cinna snorted, “Fair enough. I haven’t seen the museums in about seventy years, so we could go with you?”
Jace nodded at her statement.
Meri tilted her head, “I guess we’ll go too.”
Carl grunted, “We can do that.”
The next few weeks went by quickly. There was a lot to see in DC, it took over a week just to cover all the museums, then there were the monuments and memorials. They went out to eat a lot, most every night, to be in the public eye, but it was also fun.
Her and Jacob did get around to that conversation about children, and he answered her in a passionately physical way that took her breath away and made her with child. It’d been several thousand years since she’d been a mother, and she was looking forward to it. She was fairly positive the child would be a shifter, but she wasn’t positive. Maybe he or she would be something new. It’d be a few months she thought, before she would know for sure.
The press constantly hounded them, at first, until they kept failing to get interviews. She wouldn’t have minded giving one, but the government had requested they not do that, and she saw no reason to go against that as long as the government didn’t go against them. The press already had a full briefing on what they were and did, so it wasn’t like she was hiding anything, and after following them around they could see they were mostly just people like everyone else. Just… people with the job of safeguarding the human race.
It didn’t take her long to adjust to her new body and reality. She never showed her wings, but she always felt them there and ready to be called forth. She didn’t discover anything new outside of what she already knew about her new status and abilities, but then she hadn’t been experimenting either. Maybe that would have bothered some, but for her the ends were always more important than the means.
Her calling through her shifter nature, and her guilt, was to defend humanity. She could do that just fine the way she was. Magic came a little easier to her, and she was far more powerful now, but in the end she was the same Lilith she’d always been. She was too old, and too set in her ways to be seduced toward evil by her new power. The connection to heaven also assisted with that, but she didn’t really believe it was a necessary assistance, just a fact.
The hardest part to get used to was her new life energy, she was never tired, and her libido never did calm down to what it was either, and stayed quite high. She wasn’t worried about it though, Jacob never complained and so far he was more than happy to do his duty that way. She didn’t imagine that would change anytime soon, since he wouldn’t be getting any older. She didn’t know what that meant for their future, nothing was forever, but death wouldn’t take her new mate through aging at least, which was a comfort.
She continued to enjoy her morning workouts with Meri, Carl, or Jace, her and Jacob didn’t spar because their love and protectiveness for each other would get in the way. She also enjoyed taking up teaching Allison advanced witch techniques.
Those three weeks were a quiet time in her life, as Jacob suspected, the rogues were far too smart to show up in DC with us constantly on the news. The team that had taken out a major demon of hell, permanently. They didn’t show up in any of the nearby cities either. Her reach had multiplied by a factor of ten on the life-web, and five hundred miles meant she felt a few other cities. Heck, it was a sixth of the country lengthwise in reach, in radius. She figured teleporting would come in very useful when they returned to Chicago, when she felt rogues in the nearby cities.
The other three couples on the team were going strong as well, even with Carl’s circumspect personality it was obvious he worshipped the ground Allison walked on, and Allison adored him right back. Once the witch had gotten over the surprise of it, she’d fallen in love very quickly. The other two couples of course, had been together long before Lily got there, and she was content.
The future looked bright, her and Jacob’s child would grow up with Jace’s and Cinna’s.
She just hoped the humans didn’t come up with something unreasonable, or life would get tough for a while when they went into hiding. There was a lot of speculation and countless theories on the news those three weeks on how the government would deal with the reality of the supernatural, from locking them all up, to recruiting them, and all manner of other ideas.
Even the best ideas would mean everyone wasn’t happy. Compromise was the only way it would work. They wouldn’t accept any idea that put them under the power of the government, simply because they only hunted the evil supernatural beings, they wouldn’t be played against each other on the world stage in country against country politics, nor were they interested in taking down human lawbreakers.
Their function was to protect the humans so they could work out the rest themselves. She also knew they’d never accept a deal that would pit them against shifters in other countries, or anything like that. They didn’t want to be responsible for chasing down human criminals either, they needed to be focused on their own never-ending war with hell to keep humanity safe. The conflict between good and evil would never end.
When the answer finally came, she was a bit surprised by it, and not one political pundit had even considered it as a possibility…