Chapter Eighteen

Donata stared at the little white stick in disbelief. She’d spent the previous evening worrying and zoning out on all the conversations around her, and the night tossing and turning while she went over and over the events of the day. Now this.

Seriously. It was as though the gods were laughing at her.

She hadn’t really been concerned when her great-aunt told her about the other possibility she’d thought of that could cause a Witch’s magic to behave erratically. Apparently in a small proportion of the population, pregnancy sometimes caused this problem during the first trimester. Tatiana had said something about the baby’s energy disrupting the mother’s magic until their life forces became more synchronized with each other. To tell the truth, Donata hadn’t really been listening. She’d been too busy denying the possibility with one part of her brain while counting backward with the other.

She’d been in Gimle for twenty-six days as of that morning. Before that, she’d been fighting a Major Anemoi and dealing with a Dragon, and doing whatever the hell it was she’d been doing with Peter. She hadn’t even noticed when she’d missed a period. And to be honest, if she had, she probably would have chalked it all up to stress anyway.

The little pink plus sign stared back at her from the stupid white stick. Stress. Yup. Feeling that now.

Of course, just because her magic wasn’t working right and some chemicals on a piece of plastic had turned colors didn’t mean she was pregnant. Obviously she was going to have to go back into Masonville and get a more professional opinion. Donata had noticed a small, discreet Planned Parenthood sign on the way to the hospital the other day. She’d just borrow a vehicle, go in and get tested, and some nice person in a doctor’s jacket would tell her she was freaking out for nothing. That was the plan.

“Congratulations,” the nurse practitioner said with a smile. “You’re definitely pregnant.”

Crap. Crap with a side of whatever it was you had with really, really bad crap.

“Oh,” Donata said. “You’re sure? You couldn’t have done the test wrong?” Her heart clenched painfully in her chest. She couldn’t tell if it was fear or just shock to have the news confirmed. She had no idea how she felt. How could this even be happening?

The smile slid away. “I’m afraid not,” said the woman. She had kinky-curly brown hair, round wire-rimmed glasses, and a name tag that said Gloria. “I take it this isn’t a pleasant surprise? I thought perhaps at your age it would be.”

Why? Because Donata was too old to screw up this badly, or because she was so old that if she was going to do it, now was the time? Of course, as a Witch, she actually lived longer than most Humans, and her race often started having babies later in life, but of course, she couldn’t tell the NP that.

“I’m on birth control,” she said, trying not to sound as though she was making excuses. “I should have been fine.”

Gloria shrugged. “No birth control is one hundred percent effective,” she said. “Were you on antibiotics anytime in the last couple of months? Or could you have missed a day? Sometimes that’s all it takes.”

Donata thought about the broken nights of sleep due to having been given herbs that opened her to bizarre dreams, and dealing with Paranormal criminals, and all the other things that had happened in the month before she’d gotten to Maine. “No antibiotics,” she said. “But my life has been pretty crazy lately. I can’t swear I didn’t forget and not realize it.”

She sighed. There was a certain irony to the entire situation. Ever since Anton Eastman had started sending her dreams about babies in an effort to persuade her to create one with him, she’d actually begun thinking about them. Maybe it was her age. Maybe it was just a lingering side effect from the psychological games he’d played. She had no way of knowing. But once she’d started thinking about having children, the notion seemed to have stuck in her mind. Watching Magnus being such a great uncle hadn’t helped any either.

She had a sudden burst of memory of falling into the hole in the cave and put one hand protectively over her belly. Mine. My baby. Donata felt a swelling of some emotion too powerful to put a name to. Great goddess, her timing sucked. But still . . .

“It happens,” the nurse practitioner was saying sympathetically. “Do you know what you want to do?”

“Do?” Go home and hide under her bed, maybe? But it wasn’t her home, or her bed.

“Will you be keeping the baby? There are options, of course, and I’d be happy to discuss them with you, but perhaps you’d like to talk to the baby’s father first?”

Crap.

Donata blinked a couple of times, trying to digest the whole thing. “I’m definitely keeping the baby,” she said. That was certain, although she didn’t have much idea what else was. Including the identity of the baby’s father. The last time she’d had sex with Peter and the first time she’d slept with Magnus weren’t that far apart, and both theoretically fell in the right time frame, as far as she could tell.

“Do you have any idea how far along I am?” she asked.

“From what you’ve said and your physical exam, I’d guess a month to a month and a half. You might get a better idea from an ultrasound, but it is a bit early for that.”

Great. So, it could be either of them. Just when she thought her life couldn’t get any more complicated. Thank goodness she hadn’t slept with Anton. Having three fathers to choose from would just be embarrassing.

Donata walked out of the clinic with a handful of pamphlets and a spinning head. Out of habit, she walked to the small park in the town square and sat on her favorite bench. A couple of pigeons had been sitting on it and fluttered indignantly at her as she plopped down nearly on top of them.

“Sorry, guys,” she said, figuring that talking to pigeons was probably the least of her problems. “I need this bench more than you do.”

“Have you returned to give me the information I desire?” a voice said. West took the space next to her.

Oh, great. This day just gets better and better.

“No,” she said. “Also, go away.”

West looked down at the pamphlets in her hands and then back up at her face, which no doubt looked somewhat shell-shocked. His eyes lit with an unholy glee.

“You are with child!” he said. “It worked!”

“Do you mind keeping your voice down?” Donata muttered. There might be people from Gimle around, and the last thing she needed was for word to get back to Magnus before she could figure out how she was going to tell him herself. And what exactly she was going to say when she did.

Then the rest of what West had said sank in. “What do you mean, ‘It worked’?”

“Anton succeeded. You are with child.” He gazed at her speculatively. “So far you seem healthy enough. How do you feel?”

I feel like you should stop staring at my belly. “I don’t know what you’re thinking,” Donata said. “But whatever it is, you’re wrong. Anton and I never got to the point of being physical. He just slipped wormwood into my wine and sent me weird dreams about sex and babies. Not cool, by the way. Not cool at all. But there is no way this child is his.” She didn’t even bother to deny the pregnancy, since the top pamphlet said in large letters: So, You’re Pregnant. Now What?

West shook his head, as animated as she’d ever seen him. “You’re the one who is wrong, Ms. Santori. The Major Anemoi do not need physical contact to reproduce. The dreams you speak of carry energy from one to the other, intermingling until new energy is created.”

“Yeesh,” Donata said. “No wonder your race is dying out.” She held up one hand. “Sorry, that was uncalled for. I realize you’re desperate, although that doesn’t excuse either his actions or your threats. But I promise you, that might work between two Major Anemoi, but I’m a Witch, and we need actual mingling of bodily fluids. The baby is either part Dragon or part Ulfhednar, but there is no way it is a Major Anemoi.”

“You don’t know that,” West said. “When the child is born, you will see. It will be the salvation of our race, and it belongs to us.”

Donata could hear herself growling, and in the back of her head she thought, I’ve been hanging out with Magnus too much. “My baby doesn’t belong to you or anyone else, and if you think I’m going to give him or her up, you are sadly mistaken.”

“Tell me where Anton Eastman is,” West insisted. “He will tell you what he did.”

“I told you before. I can’t help you find him.”

“Then my previous warning stands, Witch,” West said, rising. “You have until the full moon to tell me his whereabouts, or things will get very ugly.” He stared at her belly hungrily. “Now more than ever, it is crucial that we talk to him.”

“You might want to think again about threatening me,” Donata said. “If you really believe what you say, that this child is part Major Anemoi, you can’t harm me without harming the baby that could save your race.”

“True,” West said, his brown eyes glinting in the afternoon sun. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t harm your friends or family. You are important to us. They are not. I will see you before the full moon rises. Or they will not see it set.”

Donata ground her teeth. It was getting harder and harder to feel sympathetic, dying race or not. And now she had to worry about whether or not what he’d said about the baby could possibly be true. The problem with dealing with a lost race was there was no place to look up information about them. She was going to have to figure out another way to discover the identity of her baby’s father. But right this very minute, she couldn’t figure out how.

Back at the house, the calm oasis she’d left seemed to have erupted into controlled chaos. The kitchen was filled with what seemed at first glance to be an army of women, although when Donata got over her initial shock, it turned out to be Astrid, Kari, a neighbor named Ingrid, and someone else Donata thought she’d seen around the town but didn’t know. Astrid was directing an orchestra of pot stirring, bread kneading, and chicken plucking. After a quick look at the latter, Donata carefully aimed her eyes elsewhere; her stomach hadn’t been giving her problems yet, other than the sudden dislike of coffee and that one drastic reaction to her attempt to use magic, but she didn’t want to push her luck.

“What’s going on?” she asked, hanging the car keys up on their hook by the door and taking off her coat hurriedly. The kitchen must have been forty degrees warmer than the outside air.

Astrid glanced up from a scribbled list, looking both frazzled and relieved. “Oh, Donata, you’re back. Thank goodness. We could use another pair of hands.”

“I’m happy to help if I can, although my cooking skills are fairly basic,” she said. “What’s the occasion?”

Astrid wiped one hand across her forehead, leaving a floury streak. “They’ve called a Thing. For tomorrow. I don’t know how they expect us to be ready in time.”

“A thing?” Donata was pretty sure she was missing something. “What kind of thing? Like a party kind of thing?”

Kari rolled her eyes. “Thing with a capital T,” she said. “It’s a formal meeting of representatives from all the clans. Kind of like our regular Assembly on steroids. There will be Lawspeakers like Halfrida from a number of towns, along with whoever they bring with them. Usually people come from all over the East Coast territory, but because this one is so last-minute, it will probably be limited to the clans who live within a few hundred miles of here. They’ll all represent their clan members from farther away.”

“Wow. That sounds like a big deal. I’m surprised they didn’t plan it further ahead of time.”

Astrid grimaced. “It was originally scheduled for after Thanksgiving, so the clans could set up the winter solstice summit, where the Ulfs from each clan could be counted and the new leader for the year chosen. But apparently we’re not the only ones having issues, so the current Chieftain decided to move up the meeting so they could address that too.”

“Wait, you mean other towns are having problems with ghosts too?” Donata said. She started chopping carrots for what looked like the world’s largest pot of stew, already bubbling away on the top of the giant woodstove.

“Apparently. No one wanted to admit it—including us, of course—but word leaked out. So now the Thing is being held tomorrow, since it is the only Saturday left before Thanksgiving and therefore the only time the Ulf candidates will be free to attend and tell their stories. Since it was already scheduled to be held in Gimle this year, we have to prepare to host a hundred or more hungry Ulfhednar for a weekend.”

“Crap,” Donata said with feeling, and started chopping faster.

“Exactly,” Astrid agreed, and handed her another bunch of carrots.

She didn’t get a chance to talk to Magnus that night. When he came in from the day’s training session, the family gathered together briefly for dinner, and then everyone was put to work preparing for the onslaught of guests.

Each of the Ulfhednar households was expected to put up at least one or two people, and the larger compounds, the Torvalds’ included, might have as many as three, depending on how many folks showed up. There were guest rooms to be cleaned and set up, and Donata had already been told that they’d be needing her room on Saturday night and to plan on sleeping with Magnus. He’d just given her a big grin at that announcement, of course. Since in theory they were engaged, she couldn’t exactly protest. She’d settled for kicking him under the table, which only made his grin widen.

Once dinner was over, Donata was dragged back into the kitchen. Even Erik and Enar were put to work, despite their feeble protests. Halvor chopped wood for both the stove and to contribute to the large bonfire that would be part of the proceedings on Saturday night. Only Magnus was excused, because of his long, grueling day. Which didn’t stop him from chopping wood alongside his father until long after dark.

By the time they all went to bed, midnight had come and gone, and Donata crawled into bed and was asleep almost before her head hit the pillow. Any brooding and fretting she might normally have done succumbed to the overwhelming weight of exhaustion.

In the morning, she heard Magnus leave his room and head down the hallway before she got out of bed; not that she thought this particular day was the right time to tell him. In fact, sometime overnight her brain had sorted through things and decided that the news of her pregnancy was going to have to wait until she’d solved the Ulfhednar’s problem. The information that the hauntings were affecting places other than Gimle cast an entirely different light on the situation—although sadly, that light didn’t illuminate anything for her other than the knowledge that she was even more out of her depth than she’d previously thought.

Plus, of course, she now knew that her magic might be undependable for the next month or two, and she didn’t have that long to wait. She was going to have to come at the problem from a different angle, and she was pretty sure what she had in mind would still work despite the baby. It wasn’t exactly magic; more of an innate gift. But first she wanted to see if she learned anything from the other Ulfhednar at the Thing tonight. Assuming, of course, that she was allowed to attend.