101

“Talk to me.” I nudge him, needing something more than quiet, and nuzzle closer. Inner anxiety growing as my insecure self shows face. My heart rate increases, and my palms get clammy as I try and appear neutral emotionally. I don’t want to burden him with a spew of feelings when he’s having a hard enough time deciphering his own, but it’s hard.

The spell had fallout for sure and Leyanne did warn me that he may need an adjustment period to get his head straight when we got home. That mind control and being trapped somewhere in a state of timelessness would affect them on some level, even if it only lasted a week. I don’t know how much of that is this.

I smile impulsively when he lets go of my belly and wraps his arm around me instead, gesturing for me to lift my head so his other one can slide under it and gives me his bicep as a cushion. A familiar Colton move, one that soothes me a little and I try not to overthink this and instead focus on his touch. I snuggle in greedily, needing him more than air, his legs wrapping around mine until every inch of us touches intimately and he buries his mouth in my hair and tucks my head under his chin.

“Where to start…. You went to New Mexico, you found your brother, brought back a witch…… Lead our people into a crazy dangerous battle that might have ended all of us. Had a one-on-one fight with me where I tried to kill you, more than once. And that’s just to start….” He lets out a long strained breath and squeezes me closer, his surge of chaotic emotions finally seeping through to me and I can feel just how messy his brain is.

“I know.” I mumble guiltily in a low voice and stretch my arms around him as much as I can, clinging on so needily.

“We’re also going back to the mountain to finally deal with that chaos now we have reason to believe the vampires are receding… and you’re pregnant…. we’re pregnant! I’m going to be a dad.” He breaths out heavily as though this fact is still taking its time to filter through and is obviously the major one for him that’s giving him a hard time. The woosh of words, the extra hard exhale as he got to the final point and yet I so cannot read a single emotion accurately to tell if it’s a bad sigh or a shocked one.

“I know, I know… Carmen imprinting on Jasper… meeting a vampire, finding out my dad’s not my dad…. I know there’s a lot. I get it, I lived through it and I still haven’t really absorbed any of it. I just hate when you clam up and I can’t tell what you’re thinking, while your emotions are not helping me any. I can tell you’re sort of shocked, but there’s a lingering something I can’t decipher. I can feel it, it’s making me nervy and uptight and yet I don’t know what it is.” It comes out in a ramble, my heart pounding as my feelings get the better of me and turn me into a jittering wreck. I want to so badly just ask him if he hates the fact I’m pregnant, but I’m too scared to hear the answer. My heart is literally hanging by a thread, terrified of what pain he can cause with one simple rejection of what grows inside of me.

“Disbelief…. that’s what that is. It’s not one thing, it’s many… Like, are we really ending a war that’s plagued us our entire lives? Are we really going to be parents in the midst of all this? Is this all gone from never ending threat to nothing in the blink of an eye. And what about you? Your father is royalty among … god, our enemy, Lorey. You’re a freaking vampire Princess and that just blows my mind. I’m not trying to close you out, I’m just… overwhelmed.” Which I guess is exactly how he has me feeling. Overloaded, anxious, and weighed down with a thousand emotions all at once. Sometimes sharing that is too much and it’s hard for me to swallow even though I know he’s trying so hard to shield me form the worst of it.

“Leyanne thinks that me being alive will pull Varro back from attacking our people so I guess, yes, the threat is going to end. We just haven’t had any word from Jasper or Darrius to confirm it, but the mountain had way less vampires than we both know were there before. So where did they go? And him….. once he knows I’m alive, what if he wants to see me?” I dodge the baby topic, sticking to something less traumatic to my soul.

It is something I’ve thought about, my father, and honestly, I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to face the reality that my dad, the one who raised me for ten years, the father I loved, was not even my blood at all. That some lord, some creature out there, that I’ve never met who waged wars because of me is who I belong to. I can’t absorb it. I can’t get my thoughts in order to really accept it.

“I did think it was half empty considering how many we’ve chased through that infernal forest for months. Or maybe there was always less of them and we assumed more. Maybe they just spread out and used the same patrols over and over. God knows. We defeated them so fast, it’s like they weren’t even trying to hold us off.” Colton sighs and instinctively squeezes me again, inhaling me as though he’s glad to be home again even though his reality meant he never left me. It’s odd. I guess him having my memories now means it’s messed up his timeline and he shouldn’t miss me because it was only today he left me, but his memories are making that confusing.

“Leyanne said that when vampires lose leadership when their coven lord abandons them…. they become useless. Like they have no direction, and their abilities are stumped or something. She thinks whoever the lord was, left them and the one you killed, had tried to take the place as coven master.”

She told me all this downstairs when we first arrived back in a hurried conversation while Colton issued orders to the pack and dispersed them to their homes until eight pm. Then went nuclear at Meadow and Sierra and ended up storming off to the study.

The order is to rest, regroup, and meet to talk about everything, including what we found out when we went to New Mexico. And now in the eerie calmness of a bright sunny day it feels like the events of dawn are a dream and the last week already becoming a blur that never really happened at all. If it wasn’t for the witch still being here, I would think that I imagined it all. In his arms, it feels like he never left me, despite the tension between us because of his mood and my dying need to know what he thinks of our baby news.

“That suggests your father… the vampire one, is really pulling them back, but why leave any at all? Surely he would take them if this was over.”

“What else is he going to do with them. They were made to fight and excess to needs if he no longer wants to. He probably took the strongest and left the rest behind knowing eventually the wolves would deal with them and get rid of his problem.” I got the impression from Leyanne’s conversations that vampires see halflings as dispensable and worthless and a lord wouldn’t think twice of leaving them to die. So not like wolves at all.

After meeting Darrius, I see that we have only ever dealt with these crude half-bred demons all along and the real enemy, the ones like Darrius, are something we should always fear. We never really knew our enemy at all. We would never have stood a chance had the pure bloods been out here ready to take us down.

“I just can’t relax into this idea that this is all ending. It seems to easy, too clean. Maybe because he left any at all. Maybe I just need confirmation, I don’t know. I can’t shake the feeling that this is far from over and it’s not as simple as it all seems.” Colton releases me a little and pulls my face up to him with a gentle finger under my chin. Leaning in to graze his lips over mine and it makes my heart flutter and flip over. This is first he’s calmed down enough to show this kind of intimacy since we broke the spell. I greedily push my face to his to draw more, throwing all my doubts and questions aside when faced with my desire to have more of him. I’ve craved him so much it almost made me insane and one little peck is nowhere near enough.

Alpha, we need you downstairs.