Carl Wilson
“It’s not going to get any better,” Grandma says, coming out of the bedroom. She smells strongly of healing herbs and incense she was using on Ivy, and she wiping off her magical tools before putting them back into her satchel. Nathan is sitting across the room from me.
Ivy is twelve weeks pregnant. She claims it is Ben’s, but all three of us in the room know vampires are sterile. All three of us also know beyond every shadow of a doubt that Ivy is special in ways far beyond what any of us had ever suspected. Even Grandma with her family prophecy that someone in her line would bring a child into the world that would irrevocably change the vampire lines, never suspected that it would be a child with vampire blood that would do it. Yet here Ivy is, and Grandma cannot deny that the child in her womb has vampire blood.
He also has wolf blood and demon blood in him. The baby growing within her is the son of a human mother and three fathers that are other than human. There are still so many things that I do not understand about my child, about what he will be and what he will do. I don’t feel too bad, though. Even Emily and Nathan who have their own abilities to see pieces of the future do not know exactly how everything will play out.
What does concern me, though, is that Ivy’s health is deteriorating rapidly. Emily says she’s never seen a case of morning sickness as bad as Ivy has had. We have tried every possible food or beverage we can, to try and see if anything will stay down, but almost nothing does. The few things we can get her to take, skim milk, plain rice, sometimes bread with a smear of butter on it, just don’t have the calories or the nutrients to keep a pregnant woman and her baby alive. We have even tried raw blood, in case the vampire part of our son cannot tolerate anything different, but that turns Ivy’s stomach immediately, and she throws up whatever else we have managed to get into her.
Sometimes Nathan and I go out and he uses some of his trickery here and there, and we bring home IV bags full of whatever people who can’t eat get. Grandma has long held that a witch should know both old and new ways, so she has taken formal medical training – and has used it before when she’s come across accidents while on the road – so we are able to sustain Ivy somewhat that way, but there’s still no way we can keep up with the demands of the young life inside of her.
Nathan taps me on the shoulder and looks toward the door. The two of us leave Emily to cleaning up after her spellwork, and go out to my backyard. In the short time between when Ivy moved in with me and when she became too weak to leave bed, she had started making changes to the place. There are field stones along the fence line, one stone in front of every fifth fence slat, alternating between a darker and lighter gray. Pots of herbs are growing along edges of the porch, which I am managing to remember to water for her. She has done something, and there are now more spiders in the yard than there ever were before. In the basement, are several bottles of silver iodide she had me buy, but I can’t do anything with them for her.
We sit down on a nice bench Ivy had Grandma bring over from their yard. This, I think, has absolutely no magical purpose, it is just a bench that Ivy is especially fond of.
“Any luck on your part of our little search?” he asks me.
Now that school is over for the summer, I’ve had time to see if I can find any sign of where Ben has gone. Since I do have some understanding of computers, I handle the electronic angles. Nathan does his part in other ways.
“You know I’m better than you, but I’m definitely not good,” I say.
“And there is an upper limit to what I can do from here with people,” Nathan says. Nathan would like to go farther afield, but he is by far the most powerful of the three of us caring for Ivy. He has access to magic and to powers that even Grandma has only heard rumor of, but there are some solutions you cannot solve by brute force. This is why Nathan and I are quietly seeing if we can find Ben. It is a long shot, but there may be a chance that somehow Ben can unlock the secret to helping Ivy through the pregnancy. It may be that a child as unique as the one Ivy is carrying needs the presence of all of its fathers to thrive.
“I am still only finding limited assistance from my kind as well,” Nathan says.
None of the demons of his position have been willing to muddle in mortal affairs again, and even the ones a few steps weaker have been uninterested. He has had some minor demons out searching, but they are spread very thin, and ones even below them are typically very close to specific places in the mortal world.
“I think I just need to move around,” I say. “Go out into the world and look for him. That’s how I found him last time.”
“Last time, he was just ninety miles away. He could be anywhere in the world now.”
I shake my head. “Ivy has taught me a lot about her magic. She says when you have nothing else, intent is everything.”
Nathan tilts his head to the side, considering this. “It can do no more harm than anything else,” he says.
While we’re sitting there, I hear Kate’s car pull into the driveway. I look over my shoulder as I see her coming into the yard. She has her laptop bag slung over her shoulder, which she usually doesn’t travel with, so I hope it’s good news.
Nathan and I slide over to make room between us. “Graylock,” she says, kissing me lightly on the cheek, and then she nods to Nathan. Now that he’s graduated, and with Ivy being in such dire straits, Nathan has moved out of his foster-family’s home, and into Grandma’s guest bedroom.
Because of the long closeness between Ivy and Kate, Grandma has decided to bring her in. It became very quickly apparent that we’d never be able to sustain any sort of lie about Ivy’s health with Kate, and for all of us – Grandma, Ivy, Nathan, and me, to all up and leave in short order would destroy both Kate and Ivy. They are too close, have been for too long, to be separated like that again. And Ivy needs everything she can get right now. Kate’s visits are one of the few things that can get Ivy looking alive for a bit anymore.
“You have something?” Nathan asks, touching her laptop bag.
“Maybe,” Kate says. She pulls her computer out and goes to one of the dozen open tabs in her browser. “Very tenuous, I know, but check this out.”
It’s a classified ad for a motorcycle, from out in Ohio. It means nothing to me, but Nathan is immediately interested. “Still for sale?”
“No,” Kate says. I have been tracking the KTM 690 Duke IIIs on every used bike site I can find. That model was only made for three years, ’08 to ’11, and there’ve got a small, but really dedicated fan base. You mentioned a lot of vampires are really bad creatures of habit,” Kate says, nudging me. “So maybe she just might try to find the same ride she used to have. This listing went up this morning, and I got in touch with the seller, played myself as somebody really interested, but needing to check in with the bank about a loan. Turned on some charm, didn’t try to bargain him down. So he just emailed me twenty minutes ago. Somebody straight up wired him the asking price, and says she can be there later this afternoon to pick it up. Could this mean she’s in Ohio tracking Ben?”
“She could have the capacity to travel quickly, or to have somebody take possession for her. The Negre have a good network that can do things like this really fast,” I say.
“If I can get there before the pickup happens, I’ll be able to tell if it’s her or a Negre associate,” Nathan says. He looks up at the sun. “Next flight from Denver to wherever in Ohio that seller is.”
Kate starts clacking at keys on her computer. “Ninety minutes,” she says.
Nathan shakes his head.
She does a little more searching. “11:15, arrives at 4:30.”
“I can barely make the airport,” he says, and is on his feet.
“Need me to book the flight?” Kate calls to him, but he’s already fishing keys out of his pocket and single-mindedly focused on getting to his car.
“He just needs to get to the airport. Trust me on this,” I say.