Post by Mairi on Jul 29, 2005 11:55:37 GMT -5
Taken from the the LKH's web site:
(Please note, this has not been edited. So there may be some errors, like Ronnie and Anita forgetting Ronnie had been married previously. Those will be fixed in the final edition.
Chapter One:
It was the first week of November. I was supposed to be out jogging, but instead I was sitting at my breakfast table talking about men, sex, werewolves, vampires, and that thing that most unmarried but sexual active women fear most of all - a missed period.
Veronica (Ronnie) Sims, best friend and private detective, sat across from me at
my little four-seater breakfast table. The table sat on a little raised alcove in a bay
window. I did breakfast most mornings at that view out into the deck and the trees beyond.
Today, the view wasn't pretty, because the inside of my head was too ugly to see it. Panic
will do that to you.
"You're sure you missed October? You didn't just count wrong?" Ronnie asked.
I shook my head and stared into my coffee cup. "I'm two weeks overdue."
She reached across the table and patted my hand. "Two weeks, you had me scared.
Two weeks could be anything, Anita. Stress will throw you off that much, and God
knows you've had enough stress." She squeezed my hand. "That last serial killer case was only
about two weeks ago." She squeezed my hand harder. "Just what I read in the paper and saw
on the news was bad."
I'd stopped telling Ronnie all my bad stuff years ago, when my cases as a legal
vampire executioner had gotten so much bloodier than her cases as a private eye. Now I
was a federal marshal along with most of the other legal vamp hunters in the United
States. It meant that I had even more access to even more awful shit. Things that Ronnie,
or any of my female friends didn't want to know about. I didn't fault them. I'd rather not
have had that many nightmares in my own head. No, I didn't fault Ronnie, but it meant
that some of the most awful stuff couldn't be shared with her. I was just glad we'd made up a
long- standing grumpiness in time to have her here for this particular disaster. I was
able to talk about the bad parts of the cases with some of the men in my life, but I couldn't
have shared the missed period with any of them. It concerned one of them entirely too
much.
She squeezed my hand hard, and leaned back. Her grey eyes were all sympathy, and
apology. She was still feeling guilty that she'd let her issues about commitment
and men rain all over our friendship. She'd come here today to cry on my shoulder about
the fact that she was moving in with her boyfriend, Louie Fane, Dr. Louis Fane, thank you
very much. He had his doctorate in biology and taught at Washington University. He
also turned furry once a month, and was a lieutenant of the local wererat rodere, their word
for pack.
"If Louie wasn't hiding what he was from his colleagues we'd be going to the big
party tonight," she said.
"He teaches people's kids, Ronnie, he can't afford to find out what they'd do if
they found out he had lycanthropy."
"College isn't kids, it's definitely grown-up."
"Parents won't see it that way," I said. I looked at her, and finally said, "Are
you changing the subject?"
"It's only two weeks, Anita, after one of the most violent cases you've ever
had. I wouldn't even loose sleep over it."
"Yeah, but you're period is erratic, mines not. I've never been two weeks late
before."
She pushed a strand of blond hair back behind her ear. The new hair cut framed
her face nicely, but it didn't stay out of her eyes, and she was always pushing it back.
"Never?"
I shook my head, and sipped coffee. It was cold. I got up and went to dump it in
the sink.
"What's the latest you've ever been?" she asked.
"Two days, I think five once, but I wasn't having sex with anyone, so it wasn't
scary. I mean unless there was a star in the east I was safe, just late." I poured coffee from
the French press, which emptied it. I was so going to need more coffee.
Ronnie came to stand next to me, while I put more hot water on the stove. She
leaned her butt against the cabinets and drank her coffee, but she was watching me.
"Let me run this back at you. You've never been two weeks late, ever, and you've
never missed a whole month before?"
"Not since this whole mess started when I was fourteen, no."
"I always envied you the regular as clock work schedule," she said.
I started dismantling the French press, taking out the lid with its filter on a
stick. "Well, the clock is broken right now."
"Shit," she said, softly.
"You can say that again."
"You need a pregnancy test," she said.
"No, shit." I dumped the grounds into the trash can, and shook my head. "I can't
go shopping for one tonight."
"Can't you make a quick stop on the way to Jean- Claude's big party?"
Jean-Claude, Master Vampire of the City of St. Louis, and my sweetie, was
throwing one of the biggest bashes of the year to welcome to town the first ever mostly vampire
dance company. He was one of their patrons, and when you spend that much money you
apparently get to spend more to throw a party to celebrate that the money was
helping the dance troupe find rave reviews in their cross-country tour. There was going to
be national and international media there tonight. It was like a big deal, and I as his main
squeeze had to be on his arm, smiling, and dressed up. In fact I was due at his place in
about an hour to have him get me into what I was wearing. I'd never have been able to get
myself decked out for something like this, not without help. The dress alone needed a maid.
But strangely, appearing in public in a formal dress that had a corset for a bodice
just didn't seem like that big a deal right that moment. I had other things to worry about.
Unfortunately.
"Yeah, Ronnie, I'm riding in with Micah and Nathaniel. Even if I stop, Nathaniel
will insist on going in with me, or wondering why I don't let him go. I don't want any of them
to know until I've got the test and it's yes, or no. Maybe it is just nerves, stress,
and the test will say no. Then I won't have to tell anybody."
"Where are your two handsome housemates?"
"Jogging. I was supposed to go with them, but I told them you'd called and
needed me to hold your hand about moving in with Louie."
"I did," she said, and sipped her coffee. "But suddenly me being nervous about
sharing space with a man for the first time in my life, just doesn't seem like such a
big deal."
I leaned my hands against the sink, and looked at her through a curtain of my
long dark hair. It had gotten too long for my tastes, but Micah had made me a deal. If I
cut my hair, he'd cut his, because he preferred his hair shorter, too. So my hair was down to
my waist for the first time since junior high, and it was really beginning to get on my
nerves. Of course, today, everything was getting on my nerves.
"Until I know for sure, I don't want them to know." "Even if it's yes, Anita,
you don't have to tell them. I'll close up my agency for a few days. We'll go away on a girl's
retreat, and you can come back without a problem."
I pushed my hair back, so I could see her clearly. I think my face showed what I
was thinking, because she said, "What?"
"Are you honestly saying, that I don't tell any of them. That I just go away for
a while and make sure that there's no baby to worry about?"
"It's your body," she said.
"Yeah, and I took my chances by having sex with this many men on a regular
basis."
"You're on the pill," she said.
"Yeah, and if I'd wanted to be a hundred percent safe I'd have still used
condoms, but I didn't. If I'm . . . pregnant, then I'll deal, but not like that."
"You can't mean you'd keep it."
I shook my head. "I'm not even sure I'm pregnant, but if I was, I couldn't not
tell the father. I'm in a committed relationship with several of them. I'm not married, but we
live together. We share a life. I couldn't just make this kind of choice without talking to
them first."
She shook her head. "No man ever wants you to get an abortion if you're in a
relationship. They always want you barefoot and pregnant."
"That's you're mother's issues talking, not yours, or at least not mine."
She looked away, wouldn't meet my eyes. "I can tell what I'd do, and it wouldn't
involve telling Louie."
I sighed, and stared out the little window above the sink. A lot of things to
say went through my head, none of them helpful. I finally settled for, "Well, it isn't
you and Louie having this particular problem. It's me, and . . ."
"And who?" she said. "Who got you knocked up?"
"Thanks for putting it that way."
"I could ask, who's the father, but that's just creepy. If you are, then it's
this little tiny, microscopic lump of cells. It's not a baby. It's not a person, not yet."
I shook my head. "We'll agree to disagree on that one."
"You're pro-choice," she said.
I nodded. "Yep, I am, but I also believe that abortion is taking a life. I agree
women have the right to choose, but I also think that it's still taking a life."
"That's like saying you're pro-choice and pro-life. You can't be both."
"I'm pro-choice because I've never been a fourteen- year-old incest victim
pregnant by their father, or a woman who's going to die if the pregnancy continues, or even
a teenager who made a mistake. I want women to have choices, but I also believe that it's a
life, especially once it's big enough to live outside the womb."
"Once a Catholic, always a Catholic," she said.
"Maybe, but being excommunicated, you'd think that cured me." The Pope had
declared that all animators, zombie raisers, were excommunate until they repented their
evil ways, and stopped doing it. What His Holiness didn't seem to grasp is that raising the
dead was a psychic ability and if we didn't raise it for money on a regular basis, that
we'd eventually raise the dead by accident. I had accidentally raised a pet as a child, and a
suicidal teacher [in college. I'd always wondered if there had been others that just never found
me. Maybe some of the accidental zombies that occasional show up were psychic abilities
gone wrong, or untrained. All I knew was that if the Pope had ever woken up as a
child with his dead dog curled up in bed with him, he'd want the power controlled. Or maybe he
wouldn't. Maybe he'd believe that it was evil and he'd pray it into submission.
My prayers just didn't have that kind of punch to them.
"You can't mean you'd actually have this . . . thing, baby, whatever."
I sighed. "I don't know, but I do know that I could never just go away, get an
abortion, and never tell my boyfriends. Never tell them that one of them might have made a
child with me. I just couldn't do it."
She was shaking her head so hard that her hair fell around her face, covered the
upper half of it. She ran her hands through it sharply, like she was pulling on it.
"I've tried to understand that you're happy living with not one, but two men.
I've tried to understand that you love that vampire son of a bitch, somehow. I've tried, but
if you actually breed. Actually have a baby, I just don't get that. I won't be able to
understand that."
"Then don't, then go. If you can't deal, then go."
"I didn't mean that. I just meant that I can't understand why you would
complicate your life his way."
"Complicate, yeah, I guess that's one way of putting it."
She crossed her arms tight over her chest. She was tall, slender and leggy, and
blond. Everything I'd wanted to be as a child. But she was small chested enough that
she could fold her arm over her breasts instead of under them, something I couldn't have
done. But her legs went on forever in a skirt, and mine did not. Oh, well.
"Okay, then if you're going to tell them, tell Micah and Nathaniel and get a
test and test yourself."
"Not until after the test. I don't want anyone to know until I know for sure."
She looked up at the ceiling, closed her eyes, and sighed. "Anita, you live with
two of them. You sleep over with two more of them. You are never alone. When are you
going to have time to run in and get a test, let alone have the privacy to use it?"
"I can pick one up at work on Monday."
She stared at me. "Monday! It's Thursday. I'd go fucking crazy if I had to wait
that long. You'll go crazy. You can't wait nearly four days."
"Maybe my period will start. Maybe by Monday I won't need it."
"Anita, you wouldn't have told me if you weren't pretty sure you needed a
pregnancy test."
"When Nathaniel and Micah get back, they'll jump in the shower and we'll go
straight to jean-Claude. We'll get dressed and we go to the party. There won't be time
tonight."
"Friday, promise me that Friday you'll get one."
"I'll try, but . . ."
"Besides, when you start asking your lovers to use condoms, won't they figure
somethingout."
"Jesus," I said.
"Yeah, I heard you say if you'd used condoms you'd be safe, don't tell me that
you're not going to want to use them for a while. Could you really have unprotected sex
right now, and enjoy it?"
I shook my head. "No."
"Then what are you going to tell the boys about this sudden need for condoms?
Hell, Micah had a vasectomy before you even met him. He's like super safe."
I sighed again. "You're right, damnit, but you are." "So pick up the test on the
way to the big show- down."
"No, I'm not going to rain all over Jean-Claude's big event. He's planned this
for months."
"You didn't mention it to me."
"I didn't plan it, he did. The ballet isn't really my thing." Truthfully, he
hadn't mentioned it to me until they were coming to St. Louis, but I kept that part to myself. It
would just give Ronnie another reason to say that Jean-Claude was keeping secrets from me. Well,
now it was my turn to keep secrets.
"And how will Mr. Fang-Face feel about being a father?"
"Don't call him that."
"Sorry, how will Jean-Claude feel about being a daddy?"
"It's probably not his."
She looked at me. "You're having sex with him, a lot, why isn't it his?"
"Because he's over four-hundred-years-old and when a vampire gets that old, they
aren't very fertile. That goes for Asher, and Damian, too."
"Oh, God," she said, "I'd forgotten that you had sex with Damian."
"Yeah," I said.
She covered her eyes with her hands. "I'm sorry, Anita. I'm sorry that it's
weirding me out that my uptight monogamous friend is suddenly sleeping with not one, but three
vampires."
"I didn't plan it that way."
"I know that." She hugged me, and I stayed stiff against her. She wasn't being
comforting enough for me to relax in her arms. She hugged me tighter. "I'm sorry, I'm
sorry, I'm being a jerk. But if it's not the vampires then who else, but your house boys."
I pulled away from her. "Don't call them my house boys. They have names, and
just because I like living with someone, and you don't, don't make that my problem."
"Fine, that leaves Micah and Nathaniel."
"Micah is fixed, so it can't be him?"
Her eyes went wide. "That leaves Nathaniel. Jesus, Anita, Nathaniel as the
father to be."
A moment ago, I might have agreed with her, but now it pissed me off. It wasn't
her place to disparage my boyfriends. "What's wrong with Nathaniel?" I said, and my voice
was not entirely happy.
She put her hands on her hips and gave me a look. "He's twenty and a stripper.
Twenty-year-old strippers are the entertainment at your bachelorette party. You don't
have babies with them."
I letting the anger seep into my eyes. "Nathaniel told me you didn't see him as
real, as a person. I told him he was wrong. I told him you were my friend, and you wouldn't
disrespect him like that. I guess I was wrong."
She didn't back down or apologize. She was angry and staying that way. "last
time I checked Nathaniel was supposed to be food, just food, not the love of your
life."
"I didn't say he was the love of my life, and yeah, he started out as my pomme
de sang, but that doesn't . . ."
But she interrupted me. "Your apple of blood, right, that's what pomme de sang
means?"
I nodded.
"If you were a vampire you'd be taking blood from your little stripper, but
thanks to that blood-sucking son of a bitch you have to feed off of sex. Sex for god's sake.
First that bastard made you his blood whore, and now . . ." She stopped abruptly, a
startled almost frightened look on her face, as if she knew she'd gone too far.
I gave her a flat, cold look. The look that says my anger has moved from hot to
cold. It's never a good sign. "Go on, Ronnie, say it."
"I didn't mean it," she whispered.
"Yeah," I said, "you did. Now I'm just a whore." My voice sounded as cold as my
eyes felt. Too angry and too hurt to be anything but cold. Hot angry can feel good, but the
cold will protect you better.
She started to cry. I just stared at her, speechless. What the hell was going
on? We were fighting, she wasn't allowed to cry in the middle of it. Especially not when she
was the one being a cruel bastard. I could count on one hand the times I'd seen Ronnie cry,
and still have fingers left over.
I was still angry, but I was puzzled, too, and that took a little of the edge
off. "Shouldn't I be the one in tears here?" I asked, because I couldn't think of what else to
say. I was mad at her and I'd be damned if I would comfort her, right now.
She spoke in that breathless, hiccupping voice that serious crying can give you.
"I'm sorry, oh, god, Anita, I'm sorry. I'm just so jealous."
I raised eyebrows at her. "What are you talking about? Jealous of what?"
"The men," she said in that shivering, uncertain voice. It was like she was
someone else for a moment, or maybe this was just part of Ronnie that she didn't let people see.
"All the damned men. I'm about to give up everybody. Everybody but Louie, and he's great,
but dmanit I've had lovers. I hit triple digits."
I wasn't sure that being able to number your lovers at over a hundred was a good
thing, but it was something that Ronnie and I had agreed to disagree over a long time
ago. I did not say, look who's the whore, or other hurtful remarks I could have made. I let
all the cheap shots I could have made go. She was the one crying.
"And now I'm giving it all up, all of it, for just one man." She leaned her
hands against the cabinet as if she needed the support.
"You said sex with Louie was great. I think you've used words like fantastic,
and mind-blowing."
She nodded, her hair spilling around her face so that I couldn't see her eyes
for a moment. "It is, he is, but he's just one man. What if I get bored, or he gets bored with
me? How can just one be enough?" She looked up at that last remark, her grey eyes wide and
frightened.
I made a small helpless gesture, and said, "You're asking the wrong person,
Ronnie. I'd planned on monogamy. It seemed like a good idea to me."
"That's exactly what I mean." She wiped at the tears on her face in harsh angry
motions, as if the touch of them made her even more upset. "How is it that you, my
girlfriend who had only three men in her entire life, ends up dating and fucking five men?"
I didn't know what to say to that, so I tried to concentrate on the hard facts.
"Six men," I said.
She frowned at me, her eyes taking on that look that meant she was counting in
her head. "I only count five."
"You're leaving someone out, Ronnie."
"No," and she started counting on her fingers, "Jean-Claude, Asher, Damian,
Nathaniel, and Micah. That's it."
I shook my head, again. "I had unprotected sex with one more man last month." I
could have said it differently, but maybe if we got back to my personal disaster, we
could stop talking about Ronnie's penis envy. She needed more therapy that I knew how to do
lately.
She frowned harder, then she got it. "Oh, no, no," she said.
I nodded. Happy to see from her expression that she got the full awfulness of
it.
"You just had sex with him once, right?"
I shook my head, as if I was shaking my head, no, over and over again. "Not just
once."
She was looking at me so hard, that I couldn't hold her gaze. Even with the tear
tracks drying on her face, she was suddenly Ronnie again. Ronnie had a good hard stare.
I couldn't meet it, and was left looking at the cabinets. "How much more than, not
just once?" She asked.
I started to blush and couldn't stop it. Damnit.
"You're blushing that's not a good sign," she said.
I stared down at the counter top, using my long hair to hide my face.
Her voice was gentler, when she said, "How many times, Anita? How many times in
the month you've been back together?"
"Seven," I said, still not looking up. I hated admitting it, because the number
alone said louder than any words, just how much I enjoyed being in Richard's bed.
"Seven times in a month," she said, "wow, that's . . . "
I looked up, and the look was enough.
"Sorry, sorry, just . . ." She looked as if she wasn't sure whether she was
going to laugh, or be sad about it. She controlled herself, and finally sounded sad, when she said,
"Oh, my God, Richard."
I nodded, again.
"Richard," she whispered his name, and looked suitably horrified. It was worth a
little horror.
Richard Zeeman and I had been off again, on again, for years. Mostly off. We'd
been engaged briefly until I saw him eat someone. He was the leader, Ulfric, of the
local werewolf pack. He was also a junior high science teacher, and an all round boy
scout. If boy scouts were 6' 1", muscled, amazingly handsome, and had an amazing ability
to be self-destructive. He hated being a monster, and he hated me for being more
comfortable with the monsters than he was. He hated a lot of things, but we'd made up just
enough to have fallen into bed in the last few weeks. But as my Grandma Blake told me,
once was enough.
Of all the men in my life the worst possible choice would have been Richard,
because he of all of them would try for the white picket fence and a normal life. Normal
wasn't possible for me, or him, but I knew that, and he didn't, not really, not yet. Even if I
was pregnant, even if I kept being pregnant, I wasn't going to marry anyone. I wasn't going to
change my living arrangements. My life worked the way it was, and Richard's idea of
domestic bliss, was not mine.
She gave an abrupt laugh, then swallowed it. I was glaring at her. "Come on,
Anita, I'm allowed to be impressed that you've managed to have sex with him seven times in
the space of a month. I mean, you don't even live together, and you're having more
sex than some of our married friends."
I kept giving her the look that makes bad guys run for cover, but Ronnie was my
friend, and it's harder to impress you're friends with the scary-look. They know you
won't really hurt them. The fight was dying under the weight of friendship, and my problem
being more immediate than her years of issues unresolved.
Ronnie touched my arm. "Oh, it wouldn't be Richard's. You're having sex with
Nathaniel at least every other day."
"Sometimes twice a day," I said.
She smiled. "Well, my, my . . ." then waved her hand as if to keep from
distracting herself. "But the odds are, that it's Nathaniel's, right."
I smiled at her. "You sound happy about that now."
She shrugged. "Well, a choice of evils, ya know."
"Thanks a lot, Ronnie."
"You know what I meant," she said.
"No, I don't think I do." I think I was ready to be angry about her thinking the
men in my life were a choice of evils, but I didn't get a chance to be angry, because two
of the men in my life were coming through the front door.
I heard them unlocking the door, before it opened, and their voices came raised,
and alittle breathless from the run. They'd been able to run faster, and, or further,
without me along. I was, after all, still human, and they were not.
Standing between the island and the cabinets we couldn't see the door, only hear
them laughing as they came towards the doorway to the kitchen.
"How can you do that?" Ronnie asked, voice soft.
"What?" I asked, frowning.
"You were smiling."
I looked at her.
"You smiled just at the sound of their voices, even with everything . . ."
I stopped her with a hand on her arm. One way I knew I didn't want them to find
out about the maybe baby was by overhearing a conversation. Their hearing was a little too
keen to risk it. And here they came, my two live-in sweeties.
Micah was in front, looking back over his shoulder, still laughing, talking. He
was my height, short, slender and muscular in that swimmer sort of way. He had to have
his suits tailored because he needed an extra small athletic cut. You didn't get that off
the rack. He'd come to me tanned and stayed that way from jogging outside, mostly
shirtless, all summer and autumn. He'd added a t-shirt to the short-shorts today. His hair was
that deep, rich brown that some people get after starting life as very blond. His
dark hair was tied back in a low pony tail that couldn't hide how curly it was, almost as
curly as mine. He'd taken off his sunglasses so when I moved into his arms I could look up into
his chartreuse eyes. Yellow-green leopard eyes in his delicate face. A very bad man
had forced him to stay in leopard form until when he came back to human he couldn't come
all the way back.
We kissed and our arms just seemed to automatically glide around each other, to
press our bodies as close together as we could with clothes on. He'd affected me this
way almost from the moment we had seen each other. Lust at first sight. They say it doesn't
last, but we were six months and counting.
To be continued
(Please note, this has not been edited. So there may be some errors, like Ronnie and Anita forgetting Ronnie had been married previously. Those will be fixed in the final edition.
Chapter One:
It was the first week of November. I was supposed to be out jogging, but instead I was sitting at my breakfast table talking about men, sex, werewolves, vampires, and that thing that most unmarried but sexual active women fear most of all - a missed period.
Veronica (Ronnie) Sims, best friend and private detective, sat across from me at
my little four-seater breakfast table. The table sat on a little raised alcove in a bay
window. I did breakfast most mornings at that view out into the deck and the trees beyond.
Today, the view wasn't pretty, because the inside of my head was too ugly to see it. Panic
will do that to you.
"You're sure you missed October? You didn't just count wrong?" Ronnie asked.
I shook my head and stared into my coffee cup. "I'm two weeks overdue."
She reached across the table and patted my hand. "Two weeks, you had me scared.
Two weeks could be anything, Anita. Stress will throw you off that much, and God
knows you've had enough stress." She squeezed my hand. "That last serial killer case was only
about two weeks ago." She squeezed my hand harder. "Just what I read in the paper and saw
on the news was bad."
I'd stopped telling Ronnie all my bad stuff years ago, when my cases as a legal
vampire executioner had gotten so much bloodier than her cases as a private eye. Now I
was a federal marshal along with most of the other legal vamp hunters in the United
States. It meant that I had even more access to even more awful shit. Things that Ronnie,
or any of my female friends didn't want to know about. I didn't fault them. I'd rather not
have had that many nightmares in my own head. No, I didn't fault Ronnie, but it meant
that some of the most awful stuff couldn't be shared with her. I was just glad we'd made up a
long- standing grumpiness in time to have her here for this particular disaster. I was
able to talk about the bad parts of the cases with some of the men in my life, but I couldn't
have shared the missed period with any of them. It concerned one of them entirely too
much.
She squeezed my hand hard, and leaned back. Her grey eyes were all sympathy, and
apology. She was still feeling guilty that she'd let her issues about commitment
and men rain all over our friendship. She'd come here today to cry on my shoulder about
the fact that she was moving in with her boyfriend, Louie Fane, Dr. Louis Fane, thank you
very much. He had his doctorate in biology and taught at Washington University. He
also turned furry once a month, and was a lieutenant of the local wererat rodere, their word
for pack.
"If Louie wasn't hiding what he was from his colleagues we'd be going to the big
party tonight," she said.
"He teaches people's kids, Ronnie, he can't afford to find out what they'd do if
they found out he had lycanthropy."
"College isn't kids, it's definitely grown-up."
"Parents won't see it that way," I said. I looked at her, and finally said, "Are
you changing the subject?"
"It's only two weeks, Anita, after one of the most violent cases you've ever
had. I wouldn't even loose sleep over it."
"Yeah, but you're period is erratic, mines not. I've never been two weeks late
before."
She pushed a strand of blond hair back behind her ear. The new hair cut framed
her face nicely, but it didn't stay out of her eyes, and she was always pushing it back.
"Never?"
I shook my head, and sipped coffee. It was cold. I got up and went to dump it in
the sink.
"What's the latest you've ever been?" she asked.
"Two days, I think five once, but I wasn't having sex with anyone, so it wasn't
scary. I mean unless there was a star in the east I was safe, just late." I poured coffee from
the French press, which emptied it. I was so going to need more coffee.
Ronnie came to stand next to me, while I put more hot water on the stove. She
leaned her butt against the cabinets and drank her coffee, but she was watching me.
"Let me run this back at you. You've never been two weeks late, ever, and you've
never missed a whole month before?"
"Not since this whole mess started when I was fourteen, no."
"I always envied you the regular as clock work schedule," she said.
I started dismantling the French press, taking out the lid with its filter on a
stick. "Well, the clock is broken right now."
"Shit," she said, softly.
"You can say that again."
"You need a pregnancy test," she said.
"No, shit." I dumped the grounds into the trash can, and shook my head. "I can't
go shopping for one tonight."
"Can't you make a quick stop on the way to Jean- Claude's big party?"
Jean-Claude, Master Vampire of the City of St. Louis, and my sweetie, was
throwing one of the biggest bashes of the year to welcome to town the first ever mostly vampire
dance company. He was one of their patrons, and when you spend that much money you
apparently get to spend more to throw a party to celebrate that the money was
helping the dance troupe find rave reviews in their cross-country tour. There was going to
be national and international media there tonight. It was like a big deal, and I as his main
squeeze had to be on his arm, smiling, and dressed up. In fact I was due at his place in
about an hour to have him get me into what I was wearing. I'd never have been able to get
myself decked out for something like this, not without help. The dress alone needed a maid.
But strangely, appearing in public in a formal dress that had a corset for a bodice
just didn't seem like that big a deal right that moment. I had other things to worry about.
Unfortunately.
"Yeah, Ronnie, I'm riding in with Micah and Nathaniel. Even if I stop, Nathaniel
will insist on going in with me, or wondering why I don't let him go. I don't want any of them
to know until I've got the test and it's yes, or no. Maybe it is just nerves, stress,
and the test will say no. Then I won't have to tell anybody."
"Where are your two handsome housemates?"
"Jogging. I was supposed to go with them, but I told them you'd called and
needed me to hold your hand about moving in with Louie."
"I did," she said, and sipped her coffee. "But suddenly me being nervous about
sharing space with a man for the first time in my life, just doesn't seem like such a
big deal."
I leaned my hands against the sink, and looked at her through a curtain of my
long dark hair. It had gotten too long for my tastes, but Micah had made me a deal. If I
cut my hair, he'd cut his, because he preferred his hair shorter, too. So my hair was down to
my waist for the first time since junior high, and it was really beginning to get on my
nerves. Of course, today, everything was getting on my nerves.
"Until I know for sure, I don't want them to know." "Even if it's yes, Anita,
you don't have to tell them. I'll close up my agency for a few days. We'll go away on a girl's
retreat, and you can come back without a problem."
I pushed my hair back, so I could see her clearly. I think my face showed what I
was thinking, because she said, "What?"
"Are you honestly saying, that I don't tell any of them. That I just go away for
a while and make sure that there's no baby to worry about?"
"It's your body," she said.
"Yeah, and I took my chances by having sex with this many men on a regular
basis."
"You're on the pill," she said.
"Yeah, and if I'd wanted to be a hundred percent safe I'd have still used
condoms, but I didn't. If I'm . . . pregnant, then I'll deal, but not like that."
"You can't mean you'd keep it."
I shook my head. "I'm not even sure I'm pregnant, but if I was, I couldn't not
tell the father. I'm in a committed relationship with several of them. I'm not married, but we
live together. We share a life. I couldn't just make this kind of choice without talking to
them first."
She shook her head. "No man ever wants you to get an abortion if you're in a
relationship. They always want you barefoot and pregnant."
"That's you're mother's issues talking, not yours, or at least not mine."
She looked away, wouldn't meet my eyes. "I can tell what I'd do, and it wouldn't
involve telling Louie."
I sighed, and stared out the little window above the sink. A lot of things to
say went through my head, none of them helpful. I finally settled for, "Well, it isn't
you and Louie having this particular problem. It's me, and . . ."
"And who?" she said. "Who got you knocked up?"
"Thanks for putting it that way."
"I could ask, who's the father, but that's just creepy. If you are, then it's
this little tiny, microscopic lump of cells. It's not a baby. It's not a person, not yet."
I shook my head. "We'll agree to disagree on that one."
"You're pro-choice," she said.
I nodded. "Yep, I am, but I also believe that abortion is taking a life. I agree
women have the right to choose, but I also think that it's still taking a life."
"That's like saying you're pro-choice and pro-life. You can't be both."
"I'm pro-choice because I've never been a fourteen- year-old incest victim
pregnant by their father, or a woman who's going to die if the pregnancy continues, or even
a teenager who made a mistake. I want women to have choices, but I also believe that it's a
life, especially once it's big enough to live outside the womb."
"Once a Catholic, always a Catholic," she said.
"Maybe, but being excommunicated, you'd think that cured me." The Pope had
declared that all animators, zombie raisers, were excommunate until they repented their
evil ways, and stopped doing it. What His Holiness didn't seem to grasp is that raising the
dead was a psychic ability and if we didn't raise it for money on a regular basis, that
we'd eventually raise the dead by accident. I had accidentally raised a pet as a child, and a
suicidal teacher [in college. I'd always wondered if there had been others that just never found
me. Maybe some of the accidental zombies that occasional show up were psychic abilities
gone wrong, or untrained. All I knew was that if the Pope had ever woken up as a
child with his dead dog curled up in bed with him, he'd want the power controlled. Or maybe he
wouldn't. Maybe he'd believe that it was evil and he'd pray it into submission.
My prayers just didn't have that kind of punch to them.
"You can't mean you'd actually have this . . . thing, baby, whatever."
I sighed. "I don't know, but I do know that I could never just go away, get an
abortion, and never tell my boyfriends. Never tell them that one of them might have made a
child with me. I just couldn't do it."
She was shaking her head so hard that her hair fell around her face, covered the
upper half of it. She ran her hands through it sharply, like she was pulling on it.
"I've tried to understand that you're happy living with not one, but two men.
I've tried to understand that you love that vampire son of a bitch, somehow. I've tried, but
if you actually breed. Actually have a baby, I just don't get that. I won't be able to
understand that."
"Then don't, then go. If you can't deal, then go."
"I didn't mean that. I just meant that I can't understand why you would
complicate your life his way."
"Complicate, yeah, I guess that's one way of putting it."
She crossed her arms tight over her chest. She was tall, slender and leggy, and
blond. Everything I'd wanted to be as a child. But she was small chested enough that
she could fold her arm over her breasts instead of under them, something I couldn't have
done. But her legs went on forever in a skirt, and mine did not. Oh, well.
"Okay, then if you're going to tell them, tell Micah and Nathaniel and get a
test and test yourself."
"Not until after the test. I don't want anyone to know until I know for sure."
She looked up at the ceiling, closed her eyes, and sighed. "Anita, you live with
two of them. You sleep over with two more of them. You are never alone. When are you
going to have time to run in and get a test, let alone have the privacy to use it?"
"I can pick one up at work on Monday."
She stared at me. "Monday! It's Thursday. I'd go fucking crazy if I had to wait
that long. You'll go crazy. You can't wait nearly four days."
"Maybe my period will start. Maybe by Monday I won't need it."
"Anita, you wouldn't have told me if you weren't pretty sure you needed a
pregnancy test."
"When Nathaniel and Micah get back, they'll jump in the shower and we'll go
straight to jean-Claude. We'll get dressed and we go to the party. There won't be time
tonight."
"Friday, promise me that Friday you'll get one."
"I'll try, but . . ."
"Besides, when you start asking your lovers to use condoms, won't they figure
somethingout."
"Jesus," I said.
"Yeah, I heard you say if you'd used condoms you'd be safe, don't tell me that
you're not going to want to use them for a while. Could you really have unprotected sex
right now, and enjoy it?"
I shook my head. "No."
"Then what are you going to tell the boys about this sudden need for condoms?
Hell, Micah had a vasectomy before you even met him. He's like super safe."
I sighed again. "You're right, damnit, but you are." "So pick up the test on the
way to the big show- down."
"No, I'm not going to rain all over Jean-Claude's big event. He's planned this
for months."
"You didn't mention it to me."
"I didn't plan it, he did. The ballet isn't really my thing." Truthfully, he
hadn't mentioned it to me until they were coming to St. Louis, but I kept that part to myself. It
would just give Ronnie another reason to say that Jean-Claude was keeping secrets from me. Well,
now it was my turn to keep secrets.
"And how will Mr. Fang-Face feel about being a father?"
"Don't call him that."
"Sorry, how will Jean-Claude feel about being a daddy?"
"It's probably not his."
She looked at me. "You're having sex with him, a lot, why isn't it his?"
"Because he's over four-hundred-years-old and when a vampire gets that old, they
aren't very fertile. That goes for Asher, and Damian, too."
"Oh, God," she said, "I'd forgotten that you had sex with Damian."
"Yeah," I said.
She covered her eyes with her hands. "I'm sorry, Anita. I'm sorry that it's
weirding me out that my uptight monogamous friend is suddenly sleeping with not one, but three
vampires."
"I didn't plan it that way."
"I know that." She hugged me, and I stayed stiff against her. She wasn't being
comforting enough for me to relax in her arms. She hugged me tighter. "I'm sorry, I'm
sorry, I'm being a jerk. But if it's not the vampires then who else, but your house boys."
I pulled away from her. "Don't call them my house boys. They have names, and
just because I like living with someone, and you don't, don't make that my problem."
"Fine, that leaves Micah and Nathaniel."
"Micah is fixed, so it can't be him?"
Her eyes went wide. "That leaves Nathaniel. Jesus, Anita, Nathaniel as the
father to be."
A moment ago, I might have agreed with her, but now it pissed me off. It wasn't
her place to disparage my boyfriends. "What's wrong with Nathaniel?" I said, and my voice
was not entirely happy.
She put her hands on her hips and gave me a look. "He's twenty and a stripper.
Twenty-year-old strippers are the entertainment at your bachelorette party. You don't
have babies with them."
I letting the anger seep into my eyes. "Nathaniel told me you didn't see him as
real, as a person. I told him he was wrong. I told him you were my friend, and you wouldn't
disrespect him like that. I guess I was wrong."
She didn't back down or apologize. She was angry and staying that way. "last
time I checked Nathaniel was supposed to be food, just food, not the love of your
life."
"I didn't say he was the love of my life, and yeah, he started out as my pomme
de sang, but that doesn't . . ."
But she interrupted me. "Your apple of blood, right, that's what pomme de sang
means?"
I nodded.
"If you were a vampire you'd be taking blood from your little stripper, but
thanks to that blood-sucking son of a bitch you have to feed off of sex. Sex for god's sake.
First that bastard made you his blood whore, and now . . ." She stopped abruptly, a
startled almost frightened look on her face, as if she knew she'd gone too far.
I gave her a flat, cold look. The look that says my anger has moved from hot to
cold. It's never a good sign. "Go on, Ronnie, say it."
"I didn't mean it," she whispered.
"Yeah," I said, "you did. Now I'm just a whore." My voice sounded as cold as my
eyes felt. Too angry and too hurt to be anything but cold. Hot angry can feel good, but the
cold will protect you better.
She started to cry. I just stared at her, speechless. What the hell was going
on? We were fighting, she wasn't allowed to cry in the middle of it. Especially not when she
was the one being a cruel bastard. I could count on one hand the times I'd seen Ronnie cry,
and still have fingers left over.
I was still angry, but I was puzzled, too, and that took a little of the edge
off. "Shouldn't I be the one in tears here?" I asked, because I couldn't think of what else to
say. I was mad at her and I'd be damned if I would comfort her, right now.
She spoke in that breathless, hiccupping voice that serious crying can give you.
"I'm sorry, oh, god, Anita, I'm sorry. I'm just so jealous."
I raised eyebrows at her. "What are you talking about? Jealous of what?"
"The men," she said in that shivering, uncertain voice. It was like she was
someone else for a moment, or maybe this was just part of Ronnie that she didn't let people see.
"All the damned men. I'm about to give up everybody. Everybody but Louie, and he's great,
but dmanit I've had lovers. I hit triple digits."
I wasn't sure that being able to number your lovers at over a hundred was a good
thing, but it was something that Ronnie and I had agreed to disagree over a long time
ago. I did not say, look who's the whore, or other hurtful remarks I could have made. I let
all the cheap shots I could have made go. She was the one crying.
"And now I'm giving it all up, all of it, for just one man." She leaned her
hands against the cabinet as if she needed the support.
"You said sex with Louie was great. I think you've used words like fantastic,
and mind-blowing."
She nodded, her hair spilling around her face so that I couldn't see her eyes
for a moment. "It is, he is, but he's just one man. What if I get bored, or he gets bored with
me? How can just one be enough?" She looked up at that last remark, her grey eyes wide and
frightened.
I made a small helpless gesture, and said, "You're asking the wrong person,
Ronnie. I'd planned on monogamy. It seemed like a good idea to me."
"That's exactly what I mean." She wiped at the tears on her face in harsh angry
motions, as if the touch of them made her even more upset. "How is it that you, my
girlfriend who had only three men in her entire life, ends up dating and fucking five men?"
I didn't know what to say to that, so I tried to concentrate on the hard facts.
"Six men," I said.
She frowned at me, her eyes taking on that look that meant she was counting in
her head. "I only count five."
"You're leaving someone out, Ronnie."
"No," and she started counting on her fingers, "Jean-Claude, Asher, Damian,
Nathaniel, and Micah. That's it."
I shook my head, again. "I had unprotected sex with one more man last month." I
could have said it differently, but maybe if we got back to my personal disaster, we
could stop talking about Ronnie's penis envy. She needed more therapy that I knew how to do
lately.
She frowned harder, then she got it. "Oh, no, no," she said.
I nodded. Happy to see from her expression that she got the full awfulness of
it.
"You just had sex with him once, right?"
I shook my head, as if I was shaking my head, no, over and over again. "Not just
once."
She was looking at me so hard, that I couldn't hold her gaze. Even with the tear
tracks drying on her face, she was suddenly Ronnie again. Ronnie had a good hard stare.
I couldn't meet it, and was left looking at the cabinets. "How much more than, not
just once?" She asked.
I started to blush and couldn't stop it. Damnit.
"You're blushing that's not a good sign," she said.
I stared down at the counter top, using my long hair to hide my face.
Her voice was gentler, when she said, "How many times, Anita? How many times in
the month you've been back together?"
"Seven," I said, still not looking up. I hated admitting it, because the number
alone said louder than any words, just how much I enjoyed being in Richard's bed.
"Seven times in a month," she said, "wow, that's . . . "
I looked up, and the look was enough.
"Sorry, sorry, just . . ." She looked as if she wasn't sure whether she was
going to laugh, or be sad about it. She controlled herself, and finally sounded sad, when she said,
"Oh, my God, Richard."
I nodded, again.
"Richard," she whispered his name, and looked suitably horrified. It was worth a
little horror.
Richard Zeeman and I had been off again, on again, for years. Mostly off. We'd
been engaged briefly until I saw him eat someone. He was the leader, Ulfric, of the
local werewolf pack. He was also a junior high science teacher, and an all round boy
scout. If boy scouts were 6' 1", muscled, amazingly handsome, and had an amazing ability
to be self-destructive. He hated being a monster, and he hated me for being more
comfortable with the monsters than he was. He hated a lot of things, but we'd made up just
enough to have fallen into bed in the last few weeks. But as my Grandma Blake told me,
once was enough.
Of all the men in my life the worst possible choice would have been Richard,
because he of all of them would try for the white picket fence and a normal life. Normal
wasn't possible for me, or him, but I knew that, and he didn't, not really, not yet. Even if I
was pregnant, even if I kept being pregnant, I wasn't going to marry anyone. I wasn't going to
change my living arrangements. My life worked the way it was, and Richard's idea of
domestic bliss, was not mine.
She gave an abrupt laugh, then swallowed it. I was glaring at her. "Come on,
Anita, I'm allowed to be impressed that you've managed to have sex with him seven times in
the space of a month. I mean, you don't even live together, and you're having more
sex than some of our married friends."
I kept giving her the look that makes bad guys run for cover, but Ronnie was my
friend, and it's harder to impress you're friends with the scary-look. They know you
won't really hurt them. The fight was dying under the weight of friendship, and my problem
being more immediate than her years of issues unresolved.
Ronnie touched my arm. "Oh, it wouldn't be Richard's. You're having sex with
Nathaniel at least every other day."
"Sometimes twice a day," I said.
She smiled. "Well, my, my . . ." then waved her hand as if to keep from
distracting herself. "But the odds are, that it's Nathaniel's, right."
I smiled at her. "You sound happy about that now."
She shrugged. "Well, a choice of evils, ya know."
"Thanks a lot, Ronnie."
"You know what I meant," she said.
"No, I don't think I do." I think I was ready to be angry about her thinking the
men in my life were a choice of evils, but I didn't get a chance to be angry, because two
of the men in my life were coming through the front door.
I heard them unlocking the door, before it opened, and their voices came raised,
and alittle breathless from the run. They'd been able to run faster, and, or further,
without me along. I was, after all, still human, and they were not.
Standing between the island and the cabinets we couldn't see the door, only hear
them laughing as they came towards the doorway to the kitchen.
"How can you do that?" Ronnie asked, voice soft.
"What?" I asked, frowning.
"You were smiling."
I looked at her.
"You smiled just at the sound of their voices, even with everything . . ."
I stopped her with a hand on her arm. One way I knew I didn't want them to find
out about the maybe baby was by overhearing a conversation. Their hearing was a little too
keen to risk it. And here they came, my two live-in sweeties.
Micah was in front, looking back over his shoulder, still laughing, talking. He
was my height, short, slender and muscular in that swimmer sort of way. He had to have
his suits tailored because he needed an extra small athletic cut. You didn't get that off
the rack. He'd come to me tanned and stayed that way from jogging outside, mostly
shirtless, all summer and autumn. He'd added a t-shirt to the short-shorts today. His hair was
that deep, rich brown that some people get after starting life as very blond. His
dark hair was tied back in a low pony tail that couldn't hide how curly it was, almost as
curly as mine. He'd taken off his sunglasses so when I moved into his arms I could look up into
his chartreuse eyes. Yellow-green leopard eyes in his delicate face. A very bad man
had forced him to stay in leopard form until when he came back to human he couldn't come
all the way back.
We kissed and our arms just seemed to automatically glide around each other, to
press our bodies as close together as we could with clothes on. He'd affected me this
way almost from the moment we had seen each other. Lust at first sight. They say it doesn't
last, but we were six months and counting.
To be continued