Birth of Jaiden (39 page)

Danielle resumed her
protective post but she still held Chris.

Damion held Levine at bay
with his giant demon sword and reared back for the momentum to
drive it through her just when the human group arrived. Deanna saw
Chris and ran toward him.

“
No!” she cried and threw
herself around Chris.

The doors were thrown open
and light penetrated the entire opening.

“
Alex, go!” Danielle shouted to
him. “Get them out of here,
now!
”

Levine screeched at the
sudden invasion of vampires’ worst enemy and backed away. Danielle
peeled Deanna off of Chris, joined the pack of humans and
disappeared out the door with Chris.

Sickened by the fact that
he would leave this lair without killing Levine, Alex slipped into
the crowd. As soon as he had passed through the doors, he secured
Jaiden in his arms and threw Isabella onto his back, then leapt the
rest of the way over the humans who stood in his way.

His eyes stung and his
skin was hot. He dropped Isabella to the soft grass which covered
the ground and fell to his knees just as the world exploded around
them.

Humans scattered and flew
through the air. Chunks of stone and clumps of dirt rained down
around them. The people already outside threw themselves face down
onto the ground.

One man stood in the
center of the entire battle with his hands raised to the sky.
“Thank you, Lord! Thank you! The angels have saved us. We have been
set free!”

The mountain had crumbled.
Literally, a mountain had become nothing, and he knew it would take
days before the dust totally cleared. For the time being, he knew
the rest of the world would put it off as an earthquake until it
was reported by those that an entire mountain had fallen into the
earth. Thankfully it hadn’t been a really big mountain but more of
a hill.

He hugged Jaiden tightly
to him. She seemed to have sensed her safety with him and was
finally quiet and sleeping. He stepped over people and chunks of
rubble and made his way to where the doors had been.

He sensed that something
was happening; something drew him back to that spot instead of
leading him straight home where he should be headed.

He stared at the collapsed
stone and earth until his stinging eyes blurred. He thought he saw
a subtle movement when the area he was staring at burst open and a
pale figure swathed in glittering emerald and blood
emerged.

Levine actually looked
more surprised than he felt. Her eyes darted around as if she had
never seen the surrounding area before. She squinted her eyes and
looked to the sky.

It was then that Alex
finally realized that she had had no idea she could survive in the
sunlight.

Behind Levine, Corrine
stood with her hands on her hips, shaking her head. Alex pressed
his lips to Jaiden’s curly red hair just as Levine tilted her head
enough for their eyes to meet through the dust.

“
This isn’t over,” she
whispered for him alone to hear. “Be watching for me.”

Then, she leapt in a
flying back flip right over her sister and ran with vampire speed
into the hundreds of miles of woods.

39

Deanna lay curled on the
warm earth beside her dead first love. Chris was gone. She snuggled
into his cold side and her hand found his cheek. She ran her
fingertips from his hairline down along his jaw and then over his
lips.

No one would ever know
what he had helped her to become. She was a fighter, a lover, a
woman. He had helped her to grow from the awkward girl she had been
before into something great. No, they would never know. Only Alex,
maybe, could possibly know how much he had meant to her.

She could feel tears
running down her cheeks, along the side of her nose, and she could
taste the salty sadness, making it even more real. Danielle and
some others had come and tried to take him away but she had ordered
them to leave her alone with him.

She believed in ghosts and
such but she didn’t really believe that he would stick around as a
spirit for any reason. He had accomplished what he had come into
the world to do. He had helped to save it. The first battle of many
was won because he had saved the child who would be the fate of
humanity. Nothing could compare to that.

“I love you,” she
whispered into an unhearing ear. “I love you so much,
Christopher.”

She moved up and over him
so that she could kiss his frozen, pale lips. They had always been
cold when she had kissed them and she had never craved the warmth
most girls wanted. His heart had been warm enough to heat her body
ten times over.

She reached up around her
neck and took off her necklace. It was a small sun and moon. The
silver sun sat on the lap of a crescent moon, somehow symbolizing
them together, night and day, dark and light, vampire and human.
She lifted his brown hair away from his neck and secured the
necklace, centering it just right over his chest.

“Now, I will be with you
forever, baby. I won’t forget you,” she whispered.

More tears spilled from
the corners of her eyes and splashed down onto Chris’s stone face.
She wiped them away with her fingertips. She knew that he hadn’t
loved her as she had loved him. He never would have loved anyone as
much as Marissa and she would never be so naive as to think that
she had been able to take her place, nor had she wanted to. But,
she had been happy simply being with him, even knowing he hadn’t
intended to have a future with her. He never had ignored her or had
given her reason to feel unimportant; he had treated her good and
that had been enough for her.

Alex crouched down on the
other side of Chris and took her hand in his, clasping it tightly
and bringing it to his lips so he could graze a kiss across her
warm skin.

“I love him too,” he told
her. “He was the only family I had.”

She sniffed back a sob and
shook her head. “No, that’s not true. We are your family too. Now,
you have Jaiden and Isabella also. Your family is everywhere.” She
flicked her gaze to where Danielle stood with Jaiden behind him.
“Don’t underestimate us, Alex. It’s actually a little hurtful that
you think so little of us that you wouldn’t already consider us
your family.”

With her knees still
planted in the dirt, she turned away from him and Chris and saw
Michael watching her from within the trees. He nodded to her when
their eyes met and she knew he was leaving her alone on purpose, so
that she could have her time with Chris.

“I want a real funeral for
him,” she told Alex, turning to face him. “I want people to come
and pay their respects and to remember how good he was. There are
tons of people he worked with whose lives he touched. I don’t want
it to feel like he just disappeared off the face of the earth
without cause.”

“Of course.” Alex nodded,
his own wall of emotion dangerously close to breaking
down.

“We have to get out of
here now.” She grazed one final kiss over Christopher’s lips and
then wiped the tears away. It was time to be strong; there would be
lots of time for grieving, later.

Alex agreed with a nod and
stood. He held out his hand to help her up and then picked up Chris
whose body appeared light as a feather in Alex’s arms. She walked
beside them through the sunlight scattered woods. Michael joined
them first; he grieved for his fallen soldiers too, for he had lost
far more than the Great Council. Soon, they were joined by Danielle
and Jaiden, and then, Corrine fell into step beside the group,
followed by Damion who carried an exhausted but conscious
Isabella.

Deanna separated from the
group when they reached the trucks. She noted Victoria and Jeremiah
were at their stations by the hummers and the many people who had
managed to escape were sedated once again and loaded up into the
trucks. There was a lot of commotion happening all around her but
it felt trance-like and foggy to her. It should have been a
celebration with Jaiden being saved and Malcolm’s death but the
sadness for the lost hung heavily in the air.

They hadn’t recovered
Stewart’s body like they had wanted to; there hadn’t been time. She
hated that. But, she had fought like a warrior. Her physical
training had won out over her magic and that was definitely
something. She knew Chris would have been proud of her.

Victoria appeared at her
side. Deanna received the uncharacteristic embrace Victoria offered
her. Suddenly, something crazy occurred to her. It was daytime, the
freaking sun shone down and Chris’s body hadn’t blown into ashes,
neither had Alex’s.

She spun around to assure
herself she wasn’t dreaming. Nope, Alex was there by the trucks
with Jeremiah, talking with their heads close together. It was a
miracle but she wasn’t stupid, either; she was sure Jeremiah had
something to do with it. Nevertheless, she was happy they would
have a body to bury and view at the funeral. But, it didn’t explain
how Levine had managed to run off into the bright, shiny
forest.

David, the crazy prisoner,
appeared before her in the clouds of dust.

“Hello, David.” Exhausted,
she pointed toward the trucks. “They can help you over there. They
are helping the others.”

David nodded. “I know. I
wanted to introduce myself properly and thank you
again.”

Deanna marveled at how David
didn’t seem so crazy anymore. “Well, I’m Deanna, and it is
you
we should be
thanking. You probably saved all of us.”

He shook his head. “Nah,
all that matters is we are free now.” He extended his hand to
shake. “My full name is David Fuller. I’m a professor of paranormal
psychology and wanted you to know my name, just in case you ever
need anything. I don’t teach anymore but I still
practice.”

Deanna almost laughed.
“Good grief, did Malcolm and Levine hand-pick you, or
what.”

He smiled. “No, they took
me off the street randomly. It was pure bad luck.”

“Well, David, same goes
for you. If you need anything, look us up. That guy right there,”
she pointed at Alex, “is Alexander Lucas; he should be the easiest
of us to find.”

He took Deanna’s hand and
kissed it.

“Thank you, brave lady.”
He turned to go but glanced back briefly. “By the way, I’ve always
been a little crazy. It’s not just the trauma.” And then, he was
gone.

Shaking her head, she also
turned away.

The fog didn’t appear to
lift from inside her head. All she could handle was not to fall
down and take a nap right there. She found her way to a hummer,
opened the door and reclined the seat all the way back. Hopefully,
they would be on the road soon because emergency vehicles were
coming. They had to be. Smoke and dust would cover them on their
way out of there so the helicopters that were on their way wouldn’t
see them.

Damion slid into the seat
next to her. “Looks like everything is secure. You want to go
home?”

She almost laughed. “Are
you kidding?”

She closed her eyes and
found the love and laughter of the past in her dreams.

40

Alex found the funeral for
Chris emotionally exhausting. The next day, there would be a
funeral for Stewart. His would obviously be a memorial service and
filled with far fewer people but that part didn’t matter. Stewart
was as much a hero as Chris or any of them for that
matter.

And the day after that,
they would attend the funeral for Jackie and the other slayers who
had died that day. Alex didn’t favor being around so many slayers
but he owed Jackie his presence since she had probably saved his
life more than once in Malcolm’s lair.

He had chosen to have
Chris buried on his own grounds in the small cemetery which already
contained the graves and memorial stones for the fallen members of
previous councils. He had no family to lay to rest inside what
should have been a family cemetery so it seemed fitting to give
each and every member of the Great Council a special place for
their bodies to spend eternity.

His only regret was that
they hadn’t been able to bring home Stewart’s body. Even if they
had been able to get him out, his body wouldn’t have preserved like
Chris’s vampire body. Chris would remain a perfect porcelain shell
forever.

Sunlight filtered through
the few clouds littering the watery blue sky above. The service was
over, the prayers had been said and they were giving Chris back to
the earth and God. As Chris was lowered into the ground, ‘Amazing
Grace’ was played on a little CD player and Deanna, who had chosen
to wear white in celebration of his life and thereafter, threw a
red rose down onto his casket. She did not cry, nor did
he.

Michael attended the
funeral with a few of his slayers at his side. Alex noticed Michael
hadn’t simply come to pay his respects to Chris but seemed to be
grieving more for Deanna’s loss than his own.

Isabella stood elegantly
by his side with Jaiden asleep in her pretty pink stroller. Her
wrists were wrapped with white bandages which stood out against her
simple black dress. Without the two of them, he most certainly
would have crumpled under the weight of losing Chris but Isabella
had stood the test of all she had been through and had come out
stronger than ever. She stayed strong for him too.