Forest Moon Rising (41 page)

A baby! Lucia offered me this charming baby as my own. I’d never have one of my own, but, oh, how I longed for one.

Our baby,
Scrap reminded me.

“Donovan is an adolescent. I do not trust him.”

“Adolescent?” I choked. “He fell over fifty years ago. He was a teenager then. That’s a very long adolescence.”

“When Donovan fell, he was a teenager because he was barely into adolescence in gargoyle terms when he took form inside a statue. He has barely had time to mature by Damiri standards.” Lucia dismissed my objection with a wave of her hand.

“I wonder if all of his faux pas are just teenage posturing?” I mused.

“Besides,” she continued as if I had not spoken, “if Donovan ever obtains a home world for the Kajiri, he will take his children there and he won’t allow them to know their humanity. I want my child here, in this dimension, learning her full potential.”

“Lucia, you are asking a lot. As you noticed, this place is barely big enough for me and my daughters. To add a baby would complicate things beyond measure.” My middle began to ache with longing.

A baby to call my own!

“Details. We can figure out the details later. Will you adopt Sophia?”

Do it, do it, do it
, Scrap pleaded from his perch on the wine glass rack. He flew down beside Sophia and rubbed his cheek against her arm.

She patted him idly and went back to destroying more block towers.

“I need time to think about it. It is an honor, but a huge responsibility.” I twisted my hands inside my sweatshirt to keep from reaching for Sophia and holding her close, never letting her go.

“A responsibility you are equal to.”

“You are the one who told me never to take on emotional entanglements that will interfere with my work as a Warrior of the Celestial Blade.”

“Perhaps I spoke prematurely. Perhaps I merely said the words you needed to hear in your moment of great loss.” She shrugged.

“Of course,” Phonetia whooped. “Three plus five equals eight.” I almost heard the click in her brain as numbers began to make sense.

“Sophia will help Phonetia and E.T. learn more about their own humanity,” Lucia reminded me. Her voice—devoid of the Italian accent she affected with strangers—sounded desperate.

“Let me get through the convention this weekend. I’ll be very busy with my own schedule as well as monitoring two teenage girls. We’ll talk again on Monday.”

A baby! Lucia was giving me a baby. I had no doubt I’d agree to almost any terms to bring Sophia into my family.

A baby of my own. And not my firstborn, so the Powers That Be could not take her away from me.

“W
HAT DO YOU DO if you see one of the men with a demon protection tattoo?” I stopped E.T. and Phonetia from entering the front door of the downtown hotel where the local Science Fiction-Fantasy convention was being held.

“We call you,” E.T. said brightly, holding up her new disposable phone.

“And if I don’t answer?”

“Then we call Dad, after him we call Dr. Sean, and Lady Lucia as a last resort.” E.T. beamed at me proudly. “I programmed all their numbers into my phone.”

“I’m named after a super phone, why can’t I have one?” Phonetia demanded. She placed her hands on her hips, not acknowledging her own disposable cell in a green fabric holster on her jeans’ waistband. She’d shown E.T. how to program numbers.

“Because I think you should have to earn that phone by showing a great deal of responsibility.” I glared back at her, more stubborn than she.

“Whatever.” She shrugged. “Can we go and start gaming now?” She peered longingly over her shoulder at the lines of people in front of the con registration desk. A half smile brightened her face as she recognized someone, probably from High Desert Con.

I wasn’t sure at all that we should have come. My instincts told me to sandbag the door, cover the walls in St. Brigid crosses and other wards, lay in enough food for a siege, and never emerge from the condo again.

If I did that, I’d admit that the dark elf had won and I wasn’t a worthy Warrior of the Celestial Blade.

“Let’s go buy your memberships, then I’ll introduce you to the people in the Green Room where I’ll pick up my badge and schedule. The volunteers in the Green Room are a last resort backup. There is always an adult there who can summon help. You just have to tell them you think you picked up a stalker.”

“Do Oak, Cedar, and Fir count?” E.T. looked a little scared.

“The tree boys count. So does the Nörglein.”

“There’s Dr. Sean!” E.T. jumped up and waved both arms at the man who scurried across the parking lot.

I waited for my heart to do that silly little flip of joy. Nothing happened. I hadn’t seen him since our abortive movie date.

Phone conversations on the run are okay, but they aren’t a solid basis for a lasting relationship.

My mind kept darting toward Lady Lucia and her proposal. A baby to call my own. My heart was more excited about that than Sean.

He leaped over a puddle that had collected at the curb, landing neatly at my side, a wide smile on his face. His mouth met mine in a quick kiss of greeting.

I pulled back first, fully aware that my heart wasn’t engaged.

I’d seen Gollum only a few days ago, talked to him twice since then. Sean was certainly more handsome, less enigmatic and frustrating, a good solid partner in the making. A possible father for my growing family?

He wasn’t Gollum.

He seemed oblivious to my coolness and just draped an arm over my shoulders as he escorted me and the girls into the hotel lobby.

He doesn’t smell right,
Scrap grumbled.

He changed his aftershave,
I replied on a tight telepathic link.
He smells like a bright crisp winter morning when the snow has snapped the pine trees. I loved that smell as a kid back home. The fir trees out here are great but not the same. We don’t get the cold and snow.

Yeah, right. I need some mold.
He flew off in a wide circle, looking decidedly jealous green.

But I knew he scouted the terrain for possible enemies.

We got in line to purchase memberships for the girls. Not too bad a crowd yet. Noon on Friday before a long weekend. Most of the young people were still in school and their parents at work.

“E.T., come back here,” I called as she dashed ahead of us. Three groups of people stood between me and my girl.

She skidded to a halt in front of a short boy about her own age. His ears and throat apple were too big for his narrow frame, and matched the thickness in his glasses.

“That’s just Adam. She met him at High Desert,” Phonetia explained, clearly bored. But she openly searched the growing crowd.

Suddenly, her eyes brightened and she waved at a stout girl a year or two older than her. “Mom, may I go talk to Barbara?” she asked politely.

Ah, some of my lessons in civilized living had penetrated. She must want something more than permission to talk to a friend. Like an expensive phone.

“Yes, you may. But come right back when we get near the front of the line.”

She hastened toward her acquaintance with a little more dignity than her sister.

“Friends are important at that age,” I muttered, as much to reassure myself as Sean. “Friends are a sign that they grow into normal young women.”

Sean just chuckled and pulled me closer, as if the absence of the girls gave him permission to show more intimacy.

I had an idea where this was going. I should lean in to him, give him a quick kiss for reassurance.

But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.

So there I stood, my heart a heavy lump in my gut as we inched forward. I had to keep my concentration on my girls, not think about my boyfriend who was absent more than present, or a new baby.

At last we were close enough to call the girls back.

“They’re reviving an old version of
Dungeons and Dragons
,
”
E.T. gushed.

“Some of the older kids are getting together to go for pizza later,” Phonetia added. “May I go with them? I’ll need some money.” Aha. That’s what dragged the politeness out of her.

“Find me just before you leave. I may want you to go for dinner with me and my friends. If not, I’ll give you some extra money then. You both have your allowance for snacks and gaming pieces?” We’d eaten lunch before leaving home.

They nodded enthusiastically.

“I’ll get the memberships,” Sean said, easing forward, arm still draped possessively around me.

“Have you filled out the forms I downloaded for you?” I asked the girls.

E.T. bit her lip before nodding.

I held out my hand for the much folded and slightly soiled paper. Phonetia handed hers over more readily.

I scanned their block printing carefully, in case I’d missed something this morning when they weren’t looking. Then I fished a pen out of my belt pack and signed on the line marked parent or guardian.

Pride filled me. These were
my
daughters. They shared my name, right down to the correct accent mark on the last e of Noncoiré.

“Your birth date, E.T.,” I reminded her softly.

“I . . . don’t remember . . .”

“September twenty-first,” I prodded.

“Okay.” She wrote that down, using the registration table to hold the paper. “But the year?”

“Can you subtract twelve from this year?”

A tear gathered at the corner of her eye.

I wrote the numbers on a corner of scrap paper and showed her. Dutifully, she copied them into the proper box and handed the paper back to me.

Then I handed it to the volunteer behind the table.

“Oh, hi, Tess,” she said brightly. “Glad to see you back this year. But you’re a pro, isn’t your badge over in the Green Room?”

“Hi, Maggs. Yes, my badge is. But my daughters need to register. We didn’t know until the last minute they’d be coming.” I placed one hand on each girl’s shoulder, thus shrugging off Sean’s clinging attention.

Sean plopped his platinum credit card on the table for the volunteer. Maggs swiped it and recorded the information on her official forms while the mini printer spat out the double receipt for his signature. Then she half turned to a computer keyboard and began entering information faster than I could type. She paused a moment, peering at both the registration forms and her terminal.

“E.T.? Are you really an alien?”

“No. It stands for Eternally Tenebrous,” E.T. said proudly.

“I don’t even know what that means,” Maggs muttered, shaking her head. “No doubt about it, they are your daughters, Tess.”

“It means obscure. You could try Extra Troublesome,” I laughed. “What did you two do? Stay up all night reading the dictionary?”

“Of course,” Phonetia returned. “It’s our favorite book.”

“Definitely your daughters, Tess.”

Something is wrong. I want to fly off and scout out the entire con, check out who’s here and who’s missing. I need to find stashes of mold ahead of time.

I need to mark hidey holes for both my babe and me and the girls in case of multiple attacks.

My range has decreased to a line of sight with Tess. If I turn my back on her or try to go around a corner I find myself thrown backward in a straight line toward my Warrior.

I can fly up to the top of the dome over the central courtyard and play hide and seek among the prisms arcing down when the sun peeks through the cloud cover and strikes those lovely panes of glass.

I can tweak the hair of the girls at the hotel registration and make faces at the parrot on the shoulder of one of the con members. I flick my hot pink feather boa in the face of a black pug in a harness that matches my accessory. The ugly mutt sneezes and snorts like a steam engine. No demon hiding in that body. Pugs are weird but they aren’t evil.