Chapter Forty-Four

Nyko set the glass pitcherin the Bruns' kitchen sink and poured iced tea into it, sloshing most of the liquid over the high rim. Darn it. His hand was shaking as badly as if he was a one-hundred-thirty-year-old, palsied man whose main claim to fame was not messing his Depends after his morning pureed prunes. Him in the kitchen was proving to be the proverbial bull in a china shop—the very reason he was using the sink for this iced tea chore, instead of the counter. It was also why he'd left brewing hot coffee to Beth Costache, who'd gone home to her kids a while back.

He'd broken two glasses early in the morning when they'd all first holed up here: one, two, right in a row—crrrr-ash.

The startling noise hadn't earned much more than a dull stare from the two other men, Dev and Shon, who were here with Nyko to sit vigil with Jacken. Everyone was too shell-shocked and grief-stricken to do anything but act spacey. Dev still had blood on his jeans: Toni's or the baby's? Who could tell, so much had just…come out of her.

Nyko pinched his eyes closed, his stomach lurching sickeningly. Bracing his palms on the edge of the sink, he leaned heavily on his hands as memories of the scene in ??ran?'s hospital dropped on top of him like jagged rocks: Jacken, wild with panic, rushing into the waiting room for help; Dr. Jess, frantic over Jacken's stillborn baby; the sight of Toni on the delivery table, white as paste and nearly unconscious, looking like she'd been through the wringer. Which she had.

No woman brought a child into this world easily, but giving birth to a Varcolac baby was a unique chore. Instead of contractions, the laboring woman went through what could only be described as sonic blasts. These were earthquake-like, the pulsations rolling off the womb strong enough to break windows, knock nearby people off their feet, and fell bookshelves. So as soon as a momma-to-be went into labor, she was locked into a belly container on the delivery table to protect the surroundings and the doctor. The container restricted movement, so the uncomfortable momma was made even more uncomfortable, and worse, no pain meds could be given for such a thing as sonic blasts. She had to suffer through it. The single upside was that delivery time for Varcolac babies clocked in at much less than what it would be for a regular human kid. Varcolac were birthed in anywhere from four to six hours. The rare woman went eight.

Toni had gone tenhours by the time Jacken came rushing into the waiting room.

For some unknown reason, Toni never switched from the sonic phase into pushing mode. Her womb just kept blasting away, propelling Toni toward a state of exhausted death. Dr. Jess finally decided to break protocol and have Toni push even while she was blasting.

That's when Nyko, Dev, and Shon had been called in from the waiting room and tasked with holding mattresses around Toni in order to protect the hospital machinery and Dr. Jess. Nyko had been the one to brace the mattress behind the doctor, stumbling and grunting as Jess got slammed back into the mattress again and again… Until finally, Jess had managed to extract the baby, limp, blue, and silent. Following that was more bad. Toni's final sonic blast catapulted the afterbirth out of her body along with a bucket's worth of blood, which hit the floor and splatted all over Dev. Then she coded.

Paddles! Doc Jess had yelled, then sharply commanded the rest of them to Go! the last thing any of them hearing was Clear!

Jacken lost it.

Stumbling out to the waiting room, a long, moaning growl rumbled out of him as he started to make the ugly shift into R?u.

Goosebumps raised along Nyko's flesh. If Jacken changed to his beast side now, with such stark emotions ruling him, there was no telling if he'd ever make it back out. "Jacken!" Nyko leapt forward and grabbed his brother. "Stop! I need you to stay focused—for Toni!"

Expelling another gravelly animal sound, Jacken sagged forward at the waist.

Nyko quickly hooked his arms under his brother's armpits, his forearms wrapping over Jacken's shoulders, to keep his brother from nose-drilling into the floor. "I need you to stay in touch with your radar," Nyko said.

The two of them scuffled around the waiting room, head to head, like two Sumo wrestlers going at it. A chair got booted across the floor.

The occupants of the waiting room pressed back, the males body-shielding the women. Some of the wives were weeping, loudly, while others were stone-cold silent. Difficult to tell which was worse.

"Feel your radar and tell me if Toni's all right," Nyko told his brother. "Is she?!"

An eternal pause, then, "I don't know," Jacken moaned out.

Nyko squeezed his brother harder, motivation for Jacken, a hug of relief for himself. That had been a relatively normal-sounding response. "You do know."

Jacken breathed audibly for several seconds. "Yes…she's not…she's not dead."

The surrounding women muffled relieved cries against their men.

"She's bad, though. Christ, Nyko, she's really bad off."

Which turned out to be very true.

A few minutes later, a harried Dr. Jess had rushed out to give them an update. Toni's blood pressure was dangerously low, making the next twenty-four hours crucial for her survival. The baby, who'd been resuscitated, was doing only marginally better than Toni, and so was also facing an uphill climb to remain alive. After that, Dr. Jess had shooed them all off, not wanting anyone under foot for the stressful work ahead of him, but he'd promised to keep them informed of any changes, good or bad.

So now here they all were, huddled in the Brun household, one heckuva sorry group.

Dev, who had a pregnant wife due in two weeks, looked to be permanently choking on a handful of red hot chili peppers. When Marissa had come by a few hours ago to drop off an egg and cheese breakfast casserole, Dev had ordered her to "Go home and lie down!"

Shon looked way out of his element for what to do in the situation, having never been particularly close to either Jacken or Nyko, but there was a lot to be said that he was here and trying.

Jacken's state of messed-up-ness went without saying.

Nyko himself was trying to manage all of these grim happenings while stuck in an excruciating half-bond. No. Excruciating couldn't even begin to describe this extra-special form of torture and insanity. Maybe this: it felt like every inch of his skin had been ripped off his body, dunked in boiling oil, then reapplied with serrated needles. And whoever had tacked his flesh back into place had done a slipshod job. His skin kept coming off his muscles, scraping, chafing, abrading. There wasn't any part of him that didn't feel completely wrong. He would've been willing to hack off his knife-throwing hand to be done with it.

But the only relief for him lay with Faith and what was between her thighs. Crass, but true. If it wasn't for his absolute refusal to leave Jacken even for one minute, he would've long since succumbed to his fierce primal drive, run to Faith, and without finesse or prelude, mounted her. So, he supposed on one hand it was good that he was being held here. Because in the light of clearer thinking, he had to face facts: Faith had offered up her vein to him to save his life. He, in turn, had partaken of her generosity because he'd grown too weak to resist. Those two things combined put their pre-bonding solidly into the desperate times call for desperate measures category. And after all of the other hurts he'd already inflicted on her, he didn't want to add to those by losing control of himself and humping her escape option into oblivion. That would amount to them being blood-bonded by force, which wasn't the best beginning for a strong, long-lasting marriage.

Unfortunately for him, he had no idea how long a half-bond worked at forcibly pulling a man toward completion before it finally let its talons out of the guy. The data was sketchy on that, seeing as so few Varcolac had ever made it through this horror to the other side. But if he was stuck here long enough in the Brun household, maybe he'd return to an unbounded state, and then Faith would be off the hook. And all the screaming inside his head would finally shut off.

He gripped the edge of the sink in tight fists. The mere thought of giving up Faith sent ropes of flesh unfurling off his body, his atoms sprouting lethal spikes. His knuckles throbbed, his tight jaw ached, but those feelings were absolute joy compared to the merciless vise of lust that had a grip on less-mentionable parts of his body. Thinking about it so much is really helping, too. Forcing himself to straighten off the sink, Nyko picked up the pitcher of iced tea—his hand trying to play the bongos instead of following his commands—and carefully set it on the kitchen island near some glasses. He squeezed his quaking hand into a fist. He didn't know how much more of this he could take.

Time leaked by like sand through a partially corked hourglass.

Pandra, uncharacteristically teary-eyed, showed up with Thomal at one point. Then Alex Parthen, who was finally tracked down at a computer seminar topside, arrived, not just teary, but full-on sobbing. Jacken bear hugged Alex for a very long moment.

Time, that cow, wouldn't move fast enough…yet somehow steadily trudged forward, moving from day hours to evening to night. During it all, somber neighbors came and went from the house, quietly checking in and dropping off food. ESPN played constantly on the television, though Nyko doubted anyone actually watched it. The weary vigil-keepers stared at the screen until they began to drift off; Dev and Shon flopped out on the couch, Alex with his head down on the dining room table, Luvera slumped asleep in a chair next to him, Pandra cuddled up in an armchair with Thomal.

Huh. Nyko supposed now wasn't the time to ask about that.

Nyko stayed in the kitchen, pretending to putter, when he was really just fidgeting, certainly not sleeping, what with being stuck in this wanna-stick-my-willy-inside-Faith-and-come-like-a-fire-hose mood. Jeez. He really wished he'd stop having such crass thoughts.

Jacken, not surprisingly, didn't sleep, either. He continued to do what he'd been doing as soon as he'd come home from the hospital: sit in an armchair, his palms planted on his knees, and stare at the floor. Twice he'd changed the program and gone to the bathroom. He never ate or drank or even—

There was a soft knock at the door.

Nyko cast a quick, hopeful glance at Jacken, then strode swiftly and silently to open it.

It was Marissa. She was biting her lower lip and her brow was knotted.

Nyko hated the F-bomb, but he dropped it now when he shifted his focus down to her swollen belly. In the last months of pregnancy, a momma-to-be got strapped up with a labor alarm that warned of oncoming sonic blasts.

Marissa's belly lights were presently winking like a Star Wars X-wing fighter during a Death Star attack, and, whoa, maybe he'd been spending too much time with Alex, lately.

"Oh, no." Nyko clunked his head onto the doorjamb. "Dev's going to crap himself."

"I know," Marissa groaned.

At the sound of his name, Dev sat up from the couch, blinking sleepily. His vision cleared on Marissa, and—he was on his feet, over the back of the couch, and at the door in a single leap. His eyes rounded on his wife's flashing belly lights. "Dammit to hell, Marissa, I told you to lie down, didn't I?"

"It's not my fault." Marissa's voice cracked. "I didn't overdo it, I swear."

Dev jammed his fingers into his hair. "Shit! All right—dammit!—let's go." Dropping a steady battery of F-bombs, he pounded out onto the porch and took his wife's arm, leading her down the steps. "Fuck, fuck, fuck…"

"Nichita, hold up." It was Jacken, angling passed Nyko and heading out onto the porch. "I have to tell you something, all right? You need to know that Marissa is going to be fine. She's not going to have complications like Toni did because… Listen, what I'm going to tell you is private, just between us." Jacken went down the porch steps and lowered his voice. "When Toni was sixteen years old, she had a baby."

Marissa gasped softly.

Oh, wow. Nyko pulled the front door into a thin seam.

Jacken dragged a hand through his hair. "She never talks about it, because she feels so guilty about giving the kid up for adoption. Unfortunately, she represses it so deeply she didn't even tell Dr. Jess about it as a part of her medical history. The poor guy had no idea what was going on in that delivery room until I brought it up. At that point he figured out that Toni's body was confused from birthing a human baby before. Her womb didn't know how to shift into Varcolac labor. So, you see, there was a clear reason for Toni's problems." Jacken turned to speak directly to Marissa. "Have you ever given birth to a human baby?"

The motion of Marissa's lashes released a tear down her cheek. "No. This is the first time I've ever been pregnant."

"Then you won't have any problems, Marissa, just like all the other women in this town who've had plenty of healthy Varcolac babies without a hitch: Hannah, Ellen, Beth, Maggie. Right?"

"Yes." Marissa looked at Dev.

Dev pulled in a deep breath, still tense, but now more focused. "Yeah. Okay. Jacken's right. You're going to be fine, Riss. I'm going to make sure of it." He hauled Jacken into a single-back-slap hug, then gave Marissa a quick kiss. "Sorry that I fell apart on you for a second." Scooping his wife into his arms, he took off for the hospital.

Jacken watched the two of them go. When they disappeared around a corner, he turned and, without a word, went back to his armchair.