Chapter Twenty-Two
Esmeray
I made it into Ausmius’s bedroom, admiring the hard work they’d done in preparation for his arrival. The still-drying paint, the matching furniture, all of it came together beautifully. My father sat there, smug grin twisting his face as if he hadn’t meddled where I didn’t want.
“Thanks, Father,” I said, ignoring his smugness. He’d done everything I wanted done and not deprived me of a moment. Perhaps it was what my papa saw in him. Or, perhaps, he was a doting and overprotective father set on never losing me.
“Will you love him?” Father dismissed the decorator and handed her a few bills that I dutifully ignored. She smiled and left, seeing to the gates and letting herself out the front door.
“I already do. It’s not the Ausmius we know. Knew.” I rested my hand on the side of the crib. “All this because The Church didn’t want a demigod manifesting.”
“He was getting close and Ausmius knew right away what he was—” I hesitated as that odd belly-flipping sensation intensified and clenched my insides like a tube of empty toothpaste forcing the last drop free. “Fuck!”
“Esmeray?” Father reached for me and shouted out for Gre to come up. He didn’t panic, and from the distinct lack of clinking from glass and ceramic made me certain he’d known something. Plastic snaps? He was putting it up for later—smart man.
Gre arrived a few moments later, stopping by our bedroom to grab our go-bag. He wrapped an arm around my shoulders and glanced at Father, unspoken words going between them.
“It’s time?” Gre rested a hand over my belly to traverse the hardness of it.
“I think so.” I panted through the sensation and relished the uncomfortably damp sensation at my backside. Broken waters? Leaking but mostly intact, I was certain.
Gre flicked his hand and drew a symbol in the air with his fingers.
When Gre traveled between worlds, it was nothing like the vassals, where the world melted, but rather a slash in reality that he gathered me to step through. As those with godblood in them, we went through with ease, stepping into bright lights and soft breezes.
As if they were expecting us, Lionel and Lune showed up with open arms, and Gre scooped me up.
He carried us off toward not the temple of Diana or the Pantheon of Egyptian gods, where Bast resided, but in the way the immense world shortened between an entrant and their goal, we wound up in Faunus’s glade where a tent had been erected for us, surrounded by nature, butterflies, and twittering birds.
“This sounded way more romantic when we were planning it,” I groaned out in his arms as I sank into the soft bed and shifted my hips. I barely had to move as clothes were pulled from me, replaced with a comfortable top and a thin blanket draped across my hips.
“I’d say it was my first grandchild, but it’s the first one I’ve known about.” Faunus, in his mostly naked half-goat form, strode in with the goddesses by him. Gre sat at my side on a gilded stool and held my hand as someone made sure I had a glass of water on a small pedestal at my side.
I breathed through a contraction and tensed up, making my hips comfortable as attendants, hybrids like Lune and Lionel, strode in, clothed in white and burdened with linens and tools of the trade.
I loved Gre, and I loved our child to come, even if he was a source of irritation in my life. A burdensome younger brother that I’d never fully bonded with, almost. “Ausmius, I may have never appreciated you for what you were but know I will love you as a child.”
The spoken words soothed him, my belly clenching and relaxing. A feeling of rightness flowed through me and Gre’s presence became a balm at my side.
I had grand visions of screaming the scream of the damned, pushing with sweat coating my brow. I dreamed of blood and pain that didn’t come as a dreamlike state caressed my senses.
“Push, Esmeray. Push as hard as you love me.” I didn’t know how long I lay there or if there was the strength in my body to push, but I pushed all the same. I pushed hard.
I moved when one of the hybrids lifted my leg, moved when they contorted my hips into different angles, and cried out when the first true pain wracked my body.
It burned in a strange way, not like comforting fire or heat but like salt in an open wound, alcohol on torn flesh, and a curse on an unprotected heart.
But I didn’t cry. The pain grounded me with determination.
It grounded me in solidarity, a welcome companion that I pushed against and growled out.
Burning, frustration, stretching, it all twisted inside me. I only had to remind myself not to spit out any demon swears. My father had taught me some good ones, but I never was one for them. They burned the tongue in unpleasant, but satisfying, ways.
I only wanted to feel Ausmius, Gre, and excitement for what was to come.
“Almost there, dear.” A creature, a soft gray rabbit, urged me on, and I kept pushing, kept spreading my legs. “Good!”
“I wouldn’t call it good. Feels awful!” I pushed and squeezed back against Gre, against all my worries and fears. I pushed against the five-year plan that had been shattered into pieces but fallen into place so neatly.
I was an associate with a house my father didn’t have to buy for me.
I had earned a raise. Not been given one.
And the shiny new office? Maybe I’d given in a little when that had been presented to me.
But the independent auditor had assured me that my specialized skills brought more than enough value to the firm.
I’d had a blood promise from my father that he wouldn’t do anything to sway the auditor one way or the other.
My heart swelled, my emotions rose, and I thought of Gre and the home we’d had so briefly, lost so soon. How he’d moved heaven and hell to become better, used my father’s sway for something good, to make our lives better, our child’s life better. And not a moment had he given me a wink of regret.
My father had forced our union, undoing the very plans of The Church to keep us apart, to make him undefendable. I was the only lawyer in the city capable of defending him adequately, aside from my extremely overburdened father.
We’d blown that plan out of the water. Conceived a child from the ordeal.
I’d spent months worried I’d be pregnant for the rest of my life with him until Faunus’s gift. One child was plenty for us. For the time being, and maybe for always. Ausmius needed to be an only child, I knew. He needed love like he’d never had.
I pushed for Ausmius, pushed for Gre, pushed for my father, who so eagerly waited to hold his grandson, even if being in the deic plane made him itch and become vulnerable.
“It’s wrapped,” a servant spoke.
“Happens often. Doesn’t look constricted,” another said.
Whispers and work proceeded as my heart thundered in my chest.
I wasn’t sure when my body had finished or when their shouting started, but they told me to stop, that it was over for that part.
And they lifted a child up, covered in fluid and a light tinge of blood.
He had little wings slicked up against his back.
Dark sparse hair, and despite looking strange and larval—he was beautiful.
He settled into my arms with eyes just as gold and fierce as his father when they opened, not a newborn’s blue or a demon child’s solid black.
There would be no fire in them. And, born in the deic plane, he’d be given the blessings of all his parents’ gods and goddesses as well as a welcome from his grandfather, which would go a long way into preserving the thing he was born for—nature.
I thought I cried the moment he slid into my arms, but I’d likely been crying before that. Unbefitting of a demon, but necessary. He was there.
As my fingers traversed his pinned wings, the feathers slid over my fingers not like vaned pins but like scales, scales with vessels and lymph running through them, as if they were scaled in a million tiny wasp wings. I gasped, and Gre reached over to stroke them.
“Those are unusual.”
“Like my papa’s. He—I have my father’s wings, greater cambion. These are special to his family line. Father!” I called out as the attendants did their best to cover me.
He shoved his head in, eyes full of concern, and stared with open-mouthed wonder at little Ausmius. “Ausmius Faramar Faust.”
Gre had no attachment to Hawthorne, so he agreed to take my name, and our child would be given the Station of Faust and all the respect that earned him.
“He’s perfect.” Gre reached out to stroke one of his slightly pointed ears. “A little warlock. He could pass for a dark fae, couldn’t he?”
“Essentially, he’s just that,” Faunus spoke from the doorway. “A race of people fathered by the gods themselves among mortals. Maybe more like him will come along.”
“Let us hope not,” Bastet spoke as she strode in, Diana at her side. The two stared at the child with delight. “But he needs to return to the mortal plane. I have sent missive to my follower to be on his way.”
I glanced up, unsure of what she meant.
“A certain hellcat. Half demon or no, all cats are my domain.” Bast strode over to stroke the little one’s head. “Blessings be upon you, little one.”
She gave the child a kiss right on his temple, a slight glow behind it.
The light within swirled and decorated the child’s arm with a playful little line of hieroglyphs.
And so, Diana followed suit, a trail of moons in their phases joining Bastet’s message.
Faunus strode forward next, and his bearded kiss left a circle around the babe’s arm; vines twisted.
“And nobody thought to invite me to this birthday party?” A booming voice silenced under a solid smack as Odin and Anubis made their presence known.
He held out his hand and gestured toward one of the attendants, who laid something dark, slick, and limp across his palm.
Over many seconds, the thing writhed, dried, twisted, and knotted in a concerning series of movements until he handed it to Gre.
“What—” Gre held up what had been Ausmius’s umbilical cord, in his hands a dark noose.
“Use it wisely until Ausmius has need for it. A hangman’s rope, death given at the start of life. He was born with a noose around his neck. This is a powerful tool.” Odin patted Gre’s shoulder and shuffled off before giving me a wink…or was it a blink? One couldn’t tell with old One-Eye.
“My gift is a simple one. Once may they die. Once, and I will send them back. They are near invulnerable, but if mortality kisses their lips, I will send them back once.” Anubis leaned down and pressed his snout to the child’s forehead, making him whimper and flail.
“And he will always be welcome in my temple. I have a feeling he will be able to converse with Ammit. He is a caretaker of all creatures, mortal plane or other. Ammit will appreciate the company, I’m sure. ”
“Hear that, Ausmius? You’re as important now as you ever wished to be.” I chuckled, and Aus curled his little fingers around the shroud of his blanket and cooed.
“Far more cute, at any rate.” Gre leaned in and gave his own little blessing with a whispered word and a hum of song that told him that if it didn’t kill him, it’d make him stronger.
I kissed my child, the last one to do so, it seemed. Nobody had washed him yet, and I tried to get it out of my head, the thought of my ass being on the lips of some very major deities.
“I love you, my dark moon, Esmeray.” Gre leaned down and breathed me in.
“And I love you, my Mage of Gray.” I closed my eyes and leaned into his side, whole for the first time in a long, long while.