Chapter 24
Light spilled from every window of the Blackburn Estate by the time I finally made it home, the warm glow of it bleeding out across the front lawn as though the house itself had been holding vigil for my return.
The sound of frantic voices carried through the heavy front door even before I’d reached the porch, overlapping and climbing over each other in the particular pitch of people who had spent hours searching for answers and finding nothing but dead ends at every turn.
I paused on the doorstep, looking down at the baby cradled in my arms, still wrapped in the blanket the sisters had given him.
He was sleeping peacefully against my chest, his tiny ribs rising and falling with the unbothered ease of someone who had no idea he had just been born into the worst storm any of us had ever faced.
He had no idea what waited for him on the other side of the door. No idea what kind of life he had inherited the moment he drew his first breath. But I had promised to protect him, and I intended to keep my word for as long as I had breath in my body to do it.
Pulling in a slow, steadying breath, I pushed the door open.
The sound of it closing echoed through the foyer like a struck bell, and the voices in the living room cut off mid-sentence. A heartbeat passed before footsteps thundered through the house in my direction. Too many of them. Moving too fast.
They reached me all at once, voices climbing over one another as their eyes raked over me for damage I hadn’t mentioned and answers I hadn’t given them yet.
Dominic came last, slower than the others, his expression carefully unreadable as he took in the sight of me standing in the foyer with a sleeping baby in my arms.
“What the fuck happened to you?” demanded Tessa, breaking through the chaos before anyone else could get a word in. Her gaze dropped to the bundle in my arms a second later, and the rest of her question died on her tongue. “And what in the hell is that?”
I scrunched my nose at her. “What does it look like?”
“It looks like a baby,” she snapped, both hands on her hips. “Why is there a baby in your arms?”
“Please tell me that is not the child in question,” warned Gabriel, sounding like he was barely holding himself together as is. Like one more ounce of my shit and he was going to launch himself off a building.
“The child in question…as in The Son of Perdition?” balked Tessa, her voice climbing an octave.
“That would be the one,” I answered evenly.
“And you have him because…?”
It was a perfectly valid question, and one that deserved the truth.
“Funny you should ask that,” I started nervously, before going on to tell them everything that had happened from the moment I woke up with the voices in my head to the cabin in the clearing.
The demons and the dead Horsemen. Nikki dying in that bed while her newborn son slept in my arms. The promise I’d made to her with her last breath. The Roderick sisters’ allegiance.
I told them all of it, the words spilling out in a continuous stream as we slowly made our way to the living room, never once loosening my grip on the baby.
He stayed asleep through the entire explanation, his tiny chest rising and falling in perfect rhythm, completely oblivious to the bomb I was dropping on everyone around him.
Once I was through, Gabriel filled me in on what happened at the house after I left.
Especially since I had expected to come home to a sleeping house and a couple of soon-to-be-very-pissed-off, incapacitated vampires.
It turned out he had gone to check on Tessa and noticed my bedroom door open down the hall.
Curious, he’d followed the trail to my room and found Trace and Dominic staked on the floor, incapacitated and helpless, exactly as I had left them.
Of course, I apologized to both of them. Profusely. Over and over until Trace finally cut me off and told me I didn’t need to. That it wasn’t me. That I’d been under the Horsemen’s control and none of it was my fault.
But Dominic. Dominic was harder to read. He hadn’t pulled away from me, not exactly, but he hadn’t fully come back either. There was a guarded distance to him that hadn’t been there yesterday, as if he were still working through what had happened. As if maybe he hadn’t fully forgiven me yet.
I supposed I couldn’t blame him for that.
When I finally finished explaining everything and all the talking was done, a stunned, awkward silence fell over the group. No one seemed to know what to say or what the appropriate response was when your family member came home with the prophesied Son of Perdition bundled in her arms.
Tessa was the first to break it. “So what are you going to do now?”
“Now?” I let out a tired breath. “I’m going to sleep. I can barely keep my eyes open.”
“I meant with the baby,” she clarified, gesturing to the bundle in my arms.
“What do you think I’m doing?” I asked without giving her a chance to answer. “I’m keeping him.”
“What? You can’t just…keep him,” hissed Tessa, though her voice had lost some of its edge. “He’s not some stray puppy you found on the street.”
“Thanks, Tess, but I managed to figure as much on the cab ride over here. And thank god for that, because I almost picked up puppy chow instead of baby formula on the way back.”
“I’m serious, Jemma. He’s the Son of Perdition. Do you have any idea what that means? What raising him will be like?”
“No,” I admitted honestly. “But I know what it’s like to be hunted for something I didn’t choose. To have people look at you and see a monster before they ever see a person. And I’m not going to let him go through that alone.”
“You know the Order will come for him,” said Gabriel, his moss green eyes turning sad. “You’ll never have a moment of peace. They have always seen him as a threat. As something that needs to be eliminated before he can fulfill the prophecy.”
“Then they’ll have to go through me first.”
Trace took a step toward me, his blue eyes searching mine with a focus that always made me feel like he was looking past my skin and into the rooms inside me. “You’re serious about this.”
“Dead serious.”
Gabriel’s posture eased a fraction, though the line of tension across his shoulders didn’t fully release. “And if the prophecy is real? If he becomes what they fear he will?”
“Then I’ll deal with it when that time comes,” I said, refusing to let them deter me. “But until then, he’s just a baby and I’m all he’s got. I’m going to take care of him and make sure he gets the chance to be more than what everyone expects.”
Another beat of silence followed, longer this time.
To my surprise, it was Dominic who spoke first, breaking the silence he’d held since I’d walked through the door.
“What’s his name?” he asked, his dark gaze moving from the baby to me and then back again.
I looked down at him sleeping peacefully in my arms, taking in his tiny face and the perfect formation of features that had no business being so refined on someone only hours old.
“I haven’t decided yet,” I answered gingerly. “But I’m thinking…Ares.”
“Ares,” repeated Gabriel, testing the name on his tongue. “The god of war and courage.”
“He’s going to need both in spades if he’s going to survive what’s coming for him,” I said. “Might as well give him a name that will remind him he was built for it.”
Tessa let out a long breath. “You’re really doing this.”
“I really am.”
My sister stared at me for a long beat, her gray eyes moving across my face the way they did when she was trying to decide whether to argue with me or surrender to the inevitability of what I’d already decided I was going to do.
Eventually, she shook her head with a flicker of admiration she didn’t quite manage to hide.
“Alright then. I guess we’re raising the Son of Perdition. What could possibly go wrong?”
Despite everything, I felt my lips twitch into the barest hint of a smile.
Everything, probably.
But I’d find a way to face it when it came.
* * *
Dominic stood silhouetted against my bedroom window, his arms crossed over his chest as I fed the baby his first bottle. His attention pressed against my skin like a touch even from across the room, the silence he was wrapped in dense and more loaded than anything he could have said out loud.
Trace and Gabriel had left a little while ago to retrieve the bassinet from the Macarthurs’ house. Apparently, Trace’s parents had kept everything from when he and Linley were babies. Just in case. The thought alone made my chest ache in a way I didn’t want to examine too closely.
Ares latched onto the bottle with surprising strength for someone so small.
His tiny hands closed around my fingers as he drank, his gray eyes half-open and unfocused, his entire body so completely at ease that it almost felt like a kind of magic in itself.
He had been born into the worst night of his life, and here he was, blinking up at me like I was the safest place he’d ever known.
The minutes stretched on without Dominic saying a word.
It was making me nervous.
“You don’t approve of this,” I finally said, keeping my eyes on Ares.
“I didn’t say that.”
“No,” I agreed quietly. “You didn’t say much of anything.”
The silence between us picked up where it had left off, broken only by the soft, contented sounds Ares made as he continued to drink.
“What would you like me to say, angel?” he asked as he uncrossed his arms and slid his hands into his pockets.
“I don’t know.” I looked down at the baby in my arms, at his eyes starting to drift closed with the kind of trust that should have terrified me but somehow only made me hold him tighter.
“Maybe that you think I’m insane for bringing him here.
That I’m putting everyone at risk. That this is going to blow up in all of our faces. ”
“Would it matter if I did?”