Sweet Pea
—EDEN
Something is going on with my mates. It started this morning, when I caught Sage whispering to Nook. The cabinets have been very secretive since. Ashán spent breakfast practically vibrating, and when I poked at the bond to investigate, he wrapped it in shadow and made everything murky.
“Stop fishing, ash’kaela.”
“I’m not fishing.” I am absolutely fishing. “I’m making conversation.”
“Mm.” A tendril of shadow traces my jaw, infuriatingly fond. “Fish later. Eat now. You’ll need it.”
“Need it for what?”
“Nothing.” He smirks.
Nothing? Two immortal beings, Nook and Droot—ohhh, Droot—I bet he will tell me. I sneak into the living room where he is draped across the tiny hammock that Sage has grown next to the giant floor bed. He’s cycling through colors like a tiny disco.
“Droot, do you know something I don’t?”
The King has been sworn to secrecy. He puffs his little chest out so far he nearly tips over backward.
“Sworn by whom?”
“Don’t say a word, or there will be no more sugarpetals for you!” Sage calls from the kitchen.
By the Big Bird and the Big Bony Bird. He hops into my palm. There were so many snacks.
“I can get you snacks, my Tiny King,” I whisper.
“Droot,” Ashán warns. “I am the only one who can grow you skullberries. And we both know they are your favorite.”
I can offer many things, but he’s right.
I can’t compete with those. Ashán grows them specifically for Droot—heavy clusters of shiny red berries, each one carved with a tiny grinning skull.
I’ve caught Ash at the counter late at night doing them by hand, a claw-tip working each little face like a giant death-jeweler.
Droot eats them skull-first. He says it’s more respectful.
The King will get in trouble, he whisper-chirps.
I am surrounded by traitors.
By noon, Sage appears in the doorway wearing his softest expression, and exuding his most suspicious energy. He has a baby-pink blanket over his arm. “Dress warm, Saevúra. We’re going out.”
“Out.” I narrow my eyes. “Out where?”
“Up.” His wings shake loose behind him, stretching wide.
After I get changed, he wraps me in the blanket like he’s about to ship me overseas, tucking it under my chin before he scoops me up.
“You know I can walk.”
“Mm.” He carries me out the front door, past the garden, into the open stretch of meadow. “Not where we’re going.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know, since you still won’t tell me where we’re going.”
He places a kiss on the tip of my nose, and it annoys me how much I love it.
His wings snap open to their full, magnificent span, and we’re up, the ground dropping away in one stomach-dropping rush. Nook shrinks beneath us until the meadow looks like a green coin in the forest’s pocket.
He’s stuck with me up here. It’s time for a new strategy.
“Picnic?” I ask against his throat.
“No.”
“You’re taking me to meet Droot’s mom finally?” I run my hand down his chest.
“No.”
“You found a field of those white flowers I like, and you’re trying to be romantic about it?” My hand glides lower.
A low chuckle shakes his chest. “Also no. Though I’m noting that for later. And I know what you’re trying to do, mí’aevúna.”
I roll my eyes.
“If you built me a giant nest on a cliffside, Sage, I swear to—”
“It’s not a nest,” he interrupts. “Though Ashán did suggest it. I told him your hips would complain about the twigs.”
“I suggested a mattress made of cloud-silk, you overgrown weed,” Ashán’s voice cuts in. “Give me a little credit, ash’kaela.”
I huff and go quiet. If no one will talk, I’ll just check the bond again.
I feel around the edges of whatever they’ve buried there—bright, bubbling excitement, mostly Sage.
A thin thread of nerves, which is strange, because what do an eight-foot fertility fae and a reaper have to be nervous about?
And underneath both, wrapped around the secret they’re keeping, is something so tender it makes my heart clench.
Whatever this is, it definitely isn’t a picnic.
“Stop peeking,” Ashán rumbles, amused, and his shadow muffles the bond again.
“You’re both insufferable.”
“And yet you spend your nights soaked in our—”
“FINISH that sentence, and I’m telling Droot you have a secret stash of skullberries taped underneath the kitchen sink!”
Sage laughs so hard our flight wobbles.
We pitch left, dropping below the cloud line, and the forest gives way to a rolling pasture I don’t recognize. Fence lines, a scatter of barns, and paddocks stitched together like a quilt.
A pale-pink sign comes into view, swinging over a gravel lot:
CEASEFIRE CREEK WILDLIFE SANCTUARY.
A blonde woman crosses the lot below us with a bucket in each hand. She stops mid-stride when she sees our shadow, and sets both buckets down, cupping her hands around her mouth to yell: “THE LANDING ZONE IS NOT THE GOAT PEN!”
Sage banks wide of the goat pen, pointedly, I think, and sets us down soft as a falling leaf. His wings settle and fold.
The goats scream anyway.
The blonde woman picks her buckets back up and crosses over to us, and I’m finally able to see her face.
“Elena,” I say, surprised.
“Eden.” She grins, abandoning the buckets one last time. “Sage, when I got that voicemail, I genuinely thought one of the volunteers was pranking me.”
“Voicemail?” I look up at Sage. “What voicemail? And when did you get a phone?”
“Oh, it’s saved forever. I literally listen to it on repeat.
” She clears her throat, dropping her voice as raspy as she can get it.
“Hello, Elena Mercer. We have met. I was the tall green one. My mate requires your… machine. We will compensate you in whatever currency you prefer, including but not limited to: money, rare flowers, or assistance removing an unwanted haunting, curse, or lingering spirit from your property. We are very qualified,” she chuckles.
“No compensation is necessary. Just bring Damien by sometime so Penelope can see him again.”
I turn around in the blanket. “Sage? Ash?”
“Ashán helped me with the script,” Sage says.
“I told you not to scare her,” Ashán corrects. “But you wound up sounding like a strange robotic vampire caught in the fourteenth century.”
“Why would I need your machine?”
Elena’s whole face lights up.
“Oh my God, you don’t know.” She looks at Sage and then back at me.
“You didn’t tell her?” She presses both hands over her mouth, muffling a squeal.
“Okay! Okay, okay, okay. Come on. Come inside.” She grabs onto my arm, pulling me toward the long building with a pink door.
“Eden, you’re about to be so glad you brought a blanket. ”
The inside of the building smells like clean linens and rubbing alcohol. Elena leads us past a couple of closed doors and into a small, sunlit clinic room. Sitting in the center of the space, next to jars of animal salve and rolls of gauze, is a sleek, high-tech-looking machine.
“Elena,” I whisper, “what is that?”
Sage steps into the room, and when I look up at him, the nerves I felt threaded through the bond all morning are all over his face, petals shifting uncertainly along his collarbone.
“Elena explained it to us,” he murmurs. “It works just like the ones humans use.”
He tucks a stray lock of my hair behind my ear.
“We can feel her every day, Saevúra. But we’ve never seen her. We couldn’t take you to a healer. There’s no one in this realm we would trust with what she is. And then we remembered Elena, and what she does for a living.”
Tears pour down my face faster than I can wipe them away.
“We wanted to give you her face, ash’kaela,” Ashán adds. “You give her everything. Your body, your warmth, your blood. It only seemed fair that someone finally give you something back.”
Sage’s thumb catches the tears falling as he presses his lips to my forehead.
“I confess it was not entirely selfless. I have dreamed of her face. I would like to know if she looks like you.”
A wail comes out of me with no warning at all.
“Oh no,” Elena says, already crying herself. She yanks tissues out of a box and passes me a handful. “C’mon, mama. Let’s get you up on the table so we can see this little sweet pea.”
Sage lifts me onto the crinkling paper of the exam table, adjusting the blanket so it covers my legs while leaving my belly exposed.
Elena rolls a stool beside me and snaps on a pair of gloves. She squirts some blue gel onto my belly, and I yelp.
“What is that vile slush?” Ashán snaps. “Is she trying to freeze our nestling?”
“Sorry, Eden. I’m not used to giving the animals a warning.” She picks up the wand. “Okay. Let’s go find your girl.”
One of Sage’s hands cradles my skull, the other is breaking my hand, every ounce of his attention fixed on the dark screen angled toward the wall.
She presses the wand low against my belly and drags it slowly. Gray static swims across the monitor.
She frowns, adjusts a dial, and tilts the wand. “Huh.”
Sage’s hand goes rigid underneath my head. “Huh? What is huh? Why is there a huh?”
“No—nothing’s wrong, baby is fine, her heartbeat’s gorgeous. Listen—” She taps a button, and the room fills with a fast galloping whumpwhumpwhump that knocks the air out of me. My daughter’s heart. I’m listening to my daughter’s heart.
“—it’s just, uh.” Elena tilts her head at the screen.
“Normally there’s a, you know. A sac. An amniotic sac.
And this is reading more like a…” She trails off, tilting the wand the other way.
“…a pod.” She gets closer to the screen, squinting her eyes.
“Well what do you know… she really is a sweet pea.”
Another sob escapes me.
“Hold on, let me—” Elena nudges a dial, tilts the wand half an inch, and the static sharpens.
There, inside the curved walls of the pod, floating in her own little world like she hasn’t a single care in the universe—is my baby.
The soft slope of a nose. A rounded cheek.
One tiny fist tucked beneath her chin, and a thin curl of vine wound loose around her body, like she’s grown herself a blanket and pulled it close.
She’s no longer a flutter under my ribs or a hungry pull on the greenhouse magic. She’s real. A grainy, devastatingly small face that I would already die for.
Sage lets out a sharp, breathless gasp, and the petals across his chest all burst open at once, every bloom blossoming in a soundless explosion of pastels. The jars of salve on the counter rattle as the shelves sprout in a fine green fuzz
“Oop—yep, that’s—I’ve always wanted a chia pet,” she says, glancing away from the screen.
Ash is silent, studying the screen with unnerving intensity.
“Rahnové? Are you—”
The wand drifts higher, and Elena hums. “Okay, sweet girl, let’s check that heart while you’re being so cooperative.”
The screen flickers where the wand passes over the small cage of her ribs, the gray image blossoms. Light pulses in her chest, in perfect time with the galloping beat filling the room, glowing through the grayscale like a lantern behind a curtain.
Elena leans back, then taps the monitor twice with one gloved knuckle.
“That’s… probably an artifact,” she says.
It’s not an artifact.
Through the bond, I feel something cracking down the center of Ashán.
“That’s mine,” he whispers. “Ash’kaela, the light in her chest—that’s mine.”
“She took the best part of you first,” I whisper. The frost at my spine shudders.
“Next time I do something like this, I have to make sure not to schedule it during my period,” Elena whispers under her breath. She punches a button, and something whirs inside the machine. “Every mama leaves my clinic with pictures. House rule. Usually they’re of foxes.”
A glossy strip of paper slowly prints out of the slot.
Shadow pours down Sage’s left arm, his green skin swallowed by black, vines hardening into pale ridges of bone.
His fingers stretch into elegant white tips, and Elena freezes with the printout half-extended. Her eyes track up his transformed arm.
“Different dad,” I say. “Same dad, actually, it’s—”
“You know what—” She places the strip of photos directly into his waiting skelva. “I’ve got a raccoon who commits insurance fraud. This is fine.”
Ashán doesn’t hear a word of it. He accepts the paper strip with unprecedented gentleness, cradling it at the edges. “Hello, angel. There you are.”
Elena walks us outside, Penelope trailing behind us, sneaking bites of leaves from the back of Sage’s calves. At the edge of the gravel lot, I catch her hand.
“Can I ask you something? That day in the meadow—you could barely hold your net. You were shaking so hard. And today you handed a sonogram to a…” I gesture vaguely at the guys. “You’re so much better with all of this. How?”
Elena laughs, her fist coming up to rub over her chest like it did the first time we met.
“Honestly? I have no idea. I’ve thought about that a lot, actually.
” She shrugs, something puzzled in her smile.
“It’s the weirdest thing. I just feel… completely at ease.
Like—” she huffs, searching for the words.
“—like walking into a house that smells like a childhood I don’t remember having. I know that sounds insane.”
“It really doesn’t,” I whisper.
“Come back soon, okay?” She squeezes my hand. “I want to check on our sweet pea again at the next milestone. And next time, I’m stocking the good tissues. The ones with lotion. This is a lotion-tissue family.”
She pulls me into a warm hug. The pull I felt months ago snaps into focus. It pours through the place where her heart presses near mine. I know exactly which Horseman is coming for Elena Mercer.