Chapter 9
Crystal
It was snowing outside but Crystal was still sweating.
She lay back on the bed, still catching her breath, and feeling like a wrung out rag.
Every muscle in her body ached in ways she hadn't known muscles could ache.
Her black hair was plastered to her neck in damp ribbons and the pillowcase beneath her was soaked through.
The dorm room's radiator clanked and hissed against the December cold but between that and the labor, Crystal felt like she'd been slow-roasted.
She could hear the wind scraping against the window, pushing snow sideways across the dark campus.
It was the middle of the night. The world outside was frozen and indifferent to what had just happened in this little room.
Her eyes were glued to the tiny infant in Nina's arms. Mark knelt by her side and ran a cool cloth over her forehead.
The double-sized dorm had been their home for the last several months.
Or rather, it was Crystal's home and Mark's whenever he could get there.
Crystal sort of liked living on a college campus even if its new purpose wasn't very educational.
They'd gotten the cafeteria up and running.
She liked eating breakfast with Kiera and Cassie and the other girls. It was almost homey.
"You're a warrior," Mark said, gently kissing her temple. "You did it." He swallowed and followed Crystal's gaze to the still crying infant and Nina grinned, sitting there on the bed. "It's a girl."
"A girl," Crystal whispered. "I... don't know if that's good news or bad news."
A girl in this world. Crystal had been a girl in this world and look where that had gotten her. Breeding pit. Creche. Property. Maybe her daughter would be luckier. Maybe that was the whole stupid point of having children at the end of the world.
"Her world will be different," Mark said firmly. "We'll make sure of it."
"Let me hold her," Crystal said, wincing as she sat up in bed.
Mark fluffed up her pillows and she smiled gratefully before taking the crying baby in her arms. The weight of her was startling.
Not heavy exactly, just real. Warm and squirming and furious about being born, with a full head of dark hair that was almost black and tiny fingers that curled and uncurled like she was trying to grab hold of something. "She looks so tired," Crystal murmured.
"That makes two of us, kid," she added softly, and the baby's crying stuttered for a moment as if she were considering the point.
Her face was scrunched and red but Crystal could already see it.
She had Mark's bone structure, those high cheekbones, and her skin was a shade between Crystal's and Mark's, a warm olive that seemed to shimmer in the low light.
Her eyes, when they cracked open in confused little slits, were dark and deep like Mark's.
Vampyren dark. There was something ancient in them already and it made Crystal's throat close up.
She was beautiful. She was the most important thing Crystal had ever done and Crystal had decapitated a rogue Vampyren warlord with a serrated blade, so that was saying something.
Mark leaned closer and Crystal watched his face. She had seen this man lead a charge across a burning campus with his sword raised. But now his dark eyes went wide and soft and wet. His hand hovered over the baby as if she were made of something that might shatter.
"You can touch her," Crystal said quietly. "She won't break."
Mark's fingers, calloused and scarred, settled with impossible gentleness on the baby's cheek.
She turned her face toward his hand, rooting blindly, and something in his expression crumbled.
He made a sound Crystal had never heard from him, a low shaking exhale that was almost a laugh and almost a sob. He blinked hard, his dark lashes wet.
"She's so small," he whispered, as if this were the most profound observation anyone had ever made.
"Yeah," Crystal said. "That's generally how babies work."
He didn't even seem to hear her. He was transfixed. His thumb traced the curve of the baby's ear, which was ever so slightly pointed at the tip. Vampyren. Their daughter would carry that heritage whether the world was kind about it or not.
"How did you keep this a secret?" Nina said. "All this time?"
"I didn't show much," Crystal said, smirking. "Wasn't reported to the council and all the matrons who knew are dead."
Her dormitory was in a third building next to the breeding pit where the women stayed. The surviving women from near The Loop had been able to float along without being reassigned after the battle against Drake. Loren had pulled strings. What their next steps were, Crystal didn't know.
Mark leaned on his hand, gazing at his daughter.
His joy felt short-changed somehow. Crystal had insisted their child would not be raised in a creche, even a "nicer" one like Urbana.
It wasn't as if Mark could take an infant along on his unit's missions either.
Hiding an infant on campus was far too dangerous.
They had avoided this discussion all along yet Crystal didn't seem worried.
He had a feeling she'd already come to a decision and once again, he would be swept along because like it or not, Crystal was usually right.
"So what are we going to do, baby?" Mark said, reaching out to stroke the bridge of his daughter's tiny nose.
Crystal had known the answer for months.
She'd worked it out during long nights when the bond mark on her neck burned like a brand, thinking through every option with cold pragmatism.
But that was before she'd held her. Before she'd felt the rapid little heartbeat thrumming against her own.
Two heartbeats. Human babies had one. Hers had two, faint and fast and distinctly Vampyren.
The plan was good. She also wanted to set the plan on fire.
"I'm gonna get to know my daughter for the next... two days," Crystal said, wincing. The words came out steady because she'd rehearsed them a hundred times. "Then Nina and Jet are going to take her home."
"Nina and Jet." Mark raised his eyebrows and turned to Nina who sat on the edge of the bed, her cheerful blonde pigtails sticking out of her head like pom poms. "Really?"
"The Loop's become pretty secure," Nina said, nodding. "And our place is like a fortress now. We should be safe. We always hear about trouble coming pretty quickly from our contacts."
"I need her as safe as possible," Crystal said tearfully, her baby quieting and clutching Crystal's finger with her little fist. That grip.
So strong for something so small, those tiny fingers locked around her index finger as if she already understood that her mother was about to let go.
"Safe from the Council. And the Lucian are coming. "
Two days to memorize everything. The dark wisps of hair.
The slightly pointed ears. The way she smelled, warm and new, not quite human and not quite Vampyren but something entirely her own.
It was the right call. A baby couldn't be hidden on a campus crawling with Vampyren soldiers.
Her cries would carry through the thin dormitory walls. Over Crystal's dead body.
"Yeah," Mark said darkly. "They are. Reports coming in all the time. They're moving in from the south. Not up to Illinois yet. But sooner or later."
"Just be sure to keep her warm," Crystal said thickly, her glassy eyes on Nina. She could fall apart later, in two days, when Nina's car disappeared down the road and her arms were empty. "Chicago is brutal in winter."
Nina nodded. If Crystal trusted anyone in this broken world to protect her child, it was Nina and Jet, who was lanky but stronger than he looked and had the protective instincts of a junkyard dog. Crystal meant that as the highest possible compliment.
"Are you sure about this?" Mark said. "If she were here, you could look after her--"
"She won't be in a creche," Crystal said, her jaw tight. There was no room for disagreement. "Not my girl."
She saw something flicker across Mark's face. Pain, or the particular kind of grief that came from knowing something was right and hating it anyway. He'd been raised in something like a creche himself. He knew what she was protecting their daughter from.
"Okay." He kissed her hair. "She won't be then."
The baby stirred in Crystal's arms and made a sound that wasn't quite crying, more like a small protest against the general state of existence, and Crystal understood the feeling completely.
"Can you stay with me for a few days though?" Crystal said, leaning her head against his. The bond mark on her neck pulsed warm instead of burning for once, soothed by his proximity, and she closed her eyes. "Do you have to go back out right away? Just give us one day. One day to be a real family?"
Mark was quiet for a moment. Outside, the snow kept falling. Nina had slipped off the bed and was quietly gathering up the towels and the basin of water, giving them space without being asked.
"I can stay a few days," Mark whispered, and his Vampyren hearts that could be both brutal and soft and which often felt so divided between the old life and new ached for his mate.
He looked at the baby with her dark hair and pointed ears and two tiny hearts beating in time with his own.
He looked at Crystal, exhausted and fierce and more beautiful than she had any right to be after what she'd just done.
The world outside this room was cold and dark and full of things that wanted to destroy everything he loved. But the world inside this room held everything that mattered to him, every single thing, right here in this narrow bed in the middle of winter.
"I can stay," he said again, and he wrapped his arm around Crystal so carefully, as if she and the baby were one fragile thing he was holding together. "For you. For her. For as long as you'll have me."
Crystal leaned into him and the baby settled between them, her tiny fist still locked around Crystal's finger. For the first time in hours, the room was quiet.
"Good," Crystal murmured against his shoulder. "Because if you left tonight, I'd have to kill you, and I just gave birth so I'd really prefer not to."
Mark laughed softly into her hair. It was a small, broken, wonderful sound. "Understood," he said.
Outside, the snow kept falling on Urbana-Champaign, covering the scars of battle and the barricades and the empty lecture halls.
It buried everything equally, the good and the terrible, and in the morning the world would be white and clean and still dangerous.
But that was tomorrow. Tonight there was a family in a small warm room, impossibly new and already fighting to survive, and for now that was enough.