Chapter 180 Final Days 2

Chapter 180 Final Days 2
Ryn POV

The contractions starts before dawn, the way I always knew it would, because nothing in my life has ever had the decency to happen at a convenient hour.

As the first pain moves through me causing me to jerk to life, I know it for what it is immediately, the way you know a thing your body's been bracing for. I lie still for a moment in the dark with Zevran asleep beside me and I think, so this is the day. The one at the end of all the months. The day I find out whether I live or die.

Then the next pain comes and there's no more time for thinking.

Zevran is awake the second I make a sound, and the healer is sent for. Within seconds, the room is filled with tension so thick you can practically cut through it. Even though we've been ready for weeks.

There's a birthing chair, a dozen clean linen and the healer's instruments laid out, there's also a second table in the corner with things on it I made myself not ask about, the things for if it goes wrong, the things for if the curse wakes when the child leaves.

It goes hard from the start. The healer warned me it would, half-demon children, slow at the end and then sudden. Sudden is the best word for it, hours of building pressure and then everything at once.

Laying down there, with the contractions getting more and more intense, I lose track of time. Zevran's hand is crushed in mine and his voice in my ear, steady, telling me I'm doing it, telling me to breathe, and there's the fire.

That's the part nobody could have warned me about. The white fire wakes with the labor. It rises in me with every pain, reaching, the way it reached for Zevran at the Renewal, except there's nothing to pour into, so it just builds, hot under my skin, and the child answers it from inside, its own heat rising to meet mine, the two of us burning toward each other as it fights its way out.

The healer's hands move through light that shouldn't be there. The room is too bright. Guess who the light bulb is? Me!

I'm too bright. I'm giving birth to a demon's child and lit up like a coal from the inside and somewhere underneath all of it I can feel the other thing, the curse, stirring where it's slept for nine months, sensing that the thing pinning it down is about to leave.

"It's coming," the healer says. "My lady, it's coming now, you have to push, all of it, now..."

I push. I burn. I scream, and Zevran's arm is behind my shoulders. His voice has stopped being steady because even he can't hold steady through this, as the fire crests.

Followed by the pain and the curse rises up to meet the gap that's opening as the child leaves me, all three of them peaking in the same unbearable instant...

And then the child is out, and it cries.

A real cry, thin, furious and alive, and the fire snaps out of me all at once like a door slammed, and the room goes dim and ordinary as I fall back against Zevran's arm with nothing left.

"It's a girl," the healer is saying, somewhere far away, her voice cracking with relief. "A daughter, my lady, she's alive, she's whole, she's..."

I want to see her. That's the only thought I have left. I want to see my daughter, the thing I made promises to in the dark, the one who'd be wanted for nothing but being herself. I turn my head toward the sound of her crying.

And the curse is there.

I feel it the moment the child is fully gone from me, feel it wake all the way and reach into the gap she left, the death that's only been paused, picking up exactly where it stopped nine months ago.

This is it, then. This is the answer to the question. The child is born, the curse is awake and I'm going to find out, right now, lying in Zevran's arms with my daughter crying across the room, whether I get to keep any of it.

I'm waiting for it to take me.

And that's when the cold that enveloped me the moment my daughter was born becomes something else.

The room changes. Not the light, the air. It thickens, presses, the way I've only felt it once before, in a place I swore I'd never go back to, and the healer goes silent mid-word, while Zevran's arm goes rigid behind me.

He's standing at the foot of the bed.

The Devil.

In the flesh, in Valdris, in the birthing chamber, where nothing of his kind should be able to stand. He looks almost ordinary, which is the most frightening thing about him, a man-shaped patience with eyes that have already read the end of everything, and he's looking at me with an interest that makes the curse's cold hand feel warm by comparison.

Zevran is moving, I feel him move, putting himself between me and the foot of the bed, and the Devil doesn't even glance at him, a thousand-year-old vampire king beneath his notice entirely, because there's only one thing in this room he came for and it isn't the king.

It's me. The last of the Ashveil blood, emptied and exposed, with the curse already in me doing half his work.

He smiles, and it's the last thing I see clearly, as he says one thing, in a voice that sounds like a boisterous storm with all the rumbling and thunder crackling.

"There you are," the Devil says, gentle as anything. "I've been waiting nine months for you to put that child down. A deal's a deal, little Ashveil. Time to collect what your demon bought and lost."

And the dark comes up over the sight of him, fast, and I don't know if it's the curse or the fact that I just gave birth or him. I don't know which one is taking me, I only know that the last thing in the world is his face with his lips parted in a wide smile, his eyes fixed on my heaving body.

My daughter crying uncontrollably, while Zevran's voice is breaking around my name...

And then nothing.