Cured By Blood: A Vampire Pregnancy Romance (15 page)

But remembering the hell that Blaine created, she didn’t care what happened to her as long as she never had to see her again.

Tara tried to stand up, and found herself slumping back into the swing. She pushed with her strength and finally got to her feet, only to have the world tilt around her. She grabbed for her phone on the table next to the swing and swiped the screen. A red icon was set in the center. She tapped it and saw it begin to blink. As she grabbed ahold of the post, everything seemed to start dropping away out from under her.

Panicking, she started stumbling towards the glass hall. As she felt herself begin to tilt downward, two pairs of strong arms were on either side. The world spun as one set suddenly swept her up off her feet and held on as they began moving at a rapid pace. She felt the world blink in and out. Suddenly she was on the hospital bed. Now someone was removing her clothes. The bed felt wet. She tried to move and heard someone whispering in her ear to hold still and hang on.

The world got darker and faded out for Tara as the room seemed to get brighter for Dru. Her head lolled to one side, the pool of watery blood spreading under her. Salvador was putting instruments on a table and Ardo was gathering bedding and making up the two carts for the children. They knew she would go into labor soon, but this was when things got difficult. Because her body was all vampire, it would heal many things too quickly for the infants to both successfully pass through the birth canal.

“I’m going to start cutting, I need one of you ready to grab each baby, one by one, wrap them up, make sure they are breathing and put them in the cart then do the same to the other. I need the other person to help me keep her open. We may have to repeatedly pull to keep the kin far enough apart to get the babies out before it starts to knit together.” Salvador slid the scalpel across Tara’s abdomen.

As he worked through the layers, Dru felt a surge of panic. He was fixing to see his sons, but he hadn’t expected it to be like this. He thought of the human births you saw on movies and nature channels. This seemed the worst possible situation for them, but he didn’t know what it meant for vampires.

“Ok, pulling out the first one,” Dru watched in fascination as the Salvador pulled a miniature human foot and the leg and then whole body out of Tara’s abdomen, “Ardo?”

Dru barely saw more than a flash of the child as Ardo wrapped it in towels and laid it in the first cart, he became distracted for a second until Salvador barked his name.

“Pull the sides while I get the second one out,” Salvador was trying to get the baby before Tara’s stomach resealed, which was something that baffled Dru.

Dru had watched men’s wounds stitch back together after being shot or stabbed, but watching a woman’s stomach close around her babies and the arm of a doctor was surreal. Trying to distance himself from the idea of the body being Tara’s, Dru pulled outwards as Salvador pulled up, bringing another little boy into the light.

Ardo grabbed him as quickly as the first and bundled him before placing him in the other cart. Both were wheeled under a heating apparatus that didn’t use ultraviolet light. Salvador told Dru to pull again as he reached in to scrape the after birth with his hands. He pulled his hands half way out to make sure the uterus closed before the stomach. He nodded Dru away as the rest of her stomach sealed.

“I am going to clean up and prepare an IV, Dru I need those bags of vampire blood now.”

Dru ran to the stabilizing unit in the back where they had put several bags of blood they had each donated in case Tara needed it and to give her after the birth, as its healing capabilities would help her body heal faster. The babies would be able to suckle and breastfeed for the first month, and then they would need to be on an iron heavy human diet until they started to plateau and turn fully later in life.

Salvador was shaking his wet hands and grabbed one of the bags from Dru. He hung it on an IV pole behind Tara and expertly put in the needle for the IV. After he had that going he turned to the babies, where Dru was already heading.

“They look healthy, Dru. They smell different. Not human but not vampire.” Ardo’s eyes seemed to almost glisten, a smile on his face of awe and humble reservation.

Salvador unwrapped one, checked him over, their mouths were making small cooing noises, their eyes not quite open. When Salvador was happy that everything seemed good with the infants, he returned to Tara, who was beginning to stir. Dru carried one of the babies and motioned Ardo, who suddenly seemed very uncomfortable, to get the other baby. They walked over to Tara. Ardo handed over one of the babies as Dru leaned close with the other.

“Happy birthday boys,” Tara whispered as she kissed the top of their heads.

Dru shook his head in amazement when he looked at Tara and then stared back down at the two creatures he had made. His mind was struggling to wrap around it. He had been working on the nursery himself, decking it out in dragons and ships, wanting his sons to embrace their Viking ancestry. He was baffled that they would be using it so soon, and that they would be here for so many years to come.

He would watch them grow, develop, take on traits of both him and Tara, and become amazing men, natural vampire twins. He kissed Tara as they sat baffled in the moment, Ardo and Salvador stood by, not wanting to intrude, but feeling their own amazement and love at what they had the chance to witness.

*     *     *

Tara lay in bed three nights after the boys had been born. Dru had his arms around her and she lay her head on his chest. They were quite, full bellies and rarely fussy. Tara was nervous, it was the first night they wouldn’t be in the little crib carts in the room with her, but she knew that wouldn’t last long anyway. She couldn’t help but keep her listening focused in on them, keeping an ear out for the slightest disruption.

Dru was already drifting off to sleep. Tara startled when she heard a thump, so lightly, on the stairs. Jumping up she went to the door and looked down the hall. The boys’ room was across the hall. As she stood frozen, she scanned the hall and the stairs nearby. She swung around as she noticed the thin beam of light under the door of the boys’ room. Trying to be as stealthy as possible, she eased toward the door. Carefully she turned the knob and pushed the door open. As it swung inward, someone jerked upwards from one of the cribs.

Blaine stared at Tara with white-green eyes. Her face was more angular, her hair fuller, she had been turned.

“Put him down.”

“No, sorry, I can’t so that. I know someone that wants him much more than you, plus, you already have another one. You don’t need two.”

Tara eased an inch forward.

“No, no, no,” Blaine angled one hand on the child’s tiny head, as if threatening to break his neck, “I can leave you a broken one and take the good one if you come any closer.”

“I’m telling you, you will not get out of here alive if you don’t put him down.”

“Tara…” Dru slid in behind her, “Oh shit.”

“Looky, Dru, I found someone to do what you wouldn’t. And you thought no one would believe me about Tara, that no one would help me. You’d be surprised what some vamps will do to get their hands on a genuine vampire baby.”

“I’m going to kill you.”

“No, not today. Move out of the way, I will kill him if you come near me, I promise.” Blaine stepped toward them forcing them back into the doorway.

Tara felt Dru’s hand behind her, probably pressing the alert button for the guard station. After the incident with Jared, Dru had hired all vampire guards. It paid well and they got to feel like bad asses in their all black swat style uniforms. Blaine kept pushing them forward. Tara’s eyes were latched onto her son, her brain trying to figure out a way out of the situation that wouldn’t cause her son harm.

Although they had already presented possibilities, especially in the lab tests on their blood that Salvador ran, of being much hardier than humans, they didn’t believe they had the regenerative powers of a regular vampire. Dru had explained that he had gotten cut as a young child and still had the scar from the incident, that healing wasn’t like it was for the other vampires. Diseases and sickness were almost impossible to get, but physical damage could still be severe.

“What do you want, Blaine? Money?”

“Haha, no, you are far too late for that. I want you to pay for abandoning me, for not loving me, for not turning me, and for having all this with her. My name is a foul word to almost everyone and I nearly died just trying to find someone to help me deal with you. And I did. And she wanted a baby, and I knew the perfect person for her to go after. She planned most of it and then turned me in exchange of me bringing this back to her.”

“That’s seriously twisted, and petty, Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you?”

“Nothing, not anymore.” Blaine darted around them and down the stairs, Dru and Tara on her heels.

As she ran through the house to the front door, Tara could hear the commotion outside. Automatic rifles and a lot of yelling. As Blaine backed out of the front door, Dru and Tara could see a black van with darkly tinted windows sitting just a few feet away in the driveway. Men were engaged in combat all over the yard, giving it a war zone appearance. Tara ran at the van as Blaine ducked inside.

Dru slammed his fist into the side panel causing a deep indention. Tara punched out the passenger window and tried grabbing the man inside. One of their guards turned his gun toward the van and took out the tires. Dru yanked the side door open and saw Blaine staring, her eyes wide and her hands on either side of the baby’s neck. She was staring at Dru in horror as he snarled, climbing into the van.

“I swear, I will kill him.”

“Then you will die a much slower death.”

“No matter what I do, I die, why shouldn’t I make you suffer?”

Tara ducked down as shots rang out around her. Her focus was on the woman holding her baby, but the gunfire was getting closer. She was afraid one of the bullets would end up in the van or ricocheting and hurting her son.

“Stop shooting! Stop! There is a baby in there!”

A few of the men stopped, those hired by Dru, but even less of the men with Blaine did. Tara had faith that Dru would take care of their child and spun around to kick the first t-shirt wearing thug into the ground. Grabbing his gun, she wielded it like a baseball bat striking any of the men not dressed in the uniforms Dru had provided, for situations just like this.

She had five men down when she looked back at the van, Dru with his hands held out, his face twisted in fury, trying to argue with Blaine. Tara shook with rage, swinging harder and faster as she attacked the men who were still shooting.

“If you shoot my baby I will rip your heads off!” she screamed as she flew around the yard swinging the gun.

As the last man crumbled, either by her swings or one of her men, she ran back to the van. Dru was backed up. His hands at his side, fisted and shaking with fury. His eyes almost glowed a white hot color. His teeth bared, he was all but gnashing at the woman. Blaine was still holding the baby, her hands still positioned around his throat, her eyes pleading.

She knew that no matter what she did, she wasn’t leaving alive this time. There was no more safety, no more reason for them to let her live. And now she was an unregistered vampire. She was dead. She just wanted to try to bargain, trying to think of any way to use the child to get out of the situation.

“Hand me my son and be done with it, or I swear, I will keep you alive for centuries, feeding my children off your blood.”

“You can’t feed your children if you only have one child! What don’t you get about this? I will kill him if you don’t let me leave here. I can leave with him alive and you can raise your other son however you want, or I can kill him just so you can kill me. This is an impasse, is it not?”

Tara raised the gun and put two holes in the woman’s forehead. Dru leapt forward in a blink and caught the baby as he fell from Blaine’s limp fingers. He turned to Tara and handed the baby to her.

“Take him inside. Put both cribs in our room.”

Tara kissed him and nodded as she backed away. She saw Dru pulling one of the long blades from one of his guard’s belts. He would decapitate the bodies, put them in the van, and they would be burned and then the evidence spread over a large area. The men would probably get a bonus after a night like this. Tara swallowed back her anger and residual fear as she held her son close to her. In their room she put the infant in his bed before pulling both of their cribs across the hall and into her room. It would be a long time more before they would be sleeping in a room alone.

*

Dru sat back against the headboard holding Viktor as Tara leaned against him snuggling Sebastian. The boys were already fed and asleep again, but neither Dru nor Tara could bear to close their eyes. They had a lot of cleanup to face, and neither knew exactly how to proceed next.

“I have an idea, but I am not sure how you will like it.”

“I’m kind of open for anything at this point.”

“Well, we already know that another vampire here knows about the boys and will try to send others after them. We can’t stay here, Tara.”

“I know, I thought about that.”

“Well, we can always go to Norway.”

Tara turned her head to look him in the eyes.