“So, they’re basically cannibalizing their own offspring,” Dad said while he rubbed his hand over his face in a frustrated gesture.
“Pretty much,” Vance said, a look of complete disgust passing over his features.
My dad looked at me then.
“I really hope you aren’t pregnant, Portia,” he said flatly, his eyes flickering briefly down toward my stomach.
“Me too, Dad, but it won’t matter to them if I’m not,” I replied with a slight shake of my head.
“What do you mean?” he asked, not following.
“If I fail to conceive, they’ll just go back to their original plan,” I said with a shrug.
“Which is what?” he asked me.
“They’ll try to use Vance. He already carries the bloodline mixed with their blood. They’re just hoping to make that bloodline even purer through me,” I explained to him.
Dad looked a Vance for several moments before he answered.
“This isn’t good, son,” he said with concern.
“I know,” Vance replied with a sigh.
“We really need to get you both away from here,” he said, his voice sounding more insistent.
“I can’t leave my mom behind,” Vance said stubbornly. “I won’t leave her behind,” he amended a moment later.
“Well, you being here isn’t going to help her either at the moment. If they catch you, things go from bad to worse, for everyone involved,” Dad countered, trying to persuade him otherwise.
I could see that Vance had that look in his eye when he was not going to be easy to reason with. I decided that maybe I should give it a shot.
“Look, Vance,” I said softly, hoping I wouldn’t anger him by moving to stand with my father on this. “Krista has been with them all these years, and they’ve never hurt her. She herself said she’s absolutely no threat to them without her powers. They probably hardly even notice her at this point.”
He was giving me a hard stare, and I swallowed the lump forming in my throat.
“I’m not asking you to leave her behind. I’m asking you to consider what she’d tell you to do about this,” I explained to him, wishing I could somehow make him understand what I was trying to say.
He folded his arms over his chest while he thought, looking back and forth between me and my dad with a slightly angry expression, and I could see he was really struggling with this.
“Fine,” he said, dropping his hands to his sides in defeat. “But I won’t go far, maybe to Ireland or England, but no farther. We stay there, find out everything we can about this Awakening, and we come back for her as soon as we possibly can.”
“Done!” my dad said, and he patted Vance on the back. “Trust me. I’ll do everything in my power to get her back for you.”
Chapter 14
We ended up renting a couple of apartments at the plush Milestone Hotel in London. Vance paid for the rooms, but we put them under Brad and Shelly’s names to try and help avoid detection, just in case anyone came looking.
Once we were settled in, we spent most of the daylight hours each day searching through old documents in libraries, trying to find anything we could that would give us information on ancient rituals performed in Celtic ceremonies.
In the evenings, we all spent our time strolling through, and exploring, Hyde Park, sometimes venturing out before dusk to work our way through Kensington Gardens also before they closed for the evening.
Vance and I usually retired to our room early at night just to enjoy being alone with one another. Our relationship had resumed all of its normal aspects; however, we were very careful to use some form of birth control now, just in case I hadn’t conceived during the Celtic ritual.
“If I have to dig through one more library, I think my head may explode,” I complained one night while we were crawling into bed together.
“I know exactly how you feel,” Vance said, and he reached over to pull me up next to him so he could cuddle with me.
“What should we do?” I asked, feeling exasperated. “It seems we’re getting nowhere fast.”
Vance stared off into space, thinking things over for a moment before he answered me.
“I’m thinking we must not be looking in the right place,” he said. His eyes flitted back over my face. “I mean, sure, we’re finding things about the history of witchcraft but nothing to do with actual spells or rituals. We need to find someplace that deals in things like that.”
“What about shops that deal specifically in Pagan or Wicca materials and supplies? Surely they’d have some things pertaining to historical rituals or prophecies,” I suggested.
His face widened into the sexy grin I loved.
“That pretty little head of your is as quick as ever,” he said, placing a kiss on my forehead. “I think it’s a good idea. We’ll look up some places tomorrow and see what we can find here in London.”
“I also think that we need to start thinking more like Douglas and Fiona. Where would they have stumbled across this prophecy? What kind of places do they get their information from?” I added.
“Another great idea,” Vance agreed with a slight nod.
“I mean it’s obvious this Awakening is not a well-known thing. No one seems to have ever heard of it. It makes me think it’s a practice that has fallen by the wayside. You know, sort of obsolete. Who knows if it really even happens?” I continued on, the thoughts rolling around in my head.
“Good point,” he said. “I’m thinking we have at least a few months before it might begin. They had enough time for a full-term pregnancy to occur, as well as waiting a few months to see if you’d conceived.”
I nodded.
“So what happens if I’m pregnant?” I asked, glancing down at my stomach before looking up at him, changing the subject.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” he replied without hesitation, looking directly into my eyes.
“Will you be upset about it?” I asked, a little bit worried since I didn’t really know how he felt about the matter.
“Not because of the baby,” he answered honestly. “I’d be upset about the danger it would place you and the child in. Plus, we’re young, and I’d hoped to spend a significant amount of time as just the two of us before we started a family.”
“So you’d be disappointed,” I said, casting my eyes down as I drew a lazy circle with my finger on his bare chest.
“I’d never be disappointed with something that you and I created together,” he said, catching my trailing finger and lifting it to his lips to kiss it. “I’d just miss these kinds of moments we’re getting to have together now,” he replied.
“We’d still have them,” I said, looking up at him.
“Yes,” he agreed with a slight nod. “But not as often as I’d like. A baby has a way of changing those kinds of things, and I like all the alone time we have right now.”
I couldn’t argue with him on that subject, since I loved being alone with him, too. Even with all the crazy things we had going on around us, our moments together were always magical.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he continued. “I greatly look forward to the time we start expanding our little family. It’ll be awesome to see you holding my baby on your hip, or nursing, or even changing diapers. You’ll be a beautiful mother, I know it. I’d just planned on waiting until you were at least a legal adult before I knocked you up,” he laughed, and he winked in jest at me. “Even then you’d still be a statistic … you know, teenaged pregnancy.”
“You’re crazy,” I said, and I lifted up to kiss his lips with a quick peck. “I love you.”
He grabbed me then and flipped me over onto my back, effectively pinning me beneath him.
“You know what they say, practice makes perfect,” he smiled, dipping his head in for another kiss.
“Is that what they say?” I asked, and I playfully turned my head so his kiss missed, landing somewhere in the vicinity of my ear.
“Ohhhh!” he laugh
ed. “And she’s going to play hard to get! All right, I’m up for this game!”
He proceeded to attack me with vigor, and in the end, I wasn’t sure which one of us had lost and which one had won, but we both had a great time together anyway.
“Have I told you how much I love you, today?” he asked as he cuddled up next to me a couple of hours later.
“Only about a thousand times,” I replied with a tired voice. Smiling, I closed my sleep-laden eyes.
“Well, I’d better make it a thousand and one,” he whispered, and he placed a light kiss against my hair, somewhere near my ear, “Because a thousand just isn’t enough. I love you, Portia.”
“I love you too, Vance,” I responded, still smiling to myself, and I slowly drifted off to sleep.
I awoke in the morning stretching my arm out in search of Vance’s warm body next to me, only to find him missing from the bed. My eyes popped open, and I stared at the empty spot in confusion, before looking up to glance around the room, pushing away my disheveled hair as it fell in a curtain around me.
He was sitting over at the small writing desk, still shirtless, dressed in a pair of sweatpants and drinking a glass of orange juice, while he was hunkered over a laptop reading something.
“What are you doing?” I asked groggily, and I rubbed absently at one of my tired eyes.
His head turned, and he glanced back at me.
“Hey, beautiful! You’re awake!” he said, coming over to me. He slid his hands into my hair on either side of my head, lifting my face to him so he could give me a light kiss on the lips.
When he was finished he sat down on the bed next to me.
“I’ve been searching for stores like you suggested last night,” he responded, draping himself casually over my still-blanketed legs, then propping up on his elbow.
“Did you find some?” I asked, reaching my hand over to rub through his wonderfully messy hair.
“Yep. There are about five I think,” he replied, smiling back at me.
“Sounds good. I’ll get up and get ready so we can go check them out then,” I replied.
I playfully pushed him backward so he had to roll off my legs, then stood up and made my way toward the bathroom.
“Hey!” he called after me, sounding way too chipper all of a sudden. “Care for some company?”
“I guess,” I said, drawing out the words, and I sighed heavily, acting as if I were irritated at him.
He laughed and jumped up, hurrying to join me.
Breakfast was in full swing when we finally made our way into the small kitchen area.
“Look!” Brad called out in a teasing voice directed at Shelly. “The newlyweds decided to join us.”
Vance shot him a look.
“We’d be all too happy to leave right now and resume what we were doing if you’d prefer,” Vance countered. He grabbed my hand and turned back toward the bedroom.
“No! No!” Brad protested. “I don’t want to spend the rest of the morning waiting for the two of you to get your fill of each other. Been there, done that.”
“Jealous much?” Vance said with a grin. He looked over at me and winked, his eyes dancing with amusement.
“Show off,” Brad muttered under his breath, and Vance burst out laughing, thoroughly enjoying the ribbing he was dishing out.
“Don’t worry, bro,” he said patting Brad on the shoulder as he passed by. “Your day will come, and when it does you’ll realize it was worth the wait.”
I cleared my throat a little nervously.
“So how’s the food this morning?” I said trying to change the subject before Shelly turned to her fourth shade of pink in embarrassment at the conversation.
“It’s delicious!” she replied with a grateful look before sliding a plate of muffins in my direction. “By the way, your family is having breakfast in their room next door this morning.”
“All right,” I said. I reached for a fat blueberry muffin. “Does my dad have any plans for today?”
She nodded, looking completely dejected. “More of the same, I’m afraid.”
“Portia had a great idea last night,” Vance said. “Maybe the two of you could help us out with that today.”
“What’s that?” Brad asked, looking up from his food in interest.
“She thought we should hit up some specialty shops in the city that deal with magic, rituals or occult-type things. Maybe we could find something more there,” Vance said.
“I’m game for a change of pace,” Brad replied. “How about you, babe?” he added looking at Shelly.
“Anything besides what we’ve been doing sounds great to me,” she said after swallowing a mouthful of muffin.
“It’s settled then,” Vance replied. “We’ll tell Sean our plan after breakfast.”
My dad was a little less than enthusiastic about us going off just the four of us. He felt there was better safety in numbers, so we decided everyone would make the trip to the shops that Vance had addresses for, since we had been having little luck with the library thing.
We followed the directions he had to a little out-of-the-way shop called Lankton’s. The shopkeeper came in from the back of the store when we entered through the front door, sounding a little bell.
She was very friendly while Dad told her how we were interested in looking through any old texts she might have dealing with rituals, prophecies, or history of the white witch society.
The woman led us up a small curved spiral staircase to a tiny loft that overlooked the rest of the store. There was volume upon volume of ancient looking books up here. Some were neatly organized into shelves, and others were in various sized piles around the room.
She told us to help ourselves to anything we could fine and if we needed something to just give her a holler.
Each of us picked a pile to start on and began the slow tedious job of looking through the books.
We read through the first pages of the ones that had a table of contents, looking for any one thing that might seem related to what we were looking for. Most of the books, however, did not have contents listed in them, and we were forced to turn page by page through the giant tomes to see if we could find anything.
It was well after three in the afternoon when I finally had to stop and stretch my cramping legs. I walked down the stairs and out the front door into the fresh air outside. I noticed a juice bar down the block and decided to walk over there and get some type of refreshment, thinking that might help my impending headache.
I hadn’t gone two steps before Vance’s arms snaked around my waist, as his head appeared over my shoulder.
“Going somewhere, baby?” he asked, he breath moving warmly though my hair and up against my neck.
“Sorry. I should’ve said something,” I apologized, and I turned to look at him. “My head hurts, and I thought maybe some fresh air and some juice would help,” I added, and I gestured down the street toward the store I had been heading to.
“That does sound good,” he agreed. “Do you care if I join you?”
I smiled at him.
“You know I wouldn’t love anything better,” I said, and he reached around to thread his fingers through mine.
“I have to apologize for falling down on the job,” he replied seriously, looking over at me.
“What are you talking about?” I asked in confusion.
“I should’ve sensed that you were getting tired and called for a break,” he said, a concerned look in his eyes.
I laughed. “Vance, when will you get it through that thick skull of yours that I’m a big girl and I don’t need you to cater to my every need? I’m okay, really.” I nudged him playfully with my shoulder.
“But I like catering to your every need,” he said with a serious look before he smiled at me again. “In fact, I honestly can’t think of anything else I’d rather do more.”
I stopped to turn to him on the sidewalk, releasing his hand and wrapped my arms around him tightly.
“Yo
u’re too good to me,” I said, and I nuzzled against his shoulder. “Thank you for all that you do.”
“It really is my pleasure, Portia, believe me.” He smiled before he leaned in to kiss my lips.
My stomach chose this moment to begin protesting loudly, rumbling in anger at its emptiness.
I felt the laughter rumble through Vance as his lips held mine for a few seconds longer before breaking away.
“I think you’re going to need a pastry with your juice, too,” he commented. He patted my stomach with his hand.
“I think you’re right,” I agreed.
He took my hand and began to walk a little more determinedly toward the juice shop.
We were inside placing our order when the rest of the gang wandered in behind us.
Shelly plopped into a chair that was by a small table, telling Brad what she wanted to order.
Brad came up to stand by Vance in line, so I wandered back to sit and visit with Shelly.
“How are you holding up?” I asked her.
“This research stuff is brutal.” She grimaced and rubbed her hand over the small of her back.
“I’m sorry about all this,” I replied. “Would you and Brad like to go back to Sedona? I hate to have you sucked into all this and miss the rest of your school year,” I added, feeling badly about how they were always putting their lives on hold for our benefit.
“Brad and I are finished with school for the semester,” she responded to me casually.
“How’s that?” I asked, a little shocked at her comment.
“We’ve been here quite a while … since we came to help look for you two. We had tutors the whole time, and we finished the required work for the semester. Your dad already sent everything back to the school so we’d get credit. Our parents have been telling everyone that we’re studying abroad, which I guess has been the case,” she explained.