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But I want to see Luminoura for myself.
I jump down, shifting mid-air, and when I land on the floor next to my mate, I am in my two-legged form once more. I shake off the last vestiges of muscle-memory left over from my other form—I can still feel my wings if I close my eyes—and roll my shoulders as I stand up.
Jenny immediately moves in front of me, embarrassment flaring through her thoughts. "I forgot he won't have any pants. Do you have a towel he can wear?"
You think she has not seen a cock before? I tease my mate, wrapping my arms around her shoulders from behind and dipping my head to breathe in her scent. She had a baby, you know. She knows what one looks like.
Yes, but she might think it's rude if you wander around her house with your junk hanging out, Jenny replies primly.
The other female—Sasha, my mate's thoughts tell me—just smiles. "I've seen plenty of naked drakoni, so one more doesn't faze me. I'll get him a towel if you find it awkward, though. It's hard to line up our thinking with theirs sometimes."
And then the other female looks at me and holds out her infant. She knows the reason we are here.
Luminoura shoves a fist into her mouth, covering both her chin and her fingers with drool. Her little legs kick wildly, and she stares at me with the bright, swirling eyes of all drakoni. The hair atop her head is a mess of thick black curls like her mother's and her skin is a shade of amber I have never seen on a drakoni, much less a female.
Compelled despite myself, I reach out and take the infant, holding her under her arms. Greetings, I say to her.
The little legs kick in the air and Luminoura makes a cooing sound aloud. MHAL, she bellows in my head happily. MHAL MHAL MHAL.
I grin and hold her against my chest. You are a very, very loud little warrior.
Her delighted laughter is so loud in my mind that I wince…but then I laugh, too.
32
JENNY
I should have known that Mhal would fall head over heels for the baby.
He's entranced by her. I can feel in his mind that Luminoura shares her infant thoughts with him—most of it babylike shouting—and he adores all of it. He holds her for hours, until hunger hits her again and then Luminoura wants her mother. Sasha takes her daughter from Mhal then, and for a moment, my mate looks so very bereft that my heart twinges.
I somehow know how our babies conversation is going to go.
She is special, is she not? Mhal asks me, barely able to take his gaze away from the child as she nurses. Normally this would probably bug me to see my guy staring intensely at another woman's bared breast, but Mhal's thoughts are in my head and there is zero interest in Sasha whatsoever. His fascination is with the baby. Our daughter or our son would be just like that. So strong of mind and clear-headed.
I sip the glass of water in front of me. Sasha's baked us some cookies, too. She found a stash of brown sugar a while back in an old grocery store—all of it as hard as bricks—and she chips a little off here and there to bake with. The cookies aren't what I remember from Before—they're hard and dry, but still a treat after the constant tomato- and corn-based meals in the fort. I don't know what to think about Mhal's baby fever. Part of me thinks it's cute. Who wouldn't love a big, dangerous guy brought to his knees by a fat, wriggling baby?
Part of me worries about the consequences, though. If we have a baby, are we dooming it to a terrible fate? We're assuming that enough children will be born to close the Rift. What if there aren't? What if some are born without the strong minds of the others? What then? Are they going to be stuck in a world that's a double whammy of awful?
I think about my father. He'd always been strong, but after Mom died and we were left alone together in this new world, he turned hard. He always protected me, but a lot of the time, I wondered if he'd wished I'd died when the Rift came instead of Mom. Or maybe he'd wished we'd both died so he could truck on alone. Life's a lot easier in the After without a kid in tow, especially a female one.
I don't think I'd want my baby to feel as if she was a burden to her parents. Things are hard enough as it is.
No one would ever be a burden to you, Mhal thinks confidently. You are not your father.
I know that. And he was a good father. I don't want you to think he wasn't. He did right by me. He cared for me. He made sure I was safe at all times.
