Hounded [Wild Hunt Series: 2]

15: You Are

With all the mellifluous gaiety of concrete chairs dragged across gravel, the creature's rasping song closed a bloody curtain over the nightmarish haze of days, weeks, months. The passage of time, meaningless for that bleak stretch, returned carrying more weight than I could stomach.

I found my hand on my belly, felt unease slip down the back of my throat and draw the contents out one slow wretch at a time.

And then the thing below sang its stupid rhyme again, and the words ground through my ears and hooked meaty claws into the back of my aching skull. 

For several moments I stood braced against the morning sun, looking down into the creature's beady eyes, wondering numbly when it would stop.

"You've got the words all wrong," I said stupidly. "Stop singing. Enough singing. Say the right words. Say the right words. You aren't pregnant, Tay."

I'm not pregnant. I'm not pregnant. I'm not pregnant.

Didn't matter how I said it.

I thought I'd run out of tears. I thought I'd run out of feeling. I thought I'd lost this body to him. But I found myself on the stone floor, head between my knees as that monster mocked me and the green sun shone with feverish intensity and the morning hours burned. 

"How do you know?" I croaked after I'd had it out and found new breath, hanging over the edge where the wind could dry my hot face. The thing, having retreated into the trees, crawled up one of the branches, its pale head emerging after a moment. "How do you know I'm pregnant?" I said, conscious of my belly pressed against the stone, aware I didn't need to shout for it to hear me fine.

The Witch has your blood, it hissed in the far reaches of my mind, an unpleasant echo of a storming landslide. The Witch knows your essence.

"From the ceremony?"

From the King, the creature said flatly. He gives me a little taste whenever you're at rest.

"At rest." I snorted. At rest! But last night was different, last was...

Last night was different, wasn't it? If he were a bat and this were hell...What is it you humans say, "nevertheless, he persisted?"  Ice may run through your veins, my queen, but he cut them open.

 "No," I said, glancing at the floor, toward thawed and now congealed footprints. "No."

You are.

"I'm not supposed to be. I wasn't supposed to be. I wasn't—"

The King'll be thrilled.

It wasn't hope that gave me pause, but something far more terrible, a serpent underneath the rosy word whose scaled tail lifted my chin a bit higher. "He doesn't know?"

With a pale iridescence, the thing's head canted toward the horizon. Not for a few hours.

"Don't tell him." Even as the words left my mouth I knew the second he touched me, maybe even as he crawled through the window, I would tell him. Maybe it was cowardice, maybe it was strategy. Maybe I wouldn't know what I was capable of until it was actually happening. Maybe it was everything or maybe it was none of these things.

But it was a certainty that if his claws swept across my skin again, I would kill him.

Those words and others rattled and tumbled and endlessly repeated until, though I didn't say it, I found the strength to cross one off. I tested the remainder on my tongue and tasted bitterness and disgust and strange, cold hostility.