I also thought she’d gotten over him. “What has he done now? Because I’d welcome the opportunity to call him over here and kick his elven assets halfway to Lake Pontchartrain.” I didn’t know if it would help Eugenie, but it would make me feel better.
She sniffled. “Rand wouldn’t come over here even for you, not today. He told me one time he couldn’t stand getting out in cold weather. Besides, it’s nothing he’s done. Well, nothing he’s done recently. I haven’t even seen him in a couple of weeks. Not since … you know.”
Yeah, I knew. The night Quince Randolph had told her we were married, a highly exaggerated description of our even-less-than-platonic bonding. Asshat. It was the only word that did him justice.
I tried to set my personal animosity aside and focus instead on what Rand might have done in the past that was only now making Eugenie miserable. There were so many possibilities. “I don’t unders—”
“Can elves and humans, you know…” She swallowed hard, and her hazel eyes spilled another round of tears down her cheeks as she looked me in the eye for the first time. I held on, waiting for the rest of it. Even with the little bag of herbs around my neck blocking most of my empathic ability, her fear came through loud and clear. She was petrified.
“Can humans have elf babies?”
I’d lived in old houses most of the past decade, and they’re rarely quiet. They creak and settle. Antique wood flooring crackles. Plaster chips off between strips of lathing and drifts down the insides of the walls.
You could’ve heard a feather floating through Eugenie’s living room. She looked at me in fearful anticipation of my answer, but my vocal cords had turned to ice. Because, of course, the answer was yes. Their prolific mating with humans was one reason the elves had dwindled as a species.
“Oh God, they can. Of course they can. I can see it on your face.” She dropped my hand and clutched her pillow, then tossed it on the floor and stood. “I’m gonna be sick again.”
I watched in horror as she ran through the door into the hallway and out of sight. Holy crap. Eugenie didn’t have a virus. She had morning sickness—well, in this case, afternoon sickness.
I ignored the retching sounds drifting down the hallway from the downstairs bath and reined in the runaway thoughts and spiral of what-ifs trying to unspool in my brain. The last response Eugenie needed from me was horror or hysteria. A plain-vanilla human, she’d only learned about the preternatural world three weeks ago—including the fact that the lying, manipulative bastard she’d been sleeping with was an elf with political ambitions. She needed me to guide her through this minefield.
Only one problem: I was clueless.
Hadn’t they used protection of some kind? Had Eugenie thought a baby would help her hang on to Rand when she saw him slipping away, toward me? Before she knew what he really was? What would a half-elven baby be able to do?
I got up and paced the room, ashamed that my first thoughts had been to cast blame. If I’d learned anything from the New Orleans I’d inhabited since Hurricane Katrina smashed normal life into something unrecognizable, it was to not even go down the what-if road. Blame was a useless emotion, and assigning motive was worse than useless.
To move on, I’d learned, one simply had to take things as they existed in the present and keep blundering forward.
By the time Eugenie returned, looking paler than ever, I’d composed my face into a mask of calm. Beneath, I was shrieking like a model for Edvard Munch, but I looked serene and compassionate, if not exactly competent.
I’d taken Eugenie’s glass of juice back into the kitchen and added a little seltzer and powdered ginger to it, and handed it to her when she sat down.
“I doctored it to help with the nausea.” She raised an eyebrow, and I smiled. “Don’t worry. Nothing magical. Just stuff from your kitchen.”
I waited until she drank a few sips before asking, in my gentlest tone, “Are you sure?”
She bit her lower lip and nodded. “I haven’t taken a test, but believe me, I know.”
There was hope, then. “But it really might be a virus or—”
“You don’t know this, but I’ve been pregnant before, back when I lived in Marrero.”
I fell silent, waiting to hear the rest. The time was shadowy between her childhood in the western New Orleans suburbs and her arrival in Uptown, tattooed and henna-rinsed. From late-night girl talks, I knew there had been a man; wasn’t there always? There’d been a bad breakup in the old neighborhood of Marrero, across the Mississippi River from the bustle of New Orleans. This was the first I’d heard about a pregnancy.
“I lost the baby near the end of the second trimester.” She smiled and swirled the golden juice around in her glass, looking into the past. “It was a little boy. I’d already picked out his name: Charles, after my daddy.”