To be safe, I rolled up a towel and wedged it at the bottom of the bathroom door. If I fried Adrian, I couldn’t ask him questions about elves.
Then I realized I didn’t have four items closely related to Adrian in order to power the circle. I had a business card, which I placed at due north, and a pen belonging to him that I’d accidentally stuck in my pack after our last elf lesson. I set that down at due South.
I sat on the edge of the tub, thinking of what else I might use. Adrian was a Blue Congress wizard, not Green Congress like me, but otherwise our badges should be similar, so I set my badge at due east. Lacking anything else, I scribbled his name on a sheet of hotel stationery, folded it, and laid it atop the circle at the western side of the arc.
Using a penknife from my pack, I pricked my left index finger and dropped blood on the circle as I touched Charlie to it, shooting out a bit of energy and speaking Adrian’s name.
I’d really expected this experiment to fail, because if I’d been hiding from the Elders and wanted to avoid being summoned, I’d set up wards to protect myself from the summoning magic. But he materialized within seconds, looking panicked as he felt the containment circle and glanced wildly around to see if there was a deadly light source nearby. He stared at the closed bathroom door a moment, then turned to me.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, you stupid woman?”
Adrian and I had had a slew of contentious conversations for three years before finally meeting in person, and we hadn’t liked each other any better at close range. I’d thought being a fugitive vampire might make him less haughty, but not so.
It occurred to me that if I were a good sentinel, I’d call Alex and have Adrian arrested. But I was wearing my friend-of-Eugenie hat, and getting him arrested meant it would be a while before I could pump him for information, if ever.
I reached out my foot and broke the circle. “I want to talk about elves.”
He was silent so long that I was sure he was trying to figure out a way to escape, but he finally sat on the toilet lid. “I have nothing to say about that. I can’t believe you summoned me to a hotel bathroom to talk politics.”
Oh, good grief. “Let me rephrase my question. I don’t want to talk about politics or conspiracy plots or even how you almost got me killed last month. I want to talk about elf reproduction; specifically, pregnancy. You know. Length of gestation. What the baby can do in utero. What skills a baby elf has at birth and what he’d develop later. That kind of thing.”
His eyes widened, and he gave me a head-to-toe appraisal. “Oh my God. You’ve let Quince Randolph knock you up. I didn’t think even you were that stupid.”
Now I remembered why I disliked Adrian so much. “I’m not…”
Wait. I needed to think about this. What would be more dangerous: Adrian running back to Vampyre with the news that I had an elf in the oven, or that it was Eugenie? I was better able to defend myself. She probably didn’t taste nearly as vile as I.
“I’m not ready for this pregnancy to be common knowledge,” I told Adrian. “But I do need information and I didn’t know where else to go.”
He sniffed. “Why on earth should I help you?”
God save me from self-serving, smartass wizards-turned-vampire. “Oh, because you owe me, for one thing. Plus, you’re outside the Beyond and trapped in my bathroom until nightfall. One phone call, and the Elders would have you back in their little underground vampire jail cell before you knew what hit you.”
He bared his fangs at me, a disconcerting sight. I was used to Adrian the wizard, not Adrian the vampire. “Fine.” He glared at my midsection. “How far along are you?”
I closed my eyes and cursed the day I’d met Quince Randolph—or the day Eugenie had met him. It galled me for Adrian to think I’d had sex with the elf, or that he might tell anyone else, but this was for Eugenie. “About a month.”
“You probably don’t have many symptoms yet, then. Let me think … it’s been a while since I studied this. Does Randolph know? I really had thought you were lying when you said you had a real marriage.”
Ugh. “It surprised all of us.” So far I hadn’t lied, technically.
“He could tell you more than I can, but since you’re asking me I assume he doesn’t know yet and you don’t want to ask him.”
I perched on the edge of the tub again. “Good assumption.”
Adrian sighed. “I don’t know a lot—you’re eventually going to have to see an elven midwife. Gestation is seven months, so you should be showing within another two or three weeks.”
Great. An elven baby bump.
“Average birth weight is relatively large and you’re, well, not. So you might need … surgery.”
“The elven version of a C-section?” Better and better.
“Right.”
“What can the kid do before it’s born?” I prayed his answer was not much.
“Quite a lot, actually. It’s fascinating.”
Oh, I just bet it was. “Fascinating like a work of art, or fascinating like a freak-show zombie?”