Page 305

He hadn’t even looked ashamed. “That’s different.”

“How?”

“Because she’s my baby girl.”

As if that explained a damn thing.

To Caspian, apparently, it did.

He still hadn’t wanted an exact female version of his name, but he wanted something close enough that anybody who heard it would know where it came from… something of his that she could carry without feeling like she had been handed his entire identity. And somehow, the more I said it, the more I loved it.

Cassiane Black.

It was soft enough for the tiny baby curled against me now, but still strong enough to sound like she belonged to Caspian.

She ate peacefully against my chest, completely unaware that her existence had challenged every law of nature I thought I understood and given her father another reason to walk around the house acting like he had personally invented a new brand of parenthood.

There were still moments when her existence caught me off guard. I could be changing her diaper, feeding her, watching her sleep, and suddenly it would hit me all over again.

Caspian and I really had another child… a baby girl who technically should’ve been impossible in about fourteen different ways, yet there she was in my arms, drinking her bottle and making tiny content little noises as though there was nothing supernatural about how she got here.

The months following that party had been the strangest, happiest, most exhausting stretch of my life, and considering everything that had happened before then, that was saying a lot.

I found out I was pregnant a few weeks after Halloween, and unlike the first time, there was nobody standing beside me when the possibility finally entered my mind.

For several days, I had been feeling off… nothing dramatic enough to scare me, just little things I kept finding excuses for.

I woke up nauseous two mornings in a row and blamed it on eating too late the night before. The smell of bacon nearly turned my stomach one morning, but I convinced myself the grease was bothering me. I was more tired than usual, my breasts were sore, and one afternoon at work I almost cried because the vending machine took my dollar and refused to give me the damn honey bun I wanted… even then, pregnancy never crossed my mind.

Why would it?

My man could still perform, but he was dead, which meant I assumed his ability to get me pregnant had died with him.

That alone should have eliminated pregnancy from the list of possibilities.

Then one afternoon, while sitting in my car after work, I opened the calendar on my phone to check something and noticed the date.

My period was late… not a day or two late either.

I sat there staring at the screen while my mind started doing calculations I absolutely did not want it doing. I went back to that night I had spent with Caspian when I thought I was dreaming, then Halloween night itself.

“No,” I whispered.

There was no way.

Then I remembered that Miss Veda had given him a temporary living body for those two hours. A living body. I had been so caught up in understanding how he could touch me that I never stopped to consider what else that meant.

Instead of telling Willow or Caspian right away about my suspicions, I drove to the pharmacy. I wanted to take the tests before I said anything. I refused to send the entire family into a panic over something that probably wasn’t even possible. I bought three different brands of pregnancy tests, hid the bag underneath some completely unnecessary toiletries because apparently, I was twelve and thought the cashier gave a damn what I was purchasing, then went home.

When I got home, I carried the pharmacy bag upstairs, locked myself in the bathroom, and stood there for several seconds without touching anything.

“This is ridiculous,” I muttered.

I wasn’t pregnant.

I couldn’t be.

I took the first test anyway… then the second. By the time I took the third, my hands had started trembling.