Page 28 of Her Vampire

“Who cares?” he laughed. “I can feel it.”

“You’re a madman.”

“Well, yes. I am crazy about you.”

“Oh, so mortality has made you cheesy now, has it?”

He stood up in the water and grinned mischievously at me.

“You better believe it,” he chuckled.

Now I feel butterflies swirling around my belly when I think about it, that moment, the first brick in the road of our lives. I cradle Chipper close to me and together we roll around in the silken sheets, and then I can’t help it.

I leap up and start singing, letting my voice flow through the apartment.

I sing loud and high and with pride ringing in my voice.

“We’re pregnant, we’re pregnant, we’re preeeggnaaaaant—”

And then I bump straight into my fiancé’s chest, Torsten looking even more dashing in the light of the unusually bright autumn day.

“Oh,” I whisper, gawping at him for a moment.

“We’re …”

I feel tears spring to my eyes when the devoted happiness floods into his face, his blue eyes gleaming, smiling broadly with his human teeth.

Excitement flares in him but his skin doesn’t pulsate red. And yet he still burns, burns with the passion of our love, our future.

“Yes,” I whisper. “I just did three tests, so I’m pretty freaking confident. I wanted to do something special to tell you. But it turns out you’re still pretty quiet even when you’re not a vampire anymore.”

“I knew it,” he says, wrapping his arms around me – arms that are still powerful and thick and protective even if they’re human, no, because they’re human – and smashing our bodies together in a beautiful moment of intimacy. “It was that first time, the night I changed. I can’t wait to see what an incredible mother you’ll make, Tammy. I can’t wait to spend the rest of our lives together. I love you.”

“I love you,” I whisper, laying my head against his chest, listening to the sound of his heartbeat, that wonderful hammering that lets me know how human and happy he is.Extended EpilogueOne Year LaterTorstenI sit in the couch area of the recording studio, bobbing Freya up and down on my knee and never once, not even for a goddamn second, getting tired of the way she coos and smiles sleepily. If I stop bobbing her up and down for even a moment, her eyes flitter open and she looks at me as if to ask if I’ve lost my mind.

I grin and cradle her to my chest, rocking her side to side, which she likes just as much as the bobbing.

It’s like she’s got a little piece of me in her, the part that savored the rocking of the ships as we sailed from far-flung land to far-flung land.

Chipper sits in the lap of the studio technician, Joanne, a woman who my wife has been spending more and more time with of late. Joanne is in her fifties and always wears flowing, summery dresses, despite the encroaching cold weather.

She’s a good, decent woman, and I’m glad that my wife has found a friend as well as a work partner.

But my eyes only graze across her before settling like flaming infernos on Tammy.

She stands in the booth, her hand clutching the microphone as her cheeks flame red. Her angelic voice fills the booth as she sings a song she wrote herself, a song about life and death and a thousand years in the cold dark north before emerging onto a sun-glorious beach and basking with her lover. She sways as she sings, her natural musicality shining through in her performance.

Having Freya has added even more curves to her body, something I thought impossible before. As I sit here, I’m glad that Joanne and Freya and Chipper are here, otherwise I might ruin the performance by smashing through the sound-proofed glass and claiming my queen where she stands.

After completing the song, she exits the booth and comes around to the seating section.

“God, that was awful,” she says.

“It was not,” Joanne snaps. “And you know it wasn’t.”

“It was amazing, wife,” I tell her fiercely. “It was the voice of an angel. But a dangerous angel. A badass angel. An angel capable of taming a devil, you could say.”

We share a secret smile and I feel a deafening army of Valkyries soaring through my mind and heart and soul.

In my first mortal life, all I longed for was for them to carry me off to the heavenly halls where I thought I’d be happiest, most content. But now I’m here, with my wife, looking like a picture of perfection even in her baggy T-shirt and jeans, the fabrics doing nothing to conceal the voluptuousness of her body.

“What did you think, boy?” she asks, scooping Chipper up and coming to sit next to us.

Chipper leans over and softly, tenderly licks Freya on the head. Our daughter smiles in her sleep and together we all lie back on the couch, Joanne leaving the room quietly, shutting us off in silence for a few minutes.

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