Page 33 of The Child of Rue Royale
“We’ve been trying to get answers. Figure out who helped Franklin, how we are going to raise a son in a family of only daughters. Maybe Bastian is the answer.”
“It all must unfold just as it should,” Chantal reads out loud, her eyes glassing over. “Aunt Cora told them this,” she says, covering her mouth with her hand.
“Why didn’t Bastian ever tell you about this rendezvous?” Mother demands.
I wondered it too, but I’m naturally defensive of him. “Why didn’t Grandma ever tell us? I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t remember? He was blood-drunk. And she…well she told me I was different. That I could change everything. But she never said it had to do with a vampire. Maybe he forgot, but I can jar his memory. A lot was happening during that time. He had just been turned, he was still learning how to be a vampire, and he didn’t even know much about us.”
“Well…” Mother sighs, and I plop on the bed to steady myself. “I guess there’s no choice.”
We sit in the quiet, the weight of her words heavy in our ears. She’s thinking, contemplating. I don’t need her permission to bring Bastianback. I can do what I feel is right and best. My wrists throb harder, deeper, and my eyes look to Winnie on the nightstand.
“Everything in my bones is telling me…Winnie is telling me…and it’s not because I want it for selfish reasons. I’m bringing him back. I’m asking him what Grandma whispered to him that night. It might be all the answers we need. I can feel it.” I raise my throbbing wrists, the veins inside visibly pulsing. “Look,” I say, extending them to Chantal.
Her warm hand grabs one, thumb gently roving over the veins throbbing out of my skin. “Holy shit,” she whispers.
I flip the screen so Mother can see, everything inside me coiling tightly, everything wanting to burst, like the power pounding through the veins in my wrists.
Mother stares at the screen, her eyes taking in the movement in my veins.
“Oh my God,” she finally says. And then she’s silent, her face waged in a private war until her head finally shakes. “You will have to bring Bastian back. And Universe help us all for what is about to ensue. We’ll pray the fact that he’s a vampire and not a human will hold up as a loophole for the rule.”
Chantal and I lock eyes, and then, I slide to my knees, my hands clutching the comforter, the pain in my veins completely ceasing, hope bursting like tiny stars in my chest.
I awaken the next day with a purpose, a soul-driven, grateful purpose. Sleep-deprived yet determined, I command Winnie into my arms at the whisper of her name. I left Chantal sleeping peacefully and high-tailed it to the kitchen counter, where I opened my trusty grimoire. I looked out the window, California’s sun peeking through a cover of fog—fog that would soon burn off, leaving the sun to smile in all her glory. My sunshine boy would be back. I closed my eyes for a moment, taking it all in, then opened them with a determination to get to work. I compiled the ingredients I had and made a list of the ingredients I needed.
My hands worked and wrote ferociously, my mind moving faster than my fingers could keep up. What I read in Cassius’s writing was all the validation I desired to create something illegal, not that I was new to breaking the rules these days. Having an affair with a vampire,creating a secret potion, and now having a son was bad enough. But bringing that vampire back from the dead? Well, I might as well tie myself to the stake.
But if what I’m feeling is right, that won’t happen. And this will all have been for something. I had never believed in a greater plan, that some things were just meant to be. But Bastian showed me different because if anything is meant to be, it’s me and him. And maybe I’ll be a part of changing something that’s meant to be changed.
Bastian, I think,baby, I’m bringing you back. I’m bringing you back because you and I and this boy are meant to be.
Two months. Two months is how long the spell will take once I get a drop of my baby’s blood. There’s much work to be done in that time, and it breaks my heart that Bastian will miss the first two months of his baby’s life, but there’s nothing I can do about that. Two months will fly by.
Necromancy is one of the two forbidden forms of magic. Time travel being the second, and not the trick where we mentally go back in time like I did with Bastian. I mean leaving this date and time and going back somewhere that could alter other people’s lives forever, which is way worse, right? Maybe I’m just trying to convince myself that bringing Bastian back is the lesser of two forbidden practices, but my coven won’t care about that.
Ash. Magic. Blood. The power of three. I have Bastian’s ashes tucked in my bra. I have the power, the magic that’s needed. But the last thing I’ll need is the blood of our child. I take a deep breath because there’s no way I would do anything unethical or harmful to my child. Picking up my phone, I google if blood tests are performed on newborns, and it looks like almost all newborns have a blood test before they leave the birthing center. How I’ll be able to get the smallest drop, I don’t yet know.
But for now, in this second, I’m not worried about how much of a vampire my son will be. With Bastian by my side, I never felt safer. And when he’s a father, something I didn’t know he so longed to be…well, I know we’ll be protected. I am running on faith. It’s all I’ve got at this point.
I WISH I COULD RECALLthe play-by-play, every minute detail. But there was pain. So much pain. Witches cannot stop our own pain, natural gluttons for punishment. There was a burning, a sawing, a ripping. There was screaming until there were no screams left in me.
I woke up in a pool of liquid, the sensation I was told would happen if my water broke. I shook Chantal’s hip, yelling because it’s rare for your water to break before any contractions. It scared me. I stayed scared until the moment he came. I yelled to her, “Mom isn’t here yet. He’s three weeks early!” And she looked at me, her doe eyes full of a fear I had never seen on her face before. But instead of fainting, as her expression told me she wanted to do, she sat up and said, “We need to get to the birth center.”
“He’s too early!” I had yelled as Chantal shooed me into the car. Since reading Cassius’s book, I’d vowed to use what little time I had left to finally pull myself together and prepare for the baby that was coming.
And just my luck, I wouldn’t be past due like ninety-nine percent of pregnancies—no, mine would be three weeks early. And with nothing ready. I hadn’t built the bassinet. The little changing table Cassius had sent sat in a box in the corner of Bastian’s room with not one diaper or wipe on it.
Babies need to take baths, and I didn’t even have one.God, I thought.I’m already the worst mother in the world. I was so lost in my depression, I didn’t prepare for the child that was inevitable.
There was a frantic phone call to my mother, telling her to come, please come. There was Chantal yelling to Cassius that it was happening, and he swiftly hung up in order to prepare his doctor for me.
Hours, it was supposed to be hours of labor, wasn’t it? I was supposed to be waiting and waiting until the doctor said, “Now Aster, I really need you to push.”
But none of that happened. It wasn’t hours and hours of pushing. Instead, it was rushing and pain and more rushing and the doctor smiling and saying, “The good news is that your labor will be fast, the bad news is that you’ll get no epidural.” My blood pressure was dangerously high, then low, then high again. I couldn’t keep up with what was happening. Words like, “emergency C-section” were thrown around and the possible need to transfer to a hospital, then Chantal looked at me and said, “You need to get this baby out of you right now.”
Something switched in my brain—through the pain, through the ripping of flesh with no epidural, I screamed and I pushed. My mind in and out of reality, my body at war with itself, until suddenly, in a matter of seconds, the pain was gone, and Chantal grabbed my hand and cried, “He’s here!”
And he was placed on my chest, covered in blood and muck, and I looked up to Chantal, my jaw tightening, my chest expanding. The little sound of a life anew, breathing, crying, living.
