Alternate Worlds: The Fallen (8 page)

It irritated me. I wasn’t that damned
old!

After making an appointment with one, I
settled down to tabulate expenses and then checked those against my
assets. I was relieved to see that I was still ok as far as
finances went. I had enough to get me through, even if I couldn’t
find a job, but what then?

Chapter Seven

The urge to light out for the baby shop and
start collecting everything I could conceivably need for baby was
nearly overwhelming. When I finally realized that I just couldn’t
sit still any longer and behave like a rational human being, I
grabbed my purse and headed for the grocery store.

I hadn’t brought the list I’d made.

It didn’t matter. The cupboards were bare. I
needed pretty much everything.

I’d already made one pass through the store,
tossing things into the buggy at random when I realized I was a
pregnant woman. I had to eat the right things. Once I’d breezed
back through, putting everything back on the shelf I’d decided
wasn’t nutritious enough, my buggy was almost empty. I went through
slower the next time around, reading the labels on everything until
I had a blinding headache and was tired besides.

When I’d gotten home and put everything up,
I fixed myself a light lunch and sat down to eat it while I worried
over my plans.

I didn’t like the idea of daycare. I knew it
was what working women everywhere had to do to make a living and I
still didn’t like it.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t independently
wealthy.

Tired from worry and nearly a week of
spending half of every night fucking, I finally crept into my bed
and took a nap. I didn’t feel a lot better when I woke up,
primarily I decided because I just wasn’t used to taking a nap
during the day.

The fact that Gideon hadn’t appeared was
merely coincidental.

I finally decided he had gone off to search
for his missing sword.

His behavior the night before made me a
little uneasy about it, though, which in turn annoyed me as soon as
I realized I was worrying about it. I figured I ought to be old
enough and wise enough in the ways of the world by now not to get
too wound up about something like that.

It was bound to happen sooner or later and
with most men, human men anyway, it was usually sooner. I realized
after a while that I was actually surprised and a little flattered
that it had taken him most of a week to start looking for greener
pastures.

There was no getting around the fact that it
put a crimp in my enjoyment, but after a while I was able to focus
on the problem again.

Along about bedtime, when he still hadn’t
shown up—which was purely incidental to my thought processes—it
occurred to me that I never had actually particularly liked living
in the city. My early childhood had been spent at the old family
farm. My mother had decided to move us up to the city to be closer
to her brother and his family, but I still owned the old farm.

The kid would probably like the farm better,
too. Of course it wasn’t really a farm per se. We’d just called it
that because it was outside the city limits in the country. It
hadn’t been a working farm since my grandfather’s time and I was
certainly no farmer. The old house was pretty much falling down,
too.

I decided, though, that before I spent a lot
of time job hunting in the city, I’d just take a ride down and
check the old place out. It was situated almost ten miles out from
the nearest town to it, and that town wasn’t big enough to be
called a city or even much of a town. I should see if there were
any job prospects and just how bad the house looked now.

The following morning I rose and packed a
small suitcase, figuring I might want to hang around a few days if
the house wasn’t in too bad a shape. It seemed probable that it
could take me at least a few days to check out the job market
alone.

The farm was a surprise, not altogether
pleasant. It wasn’t in as bad a shape as I’d feared, but it was
pretty grown up and the house was definitely in need of repairs.
The main surprise was that it looked a lot smaller than I
remembered from my childhood. That wasn’t the bad part, though. The
bad part was that it resurrected memories. My mother had actually
been fairly rational during that stage in my life. She’d already
been heading toward fruitcake, but there were good memories tied to
the farm and those made me miss her—or at least the her she’d been
when we lived on the farm.

I spent several days just rambling around
the farm and house, making notes on what needed to be fixed and
whether it was something I could do myself or would need to hire
someone to do.

I was in town getting estimates on doing
those jobs I couldn’t when I happened upon a job opportunity. It
wasn’t management, but I hadn’t expected to land anything in that
area anyway, not in such a small town. It
was
a job running
a small office which was still within my range of expertise. The
girl that worked there was getting married and planned to be a
housewife.

Quaint! I didn’t know women even did that
anymore.

It seemed like fate, though, so I jumped on
the opportunity.

Once I’d made arrangements for the repairs I
needed done, I packed up and headed back to my apartment in the
city. I only had a few weeks to figure out a way to get out of the
last few months of my lease and make arrangements to move.

All in all I was pleased with the way things
were coming together. I wouldn’t be making nearly as much money as
I’d made before, but it wasn’t going to cost me nearly as much to
live either. The country air would be better for the kid—unless it
had allergies—and I was ready to get out of the rat race and slow
down.

Plus, I hadn’t thought about Gideon more
than a few times a day in the entire time I’d been at the farm and
then only fleetingly.

It still bothered me that I’d thought about
him at all, but I took it with a grain of salt. I had pretty thick
skin, but I was also a creature of habit and Gideon had hung around
long enough I’d started getting used to him. Then, too, there was
the great sex thing. It was so rare to find somebody who had that
effect on you a woman could be pardoned for getting addicted to the
good stuff.

I was not happy when I got back to my
apartment and found Gideon laying in wait for me. I was so fully
occupied with my own thoughts and trying to get my key in the door
that the soft thud behind me barely registered. When he grabbed me
from behind I nearly shit a squealing worm.

I elbowed him in the rib cage just for
scaring me.

He grunted, his arms going slack enough I
managed to pull free. “You total ass hole!” I growled, whirling on
him furiously. “You scared the living hell out of me! What are you
doing here?”

He looked surprised and then almost as angry
as I was. “Why did you leave?”

I stared at him for several moments, caught
completely off guard. Nobody had kept track of me in so long I felt
totally disoriented at being questioned. “I had things to do,” I
said shortly, angry that he’d had the gall to question me at all,
particularly when he came and went without a ‘by your leave’.
Opening the door of the apartment, I entered, dropping the suitcase
by the door.

It was too much to hope he wouldn’t follow
me.

I wrestled with my anger for several minutes
after he’d followed me inside and slammed the door hard enough to
rattle the room. Finally, reason began to thread its way through
the anger and I realized that, aside from being startled, I was
being no more reasonable than he was. I dragged in a deep,
cleansing breath and let it out slowly. “Sorry,” I said as
apologetically as I could manage. “You scared me. It made me
mad.”

That seemed to leaven his anger somewhat,
but I could tell he was still struggling with it.

“Why were you looking for me anyway?” I
asked, flopping on the couch because my knees still felt as weak as
water.

Several emotions flitted across his face in
quick succession, too fast for me to catch. Finally, he turned to
pacing the room, thinking. “I have not found my sword,” he said
finally.

“Ah!” I nodded. That explained a lot. “I
figured you would’ve already gotten your man and lit out for the
gateway.”

He frowned, but whatever he’d started to
say, he seemed to reconsider. “He knows I am here and I have
nothing to fight him with. Until I can find the sword, I must keep
on the move or it is my head that will be carried through the
gateway.”

I felt so ill at that comment that I thought
for several moments I might actually throw up. Not once since I had
been gone had it occurred to me that Gideon was in danger. I
suppose I just hadn’t completely grasped his situation. Maybe I
hadn’t believed it at all. Regardless, I had spent more time
mentally berating him for heading off for greener pastures than
anything else.

Finally mastering the unsettling emotions
roiling through me, I managed to focus on the problem. I didn’t
want Gideon to get killed. I much preferred to think of him leaving
and going home to that possibility.

It would make my life easier anyway. He’d
said he enjoyed fucking me. Until he’d had his fill, he would come
back whenever the mood struck him and I’d be a sucker and let him
because of my own needs. I couldn’t allow that. I was just as ‘in’
to self deception as the next person, but I was no fool. I was
already too attached to Gideon for comfort. There was always the
possibility that familiarity would breed contempt, but it wasn’t
something I was willing to gamble on when there was just as much
chance that familiarity would breed addiction.

“I don’t suppose a different sword would
do?” I asked, wondering even as I said it where the hell I’d find
one. There were plenty of places around that made reproductions,
but I had a feeling that wouldn’t be close enough.

His look told me no. I sighed. “Why don’t
you tell me how and where you lost it to start with? Maybe if we
backtrack, we can figure out what happened to it?”

He glared at me. “I have done that.”

“You haven’t done it with me. And I happen
to be more familiar with this world than you are.”

He was silent for several moments, pacing,
either trying to decide whether it was worth the effort, or trying
to decide where to start. “I had run upon an enemy soldier—the
Garyn I spoke of—and engaged him in battle. We fought for many
hours, for we are very evenly matched in skill and strength. We
were moving all the time that we fought, sometimes in the air,
sometimes on the ground. As it grew dark, I managed to wound him,
but I was also at a disadvantage, for we Elumi cannot see as well
in the dark as in the light.”

I rolled my eyes at that since I was fairly
certain humans were a lot more disadvantaged in the dark than the
Elumi were.

He frowned. “We are not invincible,” he
growled. “We heal quickly, even great wounds, but there is still
pain and weakness from loss of blood.”

“Sorry,” I muttered, wishing he wouldn’t
talk about that since it made me hurt just remembering what he had
looked like when I’d found him. “Tell me everything.”

It took him a moment to pick up where he’d
left off. “He wounded me, as well. Still, we fought on. I thought I
had wounded him worse, for he began to slow and I could see that he
wanted to break off and retreat until he had healed to fight again.
My own wound began to pull my strength from me, though, and
although I managed to wound him several more times, he caught me,
as well, and I think we both began to realize that neither could
find victory at that point.

“We withdrew finally by mutual agreement. I
had to find a safe place to allow my body time to heal since I
could not know if he would grow strong faster—or if there were
other enemies around who could take my head while I was too weak to
fight.

“By the time I had found a place where I
believed I would be safe, I was not very clear in my mind—and it
was not as safe as I had thought. The humans came when I was barely
conscious. I fought them, but I was weak and easy for the four of
them to overwhelm. When I woke again, I was as you found me.”

I was more than a little unsettled by the
time he’d finished. I was deeply distressed. Guilt crept into the
mixture for my part in his mistreatment, but I was far more furious
at what those cultists had done to him. I had to fight the urge to
rage over what they had done, which made it that much more
difficult for me to think objectively about his problem.

“You were in an abandoned building when they
found you?”

He shrugged. “So I had thought.”

“Maybe an abandoned building,” I amended.
“You don’t recall having the sword when you were taken from the
building?”

He gave me a look. “I was not
conscious.”

I felt like crying, but stifled the
unfamiliar urge. “Not very helpful. So you wouldn’t remember
anything about the trip to the temple either?”

He shook his head.

I thought over what he’d said. “It must be
around there somewhere,” I muttered finally. “Even unconscious, I
doubt they would have considered going far with you. Believe me,
those cowards were a lot more afraid of you than you were of
them.”

He looked surprised. “I was not afraid. I
was angry. If I had had only a little time to rest and heal, they
could not have taken me. I was angry that I was so weak that I had
been taken so easily.”

Now that he mentioned it, I recalled pretty
vividly that he had been very, very angry. I’d thought at the time
that it was because of me. Now I wondered if he had been so furious
simply because I was another human who’d come to torment him.

I sighed. Water under the bridge now, but it
was certainly something to make a mental note of for future
reference—don’t get so wrapped up in what you want that you forget
to consider someone else’s feelings.