Dead Letter Day (29 page)

I let him take it, but didn’t comment. He followed me into the building and onto the stairs.

“I’ve been calling and texting you all day,” he said from behind me.

“I know.” I kept walking.

“Why didn’t you answer?”

“I guess I was shocked speechless. It happens to some people sometimes, you know?” Ha.

“Melina.” His voice had a warning tone in it. What the hell? He was pissed at me? I was clearly the injured party here.

“Don’t ‘Melina’ me.” I unlocked the door to the apartment. Or tried to. Norah had the chain on again. I did not feel like fooling around. I lifted up my foot and gave the door a swift kick just to the left of the chain. It flew off.

“Melina!” This time it was Norah.

“What?” I marched through the door and tossed my stuff down.

“You could have called for me.” She stood with her hands on her hips staring at me.

“And you could have made it easy to get into my own apartment,” I countered.

“I didn’t know when you were coming home. You haven’t been answering anyone’s calls or texts all day.”

“I was busy.” I started to walk around her, but she moved
to block my path. I stared at her. On a bad day, I could probably toss Norah halfway down a football field. I knew that. I was pretty sure she had figured that out herself by now, too. Yet, here she stood, blocking my way.

“What is your problem?” she asked.

“My problem? What is yours? You’re not the one who’s pregnant.” I moved to go around her on the left, but she shifted to block me again.

“That’s what this is about?” Great. Ted had shifted around me and was now standing next to Norah.

“Maybe.” I looked from one of them to the other. I had trusted them. I’d come to rely on them. I’d thought they’d have my back. Based on their reactions the other night, I’d apparently been wrong. They’d led me to have certain expectations, then they’d dashed them.

“Melina,” Ted reached his hand out to take hold of my arm.

Without hesitation, I snaked my arm around his and broke his grip. “What?” I asked, my voice flat.

He held his hands up in front of himself in a gesture of surrender. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t prepared for the news. I needed some time to adjust.”

“You think I was prepared? You think I planned this?” I stepped toward him and he dropped back a step. Good. He should be a little afraid of me right now.

“No. Of course not. That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what do you mean?”

“I mean that we need to talk about it.” He reached for me again, this time with both hands.

I was so not in the mood to be held and mollified. I shoved back with both my hands and as my hands hit his chest, a shock traveled up my arms with such force that it
literally set me back on my heels and then, unfortunately for my dignity, on my ass.

“What the hell was that?” Norah gasped.

I held my hands up in front of me and watched the faint blue glow around them fade. I looked up at Ted. “This is totally your fault,” I said.

NORAH HAD WISELY GONE TO BED WITHOUT ANY MORE commentary and left Ted and me alone to talk. Or whatever.

After managing to shock myself back on my ass, I was now apparently in the mood to be mollified. Maybe there was something to that whole electric shock therapy. It had certainly taken the wind out of my own personal sails.

I wondered what it would have done to Willow if they’d tried it on her. I looked over at Ted. “Did they ever do electric shock therapy on your dad?”

He gave me a quizzical look from in the kitchen where he was making me a cup of tea. “What?”

“Just curious. Did they ever, you know, zap him a little bit to see if it would make him better?”

“I don’t really know. I was a kid. They didn’t really discuss treatment plans with me.” He went back to focusing on the tea. It didn’t smell as good as the stuff Meredith made.

“What all did they do to him?”

He set the mug down in front of me, put a tea bag in and then poured the boiling water over it. “Why this sudden interest in my father?”

I shrugged. “I’m working on a theory.”

“What kind of theory?” He sat down next to me at the counter. I noticed he kept a few inches of distance from me.

“A theory about the, uh, the baby.”

“Our baby,” he said.

I didn’t dare look at him. Not for a few seconds at least. I felt something inside me melt a little, though. Maybe I wasn’t going to handle this alone. “Yes. Our baby.”

“So tell me about this theory.” He shoved the jar of honey over toward me.

“It’s going to require a little backstory,” I warned.

“I can be patient.”

That was true. He’d been patient lots of times. Patient with me, with Norah who had hated him at the beginning, patient with my mother who was still suspicious of him. So I told him about Willow.

“Okay. So she’s actually not crazy. She’s a wood nymph and didn’t know it,” Ted said.

“Yeah. But that made her think she was crazy and it made everyone else think she was crazy, too.” I sipped some tea off my spoon to see if it had cooled enough.

“I can see how that would have happened. She’s going to be okay now, though, right?”

“I think so. She’s in good hands.” I thought about Jenny for a second and amended, “Reasonable hands, at least.”

“What does this have to do with our baby?” There it was again. Our baby. Something tight in my chest loosened a little bit.

“I’m getting there. Remember when we saw Michael Hollinger up in that locked ward?” I looked down at my tea. I hadn’t exactly handled that moment all that well either.

“I do,” he said, his voice quiet.

“Well, Hollinger isn’t exactly crazy either.”

“I wouldn’t call him sane,” Ted protested.

“You would now. Besides, he wasn’t going crazy for no reason. He was going crazy because he was infected with
something and he didn’t understand what was happening to him and neither did anyone around him. Now that he’s with Chuck, he stands a chance of figuring it all out and being able to handle it.” I took a sip of the hot sweet tea. I didn’t see any way I wasn’t going to miss coffee, but this really wasn’t so bad if you doctored it up right.

“Okay,” he said tentatively. “Are you suggesting that my father was a wood nymph or was infected with some kind of werewolf venom?”

“Yes and no. I mean, not precisely those things, but maybe he had something a little tiny bit Arcane about him.” I pinched my fingers together to show how much. “And that somehow got triggered and sent him over the edge.”

Ted sat with that for a moment or two. I drank more tea and waited. It was entirely possible that two could play at this patience game.

Finally, he spoke. “So that would make me a little tiny bit Arcane as well.”

“Even less so than your dad, which might explain why you don’t give me a tingle.”

He grinned. “I don’t make you tingle? That is not the impression that you have given me in the past.”

“I didn’t mean like that.” I thought about punching him, but didn’t want the baby to zap me again. I was pretty sure that that was what had happened before, though. I’d been about to shove Ted pretty hard with the total intent of sending him back a few feet and our baby—his baby—had zapped me before I could hurt him.

He put his hand over mine. “I know. This isn’t about me being able to find parking spaces again, is it?”

Was it? “Sort of. I mean, maybe that’s some funny little way that your magic manifests itself. Maybe not. I do think
it explains some of this electricity shooting out of my fingertips, though.”

“You’re losing me,” he said.

Funny, based on the way that his hand had gone from mine to rest possessively at the small of my back, I didn’t think so. Regardless, I backtracked again and explained some of my thoughts. Sophie had started me thinking, about how I might have become a Messenger.

“So you’re saying that there’s something magical about you, innately so, that meant that you were Messenger material.” His hand was rubbing slow circles on the small of my back now. It felt good. “And maybe there’s something magical about me, too, that was passed on by my bat-shit-crazy dad.”

“Allegedly bat-shit crazy,” I amended. “All combining in my uterus to make a baby that’s zapping things when they’re a threat to someone or something it cares about.”

He smiled. “Like me.”

“Like you. And Sophie, too. So don’t get all cocky, okay?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.” He paused, his hand still on my back. “I’m really sorry about how I reacted the other night when you first told me about the baby.”

I froze, really hoping that he didn’t say anything stupid right now. I was starting to forgive him, but it was a fragile state at the moment. He didn’t say anything more. I looked over at him. He looked back at me with those ridiculously blue and serious eyes.

“I know I disappointed you. I never want to disappoint you. I love you.”

Okay. How was I supposed to stay mad at him?

“In my defense, at least I didn’t ask if you were sure the baby was mine.” His face split in a grin.

This time, I did punch him, and the baby let me do it, too.

I HAD COME DAMN CLOSE TO FORGETTING MY PROMISE to meet my mother for coffee. Luckily, she knew me all too well and called in the morning to remind me. There was a time in the not all so distant past that those reminders irritated the bejeezus out of me. I was not a child anymore. I didn’t need to be told when to go to bed, reminded to file my taxes or to turn my clocks back and/or spring them forward depending on the season.

Now, however, they didn’t seem so awful. In fact, it was kind of nice to know that she had my back. Would I be that kind of mother? The one who, despite massive discouragement from her daughter, kept helping day after day, month after month, year after year? A stab of regret slid through my heart like quicksilver. I’d been an ungrateful brat for most of my life. I was still resentful, disaffected and withholding. How would I feel if the tables were reversed?

She was already at the Temple coffee shop when I arrived, sitting in the corner, reading a book, prepared for me to be late or not show at all. I waved, but went directly to the counter to order…tea. Before I could pull out my wallet, my mother was next to me handing a five to the barista. She looked at my cup and said, “Tea?”

“I’m trying something new,” I said, the cover-up lie out of my mouth before I even thought about it. I’d been lying to my mother for so much of my life that it was more of a reflex than anything else. This time it left a bad taste in the back of my throat.

We sat down. “Was there something you wanted to talk about?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No. Just wanted to have a little girl time.”

An awkward silence stretched between us. We still weren’t good at this. It was quite possible we would never be. I’d seen other mother/daughter duos out for coffee. I knew what we were supposed to look like. We were supposed to be laughing and gossiping. We were supposed to be having fun. Not sitting across from each other grimly trying to come up with something to say. Something to share.

Not that I didn’t have plenty to share. So whose fault was it that we were sitting here with pleasant smiles plastered on our faces and a lot of dead air between us?

I took a deep breath. “Mom, I’m pregnant.”

I might as well have held up Medusa’s head and waggled it in her face. She totally turned to stone. After a few seconds, I finally asked, “Mom, are you breathing?”

That snapped her to attention. She grabbed both my hands as if I wouldn’t be able to hear her words unless we were in physical contact. “Tell me what you want to do.”

“I’m keeping the baby,” I said. I knew I’d made my decision. It was the first time I’d said it aloud. Damn it, it might well be the first time someone actually asked me. I’d thought about the alternatives. As unexpected and shocking as the news had been that I was pregnant, it had taken a while for me to really know what I wanted. I wanted this baby. I wasn’t going to have an abortion and there was no way I was giving this baby up for adoption. A ’Cane baby raised by ’Danes? Well, I had a feeling that would be worse than what had happened to Willow. I wouldn’t curse any child to that kind of life.