How (Not) to Soothe a Siren (Cindy Eller Book 9) (2 page)

“His Magic? Oh, no,” I said, feeling the first rush of panic. “Isn’t he too young for this sort of thing? I don’t know how to handle a Magical baby.”

“But, I do,” said a very welcome voice from the door.

I turned to see my mother’s beautiful smile, lighting up the doorway.

“I hear you’ve made me a grandmother again,” she said, crossing the room to look down at my son. “Oh, yes,” she breathed. “There’s no doubt that he belongs to you, is there?”

“Mom,” I said, still not sure how to process the fact that she was standing in front of me. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m here to help you, of course,” she said, bending over Asher to stroke his cheek with one finger.

I raised my eyebrows at Timothy. He shrugged. So did the others in the room.

And I knew my mother well enough to know that she would never give up her informers. Not that I was upset to have her here, quite the opposite.

If anyone knew how to handle a child with unknown Magic, it was my mother.

After all, she had raised me.

T
he next few days receded into an exhausted sort of blur. I hadn’t had this many sleepless nights since my bakery-opening days. My body was used to getting enough sleep. It complained crankily throughout the first two days.

Then, as Freyja had promised, my milk came in.

I would have celebrated more, if it hadn’t hurt so much.

“No one told me it was going to hurt,” I yelped, as Asher latched on for his first feeding with me. Had I imagined a beautiful mother-child moment? Had I pictured birds chirping and cherubs singing? Had I pictured maternal bliss complete with quiet cuddling?

Scratch that.

Asher choked and spit, as my milk rushed out faster than he was ready to drink. When I shifted him, so I could wipe his face, I ended up shooting him in the face with a stream of continuous milk. Asher screwed up his face and screamed.

I was leaky and sore. Even a Magical wardrobe was struggling to keep up with my laundry needs—not to mention those of Asher, who had output that seemed to triple the amount of his intake. I might live in Faerie, but cloth diapers were still cloth diapers.

I had ointments and salves and compresses all over my room—and those were just for me. Asher had his own full array of nice-smelling creations. He’d been swamped with useful gifts of all sort since the House Folk had learned of his arrival. He had other, less useful, gifts coming from the Fae.

Well, they hadn’t seen children in centuries, so they had a good excuse for thinking a golden rattle was a good gift for an infant. Forgetting, of course, that a golden rattle would be far too heavy for the baby to pick up until he was, oh, twelve or thirteen. I was sure Asher would appreciate it then.

It wasn’t his fault that Timothy was away most days. He had messes of his own to clean up—and what came out of Asher smelled better than the mess Owen Dark’s death had left in the Dark Lands.

I couldn’t think of Owen Dark without getting upset, and that gave Asher colic, so I had to excuse myself from all those proceedings.

Not that I minded in the least bit.

“I brought you some more water,” Eugenie said, holding the cup to my lips herself, when she saw that Asher was occupying both of my hands.

I drank gratefully. “You’re a life saver, Eugenie. No one thought to tell me that nursing a baby would make me feel so thirsty.”

Tansy laughed softly, from the chair where she was cradling little Cin, her youngest child. Like most of her clan, Cin’s head was haloed with a crown of golden curls. “I think we forget about those little things—because they become so commonplace,” she said. “I remember driving the castle staff crazy, requesting water all day long.” She smiled nostalgically as she brushed a blond curl out of Cin’s slumbering face.

“I drank so much that they had to give me electrolytes,” Jessi said, making a face. She, too, had a slumbering toddler on her lap, her three-year-old son, Jonah. He slept with his mouth open wide, making little snorty sounds with each breath.

I’d dreamed about moments like this, back when we had been nothing more than a handful of roommates who worked together at a small bakery. We had joked about growing up and raising our children together.

So much had changed, over the years. Despite our promises and intentions, we had drifted apart. We all had our own lives, our own little troubles. We’d loosened our hold on our friendship.

Yet, here we were, and it was so easy to slip back into our friendship again. We had all changed, but that bond between us hadn’t snapped, it just had been resting, I supposed.

Maybe this kind of friendship couldn’t die, even though it could be years between visits.

I could still rely on my girls.

I glanced down at Asher. He was fast asleep, though his mouth kept wriggling and making sucking sounds, as if he were still eating. Now that we were starting to get a hang of the whole breastfeeding thing, he was a champion eater.

I gently ran one finger down the slope of his tiny, perfect nose. I knew that it might wake him up, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t resist touching that soft, delicate skin of his. Everything about him was perfect and tiny. I could stare at his eyelashes alone for hours, just marveling over every detail.

His eyes scrunched up for a moment, then relaxed back into sleep, as I stroked his dark hair. His hair was soft and fine, like fairy-silk.

“I know you don’t want to think about it,” Jessi said, in her ‘I-know-what’s-best-for-you’ voice. “But, that baby had to have come from somewhere. He didn’t grow on that tree. That’s not how it works, even in Faerie. How do you know that he isn’t being searched for?”

I pressed my lips together, remembering the serenity I had felt, when I had first held Asher in my arms, up in the branches of the golden tree. Such golden moments could not last, but I could still feel a residual warmth behind my breastbone.

“I know he’s mine,” I said simply. “I don’t know how to explain it. I just
know
it.”

“And we understand that,” Tansy put in. “But, people like lawyers tend to not understand things like that. I don’t want you to end up getting hurt.” Her large, blue eyes were round with worry and compassion.

I didn’t want to face the fact that she could be right.

“I don’t need to know where he came from,” I said stubbornly, fighting the urge to pull him even tighter to my chest. “I don’t care who or what his parents were. This is my baby. Asher is mine.”

“We know,” Jessi said softly. “We know that you would love him, no matter what. We know you love Asher. We love Asher, too. He’s ours—all of ours,” she made a wide gesture that included everything everywhere. “Just… be careful, OK? I’ve seen you with a broken heart. I never want to see you hurt like that again. OK?”

I bit my lip. I could feel tears welling up in my eyes, though I wasn’t sure if they were out of gratitude for their friendship, or worry about my baby.

“Are we good?” Jessi asked.

I nodded, sniffling a little bit. I wiped the tears away with the back of my one free hand. The other one was making great strides into falling asleep. It was going to hurt like crazy, once Asher moved from his position.

“I can’t imagine how anyone can do this on their own,” I said. “I have a huge staff at my beck and call, and I’m still exhausted.”

“It will pass,” Jessi and Tansy said at the same time. They looked at each other and laughed.

“Believe me,” Tansy said, rolling her eyes, “babies stay in this newborn stage for such a short amount of time. Give him a couple months, and he’ll be rolling over. Then, he’ll be creeping, then crawling, then cruising the furniture, and talking, and walking…” She shook her head. “It’s over in an instant. The days are long right now, but the months fly.”

“He’s already changed so much,” I said. I spent so much time staring at my baby that every little change seemed to scream out at me. Already, Asher was losing some of his squishy and squinty newborn features. We’d weighed him in the basket in my personal kitchen. When we first brought him home, he had been just under six pounds in weight. Now, he weighed in at nearly eight. Not bad for two weeks of good eating!

There was no question that Asher was the tiniest baby I had ever seen. I was used to my mother’s babies, or my sisters’ little ones. Our family had always specialized in hunks of chunk, and big in every dimension.

Asher looked a bit like a bobble-headed version of a baby. His head was large, and well-shaped, but he’d been stick-skinny when I’d first brought him home. Now, some of that puniness was starting to melt away. The sharp angles were softened by the love and care he was finally receiving, not to mention having an all-you-can-drink buffet. He’d already figured out the fine art of marathon nursing, which left me in baby jail most of the time.

I’d only been a mother for two weeks, but it had already changed my life—and me—drastically.

We were starting to see some reflective changes in Faerie itself, too, in response. My years of infertility and loss had not appeared to hurt the land that I was bound to, but, now Faerie was knee-deep in bumper crops of all kinds—from wild flowers, to fruit, to babies out of season. Everywhere we looked; it was as if the dying days of summer had turned her face to spring, to warm us with brilliant colors before fall put Faerie to bed for the winter.

Silly Goose, the pet of Tansy’s many children, let out a squawk in the courtyard near us, where the doors had been left open to let in a fragrant breeze. Like the rest of Faerie, Silly Goose had been affected by my sudden shift in maternal status. She was now in broody mode—sitting on a nest full of golden eggs. I didn’t even know if golden eggs could be hatched, but I lived in Faerie—pretty much anything was possible.

Silly Goose did not like anyone getting near her nest, which she had attempted to hide behind the abundant ivy that draped the walls that circled around the courtyard. The only person she would let anywhere near her, was Annie, Tansy’s sweet daughter, who had befriended the goose.

“You know,” Tansy said, turning partway to see through the doorway, where the children were playing—accented now and then by the angry warning squawk of a would-be mother goose, “I caught Annie reading to Silly and her nest out of a book of Nursery Rhymes yesterday.”

“That’s adorable,” Jessi said. “The only thing Jonah wants is to try to climb on Silly’s back and ride her. I keep trying to tell him that he’s too big for her, but you know three-year-olds, they have selective hearing.”

“Where’s Alecto?” Tansy asked.

Jessi made a face. “D’jinn issues, as always. He won’t be gone for long. There are some things that are better handled face-to-face.” She sighed. “Oh, don’t look so grim, you two! It’s nothing that serious. My mother-in-law is involved, naturally. So, Alecto has to play dutiful son. I promise, it’s nothing worse than that.”

“I just don’t want you to make yourself sick again,” I said. “One scare like that in a lifetime is more than enough.”

Jessi wriggled under the covers, from her permanent placement in the middle of one of the largest feather beds I had ever seen. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said. She stroked a hand over her huge belly. “Not that I could move, if I wanted to. I’m so ready to have this baby and be able to move around again.”

I felt a kind of thrilling sense of shock as I realized that I didn’t feel any kind of envy for her pregnancy, which would have hurt like bee-sting before Asher had come to me from the Great Tree. Pregnancy didn’t make a woman a mother, except in the strictest sense, I supposed. I hadn’t given birth to Asher, but that didn’t mean I loved him any less than Tansy and Jessi loved their blood-related babies.

That envy and resentment slid from me like broken shackles. I drew in a deep breath, appreciating just how much Asher had changed my life for the better.  I would never look at another woman with selfish envy, just because she could bear children, and I had lost so many of my own.

I was free from that pain and jealousy now. I would never let it reach me again.

“W
here’s my little grandson?” My mother popped her head into my room. With her long, dark hair and black eyes, she looked like a woman in her late twenties, not the near-sixty that was closer to the truth. My mother had a sort of radiance about her that could never permit anything as crass and worldly as aging. She held out her arms for Asher as she crossed the room. She bounced him up out of my arms and cradled him against her cheek.

“There’s my handsome little boy!” She dropped a kiss on his nose as she cooed into his face. Asher gurgled and let out a banshee scream of delight as she blew bubbles against his stomach.

I grinned at the tableau that the two of them together made. Asher had opened up a whole new venue in my relationship with my mother. It was as if I had been welcomed in to an exclusive club, one that allowed me to see and understand more about her than I ever could have before motherhood.

My mother had made a habit of showing up at least once a day, oftentimes more, so that I could take a shower and get into ‘real’ clothes while she took care of Asher. I knew that she had more ‘important’ things to take care of in her own life, but she dropped everything at least once a day to help me out. How could I not love her all the more for that?

Being a grandmother had mellowed Mom out over the past several years. She was hardly recognizable as the woman who had raised me, which was all for the better for the two children she still had at home—my half-siblings Saul and Kara. She hadn’t had the easiest time, having and raising me all on her own. She’d only been seventeen when she’d gotten pregnant with me. She’d left my father, and her own mother had kicked her out when it became obvious that she was pregnant with me. Mom had faced the world on her own, and had become a success by her own merit. I had always been proud of her, but growing up hadn’t been easy for either of us.

Now, she was surrounded by grandchildren and apparently loving every moment, even if I’d overheard a few mutters about her shifter grandchildren being monsters.

Well, some of them were.

I left them playing peek-a-boo, which invariably set Asher off into gales of hysterical baby laughter, and went to take care of me for a few moments. I opened the door to the bathroom, grinning at the squeals of delight behind me, which were punctuated by my mother making funny sounds to set him off again.

I undressed as the shower warmed up. I wasn’t the type of person who liked to stare into the mirror, but my bathroom didn’t exactly allow me to avoid seeing my own reflection. There were reflective surfaces in all directions. It was impossible to completely avoid seeing myself in all my naked glory.

I didn’t recognize my body at all these days. My breasts were engorged or flat by turn, oft-times lopsided, even. While my breasts changed in size, shape, and texture by the moment, any of the excess curves I had had pre-Asher had burned away into the furnace of his appetite. Breastfeeding was really starting to take its toll. My ribs were growing more and more prominent, as were my hip-bones, despite my every effort to keep up with calories.

I was going to have to see if Freyja had another one of her Magical potions to help me out. Keeping up with enough calories to support me, my Magic, and my baby, seemed nearly impossible. I was trying to eat a healthy diet, even healthier than usual now that Asher was dependent on me, but even the occasional doughnut or loaf of cheesy bread wasn’t enough to keep the weight on.

I made a face. The last time I had been this skinny I’d been in middle school. I’d never struggled much with my weight—thanks to my Magic—but, I wasn’t the kind of girl to be thrilled with being Skeletor either. I preferred having a little padding to sit on.

I stuck my tongue out at my reflection and climbed into the giant shower that was one of the great perks of living in a castle. I hissed as the hot water hit my skin. I reached for my favorite shampoo and started to scrub my hair.

Long, hot showers were a thing of bliss. It was way up there with gooey chocolate bars and long kisses from Timothy.

With my mom in attendance, I could take my time and truly get clean of the baby and sour milk smells that seemed to be my eau de jour these days. One good shower was as beneficial as three hours of uninterrupted sleep, in my book.

I rinsed my hair and shampooed it again before reaching for my conditioner. Even Magic couldn’t completely control my hair without help—a lot of help. My hair was naturally thick and curly, and it fell down almost to the backs of my knees these days.

Wet, it probably out-weighed me.

The bathroom filled with billowing clouds of steam, fogging up the mirrors and the windows until I felt like I was floating in the midst of a warm cloud. Sunlight streamed through the windows, lighting up the cloud into thousands of tiny rainbows, dancing with the full spectrum of colors. I hummed to myself as I shaved my legs and reached for my favorite body wash.

Stress melted off of my shoulders. The air was perfumed with the scents of one of the many luxurious soaps I had been gifted with, tantalizing whiffs of lavender, gardenias, and summer-ripened blackberries. Even the scent was warm and comforting. I could close my eyes and picture the blackberries hanging there on the bush, glossy and warm in the late summer sunlight.

I inhaled deeply, letting the relaxing scents into my lungs and my pores.

“Mmm,” I sighed. “I could stay in here forever.”

I drew in another lungful of sweetly-scented air. The combination was intoxicating. I was going to have to see if we could start washing the clothes with that scent. I’d be sure to have good sleep and sweet dreams, in the few hours I could get a night.

I paused and drew another breath. I sniffed again. Strange, how I had never noticed how much this particular scent had a salty sort of tang to it—almost as if I were standing on cliffs above the sea. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant, though it seemed to be growing stronger by the minute.

The steam around me thickened and chilled. I called up my Magic, but it did nothing to warm the fog that now encased me.

A roaring noise echoed around me. With the salt in the air and the pounding bellow, I felt as if I had found myself standing on the edge of a cliff along the seashore. As the moments passed, the sensation became clearer. I no longer could feel my bathroom around me.

I drew in a deep breath, willing myself not to panic.

“This is just one of those ‘connected to Faerie’ things,” I reminded myself, even as I groped blindly for my robe, which I knew had to be somewhere around here. Whether it felt like it or not, my body was still in my bathroom.

Goose pimples spread across my skin. I hugged my arms across my chest, wishing that I hadn’t washed my hair. The wet mass was now nothing more than a heavy, icy cloak against my back, stealing away what little warmth I had left. I shivered in the heavy fog, unable to see or feel anything else.

The sea-smell was growing stronger. I was almost not surprised when I heard the screech of gulls crying from somewhere overhead, cementing the sensation that I was standing by the side of the ocean.

I reached out tentatively with my Magic, trying to use my connection to the land to get a sense of what I was experiencing. I could not tell where I was, or what might be happening to me. All I could feel was a sense of
wrongness
.

This fog was no usual mist, I realized. There was something alive and purposeful in the way it surrounded me, in the way it encased the land where I stood in consciousness, while my body was still back in my castle. There was an awareness to the mist that chilled me far more than the cold. I tried to reach out to it, to ask what it was, but it evaded my reach. I spun in circles, trying to cut through the mist to discover what antagonist hid there.

As abruptly as the fog had risen, it was gone.

I found myself back in my own shower, scalding myself in the hottest water I could call up. I eased back on my Magic and stood in the stream of water, trying to get my bones to warm up again. It seemed to take forever. The touch of the strange mist had chilled me, physically and Magically. I wanted to scrub away even the memory of its touch against my skin.

Try as I might, I could not wash the goosebumps away.

Once the shivers had passed, I dried myself off and dressed again with a new grim certainty. The land had called on me to settle a wrong. It was a call that I could not ignore, not when I had been pulled out of the safety of my home to witness the strangeness of the mist by the seaside.

I was a mother now, but I was still Seraphim. When the land called, I had no choice but to answer.

I had a big decision ahead of me. Either I had to take Asher with me, to whatever hell and high water awaited me… or, I would have to leave my baby behind while I dealt with whatever the problem was. It was an impossible choice to consider. How could I drag my son into danger? But, how could I leave him behind, young and fragile as he still was?

“I’m not ready,” I whispered, even as I knew that my words didn’t matter. I couldn’t just walk away from my responsibilities. I was Seraphim. I would be on call for the rest of my life, or until I handed over my responsibilities to some poor unwitting bastard, like my father had with me. I was a slave to the land. It had to come first. I could no more ignore it than I could ignore blood pouring from a wound in my side or a limb cut off. I was bound to the land, and it was bound to me. We could not be separated.

My heart pounded uneasily as I crossed the bedroom and lifted Asher out of my mother’s arms. He was so small, so innocent. His blue eyes stared trustingly into mine. I pressed my lips against his forehead, trying to fight the searing pain that filled me at the thought of leaving him behind.

I held him against my chest, listening to the way our hearts sang to each other. We fit together so well. We belonged like this—extensions of each other. We breathed the same air. There were no words to describe the feeling of loving my child—he was part of my soul, part of me that could never be erased.

I breathed in the soft, clean, lavender scent of his hair, which was growing lighter in color every day. In the sunlight, streaming through the window, it appeared almost amber in color. His arm, against mine, was olive-toned, while mine was pink. His little knuckles were nothing more than indentations in his chub—chub that I had put there. I closed my eyes, abandoning the struggle to keep my tears behind my lids.

“What is it,” my mother asked softly.

“Something is wrong in Faerie,” I answered grimly. My words were echoed in a deeper, beloved voice. I swung around to see Timothy standing in the doorway.

“You, too?” I asked.

He nodded serious. He crossed the room to kiss me quickly on the lips, then Asher on the forehead. Our baby gurgled in response, wind-milling his arms in a vigorous fashion.

“Tell me,” Timothy said, one large finger stroking Asher’s curls, “have you been dreaming about the ocean?”

“Only if you can being transported into the middle of a fog during my shower a dream,” I said.

His eyes narrowed with concern. “Are you OK?”

I nodded. “Fine. What about you? Have you been dreaming about the ocean?”

Timothy sighed deeply, his golden hazel eyes troubled. “Only if you call nearly riding off of a cliff on the way home from the Dark Lands dreaming. Whatever is out there, Faerie wants us to take care of it.”

I shivered, though the idea of ‘us’ working together made me feel much safer. The last thing I wanted to do was head out into potential danger by myself. All the Magic in Faerie couldn’t make me feel confident in the face of danger.

“I’m coming, too,” Mom announced, standing up from her perch in one of the comfy chairs that had appeared in our rooms, around the time Asher had made his grand entrance. She tilted her head at us, her dark eyes full of amusement. “What? You’re going to need someone to watch Asher for you while you’re working—and there’s no way you’re going to leave him behind. He needs you. And, if you’ll forgive me, I think I’m mom enough to know just how much you’re going to need him, too.” She held up her hand before either of us could protest. “Plus, you can’t convince me that being with you isn’t the safest place for him. The two of you
are
Faerie. The power is in you, not in this heap of stones, no matter how lovely they might be. If you want Asher to be safe—and I know you do—then he should be with you.”