Tegan's Power (The Ultimate Power Series #4) (33 page)

I wrap my arms around
Allora’s soft, curvy waist and rest my chin on her shoulder. The dark starts to
ebb away as the sun rises over the skyscrapers of the city. There’s a sweet,
musical sound from Roman’s magic as the people start to wake up.

Getting to their feet,
they yawn, rub at their eyes, scratch their heads and completely ignore the
bizarre fact that they’d all been asleep on pathways or in the middle of the
road. As Allora’s eyes are scanning the people below she tenses in my arms.

“Finn, I think I just
spotted my parents. Come on, I have to go to them.”

My heart stutters as
she pulls away from me. “Wait, Goldy. They haven’t seen you in over two years.
Perhaps this isn’t the right time.”

“I’m not waiting,” she
answers and then hurries to the stairway that leads back down onto the street. I
follow her, trying to figure out why I’m feeling so dejected. Is it because
deep down I feel like she won’t need me anymore once she gets her family back?
Maybe.

Out on the street I
stay far behind as she races to her parents. Her mother is blonde just like
her, but her father’s a tall, brown haired man. I stand back and watch her, my
heart sinking further until I think it might just plunk down into my boots.

Her mother begins to
cry when she sees her and pulls her daughter into her arms. I look at her dad
and see that there are tears in his eyes also; he puts his arms around his wife
and daughter both. A bittersweet family reunion.

Allora hasn’t once
looked back to see if I’m still here. I turn around, thinking I’ll leave her
with them. There’s no danger to her anymore now that Ridley is dead, and
Theodore too. Just as I’m about to start walking away though, I hear her call
my name.

“Finn, come and meet my
parents.”

Taking in a deep
breath, I turn back around. Perhaps she does need me after all.

As it turns out,
Allora’s parents had fled their home and were staying with friends. Because
Roman wiped their memories, they don’t really know why they were staying with
friends, but I’m guessing they got frightened when the vampire attacks started
happening.

Their names are Tom and
Beena and I start to become uncomfortable at how profusely they thank me for
keeping their daughter safe. Beena is full elf and Tom is human, creating a
half elf in Allora. When we go back to their house and they see how trashed the
place is, they assume it had been broken into and Tom starts making calls to
their insurance company.

Allora comes and sits
down on my lap in the living room, while her mother tries to salvage what she
can from the kitchen to make us all a cup of tea.

“So, I guess this means
I’m losing you,” I say in a low voice as I caress her thigh. I’ll never get
tired of touching her.

She startles when I say
it and turns to look at me. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you’ve got your
folks back. Ridley’s dead. You’re safe. You don’t need me anymore.”

“Finn, I…”

“It’s okay. I see how
you look at them. You’ve missed them like crazy. I can understand that you’ll
want to stay here. If I could have gotten my mother and sister back I’d want to
spend every second I had with them, too.”

“Finn, just stop. Yes,
I’ll be living with my parents, but that doesn’t mean you’re losing me. God, I
mean, after all we’ve been through, after all we’ve spoken about, how could you
think that? I’ve seen our future and in that future we’re together.”

I shrug and tighten my
jaw. I’ve never been good with emotional crap.

She pulls my face to
hers so that her mouth is above my ear when she whispers, “I’ve fallen in love
with you. I want to be with you for the rest of my life, you silly man.”

Something catches in my
throat, causing me to swallow hard. “What?”

“I said I love you,”
she answers, eyes looking back and forth between mine with uncertainty as
though waiting for something. Then, like a sledgehammer, it hits me.

It takes a couple of
seconds for me to find my voice. “Shit, isn’t it obvious that I love you, too?
I can hardly keep my eyes off you when you walk into a room.”

She giggles and rests
her head in the crook of my neck. “Well, that wasn’t the most romantic way for
you to declare your love for me, Finn, but at least you said it. I was
beginning to think it was all one sided.”

I cup the side of her
face in my hand, pulling her mouth to mine and kissing her long and deep. A
warm, foreign sensation spreads through my chest. I’ve been on my own for so
long that I forgot how it felt to have someone. To belong to them
unequivocally.

We’re interrupted by
the sound of her mother stepping into the room and clearing her throat. Beena’s
eyes are dancing as she takes in the two of us together, and I’m relieved that
she approves of my relationship with her daughter. Now I only have her father
to contend with.

Beena sets the cups and
teapot down on the coffee table that managed to survive getting damaged when
the house was thrashed. Tom returns, shoving his mobile phone into his pocket
and rubbing at the stress lines on his forehead.

“Well, that’s all taken
care of. They’re sending someone out to inspect the damage tomorrow.”

“That’s good, love,”
says Beena pouring the tea.

Tom’s eyes narrow when
he notices Allora sitting on my lap. Embarrassed, she quickly scoots off and
sits on the other side of the sofa. I want to smile, but I hold it in. We make
polite chit chat for a couple of minutes, and then I almost spill tea
everywhere when Beena lets out a loud gasp. Turning my head I find that Allora
is having another vision, her body going into convulsions.

I pull her into my arms
and wait for the shakes to ride out.

“It frightens me every
time this happens to her,” says Beena with an anxious expression. Tom rubs his
wife’s shoulders to calm her down.

“You don’t get visions
like Allora does?” I ask Beena a couple of minutes into the episode. Allora’s
convulsions are still going strong.

She shakes her head.
“No. I’m an empath. I read people’s emotions.”

“Oh.”

“I can see the depth of
your affection for her. I’m glad she’s found someone that feels the way you do
about her.”

Just before I get the
chance to ask what she sees in Allora’s feelings for me, the woman in my arms
stops shaking and blinks open her eyes.

“Hey, Goldy,” I say
softly. “You okay?”

She nods and sits up,
asking her mother for a glass of water. I rub her back and whisper soothing
reassurances in her ear.

“I think we need to go
and see Tegan,” she tells me after she’s downed the water her mother got for
her.

I furrow my brow. “Why?”

“Because I saw
something about her baby.”

Tegan

“What do you think?” I ask Rita as we
both sit in the back of Ethan’s new car. We’re parked on the road outside her
old house; construction has just been started to repair the damage done by the
fire all those weeks ago.

“Well, it’ll certainly
beat living in that RV. I might be a small woman, but even I need my space.”

“The house should be as
good as new within a couple of weeks,” says Ethan from the front.

“Oh, before I forget, I
want you to look at these spell ingredients,” I say, pulling out the list
Emilia gave me before she died. “Emilia said that if I take this every morning
and night my baby will survive the birth. Was she telling the truth?”

Rita takes the list
from me and looks it over. “Hmm, there’s nothing suspicious looking on here. It
should be alright for you to take it.”

I sigh in relief.
“Thank God.”

“It looks like your
dear
bunica
did one good thing before she died,” says Ethan.

A tiny trickle of grief
settles in my gut. Now that she’s gone, I hate some of the things I said to her
when she was alive. I know she was hardly going to be getting any Grandmother
of the Year awards, but maybe I could have tried harder to make her like me.

“Yeah, I guess she
did,” I finally reply.

We spend another couple
of minutes watching the builders work on Rita’s house before my stomach starts
to rumble. Ethan chuckles. “Sounds like somebody’s hungry.”

“I’m starving,” I
admit. “And do you know what I’d love right now?”

“Tell me and your wish
is my command.”

“A burger from the
diner you brought me to on our very first date,” I tell him smiling and he grins
at me through his overhead mirror.

“Oh, I could definitely
go for a burger, too,” Rita agrees.

“So it’s settled then,”
says Ethan before he starts the engine and pulls away from the side of the
road.

I break my own personal record when I
manage to stuff my face with three huge burgers. Rita and Ethan watch me eat in
amazement. The funny thing about being pregnant with a dhamphir baby is that
you can eat and eat and you hardly ever feel full. The energy gets burned up
too quickly.

We arrive back at the
house just after lunch time and find Allora and Finn waiting for us in the
living room. Everybody moved out of Ethan’s yesterday and back to their own homes
now that the danger is gone, so I’m not sure what they’re doing here.

“Allora had another
vision about you,” Finn says as I take a seat. Ethan perches himself on the
armrest beside me, rubbing soothing circles into my back.

 I look at Allora
expectantly and she begins to speak. “It wasn’t actually about her, Finn,” she
corrects him and turns to me. “It was about your baby.”

Instinctively, I clutch
at my stomach, where a little round bulge has started to grow.

“Remember when I said I
saw you in the future with a little blonde girl who would one day rule
Tribane?”

“Yes,” I reply, my
heartbeat speeding up.

“Well, it was your
daughter. She’s the one from my vision. I was right when I felt like she hadn’t
been born yet.”

My eyes flick to
Ethan’s and then back to Allora. “So, you saw me with her, does that mean we’re
both going to survive?”

“If my vision was
correct, yes.”

“What do you mean
‘if’?” Ethan questions.

She coughs to clear her
throat. “Sometimes I see things in the form of warnings. So if a certain
sequence of events comes to pass that’s what will happen. I had a vision a
couple of days ago where Theodore released his chaos on the city and the humans
really died like he’d planned. But in reality Roman intervened and that didn’t
happen. In your case, I’m guessing that if the both of you survive, your baby
will become a ruler one day. If you don’t, then something else will happen
instead.”

“But it’s highly likely
your vision is correct, right?”

“Yes. My visions have
come to pass as I see them more often than not,” she says reassuringly.

Somehow though, I’m not
as reassured as I want to be. Ever since I found out I had a child inside of me
there’s been a sense of dread at the back of my mind, a feeling that this is
the beginning of the end for me.

But maybe that’s just
me, always looking on the dark side of life, as opposed to the bright side.

“You’re tired,” says
Ethan, cutting through my morbid thoughts. “Let me bring you upstairs for a
nap.”

I nod and let him lead
me from the room after I’ve thanked Allora for being truthful with me on what
she saw. I want to be realistic about this. I don’t want anybody giving me
false hope.

Okay, that’s enough.
I’m not going to think about this anymore. Stressing out is only going to cause
harm to the baby.

When we reach our room
Ethan pulls back the sheets and orders me to strip off.

“I thought I was taking
a nap,” I reply flirtatiously.

He smirks. “That was
the plan, but if you have something else in mind I’m all for it.”

All of a sudden, I have
just the remedy to take my mind off my troubles. I pull my t-shirt over my
head, but what I intended to look suave and sexy just ends up being awkward
given that I’m wearing a splint on my broken finger. Ethan had a human doctor
come to the house and fix it up for me, seeing as how I was cut in a few places
and he couldn’t trust a vampire not to get all lusty at the sight of my blood.

Deep chuckling rumbles out
of Ethan’s chest and I scowl at him when I finally get my top off. His
chuckling ceases when he gets a load of my bra, and then my lack of a bra when
I reach around with my good hand and unclip it.

Less than a second
later his face is in my breasts, tenderly nuzzling. He scoops me up off my feet
and lays me carefully on the bed. Before he would have thrown me down roughly,
but not now. Now he handles me as gently as he would a snowflake he doesn’t
want to crumble.