The Spawning (37 page)

Something flickered in his eyes. She didn’t know exactly what it was, but then she realized that she’d opened her damned big mouth and stuck her foot in it—done exactly what she’d wanted to avoid. She’d told Khan she didn’t choose him.

She discovered she couldn’t hold his gaze once it occurred to her that she’d hurt him. She looked down at her hands miserably, twisting them together, wishing she had Carol’s neck between her fingers so she could twist her head off.

The fucking cunt! She’d decided to be spiteful to hurt Taj and put them
all
in the position of seeming like deceiving, manipulative bitches!

“What is your cycle?” Teron asked after a few minutes.

“Twenty eight days … more or less. Earth days. It would be roughly once a

month—there. I don’t even know how long the days are here. I haven’t had a period since I got here, but trauma can interrupt the cycle and throw it off. And I don’t know what the trader did to us.”

Teron looked completely stunned, she discovered when she glanced at him. They
all
looked stunned—disbelieving.

Not that she could blame them. She’d been pretty damned stunned and

disbelieving when she’d heard about their cycle.

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 166

“So … we won’t know until it is borne,” Teron said finally, a strange note in his voice.

Miranda wasn’t convinced they would know then, but she decided not to point out that the baby could take after her, completely, and look nothing like any of them. She nodded, unable to speak for the knot of misery clogging her throat, resisting the urge to say that it was most likely Khan’s given the timing. She’d already thought about that, though, which was one of the reasons she’d thought it would be alright not to say anything.

It seemed like a really bad idea to suggest she thought it was Khan’s under the circumstances. She could be wrong and it would only make him angrier, she realized, to let him believe it was his and then to, possibly, find out differently.

“What is the gestation period?” Teron asked a little hoarsely.

Miranda’s heart performed a fearful little eruption of rapid beats. She felt the blood drain from her face as she looked up at him. “About nine months—Earth time.”

Frustration flickered across Teron’s face, although she could see he was

struggling to hide his own anxiety, that it had dawned on him abruptly that she might not even have the same gestation period—which could mean disaster for the baby.

Surely not, she told herself, trying to beat back the fear that already had a toehold in the back of her mind. It was a natural thing. The body
knew
when the baby was ready.

Except that wasn’t always the case even among themselves, she knew. Her sister had had a miscarriage five months into her pregnancy.

Of course, she’d suspected the bastard her sister was married to might have had something to do with it. She just hadn’t been able to prove it, and Amanda had sworn up and down that she’d fallen and she’d been alone.

She must have looked as scared and miserable as she felt. Signaling for the other men to leave with a slight nod of his head, Teron drew her to him after a moment, cuddling her almost protectively against his chest. She struggled with the urge to weep at the unexpected tenderness and finally mastered it, although her chest felt painfully tight.

“It will be alright, dear heart.”

She was almost as glad for the fact that he’d given her shelter in his arms so that she didn’t have to face the others as she was appreciative of his efforts to reassure her.

She wasn’t particularly reassured when she knew he didn’t know anything about

her—any of them—regardless of how knowledgeable he might be about his own kind. “I haven’t had a baby before—none of us have,” she muttered, confessing the one thing that scared them all more than anything. If there’d even been one among them that had, there would’ve been someone to tell them what to expect.

She had her sister, but they weren’t close, hardly ever saw each other at all since she hated her sister’s husband. Amanda hadn’t successfully carried a baby to term, anyway, which made it worse, really, because she was afraid it might be something hereditary. The most information they’d been able to gather was from the women who’d been close to somebody who’d had a baby and close just wasn’t the same. They only had bits and pieces of information and they didn’t know how much they could even rely on that.

“There’s no reason to believe the differences between us are vast enough to cause any sort of complications,” he murmured after a moment.

And no reason to think they wouldn’t, either, Miranda thought, but she didn’t

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 167

want to push him into trying to reassure her because she didn’t think he’d have the answers and she didn’t want to
know
he didn’t.

She was looking more for a distraction than anything else when she decided to try to initiate sex, but there was no getting around the fact that she was horny as hell. Feast or famine, she thought irritably. They’d been at the compound weeks before the men decided to fuck her brains out—all four of them—then they’d taken off for nearly a week, then she’d had them in relay and not one of them had offered to touch her since.

She got plenty of kisses—when she demanded them—but otherwise they were

elusive.

Teron kissed her back with enough heat she thought she would’ve figured out that he was as needy as she was even if not for the rise of the hard ridge beneath her buttocks.

He firmly clamped her into an embrace when he broke the kiss, though.

“Dear heart?” he asked a little hoarsely.

“What?” Miranda asked a little dreamily, still feeling a warm buzz from the kiss.

“You said that you could get pregnant once each twenty eight day cycle …?”

“Yes?” Miranda said in a puzzled voice.

“Is this … would this be all the time?”

Miranda pulled away to look at him curiously. “From the time we start having

periods until we can’t have children anymore.” She could see he was a little pale.

“But … when you are pregnant, is this also true?”

Miranda gaped at him. “Of course not! We stop having cycles once we get

pregnant.”

He looked vastly relieved, but she discovered he’d lost his erection.

Well fuck!

He set her off his lap.

Miranda looked up at him with a mixture of hurt, disbelief, frustration, and

confusion, struggling with the urge to beg. She needed reassurance almost as much as she need relief, though. “We have the habitat all to ourselves,” she said tentatively.

He studied her uncomfortably for a moment and then glanced around as if seeking help when he was the one, she knew, who’d sent the others out. “Sexual relations probably isn’t wise … now … when you’re breeding.”

Miranda gaped at him in disbelief. “But … I’m hardly even pregnant!”

“And it is not my turn, in any case.”

He left before she could even react to that. It wasn’t his
turn
? They had to screw in a certain order, she thought in disbelief?

Alright, so she could see how that might prevent problems, but did they have to be so damned … civilized about it? Didn’t they do anything on impulse, damn it?

It occurred to her after a moment that they didn’t. She didn’t know if that was discipline
born
into them or taught to them because they’d been born into a world at war with another.

She didn’t suppose it mattered a lot, either, when, apparently, the only time they behaved completely impulsively was when they were at the mercy of their spawning cycle and their hormones were driving them crazy.

It dawned on her abruptly that they must know that there was at least some chance that they were fertile at other times or they still wouldn’t have questioned whether or not the baby was Khan’s.

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 168

Unless, she thought, their actual spawning cycle was longer than she’d thought?

She hadn’t considered what happened to the males
not
chosen to spawn.

Maybe they continued to be fertile for weeks after the first heat?

Not that that mattered
now
, except that it meant any one of the four might have gotten her pregnant. She was already pregnant, though. They couldn’t get her pregnant again—not until after she’d had the baby she was carrying.

Maybe they didn’t believe that, though, she thought uncomfortably. Maybe, since they’d already caught her in a lie of omission, they just didn’t trust anything she said now?

In all honestly, she had to admit it would’ve shaken her faith if the shoe had been on the other foot.

She still couldn’t
believe
she had four lovers and she couldn’t get
one
of them to give her any, damn it! She didn’t even look pregnant yet! If she couldn’t convince them before she looked like a cow, she doubted she’d be getting any after she developed a waddle!

The men had all vanished by the time Miranda gave up waiting hopefully for

Khan to make an appearance. The women were all gathered near the beach and there was enough screaming and cussing going on that it was obvious a fight was in progress.

Good god! They were degenerating into savages!

Stalking across the compound, she pushed her way through the spectators until

she reached the ‘arena’. Joy was sitting astride Carol’s chest, Carol’s hair gripped in her fists as she used it to pound Carol’s head into the dirt.

Resisting the urge to join the other women encouraging Joy to ‘beat the shit out of her’, Miranda stalked over to the pair, planted her foot on Joy’s shoulder and shoved her off of Carol. “Enough!”

Joy scrambled to her feet, still furious enough to take on all challengers. “That fucking
cunt
told Taj we weren’t in cycle when they were! She just did it for spite because she was mad at him! And now Barak hates me and it’s all her fault!”

Miranda sympathized with her, but in all fairness, it just wasn’t true. “I doubt Barak hates you … and even if he does, it isn’t her fault, as bad as I hate to side with her.

We should’ve told them, but then we don’t understand them any more than they

understand us. They’ll realize that.” She hoped.

Nobody believed her. She didn’t believe it either, actually. The men had

wanted babies, badly enough they hadn’t been able to ignore the urge, and they had to be tremendously disappointed to discover they’d been duped into thinking they had a baby on the way and now didn’t know whether they did or not.

It wasn’t as if they could explain that they’d been afraid the men would abandon them if they told them—which they had been.
That
wasn’t going to make them feel any better about it.

“We’ll just have to try to muddle through it and mend our bridges. Chances are, they would’ve found out eventually and they might’ve been even angrier if they’d spent nine months expecting a baby that turned out to be somebody else’s. She did us a favor, even though we all know she certainly didn’t intend to and didn’t care how things turned out for the rest of us. Now they know so we don’t have to worry about it anymore, and they certainly
also
know that they got us pregnant—twenty of them are going to be fathers.”

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 169

As pep talks went, it didn’t help anyone’s feelings that much. Everyone struggled to be polite when the Hirachi returned the following day, as dependable in that sense, at least, as sunrise, but there was no pretending there wasn’t a rift between the Hirachi and the Earth women that hadn’t been there before.

Politeness seemed to be the best any of them could manage, on either side.

Miranda had no idea if it made everyone miserable or not, but it certainly made her unhappy. She’d
enjoyed
greeting the men with hugs and kisses and bidding them good night the same way. Even if there hadn’t seemed any chance of more than that. The stiltedness from their misunderstanding prevented her from feeling comfortable enough of her welcome to offer even that much, though.

That was bad enough on an emotional level, but she wasn’t just emotionally

needy. She didn’t know if it was a hormonal thing, or the fact that she’d had a taste of heaven and wanted more, but, either way, she was pretty damned miserable with the abstinence she had to endure because of the chasm that had opened between them.

It wasn’t until the Vernamin returned that Miranda even thought about her

attempt to start a trade with them. Since they had nothing to offer, though, she didn’t try to approach them.

It still reminded her that they had far more reason to work on a trade now than they’d had before. They would have babies to take care of before many more months.

They needed to do whatever they could to get ready for it.

They also needed to try to eat as nutritiously as possible to ensure healthy babies.

Shifting her focus from just trying to get enough for everyone to eat to searching for food that would help round out their diets, Miranda took the device Khan had given her and led a party out the following day. She’d done a reading on the
jasumi
, just in case they

happened to find something of use in trade while they were searching, but she didn’t really have much hope or expectation of it.

None of them really dared to venture into the jungle. Whenever they went out, they stayed within view of the gates and kept to the areas where the Hirachi had done enough cutting that they could spot any animals that wandered close. They hadn’t seen many in their excursions. She thought that was probably because the wildlife wasn’t assured of plants to hide them, or maybe it was because there wasn’t enough to eat in the cleared areas to tempt them.

Either way, the animals they did see seemed as frightened of them as vice versa and generally ran the other way. If it didn’t, they backed slowly and carefully away themselves until they were close enough to the gates to dash inside and slam them closed.