I rubbed the back of my hand against my forehead and found it drenched with sweat. “Why am I not surprised you wouldn’t know firsthand?”
“Well, that was a pointed little dig, now wasn’t it?” Breandan said with a little smirk, but his voice was hollow, his face ashen. “You sure I can’t fetch you some tea while you try and decide whether you’ve been fertilized or not?”
“I can’t see how I could—” I stopped and rolled back to my knees to heave again. When I finished, I spit the last foul taste out of my mouth. “How can this be?”
“I’m not describing it for you if you don’t already know. Seems like that’d cross a line, since I just met you and all—notwithstanding the fact that you did sleep in my bed last night.”
“Thanks,” I said, and used a bit of paper to wipe my mouth. “Okay, so, yes, it’s possible. I just don’t think it’s probable, let’s put it that way. We were …” I looked at him with slight embarrassment, “ … safe.”
“Oh, I’m certain you were,” he said with a formal nod, “because it never, ever happens that being safe could go wrong. In fact, they don’t even have a word for that circumstance because it never, ever happens.” He pretended to have a thought dawn on him. “Oh, wait, yes they do—it’s called an accident. But surely it doesn’t happen often … oh, wait, yes it does. All the bloody time, in case you missed the courses where they put you in a room with a teacher who looks like they haven’t ever done the business they’re telling you about. It happens all the bloody time.”
“Oddly enough, I did miss those classes,” I said, staring up at him from the bathroom floor.
“Well, that would explain how this might happen, then.”
“What, you’re going to sit here and berate a pregnant lady?” I asked, leaning my head against the wall.
“It’s hardly a foregone conclusion,” he said with a shrug. “Perhaps you’re just acclimating after travel. Maybe you caught a bug on your flight. Or your body is reacting poorly to stress. Whatever the case, I wouldn’t get all in an uproar about it quite yet.” He smiled brightly. “You sure you don’t want that tea? I’m having some.”
“What is it with you Brits and your obsession with tea?” I asked, waving him off. “No thanks. And I never get sick. Never. Not since I manifested. Whatever this is, it’s something else entirely.”
“If you say so.” He pushed off the wall and I could hear his footsteps heading out the bedroom door and into the small kitchen as I stared at the white porcelain of the bathtub’s side. “I can recall being sicker than shite a few times since manifesting,” his voice carried as I heard him clanging in the kitchen. “Of course, those might have more to do with the number of pints I had the night before than they did with any sort of sickness I might have picked up. Except this one time—”
There was a sudden bang and the sound of a door being kicked off its hinges in the main room. I sat bolt upright, almost hitting my head on the edge of the tub.
“What the—” I heard Breandan say, and then his words were cut off by the sound of suppressed gunfire. It doesn’t sound like it does in the movies; it’s still incredibly loud. Behind it I could hear thumping of bullets hitting wood, impacting on what I suspected were the cabinets in the kitchen.
I was moving on muscle memory alone, on my feet and out the door, my nausea put aside as easily as a thought. I could feel the adrenaline flowing, any memory of what I’d been talking about with Breandan only a moment earlier completely thrust out of my mind. As I cleared the door to the bathroom I saw a man in full tactical gear—vest, hood, all black—linger with his back to the door of the bedroom. He gave me such a choice view of his back, I couldn’t help but abuse it.
I hit him in the kidney with a hard punch and he screamed. I hung my left arm around his neck and dragged him behind the doorframe for cover as bullets hissed past me. On television, suppressed gunfire sounds whisper quiet. It’s not. The sound of the bullets whipping out of the barrel and shattering the thin walls was still quieter than the bark of the shots ringing out, but they were only quieted a bit, not silent.
The man I had in my grasp decided to fight, and with more of his comrades in the next room, I had no time to deal with the possibility he could rise up and catch me from behind while I went to stop his friends. I broke his neck cleanly the way Glen Parks had taught me to, killing my second human being in less than twenty-four hours. I felt the rough assurance from inside that I was doing the right thing, the smart thing, but a small voice within cried at the thought that I was even in this position.