“Deacon.” Luke dropped his hands on the slimmer boy’s shoulders. “You need to calm yourself.”
“But a baby.” Deacon tipped his head back, grinning up at Luke. “They’re going to have a baby.” He paused, eyes widening as he locked gazes with me. “Seth is going to be a dad,” he whispered.
“Yeah,” I whispered back. “He is.”
“Wow. And he knows?”
Alex toppled over onto the couch, landing on her side as she moaned, “Did you seriously ask that?”
“It’s a valid question,” Deacon shot back.
I nodded my head. “He knows.”
Deacon smiled. “I bet he is so happy.”
It was so obvious that was a genuine statement that I felt tears start to crowd the back of my eyes. “He is. I thought he was going to pass out at first, but he’s happy.”
“Good.” Deacon lowered his voice as his gaze met mine. “You deserve it. He deserves it.”
“Thank you,” I said hoarsely, squeezing his hands.
“Okay. I have so many questions,” Deacon said. “Like, are you having a pure-blood? A half? Wait. Will it be a demigod? Or a god? Are you going to birth a god?”
I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t answer any of those questions, because I didn’t know.
Neither did Seth.
There was just so much we didn’t know about this child and pregnancy. Would it take nine months, or would it be longer or shorter? The nurse who administered the pregnancy test had seemed surprised that I’d begun experiencing symptoms so early on, but she had said that a demigod pregnancy could be different.
Which was why Seth and I were supposed to go to the infirmary today, and I guessed we would, if he ever got back here.
“I don’t know,” I said finally. “We haven’t figured that out, and it’s not like we can Google that.”
“You know who’d probably know? Apollo.” Alex’s lips pursed as my chest squeezed. “But that would require him actually showing up for longer than five seconds, and then saying something useful.”
“Yeah.” I shook off the sting that always followed when I thought of my father’s lack of involvement in my life. “It would be helpful, but it…it doesn’t matter if the kid is a mortal or a god. We’re going to love and cherish it no matter.”
“Aww,” Cora murmured. “That’s sweet.”
“It is.” Deacon rose, stopping to hug me. And it was a good hug. One that was warm and squishy. When he pulled back, Luke took his place.
“Congrats. Seriously.” He patted the top of my head like I was a puppy or something, and when he stepped back, he pulled Deacon along with him. “Happy for you guys.”
Tears filled my eyes as Gable kept his distance as he offered his congratulations, as did Cora.
“Okay.” I cleared my throat, really hoping I wasn’t going to spend however long I was pregnant being overly emotional. “So, now that the cat is out of the bag on that—”
“Or the bun is out of the oven? Heh.” Alex snorted. “That was clever of me.”
We all stared at her.
“What?” She crossed her arms. “I thought it was hilarious.”
“Aaaanyway,” I drew the word out, changing the subject. “Any update on the demigod who’s in Pluckley?”
Besides the fact that Pluckley was an interesting name for a village, it was supposedly one of the most haunted places in all of Britain.
Deacon was staring at me like he’d never seen a pregnant person before. “We were hoping to get an exact location of the dude before we head over there. Because you know how Aiden is,” he said this to Alex. “So, we’re trying to get as much information as possible.”
“Has that happened?” Alex asked.
“Not exactly, since we don’t have much to go on, but it turns out Gable is a computer genius.” Luke turned to where the guy stood. “He’s been running some searches.”
Gable shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans as Cora sat in one of those giant, “suck you in and never let you out” bean bag chairs. “Like Luke said, we don’t have much to go on, which makes it hard to even search for something. We don’t know what to look for, but I was able to hack into their local law enforcement computers.”
Whoa.
That sounded serious.
Alex’s brows knitted. “Did you find anything?”
“Yes and no.” He glanced over at Cora. “There haven’t been any missing person’s reports filed in the last year, which has to be a good sign, right? That makes me think that the Titans haven’t found him.”
“Could be,” I said, grabbing the end of my ponytail. “That would be good news if he has people who would’ve reported him missing.”
“But he did find something interesting.” Deacon looked over at Alex. “Wasn’t planning to bring this up right now. Might as well, but I’m not quite sure I should even bring it up.”
“What?” she asked. When no one responded, she rose to her feet. “Okay. You guys are starting to weird me out.” She turned to Gable. “What did you find?”
“It could be nothing.” Luke glanced at Gable, answering for him. “Just keep that in mind. It could mean nothing.”
She tensed. “Okay.”
“So, you know how Gable has an affinity with water, practically a dolphin or a merman?” Deacon said, and Gable’s forehead creased at the description. “He’s Poseidon’s son, so duh. And Cora-Bora over here is like a walking, talking Miracle-Gro. She’s Demeter’s daughter, so that also makes sense.”
I started twisting my hair into a thick rope. “Yes, we know all of that.”
“And you’ve just realized that some of your dreams are actually foretelling things that are going to happen,” he continued.
A shiver curled its way down my spine.
It wasn’t until their friend Caleb showed up from the Underworld with the means to remove the bands Hyperion had placed on me did I realize that my dreams were something more, because I had seen Caleb in a dream and I’d never met him before that moment he removed my bands. That wasn’t the only dream to come true in some fashion.
But there was one that hadn’t come true yet.
One where I was wearing a beautiful white gown, being held by Seth, and I…I was dying.
I shoved that thought aside. That wasn’t something I needed to think about. At least not at this moment.
Deacon drew in a deep breath. “We know that Zeus and Hera’s kids didn’t make it, because those two gods put the cray in crazy. And that Ares took out four more during his I-Want-To-Take-Over-The-World phase. That’s six down. We lost two more at the hands of the Titans. We know, according to what Apollo told Seth, that they were Hermes’s and Athena’s offspring. We have Poseidon’s kid here. Demeter’s kid, and of course, Apollo’s kid. That doesn’t leave very many gods left.”
“It leaves a lot, actually,” Alex said. “It could be Artemis or—”
“This is where the part about Gable discovering something else comes into play,” Deacon interrupted.
I suddenly had a bad feeling about this. Call it instinct or maybe it was a weak premonition that my demigod abilities were capable of, but either way, I had a really bad feeling about what they were about to say.
“I didn’t see any missing person’s reports, but I did see a lot of police reports involving fighting and assaults, all within the last couple of months,” Gable explained. “And I mean some serious fights. Like, entire bars throwing down. Street fights. People getting into arguments at intersections and it turning pretty violent. The police there are constantly responding to battery calls. It’s a seriously, abnormally high amount. Like, you’d think the town was the most violent and not the most haunted.”
The blood drained out of Alex’s face so quickly I feared she might pass out. “No way,” she whispered.
“Like I’m saying, it could mean nothing,” Luke reiterated. “But for some reason, both Gable and Cora had begun to experience some of the abilities tied to their parent even though their powers hadn’t been unlocked. It would be safe to assume that the same would happen to this demigod. And it made us think of…”