Page 33 of Deja New
SIXTEEN
Leah snapped awake in the darkness. It took her a few seconds to remember
(it smells strange in here)
where she was
(streetlight’s in the wrong place)
and then it clicked. Archer’s old bedroom. Visiting his family, dealing with a multitude of Drakes. And the nightmares. Dealing with those, too. This was the second in two days, and they weren’t hers.
That would have been frightening enough, even for someone in her line of work. She was used to seeing the past lives in her clients’ eyes; she was a licensed Insighter (ID #29682), certified in Reindyne therapy,*and she’d been seeing far too much since she was a toddler.
Buttheselives. Leah knew them. They were the first she’dever felt, some even before her own. They tasted the same, too: despair, grasping loneliness, the hard determination to never be forgotten, to never be ignored—with the underlying theme of look at me,look at me, LOOK AT ME!I am important, you CAN’T LEAVE ME.
She wasn’t just pregnant. She was pregnant with her mother.
Beside her, Archer growled out another snore, then muttered, “Leave me ’lone withallthe fish.” Good. No point in both of them lying wakeful at oh-God-thirty in the morning. Nor was she ready to let him know she was going to give birth to his mother-in-law.
Let’s think about that again. Really think about it. I. Am. Pregnant. With my mother.
????????????
All right. Try it again. We deal with the unknown (and the severely strange) by making it known, we deal by learning about it. So. In the history of humanity, this can’t be the first time this has happened. There’s precedent. There will be case histories you can look up. And even if there aren’t, you aren’t alone. Archer and a dozen Drakes will help you.
Nope. Still no good. Because it didn’t matter if there was a precedent. It didn’t matter if this happened to someone else three hundred years ago. It was happening to her, right now, and she was the one who had to face it. She was destined to swell like a bullfrog, endure edema and hemorrhoids and morning sickness, the tedium of multiple doctor visits, the cravings, the restrictions, the hormonal shifts, the stress and pain of labor and delivery. And at the end of all of it, she would give birth to her worst enemy.
She put her hands on her belly and laid awake until the sun came back.
