Before Ania, his family and his clan had meant everything to him. Now he was obsessed with getting the priestess pregnant, and nothing else mattered.
What if Astrid and the baby didn’t make it?
It would trigger Olek’s berserker, and Gudbrand was the only one strong enough to stop him from going on a rampage and doing gods only knew what.
If he were in his right mind, he would turn around and go back to be with his brother. But to stop was impossible. His legs refused to obey, carrying him toward the only thing that truly mattered to him at this moment.
Ania must have bewitched him.
She had taken a rational man, a man devoted to his clan, and turned him into her willing sex servant.
Except, he had to admit that wasn’t the entire truth. His damn ambition and inflated ego were at play as well.
Gudbrand wanted to be the one to impregnate Ania, to achieve the impossible, and father a child blessed by Frella. The honor and admiration that would bring him would last through this lifetime and beyond. He would become a legend.
If any mortal male deserved that honor, it was him.
He was the strongest man of all five neighboring clans, the most fearsome warrior, and the future chieftain of his clan. Who else was more suitable to father Ania’s child? Or to own the most desirable female ever created by the gods for an entire year or even for a lifetime?
The answer was no one.
The problem was that Gudbrand had only five days left to do that, and he’d be damned if he let anything stand in his way.
25
Sari
“You have visitors.” Steven walked into David’s room. “Syssi and Kian are outside.”
How long had it been since they’d left? An hour? Two? Sitting next to David, Sari had lost track of time.
“Thank you.” She pushed to her feet but then sat back down. “They can come in if they want.”
He cast her a pitying look. “You don’t have to be here all day. If anything changes, I will let you know.”
Something had already changed. David had developed a fever, and his blood pressure had gone up. Steven had assured her that both symptoms were a normal part of the process and that she had nothing to worry about. He’d even double-checked with Bridget.
It hadn’t helped ease her anxiety.
“I can’t bring myself to leave. Tell them to come in.”
The notion that as long as she guarded David he couldn’t slip away from her was absurd, but this wasn’t about logic, it was about what was in her heart. She needed to be there to fight for him.
If it came to that, Sari would wrestle the angel of death and pull him back.
“As you wish.” Steven headed out.
She took David’s hand. “I hope that you don’t mind that I’m letting them in.”
They hadn’t been together long enough for her to learn his quirks and preferences. Perhaps he didn’t want people to see him when he was incapacitated. If that was the case, she would apologize to him when he came out on the other side. But in the meantime, she wasn’t going to budge from his side.
The door opened, and Syssi entered first. “Hi.” She bent over Sari and hugged her from the back. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m doing my best to keep calm.”
“Good.” Kian came in, holding a chair in each hand. “You still have a community to run, and you can’t allow yourself to fall apart.” He put the chairs down and motioned for Syssi to take a seat. “Our responsibilities don’t go anywhere while we are battling our demons. We don’t have the luxury of checking out to deal with our emotions.”
Leave it to her brother to lecture her instead of offering words of support. But that was Kian, and no matter how hard Syssi worked on softening him up, he still had the emotional intelligence of a gnat.
Her sister-in-law cast her an apologetic smile. “I know how stressful it is for you, but you need to remember that we haven’t lost a transitioning Dormant yet, even those who were in much less stellar physical condition than David. He is probably going to wake up tomorrow, at least for a little while. From what I observed with the others, they slip in and out of consciousness.”
“It’s actually a good sign,” Kian said. “It means that their bodies are working hard on the transition. They are redirecting most of the resources to the change while shutting down non-essential functions or slowing them down.”
They weren’t telling her anything she didn’t know, but it wasn’t helping.
“What are you going to do tomorrow?” Syssi asked.
“About what?”
“Work, of course. Tomorrow is Monday, and as Kian pointed out, you have a keep to run.”
Damn, she hadn’t thought about that. Looking around the small room, Sari tried to figure out where she could put a desk, but that was a stupid thought. This was a patient room, and if anything went wrong, Steven and Bridget had to have unobstructed access to David.
“I can do almost everything with a laptop and a phone. Miranda can take care of the rest.”
“I have a better idea.” Steven walked in. “Do you see the camera over there?” He pointed at the ceiling.
“What about it?”
“As long as I have my phone with me, I can see what’s going on in here wherever I am. There is an application that you can download and watch David all day long without physically being here. It’s also connected to the monitoring equipment, so you can see how his vitals are doing as well.”
Kian pushed to his feet. “Can you show me? I wasn’t aware that we had something like that.”
Steven pulled out his phone. “Humans use it to monitor their houses, their businesses, their babysitters, and whatever else they need to keep an eye on. I asked Morgan to make a version that included a display of the monitoring equipment’s data stream.” The doctor looked smug. “We don’t have much use for it, but I figured that it’s a good idea to have something like that in case one of the human workers that we occasionally hire gets injured.”
“Good thinking.” Kian took the phone from Steven.
“You can even move the camera around with your fingers.” The doctor demonstrated. “And you can activate or deactivate the sound.”
“That’s useful. We could use something like that in the village.”
As Sari got up and joined them, Kian handed her the phone. The camera was trained on David and the medical equipment next to him. At the bottom of the screen, she saw the same readouts that were running on the monitoring screens. She didn’t know what they meant, but as long as they ran steadily, she assumed that everything was okay.
Still, watching David through her phone’s screen wasn’t the same as being physically next to him. Besides, if she was busy with work, she wouldn’t be talking to him, which she believed helped keep him tethered to this world.
Kian handed Steven the phone back. “When Bridget gets here, I want you to show it to her. I don’t know why we don’t have something like that in our clinic. It would make it so much easier on the mates of transitioning Dormants.”
“Maybe Bridget and Julian are already using an application but not sharing it with non-professionals.” Steven put the phone back. “My approach is more inclusive and less elitist.”