“No,” Lucian said with certainty. “That must have been Tybo. Magnus can no more control you than he can read you.”
“Sorry,” Tybo said when her gaze shot to him. “But we needed to leave quickly and you weren’t cooperating.”
When Allie opened her mouth to respond, Sam piped up with, “Explanations later. I want to know what happened with Stella. She was saying you were the only person she trusted, and then . . . ?”
Allie stared at her blankly for a minute, and then sagged in her seat and tried to find the thread of what she’d been telling. She didn’t know why, though, if they could just read it from her mind.
“Because we can only read it if you are thinking of it,” Sam reminded her. “And right now you’re freaking out about what we can and can’t do and not thinking about Stella.”
“Right,” Allie muttered, and then glanced at the other woman sharply as she realized Sam must have read her mind to know she was wondering about that.
“Sorry,” Sam said with a shrug, and then prompted, “Stella had no one to trust but you . . . ?”
Allie scowled at her, but forced herself back to the subject. “Right, so after telling me her concerns about Stephen . . . Well, I didn’t know what to say to that. I’d found it kind of funky that he hadn’t gone with her either, so I could hardly reassure her. And I didn’t know about the whole mind-reading thing, so didn’t even consider that their sire might have read theirs, realized what they were up to, and used the knowledge to force Stephen to stay,” she added in a steely voice, but then frowned and admitted, “I wish I had. The thought that Stephen might have become like the others was crushing to Stella.” She sighed at the memory of Stella weeping.
“Anyway, after a few moments where neither of us said anything, Stella said she knew the things she’d done since being turned were unforgiveable, and that she was a dead soulless monster now, but that she used to be a good person and was trying to be one again for her baby. She swore she’d never ever hurt me, and said she needed me in her life. And so did her baby. I was the godmother, the only person she would trust her baby to if anything happened to her.
“It was a lot to take in,” Allie admitted quietly. “My feelings were very confused. But Stella had never harmed me. In fact, she’d been a wonderful friend—fun, generous, sweet. She just didn’t seem like a monster.”
“She was not a monster,” Magnus assured her solemnly. “She was just thrown into a nightmare situation and doing her best to survive it and keep her baby safe.”
Allie nodded, but the words made her feel better. Actually, all of this was making her feel better. It was a great relief to actually be able to talk about this stuff to someone. Allie had spent the last four years entirely alone, unable to discuss her life or Liam with anyone. This was helping to ease the very heavy burden she’d been feeling crushed under for all that time. Accepting that for what it was, Allie smiled crookedly and said, “In the end, I assured Stella I could handle the situation and we were still friends. And things pretty much went back to the way they had been, except I had a lot of questions.”
“I would be surprised if you did not,” Magnus said dryly.
She smiled at him, but couldn’t help wondering why he was the only one who couldn’t read her. Pushing that aside for now, she continued. “I made her show me her fangs several times, and asked where she was getting her blood. She admitted that she was picking up men in bars on the nights she went out, going home with them, and biting them. She said she was careful now not to take too much blood, and other than a couple of false starts when she first got to Calgary, she’d left her meals alive and well.”
“Maybe the town house owner was one of those false starts,” Sam suggested.
“Maybe,” Allie agreed. “It was a couple weeks after New Year’s that she went into labor. I had just finished a big project and—”
“Wait a minute,” Sam interrupted. “No one told me what you do. What project?”
“She works at the blood bank,” Tybo said.
“I’ve only worked at the blood bank the last couple of months as a temporary part-time gig. Really I’m a web designer,” Allie corrected.
Tybo’s eyebrows rose. “What websites have you designed? Anything I might have seen? What are you working on now?”
Allie smiled with amusement at the quick-fire questions. He reminded her of Liam when he got excited about something. Before she could answer, though, Lucian said, “She can tell you that later. Let’s finish this business with Stella first.”
“Of course,” she said calmly, unsurprised by it now.
“You were talking about Stella’s going into labor,” Sam said helpfully. “You were just finishing a big project and . . . ?”
“Right. Thank you,” Allie said. “So I was working in my office upstairs, and Stella was downstairs baking something. She had started to spend a lot of time at my place as it got closer to her time,” she explained. “I guess it was about midnight when I heard this crash. I rushed downstairs to find Stella on her hands and knees in the kitchen surrounded by liquid and glass. Her water had broken as she was making whatever she was going to bake, and she, for some reason, panicked about the mess on the floor, snatched for paper towels to clean it up, and knocked over a glass. Now she was trying to clean up both of them.”
“Oh, dear,” Sam said with wide eyes. “What was she thinking?”
“I have no idea,” Allie said dryly. “I’ve never had a baby, so have no idea how a woman’s mind works during labor. But Stella’s didn’t seem to be too clear in that moment. She was determined to clean up the mess. Seriously determined,” Allie stressed. “I ended up having to sweep up the glass while she mopped up the liquid before I could get her up off the floor. But when I tried to urge her to get her coat on so we could go to the hospital, she balked. She wasn’t going to the hospital. They’d know she was a vampire and lock her and the baby in a cage somewhere and do experiments on them.”
Allie shook her head. “I think I just stood there staring at her for a full two minutes when she said that. It had never occurred to me that she couldn’t go to the hospital. I mean, when I talked about getting a bag ready for the hospital and such before she admitted what she was to me, she’d nodded and agreed and assured me she’d handle it. Turns out she just did that because she couldn’t say she wasn’t going without explaining why. And we hadn’t talked about the trip to the hospital since the revelation because I was too busy asking stupid questions.”
Allie pushed the hair back from her face at the memory. “Liam was born in my living room on a mattress I dragged down from the guest bedroom. It was the scariest, most disgusting, most painful yet most beautiful experience of my life.”
“Painful?” Magnus asked uncertainly. “You mean for Stella?”
“Hell, no,” Allie said on a laugh. “I mean, sure, she was in terrible pain, but at one point, in that pain, she gouged grooves of skin out of my arms and I can’t count the number of times I had to warn her to let go of my hand or wrist because she was about to break the bone.” She shook her head at the memory. “I should have read up on childbirth. I had no idea it could be so gross. I mean, it wasn’t just the baby that came out, and when the pain was at its worst she started vomiting blood.”