Chapter 39: Chapter 39 WHEN TO FEAR

Scarlet hadn’t been asleep long. She was enjoying the little peace and rest she had when she was woken up by the knots in her back. They felt like cramps but they didn’t envelope her whole abdomen, just her back.

She lay flat on her back trying to ease the discomfort she felt, but it didn’t work. She turned to her right side than her left but went back to lying on her back because she couldn’t sleep on her stomach. She thought of getting up and stretching but her whole body felt weak all of a sudden. She felt drained like the strength was just tapping out of her.

Scarlet pushed herself up into a sitting position and when she did the flood gates opened. She stared down as a red pattern formed on her white linen. Sitting in a pool of her blood she was speechless and numb, she couldn’t move.

Stephan walked into the room but froze when he saw the bed drenched in Scarlet’s blood. He met her eyes and the fear in them was as clear as day.

“Scarlet.”

His voice seemed to pull Scarlet out of the void she was in as she let out a heart-wrenching scream that bounced off her bedroom walls and echoed in the rest of the house.

“Scarlet,” Kayla said in a panic as she pushed out of Solara’s arms and ran to the bedroom.

Scarlet was still sitting in the pool of blood as a horrified scream echoed from her lungs.

“Stop it.” Stephan was just as powerless as she was but she wanted him to do something, anything.

“Susana!” he bellowed out but instead of the beast Solara and Kayla came running in.

“What’s going on is she bleeding again?” Kayla circled round to the head of the bed and sat beside Scarlet holding on to her hand. “Don’t worry it’s going to be fine.”

Scarlet didn’t answer, she was frozen, and her eyes fixed on the pool of blood that was spreading to the rest of the bed.

“My baby.” She didn’t dare touch the mold of her body with the fear that the slightest weight on it would cause it to deflate.

“Your baby is still in there.” Kayla could hear the concern in her voice and the fear in her thoughts.

They all knew there was a chance that this was it. This was the bleeding that could finally do its damage and take the baby with it.

Susana budged into the room with Nikki beside her. She froze at the sight of the blood a look of terror traveling from the soiled bed to the frightened mother’s face. She didn’t know what to do.

“Do something.” Scarlet’s voice was becoming horse and the fear in her tone was replaced by a weakness.

“First of all, we need to move her away from all this blood.” A look of suspicion crossed Susana’s face as she stared at the two vampires in the room.

“Are you kidding me?” Solara and Kayla hissed in unison.

“Forgive me but that is the general idea when you think of a Vampire. Kayla, help me move her to the bathroom and get her cleaned up. Boys you can deal with the bed.”

Kayla didn’t need any help and she proved it when she hoisted Scarlet up and carried her into the bathroom on her own. A few seconds later she went back into the room to get her a change of clothes just as the boys craned the bed out of the room.

Scarlet sat in the bathtub once again and watched as the clear water was turned into a deep shade of red. Slowly she lowered her palm onto her belly then gently caressed it. Her belly was still firm and as far as she could tell it was the same size.

After she was rinsed off Scarlet stood and stared at her reflection in the mirror as Kayla toweled her dry, wondering who the miserable-looking woman was. She couldn’t recognize her, her arms and legs were skinny, her skin pale and her hair lifeless as it lay wet and stuck on her skin.

She looked more like a host as the center of her body stuck out more than anything else. This was what her body was created to do, to support the other life in her not minding that of her own. She was a mother and her main focus was the survival of her young at any cost even that of her life.

When they went back into the room she had changed and so had the room itself. A new bed had replaced the soiled one and the carpet had been removed. She cozied herself into the bed and sat up staring back at the four pairs of eyes staring at her.

“What now?” Scarlet’s voice had as much life as she had inside her, none.

“Now we figure out why you are bleeding. It would probably help if you told me about your first pregnancy. The details of that may help me figure out exactly what is causing this kind of problem.” Susana sounded more like a doctor than a curious know-it.

“When I was carrying SJ, Kayla couldn’t get into my head at times. SJ was shielding me, but now...Kayla?” Scarlet was hopeful.

“I can still hear your thoughts. I’m sorry honey.” She hated not knowing what Scarlet was thinking but at that moment she wished that her mind was a complete blank to her once more.

“What else?”

“My senses got a lot sharper and I could feel everything the baby felt. I developed a thirst for blood and grew a whole lot stronger.”

“Is that it?”

“Basically yes, nothing else comes to mind.” She held out her hand to Stephan who was standing at the other side of the room and immediately he went to her.

Nikki watched as the two were brought even closer by their tragedy. She wanted to leave but knew what sort of disturbance she would cause. So she stood there watching the man she loved and the mother of his child.

“Can you tell me what happened then? Like a step by step, symptom and the week it happened.” Susana’s line of questioning went on.

“Second week Kayla couldn’t hear my thoughts. Third and fourth week the growth of the baby progressed faster, I could hear heartbeats and smell blood a mile away. The twelfth week I began drinking blood and I had incredible strength and I had my baby.” Scarlet run it through her mind making sure she hadn’t left anything out.

“I already see a pattern, this is my understanding of what happened. In the first two weeks, nothing happened because the baby was still human or had human features. Then his vampire and beast features kicked in, the shield and the rapid growth. The only reason why you drunk blood and had a sharper sense was that the child and you were one. Now we need to figure out what’s so different.”

“Maybe we should be writing this down,” Kayla suggested.

“Don’t worry I have an amazing memory.” Susana put in.

“So do the rest of us and that’s not what I meant. If we have it all in front of us maybe we can see what the differences are.” She validated her suggestion.

Solara rushed out of the room and came back seconds later armed with a whiteboard and marker pens. He could see the puzzled looks on all their faces, “What SJ had to learn somehow. These are all his stuff from when he was a baby.”

Quickly he jotted down the events from Scarlet’s first pregnancy putting it under the heading SJ. After drawing a line in the middle he started another column and headed it “Baby girl.”

“Hey can’t blame me for hoping.”

Hope, Scarlet was relieved that there was at least one other person in the room that hoped for the safe birth of her child. Girl or a boy she just wanted it to be born.

“Scarlet would you care to give us a rundown of this pregnancy.” Susan took the marker from Solara and positioned herself in front of the whiteboard ready to take down whatever Scarlet said.

“I’m guessing I was about a week two weeks pregnant when we found out. There was nothing distinct about it. The whole pregnancy was just like any other human until the bleeding started.”

“When was this?” Susana jotted bleeding on the ‘baby girl’ column.

“I think two weeks ago.”

“You think? You can’t remember when the bleeding started.” There was a tone of judgment laced in Susana’s vice that Scarlet found offensive.

“I lost a couple of days. I was unconscious.” She defended herself.

“Two weeks,” Stephan said.