Vampires Can't Have Children, So I Left Carrying the King's Triplets novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Laundry Van

Eileen hides Elspeth in a linen van, the bond's withdrawal makes her sick, and three days later every Court feed runs the headline about the king hunting his runaway bride and his fifty million.

Eileen buried me in dirty sheets.

The linen van sat behind the kitchen, engine running, with its back doors open.

"Lie flat," she whispered. "Don't sneeze. Don't cough. Don't think loud."

"I can't think quietly."

"Try."

She dumped a bin of pillowcases over my head and the world went white and smelled of bleach.

The doors slammed.

For a long time there was only the van rocking over the gravel drive.

Then it stopped.

A man's voice came through the metal, easy and bored.

"Open up. Lord Gerard wants every vehicle checked."

The back doors opened.

Light came through the sheets.

I lay still with my knees against my chest and my hands over my stomach.

A vampire can hear a heartbeat if he stands close enough.

Close enough was about the length of an arm.

Boots stepped onto the van's bumper.

"What's in the bins?" he asked.

"Forty pounds of towels from the east wing," Eileen said, "and a stain I'd like you to look at."

"A stain?"

"Somebody bled on the good duvet. Real blood. Come see."

He laughed, a short ugly sound, and the van tilted as he leaned in.

I stopped breathing.

Close enough was close enough, and he was almost there.

"Sign here," Eileen said, and I heard a clipboard hit his chest.

"What?"

"Gerard's rule. Every search gets signed, with a time. I'm not losing my job so you can poke my towels."

There was a pause.

Then the van rocked back as he stepped off the bumper.

"Go," he said. "Dirty linen. Gross."

The doors shut.

The engine turned over.

It was only after the gate that I let myself breathe.

Eileen drove for twenty minutes and then pulled in behind a laundromat.

She dug me out of the sheets and pushed an envelope into my hands.

"Two thousand dollars, a bus ticket and a phone," she said. "It's my cousin's old one. Don't use yours, don't use your name."

"Eileen, come with me."

"If I disappear, the house looks for both of us. If I stay, I'm a maid who lost track of a bride."

"They'll question you."

"They'll question a human maid with a bleach bottle." She grinned, and her eyes were wet. "Go have your babies, Els."

I hugged her until she pushed me off.

Then the bond started to hurt.

I had not known it would.

On the bus, an hour from the estate, my hands began to tremble.

By the second hour, I was soaked in sweat and my teeth were chattering.

I had felt Bastian at the back of my mind every day for a year, and now the place where he had been was a hole.

I threw up in a plastic bag at the back of the bus, twice.

The woman next to me gave me a mint and said it was a bug going around.

Maybe it was.

I changed buses in Scranton and again in a town I never learned the name of.

At every station I tried the ATM, and every time the limit was two thousand.

So I walked into a human bank in a strip mall on the second afternoon, in a stained sweatshirt, and asked for a manager.

I showed him the transfer notice.

He looked at the number, and at me, and went a shade of gray.

"This will take some time, ma'am."

"I'm not going anywhere," I said. "Split it three ways. Three accounts, three names. I'll sign what you need."

My name was on the papers.

My name, and not the king's.

It was the only thing in this whole disaster that was mine.

By the third day I was in a motel on the edge of a lake in a small town where nobody had ever heard of a Court.

The room had a bed, a kettle and a window that looked at a boat ramp.

I sat on the edge of the mattress with crackers and ginger ale.

My stomach had settled.

The hole where the bond used to be had settled too, into a dull ache I could almost live with.

I opened Eileen's cousin's phone and found a dark green app I knew well.

Court Whisper, the gossip feed every vampire in the country checked before bed.

It was the first thing on the screen.

A photograph of Bastian at a podium, taken from below.

He wore a black suit and he looked thin.

Above him, in tall red letters:

THE KING WANTS HIS RUNAWAY BRIDE AND HIS FIFTY MILLION BACK.

I read it three times.

Under it, a quote from Lord Gerard.

*His Majesty is heartbroken. He has authorized every hunter in the Court to find her.*

Heartbroken.

I put a hand over my stomach.

Bastian had signed the papers with his own hand, and now he wanted his money.

Then I looked at the photograph again.

The man at the podium was gripping the edge of it with both hands, his knuckles white.

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