Black Eyes

Chapter 20

"Come on Gayla, just one more push!"

The woman screamed, torn with pain, clinging to the sheets as if they were her only chance of salvation, but before she knew it her husband handed her a small bundle. Had she finally managed to give birth?

"Elijah, is it over?" she asked in shock, covering her legs with a blood-stained sheet.

"Of course darling" the husband replied dreamily.

Gayla looked at the little bundle for a moment. A newborn baby with his eyes closed was curled up inside.

Please don't open them. Gayla thought.

Her husband, Elijah, an elf with long black hair, had been by her side throughout the birth. What would he have done when the baby would open his eyes? Her cover, her life, everything would have changed completely.

Elijah would discover that she was a demon.

The baby let out a few cries and like a sentence, a sword lowered on Gayla's head, he opened his eyes and stared at his father.

"Gayla..." she heard him mutter "What the hell does that mean?"

That I'm a demon, Elijah. That I'm a shape-shift demon and that up until now you have gone against all the beliefs of your people.

"Gayla!" he called louder seeing that the woman kept her gaze down on the child. The baby was crying, he was hungry, but Gayla wouldn't put him to her breast. It would stick him to her.

"What do you want to hear Elijah?" the woman almost screamed, the pain still present throughout her body.

"Why is the child half-demon?" her husband's cry cut through the air like a sword.

"Because I am a demon..." the woman began to cry.

"You... what?" Elijah was sweating, his hair stuck to his forehead.

He had spent almost ten years with Gayla and was only now discovering that she wasn't human, she was a demon. Shocked, he could no longer breathe.

"I need some air" he said, heading out of the small house in the South area.

Gayla washed herself and got dressed. She gathered everything she needed for the baby and headed towards the market with the baby in her arms.

Ethan had been handed over to Mariah and her husband Roger directly from his biological mother. The woman was a minor demon, a shape-shifter and when Mariah was approached by a woman with long black hair with a child in her arms she immediately recognised the demonic nature of the baby, without however knowing that the woman was a shape-shifter. Mariah immediately understood that the little one was not normal, in fact he had large completely black eyes and a few tufts of hair on his head, black like his mother's. The woman told her that she had just escaped from a slave trade and that she was being hunted. She couldn't even think about the little one, left him in Mariah's arms and got lost in the crowd of the Southern market.

The shocked woman didn't know what to do with him. Moved by pity and by the fact that she had always wanted a child, but the various attempts had all failed, she decided to keep the little one that his mother had called Ethan.

Mariah returned home with a basket full of vegetables and a baby wrapped in a sheet. Roger was so surprised that he almost didn't believe Mariah's story, but as absurd as it may seem, she was there, holding a newborn baby.

"His name is Ethan" said Mariah "But I wish his name was Dominik"

From that day he was baptised as Dominik Davies, taking the surname from Roger.