Uriel: The Inheritance (Airel Saga Book Five)

Chapter III

Arabia—800 B.C.

URIEL WADDLED FROM THE fireside to the bed and eased herself down. Any day now, she would be a mother. There had been new pains in the womb that came and went in a quickening rhythm, faster and more intense and more often from day to day now. She knew it would be time for the birth soon.

She was filled to brimming with so many conflicting emotions about the baby that she wasn't sure what to think. She was excited and terrified. She felt the most profound peace she had ever felt in her entire life, and yet she had never felt more vulnerable, either.

She smiled as she stroked the roundness of her belly, cooing at her unborn child. "You will be a boy," she said.

She wished there was someone to answer her statement, that there was even someone to attempt to refute it, or someone to glow with it as she glowed.

But there was no one.

She thought back over the circumstances of her pregnancy, about how she had been daring and extravagant with a handsome young man just over nine months ago, how she had taken the ultimate risk on him, and how those few hours of surrender to feelings she had never before fully indulged had changed everything. She thought about how the child's father, Yshmial, had so obviously—when it was over—not shared those feelings with her, at least not to the depth she had felt them. And indeed still felt them, from time to time.

She had given him everything. And he had taken everything she'd given and then left her, without remorse. He had at least given her a son, she hoped. If it wasn't for her angelic abilities, he would also have given her a life of extreme poverty and shame. But hopefully she would be able to give her child whatever they needed, including security. I can take what we need, and if we are threatened, I can vanish with him into the air and make our escape. All that would remain would be the shame. Only she—she alone—would know of that and carry it.

That is an acceptable trade. I cannot change anything else.

She hadn't tried to exercise her abilities since she had first felt the profound change come over her. She didn't dare harm this new life by trying anything impossible, doing anything a human couldn't do. It was too risky.

Memories of her inheritance haunted her. She wondered if she was doomed to die in childbirth, as her mother had succumbed. Was she cursed to follow in the exact same fashion? She didn't know. And what of the child? Would he survive? How long would she be able to keep him, to be his mother, until she risked activating in him the same abilities that had been activated in her, thereby bringing so much risk and worry to both of them? There were certainly no guarantees now.

"He will be named Qiel," she said. "That is what I shall name him." And now, as if in response to his name, the boy began to move vigorously. Something burst within her and issued forth, soaking her. The baby was coming now. There would be no turning back from the pain, the struggle, the anxiety.

There was no one to help here. Here, where it has been safe now for these nine cycles of the moon... In a shelter near a high woodline in the mountains, where she had been safe all this time, where she had been preparing, as the day drew near, as everything became full and ripe and mature—and changed in ways she had never foreseen.

She was all alone—for now, she thought. Only for now. Soon there will be two of us.

Now, for the first time in a very long time, she thought of her father, Kreios, and longed for him. She was starting to understand how he must feel, must have felt always, toward her. Being a parent would change everything.