JEZEBEL † The Originals †

9. Atonahui

REBEKAH

October 27th
( 5 days before )

Every time I saw a woman with a swollen belly, she was glowing. She was felicitous though she spoke with exhaustion in her voice. She was proud of the moment she was living. I coveted to be like them someday until I saw the way Jezebel looked when she answered my insistent knocking that morning. She resembled being dragged back from the grave. The dark circles under her eyes were prominent, she wouldn't let go of the door itself, and she looked like she'd contracted something contagious. She was the anti to every symptom of a happily expectant mother.
"Rebekah," she identified me, sounding slightly bewildered. As she should be. I don't actively get involved with Nik's sloppy seconds too often.
"Nik told me. About the baby," I swallowed guiltily, knowing I'd nearly killed her upon her arrival. "Why didn't you stop me?"
"I didn't have to," she paused between syllables.
Obviously, she was no concerned mother, otherwise, she'd have understood my frustration. And that dead gaze would be a little more lively if not dismounting of my vampire sin.
"Right, because you had laced yourself with a poisonous plant," I choked on her own mistake.
Her eyes jetted out to the side for a brief second, recalling what passed between us at the party. "Poisonous to you."
I didn't know the technicalities of how she was getting by in this toxic place, but I knew she was limitless when it came to defending herself.
"How obtuse can you be? You're responsible for a whole other life inside you!" I nagged her.
That ashy radiance of death faded away, cheeks warming up and neck pink in color as she raised her voice. She didn't raise it at me but rather to the muggy atmosphere. "Why does everyone think this is a gift, that it's what I want!"
Her hands stiffly crinkled like a crow's talons as she spoke. That is when I started to feel thankful things fell through with Nik when they did. Jezebel was visibly not able to think ahead. I assumed her burden came from the tempting phrase of many: "Young with a life ahead of her" or "an adulterer before God." But I let my own faults get in the way of such logical reasons that Jezebel wouldn't want a baby destined to be as pretty and adroit as her.
I projected onto her, "Because why wouldn't you? You have...an incredible ability that is rarer than you would resolve...an ability most girls would kill for."
Jezebel withdrew her outburst, shoulders releasing tension and all. She saw right through my compact lecture and into the reasoning behind it.
"Rebekah, not everyone is meant to have children. Especially when the circumstances are far from being fair," she huffed, tracing the outline of the porch to empty the pale which beheld every drop her leaky gutter departed in the night.
I followed the back of floral-skirt closely.
"Of course, they aren't fair. It's never going to be fair. But you would prepare, anyway. Nik arranged a ship to come for you, to somewhere you'd be taken care of, surely. Only for you. Why didn't you get on it?"
She set the pale down harshly, that kiddy temper of her returning to her cheeks. "I never asked him to do that." Jezebel marches right past me to return to her doorstep.
"That isn't what I put up for debate." I fold my arms, taking off my gloves with my underarms as they turn clammy in the Louisiana heat.
She shakes her head, copying my movement without gloves as she stared out over the empty acres of the adjacent land.
"Safety has been more or less a mascot for what's ideal. Not corporeal. There will always be something to worry about. And I think Nik is optimistic to think otherwise. But even he knows refuge is short-lived. You know," Jezebel reasoned.
Damn. She has me there.
"Jezebel there are reasons to be positive about the future," I pushed blindly. "You've had a few unlucky moments, but—"
"Listen to me. I'm not safe. And it is because of the baby." Her head shook in micro-patterns of anxiety. "When I give birth, there is going to be transfer of magic that has been bred inside me and I will cease to live."
Had she just told me something more to the story?
"Are you—?"
She cuts me off and nods. "My mother was a witch, my father...a shapeshifter, you could say. I was not meant to be the best combination for longevity."
I'd seen it before. The short lives of mixed species. Perhaps, that is what was tampering with her ability to cope with her future birth. She didn't want the standards of two deadly legacies to get in the baby's way. Constantly, these scenarios are playing in my head as I try to empathize.
Instead, I sought to console her. "Our mother. She was the strongest witch of her time, now the oldest. She would have done anything for us to live...even turn us into beasts. But she wouldn't have had it any other way, no matter how much we hate her for it or wished her gone. She'd never trade us away."
"...What did you say?" Jezebel's brows perked up. Her mouth lie open, like a fly trap; she hadn't been listening, I supposed.
"Good God, you are scatterbrained—"
"Trade, you said," her pretty finger limply moves toward my chest. "I could trade the baby."
Her stomach visibly hopped up into her chest and shark-like, swallowed her otherwise good heart. Trade could mean a lot of things and I wasn't about to be an accomplice of such schemes.
"Are you mad?" I howled.
She pulled me inside, a vague way of inviting me into her public property.
"Someone else could carry out the remaining trimesters, I've seen it happen!" She lowered her voice as if it were a big secret.
My brows forced the thick skin above my nose's bridge to subside. "What are you saying?"
Jezebel launched herself into a rabbit hole of deep thought. If I didn't dig her out soon, I'd get no answer.
"Jezebel!" I hissed.
"There was a tradition in fertility that originated in Mexico long before I lived. Atonahui. An scourge of births that happens in the Spring. Witches have done it for centuries. One witch selects a host and transfers her fertility unto a barren body. It was practiced in secret to keep barren women from becoming sacrifices among the central Azteca communities. The baby wouldn't be able to absorb my power if I could pass her onto a new host," she proposed.
Chances be emphasized. She was speculating and trying to make it seem fact!
"It's going to have to settle for being an experiment, not a spell," Jezebel thought to herself. "Rebekah, do you know any vampire who would host a witch child?"
She seduced me with the idea faster than I could call doubt to it. How would she even begin to create the spell, let alone have an idea of what to use? God forbid, she would cut it out of herself and reattach to somebody with a record for disaster. But I wasn't a disaster. I was lovelorn, stuck, frustrated, in need of change! Bloody hell, I couldn't possibly be considering that she should commence her trials on me... That glow. The perfect protrusion of new life bringing smiles to everyone's face, to mine. Helping this ill-founded girl...who knew not what was good for her. What did I have to lose? I couldn't be killed...but I could be disappointed.
"Me," hesitant, I answered her call for audition. "If you're going to do this... You should perform it on someone who you know can care for it. And I can. I volunteer."