Demon Blood

heartbeat?” Gemma’s hand flew to her belly, her eyes rounding. “You can do that?”
    “Yes.” Years of athletic training had firmed Gemma’s stomach into a washboard. Rosalia pressed her ear against it. She picked up the heartbeat almost immediately. Oh, sweet child. She tapped her fingers against Gemma’s hip in the same rhythm. “It is like this.”
    “That’s not too fast ?”
    She heard the panic in Gemma’s voice, made her tone soothing. “No. She is already strong.” She listened for a few more beats, on the edge of crying. She hadn’t been this happy in . . . She didn’t know.
    A long time.
    “There’s more,” Gemma said when Rosalia rocked back on her heels.
    Vincente said, “We’re moving the wedding up. It’ll be in three weeks.”
    Of course they would. Vincente’s father had not married his mother or taken responsibility for him after her death. Vincente would never repeat the same.
    “And will you be moving back into the abbey with Gemma and me?”
    Immediately, Rosalia saw that she’d pushed too far. Vincente’s face took on that brooding expression, a sullen look that might have affected her more if she’d not known it so well from when he’d been five, brought to the abbey by Father Wojcinski, who had been at the end of his considerably long and patient rope with the angry boy. And, ten years later, when Vincente had been denied the right to visit the movie theaters alone after dark. This expression was never permanent, though it had lasted longer than before.
    But she remembered how it had been six months ago. She’d returned to the abbey and found it empty. Then Vincente and Gemma had arrived—and she’d seen, felt his relief and joy that she hadn’t been dead as they’d thought. She held on to that.
    When neither answered, she pushed again. Why not? She had nothing to lose. The line had already been crossed. “You don’t plan to live at the abbey?”
    The look that Gemma and Vincente exchanged told her that was still in dispute.
    As if agitated, Vincente pushed his hand through his hair. “I don’t think the home of a Guardian is the safest place to raise a child.”
    He had the grace to look uncomfortable as he said it. Gemma turned away, dropping his hand to stalk over to the balcony.
    Rosalia crossed her arms. She would not shake sense into him. “It is strange, then, that in two centuries no child has ever been harmed in my home.”
    “No. But fourteen vampires were.”
    Gemma spun back around. “Vin!”
    Rosalia held up her hand. She formed the sole rift between these two. She would not widen it. “Do whatever you feel is best. I hope I will not be completely excluded from your child’s life, however.”
    Vincente’s gaze flicked to Gemma, standing rigidly at the balcony doors. Rosalia read that glance and interpreted it all too easily. Hurt speared through her chest. Safety might be an issue, but it wasn’t the abbey that worried him: It was her . If they lived with her, Rosalia would be too influential a figure in their child’s life. Vincente would not be able to control everything she said or did, and she would fill the child’s head with stories about the Guardians.
    Vincente had heard them. So had Gemma and her brother, Pasquale. But only Pasquale had sacrificed himself to save another’s life in an attempt to become a Guardian. The danger he’d saved that woman from hadn’t been an otherworldly danger, however, but just a man—and so Michael hadn’t been called to transform him. Rosalia still didn’t know what angered Vincente more: that she’d inspired a young man to his death at twenty-two years of age, or that Michael hadn’t come—even though Michael couldn’t have known to come, and couldn’t have transformed or healed Pasquale if he had.
    Rosalia had grieved, too, and had blamed herself—she didn’t regret the stories, but that she hadn’t succeeded in protecting Pasquale. Her grief and sorrow hadn’t been enough for Vincente, however. Ten years ago, before he’d left, he’d asked her, Have you ever succeeded at anything, Mother? He never spoke the words now, but she still saw them in his eyes from time to time.
    She could have told Vincente that if her goal had been to protect him from emotional upheaval so well that he’d be incapable of coping when tragedy struck—to the extent that he had left his heart vulnerable to only one person in ten years—then yes, she had succeeded spectacularly.
    Only Gemma’s rigid