A Clash of Storms (A Shade of Vampire #50)(68)

Harper was the center of our universe, but, after all these years since Nevertide, I still felt like there was a void inside me, waiting to be filled. Just… something missing. I couldn’t explain it, but to my surprise, I discovered that Tejus had been feeling the same way. We often looked at Harper and experienced a mild form of guilt because we still felt… incomplete, despite having raised an extraordinary young woman.

Oddly enough, it seemed to be a common feeling among us Nevertide survivors. It had taken Lawrence and Grace well over twenty-one years to conceive Caia, and it had all been thanks to Corrine’s full moon ritual, which gave Grace a boost in fertility.

We’d all wanted children, after all. We’d been looking forward to growing our families and bringing wonderful beings into this world. For a while, we thought that our delay in conceiving might’ve had something to do with the Nevertide Oracle and the way in which she’d touched Grace, Victoria’s, and my, bellies four decades ago. But we had no way of finding her. All we could do was learn to live with the quiet idea of something still missing from our lives. Grace and Lawrence had felt it, too—as had Victoria and Bastien. The latter had Dmitri around the same time as Harper, leaving us all wondering as to why we’d gone twenty years without children. These births came across as a strangely timed coincidence.

We never let this void get in the way of our lives, though. I watched with joy as Harper, Caia, and Dmitri grew up. They did pretty much everything together, and occasionally dragged the Hawks into their mischief, too—not that Fly, Rock, Blue, or Sky would ever shy away from a challenge. Harper and Caia had been the first to join GASP, followed by Dmitri a couple of years later. He’d struggled with the decision, as he’d been spending some time in the human world and had been contemplating a career outside The Shade for a while.

In the end, Dmitri came back into the fold after a teenage heartbreak and asked to join GASP. He was keen to catch up with Harper and Caia, after having found his place back among the Shadians. The girls had been the first to endorse him, and, soon enough, Dmitri was learning to control his instincts and improve his attacks, with Harper and Caia, his best friends, guiding him along the way.

It was a calm and quiet Sunday morning in The Shade. Late spring had finally brought the cherry blossoms out, patches of pale pink blooming in between the redwoods, brightening the otherwise dark green forest of The Shade. Arwen, Corrine’s daughter, had been quite adamant about cherry trees over the past couple of decades, after an extended vacation with Brock in Japan.

I could only thank them for her persistence. The Shade had a little bit more color in it, and we’d each planted a cherry sapling next to our tree.

It took me a while to get out of bed, that feeling of emptiness bothering me more than usual. I found Tejus in the kitchen, waiting for me at the table with two hot coffees. Sure, we didn’t need coffee, but we still enjoyed the taste, so we’d kept it as part of our intimate morning ritual. He’d been looking out the window when I entered.

He turned his head, his dark brown eyes burning hot into my soul. He’d been having an equally difficult morning. I could feel his emptiness through mine, like a mirror image of a hole that refused to go away.

“Rough night?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

I smirked, then proceeded to sit in his lap. He wrapped his arms around my frame and rested his head on my chest, listening to my heartbeat. I ran my fingers through his long, russet-brown hair. He always made my heart skip a beat, and I knew he enjoyed it. In return, I had a similar effect on him, his body heat spiking and his pulse racing whenever we got close. It never got old. I loved the chemistry between us.

“I could say the same about you,” I replied gently. “But we only have each other to blame…”

“Sorry, I can’t help myself when you saunter into our bedroom wearing that flimsy piece of black lace you call a nightgown.” He looked up, his gaze dark as he licked his lower lip. But there was something else there, a tinge of sadness he was trying to mask, similar to what had made me dread getting out of bed in the first place.

“You’ve been feeling that hole again, haven’t you?” I sighed, changing the subject. I would’ve loved nothing more than to continue that conversation about my lace garments and his natural reaction to them, but I knew something was bothering him. He nodded slowly. “Me too…”

“But why?” he asked. “Why are we feeling like this? I mean, why do the first twenty years of our marriage seem… like an unfinished painting?”

“I don’t know, Tejus.” I shrugged, leaning my head against his as he tightened his grip on me. “There isn’t a day that goes by that I’m not happy or thankful to be with you, to have Harper. And yet, there isn’t a day that I don’t put my head down and feel like there’s something missing.”

“What I’m finding to be truly weird and a cause for concern is that Grace and Victoria are dealing with the same emotion…”

“Maybe we could grow our family a bit more?” I asked with a half-smile, relaxing against his firm body. He reacted instantly, pulling me closer and looking deep into my eyes.

“Do you think it would fill the emptiness? Harper didn’t, and I sound like such a horrible parent for saying this…” He groaned and hid his face in my chest.

I held him tight, feeling his anguish as it poured through me. He didn’t deserve to struggle like this, and neither did I. It had been going on for too long, and it had to stop.