Then she blinked. And her irises changed color.
One became green and the other blue. Just like his.
“Sire!”
At first he was utterly confused—wondering why in the hell the young female had called him that. How did she know who he was?
“Qhuinn! Let me seal you up!”
He blinked. And discovered that he had thrown himself against the headboard, and in the process, he’d torn Layla’s fangs from his flesh and he was hemorrhaging all over the sheets.
“Let me—”
He strong-armed the Chosen back and sealed his own mouth on the wound. As he took care of himself, he couldn’t take his eyes off Layla.
It was waaaaay too easy to overlay that young female’s features on Layla’s face and find something so much deeper than similarity.
As his heart started pounding, he took a little time out to remind himself that he’d never done the prescient thing. Unlike V, he couldn’t see into the future.
Layla moved slowly as she got off the bed, like she didn’t want to spook him. “Shall I go get Jane? Or perhaps it would be best if I just left.”
Qhuinn opened his mouth . . . and found that nothing came out.
Wow. He’d never been in a car accident, but he imagined the curling dread he felt now was probably the way things went when you saw someone blow a stop sign and come gunning for your side door: You triangulated their direction and their speed against your own and came to the conclusion that impact was imminent.
Although he couldn’t imagine a world in which he got Layla pregnant.
“I have seen the future,” he said from a distance.
Layla’s hands lifted to her throat as if she were choking. “Is it bad?”
“It’s . . . not possible. At all.”
As he put his head in his palms, all he could see in the darkness was that face . . . the one that was part Layla’s and part his.
Oh, God . . . save them both. Save . . . all of them.
“Sire? You’re scaring me.”
Well, that made two of them . . .
Except it couldn’t be. Could it?
“I’m going to go,” she said roughly. “I thank you for your gift.”
He nodded and couldn’t look at her. “You’re welcome.”
As the door shut shortly thereafter, he shuddered, a cold, bracing fear settling into his bones . . . and going right into his soul.
Ironic, really, he thought. His parents had never wanted him to reproduce, and go fig—the idea of shafting Layla with a defective daughter, or even worse, laying his fucked-up eyes upon an innocent young female, made him embrace his vow of celibacy like nothing else could.
And actually, he should be glad. Of all the destinies he could have seen, this was one hundred percent avoidable, wasn’t it.
He just was never going to have sex with Layla.
Ever.
So it was all an impossibility. End of.