Aísē: My Five Supernatural Wives-Chapter 146: Éve

The shirts were too big on both of them.

This was something I noticed and chose not to comment on.

Eva had both hands wrapped around the hem of mine, the fabric falling past her thighs, her light green hair still slightly loose from before. She had tucked herself against my left side.

The other Eva had rolled the sleeves up to her elbows. She was leaning against my right side, head resting against my shoulder, dark green hair falling across the fabric. Eyes half-closed. Not sleeping. Just existing in the room the way she existed in everything.....fully present without particularly announcing it.

I stared at the ceiling.

’I cannot keep calling them both Eva,’ I thought. ’That is going to cause problems.’

I said it out loud without actually deciding to.

"I need to call you something different."

The other Eva opened one eye.

"Is that so."

"It’s a logistics issue."

"I didn’t say it wasn’t."

Eva, from my left, made the small sound she made when she found something mildly amusing but was being polite about it.

I looked at the other Eva properly. Same face. Same antlers, pale and branching above the same features. The hair a deeper shade, the eyes carrying something Eva’s eyes didn’t carry in their natural state.....that settled certainty, that cold composure that had nothing cold in it when she wasn’t performing.

I thought about it.

"Éve," I said.

Same root. Different sound. Acknowledging they were one person without pretending they were the same experience.

The other Eva considered this for a moment. Then she said...

"I’ll allow it."

Eva repeated it softly from my shoulder. Testing the weight of the sound. A small smile followed.

.....

Éve kissed my cheek.

No preamble. The gesture born from something intimate, she had decided they were allowed to do this and saw no reason to make it into a moment.

Then, with perfect composure.

"Where did you get your seed so proactive?"

I turned my head very slowly.

".....What?."

"I’m being accurate, not indecent." She tilted her head slightly. "I was one with Eva for a long time. I know what your energy felt like before." A pause then. "It’s different now. More alive. Like something is in it that wasn’t there."

I looked at the ceiling again.

’The elixir,’ I thought immediately.

Aphrodite. Pink vial. The sanctuary.

Virility...

I had accepted that information, screamed, passed out, and moved immediately to the next crisis because that was what my life was. I had not thought about it again until this exact moment.

I thought about Eleanor.

My vampire wife. For whom pregnancy was not supposed to happen easily, if at all.

A vampire who got pregnant.

’Oh,’ I thought.

And then the next thought arrived, unbidden, with a arithmetic....

Me who had several wives and had just been told his fertility had been divinely amplified.

I was very still with this for a moment.

"It was an elixir," I said. "From a goddess."

"Which goddess."

"Aphrodite."

Éve looked at me. Then at Eva. Then back at me with a expression.

A expression where someone adds a new entry to a very long list of unreasonable things about a particular someone they love.

"Of course it was," she said. "Of course it was Aphrodite."

Eva made a sound against my shoulder. It was a laugh. She was not making any effort to conceal it.

.....

"Are either of you....." I started.

I glanced left. Then right.

Eva shook her head gently. Éve raised one eyebrow.

"My body is a spiritual manifestation," she said. "It’s Complicated We’ll come to that."

I absorbed this and moved on to the next calculation. Liliana. She had been with me here in England. No protection discussed. No concerns raised. With the elixir and its effects...

"Hehe~.."

Eva giggled.

I looked at her.

"You are overthinking....Liliana is a succubus," she said, in the gentle tone she used when she was about to explain something obvious that I had simply never thought about. "Pregnancy isn’t really an issue for them... but it’s not like they get pregnant by accident."

"What do you mean."

"Succubi digest the seed almost instinctively." She said it....plainly, without ceremony. "It gives them extra energy. That’s simply how their nature works. The body treats it as sustenance rather than.....the other thing."

’Ah,’ I thought.

That explained why Liliana had never once seemed concerned about it. Not carelessness. Biology.

Then: Mephistopheles. I thought about the fact that she had been insistent.....consistently, without exception.....about protection. Every single time. With a specificity that suggested she had reasons she hadn’t explained.

’She knows something I don’t,’ I concluded. Filed it away.

I exhaled once.

"So just Eleanor then," I said. Mostly to myself.

.....

Eva had been quiet for a moment. She was still leaning against my shoulder but there was something in the stillness that had changed slightly. The kind of stillness that meant she was working up to something.

"About me," she said quietly.

I looked down at her.

"My body isn’t exactly physical." She was looking at the middle distance, not quite at me. "If you are talking about my exact race, I’m a High Elf. We’re purely spiritual beings at our core. Even this flesh is just.....a manifestation of my spiritual energy. It’s not the same as a physical body."

She paused.

The blush came in slow.....not sudden but building, warmth spreading across her face as she looked up at me and then immediately looked away again.

She couldn’t finish the sentence.

Éve had been watching this from my right side with a settled amusement, she been waiting for exactly this moment.

She leaned in slightly. The voice she used was the one she saved for specific occasions.....low, certain, carrying warmth underneath the composure in a way that was entirely deliberate.

"If you want to conceive a child with her," Éve said, with a small smile, "you’ll need to impregnate her soul."

Silence.

I looked at Eva.

Eva had buried her face entirely in my shoulder and was not coming back out.

I looked at the ceiling.

’Impregnate,’ I thought. ’Her soul.’

I turned this over carefully. I had the druid bloodline. I had the elixir re-engineering my vital force at a fundamental level. I had a working understanding of spiritual energy from months of existing as a living hybrid of five bloodlines.

I did not, however, have any immediate understanding of the mechanics of what Éve had just described.

’I’ll figure that out later,’ I decided.

"That," I said carefully, "is remarkably complicated."

Éve looked entirely pleased with herself.

Eva made a muffled sound that might have been agreement or might have been her attempting to disappear into the fabric of my shirt. Difficult to determine.

"I wonder," I continued, in a dry tone, as a man who had earned it, "how someone who used to think that kissing could lead to pregnancy knows this."

Eva went more still.

Éve smiled. The real one. Small and certain and warm in the way her warmth always was.....not announced, just present.

"We studied," she said simply. "In our free time."

I looked between them. Eva, still not emerging from my shoulder, the faint shake of her that meant she was trying not to laugh and failing. Éve, entirely composed, entirely satisfied with herself and the situation and the morning and probably with the universe in general.

’Right,’ I thought. ’Of course you did.’

.....

The quiet settled again. Warm and comfortable, the three of us inside it. Eva eventually surfaced from my shoulder, pink-cheeked, and tucked herself back against my side with dignity, pretending the last two minutes had not happened.

Éve closed her eyes again.

I looked at the ceiling and thought about nothing in particular, which was a thing I was rarely allowed to do and intended to make the most of for however long it lasted.

It lasted about four minutes.

Then the knock came.

Three times. Measured. Aisha’s knock.....she always knocked like that, like she was announcing herself to a room that might need a moment to prepare.

Her voice came through the door slightly muffled, carrying something she was working hard to keep out of her tone and not entirely succeeding.

"Valerian....."

A pause. She was choosing her words.

"Duke Alucard is here."

The room went very still.

Éve’s eyes opened fully. Eva lifted her head from my shoulder.

"He wants to see you," Aisha finished. The words came out level. The breath before them had not been.

I stared at the ceiling for one more moment.

Vanir Alucard de Transilvania Tepeș. The man who turned a street into a crater and stepped through the debris without changing his expression. The man Austin had gone quiet for in the roots. The man who had looked at me and said take him to Eva as though I was a variable being moved out of the way.

That man was here.

In the building.

Waiting to see me.

"Tell him I’ll be there in a few minutes," I called back. Entirely level.

Aisha’s footsteps retreated.

The room held its quiet for one beat longer.

Éve, without any kind of urgency:

"You should get dressed."

I looked at the shirt she was currently wearing.

My shirt.

’.....Right,’ I thought.