Thank goodness. I’d had to make several impossible decisions recently, but nothing like the one Traci was facing. I’d never had to decide the fate of a child.

“Wait...” She scrubbed her face with both hands, like she was trying to wake herself up, and Harmony handed Traci her teacup. Traci pushed hair back from her face, then drained the rest of her tea, though it must have been cold by then. “What was Mr. Beck? What is my baby?”

The cool thing about disappearing before someone’s eyes is that they tend to believe anything you say afterward, which cuts down on a lot of the time I would normally have spent trying to convince someone that humans are not alone in the world. Either world. Traci had taken the expressway to all things supernatural. For me, that was kinda nice.

For her, it was understandably traumatic, and the more of the truth she heard, the worse that would get.

“Beck was an incubus,” Emma said. “That’s basically a sex demon.”

“A sex demon?” Traci stared at the coffee table like it might contain a translation of that phrase that was easier to stomach. “I had...” She swallowed thickly. “With a demon?”

“Actually, an incubus is just one of several kinds of psychic parasites. This kind happens to feed on...desire.”

“Lust,” Emma corrected, her voice sharp enough to sting. “Don’t sugarcoat it. She needs to know what really happened.” Em turned to her sister. “He came here that night looking for us, and he found you instead.”

“Why would he be looking for you here?” Traci’s frown deepened. “Who are you?”

Emma groaned, frustrated by the reminder that her own sister still didn’t recognize her. “Who I am doesn’t matter. The point is that he was mad that we stood him up, and he took that out on you, and I’m so sorry. He raped you, Traci.”

“No...” She shook her head, confusion momentarily overridden by denial that bruised me all the way to my soul. “I wanted to....”

“You didn’t have any choice,” Harmony said softly, and I could have hugged her for stepping in. Em and I...we were in over our heads. I didn’t know how to explain the truth to Traci without further upsetting her. “He made you want to. It’s as much a violation of your will as of your body. There’s nothing you could have done any differently.”

“No.” She shook her head again and swiped tears from her cheeks in one determined motion. “That’s not how it happened. I—”

“Traci.” Emma reached for her hand, but her sister pulled away from the touch she didn’t recognize, and my heart ached for Em. “Under what other circumstance would you have opened the door for a perfect stranger, then invited him straight to your bed?” Fresh tears swelled in Traci’s eyes, and her sister continued, “The only difference between Mr. Beck and half the men in prisonfor assault right now is that he violated you on multiple levels. Which makes me wish Kaylee could kill him all over again. And that I could help this time.”

Traci stared at the floor, her gaze unfocused, one hand still spread over her stomach. I wasn’t sure how much more of this she could take. Or how well she was handling what she’d already heard.

Hell, I wasn’t sure how well I was handling it.

“So the baby...?”

“Your baby is almost certainly an incubus,” Harmony said. “So we need to discuss the best way for you to...survive.”

Traci blinked, then frowned, and my heart ached as I watched her struggle to bring Harmony into focus through pain, confusion, and the Netherworld contaminate in her system. “Why wouldn’t I survive?”

“Because incubus babies are notoriously hard for human women to carry. They...” Harmony only hesitated for a moment, but I could see how much she dreaded speaking the necessary truth. “Well, they drain their mothers, from the inside out.”

Em set her soda on the coffee table and ran one hand through her hair. She seemed surprised when there was less hair than she remembered. “Then, when they’re born—if they’re born—they have no soul of their own, and if there isn’t one ready for the baby, it’ll take the mother’s soul. Unless she’s human.”

“Even if she’s human,” Harmony clarified, to my horror and confusion. “A human soul can’t support an incubus baby for long, but that’s no help to a mother who’s already passed away for want of a soul by the time her baby dies. Usually the father spends most of the gestational period hunting for a non-human soul for his child, but in this case, there’s no father.”

“May he rot in hell for all of eternity,” Em added.

“I don’t...” Traci shook her head, like she was trying to clear cobwebs from her mind. “That’s a lot of information about something I’m not sure I understand.” She glanced from one to the other of us in mounting fear. “What does all that mean?”

Harmony exhaled slowly. “It means that if you manage to carry the baby to term and deliver it, at birth he will take your soul, which will kill you. Then, when your soul fails to support him long-term, the baby will die anyway.”

Em met her sister’s gaze with a wide-eyed, urgent one of her own. “So, basically, the only way for you to survive an incubus pregnancy is for your baby...not to.”

Traci nodded. Then she stared at her hands, sitting idly in her lap, obviously thinking. Hard. When she finally looked up, I was impressed by how calm she seemed, and I wondered how much of that was because of what Harmony had put in her drink. “So, what are the chances that the baby is actually an incubus? I mean, I’m human, so the baby could be human, too, right?”