Excerpt: The Daughters of Men

She reached the entrance of the cave and she thought it strange that she had heard nothing from Sariel but his calming presence. He was not bidding her on, calling her as he had just two days before.

"I'm sorry," she said aloud. "I didn't mean to sleep for so long. I just couldn't get up."
I know, she heard him say in her head. "You're physical now aren't you?" she asked. Yes, I am, he responded and she heard sorrow in the spaces between the words which were clipped and short. "Are you angry at me?" she asked. No, never, he said.

It took her a long while to dig out the dirt from the first tunnel. She must still be tired. She heard no words from Sariel, just a sad presence which she did not understand. When she got into the second chamber she noticed it was just as beautiful as the first time she had seen it. Blinding white and solid stone. It was the second attribute that troubled her. She could not find the entrance to the tunnel.

"Sariel?" she called out. She could not tell if he was in the next chamber or not. She realized he was not when he became physical. "Sariel?"
"Vee," was all she heard. She could hear him. He was there.
"Sariel, where is the tunnel? It's all solid stone. Where is the tunnel?"
"It…is gone," he said. "For now." She was silent.
"For now?" she asked. "What the hell does that mean?"
"It means you are pregnant. For which, I am so glad. But we must be parted, for now."
"How does it know? How can it tell? Why won't it let me through?" she was starting to get frantic. She was racing around the boundary of the chamber, tearing her fingers on the sharp points sticking out from the walls, not finding the soft dirt that was the entrance to her solace.
"Because of the baby you cannot get through. The change in the passage of time will disrupt her development and we cannot take the chance," his muffled voice told her.
"No," she said.
"Vee—"
"I'll get an abortion. We'll start over. We can have a baby later," her protestations finally stopped. He was quiet, as well. Even through the wall, she could hear the despair in his voice.
"There is not enough time," he told her. She began to cry; deep heavy sobs that cut at his heart. He could do nothing to get closer to her. She cried harder than she ever had. Even the cancer diagnosis had not hit like this. She could tell from his words that he believed they would never see each other again.

She believed it, too.

PART II
When she returned home, she coud not speak to anyone at first. She did mundane things and cried. She cleaned out the refrigerator. She went to the grocery store and bought food. She looked at vitamins at the health store. Vitamins for herself and vitamins for the baby, who she was quite ambivalent about at that beginning. It was her link to Sariel. It was her barrier to Sariel. She would not even think about it as 'her' or 'Leilit'. The growth inside her was an 'it', just like the cancer was and now it would be a race to see which grew faster.

She could not even bring herself to call Miguel until a week was up and she felt like she could be partially in the world again She would never be fully in it again. Her heart was lost to the spirit world and her body was trying both to bring life and to kill itself at the same time. And her mind, well, her mind was a mess from the moment she woke up to moment she fell asleep. She would sometimes hear Sariel's feelings from far away, sometimes a word or two, sometimes just an echo of her own despair. He was avoiding the physical form because of the sorrow and loneliness, she knew that. Part of her hated him for being able to escape.

The technology for pregnancy detection had advanced greatly since her last abortion. It now only took one week of a missed period for her to confirm it. When it was confirmed she returned the nine or ten frantic calls from her doctor's office and the twenty or so hysterical calls from her family. If the cancer had stunned them slightly, the pregnancy brought at least a minute of silence from every family member she spoke to. It became a game to her. She timed the silence and her younger sister won at a full seventy – three seconds.