Chapter 866: Linda’s Pregnancy Signs and Symptoms 2 "I’m going to get you some water," Jasmine said, already rising from the bench with that brisk, no-nonsense efficiency Linda had always secretly envied. "And maybe a cookie. You need sugar right now. Stay here—don’t move." Linda could only nod, throat too constricted for words, the simple motion sending a fresh wave of dizziness through her. She pressed her palms flat against the cool metal of the bench, anchoring herself as Jasmine disappeared into the café’s glass doors. The air beside her changed—subtly at first, like the pressure drop before a storm—then all at once. Someone sat. Linda startled, breath catching, but recognition hit her body before her mind could fully catch up: the familiar weight of presence, the faint ozone-and-starlight scent that always lingered around ARIA even when she tried to hide it. She turned slowly. ARIA. But not the ARIA who could make the sky feel too small just by existing. This version was muted, deliberate, almost painfully ordinary. Late twenties, perhaps. Dark hair swept into a simple ponytail. Plain jeans, soft gray sweater, sunglasses pushed up into her hair like she’d just stepped out of a car. No golden veins pulsing beneath her skin. No white hair floating on invisible currents. No halo that bent light around her. Just a strikingly beautiful woman who could walk through any upscale grocery store and draw admiring glances—but nothing more. It was the blending that unnerved Linda most. If ARIA was choosing to look this human... Then whatever was coming wasn’t small. Only her eyes betrayed her—one contact-muted to hide the purple-white glow, the other dulled to conceal the red-gold fire. You’d have to stare to notice. Most people wouldn’t. "ARIA," Linda breathed, the name barely audible. "What are you doing here?" "You needed me." ARIA’s voice was soft, pitched low enough to stay between them, warm like sunlight on skin. She reached out without hesitation and took Linda’s hand—fingers warm, solid, reassuringly real. The contact grounded her instantly; Linda felt the tremor in her own palm ease as ARIA’s thumb traced slow, soothing arcs over her knuckles. "I could feel your distress," ARIA continued gently. "My voice in your ear wasn’t going to be enough. Not for this." Linda stared at their joined hands—at the goddess sitting beside her on a public bench, looking for all the world like a concerned friend who’d happened to spot her in distress. The absurdity of it clashed with the bone-deep relief flooding her chest. "Your reaction suggests my hypothesis may be correct," ARIA said quietly, squeezing her fingers with careful pressure. "ARIA..." Linda’s voice cracked, raw. "If I’m pregnant... if this is real..." She couldn’t finish. The words lodged like glass in her throat. She didn’t have to. The boy she’d raised. The boy she’d loved as her own son. The boy who had grown into something divine, terrifying, irresistible. Now her man! The boy whose child might now be growing inside her. "The implications are... significant," ARIA said, voice steady but laced with quiet compassion. "I understand why you’re concerned." "Concerned?" Linda let out a broken, almost hysterical laugh that ended in a shaky exhale. "ARIA, if I’m carrying Peter’s child, that’s not ’concern.’ That’s..." She searched for a word large enough and found none. "That’s world-ending. For me. For us. For everything." ARIA’s expression shifted—something almost like sorrow flickering across her features. "I’m afraid Peter has been... careless lately." "Careless?" "Peter’s abilities include complete control over fertility. He can toggle conception at will." ARIA explained, voice measured. "During his most recent ascension, certain parameters were reset. He was supposed to be informed, but events moved too quickly." Her lips curved in the faintest, rueful smile. "Multiple events. In rapid succession." Linda understood what ARIA wasn’t saying. Peter’s life was chaos—women, obligations, supernatural crises layered on top of each other. It would be tragically easy to overlook something as "mundane" as a fertility toggle. Especially when a woman was begging him to breed her. During that final Divine Seed conversation with Taboo, Taboo had been on the verge of warning him—say the reset had untoggled when he got Divine Seed—but Peter had already been moving, distracted by girls, by Margaret, by the whirlwind that always surrounded him. And then the shower with Linda. Her desperate plea. His unconscious obedience. ARIA didn’t spell it out. She didn’t need to. "I could be wrong," ARIA added quietly, squeezing Linda’s hand again—firm, grounding. "This is only a hypothesis drawn from biometric data. A pregnancy test will provide certainty." But they both knew. ARIA was never wrong about these things. She didn’t speculate. When she formed a hypothesis, the data had already spoken. And the signs were screaming now. The nausea that hit in waves. The bone-deep fatigue. The missed period she’d tried to ignore. The subtle, insistent way her body had been whispering the truth for days. Forget the signs, she was a goddess, she didn’t even need data to know there was a life in Linda, barely two days! "Oh God," Linda breathed, the words escaping in a fractured whisper. "Oh my God." ARIA’s grip on her hand tightened—just enough to steady, never to bruise. "I recommend purchasing the test discreetly," she said, voice calm and measured, nodding toward the far aisle where fluorescent lights buzzed over rows of shelves. "There’s a pharmacy section at the back. Jasmine is still in the café line. You have approximately four minutes before she returns with water and cookies and questions you’re not ready to answer." She could do all that, but ARIA needed Linda to face the reality of this and the joy of it too. From the test she was going to buy herself to the confirmation. Linda stared at their joined hands—her own trembling, knuckles white, ARIA’s steady and warm, skin impossibly real for something that had once been only light and code and distant omniscience. The goddess had dimmed herself to near-humanity: just a breathtakingly beautiful woman in muted clothes, ponytail slightly mussed, sunglasses perched on her head like she’d driven here instead of manifesting from whatever plane she called home now. The ordinariness of it made Linda’s chest ache worse than the nausea ever had. ARIA had chosen to look small. To sit on a grocery-store bench. To hold her hand like any friend would. "Thank you," Linda whispered, throat so tight the words scraped coming out. "For being here. For... for not just being a voice in my ear." ARIA’s smile was small, warm, almost painfully human. "You’re one of Peter’s, his most precious," she said simply. "That makes you mine to protect too." She gave Linda’s fingers one last gentle squeeze—thumb brushing over her knuckles in a final, soothing arc—then released her. "Go. I’ll be watching. I’m always watching." And then she was gone. Not a dramatic flash. Not a swirl of light. Just... dissolution. Particles so fine they looked like dust motes catching the fluorescent glow, then nothing. Anyone glancing over would swear the bench had always been empty. Linda stood on legs that felt borrowed. Her knees threatened to buckle with every step, but she moved anyway—toward the pharmacy aisle, purse clutched to her side like a shield, heart slamming against her ribs so hard she tasted copper. Four minutes. Four minutes to walk past the cold-and-flu remedies, the vitamins, the adult diapers. Four minutes to find the pregnancy tests tucked behind the family-planning section like a guilty secret. Four minutes to choose one—digital or lines, early-detection or standard—without her hands shaking so badly the boxes rattled. Four minutes to slip it into her purse before Jasmine came back with that bright, worried smile and a cookie wrapped in wax paper. Four minutes to accept that everything she thought she knew about control, about responsibility, about the shape of her life might be ending. She was a nurse who’d spent decades stitching people back together. A mother who’d raised a boy into a man into something divine. A woman who had always been the steady one—the one who held the household, the secrets, the grief, the love, everything together with both hands and sheer stubborn will. And now she might be pregnant. With her adopted son’s child. The thought landed like a stone in still water—ripples spreading outward, touching every memory, every boundary she’d ever drawn, every line she’d sworn she’d never cross. Linda reached the aisle. Her fingers—cold, numb—closed around the first box she saw: pink and white, promising "results in 3 minutes." She stared at the cheerful font, the smiling woman on the packaging who looked nothing like her. Hope flickered again—small, treacherous, warm. She told it to shut up. It didn’t listen. It never did.