He knocked on Tilly’s door, then strode in when he heard her scream.
“Doc,” Jameson said, meeting him in the entryway. The man was as pale as milk. “God, I—what do we do?”
“Breathe, first. C’mon.”
Jameson led him back toward the bedroom he shared with Tilly. The dark curtains were closed, making the space as much a cave as the one Chris had slept in. The stink of sweat hung heavy in the still air. He threw his medical satchel on a nearby chair, then went to wash his hands in the nearby kitchenette.
“How long?” he called over his shoulder to Jameson.
“Since about four this morning. She was good until just a few minutes ago. Then she lost it.”
Chris nodded, returning to the bedroom. Tilly lay sprawled on a coverlet that had been wrinkled and knotted by her fists. She looked relatively fresh for a woman in early labor, but a second scream in two minutes hinted this would go quickly.
“Hey, Tilly,” he said, kneeling by the side of the bed. He smoothed the matted blond hair back from her face. She mauled his other hand with a killer squeeze. Only after the contraction had passed did he try to talk to her again. “I guess it’s going to be somebody’s birthday.”
“Guess so.” She offered a wobbly smile. “Got an epidural on you, Doc?”
“Afraid not. You’re gonna have to do this the cavewoman way.”
“Ugh. I don’t think I can.”
“Of course you can. You’re built for it. Every woman is.”
That had been true, once. But the evolution of modern woman in the age of C-sections left the human race with no way to cope with the reinforced trait. He’d seen the same thing in animals bred in captivity, as they became less and less able to give birth without human intervention. The change would require a quick reversal of that trend or the hellhounds, skinwalkers, and deprivation wouldn’t be the only threats to mankind’s survival.
Here and now, there was no surgical solution—at least not one both mother and child would survive. Chris put a good face on it, knowing fear would do Tilly in.
“Just stick with me here, okay?”
She nodded, but she didn’t look convinced.
“Here’s the thing,” Chris said. “When you’re scared at night, when you’re feeling overwhelmed by the Change, where do you go? In your head? What do you think about?”
Tilly leaned her head back onto the pillow, her chin tipped toward the ceiling. She swallowed. “I think about being at the beach at Cape Cod. We used to go there in the summers, spend months with my grandma. We left when the Change hit the East Coast. I never saw it again. But God, it was beautiful. I still think about how clear the water was.”
Chris grinned to himself. Only in the world after the Change could a blue blood like Tilly wind up with a tatted thug like Jameson. He liked the contrast, even if the shadows over her favorite memory were difficult to ignore.
“Good,” he said, keeping his tone light. “That’s good. Next time you feel the pain coming on, I want you to breathe as slowly as you can through your nose and go back to Cape Cod. Got that? And I’m going to give you Jameson’s hand. You break it if you need to.”
That got a laugh out of her.
“No, wait. Jameson, you got a comb? Sort of palm-sized? Anything like that?”
The man rummaged amid their possessions, then returned with a small black plastic comb.
Chris nestled it into Tilly’s hand so that the tines poked into her palm. “When the pain comes, you squeeze the ever-lovin’ shit out of this, got it?”
“What the hell is that gonna do?” Jameson asked.
“Think about the last time you needed a bullet gouged out of you.” Chris didn’t question his assumption that Jameson had, at some point, required such a procedure. It seemed a standard-issue wound among bravos. “Did you bite down on something?”
“Sure.”
“Took your mind off it a little? The pain in your teeth?”
“Yeah.”
“The body can only process information from so many nerve endings at a time. If she can focus on the pain in her hand—a pain she can control—it’ll distract her from the contractions.” He smiled down at Tilly. “Worth a shot anyway.”
“Sure, Doc,” she whispered.
After weathering another minute of Tilly’s agony, her fist clenched around that little black comb, Chris dragged her partner to the kitchenette.
“I need to know something, Jameson,” he said, his voice low. “Are you ready to listen to me? Because needing to explain every little decision will waste time. And debating will only worry her. Unified front, got it? I need to have you on my side.”
The wiry man hesitated, which was probably only fair. Chris wondered if he’d trust himself in Jameson’s place.
“Yeah, Doc. I’m on it.” Jameson didn’t seem nearly so intimidating without his usual complement of knives—and with a healthy dose of fear shining from his eyes. He obviously didn’t respond well to feeling helpless.
“Now, you will wash your hands before you touch her, no matter what. Go. Stay with her.”
Viv and Rosa came in shortly thereafter, faces lit with expressions of excitement and concern. Chris let his gaze linger on Rosa for two extra heartbeats. She’d gotten cleaned up—new cargoes, new shirt. Her hair was pulled back, braided as tightly as he’d ever seen.
She wouldn’t look at him.
That’s not good.
But he saved his disappointment for another time.
“I need water that’s been boiled—at least a couple of liters,” he said.
“I’m on it,” Viv replied, hurrying out.
“Rosa, wash up. You’re going to check her dilation.”
“What? Why me?”
“Smaller hands. It’ll hurt her less.”
“Madre de Dios,”
she muttered, crossing herself. Then she blinked, as if the reflexive gesture surprised her. “Fine.”
Tilly moaned. Chris and Rosa returned to the bedroom to find Tilly’s eyes rolled back, her body as stiff as iron. Jameson cringed under her fierce grip. But no screams this time. Maybe those little tricks were working. Chris desperately needed them to work.
“Oh!” Tilly gasped.
Her water broke.
“Well, shit,” Chris said. “Maybe you won’t need to check her after all.”
“Jameson, more blankets?” Rosa asked.
“Here, under the bed.”
While Rosa and Jameson wriggled fresh blankets under Tilly’s rear, Chris returned to the side of the bed. He leaned close to the laboring woman’s face and kept his voice calm—no matter how crazy-fast his heart beat. “You tell me when you’re ready to push, okay? We’re all going to trust your body to know what it needs to do.”
“Okay.” She grabbed his forearm. “Doc?”
“Yeah?”
Whatever she was going to say died on her lips. She simply stared up at him, her expression filled with more trust than any man deserved. Chris fought the compulsion to look away. This wasn’t his job, wasn’t his life. This was some strange dream where a pain-stricken mother-to-be and her terrified lover depended on him for the survival of their baby.
But there was no one else.
Chris nodded once, soberly, as if to acknowledge the promises she wanted—the promises he couldn’t make. Instead he said, “You’re doing great.”
Viv had recruited Ingrid for the muscle required to haul in liters of boiled water. The women set up a receiving area for the new baby, complete with washcloths, towels, a sterilized needle and scissors, thread, and an array of tiny clothes Singer had crafted. Tilly endured each pain as it came, her ability to focus and ride out the contractions much better now.
The air in the room was stifling, stuffed with five bodies that generated a healthy dose of anxious heat. Chris stepped out to the kitchenette and mopped his forehead with a cloth, then popped open a window. A breeze eased over his face. It was warm but it was better than nothing.
Rosa met him there. She didn’t say anything, just stood, her worry like a mask over her features. Jameson wasn’t the only one unaccustomed to feeling helpless.
“What do I do?” she asked.
“Wait.”
“I hate waiting.”
“Amen.”
He walked over to her, drawn to her, needing a moment of comfort in her arms. They could do that for each other. They could make the worry and hurt go away.
But Rosa stepped back. Her expression closed off. No worry. No uncertainty. Just a clear-cut warning. “No,” she said simply.
Chris watched her go, feeling mule-kicked. He braced his hands on the countertop and bowed his head. “God damn it, Rosa,” he muttered.
The worst, he realized, would be if nothing changed. He would know her body and her taste, and he would know her rejection. All at once. Her trust would be a fleeting thing, never to be relied on. Roasting on a spit sounded more appealing.
Tilly cried out. Shoving his personal problems to a distant corner of his mind—at least he had experience with that—Chris hurried back to the bedroom.
“I need to push!” Tilly gasped. Her nightgown was soaked through with sweat. She gripped both Jameson and Viv, using their hands like a rock climber used pitons, holding on for dear life.
Chris moved to the foot of the bed. “Everybody get ready. Jameson, come down here with me. Rosa, take his place,
por favor
.”
Shoulder to shoulder with the baby’s father, Chris lifted the hem of Tilly’s nightgown. Jameson’s face turned an even more sickly ashen shade. “She’s bleeding,” he whispered.
“Just a tear,” Chris replied under his breath. “A few sutures and she’s good as new.”
Jameson swallowed and nodded, as if to reassure himself.
Chris used one of the washcloths to wipe away the blood. “Grab that clean swaddling. You’ll be holding your baby in no time. Tilly? Honey? You’re crowning, girl. Gimme all you got.”
It might have been ten minutes later. It might have been ten hours. All Chris knew was that watching that dark head emerge into the world was among the more stressful, amazing, terrifying experiences of his life. Jameson murmured prayers under his breath, clutching the baby blankets. Viv’s and Rosa’s hushed words blended into a feminine white noise of encouragement, while Tilly huffed and cursed, moaned and shrieked.
“Hold up,” Chris said. “Don’t push!” He fumbled with the umbilical cord, slipping it from around the baby’s neck, over its soft, slippery skull. He double-checked until he was satisfied. “All right, go for it.”
One shoulder on the next push. The second on the one after that. And with a final grunt, the tiny new life slid free of its mother. Chris caught it in his trembling hands.
“Holy shit,” he breathed, suddenly light-headed. “It’s a girl.”
Tilly burst into exhausted tears, while Viv offered her thanks to God. Jameson rocked back onto his heels, an expression of rapture molding his harsh features. Then he blinked, like an actor remembering his line. He handed the swaddling to Chris, then cut the cord with a hand nowhere near steady. Together they awkwardly wrapped the new baby girl in the strip of plain cloth.
Chris had to swallow past the hard, heavy lump in his throat. He placed the whimpering infant on her mother’s stomach. “Congratulations, Tilly. You have a daughter.”
Feeling triumphant, larger than life, Chris looked up at Rosa, and the tears glittering in her dark eyes humbled him.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“Thank you,” Rosa said later.
She marveled at how Chris had handled the crisis, stitching Tilly afterward. Jameson thought the doc was a genius, no two ways about it. Now she sat with Chris in the
taberna
, together but not alone. Falco and his friends sat at another table, watching. Conscious of the attention on her, she tried to behave as she did with every other bravo, but her success was impossible to gauge.
“I’ve never done that before,” he admitted. “At least not for a human.”
“You’ve delivered litters before? I guess that’s what comes of hanging out with skinwalkers.”
“No, my first experience was helping endangered wildcats bear their young.” He frowned, his knuckles whitening as he clutched his glass. “The skinwalkers aren’t all like that, you know. Like monsters.”
Ignoring his comment, she signaled Viv for another drink. “More wine, please.”
Viv brought the bottle and left it. One bravo got out his musical pipe and another set up his drums. It seemed they wanted to celebrate the new life. Tilly hadn’t decided yet what to name her daughter, but Rosa privately thought Hope would be a good choice, maybe the
perfect
choice, because that was what she represented for their town.
“Don’t change the subject, Rosita.” He said it softly enough that she didn’t think anyone heard, but she glanced around to be sure.
Really, she shouldn’t be sitting with him. It would arouse comment. Falco was seething, trying to figure out why she could tolerate Chris’s company and not his. She’d say it was because the doc had saved their asses by delivering the baby safely. God knew, Jameson would be uncontrollable if anything had happened to Tilly or his baby girl. She’d feared he would need to be put down like a rabid dog, and they’d lose the whole family.