Quickening, Volume 2

by Amy Lane

  “Yeah,” Teague conceded, reaching for his cell phone even as he peeled away.

  Green didn’t bother looking over his shoulder. He was too busy finding the side door of the garage to the rather well-heeled home that the doctor was foreclosed on.

  He walked in just in time to hear Nicky say, “So seriously, Cory, who’s the giant pot roast?”

  Bracken groaned. “Little man—”

  Nicky sounded honestly contrite. “Sorry. So sorry, Cory.”

  “Don’t be,” she panted, moaning with each breath. “I sure as hell am not. Oh… oh… Bracken… can’t you make them stop?”

  “Nobody can,” Green crooned at his most soothing, coming into the room with Katy on his heels, and ever so glad to see Renny. “Ladies, I need a big pot of boiling hot water and some alcohol to sterilize things. If the good doctor had any of those gloves, I think I’ll take a pair too, right?”

  “On it, Green,” Renny said, sounding surprisingly put together for someone who often needed to put on sweats in the back of the car because she’d been a cat for most of the day.

  Green trusted they’d do that for him and concentrated on the sweating, crying woman on the gurney in front of him. He moved Nicky a little to the side so he could pull her ravaged hair back from her face, and he was immeasurably cheered by how much she stopped trembling at his touch.

  “Hey, luv. Not quite the in-home birth we had planned.”

  “Can’t we make it stop?” she begged. “Green, I don’t want to have my babies here. Not in this place, with the….”

  He followed the direction of her gaze. “Burnt pot roast indeed,” he said, laughing gently. Then he kissed her brow. “Lovey, do you think these children don’t know their mother is a warrior?”

  She swallowed, and he could feel the pressure rushing up her body. He held his hand over her stomach and sucked in a breath. Nicky and Bracken did likewise, because, Goddess knew, they were getting that same pressure on their hands as she squeezed.

  “Sh, sh, sh,” Bracken breathed, calming her more. “Corinne Carol-Anne, don’t panic. Don’t cry. We know what you are, and we love you. They’ll love you too.”

  “Kestrels would have eaten that guy already,” Nicky said cheekily. When she laughed, Green rejoiced.

  “We can do this,” he promised, kissing her brow one more time. “Now, I’m going to go look at ground zero, yes?”

  She nodded, miserable and embarrassed. Bracken spoke more surprising poetry in her ear about how she was doing something awesome and amazing, while Green used the boiling water and plain Ivory soap that Renny had brought him and the gloves that Katy held out while he waited for Cory’s next contraction to pass.

  Her thighs were spread and parted for him, and he smoothed his hands down personally. Not proper for a doctor, no, but perfectly acceptable for a husband who was going to do something intimate for his wife.

  He pushed the skirt of her once-pretty dress up under her bottom and over her stomach, not surprised that she didn’t argue with him about propriety. The inside of her body was slick and powerful, and it clenched and rippled around him as he felt for her cervix to try to measure its effacement and dilation.

  Oh, dear.

  “Beloved,” he said, stroking her flank with the hand that hadn’t made the journey, “you are ready to go—but the children not so much.” Her body couldn’t take much more. He would need to take them out if she was going to survive.

  “Oh, Goddess,” she panted. “He’s probably got scalpels here somewhere, and….” Her lower lip trembled. “I know I don’t get anesthetic, and—”

  “No anesthetic!” her mother exclaimed, and Green looked at her for the first time. She was standing by what appeared to be a baby-care station, which she had apparently organized to her liking as Green had been checking on Cory’s progress.

  “Don’t worry about pain,” Green soothed, looking meaningfully at Ellen. “Love, it’s me and Bracken. Bracken will make the incision, I’ll dull the pain. Between the two of us, there will be no more pain than the tree felt when yielding the cradle. You remember?”

  She nodded, tears of relief flowing freely. “That was beautiful, Green,” she whispered, sounding young and lost and so very determined to not lose control again. A contraction rippled through her, this one more powerful than the last, and he felt the knots in her body as all of its effort went for nothing because the creatures it was meant to expel were lying sideways in Cory’s womb.

  “You’re beautiful, lovey. Now hold on to Nicky tightly, okay?”

  “Got her, Green,” Nicky said staunchly.

  “Renny, Katy, you get a baby each. Mrs. Kirkpatrick seems to have a cleaning station over there—make sure she’s got water and cloths.”

  “The pot roast had a fuckton,” Renny said, carrying the bundle to the table. “I’ve got warm water too.”

  They were good to go.

  “Bracken,” Green said gently, calling his husband, his lover and partner in this endeavor to his side. “I’ll need you to part her flesh—gently. Just the skin, really, and the membrane, and—”

  “I’ve been studying diagrams for nine and a half months,” Bracken muttered. “Got it, healer. Just hold her and keep her from freaking out.”

  It sounded brusque, but Green saw one hand shake as Bracken rested it on Cory’s bare and glistening belly.

  Then—very, very carefully—he ran his finger down Cory’s bikini line, asking the skin and flesh to part, asking the blood to flow around the incision and not through the parted skin. Oh! Oh, there… the tiny body, impossibly folded and unutterably cramped, slid into Bracken’s hands like the missing piece to a puzzle. Bracken pulled the child out and smiled gently.

  “Look, Green. She’s all sidhe.”

  And she was—elongated features, great oval eyes, long limbs, fifteen ribs, and all. Bracken gazed sweetly into their child’s eyes, and she gazed back, not crying at all, just blinking slowly, apparently puzzled by all the goings-on. Green looked with him, keeping his hand cupped around Cory’s calf while he peered over Bracken’s shoulder, and together they marveled at the miracle of their child. Cory moaned, and Green absorbed the pressure of the next contraction, which reminded them all that they had to hurry. Bracken smiled at their child again and said, “Okay, Miss Silver, time for your first bath,” before he handed the babe to Renny.

  “Hold her while I cut the cord.”

  With a pass of his finger, no clamp was necessary.

  Renny brought the baby to Cory’s mother to wash first and then swaddle, and Bracken and Green moved on to their sturdy boy.

  Oh, he was sturdy too. Wider than his sister, his shoulders had more breadth even though they were both sidhe long. He met Bracken’s gaze fiercely, like a man, and Green looked over Bracken’s shoulder for his first look as well.

  “He’s a fighter,” Green said proudly. “Like his fathers.”

  “Or a healer,” Cory interjected breathlessly, “or an engineer, or….”

  “Or a sidhe,” Bracken said with smug satisfaction. “He can be all of us, beloved. No worries.”

  This one too was severed from his mother, and while Bracken was doing that, Green very carefully lifted the two placentas out of Cory’s uterus, marveling at how perfectly intact they were—and making sure Bracken stayed far away from Cory as he was doing so.

  “I don’t want to see what your touch would do to her wide-open body,” Green said softly. Bracken nodded, sober and attentive, before going to help the women with the children.

  Green was delicate and detailed as he reconnected his beloved’s flesh. There would be no scar, no chance of reopening, no parts of her body left savaged by surgery. When he was done, he passed his hand over her much flatter belly and pushed as much of the bleeding she would need to do down her birth canal as possible. It poured out in a gush, and Green took great care cleaning her up from that as well.

  When he looked up, Cory was looking longingly at the clean, eerily quiet childre
n.

  “Bracken won’t let me hold them yet,” she said, yearning throbbing in her voice.

  “One of them has my talent,” Brack said, his voice matter-of-fact. “I can feel it in our little boy.”

  “Drian,” Cory said without hesitation. “Baby Drian.”

  Green ran his hands over her again, wishing they had some clean clothes for her, anything but the pile of blankets in the corner. “She’ll be fine,” he said, feeling weary and happy at once. “She’ll be fine. We’ll all be….”

  Oh Goddess. They would, wouldn’t they?

  They would all be. He’d been so focused, so determined to make do in this terrible place, to take away her pain, to make sure their young were safe and well…. He hadn’t realized there would be this moment, this heartbeat, this terrifying, deliriously happy truth.

  He closed his eyes and swallowed. When he looked out again, there they were. Cory, holding their boy child. Nicky, smiling happily at their little girl. Cory’s mother, giving brisk orders to the two girls, and Bracken….

  Bracken was coming around to the end of the table and embracing him, hard and without compromise.

  “Fine,” he whispered as Green felt the panic sobs take him over. “We’re all going to be fine.”

  Oh, Goddess. Goddess, they really were. They were going to be fine.

  Cory: Not a One-Woman Show

  THANK GODDESS I don’t remember much about the next two days after the twins were born. We made it back to the hill, and I got to spend lots of time in the shower sitting on the bench Green had moved in for me.

  Then I got to spend lots of time in bed, propped on pillows, having my nipples chewed on by the two little aliens that Green had produced out of my womb like rabbits. “Hey, Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my cooter!”

  Or at least that’s what it felt like for the first two days. I remember the men feeding me, holding the children, touching me absently. But really, at this point I was a postgestational cow and too exhausted to even bitch about it.

  My life was a blur of visiting Mom and Dad, of hill folk coming in to pay their respects, of breastfeeding and me-feeding and tiny alien things who seemed to need me all the time.

  So strange, so disconnected. It was as though that strange interlude in the doctor’s garage hadn’t ever happened. I’d gone shopping with my mother and had come home with two completely new beings who were now the center of my life.

  I wasn’t sure what to do with that. Even when Hallow told me that my professors had given me two weeks for maternity leave, I still wasn’t really sure what I’d done to deserve that. It had been a battle, right? After most battles we just came down from the high, but now I got to be a mommy?

  But then, one night—probably around nine o’clock, because the vampires were up but everyone had been kicked out of the bedroom for a bit—I heard that baby noise. Not crying, because creepily enough, they didn’t cry. This freaked the fuck out of my mother, who said it was worse than Dr. Pot Roast (oh, the shame), and I had nothing much to say to that. She’d seen a guy I’d fried like meat, and still wanted to hold my children. I couldn’t complain about my parents anymore. It was official, they’d passed parenthood. They’d had to take some remedial courses in personal acceptance and taking your child on faith, but some parents never pass that shit at all, so they were doing okay.

  So this night, when my children were two days old, my room was suddenly… empty. And quiet. Lambent had just left, after telling me that the strange fire in the almost empty suburb in Grass Valley had been declared a result of natural causes. I had no idea how Lambent did that, but he didn’t want me to thank him for it, so I left it alone. And without that to think about, I was suddenly awake with my cooing children.

  It felt like the first time we’d been alone together.

  They were both in bed with me—which was sort of funny after all that fuss about the cradles—but honestly, with the breastfeeding, it was just as easy to roll over, open the neck of my nightgown, and flop a boob into someone’s mouth so I could allow myself to be milked like a cow. (Bracken told me that the next time I said moo when I did this, he was going to buy me a black-and-white spotted sweat suit. I only said it very softly after that.)

  But right now they didn’t need the milk bar, and they didn’t want Bracken or Green or Nicky. They were just lying there, flailing their little limbs around with great enjoyment and making vowels into the quiet room.

  I propped my head on my hand and stroked their little cheeks. Both of them made those little happy cooing noises and leaned into my touch.

  “Hiya,” I said quietly. “I don’t know if you caught this, in all of the excitement of the last couple of days, but I’m sort of your mom.”

  Drian caught my finger then—oh, so strong! I had no idea if human babies could do this yet, but I was understanding the delight of that strong little grip.

  “Oaooaaaaooooo….” Could have meant anything, really, but I took it as a sign of disbelief. Me? I was on board for parenthood? Jesus, what was the world thinking?

  “Yes.” I nodded at him. “Your mother. I will make mistakes, you know? I mean, I cooked the first ob-gyn who tried to deliver you. Nobody has said anything about it, but even I know that wasn’t cool. But I’ll try—I promise I’ll try. I’ll be the best mom I can, okay?”

  He blinked sober green eyes at me, and I took that for acceptance.

  The other baby, Silver, let out this… it wasn’t even a coo. It was this… this sweet little vowel that probably didn’t exist in English. And when I caught her flailing little fist, she didn’t just catch my finger—I could swear she brought it to her cheek.

  Then she smiled.

  “Hello, Silver,” I said quietly. She regarded me with wide eyes that were a suspiciously familiar color of silver-spangled blue. “You and me, we’re going to have to work hard to be friends, aren’t we? I’m sort of in-your-face, and you’re a real little lady.”

  She rubbed my finger against her cheek again, and then Drian let out the most tremendous belch. He smiled too. And there. Boom. It happened.

  Both of my children. I had officially fallen in love.

  I THINK any new parent will tell you, those first couple of weeks happen so fast.

  I mean, the sleep deprivation didn’t help. Even with a thousand people who wanted to hold the babies and smile and coo and sing songs to them, the milk bar got priority seating. There was no pumping the milk to put in a bottle, and there was no “daddies feed too.” What we had instead was a mom who didn’t cook, clean, organize, or shop. My one job—one job—when I wasn’t at school was to nurse the children.

  Given how badly I had reacted to anything chemical or human when I’d been in labor, I certainly wasn’t going to try to change that.

  They were a wonder, really. I would find myself singing—anything from rock and roll to show tunes—and catch their eyes on me as though I’d done something amazing, marvelous, something that no other human being or sidhe on earth could ever do.

  Green told me that he would never let me stop singing again, and I was so high on breastfeeding endorphins that I sang “Rain Will Fall” for him with no prompting whatsoever. I was holding Drian as I sang it, and Green teared up, so deliriously happy with fatherhood that I resolved to sing to him every week if I could manage.

  Of course, those are the sorts of promises that we break to ourselves when our lives get busy—that’s the nature of living in a bustling household. The ability to remember those promises sometimes marks our ability to hold our lovers to our hearts.

  My lovers, all three of them, were doing a pretty good job of keeping their own grip on the lot of us.

  There was no “primary parent” thing going on here. I may have been the milk bar—but at the hill, when a baby needed to be fed, the first person near the baby brought said baby to me. Everybody changed diapers. Everybody gave baths. Everybody, at one time or another, fell asleep propped in a corner with a sleeping baby on his or her chest. />
  Of all the times that I missed having Bracken and Green on film, those were the times I ached with that the most. There was a pureness to that moment, a terrifying vulnerability. In Green’s hill, those daddies with the sleeping babies on their chests were the most carefully guarded beings in the world.

  After two weeks I had to go back to school. We had to take separate cars. Bracken, Nicky, the babies, the baby gear, and me—we filled up an SUV. It was amazing.

  It was also frustrating—and a good way to get back in shape—because I insisted on pushing that damned stroller all over the place. We kept it covered at all times—and, of course, darling little hats over their ears. If anyone who caught a glimpse of them thought they were too deformed to be human, nobody was rude enough to say so.

  And after a week or two of pushing that stroller around, I started to feel a little better about my thighs, my stomach, my back, and my grades.

  Again I was blessed with circumstance. I could not have brought my children to school to breastfeed if they had been human babies.

  Human babies cry.

  “There’s got to be a horrible penalty involved here,” I told Bracken during our first school day with quiet children. “Something terrifying and real that will make us say, ‘Jeez, I would have traded a thousand sleepless nights with a colicky baby if only to avoid this!’”

  Bracken smiled at me, his perfect oval of a face so gentle and so noble that I was forced to remember the way he’d sung to my blood and the way he’d cut so gently into my body that he hadn’t even left a scar.

  “They get to be sexually active at sixteen,” he said soberly. “And they will tell you everything.”

  I blinked, and the full horror descended. I looked into Silver’s eyes, and she regarded me back with equanimity. Her hair was starting to grow, so blonde it was colorless. I was pretty sure that within the year it would be butter yellow.

  “That’s a horrible thing to do to your mother,” I told her, truly rocked.

  She actually smiled around my nipple and laughed, apparently all done.