by Alicorn
Sue looked at me suspciously, and then the baby kicked her again. One more tiny snap.
She winced.
"Fine," she said under her breath.
* * *
The logistics were these:
I would perform the cut, with a scalpel pilfered from Carlisle's medical kit. Harry didn't think he could manage to wield the implement against his wife, even for its beneficial purpose. Syringes - full of Harry's venom, not mine - were at the ready on her bedside table. When I'd pulled out the shell with the baby in it, I was to break it, while Harry would inject her. I'd described for his benefit what I'd seen of Ilario's turning, and he knew where to aim.
"There's no anaesthesia for the surgery," Harry fretted, while I was dousing the scalpel in rubbing alcohol for a probably-unnecessary sterilization.
"Harry," I said. "You're going to turn her. If you're going to worry about having no anaesthesia, at least worry about that, not a cut." He nodded morosely.
Their children were going to hold onto her arms and legs so she didn't thrash too far and throw off my aim. After she was shot up with venom, we'd move her to the shack to finish up the transformation without human prey nearby. She had all the advance information, so there was every reason to expect her adjustment to be as smooth as mine. Better than Ilario, who'd learned that vampires really were real when he was barely capable of keeping his eyes open; better than Harry, who'd known all the myths but placed no stock in any of them until the moment his werewolf daughter sprang.
There was every reason to be optimistic, but the mood as we assembled in that close little room that stank of ill health was a dim one. Still, Leah dutifully took hold of her mother's ankles and Seth grabbed her wrists. I clutched my scalpel, Harry had a syringe in each hand, and we waited for Sue to give us the go-ahead.
I held my breath.
In the back of my mind, some little voice was screaming, This is not the way of things! You are not a doctor! You don't know what you're doing at all! You could kill Sue - you could kill her baby - Harry's never been near human blood at all since turning, what if he reacts to more than the smell and holding his breath won't do? What if - what if - do a safer thing -
But this was the safer thing, even if it had me holding a knife, even if it had me acting instead of waiting.
And I hushed that little voice, and looked into Sue's eyes.
"Go," she said.
* * *
I had no idea what I was doing.
It wasn't hard to cut her open, but I was trying to do it with the sharpness of the scalpel more than the brute force that would have let me pry her open with my bare hands, and it wasn't a balance I was familiar with. It was hard to ignore her labored breathing, her periodic screams, Seth's small whine, and the sudden notion that if anything would cause a werewolf to phase uncontrollably it might be witnessing their mother inexpertly carved up by a vampire.
I'd found time to borrow a computer and look up whatever I could on C-sections, which told me more than I needed to know about the etymology of the term and less than I needed to know to get a half-vampire out of Sue.
The scalpel wasn't sharp enough to cut the shell, so that told me where to stop, at least. I made a big crescent-shaped incision, not expecting to be able to get something roundish and nigh-indestructible out of a straight line. When I set down the instrument and tried to grab the shell, trying to hurry, and yanked, Sue's entire body jerked up with it. The shell was embedded. I'd let up the pulling soon enough to avoid breaking her spine, but it couldn't have been good for her already splintering ribs.
She howled again, and I could hear Leah grinding her teeth. I picked up the scalpel again and tried to cut away more flesh from the shell, but it was no good, it was stuck on all sides. Sue's heart started stuttering, and there was blood everywhere.
If I couldn't get the shell out, I had to open it while it was still attached.
"Breathe, Mom," pleaded Seth, his eyes screwed shut.
My hands were strong, but they were not sharp.
My teeth were sharp, but they were in mymouth, and there was so much blood, and Iknew that one taste would be the end of Sue.
I reached over her, pried Harry's mouth open, and ripped one of his canines from his gums.
While Harry hissed with pain, I swiped his tooth over the shell, then rinsed it in the alcohol I'd used to sterilize the scalpel and handed it back to him. He put it back in his mouth before any of the non-vampires in the room had even figured out what I was doing, and then there was a break in the shell that I could force my fingers into and lever open.
Inside was a tiny, warm baby boy with a heartbeat like a buzz, in a bath of viscous, clear fluid that smelled a lot like vampire venom. Sue started gurgling.
I reached in and picked him up. With my reserved air, I told Harry, "Now." The fluid stung my skin a little, but dried quickly when exposed to air and didn't seem to have done any permanent damage.
Harry lifted the first syringe and thrust it into Sue's heart.
* * *
Cody bit me with his full complement of teeth the moment after his mother started howling at the burn of the venom, even as Harry picked up the second syringe and emptied it into the secondary pulse points. She didn't need to keep still anymore, so Leah and Seth let her go, and Harry was holding her instead. He told her that he loved her, but couldn't talk much - until her blood was all dry he couldn't replenish his air without leaving her side.
The bite hurt - a lot. I jerked Cody's face away from my arm reflexively, and Leah must not have liked the way I was handling him, because she grabbed him from me at once. I rubbed the tiny double crescent wound on my wrist, which was whitening and puffing up with the scarring venom. There was not going to be any way to hide that. I'd at least have a while to think of stories.
"Leah, he's -" I began, but Cody had already chomped on her thumb. She dropped him.
Leah screamed, which, for someone who had just been bitten by a venomous creature, was normal. Her thumb was turning green, which was not normal.
It was only to be expected that werewolves would react differently to vampire venom, and not in a good way. I didn't wait to see what would happen if the substance spread: I seized Leah's hand and pinched her thumb off.
The severed thumb fell to the floor and Leah phased, snarling; the nightstand fell over and a lamp broke when she wound up with a hind leg in the wrong place. She was missing a digit from the paw corresponding to the one with the injured thumb, but it was healing over rapidly, and was not an abnormal color. She only narrowly missed stepping on her baby brother, who didn't appear to have been injured by his fall one bit and was happily staring up at her furry neck. He picked up the thumb, put it in his mouth, and then discarded it, uninterested. A burst-open sleeve from Leah's shirt drifted down and landed on his face, and he giggled.
Seth, who'd witnessed the entire sequence of events, had the presence of mind to drag Cody away from Leah by his feet, preventing him from biting again. Leah panted, whined, and finally got herself furless again. She grabbed the less bloody of the two pillows on the bed to cover herself with (the blankets being complete losses). Seth, leaving Cody burbling happily on the floor, ran to get her replacements.
Sue was not nearly as quiet a turner as Harry had been. She screamed, wordlessly, incoherently, possibly even ignorant of Harry's presence.
I was already going to have to explain one scar, and at least Cody's bites wouldn't leave me permanently deprived of any extremities. I picked up the baby - one hand under his head, one under the rest of his body, positioning him in a way least likely to present a chewtoy target. I carried him out of the blood-soaked room, and downstairs to the bassinet that Seth had pulled out of the attic the day before, where I placed him. Leah followed me down the stairs, having gotten herself dressed. Seth went past us, murmuring, "I'll let everyone know how it went."
"Can you breathe here?" Leah asked me in a low voice.
I took a small taste of the air, testin
g it. The smell was faint - just a few droplets of mostly-dry blood on myself and the little of it that wafted down the stairs. In a pinch, the fact that Sue was Harry's mate ought to let me pull in self-defense instincts the way I had in the Amazon Basin. "If I have to," I told her. I heard Harry, presumably with Sue in tow, leaping out the window to carry her to the less inhabited shack.
"Dad isn't going to want to leave Mom while she's... for the next few days," Leah said. "I'm, uh, missing a thumb, now. I don't know if I heal well enough to grow it back, especially since it looks like it's healing to a stump. So I don't think I can really handle Cody until he learns not to bite people. Same with Seth. And if he bites somebody who's not a wolf they'll just... like Mom."
"Right," I said, beginning to guess where she was going with this.
"Can you... babysit my brother?" she asked tentatively. "Just until Dad can take over."
"All you have to do is keep away from his teeth," I said. "He's pretty durable - more than you are, almost as much as I am. I doubt you're going to hurt him if you handle him strangely to avoid getting chomped. Besides, I'd need to avoid getting bitten too." I pointed out my new scar.
"The risks are different," insisted Leah. "You grabbed Dad's tooth right out of his mouth without explaining - he could've bitten you."
"If I'd used mine, I would've been too distracted by the pain to make the cut carefully until it healed and made it hard to put the tooth back. I didn't have enough air to explain my idea so Harry could do it with one of my teeth. Anyway, he didn't bite me."
"But you are in way less danger from a Cody bite," Leah said.
"Remember the part where Nahuel lived on his own in the jungle for three days until Huilen could take care of him? You could just leave him in the bassinet and feed him blood or infant formula or whatever you decide to give him, with a long miniature ladle or a baster or something, and count his toes once in a while for contact. In three days Sue'll be turned and his parents can take care of him, and in a week or two he'll be talking and you can tell him that there is No Biting Allowed."
Cody chose this moment to fall asleep. He was a rather cute baby, really. He already had a thin dusting of black hair, and he was standard Native American colored, not Harry's ecru. "Please," said Leah. "I'm missing my thumb - I mean, thank you for getting it off, otherwise it'd probably be my whole arm or I'd be dead or something - but there's only so many amputations I can take."
"If you do it right you shouldn't need anything else amputated," I said. "I want to go home to my husband. I want to go home to my husband a week ago."
"Damn it, can't you ever do anything that'sunambiguously helpful?"
I took a moment to flip through what things I'd done impacted Leah's life and how ambiguous their helpfulness might have seemed. Activated her - and her fiancé, who'd dumped her for her favorite cousin as a result. Saved her father from the injuries she'd inflicted - by turning him into a vampire and sending him away from home. Delivered her baby brother - by turning her mother, too, when Leah found vampires particularly unpleasant to be around. Saved her from some unknown green fate when Cody bit her - by removing her thumb.
So I could see why Leah might find my help a little... mixed.
But that didn't really explain why she wanted me to babysit.
"I do tend to leave complications in my wake," I said. "But that doesn't make me a great choice for a nanny. Neither does the fact that I'm going stir-crazy over my husband being on another continent."
"I'm worried Seth's going to try to pick Cody up if nobody else does, and I don't want him getting fanged to death," Leah said. "If one of us doesget bitten, and our parents aren't here, and you aren't here, we don't have a lot of really fast, clean options for getting the gangrene off."
I threaded my fingers through my hair. This was fair. Knives existed and werewolves were pretty fast, but there would still be a few extra seconds of spreading venom, and some precision sacrificed if they hurried. "Seth isn't stupid," I said.
"But he's a kid," said Leah. "Which means he sometimes acts stupider than he is. Do you really think he's not going to try to put his old baby clothes on Cody, even if it means putting his hands too near those teeth?"
I could see Seth doing that. "So what you really want me to do is stop Seth from trying to babysit Cody, rather than babysit Cody myself."
"Well, you could do it by making Seth unnecessary," Leah said.
"Leah, I want to go home. I want to say goodbye to my dad, buy plane tickets, and go try to find a way to tell my husband that we can possibly have our own baby without killing our surrogate, without explaining about Cody in particular."
"Wait, what? You're going to do this again?"
"If the surrogate, who wants to be a vampire anyway, agrees, I'm going to do it again, yes - surrounded by well-equipped doctors who know what's going on with anaesthetics all ready to go. Old, experienced vampire doctors, who have the advance expectation of the C-section and the knowledge that the shell's attached to the walls of the uterus and whatnot."
"Okay..." said Leah. "So you won't help?"
"If helping here means spending more than another half hour or so not taking steps to go home, and it's not a real emergency - sorry, going to have to say no," I said apologetically. "Ifhelping means giving you a couple hundred dollars for baby stuff, or answering a couple quick questions about vampires or half-vampires, or killing a couple elk and harvesting their blood for your baby brother so you don't have to do more of that for a couple days, that's fine, that's quick, but that's not what you seem to want."
"I do have one question," Leah said.
"Shoot."
"What's... Dad wouldn't tell us anything about what turning was like. And now Mom's in the middle of it. What's happening to her?" Leah paused. "Do I even want to know?"
"You probably don't," I said. "It's not something you'll need to prepare for yourself, obviously. But remember - when it's over, it's over. In a few days she'll be fine, it's not the same as if the same sensation were somehow inflicted on someone who was all human throughout. Beyond turning her into a vampire it's not that much of a life-altering experience. In a few more days she'll be fit for mortal company - your dad will be able to bring Cody to see her sooner than that; he doesn't smell like food or like a danger the way Billy or you would, respectively."
"He does smell sort of nice," Leah agreed absently, looking at the sleeping baby. "Like fruit, maybe."
"Well, if he smells like food to you, that's way less dangerous than if he smelled like food to either of your parents," I said. "The sorts of provocations that make a wolf go berserk aren't the same ones that affect a young vampire."
"What's he smell like to you?" asked Leah.
"Why are you stalling me? You have, or can get, my e-mail address," I said. "They have Internet in Norway."
Leah seemed stumped by this question. Finally, she said, "Rachel's been the one keeping in touch with you on behalf of the whole pack."
"That doesn't mean you can't too, if you feel like it," I said, shrugging. "I would need a lot more pen pals before e-mail would start to take up a significant chunk of my time - I can read a screen of text almost instantly and type a few hundred words per minute. Although I'm sort of puzzled about why you'd want to talk to me at all. Rachel told me to stay far away from you because I was a "herald of all things awful in your life", after Sam imprinted."
"That's exactly why I want to talk to you," she burst out. "After Sam imprinted, I couldn't talk to anybody in the pack, because they were all basically on his side, as if I couldn't feel what he felt about Emily too and as if everyone else couldn't feel what I was going through. Even Seth! But I could talk to Emily. But then we hadone stupid fight about her borrowing myshampoo, of all the things we could have fought about, and she ran to Sam and we're only starting to carefully be acquaintances and we're never going to be best friends again, ever. So I talked to Mom, but that wasn't that great to begin with because I was the reason herhusband was gon
e in the first place, and then it turns out that she's been seeing him in secret for weeks, and now they're going to be hunky-dory forever. Who am I going to talk to? Somebody too old to phase? Somebody who hasn't got the gene who doesn't really get things even if they have them explained fifty times?"
"So... I'm outside the situation enough that you can talk to me, but close enough to it that you don't have to keep awkward secrets or talk across gaps of understanding?" I filled in, tilting my head.
"Yeah. It's just barely enough to make up for the stench you've got."
"I also have a phone," I said. "I presume you can't smell me through it. But you shouldn't call it - you won't be able to tell when I'm alone. If you don't like e-mail, I'm willing to call you once a while to talk. But not in the next day, which I hope to spend mostly on a series of planes, if you don't mind. I really, really want to go home."
"Is it like when the guys have to go a while without their imprints?"
"Sort of," I said, "but it goes in both directions. So not only am I standing here kind of inclined to curl up in a ball and whine because Edward's not here, I also know perfectly well that he is inScandinavia feeling the exact same way and I don't like that. He doesn't even understand why I had to leave him alone. He's just trusting that it's something very important that he can't know about. Are we done? Can I go?"
"Sure," said Leah. "Sorry."
I did not feel that I needed any further permission from Leah to leave.
Seth and I passed each other while I left his house. I asked him if he knew where Charlie was, and he directed me to Billy's house. I walked right in without knocking - the door was half-open - and announced that I was leaving.