Chapter 8
“SOMEONE GET DEEDEE up here! And call Dylan!” Glinda shouted down the stairwell before helping me lie down on the nursery floor.
“I’ll give him a bell,” Daisy hollered back. Whether or not he’d have signal in this storm was anyone’s guess.
“This rug is organic wool,” I grunted through a contraction.
“Mmhmm, that’s nice,” Glinda said in a soothing voice, our argument a distant memory.
“It’s from Peru. Expensive—” A whimper slipped out before I swore under my breath. “Wizard help me.”
“Dylan is on his way,” DeeDee said, entering the nursery with the birth kit in hand. Hermosa scrambled in behind her with a stack of fresh towels. Sweat gleamed across her crinkled brow, but she contained her worry there as she barked orders at my cousin.
“Grab that pillow off the rocking chair and place it behind her head. Then go fetch a tub of water from the second-floor bathroom.”
“Right.” Glinda jumped up, eager to have something useful to do besides watch me writhe in pain and breathe like an asthmatic kid trying to blow out birthday candles. “I’ll be right back,” she told me after tucking the pillow under my neck.
“Could you get my bathrobe?” I gasped. “This dress has got to go.” The seams were straining with every tortured breath I took. The little silver bat at my throat was a nagging irritation now, too. I ripped it off and tossed it across the room.
DeeDee took the cue and slipped off my silver flats, calmly setting them aside. “If you’re doing this on your back, we should put a rolled towel under your hips.”
I snatched the towel from her and stuffed it behind me before the next contraction set in. “Done.” I groaned and rolled my head back to look out the window.
The storm was still going strong, but I tried to focus my breath, imagining it dispersing the clouds. Blowing Ingra away didn’t sound like such a bad idea, but I didn’t want Dylan trying to reach me in this mess.
Breathe in... one, two, three... breathe out... one, two, three...
The rain softened to a sprinkle, and a ray of light flickered through the gray. The next contraction smothered it out. But I kept breathing, willing the storm to pass along with my labor.
“I’m here!” Dylan finally shouted from downstairs. A chorus of gasps echoed up from the foyer, and then a wet fruit bat bolted into the nursery. Dylan shifted back to his human form and knelt beside me, taking my hand in his. “Are you okay?”
“Do I look okay?” I croaked. “She’s early.”
“She’s right on time,” Mama Hermosa replied. “My little Yanet is almost here.” She giggled and rubbed her hands together, stopping only when a flash of lightning lit up the windows. “Or whatever you decide to name her, mija,” she quickly amended.
Glinda returned with my robe and the tub of water just as something south of my border split open, and I made a sound that I was pretty sure no witch or Shifter had heard before, considering the looks on all their faces.
“Did she shift in there? Is that even possible?” I wailed, gripping Dylan’s hand hard enough to draw a grunt from him.
“You’re doing great,” DeeDee said in her docile voice, rolling up the hem of my dress to spread my legs wider. “She’s crowning.”
“It feels like she’s wearing a crown,” I said through gritted teeth.
“The little princesa,” Hermosa cooed.
“Keep pushing,” DeeDee encouraged. I was too lost in agony to ask what the hell she thought I’d been doing all this time. I needed this baby out, now.
And then, after a moment that felt like an eternity, she was here. Our daughter had arrived.
“There we are,” DeeDee shushed the baby’s delicate cries as she cleaned and swaddled her.
Glinda helped Dylan peel off my dress and wrapped me in the soft bathrobe, and then our little bundle was tucked in the crook of my arm, with Dylan’s wrapped securely around us both.
Only then did I realize that he was still naked.
“I’ll go fetch you some britches, mi cachorro,” Hermosa offered, frowning at Glinda’s wandering gaze. My cousin dragged her eyes away from my batty beau’s brawn and looked down at our daughter.
“She’s so tiny,” she marveled. “Is that normal for a fruit bat Shifter?”
DeeDee nodded. “She’s actual slightly above average—and just slightly below average for a full-blooded witch. And well below average for a cow.”
“She didn’t feel below average coming out,” I commented, though my labor pains had melted into something softer, drowned out by overwhelming bliss. The storm was gone, and a triple rainbow stretched over the house, the colors shining through both windows and filling the nursery.
Tears blurred my eyes, but I blinked them away to better see our masterpiece.
She was perfection. The most perfect thing I’d ever created.
A pink, cupid’s bow mouth stretched into a yawn beneath her button nose, and a curl of dark hair rested on her forehead.
Equally dark lashes lined her sleepy, emerald-green eyes.
There was West in there, but also plenty of Hernández.
The best of us both, I begged the Wizard.
“Congratulations, cousin,” Glinda whispered as she knelt beside me and dropped the softest kiss on the baby’s head. Then she pressed one to my cheek and smiled sadly. “I don’t want to leave.”
“I know, but your sister and mother are waiting—”
“No, I don’t want to go back to Kansas,” she said. “I can’t imagine being halfway across the country and only watching your daughter grow up in photographs.”
“Then don’t go back,” I pleaded, feeling more vulnerable with my whole world nestled around me and in my arms.
Glinda smiled and stood. “I’ll be back after dinner. Cross my heart.” She made the motion over her chest, and one of her puffy sleeves snagged her attention. Her nose crinkled in disgust. “I’ve had about enough of this nonsense, too,” she said, snapping her fingers.
A crackle of green electricity spiraled around her torso, and her black funeral dress shredded out of existence, leaving behind a leather catsuit lined with jeweled studs. “Much better,” she sighed. With a second snap of her fingers, she vanished in a limey spark.
“My, people come and go so quickly around here,” DeeDee said, startled by my cousin’s electric exit.
“Can we see bitty bat now?” Asher called from the second-floor landing.
“Patience, bub,” Daisy chastised him.
“But Papa Ernesto says she’s here now!”
“Are you ready for them, mija?” Hermosa called next, already on her way back up with Dylan’s clothes.
I couldn’t speak past the lump in my throat, but I nodded to DeeDee without taking my eyes away from our batty angel’s face.
My doula stepped through the doorway and waved them upstairs.
“Yes!” Asher squealed, tearing ahead of his mother and abuela.
“Gently, now,” Daisy warned as he crawled in beside Dylan, stretching over his uncle’s thick arm to get a better look.
“Yup, she’s just a bitty bat.” Asher stroked the little curl on her head with a gentle finger.
“For now,” Dylan agreed. “Give her time.”
“What will we call her when she’s no longer bitty?” Asher asked.
“Anything but Yanet,” a deep voice replied.
Everyone’s heads snapped up, our focus shifting away from the baby with break-neck speed. A ghostly apparition stood at the foot of the crib, one arm reclined over the railing near the bat and broom mobile. His features sharpened, and a vague sense of recognition struck me.
“Dios mío.” Hermosa tried to cross herself, but she fainted halfway through.
Asher clapped his hands, realizing we could all see the ghost. “I told you Papa Ernesto lived in the nursery!”
* * *
“PAPA? IS IT REALLY you?” Dylan asked, tugging on the shorts and shirt his mama had fetched. Being naked in front of my doula and cousin hadn’t phased him, but somehow free-balling it in front of his ghostly pops was crossing the line.
“Yes, is it really you?” Hermosa wanted to know, too.
She blinked dreamily up at her late husband, still incapacitated on the floor where DeeDee fanned her with one of the baby books.
My deer Shifter doula was the only one who looked truly spooked.
I’d seen too many of Dylan’s late Mamas and Papas to be rattled by them now, but there were worse fears to fret over.
“We broke the curse,” I insisted, but it sounded too much like a question for my liking. “How are you still here?”
“You broke the curse, all right.” Ernesto chuckle, and my skin crawled at the idea of him peeping on the sex ritual Dylan and I had performed to free his family from their involuntary haunting.
“Then why are you still here?” I demanded a second time.
“I wanted to meet my nieta, of course.” He managed to look more annoyed than I was, which was saying something.
Then he had to go and add, “All your actividad in the orchard, I knew it wouldn’t be long.
What’s another year or two when I’ve been here for over twenty?
And then I learned of my nieto!” he said, greeting Asher with a wide smile. “Your father would be so proud.”
“Why have you not shown yourself before now?” Hermosa asked. The hurt in her voice was palpable. If Dylan had succumbed to the curse and then hid from me, I would have brought him back just to kill him again. But maybe that was just the vengeful West in me.
“Mi amor, mi vida,” Ernesto said, kneeling to cup Hermosa’s cheek with his ghostly hand. “You left me so long ago, alone in this house after I’d fallen to the curse. I feared you did not want to see me, that I would only cause you distress.”
“Mi corazón,” Hermosa wept. “I am so sorry. I could not bear to be in this house, knowing it would one day steal our sons away, too. Forgive me?”
“Siempre.”
The tender moment was broken by a cacophony of screams from the batamigas downstairs and panicked screeches in the belfry above.
“We have company,” I said, realizing that having the baby hadn’t zapped my ability to semi-understand the bat colony’s noises. Strange, curly silhouettes cut through the rainbows on the nursery floor.
Daisy rushed to the window, and her eyes swelled with terror. She swallowed a scream of her own before she found her voice. “Are those... snakes?”