Chapter 16
He had been optimistic at first. But the county hospital, the next-door county’s hospital and the three hospitals in Baltimore all insisted that the roads were impassable.
None had a wizard on staff. And though Baltimore claimed a chief, deputy and assistant omnimancer, any one of whom could deliver a doctor to his door, no one picked up the line when he rang it.
He tried the county police. The county fire department. Even the county public works department. No, sir. Sorry, sir. Can’t possibly, sir.
He put down the useless phone, escaped the sweet old neighbor it belonged to—“such a terrible to-do! My aunt went through the same thing, never the same afterward, poor dear”—and ran downstairs to the Clarks’ apartment.
Beatrix, a steaming tea kettle in hand and several towels under an arm, swiveled and hurried toward him as he came in. “Were you able—you weren’t, were you.”
He shook his head. “Tell me there’s someone in town with medical training—a nurse, an emergency-medical technician, someone.”
But he too knew the answer to his question before he got it. “No,” she said.
Mrs. Clark cried out. Beatrix looked him in the eye. “Sue says she’s feeling intense pain in her back, and Brown’s says that often means the baby is turned the wrong way.”
Reading the lexicon was a felony on her part—reading it in the open here where any of the family could have seen her do it was a dangerous risk.
But he couldn’t keep his mind on that while the baby is turned the wrong way echoed in his head.
He’d been turned the wrong way. His mother didn’t survive the procedure that got him out.
He steadied himself on the wall. “I could teleport her to a hospital. Should I?”
Beatrix stared at him, and he knew she understood what he was asking. Should he use their last red leaf to give Mrs. Clark a better shot, or should he save it for the very real possibility that they’d need it themselves?
“Yes,” Beatrix said. “Just check the lexicon to make sure we can.”
He swallowed convulsively to press down the dread as he flipped through Brown’s. What if Beatrix’s sister died for want of a red? What if Beatrix—but at that point he found a notation in the book that made the issue moot.
Under “Contraindicated spells—pregnancy,” the book said: Teleportation while pregnant could contribute to birth defects and is not recommended.
NOT TO BE ATTEMPTED DURING DELIVERY: As with patients who have severe wounds or internal injuries, teleportation for mothers in the midst of delivery carries a high risk of death.
Beatrix, looking at the words over his shoulder, gave a deep sigh. Another scream came from the bedroom, and she scurried back with her supplies.
Perhaps a spell could turn the baby in the womb?
He flipped to the childbirth section and found it was three sentences in its entirety.
The first two read: Certain spells can ease delivery or help with discomfort, but they endanger the child and mother if cast imperfectly or at the wrong time.
Not to be attempted by wizards without obstetrics training.
Be aware, Brown’s added unhelpfully, that spells cannot help with the infections that pregnant mothers frequently acquire during delivery.
That was how Beatrix’s mother died.
There was nothing for it but to lend an almost entirely useless pair of hands, which he would have to scrub within an inch of his life. It was one thing, by trial, error and good luck, to deliver a calf. It was an entirely different matter to—
He sprang to his feet, eyes wide. Then he dashed up the steps to the neighbor with the working telephone, barged in without so much as a hello-I’m-back and dialed with trembling fingers.
“Martinelli,” the man on the other end of the line said.
“Oh, thank God, you’re still at work, I thought you might have left and I have no idea what your home number is—”
“Blackwell?” Martinelli laughed. “Slow down. What is it?”
“Sue Clark is in labor and we’re snowed in. I can’t get her to a hospital—”
“Oh!”
“Yes, and she needs a doctor immediately—something’s wrong. Can you hop a red to a hospital, get an obstetrician and bring him here?”
There was a too-long pause.
“Martinelli?”
“You know I hate teleporting. It makes me queasy.”
“I know, but this is important—”
“And that’s four reds I’d need because I’d have to return the guy and get myself home. You’re not serious.”
“Yes I am! I’m telling you, she’s in trouble—”
“Call the police—or better yet, the fire department. They’ll get through.”
“I’ve called the fucking police, and the fucking fire department, and every fucking hospital within twenty miles!”
The sweet old neighbor put a hand over her mouth, eyes wide. He rubbed his temples and said in more modulated tones, “We think her baby’s turned the wrong way. She’s in a lot of pain, and—” He took a fortifying breath. “My mother died delivering me. I can’t let that happen to Mrs. Clark. Please.”
Martinelli sighed. “All right. Damn it, I can’t say no to that. Where are you? Give me the address.”
He showed up ten minutes later, a doctor in tow. Then he sat next to Peter on the living room couch, patting him on the back. “Don’t worry, I brought you the real deal.”
“You know him?”
“Yeah, he’s …” Martinelli trailed off as the Clark children clustered around them.
“Is the doctor a wizard?” Anna asked, wincing as her mother gave another wrenching cry.
“No,” Peter said. “You can tell because wizards’ hair is always long and silver.”
“We’re very vain about our hair,” Martinelli said in a stage whisper, leaning in and tickling the youngest (Evan? Yes, Evan) with the end of his queue. The boy giggled. His older brother touched it with a single, careful finger, eyes wide with awe.
Anna was not sidetracked. She took a shuddering breath, a sob barely checked. “But wouldn’t it be better if he was a wizard?”
“Magic is nearly useless in certain situations,” Peter said. “This is one of them. A good doctor is worth ten omnimancers—wouldn’t you say so, Wizard Martinelli?”
“Oh, at least. Maybe twenty.”
“Definitely twenty Pentagram researchers.”
Martinelli laughed and told Anna that the doctor lived in his neighborhood and was very, very good.
Then he asked who wanted to hear a story, which naturally all the children did.
Peter watched as Anna relaxed, trusting that they knew what they were talking about.
Partway into a ridiculous tale about talking cats, Evan crawled onto Martinelli’s lap.
By the end of the fourth story, the boy was asleep.
“How many children do you have?” Peter murmured, realizing he had no idea about Martinelli’s life outside work besides the fact that he was married. And had a doctor as a neighbor.
“None.”
He sounded—Peter couldn’t entirely tell what. Wistful? Resigned?
“Oh!” someone cried from the bedroom. Beatrix? A sudden, confused noise followed. Urgent voices. Then a baby’s wail.
Peter realized suddenly that he hadn’t heard Mrs. Clark for—how long? Five minutes? Ten?
He dashed to the room, heart in his throat.
She lay in the bed, pale, unmoving, eyes shut. The horror of it—what would he tell her children? What would happen to them?—rendered him unable to look away.
Then Beatrix said, “Sue, you did it,” and took her hand. And the woman he’d thought was dead turned and sobbed into Beatrix’s arms as her husband—also crying—held the infant who could have killed her, but did not.
Yet.
Peter followed the doctor out of the room as he went to wash up. “What can we do to avoid infection?”
“Clean hands, of course,” the man said. “Keep the mother inside for at least the next week, and separate her as much as possible from the other children for a little while so they won’t introduce—”
Anna streaked by, too fast for Peter to catch her. She slipped past Beatrix and threw her arms around her mother. “You’re all right!” she said, repeating it like a mantra: “You’re all right, you’re all right, you’re all right …”
Peter groaned. The doctor shrugged. “The honest answer? Besides clean hands, there’s not much we can do. Life is a gamble, Omnimancer. Childbirth, doubly so. At least in this case, you don’t have to worry about the infections she might pick up from other patients.”
Later, after the doctor was convinced that Mrs. Clark could be safely left to the care of her family, Peter extracted the sleeping Evan from Martinelli’s arms.
“Thank you,” he said, unable to get anything more out over the lump in his throat.
“You owe me,” Martinelli said, raising his eyebrows.
More than he knew, unfortunately. Peter nodded.
Martinelli poked him in the arm. “I’m going to start randomly showing up and demanding things.”
This was equally alarming and funny. He grinned at the man. At his friend.
“Delightful to meet you, Omnimancer,” the obstetrician said, holding out a hand.
Peter rearranged Evan so he could shake it. “My deepest appreciation for your help. Please send me the bill.”
“No, he told me about you,” the doctor said, nodding at Martinelli. “It’s on the house. I retired two weeks ago, anyway. Oh!” he added, as Martinelli took his arm. “That assistant of yours—she should have been a nurse! Wonderfully calm under pressure.”
On that note, the two of them teleported away.
He slid Evan onto the couch, tucking a blanket over him, thinking about Beatrix.
Then something occurred to him: If she knew how to teleport dayside, they could have fetched a doctor themselves—no one would have been the wiser as long as he’d come along for verisimilitude.
They were very lucky Mrs. Clark hadn’t died because they couldn’t do that. He had to help Beatrix figure out how.
By the time the older children were settled on their living-room mats and the baby boy had been carefully washed and swaddled, it was well after midnight.
Mr. Clark sprawled halfway on the bed, halfway off, still in his work clothes and deeply asleep.
Beatrix lay the drowsing newborn in Sue’s arms, heart constricting at how wrung out and sad she looked.
Sue peered down at her child for a long, silent moment, this baby she had not planned for.
“Well, my sweet,” she murmured, dropping a kiss on his forehead, “I suppose we’ll muddle through somehow.”
Beatrix squeezed Sue’s free hand.
“Thank you for everything you’ve done, you and Omnimancer Blackwell,” Sue said, choking up. “I’m so terribly sorry you both are stuck here, and with no beds—”
“Don’t give it another thought. He can conjure something up, after all.”
“If only I could fix my problems so easily,” Sue murmured.
The words almost tumbled out. You can do magic, too.
Beatrix bit her tongue, literally as well as figuratively. She needed to let Plan B get further removed from her. Recruiting people in Ellicott Mills would be lunacy.
“Don’t leave just yet,” Sue pleaded, and that, at least, Beatrix could do for her.
She moved the bassinet by the bed and helped shift the baby into it.
She sat with her until Sue’s eyes fluttered closed, her breathing evening out.
Then she tiptoed to the door, shut off the light and walked carefully down the pitch-black hall, stopping when her hand reached the end of the wall to let her eyes adjust, lest she step on a sleeping child in the living room.
“How is she?” Peter’s quiet voice came from somewhere near her feet. She blinked, unable to make him out.
“Managing,” she murmured back.
“It just hit me—we never thought to call your sister to tell her where you are.”
She groaned and sat on the floor. “I hope she’s not too worried.”
“I think it would have occurred to one of us earlier, had this never happened and we were in the house as I’d suggested. And then what on earth would we have done?”
Both his phone and hers were bugged. What indeed.
“You were right,” he said.
“And yet here we are, sleeping under the same roof after all,” she said, shaking her head.
“In the same room, no less.”
She could see him now, lying on a mattress, looking at her. Despite the chill in the room, she felt hot.
“I made you a bed—over there,” he said, gesturing.
She glanced away with effort and saw it on the other side of the sleeping children, circled by a curtain.
Sensible. She turned back, which was not sensible.
The top two buttons of his shirt were undone, revealing something she had never seen dayside before—the hollow of his throat.
She wanted to kiss it. She wanted to undo the rest of his buttons.
Any other night at this time, they would already be in bed together.
Now they were about to slip dreamside while lying mere yards from each other. Nothing better underscored the absurdity of the lines she’d drawn than this. Who did she think she was fooling?
Peter cleared his throat. “The doctor sang your praises. Said you should have been a nurse.”
She tried to think of a reply that didn’t sound as bitter as “I should have been a medical researcher, actually,” and came up with, “Mrs. Clark thanks you from the bottom of her heart for what you did.”
“All I did was badger Martinelli to get someone to help you. Easy work.”
Oh, that self-deprecating smile—oh, oh, oh. If she reached out a hand, she could run her fingers down his jaw. If she leaned in, she could kiss him.
She looked at him. He looked at her.
“Beatrix,” he whispered, “go to bed.”
She did, her mind full of what she would do with him once they were both asleep.