Chapter 20
Gwendolynne
What the hell? The vibration on my bedside table woke me up at what should not be considered an actual time.
I scrub at my bleary eyes before focusing on the screen.
It’s a call-out, which is weird, because I’m not meant to be on duty.
We final-year students are allocated eleven at a time, every eight weeks, to be on call.
Each time, it’s seven draining days and nights of managing the entire Seamere caseload, whether myth.creat or mag.fam.
I dread my on-call weeks, because it means I might have to actually work with large animals (shudder)…
but thankfully there are usually enough Mythological Creatures students rostered on that I can manage to avoid it.
Tonight, though, there’s no such luck. Someone is calling me to the unicorn yards, and from the sounds of it, it’s urgent.
I roll out of bed, finger-combing my hair, then pull on my neglected coveralls.
Since I’m not officially rostered on, I could just refuse and go back to bed.
But the memory of our class rankings after hospital wards yesterday is branded painfully on my brain: Harrisford, a mere one point ahead of me because he fucking stole my diagnosis.
So I do up all the studs on my coveralls, slide my feet into my waterproof boots, and—leaving Percy snoozing deeply on the cushioned seat of my chair—head out into the muggy night.
The unicorn yards are a maze of reinforced fences, designed so that male unicorns can’t spear each other through the bars. Moonlight spills across the concrete, the trees casting skeletal shadows that stretch across the ground.
It’s in the foaling stable that I find the myth.creat tutor who’d paged me on my strap. He’s a newly graduated vet with dark curly hair and pale skin, and I can never remember his name.
“Ah, good, you’re here,” he says. “Follow me.”
He wanders into one of the stalls, and I pull up short at the door.
The animal inside isn’t a unicorn…instead, it’s a qílín.
Qílíns are considered the Chinese equivalent of unicorns, though they don’t look like unicorns at all, not really.
For one, they usually have two antlers instead of one horn, and their heads are dragon-esque with long thick beards and manes.
In fact, the only thing that qílíns and unicorns have in common is that they are both four-legged and have hooves.
I don’t know why a qílín has been brought to Seamere.
As far as I can recall, the zoo’s qílín is rainbow-colored, so this one must be from a private trader.
There are collectors that import mythical beasts from all over the globe, bartering and negotiating and spending way too much on those that are strange and rare.
This qílín is luminescent, her coat gold-and-red ombré, the golden scales darkening to a deep red at each of her four hooved feet. And she’s clearly in labor. Her golden tail is flicking, and every few minutes her entire abdomen contracts, her jewel-like eyes rolling.
Dystocia. She’s having difficulty giving birth.
But the qílín isn’t the only reason I stay frozen at the door. The other reason is a very familiar bearded dragon that is perched upon the railings. And if she is here, then so is…
Ugh. Harrisford.
Just my luck. I guess that’s why he wasn’t at supper, or in the Heywood Hall common room. It’s because this must be his week on call. Did he ask them to call me, the prat? And if so, why? To make me suffer?
As soon as he catches sight of me, though, I immediately know it wasn’t him. His eyes splay open wide, and his mouth opens and shuts a few times. A violent flush steals across his face, and he flings a hand in my direction.
“Marcus!” He’s practically spitting. “What is she doing here?”
I narrow my eyes at him, wishing that I could vaporize him with the force of my targeted wrath.
After our fight in the drug cupboard, he clearly wants nothing to do with me.
Well, good, in that case—because I want nothing to do with him, either.
There’s no way Marcus (we’ll see how long I remember his name) really needs the both of us.
This must have just been a huge bloody mistake.
Marcus dunks his hands into a bucket of water. “I called her.”
Oh. So it wasn’t a mistake.
A muscle jumps in Harrisford’s jaw. “Why? We don’t need her here. She’s not even myth.creat—”
The supervisor grabs a towel hanging over the railing and begins to dry his hands. “Isn’t it obvious, Briggs? She’s Chinese. This creature is Chinese. I think having her here will help.” He’s talking about me as though I’m not even present.
Having toweled off his hands, Marcus tosses the towel back over the railing and clasps Harrisford’s shoulder. “Anyway, mate. It’s late, I’m tired, and I’m going to bed. I’ve already cast the sedation spell. Good luck, kids.”
And then Marcus is gone.
We both watch him leave. Me, livid; Harrisford wearing a scowl.
Honestly, the supervisor’s reasoning is ridiculous.
First of all, I’m not the only vet student of Chinese descent currently studying at Seamere—there’s also Alice Chu.
Why he called me instead of Alice I have no idea.
Either he, like Professor Bartell, thinks the two of us are actually the same person, or maybe he just called me first because Chan comes before Chu in class listings.
And second of all, I hardly know anything about qílíns. My parents may have come from China, but I was born here, and the fact that Marcus assumed I’d be an expert is actually quite offensive.
Still, there’s not much I can do about it now.
Clearly, Marcus has already put us both down as the allocated students for the case.
So either I stay and help, or I leave Harrisford to tackle it on his own—and write the report.
He’d probably find some way to make me look bad—say I skived off the call, or something.
Fuming, I roll up the sleeves of my coveralls, right up to the shoulder, and begin pulling on a full-length plastic glove.
Harrisford’s already wearing a glove, but he uses his opposite arm to swipe some strands of hair away from his forehead. Then he fixes his gaze on me. “You should go.”
From a large pump container on the ground, I squirt out a generous measure of lube, smearing it all over my glove. “What, and let you take all the glory? Not going to happen, Briggs.”
I stalk past him, approaching the qílín. Remembering what Harrisford had said just before we rode the dragon—how standing close to large creatures is actually safer—I sidle in so near to the qílín’s hindquarters I’m practically inside her.
Harrisford gives me a funny look. “She’s not going to kick you, if you’re worried about that.
Qílíns are placid. They won’t even walk on grass for fear of crushing the blades.
” He lets out a long, protracted sigh. “Listen, Chan, I don’t expect you to know about qílíns, considering that you’re mag.fam… ”
But he trails off, because I’ve already positioned myself behind the creature and swept aside her tail. And, holding my breath, my heart hammering with the fear that I might do something wrong, I start pushing in my arm.
I feel the foal immediately, passing my hand around its gangling form. It’s all lanky folded legs and a slimy-slick maned skull, and I carefully palpate, trying to determine which end is its front half and which end is its back.
“I think its head is bent backward,” I say, my face scrunched up in concentration. I can do this. I can do this. It hasn’t been that long since I did my myth.creat modules…
I feel around again, and confirm, with more conviction this time, “The head’s definitely backward.”
Planting my feet against the straw-covered ground, I try to grab hold of the foal’s muzzle. But it’s too slippery, and I can’t get enough purchase. The qílín lets out a low bellow, eliciting a shower of sparks.
Wait—sparks? I force myself to notice what is happening rather than hyperfocusing on the foal. The qílín’s skin is heating up, becoming searingly hot, and no, oh no…
I think we’re on the cusp of another surge.
“Briggs,” I hiss, my arm still buried inside the mare. “She’s getting really hot. I think that maybe…there’s another surge coming.”
Harrisford utters an expletive beneath his breath. “We’ll need to hurry, in that case. If the surge happens with the foal inside, it’ll kill it—”
“I know that!” I’m panicking now. Even without a surge, we’d only have maybe thirty minutes, tops. But with a surge? Maybe this was a bad idea. Maybe I’ve…overcommitted. “You do it! You’ll be quicker—”
Harrisford moves beside me, resting a hand on the qílín’s rump. “No. You’re already in there. You can do it, trust me. Just take a deep breath and do as I say.”
I blink, and tears blur my vision. “Please take over—”
“Chan!” Harrisford’s composure is fraying. With his ungloved hand, he grabs my chin and turns my face to look at him. “Just listen to me, all right? You will be fine. Just do. As. I. Say.”
I nod, my forehead clammy with sweat, and blink my tears away. “Okay.” I take a deep, steadying breath, and steel myself. “Tell me what to do.” Under normal circumstances, I’d never let Harrisford Briggs boss me around. But this isn’t a normal circumstance.
“You need to push the foal back toward the uterus to begin with, to give yourself more room to work. But be careful. You don’t want to do any damage.”
I heave, trying to shift the foal, and eventually I feel it move. “It’s there, it’s there.” The birth canal is getting worryingly hot. “Now what?”
“Can you reach its head? If you can hook your fingers around its jaw, or even a nostril, you’ll be able to ease the head forward.”
I grope around, rising onto tiptoes, pushing my arm in as far as it can possibly go. Finally, I feel the foal’s head. It takes some maneuvering, but eventually I’m able to grab hold of its lower jaw and gently ease it around.
It’s difficult at first, but once it reaches a critical point, the head swings around quickly. “It’s forward!” I’m almost crying again, though this time it’s with relief.
I feel Harrisford’s hand touch my lower back, just fleetingly, before it’s gone. “Good job,” he says. “Now you just need to pull its front legs—”
And then I’m pulling, and I’m pulling, and the qílín is becoming scaldingly hot, and then two little feet are poking out of her back end, and Harrisford and I both take a leg each and we’re pulling and pulling and then finally—
The foal slides out, Harrisford supporting it, and lands in a crumpled little heap upon the straw.
I stagger backward, panting, then brace my hands on both knees. The qílín is starting to let off more sparks, and in a moment she’ll go up in flames.
It’s fortunate that qílíns are fire-resistant, I think, but then I realize—
“The foal!” I scream. But Harrisford came to the conclusion even more quickly than I did.
“Get down!” he bellows, barreling into me and knocking me to the ground. The next moment he’s already thrown himself over me and the newborn, shielding us both with his body.
I shiver beneath him, covering my head with both hands, while the qílín’s flames flare before slowly flickering out.
And then we’re both climbing to our feet, Harrisford backing away, the qílín taking a few shaky steps closer to her newborn foal.
She nudges it with her nose. It doesn’t move. My pulse stutters and my stomach begins tying itself in knots. Were we too late? Perhaps the foal died, suffocated during birth. Or maybe we didn’t pull it in time and it did get hit with the surge.
Both Harrisford and I hold our breaths. The seconds tick by so slowly, and everything is oddly silent, like the few moments before a thunderstorm when all the sound is sucked away. Each thump of my heart is almost painful in my chest.
But suddenly, the foal puts its little head up, and its mother starts licking it clean, and I let out a huge, grateful sigh. Tonight, we’ve managed to mitigate disaster—for this mother and foal, at least.
For the first time in forever, our marks don’t matter. Who’s coming first in class rankings doesn’t matter.
And, so—for the first time in forever—neither Harrisford nor I even bother to check our straps.