5. Hannah
Hannah
Iwoke with a start in the darkness, Otto’s frantic orc toddler scream roaring through the baby monitor. I gasped and sat up in bed, still not fully acclimated to where I was. It all quickly came back to me.
It was my second night in the Drakkar house. Baby Otto was next door in the nursery. The wail coming through the monitor sounded like an intense scream of pain. He’d been up briefly the night before, but this time it sounded much, much worse.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed and grabbed my bathrobe before hurrying out of my bedroom and into the nursery next door. I found Otto standing in his crib, both fists jammed in his mouth and screaming.
I hurried to him and lifted him out of the crib, cradling him in my arms. He smashed his face into my shoulder, and I felt the heat coming off of his jaw like a furnace. His tusk was really hurting him tonight.
“It’s okay, Otto. I’ve got you.”
I carried him into the bathroom off the nursery, flicked on the light, and ran a clean washcloth under the cold tap, with Otto balanced on my hip. I wrung it out one-handed while he screamed into my neck.
With the damp cloth in hand, I carefully angled it toward his mouth. He turned his face away at first, but I was finally able to find the ridge of the tusk breaking through his gums.
I pressed the washcloth onto the spot, but he arched away and howled. I bit my lip, recalculating. With Otto on my hip, I hurried down the hall, through the living room and into the kitchen, hoping I wasn’t waking up Brakkus.
I found a bowl from the cabinet, pressed it against the ice dispenser on the fridge, filled the bowl of ice with water, and then used the ice water to dampen the cloth.
When I pressed the cloth to his tusk this time, I applied deeper pressure. Otto shrieked at first but then grasped my hand and pulled it against him.
I looked at his face in the dim light from the pendants over the kitchen island.
There was relief in his watery eyes. I bounced him gently on my hip as I paced back and forth in front of the sliding glass doors that looked out onto the patio.
The pool lights glowed in the darkness, casting the water in dark blue.
The sky was a deep black above the hills, and the moon was a thin crescent against a backdrop of stars.
As soon as the cloth cooled down, Otto started screaming again. I took a deep breath and went back to my bowl of ice water, cooled it again, and pressed it back against his mouth.
For the better part of an hour, I repeated the process, walking back and forth in front of the kitchen door. Finally, after the fourth time I’d cooled his cloth, he started to go limp with fatigue. I stood in the dark, holding a suddenly peaceful toddler.
He was still, with his amber eyes staring up at me, looking past me into the darkness over my shoulder. I rocked him, holding him close. I knew from his file that he’d lost his mother six months ago, and the loss had marked a clear regression in his development.
“All better?” I asked, rocking him in the darkness of the kitchen.
“Betta,” he said.
It came out soft and slurred. The sound of it stopped me short for a moment. His file had mentioned his speech regression, and this was the first time I’d heard him utter anything since I’d arrived.
“Good. We’re going to make sure it’s all better.”
I took Otto and a fresh bowl of ice water back to the nursery, where I sat with him in the glider, pressing the cold cloth to his tusk under the dim glow of the night-light.
After a few minutes, he drifted into sleep. I carefully stood, transferred him over to the crib, and covered him with a blanket. I looked down at him as he slept, feeling the weight of his loss on my shoulders.
I thought about what I could do to help with the tusk pain. There had to be tusk-specific teething products that could make this whole process easier.
I made a mental note to get in touch with the healer he’d seen at the Breakstone enclave. When I was sure he’d fallen asleep, I backed away from the crib, ducked out of the nursery, and went back to my room.
As I lay in my bed, my heart ached for this baby who’d lost his mother. Who’d lost his words and stopped responding. There was a reason I’d come into this little monster’s life, and I was going to do my best to help him.