The Pucking Orc's Baby

Chapter 1

“Ihave a daughter?”

The words came out of Rognar’s mouth like they belonged to someone else. Some other orc. Some other male who hadn’t walked into George Barrington Jr.’s office less than an hour ago expecting to sign something about an endorsement deal or a lawsuit or anything but this.

The baby stared up at him.

She sat in a padded carrier on the chair beside him, and she was, without question, the single most serious person Rognar had ever encountered.

She had light green skin and a great deal of dark hair standing straight up from her head, and her ears came to soft points that folded over at the tips.

Her eyes were enormous and very dark, and they took up most of her face.

So did her cheeks. When she pulled her fist out of her mouth, two tiny white points showed at her lower gum.

Tusks. She had tusks coming in. Something about that made his chest ache in a completely unexpected way.

Her eyes were fixed on him with the unblinking scrutiny of a referee reviewing a questionable hit.

“She’s six months old,” George said, clearing his throat. He was a thin, studious human in a pristine navy suit with sparse grey hair combed neatly over the place where there was no hair. “Her name is Charlotte. Her mother called her Charlie.”

“Her mother. Val.” He finally managed to drag his gaze away from the baby. “You said Val is—”

“Dead.” George’s voice softened. “Valerie Mackenzie was killed in a car accident three weeks ago. I’m very sorry.”

Three weeks. Val had been dead for three weeks, and there had been a funeral, and he hadn’t known about it. He’d probably been at practice, giving Korvash a hard time about his footwork, and she’d already been gone.

Val had come to Greenwood Hollow the previous summer on a three-month contract and told him from the beginning that she wasn’t staying.

He’d told her he wasn’t asking her to. They’d seen each other a couple of times a week for most of that time, and it had been fun and easy and they’d never pretended it was anything other than what it was.

At the end of her contract, she’d kissed him goodbye and driven away.

He’d relegated her to the category of pleasant memories and moved on.

He had no idea she’d taken something with her when she left.

“She never told me.”

“No.” George cleared his throat again and looked down at the neatly arranged papers in front of him.

“According to the documentation she left, Ms. Mackenzie made that decision alone. Her will identifies you as Charlotte’s father and names you as the person she wished to assume guardianship in the event of her death. ”

He looked at Charlie again.

Val had known she was pregnant and hadn’t called him.

Even if she hadn’t known when she left, at some point she’d realized and made the decision not to call him.

She’d had his daughter and hadn’t called him.

She’d spent six months raising this little person while he went on living his life without the slightest idea she existed.

He should have been angry. He suspected he was going to be, later, when there was room for it. Right now, there wasn’t room for anything except the baby sitting eighteen inches away from him, chewing thoughtfully on her fist.

“There will be a formal paternity confirmation,” George continued. “That’s standard and shouldn’t be taken as a challenge to Ms. Mackenzie’s wishes. The court simply requires documentation. Following confirmation, we can petition for permanent guardianship. In the interim—”

“Mr. Barrington.”

A woman had been quietly sitting in the third chair, and he suddenly realized she had been watching him for some time.

Mildred Prescott was somewhere past sixty, with short grey hair, sensible shoes, and a well-washed cardigan.

She was regarding him with a cool, grey gaze that reminded him uneasily of his third grade teacher.

George adjusted his reading glasses. “Yes, Ms. Prescott?”

“That baby is going to be hungry in about twenty minutes.” Mildred glanced at her watch. “I’ve found over the years that legal explanations go better when nobody is screaming.”

George actually paled a little. “Perhaps you should proceed.”

“Thank you.” Mildred turned to him. “Do you have a car seat?”

“No.”

“A crib?”

“No.”

“Formula? Bottles? Diapers?”

“No.”

“Somewhere she can sleep tonight?”

“I have a second bedroom.”

Mildred’s eyebrows rose slightly.

“I don’t have anything to put a baby in once she gets there,” he clarified. “But the room itself is fine.”

His house was fine. Better than fine. He liked his house.

He’d bought it because he was tired of apartments and wanted a yard big enough for a grill.

It was comfortable, clean, and—most of the time—reasonably tidy.

The refrigerator contained actual food. His laundry generally made it into drawers rather than living indefinitely in a basket.

He just didn’t own a single thing designed for a person who weighed less than his equipment bag.

“Then we start there,” Mildred said, making a note.

“But I want to be clear about something, Mr. Stonebreaker. This is temporary custody while the legal process moves forward. You are allowed to say no. If you aren’t prepared to take responsibility for a six-month-old today, there are other arrangements we can make while you decide. ”

Charlie pulled her fist out of her mouth, and a long strand of drool followed it. Then she reached for him.

Her arm was nowhere near long enough, but that didn’t seem to discourage her. She strained forward against the bar of the carrier, her fingers opening and closing with tremendous determination. He leaned over without deciding to.

Charlie caught a fistful of his neatly trimmed beard first and yanked hard enough to make his eyes water. He laughed despite himself and offered her a finger as a diplomatic alternative. She abandoned his beard, wrapped both hands around his thumb, and immediately tried to drag it into her mouth.

He did not take his thumb back. Something inside him rearranged itself, quietly and permanently.

My daughter.

A surge of protective instinct came with the words, a surge so strong he nearly swayed. His grandmother used to talk about instincts like that, instincts that had kept orcs alive in the mountains for thousands of years. He had always assumed she meant it metaphorically.

Apparently not.

Charlie held his thumb and stared up at him.

“Of course I’m taking her.”

Mildred sat back very slightly, and her face relaxed.

“Then,” she said, “let’s talk about car seats.”

The baby superstore out on Route 9 covered more square footage than the Enforcers’ practice facility. He stood at the mouth of aisle six and understood, for perhaps the first time in his adult life, what it felt like to be genuinely outmatched.

There were seventeen kinds of bottle nipple. Not seventeen brands. Seventeen kinds. Slow flow. Medium flow. Fast flow. Variable flow, which sounded like a plumbing problem. Stage one, stage two, stage three. Wide neck. Narrow neck. Anti-colic, which he didn’t understand and was vaguely afraid to.

Charlie was perched in the carrier, watching everything with those huge dark eyes. She got hold of the safety strap and tried to bring it to her mouth.

“Don’t eat the cart,” he told her.

She ate the cart.

“Can I help you find something?” a voice asked from his elbow as he gently removed the strap from Charlie’s grasp.

He looked down and found a girl in a store apron who couldn’t have been more than nineteen. She wore the bright, determined expression of someone who had decided in advance not to be intimidated by a six-and-a-half-foot orc hockey player staring helplessly at a wall of nipples.

“I hope so,” he said. “What’s a flow rate?”

“How fast the milk comes out. It goes by age, mostly. How old is the baby?”

“Six months.”

“Okay. So you probably want a stage two. Maybe three if she’s a fast eater.” She reached for a package. “Is she breastfed or formula-fed?”

“Formula. Mildred gave me the brand.” He looked back at the wall. “She didn’t explain any of this.”

The girl paused with her hand halfway to the hook, and he sighed.

“Sorry. That’s going to keep happening. I’ve had her for about two hours.”

To her great credit, she didn’t blink. “Then let’s get one of each,” she said. “What else do you need?”

He bought one of each. The bottle nipples led to bottles. The bottles led to formula. Formula led to little jars of brightly colored substances that claimed to contain carrots or peas or turkey but looked nothing like any of those things.

He stared at the labels, then consulted the list Mildred had given him which was suspiciously vague on the subject.

“What do you eat?” he asked Charlie, and she blinked up at him. “Excellent. Glad we had this talk.”

He pulled out his phone.

Korvash answered on the second ring, over a background of what sounded like several children and a television. “You didn’t come to skate.”

“I had an appointment. It ran long.” He picked up a jar labeled sweet potato and apple. “How much sweet potato is a serving for someone whose entire stomach is apparently the size of my fist?”

There was a pause on the other end, and the television went quiet.

“Say that again.”

“Mildred says six ounces every four to five hours and some purée once a day. What does ‘some’ mean?”

“Rognar.”

“Also, what’s a sleep sack? Is it the same thing as a swaddle?”

“Rognar.”

He gave up. “I have a daughter.”

The silence went on long enough that Rognar checked the screen to make sure the call hadn’t dropped. Then Korvash yelled, away from the phone, “Elena. Get the good notepad.”

He closed his eyes.

It took twenty minutes. Elena Korvash had four children and no patience whatsoever, and she dictated a list while her husband made increasingly emotional noises somewhere behind her.

“Write it down,” Elena ordered him.

“I already have a list. I just don’t understand the list.”