Chapter 18 Brecca #2
"How—" I crossed the tent and knelt beside the cot and my hands were already moving, the medic's instinct overriding everything else.
I pressed my stethoscope to the baby's back and heard it: two heartbeats.
Two. Just like I'd been hearing through the stethoscope for months, offset by half a beat, steady and clear and strong. "When?"
"About twenty minutes ago. Sylvia delivered her." Tess's hand was on the baby's back, protective, instinctive. "Contractions started during the battle. Because of course they did."
"Sylvia?"
The vet tech looked up from the supply table with the shell-shocked expression of a woman who had just performed the most important medical procedure of her life and hadn't quite processed it yet.
"She came fast. Vampyren genetics, I think.
Less than an hour from active labor to...
" She gestured at the baby. Her hands were still shaking.
"You did good, Sylvia." I meant it. All those months I'd been preparing for this delivery, studying, planning, monitoring every pulse and every kick, and the baby had arrived without me, delivered by a vet tech with steady hands and the presence of mind to do what needed doing.
The irony, that the one medical event I'd spent months preparing for was the one I missed, was exactly the kind of cosmic joke that the apocalypse specialized in.
But the baby was here. The baby was alive.
"Can I—" I looked at Tess.
She lifted her daughter from her chest and placed her in my arms with the careful, deliberate motion of a woman entrusting the most important thing in the world to the one person she trusted to hold it right.
The baby was warm. Warmer than a human newborn — the elevated Vampyren body temperature I'd predicted, running hotter than human normal.
She was small and impossibly light and her dark hair was soft against my forearm and she smelled like blood and new skin and the sharp, clean scent of something that had never existed before.
She opened her eyes.
Gold. Bright, clear gold with flecks of amber, glowing faintly in the tent's dim light.
Purer than her father's gold-flecked brown.
Undiluted. Vampyren eyes in a human-sized face.
The eyes of a species that had crossed galaxies, in the face of a child born on Earth, in the hands of a medic who'd spent all this time telling herself she didn't care about anything.
I was crying. When had that started? I couldn't tell.
My hands were steady, medic's hands, always steady, but my face was wet and my chest ached with something that had nothing to do with pain and everything to do with the fact that I was holding proof.
Proof that connection created life. That two species could produce something new instead of destroying each other.
That the war I'd spent three years surviving had an ending, and the ending wasn't death.
The baby cried, a thin, furious sound that filled the tent and made Kal's hand tighten around her tiny fist and made Sylvia start crying again and made something inside me crack open that I'd been holding shut since the invasion.
"She's perfect," I said, and placed her back on Tess's chest. "Both hearts are strong. Temperature's elevated but that's normal for her physiology. She's perfect."
Kal looked at me. The Vampyren who wore Converse and sang Journey and had deserted his military because he'd seen a breeding pit and couldn't stomach it. He looked at me with those gold-flecked wet eyes and said, "Thank you," with a simplicity that carried the weight of everything.
"I didn't deliver her. Thank Sylvia."
"Thank you," he said again, and I understood that the gratitude wasn't for the delivery.
It was for eight months of prenatal care administered with a stethoscope and manual measurements and a notebook full of observations about a pregnancy that had no precedent.
For every check. For every reassurance. For keeping his mate and his daughter alive through eight months of war.
"What's her name?" I asked.
"Auriel," Tess said. She was looking at her daughter with an expression that had no bottom — it went all the way down, rearranging everything. "It means golden light."
"Auriel," Kal repeated, and the name sounded different in his accent, ancient, resonant, like a word that had been waiting centuries to be spoken.
I left them. I stepped outside the medical tent into the morning light and pressed my back against the tent pole and breathed and let the tears come properly, the way I hadn't in three years, the way I'd never allowed them to.
Tears for a baby with gold eyes and a world that might, for the first time since the invasion, have a chance.
Rael was there. Of course he was. Standing outside the tent, waiting for me the way he'd been waiting since the first day.
Patient, still, watching me with silver eyes that held everything he felt and everything he couldn't say and the pale glow that pulsed faintly in the morning light like a heartbeat made visible.
"It's a girl," I said. "Gold eyes. Two hearts."
"I heard her cry," he said. "Through the bond. You were holding her and I felt—"
"What did you feel?"
"Joy." His voice was soft. The harmonic undertone vibrated. "I have not felt joy through the network in three hundred years. And then you held that child and what lives between us carried it to me and I felt it. Joy. In your hands."
I reached for him. He met me halfway. And we stood outside a medical tent in the morning sunlight with our arms around each other and a newborn crying inside and a war ended and a city waking up to a silence that was, for the first time, a gift.