Chapter 19 Tess
I was in the medical tent. Where I'd been for the last six hours, because Kal had made me promise to stay here while he went to the front line, and I'd agreed because the alternative was an argument I didn't have the energy for at eight and a half months pregnant with a baby that had recently taken up kickboxing against my bladder.
The sound of the battle reached the camp in waves.
Distant at first, the crack of gunfire muffled by distance and the hills between the camp and downtown.
Then louder: the unmistakable crash of Vampyren blades, the high-pitched shriek of Lucian combat speed, the war cries that I recognized by voice because I'd been sleeping beside one of those voices for months.
Kal's war cry was the second one I heard.
Clear, sharp, carrying through the night air with the practiced resonance of a warrior who'd been doing this for centuries.
He was alive. He was fighting. He was doing what he'd been trained to do while I lay on a cot and grew a person and hated every second of being sidelined.
Then the contraction.
It started in my lower back. A pressure I'd been attributing to the baby's position for the last two days, which in the space of about ten seconds revealed itself to be something else entirely.
The pressure became a band. The band became a vise.
The vise clamped down on my entire midsection with a force that made me curl forward and grab the cot rail and say a word that I'd been saving for special occasions.
"Oh, fuck."
Sylvia, the vet tech who'd been assigned to stay with me, looked up from the supply table. "Tess?"
"I'm fine. It's just—" The vise tightened. "Okay, I'm not fine. I think the baby has decided that the middle of a war is the ideal time to—"
Another contraction. Too soon after the first. Way too soon.
"That's two minutes apart," Sylvia said, her face going through a rapid calculation. "How long have you been feeling pressure?"
"Since yesterday. I thought it was Braxton Hicks."
"It's not Braxton Hicks."
"I'm aware of that NOW, Sylvia."
I gripped the cot rail and breathed the way Brecca had taught me: long inhale through the nose, slow exhale through the mouth, focus on the exhale, let the body do what the body was going to do.
It helped. Marginally. The way a band-aid helps a broken leg.
Technically applied to the problem, practically useless.
The absurdity of the situation was not lost on me.
Eight months of pregnancy. Eight months of prenatal care administered by a phlebotomist-turned-medic using a stethoscope and manual measurements because there was no ultrasound machine on the continent that still worked.
Eight months of Kal hovering and worrying and rubbing my feet and asking if I'd eaten enough and making that Vampyren sound, the low rumbling vibration in his chest that their species made when they were feeling protective, which was approximately always.
And now, at the moment when the entire alliance was betting everything on a three-front assault against a psychic alien warlord, my body had decided: now.
Now is when we do this.
The baby kicked. Hard. The kind of kick that made my belly visibly move and made me hiss through my teeth, not from pain but from the sheer physical reality of a half-Vampyren child making its opinions known about the confined quarters.
"Easy," I told my stomach. "We're working on it."
Outside, the battle continued. The sounds were shifting, moving south, which meant either Front One was pushing the Lucian back or the Lucian were flanking, and I couldn't tell which because I was horizontal and contracting and Sylvia was timing things with a watch that I was fairly sure she'd gotten from a dead man's wrist because that was the kind of thing you did in the apocalypse without thinking about it.
"Twelve minutes since the first one," Sylvia said. "They're getting closer together."
"I noticed."
"Brecca should be here."
"Brecca is on the strike team. Brecca is walking into a building full of Lucian to kill their commander. Brecca is not available." I gritted my teeth through the next contraction. "So it's you and me, Sylvia. You delivered calves. This is similar."
"Calves are bigger."
"Calves don't have two hearts."
Our eyes met. The tent was dim, a single lantern on the supply table, and the sounds of the battle filtered through the canvas like a storm heard from inside a house.
We were two women in a tent, one in labor and one trained to deliver animals, and outside three species were trying to kill each other, and inside my body was doing the one thing that all the killing couldn't stop.
"Okay," Sylvia said, rolling up her sleeves. "Okay. Tell me what Brecca told you about the delivery plan."
"Head down, she confirmed that at the last check. Two heartbeats, monitor both, if one drops, alert immediately. She said half-Vampyren births might involve..." I trailed off. She didn't know. Nobody knows. There's never been a documented one. "She said to expect the unexpected."
"Expect the unexpected. That's her medical advice."
"She also said to curse as much as I need to because the vocal release helps with pain management. I'm paraphrasing."
Sylvia nodded. "I can work with that."
* * *
The contractions settled into a rhythm. Three minutes apart.
Two and a half. Two. Each one a wave of pressure that started in my back and rolled forward through my abdomen with the relentless, unstoppable force of a body that had made a decision and was not interested in consulting me about the timeline.
Between contractions, I listened to the battle.
The sounds were changing. The gunfire was less frequent.
Either they were running out of ammunition or they were winning, and I chose to believe the latter because the alternative was unthinkable.
I could distinguish individual war cries now.
Kal's was the sharpest, the one that cut through the other sounds like a blade through paper.
Mark's was deeper, rougher. Danton's was the loudest, the physical volume of a warrior whose chest cavity was the size of a small car.
I'd learned to read these sounds the way Brecca read vital signs: each one a data point, each one confirming alive, alive, alive.
Kal's war cry came again, closer this time, or maybe the wind had shifted, and I pressed my hand against my belly where his daughter was pressing back and I thought: hear that? That's your father. He's out there making sure you have a world to be born into.
The baby kicked in response. Hard enough to make me gasp. I chose to interpret it as agreement.
Cassi's mother was in the tent with us. Elena, on her cot in the corner, staring at the ceiling with the same absent expression she'd worn since the blood farm.
She didn't react to the contractions or the battle sounds or Sylvia's brisk instructions.
She existed in a space adjacent to the present moment, close enough to touch but too far to reach.
I thought about my siblings. Five of them, scattered across a continent.
Two sisters confirmed dead. Three unaccounted for.
I was about to become a mother without knowing if I was still a sister, and the cruelty of that — the incompleteness, the unanswered questions — was a pain that no contraction could match.
"Tess." Sylvia was checking my dilation. Her hands were gentle, professional. Whatever else she was, she knew physiology, and the relevant mechanics were not that different between species. "You're at seven centimeters. Moving fast."
"Everything about this pregnancy has been fast. Brecca says the Vampyren genetics accelerate the process."
"When did the contractions start?"
"Twenty-three minutes after the battle. Four twenty-three AM."
"It's five-fifteen now. Less than an hour and you're at seven." She whistled low. "That IS fast."
"Vampyren babies don't waste time."
"Is there anything I should watch for? With the — the alien part?"
I almost laughed. The alien part. As if my daughter's Vampyren heritage was a footnote, a minor complication, an addendum to an otherwise normal birth.
As if the two hearts and the elevated body temperature and the possibility that she'd grow to be seven feet tall and need blood alongside food were details that could be managed with a footnote in a medical chart.
"Brecca said the heartbeats might desynchronize during delivery. If they do, it's not necessarily dangerous, it might be a stress response. Monitor both. If either drops below forty beats per minute, that's critical."
"Forty. Got it." Sylvia had a notebook — Brecca's influence, the documentation habit spreading through the camp like a virus. She wrote the number down. "What about the umbilical cord?"
"What about it?"
"Is it — different? In half-Vampyren babies?"
"Sylvia, I have no idea. Nobody has any idea.
We're making this up as we go." Another contraction hit.
Harder. Deeper. The pressure shifting downward in a way that felt final and irreversible.
I grabbed the cot rail and Sylvia's hand simultaneously and rode it out and when it passed I was panting and soaked with sweat and more afraid than I'd ever been in my life.
The pain I could handle. I'd survived a crate shipment to Chicago, a Vampyren revolution, a cross-country journey while pregnant. I'd been beaten, shot at, nearly captured, and I'd fought back every time because the alternative was unacceptable.
I was afraid of the silence.
The battle sounds had stopped. All at once. One moment: gunfire, blades, war cries. The next: nothing. A silence so sudden and so total that it felt like the world had held its breath.
"What happened?" I whispered.
Sylvia went to the tent entrance. Looked out. Came back. "People are — they're standing still. Everyone's just... standing."
"Is it—" I pushed myself up on my elbows. "Is it over? Did they—"