Spells & Stitches (16 page)
Authors: Barbara Bretton
She condensed herself down to the size of a garden gnome and withdrew into a black hole of silence.
“Not much on conversation today, is she?” Luke asked.
“You’re complaining?”
“Not me.”
He asked if I wanted the radio on, but I shook my head. “I like the quiet.”
“Enjoy it while you can,” he said with a chuckle, “because there won’t be much of it after the baby arrives.”
Once again I was reminded of the fact that he had been down this road before with someone else. “It’s hard to believe a tiny infant can make a lot of noise.”
“It’s not the volume that gets you,” he said as we slowly navigated our way out of the parking lot, “it’s the frequency and the duration.” A quick, sad smile flickered across his face. “Normally I can sleep through an earthquake, but one little whimper from Steffie and I was—” He stopped himself with a shake of his head. “You know.”
I nodded. “I know.”
The world could be such a dangerous place. A little girl climbed on her bicycle one sunny day and thirty seconds later she was dead and her parents’ world was torn apart.
Elspeth’s gloom-and-doom warnings had taken their toll on me. Add them to my own natural propensity for worry, then factor in the scary recurring dreams about missing babies and sick children, and you had one very pregnant sorceress teetering on the edge of a major crying jag.
I wanted to be home. I wanted to be safe inside the protective arms of Sugar Maple. I wanted to know our baby would bebe born healthy and would grow up happy, surrounded by family and friends who loved her and would do anything for her.
I wanted what every new mother wanted, but mostly as the miles rolled slowly by that afternoon I wanted the pain to stop.
13
The only other car on the road was the small dark blue beater that had been ahead of us for at least the last twenty miles. I tried to keep its taillights in view but the combination of snow and dusk made it difficult. Every now and then the driver would slow down enough that I had to ease my foot off the gas to keep a safe following distance.
All in all, not my favorite Sunday drive.
The snow was moderately heavy and steady, swirled periodically by squirrelly winds that made it almost impossible to see.
“Pull over.” Chloe’s voice broke into the silence.
“There’s not much of a shoulder here,” I said, scanning the road through the falling snow. We were halfway between Lake Winnipesaukee and Sugar Maple. “Maybe I can—”
“Pull over!”
I had taken my eyes off the road just long enough to see what was wrong, but that was all it took. The dark blue Toyota had stopped moving forward and was skidding sideways across the highway and we were heading straight toward it.
“Brace yourselves.” I took my foot off the gas and aimed for the snow-covered shoulder of the road and prayed.
The world downshifted into slow motion. It took forever to travel the fifty yards or so to the shoulder. We went into a minor skid, but the all-wheel drive on the Jeep hung tough and we came to an easy stop, buffeted by a cushion of drifting snow.
“It starts!” Elspeth moaned from the backseat. “All that I foresaw starts now!”
I wanted to leap for Elspeth’s pudgy throat, but I flung open my door instead and ran around to the passenger side. Chloe’s door was already open. Her seat belt was off. And she was losing her brunch.
Elspeth didn’t help matters. She unbuckled her seat belt and provided running commentary on the proceedings, most of which made her sound like Nostradamus predicting the end of days. I tried to block out her words, but they were registering on some cellular level I couldn’t control.
I glanced toward the highway, expecting to see the driver of the dark blue Toyota running toward us, but there was nothing but snow. Lots of snow. The car was gone.
Bastard. What the hell kind of person drove away without making sure everyone was okay?
Something was wrong. I didn’t know what, but there was definitely a disturbance in the force field and this time the backseat troll wasn’t to blame.
Chloe looked like hell. Her cheeks were flushed but her face was pale and her eyes glassy. Morning sickness had stopped months ago, but that didn’t stop her from losing the contents of her stomach on the side of the road.
“The flu?” I asked after I helped her clean up and settle back in the truck.
“I don’t know.” Her voice was weak, subdued. “The pancakes maybe.”
“You told me half the sock class yesterday was contagious. I’ll bet—”
“Luke, I don’t know. I felt sick. I threw up. Enough, okay?”
“’Tisn’t illness,” Elspeth proclaimed. “’Tis the beginning.”
I wasn’t going to let her drag us down Doomsday Lane. “Nobody asked you, so shut the hell up.”
“This isn’t helping,” Chloe said, then burst into tears.
I don’t know how the troll felt, but I felt like a shit. The point had been to keep Elspeth from making Chloe feel worse. Clearly I could do it a hell of a lot faster and more effectively.
I got back behind the wheel and eased onto the empty road. We drove a few miles in edgy silence until I heard a loud bang and the truck pulled wildly to the left.
I gripped the wheel hard and steered into the skid.
I was getting good at this.
“Flat tire,” I announced as I found my way back to the shoulder. I added a string of expletives for the hell of it. “Either of you have any magick for changing a tire?” How the hell did we get a flat tire in the middle of a snowstorm anyway? There must have been a nail or some broken glass along the snowy shoulder when we stopped a few miles back.
Elspeth ignored me. Chloe, still crying, gave it a shot, but the best she could do was to make the rear window swing open and closed a couple dozen times.
“Stay in here,” I told them both. “Don’t get out no matter what. Visibility sucks. You’re safer in the truck.”
I’d changed probably a thousand tires for stranded motorists before I made detective. I knew what I was doing. I would set up the flares, the emergency lights, the whole nine yards, and get it done in record time.
But there was a part of me that couldn’t help wondering, “What next?”
CHLOEMy water broke while Luke was changing the tire.
One second I was sitting there with my eyes closed, praying the nausea would go away, and the next—well, you can imagine.
“The babe is coming,” Elspeth said when I told her. “You are following the way of your Hobbs ancestors. ’Twill be an easy birth and a fast one. The signs are all there.”
Easy I liked, but fast? I didn’t want fast. We were sitting in a Jeep on the side of the highway during a snowstorm and we were still an hour away from home.
“We can make it back to Sugar Maple, right?” I asked Elspeth as a note of panic rose in my voice. “I mean, fast means five or six hours when it comes to labor.”
“Within the earth hour,” she said. “You favor the magick now, not the human.”
Her words had barely begun to fade when the first wave of contractions hit. The discomfort I had felt at the inn had clearly been the earliest stirrings of labor. Think of a raindrop as the earliest stirring of a Cat 5 tornado and you’ll understand. This was definitely Cat 5.
We were too far from Sugar Maple to transport Lilith to deliver the baby. Transporting Brianne from Quebec City was out of the question. If Elspeth’s prediction was right, even if we got back on the road right now the baby would be born before we reached the Sugar Maple town limits.
The funny thing about fear is the way it wipes away everything that’s unimportant. Suddenly I forgot about Luke’s family, the snow, the flat tire, the fact that we were still a long way from home and began to focus on the fact that I would be holding our daughter in my arms within the hour and that meant we needed a plan.
Which, as it turned out, was easier said than done. I buzzed down the window.
“Luke! My water broke. I’m in labor.”
“I’m almost done here,” he said, sounding calm and in control. “Blueflame Lilith and tell her we’ll be there within ninety minutes.”
“You don’t understand. The baby is coming.”
“I heard you,” he said, fiddling around with the tire. “This is your first baby. Ask Elspeth. You have plenty of time.”
“We have less than an—” I stopped while a contraction ripped apart my midsection. If this was easy, I didn’t want to even think about the alternative. I was grateful for every drop of magickal Hobbs blood I possessed. “Less than an hour to go.”
He went whiter than the snow falling around him, then slapped on the cop face. “Everything’s going to be fine,” he said. “That’s why Elspeth is here, right? She’s got the baby-delivering mojo we need.”
Except, to my shock, she didn’t.
“’Tisn’t my place,” she said when I turned to her.
“But you said you had eleven children. You have to know something about the process.”
“I gathered the eggs, but I didn’t create the chicken.”
“What does that mean?” I sounded like I’d been poked with a cattle prod. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” My voice climbed up higher with every word. “You’re my plan B. You’re here to cover in an emergency.” And this definitely counted as an emergency. She’d been around since the
Mayflower
. Before epidurals and Lamaze and La Leche. She must have helped deliver dozens of babies over the centuries. “Please don’t give me a hard time, Elspeth. I need your help.” It killed me to say those words, but I’d ask her to marry me if it meant she would help bring my child into this world.
Mayflower
. Before epidurals and Lamaze and La Leche. She must have helped deliver dozens of babies over the centuries. “Please don’t give me a hard time, Elspeth. I need your help.” It killed me to say those words, but I’d ask her to marry me if it meant she would help bring my child into this world.
“Himself chose me to be the protector, not the midwife.”
And Samuel had gotten it right. She wasn’t a midwife. She knew nothing about delivering babies. All she could do was flap around spouting spells and generally making a pain in the ass of herself.
I couldn’t help myself. The situation was so crazy, so totally absurd, that I started to laugh and then I laughed harder and harder until finally I couldn’t stop until I was gasping for air. We were stuck in the snow on an almost-deserted highway two weeks before Christmas and I was in labor. If the gods had any more tricks up their sleeves, I hoped they would hang on to them until after the New Year because right now this was about as much as I could handle.
Luke climbed back into the truck as I was riding the wave of another killer contraction.
“How many minutes apart?” His voice was calm and controlled, but the faint gleam of sweat above his upper lip gave him away.
“Five.”
In the backseat, Elspeth began to mutter under her breath. We knew better than to ask what she was saying.
“I fixed the flat. We can find the nearest hospital with my GPS.”
“Too late, too late,” Elspeth said. “The babe is nigh.”
“I don’t want to go to a hospital,” I said stubbornly. “I thought we had decided against it.”
“We’re not in Sugar Maple,” he pointed out. “Lilith isn’t here to help you. Your midwife isn’t here. I want you and the baby to be safe.”
We wouldn’t be safe in a human hospital. My magick had been running rampant. He knew that. Here one minute, gone the next.
Another contraction, this one longer, more powerful than the ones that had come before, and I realized with a start that my magick wasn’t running rampant any longer. It was gone.
I’d been warned it might happen, that my particular mix of mortal and magick might go missing temporarily during delivery, but nothing prepared me for the sense of loss that washed over me, the acute loneliness, and I gripped Luke’s hand and squeezed hard until I actually heard him suck in his breath.
“There’s no time for a hospital,” I said when I could speak again. “It’s too late for that now.”
He smiled at me and the look in his eyes told me that no matter what happened, I wasn’t alone.
14
Even I could see we were on the fast track now.
Our daughter was about to be born in the back of my used Jeep and I wasn’t sure I remembered my own name, much less what the procedure was.
Chloe’s magick was down for the count. Elspeth tried to blueflame Lilith for some long-distance help, but the connection sputtered, then died.
We were on our own and I needed help ASAP so I did what any sane twenty-first-century father-to-be would do.
“YouTube?” Chloe asked between contractions. “You’re surfing YouTube while I’m in labor with your child?”
Actually I had done the surfing a few days earlier, searching out how-to videos on emergency childbirth procedures. I’m not saying that I was psychic or anything close, but I hadn’t been a Boy Scout all those years for nothing. I believed in being prepared. We had blankets in the back, both the traditional kind and the high-tech silver ones. Water. Heat packs for hands and feet. Nonperishable food. All the things any good New Englander knew belonged in a well-equipped car between October and April. I had two flashlights, an emergency medical kit, flares, and a crank dial radio.
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