The Fledgling (10 page)

He gasped.

She flinched. “What?”

“I can see a teeny bit of the baby’s head! You’re going to need to push very soon.”

A tear trickled down her cheek. “I don’t think I can do this.”

“Of course you can.” His heart beat rapid-fire in his chest. “Have you thought of names yet?”

She shook her head. “No. I don’t know. There are too many names to choose from.”

“Yes. You just need to narrow down the list.”

“How?”

She grimaced, and he grasped her hand during the contraction. After a moment, she took a breath.

“Maybe you can pick the name of someone who is important to you. A meaningful name which your child can strive to emulate.”

“You mean more than an unwed, teenage mother?”

“I will have none of that. A mother who was willing to have a baby on her own regardless of what others thought of her? I think it is a good kind of mother to have.”

Deanna whimpered again.

“It is time to push now, Deanna. I can see more of the baby’s head.” He grasped both of her hands, and she gritted her teeth and pushed hard. A groan tore from the depths of her.

“That’s it! Keep it up.”

Had it been ten minutes or sixty? Misha didn’t know, but he did know they were both soaked with sweat. Finally, the head pushed through, and he caught the little face in the palm of his hand. “You’re doing great, Deanna. The head is out, push.”

She clenched her teeth again, and he held his breath as the right shoulder appeared first.

The elevator started to move.

Now? They got it moving
now
? The left shoulder came out. The elevator dinged and the doors opened behind him, but he didn’t move.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Nancy the nurse step into the elevator.

“Don’t let go now, big guy.”

He blinked back tears. “One more push, Deanna!”

“Unhhhhhhh.”

The rest of the baby slipped out, and he flipped her over. A perfect little face and body, complete with arms and legs and fingers and toes. “You did it! It’s a girl.”

Hands reached out, and he handed her to another nurse who cleared the baby’s nose and mouth.

Deanna flopped back, exhausted. “Is she okay?”

After a few seconds, cries bounced around the elevator and cheers rang out in the hallway behind them.

Nancy patted him on the shoulder. “Okay, hero, move back and give us some room.”

* * *

Misha sat in the seventh floor waiting room. The nurses had found him a pair of scrubs, which apparently had not been easy because of his size. He rested his head against the wall and took a deep breath. A couple minutes later, a hand rested lightly on his arm.

“Hey, big guy.”

He opened his eyes to see Nurse Nancy smiling at him.

“Is she okay?”

“They’re fine. They both just got settled in the room. Let me take you to see them.”

Misha groaned as he stood. “Do you have a twin? I thought you worked in the ER?”

She smirked. “I do. I’m actually off duty now. When I heard the elevator was stuck and you two had never made it to OB, I had a bad feeling. Couldn’t bring myself to leave until they got you out of there. Do I dare ask why your accent has changed from Southern to Russian?”

“Not really. It’s a long story.”

“Well, I like the Russian accent better. The Southern one was a bit too
Gone With the Wind
for me.”

They ambled down the hall, and she bumped her shoulder against him. “You did a good job today.”

Nancy left him at the door to Deanna’s room, and Misha stood for a moment in silence, mesmerized by the young mother lying in bed with the baby in her arms.

He cleared his throat. “You two make one of the prettiest pictures I have ever seen.”

Deanna smiled. “She is gorgeous, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“Thank you so much.”

Misha shrugged. “You and the baby did all the work.”

“That isn’t true and you know it. Do you want to hold her?”

He rubbed his palms against his scrubs and walked up to the bed. “Yes.” He reached down and, ever so carefully, picked her up. He studied the light fuzz on her head and the button nose on her perfect face. Her eyes stayed closed, but one of her hands poked out from under the blanket, and he blinked at the teeny fingers as they flexed slightly.

With a lump in his throat, he said, “Hello, little one, welcome to the world.”

* * *

Misha lugged the three-foot teddy bear through the sliding doors of the ER. He had decided to stop there before going upstairs to see Deanna and the baby. He smiled when he recognized Nurse Nancy behind the desk, but she frowned in return.

His stomach twisted. “Has something happened?”

“No, nothing bad happened…Deanna already left with the baby.”

Misha’s chest constricted. “What? But I told her I would pick her up and take her home today.”

Nancy reached up and patted his arm. “I know. But Deanna felt like she needed to do this on her own. She asked me to tell you thanks again for everything.”

Misha nodded and took a deep breath. “Do you think she’ll be okay?”

“I think you gave her a wonderful chance at a new start. If you hadn’t been with her in the elevator, the outcome could have been very different. As a nurse, I had to learn a long time ago that I can only help my patients with medical problems. What they do once they leave here is up to them. It’s hard, but you have to let them go.”

In his head, he knew she was right, but someone needed to tell his heart to stop protesting so much. He held up the large bear. “So what should I do with him?”

“I’ll take it up to the children’s ward. They’ll get a kick out of it. Better yet, it’s time for my break. Why don’t you come up there with me and give it to them yourself? The kids will love you. They’ll think you’re a giant and hang off of you like monkeys.”

Misha turned the bear around and looked him in the eye. “I think we’d both enjoy that very much.”

Nancy chuckled. “I thought you might.”

Thanks!

I hope you enjoyed the second book in my Mind Sweeper Series. My third book is a novel that will once again center on Kyle, my heroine from book one. You can find my other books listed below.

If you would like to know when my books will be released, please join my new releases email list at
www.aejonesauthor.com
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@aejonesauthor
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And if you are so inclined, please review this book as well.

Mind Sweeper Series

Mind Sweeper
– Book 1

The Fledgling – Book 2 (A Mind Sweeper Novella)

Shifter Wars – Book 3 (Coming Late Fall 2014)

Books 4 & 5
 
– Coming 2015

If you haven’t read my first novel,
Mind Sweeper
, please turn the page for an excerpt.

Excerpt from

Mind Sweeper

AE Jones

Chapter 1

An angel, a demon, and a vampire walked into a bar. No seriously, they did. And all hell broke loose. Then I got called in, or rather the team got called in, to handle supernatural damage control. My job was to manipulate people’s memories. Don’t ask me how. I was born with it, and like someone born with double joints or the ability to flip their eyelids inside out, I just do it and hopefully not freak out too many people in the process.

On this particular night, I was destined to spend the evening in a bar with no chance of getting lucky. Dead bodies tended to put a damper on romance.

Not that I was dressed to attract men—my jeans, graphic tee, and black work boots didn’t exactly fit in with the skimpy dresses and three-inch heels worn by the other women in the bar. But then I had missed the class about fitting in, so this was nothing new.

I held open the door, and the muggy Cleveland night invaded the air-conditioned bar, steaming up the door window. Pasting on a flight-attendant smile, I barely restrained myself from muttering “buh-bye” as the witnesses filed out calmly. Calmly, because I had spent the past twenty minutes implanting them with new memories.

Instead of a demon and a vamp facing off, their recollections featured a brawl between a biker and a drunken fraternity boy. Crisis averted. Now the rest of the team could get to work.

Jean Luc peeled the tablecloth off the corpse he’d stuffed in the corner during my shtick with the patrons. Even though moving the body had meant disturbing evidence, we couldn’t very well keep a dead vamp—especially a
headless
dead vamp—lying around when minds had to be scrubbed and altered to believe nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Humans don’t do well with
different
. So our team’s job? Clean up the mess.

I studied our potential publicity nightmare—the headless body in a rumpled suit. Dead vamps always surprised me. Every movie I’d ever seen showed the vamp disintegrating. Stab him in the heart, instant ash cloud. Chop off his head, get out the dust vac. It wasn’t until I met Jean Luc that I learned those movies were bunk. And since he’d been a vampire for the past four hundred years, he was the foremost authority in my book.

“What do you think happened?” I asked.

Jean Luc grinned slowly. “Well, Kyle, I would say he was decapitated.”

I frowned at him. “Thanks, Dr. Obvious. I meant why the supernatural smackdown in the middle of the happy hour and hot-wings crowd?”

He shook his head. “Supernaturals are not normally this careless. There must be a compelling reason why this happened when it did.”

“Have you ever seen an angel before?”

“Yes, but never one that revealed himself to humans this blatantly. Nicholas will be watching us closely until we figure this out.”

I bristled. “Nicholas can chill. If he’s worried we’re not doing our jobs, he can come here and supervise us himself. Did you find the vamp’s head?”

“No.”

I didn’t want to think about why someone would take it. “Where’s Misha?”

“Talking to our supernatural witness in the back room.”

Since the place had been busy, odds were good at least one supe would be in the crowd, and we had hit pay dirt. There’d been a shifter working as a bartender.

“Hopefully, we can get a credible story from him.”

I walked through the kitchen door. It was quarter-wing night and the sweet-smoky smell of barbeque sauce hit my nose. My stomach growled like a pissed-off Haltrap demon. Definitely a crime scene faux pas, perusing a dead body one second and drooling over mesquite the next.

I hurried through the kitchen and into the storage area. Misha glanced up when I pushed open the door and then turned back to the bartender, who was cowering nervously in a chair.

The pencil-thin shifter bounced his leg so hard his teeth were chattering. He pushed his dark hair off his forehead in a jerky motion, which made me wonder what type of animal he could change into—a monkey? One of those yappy little Chihuahuas? Of course, having Misha breathing down his neck didn’t help matters.

Six-foot-six and two hundred and fifty pounds of pure muscle, Misha looked like a Browns linebacker. With short, blond hair and ice-blue eyes, he was intimidating when he smiled and terrifying when he scowled. The little guy didn’t stand a chance. I stayed close to the door, not wanting to interrupt the interrogation.

Misha’s bass voice, laced with a thick Russian accent, rippled across the room. “So what happened?”

“The vampire came into the bar first and was acting weird.”

“Weird how?” Misha scrubbed his perpetual five o’clock shadow.

“You know vamps, normally nothing fazes them. This guy was actually nervous. He kept looking over his shoulder. Even asked me if there was a back way out. Then the demon came ripping through the front door, and the vamp took off at a dead run.”

“What kind of demon was it?”

The shifter paused for a second before answering. “He wasn’t a Shamat like you.”

Misha stiffened. He did a good job of suppressing his demon side when he was out in public, but a shifter’s nose could sniff out anything. “Then what kind was he?”

“I couldn’t get a good whiff of him at first. It wasn’t until later, when the angel got here, that he transitioned into his demon form—purple skin and yellow eyes. Then I knew he was a Pavel.”

I gasped like a little girl. I couldn’t help myself. Demons didn’t show their true selves in public, ever. And a Pavel demon? Even by supe standards they were badasses.

Misha scowled at me before returning to his questions. “What happened before the angel arrived?”

“The demon tackled the vamp. The vamp bared his fangs and sank them into the demon’s arm, and the normals wigged out. After a couple more seconds, the room started to vibrate. My hair stood on end, and all the humans froze. That’s when the angel appeared. Then it got
really
weird.”