Broken (49 page)

“It didn’t work, did it?” I said.

He shook his head.

“You knew it wouldn’t. You knew Hull was lying, that closing the portal wouldn’t cure Clay. There’s no magic here, is there?”

He walked up behind me, very gently kissed the back of my head and whispered, “No.”

My knees wobbled, and I grabbed the side of the bed, but Jeremy caught my arm to steady me.

“He’ll be fine, Elena. Randall is coming back to do the debridement—cut away the infected area—”

“But that means—Tolliver said—It’ll be permanent, won’t it? Muscle damage?”

“Possibly.” He hesitated. “Probably. His arm won’t be perfect, but he’ll still have it. Right now, those are my priorities. First, that he keeps the arm. Failing that, that he keeps his life.”

I lowered myself onto the bed.

Jeremy put his hand on my shoulder. “Matthew Hull is dead. The portal is closed. Your babies are safe. You’re safe. Yes, Clay might lose muscle. Possibly even his arm. But you know what he’ll think about that?”

I looked up at Jeremy.

“That it was a small price to pay, considering what he could have lost.”

When you live in a world of magic, you come to expect magic. You can fight that, try to concentrate on what’s real, but deep down, you still hope that the flick of a wand can make everything better and everyone will live happily ever after.

Clay’s cure did come—at the hands of a doctor. Tolliver cut out the infected tissue, and found clean flesh below it. So it was over. A price paid but, as Jeremy said, a relatively small one. I only hoped Clay agreed.

He woke up later the next day, when the drugs wore off. Groggy at first, he just lay there, listening as I told him that Hull was dead. He was too weak to manage more than muttering, “You took a stupid risk, Elena.”

Then Jeremy explained what they’d done to his arm, that some of the muscle had been damaged. While he’d have plenty of physiotherapy to undergo, he’d never get his full strength back in that arm.

He took it all in, unblinking. I tensed, waiting for the dismay, the rage that this had happened, all because of a letter I’d insisted we steal. As he turned to look at me, I steeled myself for what I’d see.

He met my gaze. “Ready to go home, darling?”

News

TWO WEEKS LATER
,
I WAS SITTING ON THE WEIGHT BENCH
in the basement at Stonehaven reading the Toronto papers Jeremy had brought me. Clay was battling the punching bag, starting the long process of training his brain to favor his left arm. I was reading the news aloud—at Clay’s request. Not that he cared about the aftermath of events in Toronto, but my reading distracted him.

As Jaime and Robert had predicted, once the portal closed, things had started getting back to normal in Toronto. It wasn’t instantaneous—no magic-wand solutions there either. But the city’s efforts to clean the water had begun working, and the rats—though still infected—had stopped rampaging. Like Clay, the city had begun the long road to recovery.

As I reached for the
National Post,
I rubbed my abdomen.

“Still bothering you?” Clay said, stopping.

“Just uncomfortable.”

I’d been “uncomfortable” since last night, unable to sleep and restless, an intermittent dull ache in my groin. Since our adventure in Toronto, I’d been feeling the pregnancy more—weighed down, tired and generally ready to get it over with. Nothing alarming, but Jeremy and Clay panicked every time I mentioned a stray twinge…so I’d stopped mentioning them.

I opened the paper. “The
Post
is blaming the provincial Liberal government for—”

A sudden gush of liquid between my legs made me jump up, those horrible miscarriage dreams zooming back from their hiding place. No, probably just another bladder leak—I’d been experiencing the joys of mild incontinence all week. Yet I hadn’t laughed or sneezed or any of the other things that normally set it off. When I inhaled, I smelled something that wasn’t blood or urine…something I didn’t recognize.

“Shit!” Clay said, turning so fast the ricocheting bag hit him in the back. “Your water broke.”

“My—?”

I looked down at the wet stain down my legs, and was still staring, not quite comprehending, when Clay started yelling for Jeremy.

So it began.

When I’d first become pregnant, Paige had offered to be my midwife. She’d done it several times when she’d still lived with her Coven. Yet when Jeremy had suspected, early that morning, that my labor had begun, he’d put off calling her. Savannah had started school, and Lucas was out of town, finishing that investigation they’d been on last month, as he tried to find the shaman a local lawyer to handle his legal case.

So Paige couldn’t throw together a bag and leave for what could be a false alarm. Jeremy postponed the call until he was sure. By then though, judging by my dilation, the babies would be here before Paige would, meaning we had to settle for a long-distance midwife.

My “discomfort” solidified into recognizable contractions. They were intense, but a few minutes apart—hardly debilitating. While Jeremy prepared tea from the brew Paige had sent, I prepared for our new arrivals.

We’d cleared out Malcolm’s old room, but hadn’t started decorating yet, so my room would stand in as a temporary nursery.

I put bottom sheets on the bassinets, shook out baby blankets, gathered sleepers and opened the package of diapers. Clay kept trying to figure out my next move so he could beat me to it. He got in the way more than he helped, but I didn’t even snap at him. That hour seemed almost surreal, me calmly laying out tiny diapers and bath towels, unperturbed by Clay—and later Jeremy—as they tried to persuade me that none of this needed to be done now. When a contraction hit, I’d just wait it out, breathing deeply, then carry on. Maybe it was a sudden nesting urge, but I was probably in shock.

Then, all of a sudden, the contractions progressed from “that’s not so bad” to “holy crap!”

When it came to childbirth, being a werewolf gave me a few advantages. First, I was used to going through “holy crap!” pain, the kind that makes you vow never to do something again. As with Changing, this pain had a reward at the end, so I concentrated on that. And when that promise of reward no longer worked, well, the guys were used to seeing me in a cursing, shouting temper, so they handled it remarkably well.

Jeremy acted as midwife while Paige coached over the speakerphone. When the time came, I started to push. Baby number one slid into position…then I realized, with sudden clarity, that I was about to shove a baby out of a hole usually used by something much smaller. I panicked, and I was about to scream, “I can’t do this,” when I couldn’t help giving a last push and…

“We’ve got…a boy!” Clay said, grinning.

He was about to come to me, then stopped, as if uncertain where his attention should be. Jeremy finished cutting the umbilical cord, then passed Clay the baby—wiped down, but still bloodied.

Clay handed him to me and for a second, I was lost in those big unfocused eyes. I nuzzled the top of his head, inhaling the scent of him, a new smell with the barest whiff of the scent that marked him a werewolf. It didn’t smell the same as a mature werewolf, but I expected that—Jeremy said it would be subtler.

As I kissed his head, I remembered this wasn’t done.

“Better take him,” I said to Clay. “The first impression he gets of his mom shouldn’t be cursing and screaming. He’ll hear enough of that later.”

Clay took him, and juggled him around a bit, trying to figure out a safe hold. The baby only whimpered, eyes wide and unblinking, taking in his new world.

“Shouldn’t he be…louder?” I asked. “Squalling?”

“It’ll come, I’m sure,” Jeremy said.

Clay grinned. “And if it doesn’t, you won’t complain, right?”

“True.”

“Elena?” Paige said through the speakerphone.

“I’m still here.”

She laughed. “Good, because you’re only half done. Do you feel the other one coming yet?”

I did. And we started all over again. This time was better. The way had been cleared and I knew the end would come fast. In what seemed like minutes, I had another baby.

“A girl!” Clay looked over at me, his grin as wide as the first one. “We have a daught—”

His words were drowned out by a squall so loud even Jeremy started.

“I think you have your screamer,” Paige yelled over the phone as Clay passed our son back to me.

Getting this baby cleaned up and ready for presentation wasn’t nearly so easy as her brother. She screamed and kicked and flailed so much that I could tell Jeremy was worried something was wrong. But when he handed her to Clay, she fussed only a moment, as if getting comfortable, then snuggled in.

When she’d settled, we traded babies. Our son only wriggled a bit in complaint, but she howled, face red, enraged at the disturbance. Again, after she was nestled in—to my arms this time—she quieted.

As I held her, I bent to kiss the top of her head, and inhaled deeply. I blinked. Was that—? No, it shouldn’t be. The genes didn’t pass to daughters. I took a deep breath of room air, then tried again. There seemed to be…No, I couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter. Either way, it didn’t matter.

“Do you have names picked out?” Paige asked.

I looked up. “Um, pretty much.”

We’d decided if we had a girl, we’d name her after my mother. And yet, looking down at the baby in my arms, “Natalya” just didn’t seem to fit.

“Paige?” I said. “What’s your middle name?”

“My—? Um, Katherine…with a K.”

I glanced up at Clay. He nodded.

But there was still one more question. We hadn’t settled on a surname, not because we’d been arguing over it, but because neither of us really cared whose name the babies bore. As Clay said, Danvers wasn’t even his name, so if I wanted Michaels, he didn’t mind. And yet…

I looked over at Jeremy. Danvers might not be our name, but it was the name of this house and this family. Clay slid onto the bed beside me. I smiled up at him.

“Logan Nicholas Danvers and Katherine Natalya Danvers.”

About the Author

KELLEY ARMSTRONG
lives in Ontario with her family.

Visit her website at
www.kelleyarmstrong.com
.

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Here’s a special preview:

EXIT STRATEGY

Mary

Mary Lee pushed open the shop door. A wave of humid heat rolled in—another hot Atlanta night, refusing to give way to cooler fall weather.

Her gaze swept the darkened street, lingering enough to be cautious, but not enough to look nervous. Beyond a dozen feet, she could see little more than blurred shapes. At Christmas, her children had presented her with a check for a cataract operation, but she’d handed it back. Keep it for something important, she’d said. For the grandchildren, for college or a wedding. So long as she could still read her morning paper and recognize her customers across the store counter, such an operation was a waste of good money.

As for the rest of the world, she’d seen it often enough. It didn’t change. Like the view outside her shop door tonight. Though she couldn’t make out the faces of the teenagers standing at the corner, she knew their shapes, knew their names, knew the names of their parents should they make trouble. They wouldn’t, though; like dogs, they didn’t soil their own territory. As she laid her small bag of trash at the curb, one of the blurry shapes lifted a hand and waved. Mary waved back.

Before she could duck back into her store, Mr. Emery stepped from his coffee shop. His wide face split in a Santa Claus grin, a smile that kept many a customer from complaining about stale bread or cream a few days past its “best before” date.

“Going home early tonight, Miz Lee?” Emery asked.

“No, no.”

His big stomach shuddered in a deep sigh. “You gotta start taking it easy, Miz Lee. We’re not kids any more. When’s the last time you locked up and went home at closing time?”

She smiled and shrugged…and reminded herself to take out the garbage earlier tomorrow, so she could be spared this timeworn speech. She murmured a “good night” to Mr. Emery, escaped back into her shop and closed the door.

Now it was her time. The customers gone, the shop door locked, and she could relax and get some real work done. She flipped on her radio and turned the volume up.