The Lycans Voted Her Queen novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: The Grandson

The young man was holding the gate open himself.

Rolf was nowhere to be seen.

I ran across the courtyard with my bag banging my hip, and Garrick ran behind me, and we took the stairs three at a time.

The upstairs hall smelled of blood and lamp oil.

The bedroom door stood open, and at least thirty women crowded the room and the corridor, in nightgowns and shawls, with their faces gray.

The hold healer stood in the middle with his hands hanging.

On the bed lay a woman of about twenty-five.

She was pale as paper, curled on her side, with a dark spreading stain on the sheet beneath her.

"Out," I said, to the room. "Everyone who isn't holding a lamp. Two of you with clean hands, to me."

Nobody moved.

"Now."

Women scattered.

Two stepped forward, a gray-haired one and a girl of eighteen.

"Wash. There's a basin. Scrub to the elbows."

I dropped to the side of the bed.

"I'm Moira," I told the woman on it. "You asked for me."

"I did," she said. Her lips were cracked. "He said I'd be fine."

"You will be. Let me look."

She was fully dilated.

That was the good news.

The bad news was the bleeding, bright red and steady.

The other bad news was the baby's heartbeat, which I found on the second try, and which was too slow.

The placenta was peeling away from the wall of her womb before the baby was out.

I had perhaps ten minutes.

"What do you need?" Garrick said from the doorway.

He had not come in.

He stood with his boots on the very edge of the sill, gripping the frame, and his face was the color of candle wax.

"Towels. Hot water. Every clean sheet in the house. Stand there and hand them in."

"Yes."

He turned and bellowed down the stairs.

Women ran.

"Listen to me," I said to the woman on the bed. "The baby has to come now.

"You will feel me push, and you will push when I say, with everything you have. Not later, not when you're ready. When I say."

"All right."

"You," I said to the hold healer. "Take her other hand.

"Look at her, not at me."

He did.

I will say this for him, he did what he was told.

"Push."

She pushed.

She screamed.

The girl and the gray-haired woman held her legs.

"Again."

The head crowned in a rush of blood and water.

"Again. Everything."

The baby slid into my hands, small and limp and blue, and he did not cry.

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