Talulla Rising (6 page)

A voice with a weird accent said: ‘Twenty thousand years, you think you’ve seen it all.’

I jumped. It was right behind me (
how the fuck
?) – but when I turned there was no one there.

For a moment I stood still, breath moist and warm around my muzzle.

Then my waters broke.

6

As with all dreaded things, once it happened it felt inevitable.

Of course I’d known it was a possibility. Simple math determined an approximately one in thirty chance labour would coincide with a full moon. Cloquet and I had prepared. We had labour-inducing drugs: Pitocin, dinoprostone, misoprostol. We had (or would have had, if the consignment hadn’t been stuck at Anchorage) half a dozen amniohooks – little plastic crochet-needle type instruments used if the drugs don’t work to rupture the membrane of the amniotic sac – though the thought of having to resort to these terrified both of us. The plan had been to wait until the thirty-sixth or -seventh week then make a decision: induce and risk slight prematurity or leave it and risk having to give birth... like this.
Radical
prematurity I’d refused to prepare for. Radical prematurity would just mean – in the old universe where things meant things – that the baby wasn’t meant to survive.

Well, now we’d find out.

Ghost voice shoved aside, I looked down at the steaming splash my waters had made in the snow.
The passing of the mucus plug from the cervix is known as the show. It is a sign that labour is soon to start, but it goes unnoticed by many women
. Many women and one idiot werewolf.
The amniotic sac ruptures either shortly before or at any time during the first stage of labour. The first stage of labour lasts on average 6-12 hours
.
The second stage of lab—
I screamed. Yelped, rather. All the times you’ve heard women talk about this pain it’s remained a mystery. Then one day it comes to you. Your version. The only version that matters. I thought of my Aunt Vera telling my mother about the thirty-hour labour she had for my cousin Andy:
They kept telling me to pant like a dog, but it didn’t make a damn bit of difference. I told that dumb-ass doctor why didn’t he try meowing like a cat
... In Westerns it was men pacing up and down outside and trying to get in and being shooed away by a plain old housemaid suddenly filled with occult authority, or a sour grandmother everyone thought hated the girl but it turns out loves her and delivers her baby. There was this mental blur and flutter, images of people ripping up bedsheets and putting water on to boil, female screams and the sweaty big-thighed woman in the Sex Ed video, Lauren whispering,
If your kid’s too big your pussy tears open and they have to stitch you up
. It rewrites the contract, I’d read somewhere. Your self’s no longer central. This thing comes out of you and drags half your soul along after it like a blanket.

Another pain went through me, an effect like the sudden splintering thunder of a fighter jet overhead.
They kept telling me to pant like a dog.
Like a dog. Ha ha—

A moment of blindness, the world swung up. I found I’d fallen to my knees and bent forward, elbow-deep in the snow. My head was giant and wayward, too much for my neck. I crawled into the moonlight expecting its balm, but there was nothing. Just another contraction that doubled me, lips curled, fists clenched. I thought of the care Poulsom had taken of me in the white jail, the Harrods towels and beaming bathroom. In his own way he’d contributed, if this child survived. I wanted my mother. Her ghost, her voice in my head, anything of her so I wouldn’t be going through this alone and she could tell me it would be all right and because it was her I’d believe it.

But there was nothing. Of course there was nothing.

I got to my feet and lurched, wet-thighed towards the drive.

Cloquet knew immediately something was wrong, and almost simultaneously
what
was wrong. He let go of Kaitlyn (who collapsed) and came towards me, but I waved him back. (Waving, gesturing, miming. Not many worse times to lose the power of speech.) He stopped, suffered a moment of paralysis, mouth open, arms held slightly away from his sides, then turned, grabbed Kaitlyn’s hand, yanked her to her feet and all but dragged her back into the house. By the time I crawled across the threshold he’d cuffed her, semi-conscious, to the cistern pipe in the downstairs bathroom.

‘
Merde... merde... merde
...’ he said, neutrally, as if the emotions under the word were missing. His face was pale and not just clammy but
wet
. ‘
Oh, mon ange, mon ange
...’ still without discernible feeling. ‘Jesus. Fuck.
Merde
.’

I had enough strength to get to the couch, but I knew that would be the last of my legs for a while. Cloquet, now that we’d come to it, froze. Through the pain I could see that confronted with the central fact – you have to deliver a werewolf’s baby – he was capable of all sorts: fainting; taking a Ski-Doo and riding away; cutting my head-off; going for medical help; sitting down and smoking a cigarette.

He needn’t have worried. I didn’t want him there. Not just because in the absence of any real knowledge (despite his bedside
Essentials of Obstetrics and Gynaecology
) there was nothing he could do, but because I couldn’t spare the consciousness his presence would demand. What was happening to me would require all the consciousness, all the being, all the anything I had. Which still wouldn’t be enough.

A contraction came, and a last defiant surge of hunger met it head-on. One moment of balance – a salt whiff of groggy Kaitlyn; even Cloquet briefly risked a clawed swipe – then appetite went, seared away in the solar flare of another contraction, and I was left with the one priority, the womb’s screaming monomania:
Get this fucking thing out of me
.

7

I ended up under the dining table, though I couldn’t tell you how I got there.
Your bitch will seek a covered over or tucked-away place to litter. She may ignore the whelping box, however comfortable you’ve made it, but this is normal. Let her follow her inclinations.
A great hoot for
wulf
was doing away with any delusions of dignity your human half might have. Somewhere between hotel reruns of
Friends
and surreally perused
Elle
s I’d gone to canine-health.com, the tone of which alternated between pseudo-clinical and gratingly down-home.
Mom will NOT thank you for bright lights and crowds on her big day, however much the kids (and adults!) might want to watch. Give the little lady some PRIVACY.
I’d visited the website in a moment of self-ridicule, and couldn’t have spent more than two minutes scanning its content, but it had gone in. Lycanthrope hard-wiring or a subconscious concession to my one-in-thirty chance of needing it. And now here I was, needing it.

Push. Don’t push. Breathe. Pant. Push. Breathe. Don’t push. According to
Essentials
there was a technique, a method. I might have had it memorised once but I didn’t have it now. What I had now was the feeling of slowly splitting – starting between my legs – in half. (Plus irritation that there even
was
a method. What about the millions of women who’d had their babies without being told when to push and breathe and pant?
This is all bullshit
, Lauren had whispered in Sex Ed.
Women in the Amazon just go off into the jungle and give birth on their own. They dig a hole and fill it with leaves and squat over it. They don’t have stirrups and enemas and fucking doctors talking about golf
.) No position was bearable for long. I had to keep moving: all-fours; side; back; squatting. The contractions emptied my mind of everything, the way God must have felt before creation, when it was just Him on His own, without the angels or even Time going by. Between contractions was the terrible fact of my finiteness, the exact shape and size of the body that somehow had to accommodate all this.
Mom will NOT thank you for bright lights
. This turned out to be true. The lodge ceiling had angled spots on its exposed beams and for some reason Cloquet (more miming had got him out of the house, from where he could have continued to Disneyland for all I cared) had left all of them on. In the moments when I wasn’t God I was aware of them giving me a headache. My claws scored the oak floor. Blood gossiped and thumped in my skull. Random details came and went with pointless vividness: the little brass logo on the range door; Cloquet’s yellow road atlas of the USA & Canada; a small carved wooden bear on the mantle; my The North Face jacket on a chair, one red thermal glove hanging out of its pocket. The room was like something stupidly smiling in the face of horror. Was it the Vietnamese who smiled when terrified? Some movie.
Platoon
or
Full Metal Jacket
. I was aware of my own crammed silence. At one point I heard something like metal grinding rhythmically in the bathroom where Kaitlyn was tied-up, then it went quiet again.

I don’t know how long it lasted. I pushed when my body demanded it. Once or twice tried not pushing. Couldn’t tell what effect it had, other than making me feel I was at the limit of what I could stand. I remember putting my hand between my legs to try to feel how much I was dilated (vaguely thinking: four inches for humans – double it?) but I couldn’t tell and my fingers came away wet with blood and in any case what was the point since I’d already started pushing? I thought: Okay, this is it. You die.
She died in childbirth
. Fittingly Victorian, for Jake. Then the reality of death struck me – death right here, right now,
actual
death – and all I had besides pain was fear. Vestigial fear of the Devil and hell quickly torn through into the bigger, up-to-date fear, of falling through cold black silent nothingness like an empty lift shaft between two universes – for ever.

But you didn’t die. That was the treachery of suffering. It took you to the point from which you thought death must follow, then let you know it could hold you there indefinitely. That was when you stopped fearing death and started wanting it, praying for it, begging for it. I knew how that worked. Serves you right. Monster. Murderer. Mother-to-be.

I lay on my side, jaws clamped around one of the table legs. My thighs were sticky with blood.
During the final stages of labour the uterine contractions are very strong and usually painful. The baby’s head presses on the pelvic floor, which causes the mother to have an overwhelming urge to push down
. In the gap before the final contraction I heard Kaitlyn thrashing around in the bathroom. Then it
was
the last contraction, and with a sharp scalloping sensation and a sound like a rubber glove being pulled off, the baby, in a knot of satiny gore, slithered out of me.

At that moment Cloquet crashed through the window and went flying across the floor.

8

They were here.

All the calculations and evasions and disguises and double-checks and now it was for nothing and there was no time and no strength. I started wondering how they’d found me – but it didn’t matter how. Only
that
. I was turning to see the child when the first vampire leaped in through the broken window. I glimpsed close-cropped grey hair and a small neat face before he turned to take Cloquet’s four shots in the shoulder with barely a twitch. There was an inexplicable suffocating pressure on my arms and chest, though my legs felt weightless. The front door opened. Cold air that should have been knife-fresh rushed in packed instead with the pigshit-and-rotten-meat stink of the Undead.

In spite of which the imperative was simply to see the baby, verify its existence, establish it was breathing. With immense dull elephantine effort I reached down and lifted him towards me.

It was a boy. His eyes were closed and he was covered in mucus and blood. I licked his muzzle, quickly, cleared the tender nose. He coughed and wriggled closer. I knew this was only a moment but it was pathetically intact, like a petal in a paperweight, my astonishment at the miniature hybrid hands and feet, the little penis and the soft covering of gold and black hair. He opened his eyes. They were dark, like mine, like Jake’s. I thought: You walk around with it inside you and nothing prepares you for the absurd concreteness of the fact: a new creature suddenly here, disturbing its share of atoms. I put my hand under his head and sensed flickery consciousness inside. He blinked up at me, once, twice.

I want – you’ve no idea how much – to be able to say I loved him, instantly. I want to be able to say the miracle happened just as it was supposed to, that his life took immediate priority over everything. I want to tell you that as soon as I saw him the paradigm shifted, that the rubbishy clutter of my self fell away, that the contract was rewritten, that he’d come out of me dragging half my soul behind him like a blanket, that I was now – with molecular certainty and before I was anything else – a Mother.

The truth is I felt neutral. A living creature had come out of my body, but that was merely a bizarre fact, just another thing that happened to be the case. If I wanted to I could snap his newborn neck or rip out his newborn heart. There he was, warm flesh and banging blood, arms and legs and head, teeth and tongue – but in those first pure moments he was simply a live alien object in my hands, nothing to do with me. He was like a word you repeat so many times it loses its meaning and becomes raw sound.

Delilah Snow’s legacy.

Everything since I’d met her had been leading up to this moment.

The table lifted and spun away through the air to crash against the range. Two vampires stood over me. A Henry Mooreish perspective, their heads remote. One was a petite young (looking) male with dark brown curly hair and a smug long-eyelashed face like the early Bob Dylan’s. The other was a slim, attractive, green-eyed woman in her (nominal) late thirties with coppery red hair cut like Hitler’s. Both wore black jeans and zip-up leather jackets with a red leather emblem – something like a cuneiform character, I thought – embossed on the left lapel. Both had a stripe of thick white paste beneath their nostrils – an olfactory block, though from the look on their faces not completely effective.
Their
smell made me gag. The redhead was terrifically excited, at a pitch that gave her a steady gleam. I could hear a helicopter. The sound brought a feeling of exposure. I didn’t know why I could barely move. My legs were pillowcase light. An invisible weight lay across my abdomen. I tried to turn so I could shield the baby (if a reflex then a lumbering one, something I dimly knew I was
supposed
to do) but the woman kicked me hard in the side of the head, and in the time it took me to absorb the blow the youth rammed something big and sharp-pointed straight through my throat into the floor, pinning me. The pain rolled me up to the edge of blacking out, then back again in a sickening blur. I raised my left sandbag arm but found it grabbed and held by the grey-haired vampire. With no hint of effort in the natty, civilised face he forced it down, produced a second spike (not silver; someone wanted me alive through this) and impaled my helpless hand. I began to choke.