The Beast

SIXTY

Qhuinn held his breath as the anesthesia was administered to Layla and a dark brown, pungent-smelling antiseptic was splashed across her round belly. And he further did not breathe as Manny, Jane, Ehlena, and Vishous clustered around the operating table, two on each side, their gloved fingers picking up and trading instruments back and forth.

You could scent the blood in the air as the cut was made, and Qhuinn felt the floor go into a wave pattern under his feet, sure as if the tile had liquefied.

As Blay’s hold bit into his arm, it was hard to tell whether that was because the male was worried about Qhuinn fainting, or because he himself was likewise unsteady. Probably some of both.

How did it come to this? Qhuinn wondered silently.

But as soon as the thought hit him, he shook his head. What the fuck had he assumed was going to happen with two young in there?

“Is she all right?” he barked. “Are they alive?”

“Here comes one,” Blay said roughly.

“Baby A,” Manny pronounced as he handed a little purple bundle to Ehlena.

There wasn’t even a chance to look at the kid. The nurse moved fast, rushing the infant over to one of two triage beds that had been set up.

Too silent. Motherfucker—it was too damn quiet.

“Is it alive!” Qhuinn yelled. “Is it alive!”

Blay had to hold him back—but then again the lunge forward was ridiculous. Like he could do anything to help any of this? Oh, and as if he wanted the nurse to be thinking about anything other than saving that infant?

But Ehlena looked over. “Yes, he is. He is alive—we just need to keep him that way.”

Qhuinn took no comfort in any of that. How could he when the entity she was intubating and giving drugs to looked like some kind of tiny alien. A tiny, fragile, wrinkly alien that had nothing in common with the fat babies he’d seen born to humans on T.V. from time to time.

“Jesus Christ,” he moaned. “So small.”

The infant wasn’t going to survive. He knew it down to his soul. They were going to lose him and—

“Baby B,” Jane announced as she handed something over to Vishous.

V steamed by with the young, and Qhuinn gasped.

The daughter—his daughter—was even smaller. And she wasn’t purple.

She was gray. Gray as stone.

All at once, the memory he had taken with him when he had serviced Layla during her needing came back to him. It was from when he had nearly died himself, and had gone up unto the Fade, and had faced off at a white door in the midst of a foggy white landscape.

He had seen an image on that door.

The image of a young female with blond hair and eyes that were shaped like his—eyes that had changed color before him from the precise shade of Layla’s to the mismatched blue and green of his own.

With an animal’s cry of pain, he bellowed into the OR, screaming with an agony he had never felt before—

He had guessed wrong. He had . . . been wrong. He had misinterpreted what he had seen.

The vision on the door had been not the prediction of a daughter to come.

But a daughter he had lost in birth.

A daughter . . . who had died.