Meshara tried to shrug, but her shoulders hardly moved. “I can’t feel anything anyway.”
I had to clench my teeth to keep from screaming in frustration, afraid to attract degenerates while I was still trying to bring Mellie’s baby into the world.
“Okay. Let’s make a deal.” I half tugged, half carried her three steps to the middle row, where I helped her sit on the edge of the bench seat, facing me. I looked straight into eyes that couldn’t see me, hoping she could still hear me well enough to understand what I was about to offer. “You help me deliver the baby, and I’ll take you to Pandemonia so Kastor can give you a new body.”
She rolled her unfocused eyes. “You’re an exorcist. You wouldneverlet a human die so a demon could have a new body.”
I took her by the shoulders and leaned in close, even though she couldn’t see me. “There isnothingI wouldn’t do for a chance to hold Melanie’s baby.” To make sure that theonlything the poor kid would feel in its horrifyingly short life was love.
And heaven help anyone who got in my way.
“If you don’t believe me, look back through her memories,” I demanded. “I risked prison to steal food for her. I risked my life to rescue her from the Church. Mellie’s baby is all I have left of her, and the child won’t live long. Maybe an hour. Give me that hour, and I’ll give you another humanlifetime.”
“Swear.”
“I already—”
“Swear on your sister’s name,” she whispered, and her tongue seemed to be in its own way. “Swear on her baby’s life.”
“I swear on the name of my only sister, Melanie Kane. I swear on the soul of her dead lover, Adam Yung. And I swear on the life of their unborn child. Please, Meshara. Help me deliver this baby.”
“Fine,” she relented. “But I can hardly move my own tongue.”
That would have to be enough.
“So, what do we do?”
“Um…” I propped both hands on my hips, wishing for the millionth time in the past half hour that I’d paid more attention to the endless series of childbirth discussions. But I’d thought that even if I was present when the baby came, my role would be that of cheerleader.
In truth, I’d always assumed the aunt’s chief duty in the whole affair would be cuddling the newborn. I was highly prepared for that.
“Okay, scoot all the way in and lean back against the door. Make sure it’s locked. Then I need you to pull up your shirt and put your hand on your stomach, and concentrate, to see if you can feel the contractions. Can you do that?”
She couldn’t, and the fact that I had to help her scoot across the bench seat didn’t bode well for her ability to push a baby out through girl parts she couldn’t feel.
While Meshara scowled at a stomach she couldn’t see, I threw open the back hatch and started going through everything Eli had packed before the demon had felled him with his own crowbar.
Melanie’s delivery bag wasn’t there; it must have stayed in the truck. But I found a clean maternity T-shirt in her personal bag and set that aside, mentally earmarking it for the baby’s first—and likely last—swaddle.
Eli’s duffel held not one, but two sharp knives, each stored in its own handmade leather sheath, and I wanted to kick myself for not hopping around the car to search the luggage when I’d needed to cut through my ankle bindings. I slid the cleaner of the two knives into the largest of my cargo pockets, intending to use it to cut the umbilical cord.
Cutting the baby out was a last resort. But now it was actually possible, should it prove necessary.
I was rummaging through Reese’s bag full of spare parts for a flashlight and some batteries when Meshara called out from the middle row, and her words were now nearly atonal, as well as mushy. “I think it’s happening again.”
Nearly panicked, I pulled every sleep roll and blanket I could find from the cargo area and set them on the third-row seat, to keep them out of the dusty badlands air. “I need you to start counting the passing seconds as soon as the contraction ends. I don’t have a watch, so we’ll have to use the revered one-Mississippi method, which I learned in kindergarten.” Sister Margaret had been teaching us to estimate the drying time for white school glue, but I was sure she’d be pleased by my unconventional application of the knowledge.
While the demon counted silently, laboriously moving her numb lips with each unspoken number, I spread another blanket beneath her and across the rest of the middle bench seat. Then I dove into the cargo area again in search of the last packet of wet wipes, which Melanie had been saving for the baby’s first badlands bath, in case we weren’t within reach of a freshwater source when her labor began.
As near as I could tell, we weren’t within reach of anything.
When I’d laid out everything we could possibly need—at least, everything we had on hand—I sat on the end of the bench seat and spent the next hour alternately watching for hostile company from the badlands and reading from the pregnancy book I’d found wedged between the passenger’s seat and the center console, with one hand on my sister’s belly so I could feel the onset of the next contraction. Meshara couldn’t feel them anymore, either from the inside or the outside, but she was still able to count out the seconds between spasms.
The contractions started out at six-minute intervals, and I got good at mentally dividing seconds into minutes. But by the time the sun began to sink toward the western horizon, Meshara’s water had broken, her stolen uterus was contracting every three minutes, and she was almost sure she felt a little pressure in her pelvic floor.
Even after reading the emergency delivery section of the book four times, I wasn’t sure exactly what the “pelvic floor” was, but if she was feeling anything at all, the sensation must have been quite strong.
I told myself that when the contractions were two minutes apart, I’d make myself “check” her cervix. Or at least make sure the baby wasn’t about to fall out.
