“Oh?” Another glance at the mother. “Are we related?”
“A dozen times removed.”
“I’m losing count…” Presume that is also a mortal conundrum.
Sera reaches deeper as the woman’s light flickers toward the familiar pull of my own nature—the endless gravity of what I am. “Aura?”
“Dimming.”
Sera’s jaw tightens. That jaw. “How much?”
“Enough to concern me.”
“You’re Death. You’re not supposed to be concerned; you’re supposed to be pleased.”
“I find I’ve developed opinions about which souls come to me and when.” I move to the woman’s side and take her free hand, the one not gripping the table edge. She can’t fullycomprehend me in her state, but she senses the steadying weight of something vast pressing gently against the fraying edges of her light. “Stay,” I tell her. “Your child is almost here. Stay a moment longer.”
Her fingers close around mine.
“Talking to her?” Sera asks, not looking up. “Fighting death?”
“Apparently.”
“Is it working?”
“Her grip just tightened.”
“Good. Keep going.”
“I wasn’t aware I took instructions from?—”
“Uncle…” The word is quiet. Pointed. And beneath it, something unguarded. A flicker of the thing she refuses to show in front of the nurses. Fear. Not of failure. But of this specific loss, in this specific room, with this specific witness. “Please.”
I keep talking. Low, unhurried, the kind of voice I used once beside a boy’s cot in an orphanage, beside a young king in a throne room, beside a gravedigger’s deathbed. The voice that isn’t mine and has always been mine—the part of Death that learned, very late, to hold on as well as to let go.
“There!” Sera’s hands go in and lift.
The child emerges. Slick. Furious. Already deeply inconvenienced by the world, the sound he makes piercing the chamber like a lance of light.
The aura blazes.
I release the mother’s hand. Her light is stabilizing: flickering still, but catching, the way a flame sputters before it commits to the wick.
She’ll live.
Sera cleans the child with efficient hands that betray only the faintest tremor and lowers him to his mother’s chest. “A boy. Healthy and whole.”
The mother’s sob is the sound of relief so total it breaks the body a little on its way out. Her arms curl around the bundle with the ancient, instinctive grip I’ve watched a thousand times.
Sera strips off her gloves. Turns to me. The professional composure is mostly intact except at the edges, where something bright and fierce and desperately controlled is fighting its way through.
“Well?” she asks. “Both auras?”
“The child is blazing.” A pause. “The mother will live.”
One sharp nod. A crack at its edges, letting through one unguarded flash of raw triumph before she buries it. She turns away, busying herself with instruments that don’t need attention, and I watch the set of her shoulders as she breathes through whatever is happening inside her chest.
So like her.
