Page 46

“One more push,” the doctor says.

“You said that four pushes ago, you lying motherfucker!”

The nurse laughs so hard she has to hold on to the bed rail.

Then my mate bears down with everything she has left and screams so loud the windows hum, and our daughter comes into the world furious about it.

She opens her mouth and lets out the loudest, angriest cry I’ve ever heard in three hundred years, and every single light on the floor goes out at once. The machines go dark. The hallway goes black. For one second, the whole maternity ward of Saint Ursula Memorial Hospital is pitch black, and the only light in the room is the glow coming out of my eyes. Then the lights come back on, every one of them, all at once, brighter than before.

“Huh,” the doctor says, staring at the ceiling. “Power surge.”

“Mm-hm,” says the nurse, looking right at me.

They put my daughter on Kisha’s chest. She’s small, wet, and screaming, with a full head of black curls, and I can’t fucking breathe.

My mate looks up at me with tears running down her face and our baby squirming against her skin. “Nik,” she whispers. “Look at her.”

I’m looking. I can’t stop looking. The shadows in the corners of the room have all gone still and quiet, curled up, like they’re looking too.

The nurse reaches for the baby. “Okay, mama, we just need to weigh her real quick and…”

The growl comes out of me before I can stop it. It’s not a human sound. It’s not even close. The nurse freezes with her hands half out, and the doctor drops his clipboard.

NIK! Kisha thinks so loud it hurts.

“She needs to be weighed, honey,” the nurse says, very calmly, not moving an inch. “That’s all. I’ll put her right back.”

I hold her stare for a long time. Then I hold out my hands. “I’ll carry her.”

The nurse thinks about it. Then she shrugs and points to the scale in the corner.

So I’m the one who carries my daughter for the first time, across a hospital room, held so carefully in both hands that I barely breathe. I set her on the scale like she’s made of glass. Seven pounds, four ounces. She stops screaming the second my hands touch her, opens her eyes, and stares right up at me.

My eyes. She has my eyes. They’re dark now, but for half a second, right in the middle, there’s the faintest glow.

I pick her back up and carry her straight back to her mama. I don’t let anybody else touch her for the rest of the night.

Much later, the room is dark and quiet. Kisha’s asleep, wrecked and beautiful, her hair a disaster on the pillow, my bite on her neck and a hospital bracelet on her wrist. The nurse is gone. The doctor is gone. The whole floor is quiet. I’m in the chair next to the bed with my daughter asleep on my chest.

My phone buzzes on the table. I don’t pick it up. I can see the screen from here.

Boogeyman: Heard every light in the Bay went out for one second at 1:52 PM. Congrats, Santa.

I look down at her. She’s sleeping with her mouth open and her tiny fist curled in the collar of my shirt, the same way her mama sleeps.

Noelle. That’s what Kisha named her, three weeks ago, with her feet in my lap and a bowl of ice cream balanced on her belly.

“A Christmas name,” I told her. “For Krampus’s daughter.”

“Exactly,” she said, grinning at me with chocolate on her lip.

I spread my hand over my daughter’s back. It covers her completely.

My list has always been long. It’s about to get longer. Every person who ever makes either of my girls cry, every person who ever looks at them wrong, every person who ever thinks about hurting them goes on it. Forever.

My shadows curl up around the chair, around the bed, around the both of them, and settle in for the night.

Nobody gets through.