Page 65 of Monster Queen Rising

"There is no van. There is no road. Nobody knows this house. Nobody is coming, tonight or any night." A beat. "That is the first thing I want her to know."

Madison makes a sound that isn't a contraction.

He keeps going. He tells her the trees. He tells her the names. He tells her Crull's arm is healing and Harek is a good one and Daron talks too much, and Madison — worn out and shaking and doing this early — laughs, once, cracked open, three seconds long, and Janet's got her before it turns into anything else.

He doesn't have many words. He said so on that porch. He spends every one of them, all night, on a person who can't hear him yet.

I've stood at the door of a cell he was in. I've seen what they did to him. I have never heard him talk this long.

Her legs give out around five and she wants the bed.

She goes on her side. Janet at her front with her arms around her shoulders. Harek at his work. Mara's at the dresser with the cloths and the things Harek laid out, handing them across when he asks, her own face wet and her hands steady.

I'm at the foot. When Madison's foot pushes out at me through a contraction I brace both hands against it and press back, hard, and she drives into it like it's the floor, and that becomes the one thing my body can do in this room.

I press. She breathes. The window goes gray.

The gaps keep shrinking. And under the nightshirt I can see the shape of her move in a way that isn't a kick — something turning, something with a will in it — and Harek sees it too, and neither of us says a word about it.

Fen's voice comes on through the door under all of it.

Somewhere in there he starts saying the same things over. The trees. The pack. The bread on the counter. Nobody is coming.

It doesn't sound like less the second time.

Then something changes all the way through Madison's body and her voice comes up out of the low place.

"I have to push."

Harek checks. Looks up.

"You can push."

And the room turns. The waiting's done and the work has a direction.

Madison pushes.

She's moved me up to her shoulder and her hand in mine is a vise. She bears down in long efforts with Harek counting her through low and steady, and between them she drops back with her eyes shut and her chest going and then sets her jaw and goes again. Janet's face is right there in hers the whole time.You're doing it. Again. Now.

It takes everything she has. Then it takes more than she has and she finds it anyway, twice, three times, somewhere underneath the last one.

I look at the door. Fen hasn't moved. The dark lines are up his throat and his breathing has matched hers without him knowing it, and he's still talking, quieter now, so low it's under the sound of the room.

"Head," Harek says, and the calm cracks — the smallest lift in his voice, the first one all night. "Madison. One more like that one."

She gives him one more like that one.

The baby comes in a slide, into Harek's hands.

The whole room lets go at once.

She makes a sound — wet, more breath than cry, and then a real one, thin and furious. Her arms move. Her legs move. Across the hall Crull's line goes through me so hard I have to put a hand on the bed. Far down, downstairs, I feel Thaw's ease.

Harek brings her up and lays her on Madison's chest.

Madison's breathing hard, soaked, her face wrecked, and her hand goes to the daughter without her telling it to.

"Hello," she says.