“Well, I thank you for attending me,DoctorTrenton.” Mads disrobed and stepped lightly into the tub, settling beneath slightly warm depths with a sigh of relief.
“See, this guy knows his stuff.” Trenton gestured toward Mads appreciatively as a twinge of a contraction rolled over the surface of his belly, the muscles stretching in a familiar way, distantly so. It was at that point, Mads recalled the charm and had Marquis pull the thing from his pants pocket.
“Mads, what is this?” He turned it over as if he’d never seen such magic before, brow furrowed.
“It’s a charm. Sikko helped me figure it out. It’s shifter magic that I modified to help the birth.” Mads breathed through the contraction that ebbed the moment that charm hit his palm, calming the pain in an instant.
The magic worked through Mads, easing pain for magic, turning the power into something mage magic never was. Mage magic was an act of will against nature. And shifter magic was an act of nature against will. So, as long as the result Mads wanted went with the laws of nature, a shifter could cultivate it.
As if everything fell into place, the moment Mads settled into the tub, a flood of pink gushed out before him, his bellytwitching as it knotted up into a smaller, tight mass in his core. “Ooof!”
“Dramatic.” Trenton ushered Marquis away as he knelt at the tub’s edge and reached down, cupping fingers to probe the slit of Mads’s line. “And mostly open. You weren’t kidding.”
Trenton ran his fingers over the charm to feel the magic in it, brows rising. “And I want to talk to you about this charm, after. Old magic like this is spectacular.”
Because most spells acted upon a mage or a physical body were near impossible to control or do accurately. Mads breathed through the strange sensation of his insides open to the warm water of the tub. He made a note in his mind, wondering if what Nite had done with wish was shifter magic. Drawing nature to an apex. Shifters could be the key to solving what had broken mages. But that was for another time.
Marquis wrung his fingers as Trenton fished his back and forth along Mads’s line, making sure it was fully open with an uncomfortable tug.
Mads braced his arms on the sides of the tub, lifting his hips and forebody to ease the strain. Bless whatever magic made omegas, because he could not imagine birthing a child through the same hole he conceived it in.
He barely had time to breathe before another contraction clenched his insides. “Can Marquis please hold my fucking hand?”
Trenton ceased his exploratory touches and withdrew, shaking bathwater from his glove before removing it and sliding away. “By all means.”
The sarcastic tone that floated in his words might have made Mads apologize at one point in time, but with the pressure mounting into his pelvis and bulging against his pouch line, he couldn’t muster the effort to be polite.
Marquis had come rushing in the front door almost a week ago, panicking at Helena’s suggestion he’d be birthing soon, and Mads had agreed with her, but the practice contractions never pulled his line apart, merely wept a gentle drop or two against his waistband at the small raw spot that had parted in the most mundane of ways.
But, in mere moments sitting with his would-be stepfather having some polite banter and breathing exercises, and he’d passed whatever peaceful hurdle his body had demanded. “F-fuck!”
Mads remembered swearing when Rexford was born, the burn and stretch, but in water, holding the charm things had a muted quality that left him wrung out, hollow, and pushing against an invisible force. It didn’t feel right, though. He pushed the charm into Marquis’s hand and drew back experimentally, waiting for another contraction to begin. It ached, the pain a dull burn that grew in intensity with every throbbing beat of his heart. As the muscles drew in, his belly hardening and pressure diverting, the pain came back, and he cried out in breathless shock that somehow gave him the courage to push against the force.
In the midst of a contraction, his body aiding the motion, things shifted, his line spread over something and, caught off guard, he nearly shrieked, biting his lip to stifle the wail of pain.
Marquis fumbled, offering the charm back as Mads snatched it in a heartbeat, relishing the pain as it seemed to draw back from his belly and line like waves on a shore. Low tide rolled in, things sucking back into the ocean of power from which all things came and went.
“Let me scoot in here a moment, please.” Trenton dipped around Marquis and his iron grip on Mads’s hand, arm plunging into the bloodied water. The pink tinge darkened slightly as Trenton reached in, stirring the gentle seep of birthing fluidsand the light leak of blood from a stretching pouchline. None of it worried Mads, because with the magic in that talisman, an overwhelming peace and calm sank into his belly and words muddied in his mind.
Marquis pulled away, taking Mads’s hand with him. His soothing words brushed his ear as Trenton plunged both arms in. Dr. Vans said something and approached, towel in his arms. He couldn’t possibly be willing to hold a newborn baby… Mads couldn’t think of any single more body-fluid-coated thing in the world.
But there he was, arms open as Mads pushed and pushed again. Water splashed, Trenton worked, and Marquis whispered sweet nothings. He promised a lifetime of happiness, his unfaltering devotion, that he would chase Mads to the ends of the earth.
Marquis had promised so much of that all those years ago and hadn’t come. But Marquis meant it. He did then, too. And only then did Mads realize something—there was no way that Marquis wasn’t under some similar spell as him.
Mads brought Marquis closer, shared a fleeting kiss and a soft whimper before he spoke. “There’s no way on earth you didn’t come after me of your own free will. I believe in my heart more than anything else that Doris spelled you somehow.”
And silence broke only with his own soft sobs and the flurry of motion that saw their little one being drawn from the water, cord still attached with the quietest little cry he’d ever heard.
Some babies were loud when born. But it took time for those lungs to figure it out.
But that soft whimper? That single cry into the world? It rang louder than church bells.
“Morgana Penumbra,” Dr. Vans said as he accepted the babe into his outstretched arms. “Welcome to the world.”
He gestured Marquis over to hold the child, clamping and singing the cord with his wand.
Those soft cries escalated as some sort of cleaning commenced, a towel gently patting at her skin.
