Page 66 of Monster Queen Rising

Then quieter. The second time. Her hand cupping the back of the small head.

"Hello."

Harek works the cord and the rest of it and his shoulders come down out of where they've been all night.

I look at the baby.

Her eyes open. Dark — black at the iris with something moving under it, dark in a way a newborn's eyes are not. They don't fix on anything yet. The skin's pale and under the pale is a shadow that isn't bruising. Her hands are tiny and at the fingertips there are claws. Soft. Half-formed. There.

Madison looks at them a long time. She runs her thumb over one and doesn't flinch.

She's known what her daughter would be since the night she learned about Fen and I.

Harek finishes. Mara steps back. Janet’s got her hand on Madison's hair.

Madison looks up at me.

"Bring him in."

Fen stands up in the hall. He crosses the threshold for the first time.

He comes to the bed and kneels and then he stops with his hands at his sides, the dark eyes on the small shape on Madison's chest, and he doesn't move at all.

Madison shifts the daughter, and stops, her hand staying on the small back a second longer.

She looks at Fen. The man who's sat outside every room she's been in since she came and never once asked to come closer.

"She's not going to grow up with less because I was afraid," she says. She looks at me. "Both of you. All of you."

Then back to Fen.

"No more hallways."

She holds her daughter out.

"Take her."

He looks at Madison first. One last time — the question he's been asking since the porch step and never once said out loud.

She doesn't look away from it. She nods.

He puts his hands out and they aren't steady.

The claws are gone. The fingers are blunt and careful. And they shake, and I have never in my life seen Fen's hands shake — not on a ridge, not in a white room, not with a man's throat under them.

Madison sets her into them.

He cups her the way you hold a thing you're afraid of breaking just by being what you are.

The shift doesn't come up. I didn't know I'd been waiting for it until it didn't.

He looks at her. She doesn't look back. Her eyes aren't there yet.

“Hi.”

She turns her head toward him. Toward his voice. The one she's had all night, through a door, from a man who doesn't have many and gave her all of them.

Fen sees it. Everything he has left goes out of him at once, and I have to put my hand on the bed again.