Dela's Hunters (The Harem House Book 1)

by Charissa Dufour

  Isn’t it supposed to cry? Dela would have been the first to admit she knew nothing about babies, but she felt confident some crying was expected. She glanced up at the mother but the exhausted woman had slumped back, her eyes closed as she recovered. She gave the tiny body a little shake, hoping that would stimulate it. It just lay there, its limbs hanging from its tiny body. Dela tapped its chest. Nothing.

  Dela glanced up at the woman, who had become aware of the issue. Thinking of the time Quiq had nearly drowned, Dela rolled the infant onto its chest, thumping its tiny back with her fingers. Liquid poured from its nose and mouth, but no sound came out. Dela finally resorted to pinching the sole of its foot, leaving a little mark.

  The infant took a deep, gurgling breath before letting out an astonishing wail. Despite the delay, the child was strong and ferocious. Dela carefully flipped it back over, suddenly taking notice of something rather important.

  “It’s a girl,” Dela said, astonished at the little girl draped in her blood-stained hands.

  Was this what she could have if she married? Suddenly her future didn't look quite so bleak.

  The mother reached out for her daughter, and Dela reluctantly handed the infant over to her. She watched as the mother pulled the top of her loose dress down so that the sticky infant lay against her bare flesh. Envy filled her as she took notice of the mother’s sudden contentment, despite all the pain she had just endured.

  Finally, Dela realized there was more coming from between the woman’s spread legs, and that the cord was still attached to the baby. By the looks of things, her body was still convulsing, though to a lesser degree.

  “What now?” she asked the mother, wishing she didn’t need her guidance.

  “We need to tie off the umbilical cord.”

  “Tie off?”

  “With a bit of string, or rope.”

  “I don’t have string!” Her voice sounded frantic, even to her own ears.

  “Pull something off your clothing.”

  Dela examined her old vest and her chemise beneath it. She finally found a loose thread and pulled it free. She tied it around the cord where the mother directed and drew her knife. Dela gave it a little flick of her knife, finding the cord to be a lot tougher than she had expected. She gripped it again, bending it over the knife and pulling it through.

  Blood gushed from the cord, and Dela let out a little gasp of shock.

  “It’s okay. That’s normal.”

  “Something… else is coming out…of you…”

  “That’s normal, too.”

  Slowly, a strange sack attached to the opposite end of the cord emerged, dropping to the ground with a slurpy splat. Dela swallowed, once again wanting to vomit.

  “I need you to make sure the sack is whole,” the mother said, never taking her eyes off her precious baby girl.

  “What?” Dela demanded, not much wanting to touch the blob of membrane, blood vessels, and blood.

  “Just make sure there are no big holes in it.”

  Dela grimaced as she picked up the sack and turned it over and over. “It looks whole.”

  “Good.”

  Dela set the sticky sack aside, her eyes catching sight of a puddle forming around the woman’s exposed backside.

  “You’re bleeding.”

  “That’s normal.”

  Dela looked up. The mother was too lost in her daughter to heed her warning. She glanced back down between the woman’s legs. The puddle had grown, some of it soaked up in the dry dirt, some pooling out around her.

  “You’re bleeding a lot.”

  Dela looked up just in time to see the woman’s eyes flutter shut and her arms go limp. The baby began to slip off of her mother’s chest, and Dela jumped up, ignoring the pain in her damaged body. She caught the infant as it slipped free of its mother’s grasp. She knelt beside the mother, holding the mewling baby with one hand while she pressed her fingers against the woman’s neck. She felt a slight flutter against her finger. It stopped for a few seconds, fluttered again, and stopped altogether. Dela glanced down at the pool of blood, still growing.

  At that moment, Dela noticed the sound of snapping twigs and rustling branches. She scooped up her knife, fearing a cougar might have smelled the blood. With her injured hand and forearm, she pressed the infant to her chest, supporting its limp head. With her other limb—also injured— she raised the knife. A second later, the crunching sound increased and Gareth came into sight.

  Dela nearly dropped the infant in relief as her body sagged. Gareth stood over her, looking down at the sight before him. It was only then that Dela considered what he was seeing. Her lips began to quiver as she lowered her dagger. The adrenaline drained from her body, and she nearly fell over.

  Gareth fell to his knees, looking over the prone body. He pressed his fingers to the woman’s neck, and Dela watched as his shoulders slumped. “What happened?”

  “I-I-I tried. She said the bleeding was normal. But then she was just gone. She was dead before I even knew there was a problem.” Dela knew she was rambling at a rapid pace, but she couldn’t stop the words flowing from her mouth. “I’ve done this. I’ve never even seen a baby born. I tried. I’m sorry, Gareth. I tried. I did my best.”

  In a lightning move, Gareth climbed to his feet just enough to step over the body and collapsed back onto his knees. He pulled her into his arms, the squirming infant tucked between them.

  “Ssshh, ssshhh. This is not your fault. It’s dangerous to give birth in the best of situations, with a midwife present. The baby is alive. That is a success.”

  Gareth adjusted his hug, shifting the broken arrow in her shoulder. Dela screamed, causing the baby to start crying.

  He pushed her back to examine her. “Holy shit. You did all this with an arrow in you?”

  Dela began to waver on her knees, feeling faint herself. Careful not to touch her injured shoulder, Gareth lowered her onto her rump, her back against a tree. He moved to the body, cutting the bloodstained gown from her body. Dela looked away, embarrassed to see the dead woman’s naked body.

  Gareth brought the cloth to her, cutting the bodice away from the skirt. He laid the bodice across the ground before taking the still-crying infant from her arms. With expert care, he placed the baby in the center of the cloth, wrapping it up into a little bundle and tying it off with the sleeves.

  He returned the infant to Dela’s good-ish arm, adjusting her grip to allow the infant to nestle in against her warmth. “Hold her for a bit while I get ready to remove that arrow.”

  “How do you know how to do all this?” Dela asked, focusing on her curiosity distract her from the pain.

  “That’s a long story,” he said as he examined her shoulder and clotted blood formed around the arrow.

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  He gave her a little grin, but Dela could see the hesitation in her eyes. Dela hoped he would speak. She needed the distraction—not just from the pain, but from the last hour of her life. Dela squeezed her eyes shut, feeling the tears begin to build. She couldn’t think about the child or the dead mother, or she would lose it completely.

  “Alright. If you insist…”

  Gareth watched in shock and horror as Dela bolted toward their enemies. Not for the first time, he wondered what she could have possibly been thinking. He took one step to race after her when the enemy lines broke free of the underbrush and charged at them. With practiced speed, he holstered his gun and drew his dagger, raising it just in time to block a jab aimed at his stomach. The battle was swift. Gareth had no intention of dallying with his enemy. He had to get to Dela. In record time, he sliced the man open, his intestines spilling out as he slumped to the ground.

  Without even checking to see if his comrades needed help, he charged into the underbrush. He sprinted, jumping over fallen logs and raised stones. His side began to hurt as sweat poured down his neck, soaked up by his shirt, but he ignored the discomfort and pushed forward, not slowing until his legs bega
n to feel like jelly.

  As he slowed to a quick walk, he spotted a horse grazing at the edge of a small thicket. His feet skidded to a halt as he recognized the animal’s markings—she had been riding that horse, the woman who reminded him so much of Marie.

  Gareth jogged to the thicket, rounding a thick bush to find a little macabre clearing. Until the day he took his final breath he would remember the scene laid out before him. Dela knelt beside a pale body, her dagger drawn and ready to defend herself. The body lay in a pool of bright red blood. For once, he didn’t pay Dela any heed as he took in the woman’s exposed body and the blood that coated her lower half. Slowly, he realized her once-bulging stomach had softened, but it wasn’t until he heard a rather pathetic sound that he truly understood what he was seeing.

  He raised his eyes to Dela, his throat constricting as he took in the naked newborn coated in blood and afterbirth. After giving the infant a good, long look, he made eye contact with Dela. She looked as though she had seen a ghost. No, that wasn’t strong enough. She looked as though she had seen her own ghost and it had told her how she might die. He couldn’t bear to look at her any longer, and his eyes drifted back to the pregnant woman or the previously pregnant woman.

  Gareth dropped to his knees beside the prone body, pressing his calloused fingers against her soft throat. Nothing. Though he didn’t want to, he glanced down toward her legs. It was much too late to save her, even if he had felt some sign of life. What had Dela done?

  “What happened?” he asked, forcing himself to look up at her again.

  “I-I-I tried. She said the bleeding was normal. But then she was just gone…”

  Gareth didn’t hear the rest. He knew childbearing was dangerous. He knew it better than most men. Of course, he’d experience a different sort of danger. Her voice, if not her words, broke through his haze and he realized his precious, strong Dela was on the verge of breaking, and he wouldn’t get a coherent re-telling until he calmed her down.

  He jumped over the body and wrapped his arms around her and the naked newborn. She practically fell into his arms. He said something comforting, but what it was he couldn’t remember. He gave her an extra tight squeeze, only to have her scream.

  Gareth pushed her back and began examining her dirty, blood-stained body, finally noticing a darker splotch near her shoulder. A wooden arrow bolt protruded from her shoulder with dried blood staining her torn vest. Bright spots showed where she had opened and reopened the wound.

  “Holy shit! You did all this with an arrow in your shoulder?”

  Gareth knew the girl before him was strong, but he had never expected this. He would have been wailing like a baby, unable to help the woman in her most trying moments of life.

  Still, Dela was on the verge of a complete breakdown. Gareth went into action, wrapping the baby in the dress taken from her dead mother. In his efforts, he noticed the infant was a girl. He tucked that thought aside to consider later. With the infant back in Dela’s good arm, he began to examine her shoulder.

  “How do you know how to do all this?”

  “That’s a long story.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Alright, if you insist,” he began, knowing she needed a distraction; truth was, he did too. Gareth went to work on her shoulder as he spoke. “Well, I guess the short version is I almost got married once. I… err…I got a girl pregnant. She was in the Harem House, and the town officials were, of course, furious at her. Not me. Evidently, only the girl is responsible.”

  Gareth shook his head in frustration as the memories flooded back. “Anyway, she was shunned. Not just by the Harem House, but by everyone. I offered to marry her… and she agreed.”

  He felt his throat constrict at the memory, and to distract himself, he yanked the arrow out of Dela’s shoulder. She shrieked and he felt a little better—focusing on her pain instead of his. Gareth eyed her and the crying infant. To his amazement, she hadn’t squeezed the baby in her pain. In retrospect, he realized he shouldn't have left the infant in her arms while he worked on her injury.

  “Anyway, we prepared to get married, but there were delays. The town officials wanted to punish her. Everyone wanted to punish her. And… uh… well, she ended up having the baby before we got married.”

  He stopped, unsure if he knew the right words to express anything else. He glanced up at Dela’s face before returning to his work. Gareth tore the sleeve off his own shirt—wishing it was cleaner—and wrapped it around the wound. It was the best he could do for her there.

  “What went wrong?” she asked, perfectly aware the story wasn’t over. “Did she die in childbirth?”

  Gareth could hear the catch in her voice. She thought she had figured it out. He shook his head.

  “No. She and the child were fine.” Gareth watched as her features puckered into a frown. “A few days after the birth we still hadn’t gotten married and the town was ready to lynch her. She couldn’t take it anymore. She hung herself.”

  Gareth choked the words out. He didn’t speak of her often, and he hated sharing all this with Dela. Why he couldn’t say, but the idea of Dela knowing he had caused Marie’s death made him feel as if he had killed her himself. He hated the idea of Dela thinking of him as a murderer.

  “Does this mean you have a child somewhere?”

  He shook his head. “No. When we found her, we found the boy dead. The physician thought she had smothered the child.”

  Even to his own ears, his voice sounded dead. He couldn’t share the story with emotion. If he felt anything, even just a little of what he felt that night, he would not be able to get them to safety.

  And he would not fail Dela the way he had failed Marie. Nor would he fail the child crying in Dela’s arms. At that moment, he heard the first rustle of noise outside their little blood-soaked clearing; he had to hurry.

  “Did you love her?” Dela asked, cutting off his morbid thoughts.

  It took him a moment to answer; he hated answering the question. “No. I did not.”

  “Doesn’t make it any easier.”

  Gareth’s eyes jerked up to hers. In all the years since Marie’s death, no one, not even Lath, had understood that he didn’t need to love her to feel responsible for her untimely end. And yet, here was young Dela seeing through what so many before had missed. A twinge of guilt stabbed at him. Even after sharing his sordid past, he still had secrets. Secrets that involved her.

  Gareth heard another rustle of noise, followed by a low growl, distracting him from his guilt.

  At that moment, Dela rose up onto her knees, the tiny infant still cradled in her arm and leaned into his chest. Her free arm slipped under his and pulled him into her awkward embrace. With a child in one arm and the other being injured, it was the best she could do, and yet to Gareth it was the warmest embrace he had ever felt. It wasn’t the hug of a lover, nor the hug of a sister. It was the compassion of someone who knew what it was to lose someone and, he guessed, feel guilty about their death.

  “We need to move before the scavengers smell her body,” he said, pushing Dela away. Now was not the time to seek comfort in her.

  Her glistening eyes grew wide. “We’re just going to leave her here?” Her voice broke, and Gareth felt his heart crumble. As if on cue, another deep growl permeated the little copse, and this time Dela heard it, too. The horse gave a nervous sputter of noise.

  “We have to, Dela. We can’t take her with us. We’d become prey, too. And we can’t take the time to bury her. We have to get back or the baby will die.”

  Dela’s lower lip quivered. “B-b-but, I didn’t even know her name.”

  Fresh tears flowed down her cheeks, make trails in the dirt. Gareth cupped her cheeks. “Her name was Anna, and she told me her greatest wish was to have a baby girl. She did that. You gave her those few moments of bliss. But now we have to save her little girl.”

  “Anna.”

  Gareth nodded. “Now, let’s save Anna’s little girl.”
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br />   Chapter Twenty-Four

  Dela licked her cracked lips. They had been walking for hours. Between her blood loss and the desert heat, Dela was beginning to feel her own dehydration. The infant had stopped crying, which worried her more than her own pain. Her foot caught in the dirt and she stumbled to her knees with a grunt. Dela sighed, thankful Gareth held the infant tucked into his strong arms. She even felt a little envious of the little girl. Slowly, she climbed to her feet.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Yeah.”

  By the looks of things, Gareth wasn’t doing much better. Though he was uninjured, he had been fighting before running into the desert to find her. He had used up his own resources. Though neither of them were up to running, they kept their pace up as best they could. It was at least an hour before they reached the scene of the battle.

  Dela stared in wonder at the empty ground. The only signs of the fight were a few splotches of brown drying blood, a few arrows protruding from the dirt, and a single discarded revolver. Dela’s eyes burned as she took in the scene, but no tears came.

  “Where are they?”

  “Either they were taken or they ran.”

  “You think they could have been taken?”

  Gareth shook his head. “Of the two, my bet would be that the group fled as soon as they could, putting distance between them and the gang’s perceived territory.”

  “Perceived territory?”

  “What they consider theirs isn’t always theirs.”

  Dela didn’t feel up to debating perceived territory or what it might imply. “What do we do now?”

  “We follow their trail and assume they’ve fled.” Gareth scooped up the revolver, checked it for bullets, and tossed it back into the dirt. Nowadays, guns weren’t worth much without ammunition. “Let’s go.”

  He turned southward and Dela followed. She began to wonder what his plan was. Were they to go without water until they caught up with the others? Would the infant even survive that long? Would she?