by Amy Star
CHAPTER 13
It wasn’t quite like the movies and television shows had led Cheyenne to believe it would be. There was still a hell of a lot of screaming, of course, but it came later. Once her water broke, there was actually a reasonably long time before anything else really happened. The contractions were slow to come at first, starting surprisingly small, though in time they ramped up to what she had expected.
It also wasn’t quick. She didn’t scream her head off for ten minutes and then pop out a baby and mosey on her way. Oh, no. Cheyenne was in labor for nearly twelve hours, spending the entire time alternating between tossing back and forth in the hospital bed and hobbling back and forth along the hallway outside of her hospital room, accompanied by either Daphne or Harry. At first, she simply felt uncomfortable more than anything, though the discomfort was interrupted by occasional bursts of agony.
She napped a few times, until a contraction hit and ripped her out of sleep each and every time she managed to nod off. Daphne slept on the window seat, curled up like a cat, until Cheyenne’s screaming, whenever a contraction hit, woke her up. (Cheyenne was going to assume she did not actually have a concussion or anything like that, since she seemed reasonably functional and she still woke up after falling asleep. Which was good news, of course, but it was not news they acquired through anything even resembling the appropriate means.)
Harry, on the other hand, seemed largely incapable of sitting still and resting, even with the assurance that if something went wrong, it would be more or less impossible for him to not know. Instead, he sat in the chair beside the bed, and his knee bounced enough that Cheyenne swore people on the floor below them could probably hear it, and she almost felt like she should go down to find whoever or whatever was beneath her room and apologize to them.
And at some point—Cheyenne didn’t want to say, “without warning” considering everything that had happened from the time her water broke was technically the warning—everything seemed to get flipped into fast forward, as the contractions that had been gradual but increasing grew to be nearly constant.
There was a doctor standing at the foot of the bed, between her legs (and she almost felt embarrassed for a moment, but it didn’t last long) and a nurse standing beside her, both of them coaching her through it, and frankly, she was pretty sure that she could live her life without ever hearing the word ‘push’ ever again, and she would live a happy, happy one.
The biggest departure from what media had shown her, though, was that once she heard crying, she still wasn’t done. Oh, no. There were still two more for her to push out, red in the face as she shouted and swore and rambled off bodily threats to everyone she knew and a few people she had only heard of in passing.
By the time all three of them were out, blinking and shrieking in the hospital lights, Cheyenne was exhausted. She had just enough left in her to meet the three of them and for the doctor to assure her that all of them were in perfect health—and to learn that the doctor had been astounded a C-section hadn’t been necessary, considering the number of babies being delivered—and then Cheyenne happily passed out for a very long time.
*
Cheyenne’s children were beautiful. Granted, she was perhaps a little bit biased, but she didn’t care. As far as she was concerned, all three of them were the most beautiful children she had ever seen or would ever see, and no one was going to convince her otherwise.
She had three little girls, though they weren’t identical as Cheyenne had sort of assumed they would be. They had skin like cocoa, and while one of them had Harry’s eyes, two of them had Cheyenne’s. One had Harry’s hair, one had Cheyenne’s, and one was smack in the middle. Or at least that was what Cheyenne was assuming; at that moment, all of them mostly just had a bit of fuzz on the tops of their heads (which were still a little oddly shaped, though the nurse assured Cheyenne that was normal from being squeezed through the birth canal, and the bones of their skulls would settle in a more natural position before long).
Cheyenne hadn’t put much thought into their names before then, and she sort of regretted it once she was awake enough to actually contemplate it. She hadn’t known if they were going to be boys or girls or some combination, and it had all just slipped her mind. In her defense, though, she had spent the last few months rather thoroughly distracted by basically everything.
After what seemed like nearly an eternity of Cheyenne, Harry, and Daphne tossing names back and forth, they picked their favorites of the lot.
And, all things considered, everyone was remarkably healthy. Even Cheyenne was more or less right as rain, though she felt a bit off balance considering the amount of weight that had been offloaded the night before. But despite that, it wasn’t long before she was being wheeled out of the hospital, Daphne pushing her in a wheelchair as Cheyenne held two infants and Harry carried the third while he walked beside them.
Maybe she just got lucky. Maybe there was something about the girls’ father being a were-bear that made the pregnancy and the birth easier than everyone had expected. How was she supposed to know?
Cheyenne wasn’t going to complain, though. It had been a very stressful, very eventful couple of days up to that point, and she was happy for it to finally stop, so she could ground herself again and stop feeling like she was going to get launched out into space without a moment’s notice. She was more than happy to bring little Annabelle, Felicity, and Dakota home.
THE FINAL
CHAPTER
There were workers in the house. Not a lot of them, true enough, but there were still people going in and out of the house to take measurements for the broken window and the broken door, to remove the broken installations, and to replace them with a window and a door that were obviously not broken.
(The glazier had stared at the broken window and the door being held closed with a chair in open bemusement, until Harry shrugged helplessly and said, “It was a hell of a party. I don’t actually remember what happened.” Luckily, the glazier seemed to accept it without question, and he carried on doing his job.)
It didn’t take long, but even so, it was enough time for the handful of people to stop and coo over all three infants, multiple times.
The girls didn’t seem to mind. They seemed to enjoy the attention, truth be told, and they regarded the entire house and everyone in it with a sense of wonder. Cheyenne sort of hoped they held onto that sense of wonder for a long time to come. The world was a strange and unusual place, after all, and it would be a pity if any of them lost sight of that as they got older.
Lorraine was gone, of course. In a very permanent way. (Cheyenne didn’t ask what Harry did to get rid of the body. She didn’t want to know. So long as it was gone and there wasn’t going to be any trouble for any of them, she told herself she didn’t care, and she was content with that.) The primary issue was no longer in the picture, and it was only a matter of days before Daphne started packing up her stuff to head back to her apartment. True to his word, Harry had been paying the rent on it the entire time. So, it would need to be dusted and vacuumed, more than likely, but it was still sitting there, waiting for Daphne to walk through the doors again.
“It’s going to be so quiet without you there,” she sulked as Cheyenne helped shove her things into her car.
“You could stay here,” Cheyenne pointed out. “Harry doesn’t care.”
“Ugh,” Daphne groaned emphatically, bonking her head lightly against one car door. “No thanks,” she grumbled. “This third wheel can recognize when she’s not needed somewhere,” she added, pouting good-naturedly as she said it. “Besides, I would probably walk in on you two having sex on the kitchen table or something like that, and then I’d never actually be able to eat in there ever again. So, you know. It’s for the best if I just visit like four times a week.”
“I’ll keep the guest room clean for you,” Cheyenne deadpanned in return, rolling her eyes as she said it.
“Much appreciated,” Daphne assured her primly, as she
shoved the last bag into the car and slammed the trunk closed.
Cheyenne offered her a hug goodbye, and Daphne nearly picked her up off of her feet, despite the fact that she had already acknowledged that she would most likely be back multiple times each week. Cheyenne wasn’t going to complain, though.
She stood on the driveway as the car pulled out onto the road, and she waved as it started to trek along the street. She waited until it rounded the turn at the end of the block before she turned and headed back inside to liberate Harry from the three small infants that were probably shrieking for food or more attention than one person could feasibly provide without sprouting an extra set of hands or four.
Harry seemed grateful for her return when she got inside, though only two of the girls had started crying at that point, as Dakota was fast asleep. It seemed to be her favorite activity, and Cheyenne had been concerned at first until the doctor told her it was perfectly normal.
Felicity and Annabelle, however, were both demonstrating that they had very healthy lungs and that Harry did not have enough hands to keep them occupied. They only got marginally quieter when Cheyenne plucked Felicity from his grasp and they both had a fully-grown person all to themselves.
“So, is this level of fussiness a were-critter thing?” Cheyenne asked as she bounced Felicity gently against her shoulder.
Harry snorted and picked up the plush lamb that Annabelle had dropped for the fifth time in as many minutes. “I’m pretty sure it’s just a baby thing,” he answered wryly. “Unless you’re Dakota. But I guess that just makes her the exception that proves the rule.”
Dakota carried on sleeping as if nothing was going on. They were pretty sure a bomb could have gone off just upstairs, and she wouldn’t have even noticed.
*
Cheyenne had turned in her notice for the receptionist job. She had no plans on returning. Even so, she showed up with the girls when she knew the office was generally fairly quiet. Her coworkers had never been the problem with that job, after all. She just hadn’t been the right match for the job itself.
(She could have come back, if she had been so inclined. Her boss would have welcomed her back with open arms after maternity leave. But it wasn’t in the cards, and Cheyenne wasn’t going to try to force the matter just to spare her old boss’s feelings.)
She wasn’t surprised at all by the reaction the girls garnered, as everyone crowded around to coo at them as if they were a trio of puppies or kittens. Or bear cubs, even. Though if that was the case then Cheyenne had yet to see any proof.
(She wasn’t sure when she was supposed to know, definitively, if her girls were actually were-bears or if they were human. Harry hadn’t been particularly helpful when Cheyenne had asked him about how she was supposed to tell, considering he had shrugged and said, “We’ll know when or if they transform for the first time.
There isn’t really any way to tell, other than that.” He didn’t seem especially bothered by the ambiguity, though, so Cheyenne supposed she would let it go. They were her girls, after all, and she loved them whether they were human or otherwise.)
Gregg met them too. Of course, he did; he worked at the office building, and Cheyenne had known he would be working that day. There was still some lingering awkwardness between them both, and on the whole, Cheyenne was pretty sure she wasn’t going to remain friends with any of them, save for perhaps in the fair-weather sense. She couldn’t bring herself to feel especially bad about that, though, and if nothing else, she was satisfied that she was getting a very memorable send-off.
*
There was a very strange noise coming from the nursery. It was mixed in with the much more familiar sound of two of the girls crying, but the third noise was an odd sort of yowling noise, like something was trying to scream but wasn’t quite sure how.
Cheyenne sprinted to the nursery as soon as she heard the sound through the baby monitor, only to practically slide to a halt once she was in the room. She had to stare for a moment.
Annabelle and Dakota still looked just as they usually did, squirming in their cribs and crying as if they were convinced they were going to Hell and they were trying to plead for forgiveness. It was their standard amount of crying, considering even Dakota didn’t really have any sort of middle ground once she started crying.
Felicity, however…was a bear cub, crawling around her crib and squalling, tiny claws tearing up the blanket as Cheyenne approached the crib and leaned over it.
Carefully, Cheyenne picked her up, wary of her teeth and claws. She was just as clumsy as a cub as she was as a human, though, so she wasn’t especially threatening, and her waving paws were easy enough to avoid. The difficult part was trying to figure out how to hold a bear cub. She hadn’t exactly been able to take any classes on it, despite the numerous motherhood classes she had seen advertisements for.
She settled for cradling Felicity to her chest and bouncing her delicately, in much the same way she would hold her while she was shaped like a human.
Soon enough, Felicity began to quiet, and as the yowling noise died down, Annabelle and Dakota gradually dropped off to sleep again.
Once the nursery was silent once again, Cheyenne cooed down at the sleeping cub in her arms, “You transformed and scared yourself, didn’t you? You’re ridiculous.”
She could only imagine how ridiculous life was going to be if it turned out that all three of them were were-bears. She was prepared, though. Or as prepared as she could be.
*
As if they were trying to outdo each other, it was only a few more hours before Dakota transformed as well. Cheyenne had been sitting on the floor playing with all three of them when the wind knocked a tree branch against the window with a clatter, and between one breath and the next, Dakota transformed.
All three of them promptly began crying. Of course, they did. Cheyenne couldn’t even be surprised at that point.
It only took a few moments to calm them that time, and while Dakota didn’t change back for almost a solid hour, she was at least still willing to play while she was shaped like a bear.
*
Cheyenne had to wonder if there was some sort of chain reaction. First Felicity. Then Dakota. And by the time she had the girls in their highchairs and waiting for their afternoon snack, as they all squirmed impatiently, she heard that, by then familiar, squalling noise yet again, and she looked over to see Felicity and Dakota staring at Annabelle, who was very bear-shaped and very vocally unhappy about her entire lot in life.
(Granted, babies as a whole didn’t seem to have much of an in-between from “perfectly content” to “torturously miserable.”)
She calmed down once there was food in front of her. Granted, actually feeding her was made a mite more difficult, but Cheyenne supposed that feeding a bear cub was just a skill she was going to have to master.
(She could understand why Harry had been so insistent on her staying with him, though. Even if he could have gone about convincing her in a different way.)
*
Cheyenne informed Harry of his daughters’ newest talents that evening when he got back from work, and he practically cheered. He had done a very good job of hiding how much he had been hoping the girls were were-bears like he was, but Cheyenne supposed she couldn’t blame him for holding out that hope.
She looked forward to getting incredibly embarrassing footage of Harry attempting to teach all three of them how to be bears. She wasn’t actually sure how one went about teaching something like that, but if it was like any other aspect of family, parenting, or growing up, she was pretty sure it would be embarrassing, and considering she was officially a mother, that meant she had to start stocking up on embarrassing ammunition.
She wasn't going to mention that to Harry, though.
*
It was weeks before Cheyenne was ready to do anything intimate again. Weeks of getting rid of the last of the extra weight, and weeks of just letting her body heal. She had been carrying three extra human beings inside o
f herself for nine months. Their sudden absence had left a few things in flux, and for a while just moving was a chore, as everything was sore for days, and her entire sense of balance needed to readjust.
But of course, the pause in that part of their lives didn’t last forever. All told, it didn’t even last particularly long, though once Cheyenne decided she was ready again, it was rather late at night. They needed to wait until the children were in bed, after all, and even then, until it sounded as if they were asleep deeply enough to stay asleep for some time.
Harry was getting undressed and getting ready to put his pajamas on when Cheyenne interrupted him. Not with words, but simply by clicking her tongue and curling one hand around his arm and giving it a tug. He turned easily, clad only in his boxers, though that was still more than Cheyenne was wearing when he turned to face her.
She was bare from head to toe, not wearing a single stitch of clothing. She let go of his arm, knowing she had his attention for good as she watched his gaze rove over her. She folded her arms over her chest, weight shifting to one side.
