Spells & Stitches

by Barbara Bretton

  “She says she’s fine, Ma, just tired. She can sleep on the drive back.”

  “She’s in her ninth month, Luke. Do you really think she’ll be comfortable sleeping in the truck?”

  I didn’t, but that was where the magick came in. Between Elspeth and Chloe, they’d figure out something.

  “I’m concerned,” my mother persisted. “I wish I could put my finger on what’s different about her.”

  “This is only the second time you’ve met,” I reminded her. “You don’t exactly have a baseline to judge against.”

  “Talk to Chloe,” she urged. “This is a beautiful inn. Tell her you’d like to spend a relaxing day here with her.”

  Actually the idea had merit. Driving through snow got old pretty fast. Driving through snow with a backseat troll got old even faster. But I knew Chloe wouldn’t rest until we were home in Sugar Maple and, to my surprise, neither would I.

  You get used to things like protective charms and magick on command. I wanted Chloe and the baby surrounded by every measure of comfort and security possible and I had come to realize Sugar Maple was the place.

  Chloe was surrounded by MacKenzies, all patting her bump and trying to get their two cents into the conversation. I could see she was running on empty.

  “Time to go,” I said, elbowing my way through the gaggle of kin. I rested my arm lightly across her shoulders. “I want to get us home before dark.”

  Ronnie clapped me on the back. “Next time we see you, the baby will be here.”

  “Your mouth to God’s ear.” My mother quickly crossed herself. “The last few weeks are the longest.”

  “Especially with the first,” Jen chimed in.

  “You’ll probably go at least a week past your due date,” my sister-in-law Tiffany said, “so don’t be surprised.”

  “I just can’t believe Meghan would miss this occasion,” my mother fretted. “She could have tried harder, in my opinion.”

  Meghan’s “car trouble” phone call had been followed twenty minutes later by an apologetic text message that fooled no one.

  Chloe smiled and nodded and clung to me like we were on the Titanic.

  Another round of good-byes and we were finally out of there.

  “It’s still coming down pretty steady,” Chloe said as we retrieved our coats and shrugged into them at the door. “I was hoping it would stop before we left.”

  “We’ll be okay,” I reassured her. “All-wheel drive, snow tires, chains and sand in the back, and Elspeth for ballast. What can go wrong?”

  She shivered slightly and pulled her coat tighter. “Don’t ever ask that around a pregnant woman.”

  “Stay here,” I said. “I’ll pull the car right up to the edge of the walkway.”

  “I’m not sick, Luke,” she snapped. “I’m just the size of a whale. I can walk to the car.”

  Since when? I had seen her push through a snowdrift to avoid slipping on a shoveled but still icy walkway.

  “It’s slick out there.”

  “I grew up in northern Vermont. I think I know how to walk in snow.”

  And wasn’t she the same woman who spent more time on her butt each winter than a toddler learning to walk?

  She was smart, funny, beautiful, talented, magical, and stubborn as hell. Nothing short of a wizard or a medium-sized nuclear blast would be able to change her mind.

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s not getting any earlier. Let’s go.”

  We were halfway to the truck when she stopped abruptly.

  “I told you it was slick,” I said, holding her steady. “Stay put. I’ll get the truck.”

  “It’s not the snow. It’s me.” She winced, then inhaled sharply. “I wish she’d stop kicking so hard.”

  “You’re in pain.”

  “Not exactly pain . . .”

  “Severe discomfort?”

  Her smile came and went in a heartbeat. “Not quite.”

  “You don’t think—”

  “Of course not! There is no way I’m in labor.”

  “Have you been timing the pains?”

  “Trust me, Luke, these aren’t contractions.”

  “How would you know if you’ve never had them before?”

  “I’m a woman. I’d know. These aren’t contractions. They don’t come at timed intervals.” She thought for a moment. “It’s like I overstretched my muscles and now they’re making me pay for it.”

  That didn’t sound like anything I remembered Karen experiencing, but what the hell did I know.

  “I’ve got a great idea,” I began. “How about we get a room here and stay the night? We’ll catch up on sleep, watch some TV, order room service, and head out early tomorrow morning after the county crew plows and sands the roads.”

  “I’m going home now.”

  “Think about it,” I urged. “We can get a room with a fireplace and a view of the lake.”

  She wasn’t having any of it. Her jaw was set and that little blue vein in her right temple tapped out a warning.

  “I’m going home,” she said, her voice climbing into the dogs-only zone. “You can stay here if you want, but I’m going back to Sugar Maple.”

  We made it another four steps before she stopped again.

  “The baby shifted. Let me catch my breath.”

  “Shifted? Do you mean dropped?” Dropped was a big deal.

  “I don’t know what I mean,” she said, dodging the question. “All I know is that I feel like crap.”

  I had been down that road before. When it came to babies, anything could happen. I had visions of pulling over to the side of a snowy, slippery road and watching while a yellow-haired troll delivered our baby in the backseat of my secondhand Jeep.

  And don’t think it couldn’t happen. I worked a beat before I became a homicide detective, and believe me, when it came to being born, babies frequently managed to find the worst places and the least convenient times.

  I wasn’t going to let that happen on my watch.

  CHLOE

  I was sweating under my down coat by the time we reached Luke’s truck, but I would rather choke than admit he was right and I should have let him bring the truck to me.

  “I’m not going to break,” I snapped at Luke as he helped me settle into the passenger seat. “I’m not made of china!”

  “The attitude’s getting old,” he said with a good-natured grin. “Now shut up and let’s put the seat belt on. You can bitch me out later.”

  “We can’t leave without Elspeth.”

  He leaned close and planted a quick, warm kiss on my lips. “I say we can.”

  What was the matter with him? He knew we couldn’t do that. Even here, far from Sugar Maple, she was still under Samuel’s protection and came and went as she chose.

  “I sent her a blueflame. She’ll be here any minute.”

  “I thought she refused to use blueflame.”

  “She’s old-school,” I admitted, “but I convinced her to make an exception today.” Actually it hadn’t taken much convincing at all. Usually Elspeth was hardheaded and as intractable as steel, but she didn’t put up any argument at all.

  “How long is it going to take the old—”

  We both jumped at what sounded like gunfire from the backseat.

  “Jeez, Elspeth!” My heart nearly jumped out of my chest. “A little warning might be nice.”

  She mumbled something, but it was lost as her molecules finished rearranging themselves into recognizable form.

  Luke glanced into the rearview mirror, winced, then looked away.

  “’Tis the same Elspeth as before,” she said tartly, “no more, no less. Best be on our way before it’s too late.”

  I guess I was feeling a tad edgy because I pounced on her words. “Too late for what?”

  “Home is always best,” she said, not answering the question.

  She condensed herself down to the size of a garden gnome and withdrew into a black hole of silence.

  “Not much on
conversation today, is she?” Luke asked.

  “You’re complaining?”

  “Not me.”

  He asked if I wanted the radio on, but I shook my head. “I like the quiet.”

  “Enjoy it while you can,” he said with a chuckle, “because there won’t be much of it after the baby arrives.”

  Once again I was reminded of the fact that he had been down this road before with someone else. “It’s hard to believe a tiny infant can make a lot of noise.”

  “It’s not the volume that gets you,” he said as we slowly navigated our way out of the parking lot, “it’s the frequency and the duration.” A quick, sad smile flickered across his face. “Normally I can sleep through an earthquake, but one little whimper from Steffie and I was—” He stopped himself with a shake of his head. “You know.”

  I nodded. “I know.”

  The world could be such a dangerous place. A little girl climbed on her bicycle one sunny day and thirty seconds later she was dead and her parents’ world was torn apart.

  Elspeth’s gloom-and-doom warnings had taken their toll on me. Add them to my own natural propensity for worry, then factor in the scary recurring dreams about missing babies and sick children, and you had one very pregnant sorceress teetering on the edge of a major crying jag.

  I wanted to be home. I wanted to be safe inside the protective arms of Sugar Maple. I wanted to know our baby would bebe born healthy and would grow up happy, surrounded by family and friends who loved her and would do anything for her.

  I wanted what every new mother wanted, but mostly as the miles rolled slowly by that afternoon I wanted the pain to stop.

  13

  LUKE

  The only other car on the road was the small dark blue beater that had been ahead of us for at least the last twenty miles. I tried to keep its taillights in view but the combination of snow and dusk made it difficult. Every now and then the driver would slow down enough that I had to ease my foot off the gas to keep a safe following distance.

  All in all, not my favorite Sunday drive.

  The snow was moderately heavy and steady, swirled periodically by squirrelly winds that made it almost impossible to see.

  “Pull over.” Chloe’s voice broke into the silence.

  “There’s not much of a shoulder here,” I said, scanning the road through the falling snow. We were halfway between Lake Winnipesaukee and Sugar Maple. “Maybe I can—”

  “Pull over!”

  I had taken my eyes off the road just long enough to see what was wrong, but that was all it took. The dark blue Toyota had stopped moving forward and was skidding sideways across the highway and we were heading straight toward it.

  “Brace yourselves.” I took my foot off the gas and aimed for the snow-covered shoulder of the road and prayed.

  The world downshifted into slow motion. It took forever to travel the fifty yards or so to the shoulder. We went into a minor skid, but the all-wheel drive on the Jeep hung tough and we came to an easy stop, buffeted by a cushion of drifting snow.

  “It starts!” Elspeth moaned from the backseat. “All that I foresaw starts now!”

  I wanted to leap for Elspeth’s pudgy throat, but I flung open my door instead and ran around to the passenger side. Chloe’s door was already open. Her seat belt was off. And she was losing her brunch.

  Elspeth didn’t help matters. She unbuckled her seat belt and provided running commentary on the proceedings, most of which made her sound like Nostradamus predicting the end of days. I tried to block out her words, but they were registering on some cellular level I couldn’t control.

  I glanced toward the highway, expecting to see the driver of the dark blue Toyota running toward us, but there was nothing but snow. Lots of snow. The car was gone.

  Bastard. What the hell kind of person drove away without making sure everyone was okay?

  Something was wrong. I didn’t know what, but there was definitely a disturbance in the force field and this time the backseat troll wasn’t to blame.

  Chloe looked like hell. Her cheeks were flushed but her face was pale and her eyes glassy. Morning sickness had stopped months ago, but that didn’t stop her from losing the contents of her stomach on the side of the road.

  “The flu?” I asked after I helped her clean up and settle back in the truck.

  “I don’t know.” Her voice was weak, subdued. “The pancakes maybe.”

  “You told me half the sock class yesterday was contagious. I’ll bet—”

  “Luke, I don’t know. I felt sick. I threw up. Enough, okay?”

  “’Tisn’t illness,” Elspeth proclaimed. “’Tis the beginning.”

  I wasn’t going to let her drag us down Doomsday Lane. “Nobody asked you, so shut the hell up.”

  “This isn’t helping,” Chloe said, then burst into tears.

  I don’t know how the troll felt, but I felt like a shit. The point had been to keep Elspeth from making Chloe feel worse. Clearly I could do it a hell of a lot faster and more effectively.

  I got back behind the wheel and eased onto the empty road. We drove a few miles in edgy silence until I heard a loud bang and the truck pulled wildly to the left.

  I gripped the wheel hard and steered into the skid.

  I was getting good at this.

  “Flat tire,” I announced as I found my way back to the shoulder. I added a string of expletives for the hell of it. “Either of you have any magick for changing a tire?” How the hell did we get a flat tire in the middle of a snowstorm anyway? There must have been a nail or some broken glass along the snowy shoulder when we stopped a few miles back.

  Elspeth ignored me. Chloe, still crying, gave it a shot, but the best she could do was to make the rear window swing open and closed a couple dozen times.

  “Stay in here,” I told them both. “Don’t get out no matter what. Visibility sucks. You’re safer in the truck.”

  I’d changed probably a thousand tires for stranded motorists before I made detective. I knew what I was doing. I would set up the flares, the emergency lights, the whole nine yards, and get it done in record time.

  But there was a part of me that couldn’t help wondering, “What next?”

  CHLOE

  My water broke while Luke was changing the tire.

  One second I was sitting there with my eyes closed, praying the nausea would go away, and the next—well, you can imagine.

  “The babe is coming,” Elspeth said when I told her. “You are following the way of your Hobbs ancestors. ’Twill be an easy birth and a fast one. The signs are all there.”

  Easy I liked, but fast? I didn’t want fast. We were sitting in a Jeep on the side of the highway during a snowstorm and we were still an hour away from home.

  “We can make it back to Sugar Maple, right?” I asked Elspeth as a note of panic rose in my voice. “I mean, fast means five or six hours when it comes to labor.”

  “Within the earth hour,” she said. “You favor the magick now, not the human.”

  Her words had barely begun to fade when the first wave of contractions hit. The discomfort I had felt at the inn had clearly been the earliest stirrings of labor. Think of a raindrop as the earliest stirring of a Cat 5 tornado and you’ll understand. This was definitely Cat 5.

  We were too far from Sugar Maple to transport Lilith to deliver the baby. Transporting Brianne from Quebec City was out of the question. If Elspeth’s prediction was right, even if we got back on the road right now the baby would be born before we reached the Sugar Maple town limits.

  The funny thing about fear is the way it wipes away everything that’s unimportant. Suddenly I forgot about Luke’s family, the snow, the flat tire, the fact that we were still a long way from home and began to focus on the fact that I would be holding our daughter in my arms within the hour and that meant we needed a plan.

  Which, as it turned out, was easier said than done. I buzzed down the window.

  “Luke! My water broke. I’m in labor.”
<
br />   “I’m almost done here,” he said, sounding calm and in control. “Blueflame Lilith and tell her we’ll be there within ninety minutes.”

  “You don’t understand. The baby is coming.”

  “I heard you,” he said, fiddling around with the tire. “This is your first baby. Ask Elspeth. You have plenty of time.”

  “We have less than an—” I stopped while a contraction ripped apart my midsection. If this was easy, I didn’t want to even think about the alternative. I was grateful for every drop of magickal Hobbs blood I possessed. “Less than an hour to go.”

  He went whiter than the snow falling around him, then slapped on the cop face. “Everything’s going to be fine,” he said. “That’s why Elspeth is here, right? She’s got the baby-delivering mojo we need.”

  Except, to my shock, she didn’t.

  “’Tisn’t my place,” she said when I turned to her.

  “But you said you had eleven children. You have to know something about the process.”

  “I gathered the eggs, but I didn’t create the chicken.”

  “What does that mean?” I sounded like I’d been poked with a cattle prod. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” My voice climbed up higher with every word. “You’re my plan B. You’re here to cover in an emergency.” And this definitely counted as an emergency. She’d been around since the Mayflower . Before epidurals and Lamaze and La Leche. She must have helped deliver dozens of babies over the centuries. “Please don’t give me a hard time, Elspeth. I need your help.” It killed me to say those words, but I’d ask her to marry me if it meant she would help bring my child into this world.

  “Himself chose me to be the protector, not the midwife.”

  And Samuel had gotten it right. She wasn’t a midwife. She knew nothing about delivering babies. All she could do was flap around spouting spells and generally making a pain in the ass of herself.

  I couldn’t help myself. The situation was so crazy, so totally absurd, that I started to laugh and then I laughed harder and harder until finally I couldn’t stop until I was gasping for air. We were stuck in the snow on an almost-deserted highway two weeks before Christmas and I was in labor. If the gods had any more tricks up their sleeves, I hoped they would hang on to them until after the New Year because right now this was about as much as I could handle.