Power(2)

Oh, gods—

Camilla’s scream tore free from her throat as though it had been ripped from her like a goat’s skin from its meat. The pain of labor crashed in again and she found herself pushing involuntarily, against her will, mind howling about how there was something terribly wrong even as the child began to slip from her. She could feel it against her, the writhing thing, could feel it burning her as it passed—

“Just a moment more,” Aelia said, but she sounded so very, very far away.

Camilla’s scream faded in her own ears as the fire reached its height, its zenith, and she felt rather than heard something pop loose. Her sight fled, the smells of the room faded, her pain dropped away into black as her own screams abruptly ceased. It was all darkness and then—

Fear.

The world came back in a rush of crying. Screaming and crying. It was short, sharp cries, cries born of need and ignorance and pain.

The cries of a child.

Camilla could hear them, had expected them at the outset of the labor. But they sounded … different … than ones she’d heard before, at other births she’d been at. They sounded—

Like she was hearing them from within her own head.

She saw nothing, just a faint light through unfocused eyes. “There, there,” came Aelia’s soothing voice. “It is a boy, Camilla. What was the name again?” There was a pause. “Marius?”

Yes, she tried to say, but her throat would not cooperate.

Her throat …

… was already crying …

… the cries of a baby.

There was something else with her, raw fear pushing against her. She could feel it, something squirming and afraid, something longing for warmth and darkness. Something scared of every raw, cutting sound, every rough touch of Aelia’s hands. It pushed against her thoughts, and she pushed back roughly.

What … is … this …?

Camilla tried to give voice to the words, tried to push them past the screaming of her lips, but failed. The fear of the other was overcoming everything.

“Camilla?” Aelia’s voice permeated her consciousness, broke through the screaming of the child using her voice. “Camilla?” She could hear Aelia’s voice get higher. “Marcellina!” Aelia called, the panic obvious as she screamed out for the assistant she had left outside.

There was a surge of light—the door opening, Camilla dimly realized over the screaming and the fear from the other—and the sound of harsh footsteps on her floor. She could feel the rough sensation of a blanket being draped over her skin, wrapping completely around her, of a sense of warmth.

The other felt it, too, and a little of the fear subsided. Just a little, though.

“Take the child,” Aelia said, and Camilla felt the world shift roughly, the balance tilt. A dim hint from that came to her, and she dismissed it as madness—

“Is she …?” Marcellina’s voice came from above her, and a subtle rocking began, the bare motion of left to right.

“Dead,” Aelia said. There was a pause. “She must have died during the last moments of the labor.”

What …?

“And the child?” Marcellina asked. She was barely a girl herself, a thin, reedy little thing. There had been a reason she’d been waiting outside. Gossipmonger.

“We will take him with us, for now,” Aelia said. “Camilla had no family left. The boy—Marius, she wanted him to be named—we will have to find him a home.”

A silence filled the air. The cries had subsided, and only the faintest hint of light made it into Camilla’s vision. But she could feel the blanket around her, strong arms beneath her. She could smell, could hear. It is not possible, she wanted to tell herself. And yet—

Somehow it was.

She pressed her thoughts against the other thing that was with her, the other … mind? She felt it press back only gently, a deep weariness already falling over it. It was incomprehensible, nearly, especially for a woman who tried to think of herself as reasonable, tried not to indulge in fits of fancy—

It is like a story of the gods, a tale of punishment and madness and woe for those who go against them. What did I do to deserve this …?

The other mind in her body slept, and she felt it drift away while she stayed awake, fighting the urge to sleep that came with it. She stayed, numb in her shock, the faint light still flooding through her eyes as she was rocked, back and forth, like the baby she now was.





Chapter 2


Sienna Nealon

Now





The door burst off the steel box with the fury of a succubus unleashed. It felt as if I’d been speaking to Adelaide in my head for hours, but I knew when I’d come back to myself that only minutes had passed. Minutes that I’d spent in that cramped metal box, the smell of blood and fear still trapped in the dark with me. The steady thrum of the aircraft’s engines buzzed in the background, and I smiled as a slightly oily scent flooded into the open box along with the light of the cargo plane’s hold.