A Shiver of Light Read Online Free

remains unanswered,” Doyle said. “Why is Dr. Kelly here?”
    “He has the most experience with birth delay of multiples.”
    “What is birth delay?” I asked.
    “With a cesarean birth we might have the option of delivering the first two babies but leaving the third, smaller one in utero for a week or two. It’s not a given, but often smaller size means certain systems might not be as developed, and this would give more time for the baby to grow in the perfect self-sustaining environment of the womb.”
    I just blinked at him for a few seconds. “Are you actually telling me that the triplets might have different birthdays by weeks?”
    He nodded, still smiling.
    “And if we can’t delay the third baby’s birth, what then?”
    “Then we’ll deal with whatever issues may arise.”
    “You mean we’ll deal with whatever is wrong with the babies, especially the smaller … triplet.”
    “We don’t like the word
wrong
, Princess, you know that.”
    I started to cry. I don’t know why, but for some reason the thought of having two babies delivered and leaving the third inside me to cook a little bit longer just seemed wrong, and … I wanted it over with; I just wanted our babies to be all right and to be on the outside of me. I was tired of being pregnant. I couldn’t see my feet. I couldn’t tie my own shoes. I couldn’t fit behind the wheel of a car to drive myself anywhere. I felt helpless and bloated like a tiny beached whale, and I just wanted it over. Even though nothing had actually gone wrong, the doctors had still warned us about every awful possibility, so that my life had become a list of nightmares that never happened while the babies grew inside me. I was beginning to think I’d had too many good doctors and too much high tech, because there were always more tests, even though in the end all the tests told us was what wasn’t wrong. Or maybe they’d missed something and it was all going to go wrong. They’d missed a whole third baby; how could I trust any of them anymore? All the months of confidence building and trust in my doctors was in ruins. I was having triplets. The nursery was done, but we had only two cribs, two of everything. We weren’t ready for triplets. I wasn’t ready.
    I was screaming quietly into Doyle’s shoulder while everyone ran around trying to calm the crazy pregnant woman when my water broke.

CHAPTER
THREE
    HIS NAME WAS Alastair, and he fit in my arms as if he’d been carved from a missing piece of my heart. He blinked up at me with huge liquid blue eyes set like shining sapphires in the pale, luminescent skin of his face. His hair was thick and black, and one tiny, slightly pointed ear was as black as his hair. The curled tip was almost lost in the midnight straightness of his hair. The other ear was like a carved seashell, shining mother-of-pearl set in the velvet of his hair.
    All the exhaustion, all the pain, the panic of finding that Gwenwyfar was too far into the birth canal for a c-section, and her brother, Alastair, came so close behind her there was no time, and it was all lost on the wonder of tracing that tiny ear down through Alastair’s hair to find that the black of the one ear trailed down onto the side of his neck, like a spot on the side of a puppy’s ear.
    Doyle was still in his surgical scrubs, pink against his shining black skin. He traced the side of Alastair’s neck and said, “Do you mind?”
    It took me a moment to understand the question, and then I blinked up at him, like I was waking from a dream. “You mean the spot?”
    I smiled up at him, and whatever he saw made him smile back. “He’s beautiful, Doyle; our son is beautiful.”
    I got to see what very few had ever seen: The Darkness cried as he turned our tiny son gently in my arms so that he could show me a black star-shaped mark on his tiny back. It was a five-pointed star, almost perfect, taking up the middle of his back.
    Alastair made a protesting sound, and I turned him