Chapter 132
The drive to the house was full of excited tension as Valkyrie debriefed her team and Corrival on the phone via a multi-call or whatever it was called, and it ended with perfect timing when they pulled up at their house. Jumping out, Valkyrie ran into the house and to the parlour where Tanith was kneeling on the floor, legs apart and clenching her fists together, swaying and looking pale. Nadia was stroking her back gently and gave Valkyrie relieved look. After seven days and eight nights apart, Valkyrie and Nadia got to smile at each other for a moment before Valkyrie kneeled next to Tanith and rubbed her back as comfortingly as she could.
"How's it all going?" Valkyrie asked when Tanith took a gasping breath and her tense muscles relaxed a little.
"Good," she nodded, smiling just a little. "It really hurts. Twelve minutes apart. God, it – it makes everything down there hurt!"
Erskine snorted a laugh behind Valkyrie and the other two Idiots barely masked their laughs. In the room was Tanith, of course, and Solomon and Nadia who had been there for the hour or so that everyone else had been gone. Then there was Valkyrie, obviously, as well as Saracen, Erskine and Dexter. Ghastly had apparently been given a text by Solomon, with no response, and Anton was on the way but couldn't do anything until midnight because of the hotel. He had informed them, on the phone on their way home, that he had set the next place for Ireland but he had almost thirty people on board and couldn't just move the hotel right then.
"Should it feel like that?" Valkyrie asked warily, looking at Nadia.
"The internet claims that you may feel, and I quote, 'rectal pains'. You should also have a bunch of mucus flowing from you."
"Flowing from me?" Tanith laughed.
"Has your water broken?" Valkyrie asked.
"Either that or I pissed myself on the sofa," Tanith cringed, and Valkyrie noticed then that the sofa Tanith usually sat on was covered in towels and also that the gorgeous hardwood floors were covered in towels with a fair amount of liquid beneath Tanith alongside dripping liquid and blood on her inner thighs. It was really gross. "We need to go either way. I'm pretty sure they're coming and the water breaking might take hours."
With that, Tanith was loaded into the car via Erskine who was able to essentially airlift Tanith. Dexter took the bike back to the garage and they split into two cars, one of which had a car seat. Tanith, Saracen, Nadia and Valkyrie went in the car-seated car which they planned to leave at the maternity hospital. Just as they got out of the front gate, another contraction set in and Tanith carefully breathed through the pain with Valkyrie gently massaging her neck in the very cramped back seats.
By the time they got to the hospital, Tanith had had a few more contractions and they were officially nine minutes apart. Nadia informed her that usually, they'd have to wait to be five minutes apart, but because of how stressed Tanith had been and how bad the pregnancy had gotten at times, as well as being almost four weeks too soon, they were being brought in early for safekeeping.
Quicker than Valkyrie thought possible, Erskine and Dexter locked hands and were carrying Tanith upright between them into the pretty cottage-like maternity hospital. Nadia and Valkyrie held hands and grinned in excitement together, getting the chance to kiss for just a moment before they were whisked to a large, clean room upstairs with a bed, sofa, small wardrobe and baby basin.
"Right, before we get ahead of ourselves," the midwife, whom Valkyrie didn't know, began after they had put Tanith in the bed. "Let's get your trousers off and I'll give you a check, and we'll also have a look at baby's heart. Do you know the gender?"
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Skulduggery Pleasant: Raising Cain
Fiksi Penggemar(This story is written as a fanfiction, but can be read as a story without having read any of the books.) Valkyrie Cain, the adoptive daughter of the Dead Men, has had a life full of love and magic. But as she gets older, times become scarier and sh...
