Page 177 of The Wolves of Forest Grove

“Eight centimeters,” Layla announced a minute later, her pulse almost on par with Allie’s pounding drumbeat. “We should see a head, right? Where’s the head?”

“Move!” Hazel shoved Layla out of the way, her long braid falling forward as she reached beneath the sheet to feel what she could not see.

I took Allie’s hand, and she squeezed tightly, her gray eyes flitting between Layla’s haunted expression, the hunch of Hazel between her legs, and me.

“What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong? Are they okay? Are my babies okay?”

As though she could feel for herself, she flattened a palm against her impossibly large stomach, and I watched as a limb moved beneath the surface of her skin. Like a tiny hand trying to reach out for the touch of his mother.

Hazel rocked back on her heels and rose, putting a bloodied hand to her temple. “He flipped,” she said. “He isn’t in the right position.”

“Can we turn him?” Layla asked hopefully, rushing to flip through several pages of the birthing bible she’d been carrying around for months. “There’s a section in here that explains—”

“It’s twins,” Hazel cut her off. “Packed in there like a couple of sardines. We can’t turn him.”

“We should’ve had the birth at a hospital,” I all but growled, my wolf flooding me from the inside, making my heated flesh prickle with agitation.

It had been a sticking point from the start.

Births had always been done on pack land.

Try explaining rapid healing and glowing eyes to a mortal doctor…

but I’d have handled it. Hired a vampire to compel the doc to forget.

Whatever we had to do to make sure something like this didn’t happen.

“If they’d come on time, then Katie would have been here,” Layla argued. Katie was a surgeon from a southern pack who’d be here on standby in case of an emergency. She was meant to arrive in just two days.

Two days too late now.

I pinched the bridge of my nose and inhaled deeply, hating how the scent of her blood was all I could smell. It permeated my nostrils, filled my lungs like poison.

“What do we do?” Allie asked, her words trailing off into a cry as another contraction nearly put me on my knees. Allie almost snapped my index finger from her grip.

Clay raced back inside, his eyes lit with his wolf as he glared at Hazel and Layla as though they were somehow to blame for her pain. “What’s happening?”

“Clay,” Allie choked out, sagging back against her mountain of sweat-stained pillows.

He came to her, shaking the cabin with each stomp of his feet until he was hunched over the side of the bed opposite to me. He bent and took her other hand, putting his forehead to hers. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I’m here now. I’m here.”

She nodded against him and then pulled away, gasping, her hands going to her stomach. “Something’s wrong,” she said, all the color draining from her face.

“Something’s wrong,” she repeated, frantic, her hands moving over the surface of her belly. “I can’t hear her. I can’t hear her heartbeat.”

Hazel rushed to the bedside, almost barreling into me as she listened at Allie’s belly, her hunched back showing a knobby protrusion of spine under her surgical gown.

“It’s there,” Hazel said after the longest moment of my entire fucking life. “But faint.”

“Get them out,” Allie said, her whole body shaking. “Get them out now.”

Her fear crept over my heart like frost, and it was like all my worst fears were coming true before my eyes and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

Hazel went for the surgical tray, cutting herself as she rifled through polished utensils until her wrinkled fingers found the blunt end of the scalpel.

“Fuck that,” Clay growled, standing between Hazel and Allie. “No, Grams. You aren’t cutting them out of her.”

Vivian sagged against the wall in the doorway, blinking like she might pass out.

Layla just stood there, frozen still by the realization of what was happening.

The one thing we weren’t prepared for.

“Move, Clay,” Allie all but hissed, trying to sit up so she could move him herself.

“No, Allie.”

“Clay!”

She looked to me, her eyes pleading. Lower lip quivering. “They’ll die…”

She couldn’t ask me to do this.

I wouldn’t do this.

“Please.”

Fuck.

I left her side and tackled Clay to the ground, getting a good elbow hit into his ribs before he went down, the air rushing out of his lungs. He fought back, trying to get the upper hand.

“Viv!”

She was there in a split second, helping me get a hold of Clay. “Hey!” I shouted, trying to get his attention as Layla and Hazel crowded in behind us.

“Okay, hun, you’re going to have to do this,” Hazel was saying, the scalpel glinting in the lamplight as she passed it to a stunned Layla. “I’ll talk you through it.”

“Get the fuck off me,” Clay bellowed, knocking over a nightstand.

“Stop it!” Allie screamed, making Clay pause just for a second. The second we needed to get through to him.

“Man, listen,” I ground out, my muscles burning with the effort of keeping him on the ground. “Listen!”

The fight went out of him, a little at first, but more as the seconds passed. “She can’t leave us, man. She can’t.”

“She won’t, you big idiot,” Vivian snapped in his face. “She heals faster than all of us. She’s got this. She can do this. You need to let her do this.”

I lowered my mouth to his ear, speaking low so only he could hear. “If something happens to them because you wouldn’t let Hazel and Layla do this, she’ll never forgive you.”

He knew it was true, but the last of his fight left him and my chest ached at the hatred in his stare. He bared his teeth. “But at least she’d be alive.”

Allie cried out and a sharp pain skated over my nerves, making the three of us come apart in a tangle of limbs on the floor. I scrambled to my feet, rushing back to her side.

“Don’t look,” she insisted, gripping my hand. “Look at me.”

Clay held her other hand, and I saw his face harden in a mask of stone as his gaze swept low over Allie’s belly where Hazel was coaching Layla where to cut.

“At me!” Allie demanded, tugging Clay’s hand to get his attention.

He watched her in muted horror as they sliced through her stomach and she barely made a sound. Silent tears and a wire-tight jaw the only outward proof of her torment.

This pain wasn’t shared, but we could still sense her resolve. Stronger than her fear.

“I love you so much,” I told her, lifting her hand to my lips. “So much.”

She grunted and sagged, her body jerking before her grip on my hand softened and her head rolled back.

“Viv!” Layla cried. “Take him.”

Allie looked down, and I followed her gaze to the mess of her stomach and the tiny thing Layla passed into the hands of Vivian.

“Is he...okay?” Allie asked groggily, and I turned to find her pale, her eyelids heavy.

“Allie?” I prodded, brushing my knuckles over her cheek to try to rouse her.

“Is he okay?” Clay echoed, her voice gruff. “Vivian! Is he okay?”

“I...I don’t know.”

“Help him,” Allie muttered, and Clay looked between her and Vivian frantically, trying to find a place to lay the infant down.

“Clear his airway,” Layla ordered, her tone steadier than it had any right to be.

Clay was across the room in half a second, his hands shaking as he took the baby from Vivian. A few seconds later a strangled cry rose, filling the cabin with its perfect sound, drawing on something deep inside my core.

“He’s okay…” Allie breathed, her body jerking again as Layla tugged another baby from her. Her brows pinched, and she sighed, her eyes fluttering.

Droplets fell over Allie’s cheek, and it took me a minute to realize they were tears. My tears.

“He’s okay,” I repeated, pushing her hair back. My fingers stilled as they brushed her forehead. Flushed only a second before it felt cool. Too cold.

A second cry rose to meet the first, this one higher in pitch, drawing my attention away from my mate to find her. Little Charity Grace, impossibly small. A tuft of white blonde hair on her squirming head in the arms of Layla.

“Allie, they’re okay. Look, they’re—”

Her eyes fluttered to a half close, showing whites.

“Layla!” I called, releasing her limp hand to grip both sides of her clammy face instead. “Wake up, Allie. You need to stay awake.”

“Here,” I heard Clay say, and then he was there, elbowing me out of the way and tapping Allie on the cheek harder than I’d like.

“Babe?” he said, voice a distant monotone. “Babe, wake up.”

I stepped back, an odd sensation making everything hazy. Like I was watching from a shelf high up in the corner. Like I wasn’t really here.

Like this was just a dream

A nightmare.

Soon, I’d wake up.

Wake up.

Wake. Up.

Clay was shouting something I couldn’t understand.

Layla worked on Allie’s stomach. The chink chink of the staple gun like gunshots to my lungs. Was I breathing?

Did it matter?

“Look!” Vivian shouted, cradling the still crying baby to her chest. “She’s healing. She’s already healing.”

I blinked, coming back to myself like a soul sucked back into a body and caught myself on the headboard before my knees could buckle.

“She’s healing,” Layla confirmed, and I found the edges of her wound, a strange laugh blooming on my lips as I watched her skin slowly knit itself back together, helped on by the staples keeping her skin and muscle and sinew together.

I could kiss the fucking stars.

She groaned, and Clay and I leaned over her, both of us breathless as her eyes fluttered back open, trying to focus.

“Where…” she muttered, her voice small and faraway. “Where…”

Vivian tapped me on the shoulder, and I spun, my lips parting at the baby in her arms. “Here,” she said while Hazel brought the other one to Clay.

I took her into my arms, terrified that I wasn’t doing it right. You’re supposed to support the neck, right? What if I drop her? What if…

My chest ached at the sight of her, twinging even more as she nuzzled into my collarbone, settling as though she already knew who I was.

“Hi, Charity,” I managed in a watery voice, running a finger down her tiny nose.

“Jared?” Allie pleaded, and I swallowed hard, trying to get my arms to stop shaking so I could set her down with my mate.

I settled Charity into the crook of Allie’s arm while Clay nestled a fussing Liam against her chest. Christ, it must’ve taken us four months to decide on his name. Liam was the only name none of us hated and looking at him now, it fit. We made a good choice.

Allie began to sob, her weak arms trying to draw them in closer.

“They’re perfect,” she said after a minute, lifting her gaze to me, and then to Clay. “We did it.”

“You did it,” Clay corrected her, pressing a kiss first to Liam and then to her forehead.

Outside Hazel’s cabin, cheers erupted from the pack. A cacophony of whoops and hollering. Of laughter and of clapping hands.

Welcome to the pack little ones.