CHAPTER NINE: UNRAVELING

The call took four attempts.

Not because the number was wrong or the line was busy, but because Maya sat on the edge of her bed with her phone in her hand and dialed as far as the third digit three separate times before ending the call and setting the phone face-down on the mattress and sitting with her hands pressed between her knees, staring at the middle distance.

She had not called in sick in three years.

She understood, in the abstract, that this was not a morally significant fact. People called in sick. It was a normal and reasonable thing that normal and reasonable people did when their bodies or their circumstances required it, and no one at the hospital thought less of a person for using the leave they'd earned. She'd covered enough shifts for colleagues dealing with genuine illness, family emergencies, the ordinary catastrophes of living, to know this was true.

But she had also spent three years building her attendance record into something load-bearing. Into something that proved, in the particular private logic she'd been operating under, that she was reliable. That she showed up. That she was, whatever else she was or wasn't, the kind of person who could be counted on to be exactly where she said she would be.

She was not entirely sure who she had been proving this to.

She picked up the phone and dialed the charge nurse's station before she could set it down again.

Linda picked up on the second ring.

"St. Catherine's, ER nursing."

"Linda. It's Maya."

A pause. A short one, but specific in quality, the pause of someone recalibrating their expectations of a call. "Maya. Hey. How are you doing? We've been…" Another small pause. "How are you holding up?"

The we've been trailed off into something unfinished, and Maya understood from its shape that the story had circulated. Of course it had. Hospitals were enclosed systems with their own internal weather patterns, and James's hospitalization and the subsequent events in the corridor outside room 304 had been witnessed by at least two orderlies and one other floor nurse. She had not thought about that at the time. She had been somewhat occupied.

"I'm not going to be able to come in today," Maya said. She kept her voice even and professional, the same register she used when delivering difficult information to patients, because it was the only register she trusted right now to get through the sentence without fracturing. "I need to take a sick day."

Silence.

Not long silence. Three, maybe four seconds. But she could hear Linda's surprise in it, Linda, who had worked alongside Maya for two of the three years, who had said once, in the middle of a brutal overnight shift, Maya Chen, I think you might be a cyborg. Normal humans go home. Said it with affection and genuine bewilderment.

"Of course," Linda said. Her voice had softened into something warmer and more personal, setting aside the charge-nurse register. "Of course, Maya. Don't even think about it. We'll cover your patients."

"Thank you."

"Are you…" Linda stopped. Started again. "Is there anything you need? I heard about James, and I just want you to know that everyone here thinks he's…"

"I'm fine," Maya said. "I just need a day."

"Take two," Linda said firmly. "Take the rest of the week. You have the leave, Maya. Actually use it."

After she hung up, Maya sat with the phone in her lap and the morning light coming through the gap in the curtains in a single pale stripe across the floorboards. The apartment was very quiet. It was always quiet during the day when she was usually at the hospital, the building's daytime rhythm was different from its nighttime one, lower traffic, fewer families moving through the hallways, a particular stillness that settled into the spaces between walls.

She had never been here to hear it before.

She set the phone on the nightstand next to the prenatal vitamins, the specialized ones the doctor had given her, in their unmarked bottle, looking entirely ordinary from the outside, and looked at the ceiling.

Okay, she thought. Inventory.

It was a habit from nursing, this impulse toward systematic assessment when things became overwhelming. You could not manage what you hadn't catalogued. You could not treat what you hadn't diagnosed. Panic was, among other things, a failure of information, the feeling of being overwhelmed by something that hadn't been properly named yet, because unnamed things couldn't be approached and unnamed things couldn't be solved.

She was pregnant. This was confirmed by a blood test conducted at a hospital whose name she'd already memorized and whose doctor she would need to follow up with, given that the woman appeared to have experience with supernatural pregnancies and Maya had approximately zero.

The pregnancy was progressing at an accelerated rate. She was two days past the night at the hotel and already experiencing symptoms that should have been impossible at this stage, the heightened senses confirmed last night at her own kitchen table, the hunger, the nosebleed, the baby's movement.

The baby's movement. She pressed her hand to her stomach now, automatically, a gesture that was becoming habitual in the way that repeated things became habitual before you'd consciously decided to let them. She'd felt it last night sitting with Mrs. Patel, that soft rhythmic nudging, and she'd felt it once more just before dawn, a single clear pulse like a tap from the inside, hello, still here, still real.

She was two days pregnant by any normal biological measure.

She should not be able to feel fetal movement at two days.

She should not be pregnant at two days.

The doctor had said six weeks instead of nine months. A supernatural accelerated timeline. Which meant she had approximately, she did the calculation quickly, reflexively, the way she calculated medication dosages, she had approximately six weeks before she would give birth to a child she knew nothing about, fathered by a man whose last name she didn't know, in circumstances that her nursing degree had left her comprehensively unprepared for.

Information, she thought. Start with information.

She got up.

Her laptop was on the kitchen table where she'd left it two days ago, closed and unplugged, its charging light blinking amber. She plugged it in, made herself a cup of tea she didn't particularly want, sat down, and opened the browser.

She paused with her fingers over the keyboard.

The cursor blinked at her from the empty search bar.

There was something almost absurd about this moment, Maya Chen, BSN, three years emergency nursing, sitting at her kitchen table in an oversized cardigan about to G****e werewolves. She was aware of this. She was also aware that there was no version of her current situation that didn't require this moment, that the gap between what she knew and what she needed to know was not going to close itself through dignified inaction.

She typed: werewolf pregnancy symptoms human

The results loaded.

She worked through them methodically, the same way she worked through a patient's chart, not skimming, actually reading, giving each source the amount of attention it warranted before moving on.

The first page was, predominantly, fan fiction.

She clicked through it anyway, because dismissing sources without examining them was the kind of intellectual shortcut that caused diagnostic errors, and read three separate entries on websites with names like MoonlitPassions and AlphaObsessed and ShifterRomanceArchive. The content was detailed and specific and written with genuine investment and told her, with remarkable consistency, the following: that werewolf pregnancies in human women lasted between three and six weeks, that the human woman developed enhanced senses and increased physical abilities, that the bond between the werewolf father and human mother was essential to the pregnancy's stability, and that Alpha pups were significantly more powerful than standard werewolf offspring.

She sat with that for a moment.

The consistency was interesting. Not because fan fiction was a reliable source of medical information, she was not under any illusions about this, but because consistency across multiple independent sources sometimes indicated a common origin. These writers were drawing on something. A mythology, a shared cultural framework, something. The specific details recurred with the regularity of things that had been transmitted rather than invented.