At thirty-six hours, Dr. Rosen declared we needed to do an emergency C-section because my cervix couldn’t seem to dilate enough, and the baby was in distress.
Priest almost knocked over the table of medical instruments in his haste to get me out of the private room and into surgery.
“I’m scared,” I confessed as they set me up in the operating room, a sheet veiling my belly from sight. Priest’s hand was gripped in mine so tightly, I might have been causing him physical pain, but of course, he didn’t say a thing.
He leaned close to my face in his blue scrubs, beard obscured by a mask, a cap over his long, thick mane of copper hair so his eyes were all I could see. Those pale green eyes ringed in a thick black circle I’d learned was called a limbal ring.
“You are not weak,” he reminded me, voice full of vigor as if he could pass the strength of his conviction to me through tone alone. “You never were and now, after everythin’, you’re even stronger. You’re gonna do this, my Bea. You’re gonna bring our baby into this world.”
I clung to his hand, to his gaze, the entire time they operated.
And then, twenty minutes later, the doctor declared we had a baby.
A baby boy.
I was crying before I even saw him because of the look on Priest’s face. He could see beyond the veil where I couldn’t, his gaze fixed on a single point that must have been our baby in the doctor’s arms.
“Oh,” he said, a single, small exhale of sound.
But that one syllable was so profound, a tiny halleluiah.
The entire expanse of Priest’s hard featured, perpetually scowling face was alit with love, palpable love and awe, utter worship.
“He’s…” he tried to explain to me as they cleaned and checked baby McKenna’s vitals. He shook his head, unable to find the words for the emotions he felt. “He’s just like you.”
“He looks like me?” I asked, so eager to see him my heart clenched.
“No,” he whispered, leaning down to kiss my hand he held through his mask. “He’s an angel like you, not at all like me.”
“Priest, if he’s half you,” I argued as they finally brought my baby over swaddled in a blue blanket to lay him on my chest.
Priest was there instantly, helping move the fabric of my hospital gown so the baby could place his red little cheek on my naked skin. He hesitated, a tombstone tatted finger gently, so gently, smoothing over that plump cheek.
I gazed down at the light face, eyes squeezed shut as he fussed, then settle slightly against me. He had such a little fist, half the size of his dad’s one finger, and a small smattering of hair on his head the same shade of antique copper.
“He looks like you,” I murmured, feeling love turn over every molecule in my body, turning me from plain old Bea Lafayette into something greater, made whole and invincible by my love for his baby and this man.
“Like you,” Priest argued lowly as he peered down over us, smoothing back my sweaty hair while he ran his finger over the baby’s downy head.
“Both of us, then,” I declared on a weepy light laugh. “Look at how beautiful we are together.”
Priest kissed my head, and I knew he didn’t have language for the unprecedented feelings roiling through him.
“What should we call him?” he asked me a moment later.
We hadn’t decided on baby names. I wanted to meet our little McKenna before we decided on anything, perhaps romantically thinking the right name would come to us like a lightning strike.
I should have trusted my instincts because one did.
“Azrael,” I said reverently, anointing his forehead with the touch of my finger. “Azrael Axelsen McKenna.”
A little smile, small and newborn as our baby, flickered at the edges of Priest’s mouth. “The Angel of Death.”