There was too much blood. Lyra didn't even think she had that much blood in her, much less that much to lose. If she survived this, she remembered thinking in a state of near delirium, she was going to have to kill someone. Immediately.

That was the first time, during the process of this entire pregnancy, that she had ever thought in terms of if she survived this. The infant's survival had always been uncertain; experience had taught her that even human life was so fragile, and the circumstance they were in was so unnatural. She, however, was a survivor; she had survived childbirth, had survived both her parents and one brother, she had survived a crazy Squib with a knife and a vampire attack. She was immortal, or near enough to make no matter; now, for the first time in almost a year, Lyra was thinking of her own mortality.

The midwife didn't speak much–they had picked her out specifically for her discretion, not for her fantastic bedside manner. Aside from a few coarsely-delivered instructions, she did little to influence Lyra's mental state, which left the vampiress to her thoughts. The baby is going to die, and then I'm going to die, were the chiefest among them. That's too much blood. We're all going to die.

But that wasn't so bad, was it? Darcy was dead, and so were both her parents. Technically speaking, she was, too. August would have a hard time convincing them to exhume her casket to rebury her, when she had already been "buried" for a year, but really, everything was just returning to its natural state.

That was where she was, mentally, when she heard the infant's cry. "What is it?" she asked, voice slurred from pain and effort. "What is it? A boy or a girl?"

"A boy," was the midwife's rather brief reply, before she took the baby, still slick with blood, out into the hallway to meet his father. Lyra could barely see when she came back into the room. Her head was spinning, and she felt weak and drained. Too much blood. She might not have been able to see the midwife come back towards the bed, but she could smell her—and when she leaned over to see whether Lyra was still conscious, she could hear her heartbeat.

It was more a reflex than a conscious thought, but by the time the door opened again, the midwife was dead. Dead, and entirely drained of blood. Lyra's head had stopped spinning enough for her to realize what she'd done about halfway through the process, but she didn't have the self control to stop herself. She hadn't ever had the self-control to stop, when she slipped up like this, and at this point it would have just been a waste of good blood, anyway. The midwife was not going to walk away from this one.

Sitting upright in the bloodstained bed that she'd given birth in, with the corpse of the midwife lying limp across her lap, Lyra looked towards the door and blinked. The light in the hallway was brighter than that in the room, she thought, and she was having trouble making August's form resolve into more than a shadow, though she knew it was him in the doorway.

"I—" she said, raising the back of one hand to her mouth to ensure it wasn't still smeared with blood. "I didn't mean to — I couldn't help it," she stumbled. "I felt like I was dying."

August Echelon-Arnost