[This post is from Hecate’s point of view.]
Hecate looked up from the infant in her arms, her brow arching slightly. “I know that you’re—”
“We named him after Thom. The middle name is actually from his family, too, a maternal grandmother’s family name.” Marin gave her a rueful smile. “We call him Lin. The whole name—it’s a little much.”
“It’s good to know the irony isn’t lost on you,” Hecate murmured, looking down at the baby again. He was still staring up at her, a clear-eyed, serious gaze, one that seemed more than a little strange from a baby only days old. She took a shaky breath, meeting that gaze, one that drew her back into a time long ago and a place that seemed very, very far away.
She had held infants before—many of them, in fact, newborns and older, though mostly newborns. She had held them crying, squalling their first cries, naked on the days of their birth. Her stomach felt hollow and a new ache began inside. Tears pricked her eyes again and she exhaled a quiet, shaking breath.
“Can you sense it?” she asked Marin in a whisper, her gaze flicking up again. “This baby, Marin, he—”
Her lips thinned and she nodded. “I knew before he was ever born that he was going to be something, that there was going to be something about him. I know he’s powerful. I’d know that even without having seen it.” Marin leaned forward, resting her elbows against her knees and staring at the floor for a few seconds. “I don’t want that to define him, though—I don’t want his name to define him and I don’t want his power to define him. I want him to have some kind of childhood. I want him to be safe and loved for as long as I can make that happen.”
A shiver crept down Hecate’s spine. “You say that like you won’t be here to make it happen.”
“Because after a while, I know I won’t be,” Marin said softly. “And that’s the worst part of all of it. I know I’m not always going to be there when he needs me. It’s going to have to be someone else someday. I just don’t know who.”
