The Magdalene Mercies

By Winifred Burton

Midwife Ursalynn Wade is attending the most dangerous delivery of her career. The perfect couple her sixteen-year-old patient did not select as adoptive parents are not taking no for an answer, and now Howard Memorial Hospital is under siege.

 

Ursalynn is the only witness to the first birth of its kind in over a thousand years. More than one kind of family wants this baby. When her patient begs her to keep the extraordinary child safe from the sinister forces of the Magdalenes, Ursalynn must do the unthinkable. She must turn her back on everything she's worked hard for, and go on the run.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cirrina Books
• Release date: Oct 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9780991466160

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Sandra wandered the unoccupied wards of Howard Memorial, making her rounds in no particular order. The childbirth unit on four was the worst. Whenever those princesses pretended they didn't know where to find something, they called the house assistant, like she didn’t have anything better to do. The low, heavy hang of the full moon tipped the balance of sky from Friday to Saturday, bringing with it a busload of women ready to pop. The need for an extra infusion pump in a delivery room was somehow Sandra’s problem. She’d bring it. Eventually.

Sandra started her search on the deserted ground floor. The four-story community hospital’s new emergency department looked after the same number of broken arms, intoxications, and mental breakdowns as the old one. The fevers, coughs, and domestic misunderstandings showed up on schedule every week, but the rest of the hospital's admission numbers lagged behind shrinking insurance reimbursements. The board of trustees had hoped the hulking magnetic resonance imager or stack of automated external defibrillators would bump their standing from better than nothing to good enough if you can’t get to General right away, but Vincent Township didn’t have enough drunks or pregnant women to remodel the rest of the hospital. It barely had enough regulars to keep the lights on.

Sandra drifted through rooms with laminate walls cured beyond recognizable color. The twitch of the fluorescent bulbs and flung open doors in her wake would go unnoticed for weeks.

I'll be long gone by then, she announced to the emptiness.

Whoever abandoned a broken wheelchair at the threshold of a clean utility room, choked with nests of cracked rubber tubing, and a row of wood-veneered dialysis carts likely thought the same thing.

Metal beds, sculpted into waves by the constant torsion of healing yet never getting better, were the first to go. Scrap yard. Scavengers hollowed out the rest, until the care areas were naked of everything except the gas and vacuum fixtures on the walls. Even the clock above the drinking fountain had grown silent with no one to watch it. Sandra wasn’t thirsty but she stopped anyway. She bent low and sipped, her nose tickled by the arc of water, water dripping onto the front of her uniform as she straightened up and stretched her arms over her head. She yawned and retraced her steps to the exit.

Movement fluttered in her peripheral vision, then a tepid slosh of acrid oily liquid that smelled of rancid onions doused her. It left a trail of agony as it soaked through her already straw limp hair, into her scrubs, and down to her skin. The metal push bar door swung open and she stumbled back into the emptiness’s embrace. Her throat swelled, the tender membranes of her eyes, nostrils, and lips stung with the kiss of chemicals not meant for flesh. She snorted and gagged, but she couldn’t retch the fluid away. She’d swallowed some of it, breathed it in, and the trickle of air only intensified the sear of pain.

Sandra collapsed face first onto the grey carpet saturated with the drippings of years of traffic. She struggled to right herself up onto her knees, but only succeeded in flipping onto her back. She heard the soft release of the unit door clicking shut; then a flap of what sounded like the ancient roll up window shades as they snapped open to reveal the blaze of the parking lot floodlights. It wasn’t until she heard the overhead announcement Code Red, Unit E, Code Red, ground floor, Unit E, West Entrance that Sandra Liddette realized she was burning alive.

Sandra was beyond rescue. The attackers ignited her writhing body with a lit match and moved on to the next task. They exited via the stairwell, and blocked it behind them, silently stacking more fuel against the door in tandem. One always reaching back without even looking, confident they’d be handed another jerry can of their fertilizer and diesel blend, until finally a device crafted in incremental evenings at the kitchen table lay atop the heap, satisfyingly complete. They stole sidelong glances at each other as they made their way up to the fourth floor. When they reached the sheltered privacy of the central elevator alcove, they touched; a switch that detonated the controlled collapse of the hospital’s western foundation pressed between their clasped hands. Their dry lips brushed together and a spark of joy traveled between them as they separated. The next time they saw each other, they would be parents.

ONE

The explosion rippled through the building’s skeleton. The intensity dispersed through three floors of carpeting, concrete, steel, and drywall, reduced to a muffled boom by the time it got to Four East. If anyone on the childbirth unit saw the flicker of the lights, or felt the blast jolt the foundation, they explained it away. The dueling wails of two women in labor were the only sounds anyone heard. The agonized panting, the breaths sucked down between pulverizing waves of contractions, dragging them beneath the surface of pain to a desolate, irrational place that swallowed everything else.

The unit’s walls let all the privacy out. They weren’t constructed to withstand the primal release of inhibitions. Room two planted her foot on her nurse’s thigh and groaned into each push, holding her breath and bearing down until her headboard rubbed a groove into the drywall. The rapid progress of her baby’s descent could be monitored from the nurse’s station by the squeal of the bed across the tiled floor, and her nurse Karen’s praise. Room five’s screams echoed throughout the floor. The patients who had already succeeded in their trial winced at each piercing cry, grateful that their ordeal was over. When the fire doors closed, the emergency lights flashed, and the public address system crackled, Nancy, the nurse in charge of Four East, was glad to have a distraction.

Thank God. At least it’s not a drill.

The fire on the other side of the building was probably