Dear Diary,

"If Bloodlust gets you Vengeance,

Do not fuck around with it,

Or they just might get away."

Doctrine of Tabitha, Book of Bloodlust

I never thought I would wind up writing Important Safety Tips for Vengeance or Bloodlust, but here we fuckin' are. I mean, shit, in a perfect world nobody would need actual Vengeance, and Bloodlust would, I dunno, either be frowned upon or exclusively the venue of people who like using sharp knives in bed. Meanwhile, in the worlds I've actually lived in, they're horrifying necessities.

When it comes to anything related to 'lust', you just know some of the people who are into it are gonna try to drag it out. I may be a Goddess of Justified Homicide, Vengeance, and Bloodlust, but I'm not a fuckin' Goddess of Torture, and my emotional response to that tells me that I'm both glad and surprised I'm not, and the only remaining thing making me nervous on the subject is whether I hated every second of it or enjoyed it way, way too much. Because if I wound up in a situation where I had to do it because I saw no other path forward, maybe I had to do it, but after what Conrad did with his machines, I am firmly anti-torture.

And I fuckin' threatened Lady Crow with it because I wanted... no, needed her to drop that fuckin' Blade. I guess that's maybe part of being a Deity of Children? Not being able to stand by and let them get hurt when I can see it and stop it? I mean, shit, in a crapsack world like this, I'm sure there's a kid getting hurt like that every day. Every hour. Every minute maybe. I hope to fuck not every second. I'm pretty sure most of them aren't as brave as Ria was, either. The thought of terrified kids suffering on the regular is not happy making, but it doesn't inspire the same visceral hot-stove reaction as seeing Ria in danger did. Which... she wasn't even really 'my' kid then, so I guess it's just something about me and kids. I really hope Saffron gets how important that is to me, because while I'm a Goddess, I can't seem to pay attention to more than one thing at a time, and as Imperator she's got all the fuckin' machinery of the Alliance to make the world a place where fewer kids get hurt.

Kinda funny, because I think she might be the less nice one of us, but I normally get the position of terrifying big stick, and she gets the role as nurturing builder. But then, maybe that's a good thing? Like, I maybe enjoy bringing righteous retribution in the moment, but I'm not gonna go looking for excuses, because I realize it's way too easy to label shit as deserving of that if you try. Meanwhile she'd lose herself to that, but she doesn't get bored with the endless minutiae of running a whole semi-modern government with mostly medieval tools. Okay, I think it's semi-modern. Fuck, I'm just realizing that I don't even really know how the government works. I know there's a Council, but I have no idea if they're elected, appointed, or just yoinked in off the street.

Fuck, I almost hope it's that last one, because that'd be fuckin' funny as shit. 'We're down a Councilor! Go collect a homeless dude and tell him he just won the lotto!' Certainly wouldn't have nearly so much problem with entitled assholes who won the birth lottery thinking they know better than actual trained experts because they happened to slide out a high caste vajayjay.

Speaking of high quality vajayjay, Saffron returned from her latest confab with Lady Crow with very little in the way of additional news that made sense to my brain. I mean, she told me details, but I understood like one word in ten. I think, and I'm not entirely certain here, that the House Crow Blessing, since it's kinda Divine, piggybacks onto any and all other Divine connections the target has. Not, like, spreading to the people or Deities connected that way, but using those connections to anchor itself. Which is something we sort of knew, but even if we disconnected all my bonds we knew about it, it wouldn't spontaneously break the Blessing. It would just make it easier to break in and of itself. Which would have severe backlash on Ria. Maybe not enough to kill her. Maybe not enough to hurt her permanently.

Maybe.

Not something I'm risking. Absolute non starter. Which probably speaks to that whole 'my reaction to kids in danger' thing.

So right now it looks like Saffron and Conrad and Loki and Siobhan are gonna be looking for ways to prevent that backlash. Or to detangle the fuckin' thing entirely somehow. Not the greatest option, but still better than just losing a year of my life, a year of really understanding who and what I am here, not to mention a year of learning about my partners. Like, part of me is really kinda jazzed about learning shit about them, but I can totally see where me forgetting things like birthdays and anniversaries and shit is gonna be pretty awful for them. Just a reminder that... Well... I accidentally forgot about them. Like, from what Ria told me, I literally asked to forget about everything. I'm pretty sure I meant the stress of Search and Rescue, and by 'forget' I probably meant 'leave it in the rear view so I can spend quality time with the family', but that's not what I said.

At any rate, Saffron got home in reasonably good shape for spending a day with Lady Crow, and we went straight to bath time. Which is when she saw the technicolor madness which had gripped our offspring. "Children, and understand I ask this from a place of love, What in the name of all that is holy and good did you do to yourselves?"

"We painded!" crowed Isnomi. "Painded owah wooms!"

I couldn't help it, I lost my shit right there. I managed to keep the laughing to a dull bely shaking chuckle, but I could not for the life of me stop. At least part of that was because on the way back I'd gotten a glimpse under Ria's shirt when she peeled it away from herself. I don't know how they did it, but they'd gotten paint under their clothes. If our Menace revealed that she had not, in fact, been lisping on that last word, I'd be completely unsurprised.

"There was an accident with a paint bucket and a ladder," explained Ria as Marie and Siobhan worked together to peel her clothes off of her without damaging them or her. Okay, I'm pretty sure all the kids didn't realize how glad they were that they hadn't hit puberty yet, because while paint isn't wax, I'm sure any body hair would have come off with their clothes.

"Yeah, spilling a bucket of paint wouldn't get all of you doused, and sure as sugar wouldn't cover you each in a different color." All of them looked sheepish, although the full body paint jobs didn't allow for any blushing. Or at least not that I could see. For reference, Ria looked like she'd been dunked in whitewash. Menace had charcoal everywhere. David's everything was the pinkest pink that ever pinked. Lindsey was a really nice hunter green. Alex was red. Like, The Dress red. Maze was a deep kinda blue; I knew I'd seen it somewhere, but couldn't remember where. Daya was a nice golden yellow. "So... not saying there wasn't an accident with a paint bucket and a ladder, but what happened after that?"

Maze cleared her throat from the back of the pack, and when I looked over to her went into a lecture mode that reminded me so much of Saffron it hurt. "We've been painting a landscape on the walls of the family room, and Isnomi suggested birds in flight as a border near the ceiling. Ria, the only one of us able to paint a reasonable facsimile of a bird, climbed up a ladder with Isnomi following with the paint bucket."

"And the problem with the ladder?"

"It wasn't very stable. We all braced it from below, but someone sneezed."

"It wasn't me!" Alex blurted out.

Maze just cocked her head and half turned to face her sister. "I didn't say it was."

"Oh. Yeah. But it wasn't!"

Maze shook her head and turned back to me. "Someone sneezed, and those of us supporting the ladder shifted enough that Isnomi dropped the paint bucket. Ria dropped her brush as well."

Ria spoke up from the tub where Saffron scrubbed at her, trying to get the worst of the paint off. At least enough to maybe keep her from getting paint all over everything she touched. "I slipped when the ladder moved. I would have fallen had Isnomi not caught me."

Menace just looked smug. "I cand howd Wia an da bukkid."

I sighed. "Is anybody hurt?"

Maze shook her head. "No, papa. A few of us were scared..."

"Not me!" Alex again. Had to have a chat with her.

"Of course. But no one was hurt. At that point Ria had the idea that since the splashing paint had put a silhouette of Alex on the wall, we could do another for each of us."

"So you what, just lined up and tossed paint at one another?"

"Yeth!"

Saffron sighed as she scooted Ria toward me. I love our daughters, but every day I grow a little gladder one of our women is a brewer.

Sounds cute as hell though.

She smiled at me as I dried Ria off, trying to see if I could tell if the towel was getting any white paint on it. Hard to say, what with the towel itself being white. It does.

So bath time took a little longer than it normally did, but nobody seemed too bent out of shape about it. Marie and two of the Maenads left to bring dinner back up, because if the kids had managed to hide any paint on their bodies, I figured it was just polite to keep that mess inside the Imperator's suite. While they did, I snagged Alex and took her to the office for a chat.

If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

The first words out of her mouth when I shut the door? "I didn't do nothin!"

I led her over to the desk where I could sit, and boosted her up to sit on the desk. That put her eyes a little above mine, but honestly I'd rather do it that way than have her standing while I sat, or have me looming over her. "Yeah, I didn't say you did. But that reaction right there?" I waited half a tick, then when she got a bit of a belligerent look, said, "that's kinda the problem."

"But... I didn't do anything!"

I sighed. "Look, Alex, I really don't think you did. At worst, you might have gotten startled by the jump scare of somebody sneezing." Before she could give voice to the very obvious next denial of 'not being scared', I cut her off, "Which, since you were at the bottom of the ladder, means you weren't scared for yourself, but for Ria and Isnomi. That's a good thing."

She gave me all the side eye and said, "being scared is a good thing?"

I nodded. "Being scared for others means you want to protect them. If you didn't care, you wouldn't be scared." I nodded then leaned in. "Being scared for yourself isn't always bad either. It's what keeps us from doing dumb stuff."

"You're never scared!"

I chuckled. "I'm definitely scared sometimes, but I'll tell you right now, I'm not scared enough. You know how much dumb stuff I've done that, if I'd been scared enough to think for half a second, I could have avoided?"

She fumed a little, then grudgingly said, "a lot?"

I nodded. "Yeah. A whole lot. But that's not really what I wanted to talk to you about. Being scared, that is. What I wanted to talk to you about is the whole denying everything."

"But it's all true!"

I shook my head. "Never said it wasn't. But when you jump out and deny stuff before anybody says anything? it looks really shady. Like, if you didn't do it, and nobody's accused you, and you say, 'I didn't do it', people immediately think you're hiding something. Most likely, that you had something to do with it, or you saw who did it, or... I dunno. It just makes you look guilty."

She pursed her lips. "So what am I supposed to do if I didn't do it?"

"That depends. If you're talking to me or Marie or Saffron or Siobhan, or maybe Karen or Larry or Bonnie? Somebody you know is on your side and cares about you and is looking out for you? You shut your mouth until we ask you, and then you tell us what you know. Even if it makes you look guilty. And if you did do it? You tell us, because our first priority isn't gonna be punishing you, it's gonna be trying to clean up the mess, and we can't clean the mess if we don't know what the mess is."

She looked doubtful, but nodded. "Okay. What about anybody else?"

I smiled. "Then you shut your mouth and wait for one of us. I don't care who it is, you shut your mouth and wait for one of us to come get you."

"But what if they're trying to help, or you don't know where we are?"

I put my hands on her shoulders and looked her right in the eye. "You know who I am." She nodded. "You know who my father is." She nodded again. "You know who your big brother is?"

"Conrad?" Her eyes got more than a little wide.

"Yeah, Conrad. If something happens and we don't know where you are? Every single person in that room over there is gonna be looking for you. Same as any of your sisters. Me. Mom. Marie. Loki. Sigyn. Conrad. If we have to get them involved, the whole Army of the Alliance. And we will find you. And we will come for you. But while you're waiting?"

"Keep my mouth shut."

I pulled her in for a hug. "Good kid. Hungry?"

"Yeah!"

"Let's go get some dinner."

Marie shot Saffron and I a look as everyone in the suite got down to the serious business of eating. The dining room stands empty.

Huh. Wonder why.

Saffron answered. It could be Bonnie isn't feeling well. Or perhaps is feeling a bit too well to let Larry out of their suite?

Oh, now I feel guilty, because my brain doesn't want to think about them getting it on, which means I'd rather she was...

Right about then a sharp knock sounded on the door. When we opened it, Lachlan stood there, wild eyed. "The baby's having a Bonnie! I mean, the Bonnie is having a baby! I mean.."

I grabbed his arm. "Okay, okay, dude, we get it. Does she need us?"

"Uh... I guess Healers? Um, girl Healers, in case she feels some kinda way?

I snorted. "Hey Siobhan? You do midwife stuff?"

She stepped up beside me as I turned. "Of course." She turned, "Imperator, can I call upon you should you be needed?"

Saffron nodded. "Of course. Marie? Go with her, please?"

I almost commented, then realized that if somebody, like a big beefy somebody who was already losing basic speech, decided to take a header into the floor if things got a little messy, having Marie along to catch him and move him out of the way would be pretty fuckin' handy.

Saffron and I got the kids to bed, despite how half of them wanted to rush up and greet their prospective new playmate. The women in the suite helped us out, telling stories about how boring childbirth was, just hours and hours of waiting. Even I could tell that most of it was bullshit, but that specific kind of bullshit that isn't technically lying. Childbirth can take hours. Hours where not all that much is really happening. Just a woman lying there alternating between screaming in pain and panting and angry from being in pain.

Once the kids were asleep, Saffron and I snuck out to the living room and sat down. "Any idea how long it's gonna be?" I asked.

Saffron shrugged. "He's at least half Dan. She's less than half Bag, but I wouldn't say much less than half, given the Obols. I've heard Dan matrons have difficult labors. I've heard Bag mothers have easy ones."

"What about you?"

She shot me a look that was half grimace, half smirk. "On the one hand, I am, as you have noted many times, and take advantage of whenever you think I'll let you get away with it, very petite. On the other, I have what my grandmother referred to as 'birthing hips'. Even moreso since having actually given birth. Also, Isnomi was even tinier when she was born. From my reading that's one of the more pertinent causes of easy Bag labor."

"Uh... huh?"

"We have smaller babies. Some of that may be the shorter gestation period. Some may be our generally smaller stature." Her expression darkened. "Some of it may be lack of proper nutrition for so many of us. Some of it may be..." She stopped herself, shook her head. "No point in holding grudges at this point. Forward. Always forward."

I smiled at her and snuggled her into my side. She curled into me. "You certainly seem to hold onto your grudges against Gods though?"

She looked up at me, her eyes cold, but really kind of looking through me. "Against those who suborn themselves to you, as they ought? Of course not. They have seen the error of their ways and seek to atone. But the others?"

"Okay. Yeah. I get it, if somebody's continuing to be a twatwaffle, it's not a 'grudge'."

She smiled and stretched up to kiss my chin. "Exactly."

We sat there, waiting, for hours. I looked in through Siobhan's eyes at one point, then looked right the fuck back away. I did not need that view of Bonnie. Like, okay, yeah, I'm down for admiring orchids, but this was not 'orchid ready to be admired', this was 'orchid tryna pass a bowling ball'. "Hey, Kitten?"

"Yes, love?"

"We're planning on having kids, right?" She nodded, smiling wryly. "You're planning on knocking me up, right?"

She chuckled a little. "Searching for ways to ensure it happens, as a matter of fact."

"Yeah... Um... Is there, like, a shapeshifting thing like with the Marie teeth thing, only to make the baby ejection port like a foot across?"

She snorted, barked out a single laugh, then covered her mouth with her hands and buried her face in my lap laughing. When she got control over herself, she sat up, wiping away tears, and said, "I'm sorry, love, but from the research I've done, shapeshifting while pregnant is discommended."

"Oh. Damn." Dad? Did you?

Spend an increasingly uncomfortable year as a mare? Yes.

Fuck.

That would be how I got that way, yes.

I snorted out a laugh. Thanks, Dad. I needed that. You're the best.

I know.

"At any rate, that image... You have accused me more than once of wanting to 'stretch you out so wide I could walk in and put you on like a suit of armor'."

I snorted. "Yeah, well. I don't really think you want that."

She looked me right in the eye from less than an inch away, her breath hot on my lips when she said, "who said I didn't?" Then she stopped me from making any coherent response to that by kissing me.

The rest of the night passed like that. After breakfast in the suite, Maze took the kids and most of the women into the bedroom to read some Pratchett to them. Not sure which one, Marie took her to grab it off the shelves back at the Academy. A few hours after that, I thought at Siobhan, everything going okay?

This labor is... exceedingly difficult. I do not know why, but she does not appear to be dilating properly.

That's... not good.

No, it's not. Imperator, could you come up to consult please?

A moment later, my arms were empty. A bit of humming in my brain from Saffron later, she thought, she's dilated, just not wide enough to pass the baby. Also... there's some discoloration, I think? Is that bruising?

It's been like that since I arrived. So... possibly? I hate to think so. It's so dark. Almost... The two of them both looked over at where Bonnie's right hand gripped one of the posts of the bed. The wood had cracked around her matte black fingers. Her other hand clutched at both of Larry's, and I'm not sure if his fingers were in much better shape than the post.

Bonnie panted, then screamed and heaved, every muscle in her body going tense. Then... a horrible sound, a crunch with an almost liquid sound underneath it.

I didn't think. "No..."

I stepped up to the Heir's suite in my wireframe world. Domnu stood behind me, and I silenced her with one upraised hand. "Can you help, in a way that does not in any way harm the mother or child?"

"The child is dying already."

"I'll take that as a no. Shut. The. Fuck. Up." I looked down at Bonnie. Through her. I saw the baby in her belly, pressed up against the dead black, insufficiently dilated, impossible to break cervix. I didn't know exactly how to do what needed to be done. But I didn't have to. Not here. Not now. I stepped over to Marie and Mimicked her claws. Then I stepped back, took a deep breath, and ran one claw down across her belly from top to bottom. Blood and some fluid spilled out, then froze like everything else in the timeless darkness. I reached in, pulled the baby out, pushed its fleeing Soul back in, and Healed it. Him. Took after his uncle. I pulled the umbilical out, sliced it off, and froze for a second before laying him next to his mother and just tying it off. No idea if that was the right thing or not, but it seemed better than just, y'know, leaving it dangling.

There in the timeless darkness, I leaned over Bonnie and said what I don't think I could say to her face. "I'm sorry, Bonnie. I fucked this up back then. We'll... find a way to make this better... to do this better, if you want to have another one. I promise."

"Daughter."

"Shut. Up. Mom."

I Healed her. Heal Injury didn't leave so much as a scar, although she had a few stretch marks already. Not a lot.

I sighed. "Y'know what really sucks?" Mom didn't reply. Something, something, something, I'd core her and pretend I hadn't if she said anything else. "I remember like this. But I don't know if past me will remember. Fuck. Mom?"

"May I speak?"

"No. If, when I let go, I drop this kid? You catch it. Without hurting it or anyone else in any way. I know you understand, and if you don't? I will make you envy every Mortal you've ever watched die."

Then I let Time flow...

...I blinked at the sudden weight of a kid in my arms. Fortunately, apparently my instinctive response to 'sudden mini-human covered in forty weight motor oil' was 'cradle them so they don't slip', not 'yeet the baby'. I stepped over to Bonnie, who was weeping and pulling Larry over to shove her face into his chest. "Uh, Bonnie?" She didn't say anything. Just sobbed into Larry's chest. "I think this guy is yours?"

Her head snapped around so fast I think she might have broken something in Larry's general head region. Then her wide eyed stare of dawning joy got eclipsed by another contraction.

"Tabitha?"

"Yep. Whatcha need, Siobhan?"

"Did you remove the afterbirth?"

I winced. "Uh... Sorry, Bonnie."