Dr. Peters signed the death certificate an hour later, his hand stiff and unfamiliar. "Complications during childbirth resulting in catastrophic cardiac arrest." It was a neat, medical lie. He knew what he'd felt. Elara hadn't just died. She had been consumed. Her body was a husk, a battery drained to nothing.
He was in the nursery, alone. Davies was on a forced sedative, and the rest of the staff was running on adrenaline. The baby, though, was a medical miracle. Nine pounds, six ounces. Pink, loud, and impossibly healthy.
"Well, little man," Peters murmured, his voice hoarse. He'd started calling him Bruce, the name Elara had written on a dozen forms. "You really know how to make an entrance."
He began the routine cleaning, his hands still not quite steady. The baby had quieted, his dark, ink-blot eyes wide and unnervingly alert. He wasn't staring with the unfocused, milky gaze of a newborn. He was watching.
Dr. Peters turned him over to wash his back. And he froze.
There, on the baby's left shoulder blade, was a birthmark.
It wasn't a "stork bite" or a simple splotch of discoloration. It was a thing of intricate, terrifying design. It was a deep, dark crimson, almost black, and it looked less like a mark on the skin and more like a window through it. It was a perfectly symmetrical, coiled knot, like a serpent eating its own tail, or a vortex of dark ink. It seemed to absorb the nursery light, to drink it in.
He found himself mesmerized. He touched it, his gloved fingertip pressing against the skin. It was just... skin. Not raised, not rough. But it felt cold.
He pulled his hand back as if he'd been burned.
The baby, Bruce, watched him in the reflection of a steel cabinet, his infant face a mask of strange, old stillness.
Dr. Peters swallowed, a cold dread washing away his scientific certainty. He was a man of data. He believed in what he could measure. This... This he could not measure.
He quickly, almost frantically, swaddled the child, hiding the mark under a fold of white cotton. He would note "minor vascular blemish" on the chart. And then, for the rest of his life, he would try, and fail, to forget he had ever seen it.