Description & Prologue

Description

Mina Landers is a Magician, a magical breed in hiding, and on a quest to avenge her little brother's murder.  After spending three years in the solitude of a forest to hone her abilities, she feels it's time to venture beyond the trees and begin her hunt.  With the help of Alister Nolan, a Mage who stumbles into her life unexpectedly, she is prepared to do to her brother's killers what they did to him.  However, in the process, a deeper evil rears its head.  Slowly, things begin to fall into place and Mina is left to figure out how to defeat something that has been planning her demise since the day she was born.

Prologue

            The Ford Escort rounded the corner of 25th and Main so hard it nearly did so on two wheels. Gasps and outraged cries were heard from the pedestrians on the sidewalk as they leapt back from the street. For a moment, the two women in the car wondered why so many people were out after dark, but then the costumes ranging from Batman to zombies reminded them it was Halloween. The full moon suspended above them illuminated the sky almost better than the streetlights. The passenger, Audry, would have sworn the man in the moon was laughing at her as her best friend sped towards the hospital.

            "Raquel, slow down! You're going to kill us both!" Audry cried. One hand gripped the support handle while the other rested on her swollen stomach, as if to protect her unborn child. A wave of tension and pain rose through her abdomen and she moaned, wanting nothing more than to be out of that car.

            Raquel rounded another corner too quickly and apologized profusely as she sent Audry crashing into the door. Finally, after what seemed like hours, they screeched to a halt at the doors to the emergency room alive.

            Raquel jumped out of the car without shutting it off, and dashed through the automatic doors of the hospital. Audry opened her door, but didn't stand. Instead, she cried out as another contraction seared through her body. Over her own pained vocalization, she heard Raquel's shouts inside.

            "Delivery! We need help!"

            Not minutes later, a nurse was hurrying a wheelchair out to Audry, Raquel right on her heels. The two women helped her shift from the car to the wheelchair, still moaning in pain.

            And to think, these are the easy ones, Audry thought as the nurse raced her down the halls, calling for assistance.

            "I’ll be right here when you get out!" Raquel shouted, falling behind as Audry was pushed through the doors of the maternity ward. Before the doors shut behind her, she waved over her shoulder, signaling to Raquel that she would be fine. 

~

            Raquel knew she had no reason to be so worried about her friend's delivery. This was, after all, her third child. She could do this with ease. But Raquel had never seen anyone go into labor before, never had to stare in horror as she watched someone's water break all over her kitchen floor, and certainly had never delivered a baby herself.

            When Audry's water had broken, the friends had been in Raquel's kitchen, cutting up vegetables for a salad. Audry had gasped suddenly and Raquel thought at first she had cut herself until she didn't see any blood.

            "What's wrong?" She had asked, worried.

            "My water just broke," Audry responded, looking up at her.

            It had taken a few seconds to register. Water? Then... "Oh my god! What do I do? Are you okay? We need to go to the hospital!" Raquel shrieked. She helped Audry into the car quickly before announcing she forgot the car seat and ran inside to grab it.  With a panicked sigh, she tossed the car seat haphazardly into the back and climbed into the car.

            Audry had tried to prepare her for this, and Raquel would have sworn she was ready. She supposed you were never really ready. Single as she was, she wondered how someone knew they were ready to have a kid, forget just watch someone's water break.

            So there she sat in the lobby of the hospital, waiting for Audry's child to be born. She didn't know the gender yet; Audry wanted it to be a surprise like her other two. She remembered going over baby names with her friend somewhere in the second trimester. April, Maria, Jasmine. Joshua, Randall, Alexander. If Audry had picked one, she hadn't told Raquel.

            She sighed and picked up an issue of Parenting from the table beside her. She flipped through it, trying to keep her mind occupied and off of what might go wrong in that delivery room. Instead, her mind wandered to James, Audry's husband.

            James should be there instead of her. James should have been the one to talk about baby names with Audry. He should have rearranged the office into a nursery again with her, not Raquel. He should have gone to her doctor's appointments, instead of having Audry's OB/GYN think god knows what about the relationship between Raquel and her patient.

            Instead of being here, James was probably at a bar.

            James’ drinking problem was no secret to anyone. He worked construction and it was a miracle he had managed to keep his drinking under control on-site. Right after work, though, it started and didn't stop. There had been many days Audry had mentioned he'd been late to work due to sleeping off the hangover from the night before.

            When Raquel asked why Audry stayed, especially after she started noticing the bruises, she merely shrugged and changed the subject.

            Audry didn't talk about her relationship with James much. After being friends with Raquel for three years, she had never once spoken badly of him, talked about a fight, or mentioned abuse.  She barely even spoke of his drinking.  Raquel assumed she was too afraid of him.

            It hurt Raquel to know her friend was silently suffering and there was nothing she could do.  She didn’t have room in her one bedroom apartment for Audry and, now, three children.  As she thought about it, she realized they had never discussed if Audry even wanted to leave or had anywhere else to go if she did.  Raquel sighed and wondered why she had never discussed this with her friend.

            She felt a pang of guilt as the awful truth swam into her mind.  It was easier to pretend there was nothing wrong than face the horrific facts.  Raquel just didn’t want to be involved. 

~

 

            "It's a girl," the nurse told Audry, the child screaming at the top of her lungs. She wrapped the girl in a blanket and handed her to her mother and watched with soft eyes as Audry cradled her newborn, smiling lovingly. "What's her name?"

            Audry looked up for a moment, as if remembering she did actually have to name her daughter. But, then, she said, "Mina. Her name is Mina."

            "You're a Halloween baby, aren't you, Mina? Why don't we get you cleaned up?" The nurse said. Audry handed her daughter back and the nurse informed her she would return soon.

            She left the room with Mina, who had started crying the instant she had left her mother's arms. As she headed down the hall, she cooed words of comfort to the child.

            She backed into another room as Mina suddenly stopped screaming. The nurse looked down in confusion before almost dropping the little girl with a gasp.

            Her eyes were open wide, her irises an emerald green. The pupils were mere slits. They were the eyes of a cat.

            Quickly, the nurse put Mina on the scale and backed away, fear flooding her. I didn't just see that. That didn't happen, she told herself. But as soon as Mina's back had hit the scale, she'd started crying again, her eyes squeezed shut.

            The nurse glanced out the door to see if anyone had noticed anything, but the hospital bustle implied she’d been the only one. She stepped cautiously over to the baby, who now looked and sounded completely normal.

            What is wrong with me? She thought, trying to regain her composure. Mina was just an innocent child.

Reviews

[Renvek]

Howdy,
I picked your story out of the writers to watch list and thought I would check out your story. So just a few details to clarify your story. A child is born in this chapter and everything here is about that and we are to surmise that the cat's eyes are the unique thing that you are trying to convey to us. It is also to get us to hook into your story by showing off your writing skills. Most prologues give an important back story idea to the readers it may show us important characters that going to be involved in the story and also yet have seeds for the conflict we are going to see later. Unless I am missing something here there is no conflict other than this child's eyes are different and this is set in a modern day world like ours enough that we recognize it as being ours but different in some way.
As to birthing details having witnessed my now ex-wife's labor and delivery and being trained as an EMT to deal with emergency births there are a few details that my trained eye picked up on. During the final stages of pregnancy a woman's body becomes less graceful and she is losing the ability to move quickly. Once the water breaks contractions begin and 'running back in for a car seat' does not become an option. While most people panic at the water breaking it is not yet an emergency so the character driving fast due to the fact that she would be unaware of the non-emergency nature of the situation is reasonable. Usually if a pregnancy is 'high risk' it has been identified by adequate prenatal care and regular check ups during pregnancy. If the baby were say pre-mature by over one month that would be an emergent situation. If mom had high blood pressure or any number of pregnancy related symptoms that identified it as high risk then she would be in that category as well. The description of her water breaking can include a pool of fluid on the floor visible to her friend. Sometimes it is a little, sometimes it can be quite a bit. It is mostly described as peeing herself but without control.
James situation with the alcoholism is a concern from a perspective of fetal alcohol syndrome especially if he started drinking years ago as is implied in your story line. There are specific physical and mental defects that are associated with this syndrome. For story telling purposes you could describe him as a cyclic alcoholic where he gets bad for a while then as an apology stops for a while cleans up his act then slowly falls off the wagon and becomes abusive again that would potentially allow for the child to be formed during his sober period and then cause the tension that he needs to find an excuse to fall off the wagon again. It makes story telling sense on a number of levels one of the well known and published cycles of abuse is tension building to explosion, followed by regret and a "honeymoon" effect. So you would be able to speak to a bigger audience that has either lived with it, read about it, or knows someone who is living with it.
My final advice is after the child is born it is standard practice for the attending physician or pediatrician (both doctors) to take the child over to a warming table and thoroughly check him or her out. They look in ears, eyes, mouth, nose and all extremities. Eyes as described would have been noticed much earlier than you pointed out. Your other route for discovery is if there was a mid-wife involved in which case the timing would be more appropriate and it would have to take place outside of a hospital in a home delivery setting. Unless there was a midwifery clinic nearby that had facilities you were describing and they also are trained to look at all of those things. Her pregnancy would have been closely monitored for a midwifery clinic to make sure she wasn't high risk as mentioned in my comments above.
There were quite a few times where you could have shown us what was going on versus telling us but it is forgivable in a prologue so I won't specifically cover that in this review. When your work is complete I would remove the description from the overall story as it doesn't really help but it did help me choose to read this rather than skip it.

As to the style of writing it was readable and was coherent enough that I found I could read this over a long term so good job on the writing style. No glaring grammatical mistakes that detracted from the readability so another good job. I hope my review helps when you come back to edit this.
Renvek.

[Coyote Poetry]

A very good chapter. You said up the characters and I like the storyline. The ending was very strong. Left the reader with question and open ending. Thank you for sharing the excellent chapter.
Coyote