Page 96 of Installment Immortality

Chupacabra aren’t true sanguivores—they don’t live on an all-blood diet, thankfully—but they do have a species-wide form of gastroparesis, making their digestion slow and making solid foods difficult for them. They excrete an enzyme in their saliva that breaks down most animal byproducts, making it possible for them to survive even when they don’t have a blender close to hand.

Once you’ve seen a chupacabra merrily jam a straw into a tall glass of pureed liver and onions, you get a lot less squeamish about the other things they think of as food.

“Why is it easier for you to digest solid food while you’re pregnant?” I asked.

“The hormones we produce make our stomachs work faster, and as long as we don’t overdo it, we can handle more in the way of things that take time to digest without making ourselves sick.” Malena shrugged. “I don’t really understand the biology of it all. I’m sure you do.”

“Not without some monitoring in a lab, and maybe a dissection or two,” I said, trying to keep my words light.

Malena blinked at me. “Way to escalate, lady. You arenotdissecting me. But maybe next time I lay a dud, we can discuss egg ownership.”

That was more than we’d ever been able to get out of a chupacabra before. “Don’t you normally eat those to recover the calcium?”

“Used to. But it turns out that when given the choice, it’s easier to add a lot of calcium supplements to your smoothies than it is to eat your own unhatched babies. My grandmother says it’s a sign that my generation hangs out around humans too much; we’ve picked up some of your attitudes, and it was better when we just thought of duds as, well, duds. Eggs that weren’t meant to hatch. Only now we get all tangled up in questions about whether or not it’s right to eat unhatched eggs, and it sort of sucks.”

I blinked. “Huh.” Humans place a lot of value on our offspring in part because making human babies ishard.We have a long gestation period and lots of things can go wrong while it’s happening. It saps nutrients and energy from the mother, and even childbirth itself—relatively easy for most mammals—is fraught with dangers, and can end with both parties heading for the morgue instead of making a happy homecoming. It makes sense that species who take fewer risks during that time would place less importance on the process.

Not on the children themselves, once they exist. There’s no known intelligent species that doesn’t care about their children. Even the cuckoos care enough to abandon their babies in the best possible situations, trying to set them up to succeed in their brood parasitism. It may not be a form of care that looks super familiar to human eyes, but it’s there.

“I thought you were going for live birth next time, anyway,” I said.

Malena eyed my belly. “I may be changing my mind about that. How do yousleep?”

“Poorly. I have heartburn, like,allthe time, and I have to peeevery half hour or so. And the scary part is, compared to Livvy, this is theeasypregnancy.”

“Really?” Malena asked, with delighted horror. She sounded like a kid being told a scary story.

“Yeah. With Livvy, I had something called gestational diabetes, which means my body basically forgot how to deal with sugar. I also had theworstcravings for, you guessed it, sugar.”

“And you don’t have that this time?”

“Nope. Turns out that’s one of the side benefits of living close to Madhura. I already knew my bread wouldn’t mold and my teeth wouldn’t decay, but it turns out proximity also makes my body better at dealing with sugar. I’m taking Rochak with me if I ever move out of here.”

Malena blinked. “Rochak being…?”

“He’s the older of our two resident Madhura. They both look like adults to me, but from the way he and his brother talk, it’s pretty clear that Sunil is still considered a child. Two is enough, I don’t need to adopt a third, no matterhowgood that makes my metabolism.”

Malena blinked again. “And what are Madhura?”

“Oh. Right.” There are dozens of species of human-form cryptids, which is a very humanocentric way of looking at it: why should we get to come first, when we’ve already established that other intelligences evolved before we did? Yet because I’m the one doing the describing, that’s the lens I have to look through.

It wasn’t a particular surprise that Malena didn’t know what a Madhura was. They’re a relatively uncommon species in North America, originally from the Indian subcontinent, and they tend to be pretty insular when they do settle here, preferring the company of their hives. There was no specific reason that Malena, as a chupacabra, would ever have encountered them.

“They’re sort of… bee-people,” I said, after a pause to collect my thoughts. “At least, we think they evolved from bees, givenvarious aspects of their biology. That would make them closer to the Johrlac than anything else we know of, but since we know the Johrlac originated in another dimension…”

“Wait. We know that?”

“We do.” I shrugged. Sometimes I forget that not everyone knows what’s considered common knowledge in my family. “They came here centuries ago, after they got chased out of the last dimension they totally screwed up. You remember my cousin Sarah?”

“Vaguely.”

“Well, she’s a Johrlac, and they tried to turn her into their apocalypse maiden to blow a hole in the side of reality so they could all escape to the next dimension down the line.”

Malena gave me a hard look. “You shouldn’t say things like that as if they were perfectly reasonable. They’renotreasonable, in the slightest. Does this have something to do with what happened in Iowa?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Sarah channeled the power the Johrlac gave her, and used it to transplant an entire college campus into another dimension. She took my baby sister with her. That was one of the scariest things I’ve ever had to deal with. We’re still not sure my cousin Artie actually came back.”

Malena blinked, slowly. “Your family is… a lot,” she finally said. “Like, that is almost too much for me to deal with in one sitting, and from the way you said it, it’s like a third of the story, tops. Can we get back to the Madhura?”

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