CHAPTER 8 – DR. AHMANN PLEADS THE FIFTH

(High Teen rating: some language)

Jeannie got a frantic phone call in early March, from Patty in Chicago. "I have to go to the hospital, Jeannie, and I cannot get there. I have NO powers!" Jeannie blinked to Chicago to find that Howard was gone on a flight. She blinked with Patty over to Dr Ahmann's in old Baghdad, made sure she was settled with a nurse, and then went two other places. In Albuquerque, she got Kashi to go stay with Patty until she could get back – Robert was in school and Mark would pick him up from school.

At Patty's and Howard's apartment, Jeannie found a copy of his flight schedule, and found that he might be between flights with a layover in Denver. She blinked all over the Denver Airport, which was under reconstruction, and finally located him in the Pilots' Lounge.

"Jeannie! What are you doing here!" Howard was glad to see her, yet worried. Jeannie smiled, because Howard never seemed as nervous about her sudden appearances as Tony always was.

"Your wife needs you right now, Master Borden." Jeannie called him by his formal name because she was working.

"Now? But I've got a flight leaving in…" he looked at his watch, "…about two hours."

"I have not blinked a double in a very long time, Master Borden, and I do not know if I could blink one that could fly a plane. But she is at Dr Ahmann's and I believe you would like to be there?"

"Why?"

Now Jeannie was irritated at Howard's scatterbrain trait. "Do you not wish to see your child born?"

Howard looked stunned. "NOW? But Patty's not due for another week!"

"Babies come when they wish to, not when they are expected." Jeannie remembered that Tony and Roger had both behaved this way and resisted the urge to giggle.

Howard headed for the airline office, Jeannie at his heels – the man had an incredible amount of energy for his age, she thought. He introduced her briefly as his wife's friend and then said he had to fly HOME, not to his next destination which was Seattle; his wife was in the hospital having their baby. The airline officer looked at Howard in amazement, probably due to his age, but said, "All right, we'll get a sub on that flight." It usually wasn't done, but they'd had four canceled flights due to weather and so they had 4 crews on standby.

Jeannie got the two of them to Dr Ahmann's just in time to find Patty, with Kashi at her side, going into delivery. "This one is in a hurry," Dr Ahmann's head nurse told Jeannie. "Where is the father?"

"I'm right here," Howard told her. Kashi and Jeannie stayed out, while Howard went in with his wife.

Kashi shook her head. "She is really frightened, sister."

"Do you think she will be all right now that her husband is here?"

"I hope so. She is so very young, and he is so much older. I hope he can calm her down."

Patty was beside herself, out of control. Dr Ahmann didn't seem to be bothered and let her go through this stage. "This hurts, I don't want to do this, take it out of me, let me go!" she screamed.

"PATTY." It was Howard. With help from the nurse, he was placed right in front of her where she could see him. Standing with his hands on his hips, wearing his airline blues, he looked commanding. "Stop that! It's me."

"Go away. YOU did this to me! You son-of-a-bitch! I don't want to do this! THIS HURTS!"

The nurse looked at him. "She is in transition. She does not mean a thing she is saying right now, Master Borden. Do not take it personally."

He nodded. "My son is 26, but I remember when my first wife called me a bastard while he was being born."

The nurse laughed. "So which are you, Master Borden, a son-of-a-bitch or a bastard?"

Howard looked at her and almost seriously said, "Maybe both." He leaned down and stroked Patty's face, very lovingly, with his handkerchief. The nurses were in awe of Howard's uniform. Three of the human fathers had been wearing uniforms during their baby's birth, and a fourth had shown up wearing a strange looking costume. "Patty, it's me, Howard. Your husband. Honey, you need to calm down. The baby needs your strength."

"You couldn't WAIT to knock me up, could you?" Patty yelled at him. Howard jumped back, in shock. This didn't sound like his genie. "All you wanted to do is fuck the hell out of me!" The nurses were appalled at that language. "Get the hell out of here!"

"I think that little genie has been watching many American movies and television shows. Such language I do not hear from other genies!" Dr Ahmann commented, and left.

The nurse put her hand on Howard's shoulder. "She's almost ready to deliver. She'll calm down when she gets to 10."

The other nurse chuckled and said to Patty, "You should be so lucky. A lot of women have husbands that don't look at them."

The first nurse looked at the other one and whispered, "Ah, give her about six weeks. She'll be back in bed, spread-eagled and begging him to get her pregnant again. She's plenty young." She looked up at Howard. "She's your wife and you have a son her age?" He nodded. "Amazing, for a human."

The nurses were right in their predictions. Within minutes, Patty went to 10 and began the hard work of delivery, calming down considerably. Howard had shed his airline jacket and was sitting by her side, wiping her brow. He had only once taken a childbirth class – all airline flight crew employees were required to take one in case a passenger decided to give birth in flight. The nurses told him to wipe her brow, offer her ice chips and just give her loving support to his best ability.

One nurse said to the other, out of earshot of Howard, "I'll bet this one falls apart during delivery."

"Oh, I don't know. He's a pilot."

"Five says he does."

"You're on."

Dr Ahmann came back in, and looked at Howard. "Another human in my delivery room," was all he said, shaking his head.

"Hello," Howard said. "You're a DOCTOR?" Dr Ahmann looked like a typical Arab, with long white gown, white cap, gray beard and mustache, huge dark grey eyebrows, and big brown eyes. He had no gloves or mask on.

"I have been birthing djinn for over 3000 years."

"Oh." Howard had adopted his wife's favorite response to things, a simple "oh".

"Fall apart in my delivery room and you will see what happens from a djinn doctor," Dr Ahmann warned him.

From the birthing bed, Patty squeaked out a very weak, "He will not." Howard breathed a sigh of relief – Patty was talking more like herself now. "Howard – it is time."

"Ssh, sweetheart. Save your strength. You're going to need it very soon."

"PUSH!" hollered one of the nurses squatting at Patty's feet. She was on an inclined birthing bed. Howard noticed that Patty pushed down with her abdoment and a lot of blood came out. He turned his head away. Blood was not something he liked, and he didn't want to find out what Dr Ahmann was threatening. Patty had told him that Jeannie had threatened Healey with a one-way blink to the North Pole for something, and that didn't sound very appealing.

Three more pushes, and a nurse cried out, "There's a head!" Howard looked down for the first view of his second baby. There was blood, but he focused on the tiny ear and face he could see from his vantage point. He was already in love with it and the blood didn't bother him any more.

Howard told her, "Another push, honey. Come on." He leaned down and kissed her forehead, wondering if he'd done the right thing in getting her pregnant so soon.

The shoulders appeared, and Dr Ahmann said, "One more little one," and Patty pushed. The baby came out, and like in humans, the baby was attached to the umbilical cord. The doctor turned the baby over. "It's a boy!" There was a cheer among the nurses.

"Whoo-hoo!" The very happy human husband leaned down to give his djinni wife a kiss. "Did you hear that, sweetheart? It's a boy! We've got a son!" He stood up quickly and one of the nurses pushed his shoulder to make him sit back down.

Patty was exhausted. "I am … so … glad…"

"One more push to get the afterbirth, Genie of Borden," Dr Ahmann told her. Howard held her hand, and whispered, "You can do it."

The nurses were amazed. The one who thought Howard would fall apart said to the other quietly, "I owe you five. I could have sworn."

"I know. These humans are stronger than we give them credit for."

"Five deliveries of children from human fathers…and the fourth boy," Dr Ahmann commented. "One is part-djinn, two are humans. I wonder what this one will be?"

Jeannie was waiting outside the delivery room, along with her sister Kashi, when Dr Ahmann came out. "Dr Ahmann?"

"You ladies all stay together, do you not?" he told them. "Boy. The nurses are cleaning him up. I am sure that Master Borden will be out shortly."

"He made it, did he?" Kashi grinned, while Jeannie exclaimed, "Oh! A boy!"

"We did not think he would, at first. He was very pale at the first sight of blood. But he…dealt with it, as your humans would say. I thought he was going to fly without his plane when I told him it was a boy."

Howard came out a few minutes later, carrying a bundle of wrapped baby carefully and grinning from ear to ear. "Ladies…Thanks for getting us here. I'd like to show you my son."

Jeannie and Kashi both peeked at the little red bundle, and smiled. They looked back up at Howard. "Does he have a name?"

"Patrick Howard Borden. Patrick for his mother, Patty, and Howard for me."

"No Howard Jr?" Jeannie asked.

"There's already one of those, who doesn't know yet that Patty was pregnant."

Jeannie blinked, and into her hands came a Polaroid camera, with film in it. "Hold the baby up, Master Borden….Howard," she said, realizing she wasn't on duty right now. He did so, so that the face of young Patrick would show. Jeannie took a picture, removed it from the camera, and then took a 2nd one when Howard didn't know – he was looking at the baby with such love on his face that Jeannie was touched.

A few minutes later, Jeannie removed the backing of the first photo, to reveal a clear picture of a loving father holding his baby. The baby's face clearly showed in the picture. In the second photo, the baby's face also came out beautifully evident. As Jeannie handed the pictures to Howard, who had allowed Kashi to hold his son, Jeannie told him, "Your son is human."

"How do you know that already?"

"He photographs very well. Djinn do not photograph at all. My husband must get paintings done of Janae and me. Half-djinn photograph with a halo around them, which is difficult to remove from photographs. There is a spell to get rid of that, but also one that can be placed on the djinn to help. But your son photographs well with no halo – as Kashi's son did at birth."

"Does that always work?"

"It has worked in all 4 cases, I am told. Tim used it for Thomas and predicted his full humanness."

Kashi looked at Jeannie. "I wonder why you're the only one that has delivered djinn. The rest of us have all had human boys."

Dr Ahmann was listening to part of the conversation. "An old djinn legend said that girls were likely to get the djinn genes. Boys are not. We are not sure how T.J. got a few but not all of them. But Janae has enough human genes to cause her to need human inoculations as well as the djinn shots."

"But Dr Ahmann – the original djinn legend was that a genie would lose her powers if she married her master. That turned out not to be true," Jeannie argued.

He shrugged. "But the legend regarding the mixing of the blood appears to be true – girls are more likely to be djinn than the boys. Jeannie, we said you were the test case in our world. Now there are three others, to prove our theories correct or incorrect."

Kashi looked at Jeannie. "I am glad I still have my powers, and Mark is happy that Robert takes after him."

"Anthony would like T.J. to be a full human, but T.J. is testing our medical skills in the djinn world," Jeannie said.

Howard was listening to the exchange, rocking his son back and forth a little. He finally looked up and said, "I'm glad Patty had a boy. My grandson is going to have a playmate someday…his daddy's little brother."