Eli kneels down to pick it -- her, as it turns out -- up. She's so small, and clearly too dark-skinned to be an immortal child, and she killed her mother coming out.

And she's alive, and he's...

He's an uncle. A horrifying thought, since he only has one brother, but she's a baby, and Eli turned out fine even if Silas didn't.

Eli's niece regards his arm solemnly, and then chomps down on it.

Her teeth are sharp enough to break vampiric skin, but as it turns out, she isn't venomous. Also, she doesn't think much of his taste, and is now gazing intently at the fresh corpse of her mother.

He did sort of make a promise to Myra.

"No, Calypso," he says to his niece. "Eating your mother is not acceptable behavior. I still have some food left over from when I was caring for her. What do you think you'll make of raw steak?"

Calypso allows herself to be carried into the tiny kitchen, sits on the counter when set there like she's six months old instead of six minutes, and accepts refrigerated steak after some brief contemplation.

She devours an awful lot of it, for a neonate.

Well, most neonates don't have full heads of hair, or teeth, or the ability to hold their heads up let alone sit so steadily.

... The rate she's going through food seems likely to put a dent in funds that he'd rather reserve for rare books. "I wonder," he says to her, "if I could bring you along on a hunt." She certainly doesn't smell like a human, just something mildly pleasant.

"Are you really going to feed her that sludge you drink?" Silas asks mildly, from a safe distance of a hundred meters east-south-east of Eli's cottage. "She's my daughter, you know."

"Ah yes, because bringing a hematophagic baby with dubious self-control near sources of her most desired food seems like such a good way to keep under the Volturi's radar."

"You have a perfectly good cooling human corpse you need to dispose of, Eli."

"As practical a solution as that might be, I am loathe to feed my niece her mother."

Calypso, evidently bored by this conversation, lifts Eli's hand to her mouth and nibbles on one of his fingers.

"You've gone entirely too soft on that muck. Feed her the damn corpse, or I'm bringing her a snack her own age."

Eli spends a fraction of a second estimating the probability of his brother following through on that threat if he tries to call his bluff.

"Fine. She'd get more meat off Myra's bones than any infant's, anyway."

"What an eminently sensible idea." Silas begins to approach the cottage again. "Do you think she can strip the bones clean?"

"I wouldn't care to guess."

He sighs, picks Calypso up from the counter, and brings her to the main room of his cottage. Myra is still lying where she died, blood pooling around her from her abdomen.

Eli sets her daughter on the floor beside her and murmurs, "God only knows how your mind works, Calypso, but I hope you won't remember this."

Regardless of any future feelings about the matter, at present Calypso seems entirely happy to suck her mother dry of what blood remains in her body.

Silas is shortly present in the room. "Oh, look at you," he coos. "Aren't you a gorgeous, obviously not fully vampiric infant? Aren't you a treasure, I wonder if you sparkle or if you could toddle among the humans and suck blood from their ankles."

He kneels down and reaches to ruffle her dark hair.

Calypso, after swallowing a bite of raw flesh, ducks her head away from his hand and frowns up at him.

Silas scoops her up and cuddles her. "Now, now," he scolds her gently. "I'm your father."

He cradles her comfortably in one arm and ruffles her hair with his free hand. "I suppose you'll need clothes if I want to take you anywhere," he says thoughtfully. "Eli--"

"I cared for Myra for the last week, you can buy your daughter clothes with whatever you've swiped off your last few meals."