Could he keep that information from her, though? Should he stay quiet about it, and hope that operations on his end would be enough to deal with the situation? Or should he just say something?
Seeing her nervous attitude, and the fact that she mentioned already feeling a little overwhelmed, made him resolve not to say anything until later. She didn’t need the whole problem dumped on her like an avalanche yet. She deserved at least some time out on the matter. He still felt massively deceptive, even if it was for a good reason.
With the notion of a potential child along the way, more than ever, he couldn’t afford to sit back and let Broxar fuck things up.
* * *
First things first, she wanted a check-up. However, she didn’t want the check-up to be anywhere near the area of Whitefall Creek, because rumors spread like absolute wildfire, and there could be a lot of judgment within a tiny town. Kieran gently reminded her that people would judge regardless, because sometimes they just had nothing better to do in their sorry lives, but she still insisted on attending a hospital five hours away instead, just to make sure no one caught her out. That meant an annoying drive, interspersed with dramatic, sweeping scenery of the Appalachian Mountain range and the long, twisting roads where few cars went. He liked that a whole lot, but not the travel sickness that came from being stuck in a metal box.
Apparently, Tegan got travel-sick a lot as well, and kindly offered him some of her anti-nausea tablets, which… didn’t really feel like they did much, but he wasn’t sick, so they probably did work.
“Could have been so much easier if you chose to turn into a dragon. You have flight licenses, right?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t like traveling in cars. But I wouldn’t be comfortable having someone on my back. Easy to slip off.”
“You said you’re about the size of a horse?”
“Something like that,” he muttered.
“Well, we could just buy you a saddle, then. Would a regular horse one do, or are there, like, custom designs for saddles?”
“D’you know, I have no idea,” Kieran said. Dragons wouldn’t bother with such needless inventions. But humans? Were there humans who actually built saddles for dragons?
One way to find out.
He spent a few minutes scrolling through his phone before discovering that yes, humans did make custom dragon saddles, and other shifter saddles, too. Turned out there were far more horse-sized dragons than he previously anticipated, though he knew they were the more common denomination of dragon. The bigger ones tended to marry bigger or stick with their own groups. Keeping the bloodlines pure and consolidated. There were even designs made to fit over or around spikes on the back so that it would be painless for rider and dragon.
He also needed to stop scrolling, because staring at his phone for too long in a moving car gave him a throbbing headache, a slight fever, and the increased urge to be sick.
Kieran survived, though. He made it to the clinic and hovered anxiously outside the ward as Tegan got her first check-up, complete with a scan to see if there were any abnormalities that needed to be dealt with. He hadn’t quite realized how many things could go wrong with a pregnancy until the others in the waiting room decided to happily voice all the issues they’d ever personally experienced, or some friend of a friend did.
Frankly, it was a miracle that children were even born at all, given all the ailments out there.
There was one more shifter in the ward, waiting calmly, with luminous yellow eyes. Werewolf. Growing up with dragons, he’d always heard them mocking werewolves, how weak and pathetic they were compared to dragonkind. Though he knew better now, there was still that slight apprehension upon seeing one.
The werewolf met his eyes and gave a thin, closed-mouth smile. “First time I’ve seen a dragon here.”
“First time being here,” Kieran replied, and the werewolf’s smile widened. When the werewolf looked as if he wanted to head over to Kieran, he beckoned, and the two of them sat together.
“Human?”
“Yeah,” Kieran said. “Rather it was a human than my own kind.”
“Ah.” The werewolf quirked one blond eyebrow. “One of those people. Shit family?”
“Really shit.”
“Then it’s a good choice. Hybrid children have a much better time in human society, especially if they can’t transform but have a few traits anyway. Enhanced strength, hearing. You see a few of us in the Olympics. Though I hear there’s a push to get any hybrid Olympians placed in their own categories now.” He made a sucking noise with his teeth. “You won’t have trouble with your family?”
Even a complete stranger was asking. Though being a shifter from a species traditionally linked with large families and complex relationships, Kieran figured it’d be something he’d question.
“Yes. I’m trying to take the necessary precautions, but I’m not entirely certain they’ll be enough. Maybe if I build an underground bunker or something.”
“Take it from someone who has similar issues. Pull on every connection you have. And find something that they would like better than you. You give them something else they want—your problem will be over.”
Kieran absorbed the information, thoughtful. “I’m Kieran.”
“Raymond.” They shook hands, more of a human gesture than something that derived from their tribes. “My Jane was in some danger, but the problem has been solved. All it took was a lot of money. Not sure if that’d work with you.”
Kieran didn’t think it would. The one thing his family wanted more than anything else was an heir. With his older brother betraying the clan by marrying outside, it meant they expected him to conform. If he didn’t… then the family legacy would be considered ruined and would pass elsewhere.
Broxar, after all, was infertile as well. Another reason why he was so relentlessly shitty as a dragon.
“Think about it,” Raymond insisted. “If you want to make sure that they won’t keep haunting you for the rest of your life.”
They continued talking after that, going to safer subject matters, finding out a little of each other, with Raymond exchanging numbers and offering to go out for a drink sometime in Whitefall Creek, try out some local brews. Which made Kieran think of Tegan, who wanted her own brewery, her own business.
Right. That’s something I still need to do. Though he wasn’t really sure where to begin when it came to that kind of business. Buy a building to be converted into a bar, probably. Have more land for growing things, probably as well. Would there need to be bees? Didn’t they have honey for mead or something?
He mused over the complications of that for a while longer, and Raymond said goodbye, leaving with the woman known as Jane, raven-haired and armed with a lot of tattoos. Nice-looking couple—they drew the attention of the other humans in the area.
When Tegan emerged from her appointment, she seemed rather dazed.
“How is it? Everything okay?”
“Mm…” She stared at him for a moment, and he waited, wondering what raced through her mind right now. “Did you know that hybrid babies tend to gestate faster than average human ones?”
“They do?” He was vaguely aware of that, but not of the exact timeframe, as it differed for each species. “Did your doctor know?”