He hadn’t found time to shave yet, and the slightly scruffy scratch of his beard as bent down to kiss me still sent a shiver down my back, even through the haze of pain and medication. I didn’t waste time on pleasantries, though.
“The baby needs a name,” I said, zeroing in immediately on the one thought that had been running through my mind ever since I awoke. I couldn’t have explained why, but somehow, naming the baby seemed akin to protecting her.
Maybe even claiming her?
Kade didn’t even stop to ask why. He simply nodded and said, “Do you have any ideas yet?”
“Can I use your phone? I want to check something.”
“Sure.” He pulled it out of his pocket, and I ran a quick internet search.
“I was thinking that as the first new lamia baby, she should have a name that means peace,” I said, showing him the list I had found. “Maybe Serena?”
He nodded. “I like it. I’ll let the NICU staff know.”
As he left, Daria returned. “Okay, sweetie. Let’s get you up and walking.”
I winced. “Already?”
With a nod, she folded the covers down to the bottom of the bed. “And when the physical therapist comes in later, she’ll walk you through a couple of shifts.”
“Shifts?” My voice sounded almost as stunned as I felt.
Daria laughed. “This is a shifter hospital, honey. We put you through all your paces before we send you home.” She paused, then said, “Try to keep it in the normal size range, though?”
I raised my eyebrows. “Only if you promise to keep the wolves and bears at bay.”
“You got it, hon.”
APPARENTLY SHIFTING from one form to another did speed up the healing process a little. Though I didn’t say so aloud, I was fairly certain that my daily visits to Serena helped, as well. At any rate, the more I stumbled around the hospital, the happier all the doctors and nurses were with what they called my “progress.”
I went to see Marta only once, the day she was due to be released from the hospital. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, dressed in a soft, black, jersey cotton dress, and gingerly holding a small bag in her lap. She flinched when she caught sight of me coming in the door. I didn’t really blame her. I might have saved her from her rapist, but in the end, I was a reminder of a horrible time in her life. That she had been willing to have Serena rather than abort her was amazing. I had planned to thank her, to tell her the baby’s name, but in the end, I decided not to.
She needed to be released from anything having to do with lamias and other shifters more than she might possibly need to know about the child she had borne.
“What will you do next?” I asked.
“I’m leaving,” she said. “Not just the hospital. Texas. I’ve been approved for a transfer, and I’m going...” she paused as if she had been about to tell me where she was headed, but then continued with, “...as far away from shapeshifters as I possibly can.”
That there were shapeshifters everywhere was just one more thing she didn’t need to know.
“Take care of yourself. You can always reach out if you need me,” I said. I didn’t hug her goodbye, but I waved at the door.
Someday Serena would want to know about her birth-mother. I would need to spend a lot of time considering what to tell her because I was certain that Marta would never want to know her child.
The thought saddened me more than I had anticipated.
The next day, my own surgeon—not Kade, since apparently he had tagged someone else to do the actual operation to put my innards back inside my stomach—pronounced me almost ready to be released. Kade agreed, but only if I promised to go to his house rather than back to my apartment since the Shields hadn’t finished tracking down all the conspirators who had participated in planning the attacks on Marta and Serena.
As the only survivor, the Kodiak—a shifter named Bartholomew Jenkins—wasn’t talking. He wasn’t walking, either, something I would feel worse about if he hadn’t tried so hard to kill a premature infant, not to mention her nurse, my boyfriend, and me.
“The other mothers could still be in danger, too,” I said to Kade, as part of my argument for staying in my own place. “More danger than I’m in.” We were back in my hospital room, but this time I was sitting on the reclining chair by the window, and he was leaning against the wall next to me.
“No.” His tone was unyielding. “If you don’t agree to go to my house, I’ll have Dr. Smith cancel your release orders.”
I shrugged. “I could still leave.”
Kade scowled and I finally relented. “Okay, okay. I’ll stay at your place.”
His phone buzzed and he checked an incoming text. A broad smile broke out across his face. “We need to go see Serena.”
“What’s up?” I asked.
“You’ll see when we get there.”
He almost bounced on his toes all the way down the elevator and through the NICU scrub-in area.
Serena had been set up in a new room while construction workers repaired the old one and the hospital filed insurance claims against the damaged machinery. The story—the one that had gone to the police and the public—was that Serena’s biological father had broken in to try to kill the child he had wanted to abort, after attacking Marta and failing to kill either her or the baby. I had no idea what paperwork they had presented to back that up, or what would happen to Bartholomew Jenkins, but it had worked well enough as a cover for the hospital’s, and the shapeshifters’, purposes.
The tear in reality in that room still leaked Earth magic. The other shifters could sense it now, but no one else had been able to use it yet. Eduardo had come to visit me once and he and Kade had speculated that similar tears might be the source of the Earth magic hot spots in other places, as well.
I didn’t care. I just wanted to make sure that I hadn’t done some sort of irreparable damage to the world by pulling the Earth magic through someplace it wasn’t supposed to go. And despite my physical therapist’s prodding, I refused to use the Earth magic I had torn into the hospital to augment my shifts. I claimed remembering the events was too traumatic, but in reality, I was afraid of what kind of permanent harm I might cause.
Now, as we walked into the new room, Kelly, the nurse who had carried Serena away from the attack, was standing in front of the incubator, a wide grin on her face. “You ready?” she asked.
Kade wore an almost identical smile.
“Ready for what?” I glanced between them.
Kelly stepped to one side and presented the incubator with a flourish of her arms, like a game-show hostess.
Inside coiled a juvenile snake—but not any species that I recognized. Not from the animal kingdom, anyway. Her head was a triangular wedge and she had the heat-sensing pits of the pit viper between her eyes and nose. Her body, however, had the pattern and musculature of an albino python.
“That’s Serena?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer. “She’s a lamia.”
“She’s a lamia who imprinted her shape on you,” Kade corrected me. “That’s almost exactly what you looked like the night you shifted in front of her.”