I needed to talk to some other shifter parents to figure out how they dealt with issues like that.
And I was right back to worrying incessantly about how I would manage to take care of all of these children and still arrange to have something of a life.
WHEN I GOT TO THE HOSPITAL the next morning, Serena’s doctor was already waiting for me. I’d also called Kade to see if he wanted to meet me for coffee after my meeting, but he hadn’t answered his phone—I was guessing there was probably some kind of emergency. I hoped it was a human medical emergency, and not a shifter one.
“Thanks for coming in,” Dr. Jimson said. “I simply wanted to consult with you about a possible change.”
A change? My anxiety ratcheted higher.
“Thanks for calling me in,” I said, clinging to the usual social niceties in order to ground myself. “What’s the issue?”
“It’s really nothing terribly serious,” Jimson said. “I had an idea about a way to coax Serena into shifting.”
And you couldn’t find some way to discuss it with me over the phone? I managed to keep the thought to myself.
“Tell me about it,” I said. I crossed my legs and placed my hands folded over my knees. We sat in his office, a tiny room right off the NICU. It was the same place I had met with all of Serena’s doctors, come to think of it, so probably it wasn’t specifically Jimson’s office—but I had grown to associate it with him since he had taken over Serena’s care.
“Now let me clarify,” he said. “I don’t necessarily know that this is going to work. It’s nothing we’ve tried before and is therefore by no means guaranteed. Even for a shifter child, Serena arrived very early. And we don’t know exactly what effect the prenatal trauma she experienced when her mother was beaten might have on her development.”
I nodded and circled my hand in the air, allowing a little of my impatience to show. We had had this conversation several times before. I was ready to get to the new stuff.
Admittedly, I might’ve also been a little cranky about having to come in early when I had spent part of the night listening for the sounds of my new house guests.
They might’ve been part of my anxiety, as well.
“Well, as you know, in her juvenile serpent form, Serena is ready to go home. The problem is that if she shifts back to her human form, she’ll still be relatively underdeveloped. Probably.” He tapped his forefinger on the desk in front of him and looked thoughtful. “At least, that’s our guess. We don’t have much baseline information about lamia development. Most of what we know is through hearsay.” He cut his eyes at me, squinting. “And I understand that you don’t have much to add to that?”
“No. By the time my foster family found me, I was probably about two years old, at least in terms of development as a human.”
Dr. Jimson nodded. “We do know that Serena shifted for the first time into her serpent form when she observed you in the NICU during your...” He paused, clearly trying to come up with a word to cover what had happened in the unit.
“During my battle with the wolves and the bear,” I supplied.
“Yes, that.”
“So what does this have to do with your ideas about how to get her to shift again?”
“We assume that since she shifted into a serpent form that mimicked the one you took during the battle, she has in some way imprinted on you. We want to encourage that.”
“I come up here every day,” I interjected. “I want to spend as much time with her as possible.”
“Of course,” Jimson replied hurriedly. “No one is doubting your dedication to making sure that she does well. Far from it. In fact, what we are considering is the possibility of sending her home with you for some extended time.”
My heart leaped into my throat at the thought. I mean, I had planned to bring Serena home with me—but that home was supposed to be the group home that she would eventually live in with all of the other lamia shifter babies. Originally, the plan had been for me to work as a counselor there, and spend some evenings and weekends as one of several caretakers in residence. In rotation.
What I had come up with the week before, exhausted from fighting for these babies’ lives, was something much more like what I had grown up with. My parents were loving, kind humans who had provided a stable home and had taught me how to draw on the human side of my nature. My father had always insisted that being a shapeshifter did not negate my place in the human world. His training, combined with my mother’s love and devotion, had taught me how to function as the only shifter, as far as I knew, in the entire world. And he’d taught me how to maintain my connection to other people, too.
It was why I had become a counselor.
Now, I wanted to share that kind of upbringing with these other lamia children—babies who, for all intents and purposes, were orphans—their father a cold-hearted killer, and their mothers the victims of a rapist determined to save his own race.
Worse, the rest of the shifter community viewed them with suspicion, as they were the new representatives of an old race that had fought to subjugate all other shifters.
I had been reconsidering my plans to take them on as full-time children of my own—I’d been going back and forth over and over between our original plan to keep them in a more typical group home foster setting and taking them on as if they were all my own children.
This plan of Dr. Jimson’s threw that quandary into high relief.
I glanced up from where I had been staring down at my hands as I twisted my fingers around one another and found the shifter pediatrician watching me interestedly.
“I know this was not in your original plans,” he began.
“I don’t even have a place for her to stay in my apartment. The group home isn’t ready yet. I don’t know what I would do.”
“If we decide to go this direction, you can start with one night, and bring her back here if she shifts. Beyond that, we can give you time to set up a space for her, and to make arrangements as necessary—we even have some guidance on that, as well. I know that many of the doctors and nurses in the hospital are eager to help integrate these children into our society.” Lines formed around his eyes as he smiled. “No matter how it might have seemed, there are more of us on your side than not in this.”
I took a deep breath. “Okay.”
My stomach clenched into knots at the word, but I also knew it was the right thing to do. If what Serena needed was to spend more time with me, then I would give that time to her.
Along, apparently, with the time required by my jobs as both counselor and Shield, my physician boyfriend, several pregnant women eager to rid themselves of the infants growing inside them, and a Hunter with a hyena-shifter boyfriend—those last two secretly.
Yeah.
My life was getting a little twisty.
Chapter 14
I WAS ON THE PHONE with Kade when I walked into the CAP-C office after I left the hospital. It really wasn’t a discussion I wanted to be overheard, but at the same time, I felt like we needed to at least get started on it before I showed up at his place and dropped on him the idea that Serena might be coming home as soon as the weekend.