“I think it might be. We need to see if we can find someone tech-savvy enough to strip out the sound and enhance it.”
With a nod, Gloria sprang into action, picking up my office phone and hitting one of the saved numbers. “I hope you’re wrong,” she said to me, just before asking to be transferred to Detective Daniel Moreland.
I HADN’T MEANT FOR the strange noise behind the recording to take attention away from my late reports but waiting for Detective Moreland to get back to us did have the beneficial effect of allowing me to catch up on my work.
Even if I did catch myself trying to think of what might have made that creepy breathing noise.
During my lunch break, I called and left a message on Kade’s voicemail. I wanted to get another shifter’s take on the breathing sounds I’d picked up. Preferably a shifter with better hearing than mine.
He wasn’t anywhere to be found, though. I was guessing some emergency had come through the ER at Kindred Hospital—mostly a facility for shapeshifters, but sometimes used by the unwary general public, as well.
By two o’clock, Gloria and I were ensconced with the detective and a sound tech in some kind of recording studio—the twenty-something guy wasn’t an official police contractor, but Moreland said he had the best ears in the business.
I half-suspected he was a shifter from the way his scent buzzed on my tongue, but if so, he wasn’t of a type I had encountered before. His movements were quick and sharp, and alternated with moments of perfect stillness as he listened to the sounds coming through his headset.
“I’ve boosted that background sound,” he said, flipping a toggle on the switchboard in front of him, “and dropped down everything else as much as possible.” The sound came out of speakers all around us, heavy and deep—and definitely breathing.
“Can you tell anything about where it was coming from?” Gloria asked. “What part of the room?”
“And why the recorder picked it up but no one in the room heard it?” I added.
Moreland squinted into the distance, considering. “Was the breathing closer to the recording source than they were?”
The tech nodded, even as Gloria shook her head. “Not possible,” she said. “The recorder is built into the wall.”
My phone buzzed against the inside of my purse. When I saw it was Kade calling, I murmured an excuse to step away from the group and into the small anteroom.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Marta’s been attacked.” His words were clipped, hurried, and I could hear the noises of the hospital in the background. “They’re bringing her in, but the EMT thinks we’re going to have to take the baby now.”
“Now?” I tried to do some quick calculations, but my mind wasn’t working right. “It’s months early.”
“Twenty-eight weeks. In humans, that would give the child a 90% shot at survival in a top-notch neo-natal facility like ours.”
Out of habit, I lowered my voice, even though no one else was around. “And a lamia child?”
His shrug came through his tone. “No one really knows.”
“Who did this?” I paused as a thought struck me. “Was it someone who knew what kind of child Marta was carrying?”
“No idea.” I hadn’t thought it possible for Kade to sound any more curt until he clipped out those words. “They’re pulling up now. I’ll be in touch.”
“I’ll be there.” Sheer rage at that thought of someone attempting to harm Marta and her baby slipped into my voice, but I didn’t know if Kade heard it—he was already gone, his voice barking orders to his medical staff the last sound transmitted through the phone as he swiped it off.
I stood perfectly still for a moment, trying to calm my breathing, but instead, all I could do was think of the last time I had met her for an ultrasound, when she had held my hand and squeezed it as she watched the screen. “I can’t keep the baby,” she had said without looking up at me. “But you’ll make sure she’s okay, right? Not like...” Her voice trailed off, but I knew what she meant.
“I’ll make sure.”
Remembering my words now, my anger swelled again, and the colors of the room blinked out, muted in an instant to shades of black and white and gray.
If I didn’t control myself, I would end up doing that insta-shift thing I’d pulled the other night with Eduardo and wind up exposing the whole were community.
Even as the thought crossed my mind, I heard the door to the recording studio room open behind me and closed my eyes to concentrate on pulling the shift back down inside me.
“You okay?” Gloria asked, coming up beside me and placing one hand on my shoulder. The warmth of her hand seemed to pull me back into my human body. One long shudder traveled down my spine, leaving me oddly calm in its wake.
“Seriously, is something wrong?” my boss said. Opening my eyes, I checked out of the corner of my eyes.
Color vision.
My pupils should be back to normal now, human-round rather than serpent-slitted.
With a deep breath, I nodded and met Gloria’s concerned gaze. “A friend of mine was attacked just now. She’s in the hospital.” If she noticed my hesitation around the word friend, she gave no indication.
“Go to her,” she said instantly. “I’ll keep you posted on anything we learn about this.”
Moreland turned from saying goodbye to the sound tech. “Did I hear you say someone was attacked?”
“I don’t know much yet.” At some point, I would have to tell them something about the house full of children I was about to begin counseling.
But not yet.
Not until I was absolutely certain that the first of those children would even survive the night.
Chapter 4
AT THE HOSPITAL, I realized that rushing to get there might have been a little foolish. There was nothing more that I could do there than I could have done at work. And at least at the CAP-C, I would have been able to keep busy. In the waiting room at Kindred, all I could do was try to look up statistics on premature babies.
I wished I had been able to speak to, or at least see, Marta before she was rushed to surgery. I knew that was more out of my selfish need for some kind of reassurance than any belief that I could have helped.
We had never discussed what she might want to do about the baby if both their lives were at risk. She had been too far along in her pregnancy for a simple termination and hadn’t seemed to want one, anyway.
If they had to choose between the baby and Marta, I had to believe that Kade would choose Marta.
Wouldn’t he?
Surely a fully formed human life took priority over an ... unfinished baby.
Unfinished baby shifter.
That was the rub. I honestly didn’t know if Kade and the other Kindred doctors would value a shifter infant—developed to term or not—over a human mother.
I groaned aloud and dropped my head into my hands. This waiting business was terrible. Standing up and walking around the hospital didn’t help, either—I had tried it. I ran into too many other shifters, some of whom I knew.
I couldn’t bring myself to socialize.
I could barely bring myself to stay human. There might not be any better public place to shift if it came down to it, but for all that, it was still public. There were plenty of humans around.