My boyfriend turned his hand up. “Uncertain, really. All shifter gestations that I know of are shorter than their human counterparts—but often much longer than their animal forms might suggest. That often means that our young are born in their animal forms and don’t shift until later—that gives them a chance to allow the human side to finish developing.”
Shane nodded and made some encouraging noises. “But Serena didn’t do that, did she?” he asked. “What form was she born in?”
“Human,” I said. “She didn’t change into a serpent form until she’d seen me shift.”
“She still prefers to be a snake when Lindy is around,” Kade said.
“I can’t blame her,” I said with a grin. “She’s a lot more mobile that way, and she seems to have imprinted on me in that form. But she much prefers snuggling in her human form with Kade.”
Kade returned my smile. It was a nice moment—we hadn’t had enough of those lately, what with all the various attacks on us.
I didn’t know if we were going to get to have much time alone together ever again, in fact—not with the rate at which the lamia babies seem determined to enter the world.
“That said,” Kade continued as we exited the elevator on the floor that held the maternity wing, “we don’t know much at all about lamia birth, so I think we should continue to try to be ready for anything.”
Apparently he was absolutely right, because after Kade took us down the hall to scrub in, as we entered the delivery room, one of the nurses began saying, “okay, Evangeline, it’s almost time to push.”
Kade blinked, and then almost visibly pulled his doctor persona on around him. “Well,” he muttered to Shane and me, “that went faster than I anticipated.”
Pulling a pair of gloves out of the dispenser on the wall and snapping them on, he moved over to join the nurses by Evangeline’s bed. “Tell me what we have here,” he said in what I had come to consider his doctor-voice.
One of the nurses, someone I didn’t know, said, “It looks like one of the infants is determined to come on out.”
“How far is she dilated?”
“Oh, not fully,” the nurse replied. “But if you take a look at the last sonogram we did, you’ll see that Baby C is...” She paused for a second as if searching for the right word. “Well, that one has a much smaller circumference than the other two.”
I hadn’t spoken to Evangeline yet. Of all the women Scott had impregnated, she was arguably the one suffering from the worst post-traumatic symptoms. Although she hadn’t come out and said so, I was fairly certain the only reason she hadn’t aborted was that she held some pretty strict religious beliefs about the sanctity of life.
She had also convinced herself that everything she had seen during her captivity—especially the sight of Scott’s mother in her half-serpent form—was the effect of some kind of nightmarish drug, or maybe hypnosis.
Even now, she walked around with a half blank look in her eyes, as if waiting for all of this to be over.
All of us had learned pretty quickly to avoid words like snake or serpent around the pregnant women—or even lamia, as some of them had figured out that’s what Scott’s mother was.
This was particularly important around Evangeline, as she had, more than once, gone into full-blown, screaming panic attacks when confronted with the idea that she might be carrying one of the shifters.
Hence the nurse’s careful phrasing. And as I moved to stand behind Kade, where I could see the monitor, I saw what she meant. Evangeline was carrying three babies. Two were in human form. But the third, in its snake form, was poised to take advantage of its smaller size and make an exit now.
“Oh, I see what you mean,” Shane breathed behind me. He leaned in over my shoulder. “What form is that? Constrictor?”
I thumped his hand with mine and shook my head when I caught his gaze. “Come out in the hall with me for a minute,” I said.
It didn’t take long to get Shane all caught up on the necessity of keeping the snake-talk down to a minimum. After all, he was a herpetologist—he’d been around plenty of people who made him shut up about his work.
Back inside the room, I let Evangeline know that I was there, willing to help in any way I could. Despite the fact that I had helped save her from Scott, she still clearly thought of me as part of that particularly horrible time in her life and wanted nothing to do with me. “The best thing you can do for me,” Evangeline said, “is take three giant steps back.”
“Got it,” I said holding my hands up and backing away. I went more than three steps, too. I moved all the way out of her line of sight.
Best she not even know I’m here.
I leaned against a wall and waited.
I hated not having anything to do, but I realized that my job would come later. And yet I wanted to be here for the births.
Kade sent one of the nurses out to arrange for an additional incubator to be brought in. He didn’t say so out loud in front of Evangeline, but I knew that it was one of the special designs he had arranged to have shipped to the hospital—made specifically for baby lamia.
And I watched from several feet away as Evangeline pushed to help the first infant be born. I realized at that moment that Kade had told the nurses to stand back for a reason—although Shane was guessing that this lamia was in a constrictor form as a snake, he wasn’t certain. For all they knew, they would have a brand-new baby viper on their hands, and the last thing they wanted to have to do was deal with a venomous snake bite in the maternity ward.
As a mongoose-shifter, Kade had a natural resistance to snake bites—more so than any of the other shifters who worked at the hospital.
Until that moment, it had never occurred to me to wonder how I might respond to the snakebite. I assume that I was largely immune, at least in my own serpent forms, but I had no idea how my human shape would deal with a venomous bite.
None of the vipers in dad’s herpetarium had ever even tried to bite me.
Shane, as a trained herpetologist, had donned a set of heavy gloves over his hospital gloves, and had a small, collapsible stick with a hook on the end.
I knew it shouldn’t bother me to think of him handling the newborn lamia with a stick, but the sight of it pissed me off. I had to remind myself that he meant no disrespect.
And then the newborn lamia, a constrictor after all, was being bundled into the incubator, out of sight, and taken down to the special room of the NICU that had been devoted initially to shifter babies, and now to the lamias being born in this hospital.
I was torn between following the snake baby downstairs and staying behind to wait for the other two to be born. Undecided, I waited too long to travel with the nurse who went with the incubator.
So I was still in the room with Evangeline when the hospital alarms went off.
I knew, even before Kade’s phone began buzzing, that it had to do with the baby.
I’d made the wrong choice.
Chapter 28
I TOOK OFF RUNNING down the hallway toward the elevator, wishing I knew where the stairwell was on this floor. By the time the elevator got to my floor, Shane and hospital security guard had caught up with me.
“Where’s Kade?” I asked.