Just not in this surgical waiting room, where one of the nurses had led me when I came reeling up to the check-in desk in the emergency room. “Dr. Nevala said you should wait here, and he would come to you as soon as your cousin was out of surgery.”
Cousin. So that would be the fiction for the non-shifter staff. I could live with that.
Here I was all alone.
I poured another cup of the sludgy coffee and tried to cover the taste with creamer and sugar. I gave up when it began tasting more like syrup than anything drinkable.
It seemed like hours before Kade swung around the doorframe, as usual seeming to take up much more room than he should have. I flicked my tongue against my lips nervously, trying to get a sense of his mood.
Tired.
That was all that brushed through me from him.
Too afraid to say anything, I simply waited.
He ran a hand across his eyes, and I tried to brace myself for bad news. Any bad news. The worst news.
“They’re both okay.”
All the air seemed to whoosh out of me at once, and I deflated against the back of the chair I sat in.
“For now, anyway,” Kade continued. “The baby is on a ventilator to help her breathe, but that’s not uncommon at this stage. We didn’t have time to help her lungs develop any more quickly.”
“And Marta?”
“Pretty badly beaten. We repaired the internal injuries.” He closed his eyes briefly. “They both have a long recovery ahead of them.”
“Can I see either of them?”
“Marta’s still out. We’re going to keep her under until tomorrow. The baby ...” He waggled his hand in the air in a so-so motion. “It probably wouldn’t hurt, but she’s still being checked in. Later would be better.”
Glancing past him through the doorway to make sure no one was nearby, I lowered my voice. “Any sign that she’s a lamia?”
“None. Yet.”
“Would you be able to tell?” I realized that in all my discussions with him about shifter babies, I had missed some important questions. “If she inherited the weresnake gene, how soon is she likely to shift?”
Oh, God. Could that be a problem?
Seeing the panic on my face, Kade wrapped one arm around my shoulder and pulled me in close. “Usually not for a while—several weeks, at least—but even if she does, it’ll be okay. We’ve got her in the shifter ward. It’s set up as a contact isolation ward, so only approved visitors are allowed, and they’re all screened.”
“But what can I do?” My voice pitched up at the end of the question, turning it into more of a wail.
“Go home and rest. Go back to work. Whatever you want to do. Nothing is going to change overnight. It’ll all be okay.”
Easy for him to say. He had been in the operating room for the last several hours, actually doing something helpful.
Now that the immediate crisis had passed, though, I was feeling the effect of the anxiety. “You staying up here tonight?”
He nodded. “You going back to my place or yours?”
I paused. It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder—I had simply assumed I would go to his house. “Mine,” I said firmly. I needed to keep my own space.
Right?
With a sigh, Kade nodded. “Okay. Call me when you get done with work tomorrow and we’ll come back up here to see the baby.”
His words sent a shiver through me, but I couldn’t quite pin down the exact reason. Anticipation, surely, and a touch of anxiety.
Sheer terror? my internal smartass suggested.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said to Kade, turning my face up to claim a kiss and firmly ignoring that mocking inner voice.
Marta was okay. The baby was okay.
That would have to be enough for now.
I could examine my own emotions later.
When I got home, though, I couldn’t sleep. Instead, I tossed and turned all night, wishing I had gone to Kade’s instead.
By 6:00 the next morning, I was up and dressed and headed to the nearest big-box store.
Kade had told me that the baby would be in the hospital for a while longer, but I knew, from other conversations, that the shifter community really didn’t know that much about lamia babies. Really, for all he knew, an infant already in serpent form would be ready to go home in a week.
Never mind that Marta’s baby wasn’t in serpent form.
Never mind that none of us were ready to have a baby come home in a week.
Hell, construction on the group home wasn’t even done yet.
That simply meant that we needed a backup plan.
And that meant I had to go shopping.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a good enough counselor to know when I’m losing my mind. I knew that the idea of bringing one or more shifter infants into my own home was insane—especially if someone had set out to hurt that shifter infant.
For that matter, Kade and I didn’t even have a home—we had two homes. Separate homes. He had a house and I had an apartment. We had only recently exchanged keys.
And yet, at six o’clock in the morning, I was shopping the baby department in Walmart. Yes, I knew it was insane.
But sometimes, you simply have to work with the life you’re handed.
Chapter 5
BY THE TIME I HIT MY office at 8:30, I had a car-trunk and backseat full of all the things the most popular baby site on the internet told me were “necessities.” Never mind that I didn’t know what half of them were.
For someone who works with kids, I’m pretty clueless about the mechanics of dealing with infants.
I was kind of glad that no one else had any more experience with lamia babies than I did.
Except, of course, my own parents—though they didn’t get me until I was a toddler, around the equivalent of two human years old, according to their best guess. Kade said most shifter children aged along a similar timeline to humans, instead of following the aging path of their animal counterparts. That accorded with what I knew of my own childhood experience after Dad found me out there in the West Texas desert.
A text message from Kade reassured me that Marta and the baby were both fine and that he would clear me to visit them that evening.
I managed to get caught up on paperwork before my first appointment that morning, but I didn’t get a chance to speak to Gloria as I had hoped. But she had clients already waiting for her in the waiting room when she arrived, and a steady stream of people through her office all morning long.
It’s a busy day in the child-protection biz.
I sighed at the thought. Every day was eventful in this business, and I was sure I would never get used to that fact. Almost everyone in the shifter community continued to assure me that my “natural” instinct should be toward cold-blooded, emotionless behavior, the likes of which they had all been used to seeing from lamias. However, my adoptive parents had encouraged me to focus on my human side, the parts of me that were nurturing and loving.
Anyway, my dad—a herpetologist by training and a college biology instructor by profession—said that the idea that snakes are unemotional is a myth. He prefers to call them “choosy.”
I don’t know who’s right, but I do know that I am more than my inner reptile. And the part of me that cared about others remained horrified by the way humans, supposedly the creatures capable of the most empathy, were capable of the kinds of atrocities against children that I dealt with in my office every day.