A Generation of Vipers (Shifter Shield Book 2) (3 page)

"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.

At the hospital, I realized that rushing to get there might have been a little foolish. I didn't have any 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.

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.

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.

It was precisely one of those atrocities that I was railing against when I finally did make it into Gloria's office sometime that afternoon.

"It was long-term, continued abuse over years, and the girl's mother knew about it." I all but spat out the last words, pacing back and forth the six paces across my boss's office in front of her desk. "She didn't want to lose her boyfriend—or more likely, her access to whatever he had her strung out on." I heaved a sigh and flung myself down into one of the upholstered chairs against the wall, scrubbing across my face with my hands.

"Any word from the bio-dad?" Gloria asked.

"Nothing. No one has heard from him since the child was an infant."

She nodded, her blond curls bouncing as she made a note. People who didn't know her often made the mistake of thinking she was soft, simply because she looked like some artist's idea of a sweet, round, cookie-baking mama.

Gloria was all of those things.

Also, she was one of the toughest women I've ever met when it came to confronting child-abusers. Our District Attorney loved it when he could call on her to testify in a case. She was precise and clear and harsh when it came to dealing with people who hurt kids.

"How is your friend who was attacked yesterday?" she asked as she finished her comments in the case-file we had been discussing.

"Okay. Kade and his team went ahead and delivered the baby. A girl. They're both still in intensive care, but Kade said I could go by and visit tonight."

"Is this someone you've talked about?"

I gave a quick shake of my head. "Probably not."

Definitely not. No. This is the woman who was carrying Scott's weresnake rape-baby I didn't tell you about.

"She's a fairly new friend," I added. "I met her through Kade."

More or less
.

Thankfully, Gloria didn't follow up on that line of questioning. "That's still going well, I take it?"

I couldn't help but smile at the thought of my relationship with Kade. "Very."

Gloria laughed aloud. "So I see."

I smiled, but shook my head. "I actually didn't come in to talk about any of that."

"Not even the Kavanaugh case?"

"No. I wanted to see if you had heard anything else from Moreland about that weird recording." What I didn't say was that something about it was bothering me, but I couldn't pinpoint why, exactly. I suppose I could have brought up an intuition—Gloria wouldn't have seen anything particularly odd in that—but out of long habit, I kept quiet about anything that might be attributable to my unusual nature.