Outcast (Supernaturals Book 2) (19 page)

“How did you know if she’d just conceived,” the guy named Devan asked, and I took that to mean Sam didn’t normally know these things.

“When I first came here, I cast a revealing spell on the house and its occupants before I entered to show me who they really were and to be sure I wasn’t walking into a trap. It told me everything they were saying was true. Showed me that those two are mated and that she is pregnant. It also revealed that those two are alphas,” she said, pointing to Dave and Danielle. “I don’t know much about their pack, but from what I can tell, they should be leading it.”

All eyes turned to Dave and Danielle for a second, but a second was too long for my sister, so to deflect their attention, she pointed to me and said, “She’s pregnant.”

I looked to Ryan for support, but he only looked angry. Fresh tears streamed down my face, as I feared that angry look was for me. Thinking the same thing, my mother pulled me from his embrace and into her arms. The glare she gave Ryan terrified even me. He paid no attention to her. He stood rooted in his spot, glaring at me. When he finally moved, I flinched, thinking he was going to come at me. My mother jerked me behind her and my father grabbed me.

Instead of coming at me though, he spun and lunged for Sophia with murder in his eyes. Devan, Dave, and Daniel grabbed him before he could get to the screaming woman. They disappeared into thin air with him. I screamed his name and looked around the room franticly for him. A crash came from upstairs, our bedroom I assumed, and then I heard Ryan cussing. I broke from my father’s arms and ran up the stairs.

“Let go of me. I’m going to kill that bitch. She tried to kill my mate, my child. She deserves to die,” I heard Ryan yelling at the men.

“Calm down, young man,” Daniel said. “You can’t kill her. We have to take her before your Council. They have to decide her fate. We were all there. We can testify against her. You’ll get your justice, but you have to keep a level head.”

I rushed into the room to see the area in a mess and that Ryan was calming. I threw myself into his arms and cried. He held me tight, and with the way he was breathing, I could tell he wanted to cry himself.

Without saying a word to either of us, the men left the room.

Ryan swept me into his arms and carried me into the bathroom, sat me on the counter, and wet a washcloth with warm water. His hands shook the entire time. Once he finished cleaning my face, and I had calmed, he knelt down on the tile floor and wrapped his arms around my middle, burying his head in my stomach.

I brushed his hair with my fingers and let everything sink in. As I was opening my mouth to ask him how my parents could be shifters and I was not, or if I was, how I didn’t know, when I felt a warm liquid seep through my shirt.

“Ryan, baby, I’m all right,” I said and hugged him to me, thinking he had finally decided to relieve himself of the grief he felt at nearly losing me.

“I know. I know you are. That isn’t why I’m crying,” he said in a low voice.

“Then what are you crying about?” I asked, turning his head so that he could look up at me. The sight of his tear-filled eyes amazed me. I had never truly seen a man cry before then. Seeing them ease down the side of his face brought tears to my own eyes.

“I can hear her heart beating,” he said, pushing his ear a little more firmly into my stomach and closing his eyes. The look of pure contentment and love on his face was sublime. There was no doubt in my mind that he was completely fine with me being pregnant. We hadn’t talked about kids. Hell, we hadn’t really talked about getting married, but the baby changed things. Wow, a baby.

“So I’m really pregnant?” I asked, looking down at my already-rounded stomach. Shawna had said so. Sam had said so, but until he had said he could hear a heartbeat, I don’t think it had truly set in that a life was growing inside me.

“You are. I don’t know why I hadn’t sensed it until now. Her heart is beating so fast. I hope that’s normal.” He nuzzled my stomach some more as if he were playing with the tiny blob inside.

“Wait, what? How do you know it’s a girl? Do you have some super supernatural abilities that can tell you if an embryo is a boy or a girl?” I pulled his face away from me enough to get his attention.

“No. I don’t know. But she has to be a girl. A beautiful little miniature you,” he said, standing up and kissing me.

“What if I want a boy?” I said, once he stopped kissing me and I had wrapped my arms around him to listen to his heartbeat.

“We can have a boy after her.”

“After? Does that mean you want to keep me,” I asked.

“Forever,” he said. “We’ll marry after Sophia’s trial. Daniel says we can join his pack if Pine Hollow won’t accept you. Your parents are on the fence about leaving, but I think we can convince them. Dave and Danielle will definitely come with us. They have to swear fealty to Daniel to prove that they don’t intend to take over his pack first, but they’ll come with us.”

“You’ve discussed this with my family already?” I asked, interrupting him.

“Yeah. I’ve been talking to them about this for months now.”

“That’s right. They’re shifters as well. But I’m not, am I?”

“No.”

“How is that possible?”

Chapter 21 ~ The Truth

~~~Leigh~~~

“I…um…” Ryan sputtered.

“Ryan, what are you not telling me?” I asked, pushing him away from me so that I could see his face.”

“A lot, but it isn’t my place to tell you. I promised your father that I wouldn’t tell you their secret. That I would allow him to do it.” He didn’t look pleased at having to keep the secret, so I decided not to be angry with him.

“Dad,” I yelled and hopped off the counter. “Mom.” Shoving Ryan aside when he tried to block my way, I left our bedroom and headed downstairs. The whole way down, I called for my parents. Both met me at the bottom step.

“What’s wrong?” my mother asked, eyeing Ryan. Her look said she thought he was the one I was pissed off at; therefore, what I said next surprised her.

“Are you my real parents?” I asked, searching both of their faces.

There was a long pause before my father said, “Leigh, now isn’t the time for this. We were waiting for the two of you to come down so that we could interrogate Sophia.”

“That can wait. Answer my question,” I demanded.

Ryan stopped behind me and placed his hands on my shoulders for support. He didn’t say a word though. That conversation was between my parents and I, and he didn’t feel as if he should intervene.

“We’ll wait in the dining room with Sophia while you discuss this,” Daniel said, motioning for his people who had remained to follow him. Serena, the Angel, was gone, but Sam had stayed and followed Daniel. Dave and Danielle tried to slink away, but I stopped them.

“Where do you two think you’re going?” I asked them. “Danielle, you are as much a part of this as they are. I want the truth, and I want it now.” I crossed my arms over my chest to show them how stubborn I was going to be about getting answers.

“Fine,” my father said and hung his head. “Let’s go sit in the living room. The story is a bit long.”

I watched my family leave the hall. I, on the other hand, was rooted to the spot and trembling. The look in their eyes when I had asked the question told me I wasn’t theirs, and I feared what I was about to hear.

“Come on, baby. Everything’s going to be all right. They aren’t going to tell you anything too terrible or anything you don’t already suspect.” He put his arm around me and guided me to the love seat. My parents were on the sofa. Dave was in an armchair, and Danielle was pacing in front of the fireplace. I was sure I was not about to get a happy story.

Ryan pulled me under his left arm and took one of my hands in his. I sat stiff and silent, waiting for one of them to speak. When no one did, Ryan said, “Go ahead.” That was my father’s cue to start speaking.

“No, we aren’t your biological parents, though I guess that’s obvious in more ways than one. When your mother was about eight and a half months pregnant, she and I took a trip to her sister’s house in Georgia. Her sister had married outside of our pack, which is the first major offense that her side of the family had made, which meant Pine Hollow didn’t like us even before you came along. We feared that if we didn’t go see her then, we wouldn’t get permission to leave the pack to do so once our first child was born.

“On our way home, your mother went into labor. We weren’t close to any packs that we know of, so she gave birth in a human hospital. Well, hospital isn’t exactly what I would call it. It was more like a clinic. The place was small and poorly staffed. If it had only been us, things would have obviously turned out differently. See, your mother wasn’t the only one giving birth at that moment. Another couple had pulled up to the hospital at the same time we did. The nurses rushed both women into the same room—as I said, it was a small hospital and only had one delivery room—to give birth. Both of you came at the same time and were both girls.

“It was the oddest thing we’d ever seen. But being supernaturals, we had seen the Fates align things to suit them before. I assumed the Fates meant for us to meet these people for a reason, and we were.

“We aren’t sure when the mix-up occurred, but it had to have happened almost right after you were born because you were the baby they handed to us after they cleaned you both up. You suckled right away, which to us means a great deal, because most of our young don’t take to other mothers and human children don’t take to our mothers at all. Why you did, we don’t know. Again, the Fates make up and change their own rules when they want.

“Since you and your mother were doing so well, the hospital discharged you the next day, and we went back to Pine Hollow. Your homecoming was a great affair. Four days later, we got a call from the hospital asking us to come back in for what we assumed was a follow up examination. They didn’t say anything over the phone about why they wanted us to come, only that they did. We assumed they needed to do more tests or something. In Pine Hollow, we don’t have to worry so much about all of that, but we didn’t want the hospital reporting us as bad parents, and we didn’t think anything they would do to you would hurt you. You were born outside of the pack territory and were exposed to a great deal of things our children aren’t, so we went.

“The hospital looked you over, deemed you perfectly healthy, and asked us to join the Chief of Medicine in his office. Immediately we were on edge. What came out of his mouth wasn’t at all what we feared he would say.”

My father paused there for a long moment and looked to my mother. The grief in their expressions scared me. They had obviously kept me, but for the life of me, I couldn’t understand why. They would have been much happier if they had gotten their real child back. Four days with one child wasn’t that long compared to a lifetime with another…the real one. Surely, they hadn’t bonded with me so much that they refused to take their own child.

I don’t know if my life would have been better with my biological family. They could have been horrid people or they could have been perfectly fine. So many thoughts were running through my head when my father spoke again that I almost didn’t hear him.

“We exchanged pleasantries with the man, but I smelled fear and sorrow all over him. When we sat, I asked him point blank if something was wrong with you and, if so, to tell us. Shifters don’t get sick and almost never have any fatal diseases like cancer or leukemia, so we couldn’t for the life of us imagine what was worrying the man.

“‘Mr. and Mrs. Alexander,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I have some upsetting news. Mind you, the hospital takes full responsibility for the initial mix-up.’ ‘Mix-up?’ I asked. What do you mean, mix-up?’ ‘I don’t know how to tell you this, other than to come right out and say it, but the night your daughter was born, as you may remember, another couple was here, and they also had a girl.’ ‘Yes, I remember,’ I told him. He said, ‘We don’t know how it happened. Maybe because we were so short staffed and only had the one room, but somehow the nurses that were tending to the babies gave you the wrong child.”

Dad stopped again to take a deep breath and gauge my reaction of things so far. I was so stunned that I couldn’t do anything but stare at him. People in the real world don’t switch babies…do they?

“Your mother and I were outraged, surprised, fearful, and a million other emotions. We didn’t hate you—we’ve never hated you—but we did want our child, the one we had created, and not only because you were human and ours was not. We had also grown attached to you. You were our child, the one we had loved since the moment we knew a child was coming. We had memorized every inch of you. We knew your cries, likes, and dislikes. We couldn’t see how we could give you up for another, but we couldn’t leave a shifter baby with humans.”

Ryan pulled me closer to him, and both of us cradled my stomach as if to make sure our child was safely secure within our arms. I couldn’t imagine having someone else’s child, loving a child that wasn’t Ryan and I’s, but I had never thought much about children in the first place. I thought I might one day have one because it’s what people do, but I was content not to. I figured those people who spent all of their lives wanting children, as my parents seem to have been, would just be as happy adopting, as they would be having their own children.

“The doctor gave us time to take this all in then let us ask all the questions he knew we would want to ask. Are they sure? How did they find out? Do the other parents know? Are they willing to give us our child back? Have they been good parents to our child? If not, could we have you both? And a long list of others. Finally, he put his hand up to stop us.

“‘Unfortunately,’ he said, ‘there is more bad news.’ The baby, our baby, was sick, so the family had to stay a bit longer than we did. The mother wasn’t doing so well either. They let them go home at the end of three days because they couldn’t find anything seriously wrong with them and made them promise to see their general practitioner and pediatrician. On their way home, though, they got caught in a snow storm and died in a car wreck.”

My father stopped again to let my mother and I cry over the loss. I hadn’t known those people, but they had been my parents, the people who had created me. I would never meet them. Never know them. Danielle brought Mom and me tissues and something to drink before collapsing into Dave’s arms to shed a few tears of her own.

“So if they died, how did the hospital find out there had been a mistake?” I eventually asked.

“The medical examiner happened to test their blood, and the child didn’t match her parents. They pulled our files and realized the mistake. The doctor told us that your parents didn’t have a family. He knew this because he knew your father. He said that your father was an only child whose parents had died young, and your mother didn’t know her father, and her mother was an alcoholic. Your grandmother had family, but none that anyone knew how to contact. Your parents met in college, fell in love, built a small life for themselves, and decided to have you. When we asked what needed to happen, he said it was up to us. We could give you up and let the state take care of you, or we could keep you. You know what we decided there. We buried our daughter in Pine Hollow. We requested that the town let us do the same for your parents, but they denied our request. We helped lay your parents to rest with your father’s parents in Alabama and moved here.

“A great aunt on your mother’s side eventually found us, but we had had you nearly six months by then, and she agreed to let us keep you as long as we kept her updated on you. She agreed to keep our secret that we weren’t your parents if we sent yearly photos and allowed her to send you the occasional gift. We also promised to ask her for financial help if we needed it, but we didn’t.

“The Council wouldn’t let us come back to Pine Hollow with you but wouldn’t let us out of the pack, and we didn’t want out of the pack. Both of our families have belonged to Pine Hollow for as far back as I can remember. We tried to plead this, but the Council, the ruling body of the Pine Hollow pack, refused to have a human on pack territory.”

“The Council sucks,” I said for a lack of anything better to say about them or the situation. I didn’t know them, but assumed that they were probably the people who spent the most time at the wedding and other functions ridiculing me.

“I agree,” Dad said, “but that’s how our pack is run. In some ways, I agree that having so many people vote on something is better than having one person make all of the rules, but those same people have been on the Council for nearly a hundred years now, and they aren’t going to change tradition in any way. I also agree that it would have been dangerous for you to stay there. Not only that, but the Regent—that’s the ruling Council over all the supernatural races—has made it illegal to tell humans except under dire circumstances about the supernatural world.”

“Wouldn’t they have considered me a dire circumstance?” I asked.

“No. You were an infant. They would have most likely told us to send you to an orphanage or something and to be done with you, but we couldn’t. We loved you too much.”

In that moment, I was glad my parents loved me as much as they do, but I wondered at how distant they were to me over the years and thought, fleetingly, that I might have been better off at an orphanage.

The look my mother gave me said that my thoughts were written all over my face and that she was hurt by them and sorry she hadn’t been a better mother. I flew off the loveseat, rushed to my mother, threw my arms around her waist, and buried my face in her lap. All the while, I cried and told her I was sorry for thinking badly of her and my father and for not understanding why they were the way they were.

She cried and told me she loved me. Had always loved me, but her fear that the Council would come and take me away or make them give me up made her keep her distance.

“Of course, now we understand that we would have never allowed that,” my father said, patting my back. They would have fought the Council to keep me, found a way to leave the pack, and moved us away. No shifter likes to be without a pack—they are stronger in every way when they belong to a pack—but to keep me, if no other pack would have me, they would have done so. Over time, all of them would have lost the ability to shift, lost their senses, and in most ways become human. Their blood heirs would be more or less human. That would have broken my heart if I had ever found out.

After my mother and I had our cry, she lifted me from her lap, wiped my face, and said, “We have something for you.”