Well, that was interesting. Samantha settled in her airplane seat and prepared to take a nap. She’d been up all night saving the life of that ungrateful asshole Keller, and she was dead tired. Only she couldn’t seem to get comfortable. She couldn’t get Keller’s bruised and battered face—his one good eye blazing at her—out of her mind.
Why was that?
He’s an asshole, she told herself uneasily. He was just trying to scare you. Forget it. Forget him and his whole crazy town and everybody in it. Well, except for her twin, Sadie, that was.
How in the world her sister—who had always been the most stable, sedate person in the world, with the most boring, normal life anyone could imagine—had gotten herself mixed up in the plot of a real-life monster movie was more than Samantha could comprehend. Or no, the Shifters weren’t monsters exactly, she supposed. It was more like they had an animal side—one which could literally come out in the open on full-moon nights.
And somehow, now, her sister was one of them. According to Sadie, she could now change into a beautiful doe to complement Mathis’s huge, scary, prehistoric buck. The buck Samantha had seen the night before—she was still trying to forget the image of her sister’s new boyfriend . . . mate . . . or whatever he was—changing from a human into an animal that had been extinct since the last Ice Age.
Of course, Keller changing into a cougar the size of a draft horse had been pretty damn impressive too. Not to mention terrifying. Samantha still shivered when she thought of the six-inch fangs and deadly claws he sported in that form. He was scary enough as a man—he had to be six foot seven if he was an inch—with the muscles to match his large size. But as a Cougar, well . . . he was in a whole different league.
It had taken all Samantha’s courage the night before to approach the massive beast Keller had changed into after Mathis’s buck had trampled him almost to death. Sadie had tried to warn her that he might be dangerous—that a wounded beast was far more deadly than a healthy one. Samantha had known her sister was right, but somehow she couldn’t help herself—she had to save him.
She still remembered approaching him, the huge, furry side with its tawny fur heaving for breath. His fur had been bloody, his immense body wounded, trampled, and torn. He’d been lying on his side, and the one eye she could see had rolled up to meet hers. It was the same silvery-leaf-green color as Keller’s human eyes. In it, Samantha had thought she’d seen human intelligence.
“I’m not going to hurt you, buddy,” she’d murmured, trying to make her voice soft and soothing. “Just want to take a look and see if I can help. Okay?”
To her surprise, the immense, furry head had nodded once, though it clearly hurt Keller to make the movement. That one surprisingly human gesture in the huge beast had given her the courage to put her hands on him and assess his injuries—which had been massive and traumatic.
Samantha still didn’t know how he had survived being so savagely trampled. One eye had been nearly torn from its socket, his liver had been lacerated, multiple bones had been broken, and she was almost certain he was going to lose one of his kidneys. Still, he had hung in there and today, after an eight-hour surgery, he was awake and trying to get out of his bed in the ICU to keep her from going to Vegas.
Incredible.
Too bad somebody can’t bottle some of the Shifter essence, or whatever it is that makes them so freaking unkillable, Samantha thought, finally closing her eyes as the plane taxied down the runway in preparation for liftoff. Drug companies would make a fortune off it.
Then the plane lifted into the sky, the G-forces pressing down against her entire body like a giant hand, and she gave a contented sigh. Unlike many people who have flight anxiety, Samantha had the exact opposite reaction to flying. Being up in a plane was usually quite restful for her—maybe because she was in the one place where she couldn’t be called in at the last minute to perform emergency surgery. Just knowing that she was out of reach and completely free of any obligations relaxed her completely.
This flight was no exception. Pushing the thoughts of her troublesome patient and her sister’s new, strange situation out of her head, Samantha took a deep breath and let herself drift off. . . .
* * *
The next thing she knew, she was gloved and gowned, standing in the OR. Trays of gleaming surgical instruments were to one side of her, and a patient, draped in blue, was lying on the operating table before her.
“Hurry up, Dr. Becker!” a nurse was saying in her ear. “The baby’s crowning!”
“What? Baby? What baby?” Samantha frowned. This had to be a mistake. She was a trauma surgeon. She hadn’t delivered a baby since her OB/GYN rotation back in med school.
Yet when she looked at the patient on the table again, she saw that it was a woman and, sure enough, she was up in stirrups. Not just any woman though—it was Sadie.
“Hurry!” she begged Samantha. “Hurry, Sammie—the baby’s coming! I can feel it. Please!”
“It’s all right, Sadie,” she hastened to reassure her sister. “I haven’t done this in a while but I can still manage. Here we go now—push!”
To her relief, the baby came out, squalling and pink-faced, with no problems. It had a shock of dark hair just like Sadie’s, and it waved its tiny fists appealingly, as if protesting this state of affairs. Samantha started to hand it off to one of the nurses but found herself giving it to Mathis instead, who was standing beside her with a wide, proud grin on his bearded face.
“Here you go,” she told him. “You’re a father.”
Samantha breathed a sigh of relief. Well—glad that’s all over! But just as she was starting to relax, one of the gowned and gloved nurses shouted at her.
“Dr. Becker! Hurry—here comes the next one!”
The next one?
Samantha could scarcely believe it, but she found herself delivering yet another baby. She handed this one off to Mathis too, who grinned as he cradled his newborns, one in each massive arm.
And then another baby came. And then another.
Samantha couldn’t believe it—how could her sister keep on giving birth like this? How many babies did she have up there anyway? Mathis had transferred the first two babies into two cribs—one pink and one blue—and as each baby came along, another crib appeared for it, magically. Soon he had a whole row of them behind him—a row of cribs, each with a yelling, red-faced infant inside it. They were making such a racket that Samantha could barely hear herself think.
Then the next baby came, but this one was different. It wasn’t yelling for one thing. It was quiet and alert, its leaf-green eyes staring thoughtfully into Samantha’s own as she gently toweled it off. It was a little girl, and she had blond hair—not dark like the rest of the babies.
Hmm, Samantha thought, staring at the tiny baby in her arms. This one is actually kind of cute.
She turned to hand the infant off to Mathis, as she had all the others, but when she tried to give it to him, he shook his head.
“Huh-uh, sister-in-law,” he said in that deep, rough voice of his. “This little girl is yours.”
* * *
Samantha woke up with a start, her heart pounding and her hands clenched into fists.
What the hell was that all about? The weird dream was still strangely vivid, playing out in her mind’s eye even as she took a deep breath and realized where she was.
“We’re now landing in Las Vegas,” announced the captain’s voice over the intercom. “Local time is seven forty-five in the evening, and it’s about eighty-two degrees and dry. Perfect weather for those of you who are going straight to the casinos and don’t plan to see the light of day until you fly back home again.”
The passengers around Samantha laughed dutifully. The “fasten seat belts” light blinked off, and everyone scrambled up and started digging through the overhead luggage compartments, eager to get their bags and get out of the plane.
Samantha blinked and forced herself to do the same, standing on tiptoes to reach the compartment, since she was a diminutive five foot three. But even as she grabbed her bag and filed from the plane with the rest of the passengers, she couldn’t get the weird dream out of her head, or forget her new brother-in-law’s voice saying, “This little girl is yours.”