Chapter 5
As it turned out, I didn’t have to open up the conversation at all. Shadow was waiting inside the door, ready to pounce when I came in. “What have you learned?” she demanded.
“Things might be getting a little complicated,” I said.
She jerked away from me and turned, pacing back and forth in my small apartment living room. “It was complicated before,” she said. “What’s changed?”
From his spot reclining on my sofa, Jeremiah watched Shadow carefully, his eyes tracking her every movement.
“She’s apparently been informed that her hyena Shield was kidnapped by a Hunter.”
I waited for the explosion that I assumed would come after that statement. However, Shadow took the energy that was fueling her pacing, and coiled it back in on herself. She became utterly still.
“So the wolves are turning all of the shifters against us.” Her eyes narrowed into a squint and her mouth tightened.
“We knew this would be difficult,” Jeremiah said. “There is nothing she can do, or that the werewolves can do, that makes our path any more difficult than it would be for any shifter and Hunter to follow.”
His words weren’t directed at me, but the sound of Jeremiah’s voice was soothing.
Hell, I could sit and listen to him read the phone book, and I suspected I would feel calmer.
Somehow that wasn’t what I had expected from a hyena shifter, given the unnerving sound of a full hyena’s laugh.
Shadow was nodding. “Okay, so what do we need to do?” She took all her contained energy and moved over to sit next to Jeremiah. She pulled her hair over one shoulder and began plaiting it into a long, blonde braid.
“I think we should wait until tomorrow, after she’s had time to put whatever she’s going to do into motion, and then we should reach out to her.”
Why wait until after?” I asked the hyena shifter.
“Keeya will not want to be embarrassed by having her meeting interrupted. She’s a kind leader, but she’s a very proud woman. If we wait until the morning, we should be able to speak to her when she is alone. That will give her time to determine how she wants to present this to the Council.”
I nodded, though my inclination would be to get it over with as soon as possible.
“Sounds good,” I said. This meant that the hyena and Hunter problem would be off my desk by the time I picked up Serena. I was all for that.
I considered leaving a message for Kade to call me back when he got home. However, I couldn’t decide whether it would be better to confess everything now, or wait until I had more information about what the matriarch was planning to do.
In the end, I opted to wait. It might’ve been cowardice on my part, but I preferred to think of it as continuing my counselor confidentiality for as long as necessary.
I would get Jeremiah and Shadow’s permission to tell Kade everything, I promised myself. But not until after they had planned out their next move.
* * *
I created an email account and logged Jeremiah into it the next morning.
“Use this to send me a message when you get everything sorted out. No one should be able to trace it,” I said. “I’ve taken this afternoon off from work, and I am picking up Serena, my…” I paused over what to call her, then decided to keep it simple. “My foster child, at 3:30. I should be available any time from noon to three if you want backup or moral support for whatever you end up doing.”
Jeremiah nodded. “Thank you. You’ve done so much for us already that I don’t know how we can ever repay you.”
“Pay it forward,” I said with a smile.
As I left the apartment, I finally allowed myself to show how relieved I was that the hyena and the Hunter were no longer going to be my problem. I still wasn’t certain I’d made the right move by allowing them to stay with me, and I was certain Kade would have some choice words about it when he learned the whole story. But in my defense, I hadn’t known anything about the hunters before one showed up on my doorstep. So I hadn’t realized the potential danger I was putting myself in as a shifter. Yet, it seemed to be working out okay in the end.
On the drive to work, I routed my phone through my car stereo and called my father.
“Hey, Dad. I have a favor to ask. It’s kind of a big one, and it’s kind of immediate.”
“What do you need?” he asked. I pictured his sun-weathered face, eyes lined from squinting against the West Texas desert sky during his many outings as a herpetology professor.
“Serena’s doctor thinks that she’ll do better learning to shift between human and reptile if she spend some quality time with me. I’d like to bring her out to the ranch this weekend if I can.”
“Of course,” Dad said. “You know you’re always welcome, sweetie. And I look forward to spending more time with her.”
“Maybe we can even get her to shift so mom might want to spend more time with her, too,” I said, laughing. Mom wasn’t anti-serpent, by any means—I don’t think any mother ever loved a child more than she loved me. But I also knew that she was much more likely to bond to Serena’s human infant form than Serena as a juvenile serpent. Dad had already fallen in love with her, from visiting her at the hospital, so that was no problem. In any case, I knew it wouldn’t take long for those two to become doting grandparents to however many infant lamias I brought home.
The ranch was a perfect place for me to spin this weekend. Kade was on duty in the ER, so he wouldn’t be around, anyway. And I was ready to get out of my own apartment and let the Jeremiah and Shadow situation resolved itself without me around.
Finally, it had been some amount of time since I had shifted into my most common snake form, and spent time with Suzy, the enormous python I particularly liked to snuggle up with when I went out to the ranch.
I wondered how Suzy would feel about being a grandmother figure to Serena, too.
For the first time, I was more excited than anxious about bringing Serena and the other infant lamias into my life.
* * *
Gloria hadn’t been thrilled at my request for time off to “work with my foster-daughter’s doctor to develop her treatment plan,” but there really hadn’t been much she could do about it—not only did I have some time off built up, but the CAP-C had a generous parental leave policy that applied to adopted and foster children, too. It would’ve been hypocritical for them not to, of course, since their entire reason for existing was the well-being of children.
And although I knew Gloria wanted to look out for me, I was irritated at her response to my decision to take in and work with these infants.
At any rate, though, there was no way for her to stop me, and after a morning meeting with the teenager who swore she had never been diagnosed as paranoid—a session in which we did not get very far, since she still insisted everyone she knew was out to get her—I left for the rest of the day during my lunch break.
When I got back to my apartment, Jeremiah and Shadow were waiting eagerly.
“So what did the matriarch say?” I asked, since I could tell they were both eager to let me know.
“Keeya is planning to have us meet her on Monday morning,” Jeremiah said. “We will call her early that day and ask her where to meet.”
I glanced at Shadow. She wasn’t thrilled with the arrangement, from the looks of her, but she seemed content enough to go along with it for now, anyway.
“I realize it is an imposition,” Jeremiah was saying, “but could we possibly…”
“You can stay here,” I said. “I’ll be away this weekend, but you can use my computer and contact me via that email I created for you, if you need to. And I stopped by a grocery store. There should be enough supplies here to get you through the weekend—be careful, and if anything comes up, you know how to reach me.” The two nodded, and to my surprise, Jeremiah, who seemed so reticent, reached out to give me a quick hug. Shadow did not follow his example, but she did nod gravely to me and gave a half wave as I headed toward the door.
It wasn’t the clear, clean break and ending that I had been hoping for, and I wasn’t going to be able to tell Kade about those two the next time I talk to him as I had hoped, but it looked like their situation was wrapping up fairly soon. At any rate, I didn’t think I needed to worry about them over the weekend. I hadn’t seen any sign of werewolf surveillance since going to Kade’s house, and I assumed if they suspected the hyena and Hunter had reached out to me, they would be watching me pretty closely. Just to be sure, I engaged my reptilian senses on the way out to my parking spot.
Nothing. I headed off to the hospital feeling pretty confident that everything here was going to turn out okay.
Shows what I know.
* * *
At the hospital, Dr. Jimson helped me gear up for Serena. He had been glad to learn that I was taking her to my parents’ ranch—even happier to discover that my father was a herpetologist. “So you’ll have everything you need for a juvenile serpent, I presume,” he said. I nodded—anything I didn’t have, Dad certainly would.
“I’m more concerned about what to do if she shifts into a human infant form.” My hands tightened into fists at the thought of it—not so much that I was worried about dealing with the baby, but this baby had come quite a bit early for a human, and I was worried that there might be some human infant difficulties that she would have to deal with.
I knew premature human babies often had trouble. Right? God, it had been so long since I had taken my child development courses that I could hardly remember. I knew that some of them ended up with pretty severe developmental delays, but professionally, I tended not to see them until they were in school. I sometimes got the younger sibling of one of my clients in for a family session, but my work mostly dealt with children five years and up.
Dr. Jimson was watching me with a slight smile. “Dr. Nevala was down here earlier making sure we had everything ready to go for you on that account,” he said. I blinked, startled by the comment. “Kade was here?”
Jimson smiled wider, and said, “Fluttering around every bit as nervous as any new father.”
I didn’t even answer that. I didn’t know what to say, for one thing. Like a “new dad?” Not, apparently, like a “supportive… whatever.”
I brushed the thought aside. I’d deal with it later. “What did you come up with?” I asked.
“First of all, we’re going to send her with you in a fairly standard terrarium with a warming lamp. I’ll help you secure it in the front passenger seat where you can keep an eye on it. I’m also having a traditional children’s car seat installed in the back seat. I’ll give you a quick lesson in how to use it, and then, if she shifts while you are driving out there, you should pull over immediately and move her from the terrarium to the infant seat.”
I didn’t even know what to say to that. The thought of her shifting while I was out on the highway made my head spin and my stomach clench. Surely she wouldn’t do that, though. Right?
Suddenly I wished I had waited until Kade could come with me. At least then I would’ve had someone else in the car to keep an eye on Serena.
Plus, I wouldn’t have minded seeing some of this new-father behavior for myself.
Dr. Jimson was still speaking. “I’m also sending a monitor for her heart rate and oxygen level. If she shifts while you are out at the ranch, you will need to hook her up to this, and keep track of it. You’ll have a small oxygen take that you can if she needs it as you bring her back into town.” He pointed out each of these items as he went through them, and I found myself nodding almost by rote, overwhelmed by all the possible things that might happen. Terrified by what might go wrong.
Dr. Jimson pulled out an infant-sized doll, complete with floppy head and arms. From a cabinet that ran along the side of the room.
“This is our CPR doll. We’ll use her to show you how to hook everything up and what to do in case of an emergency.”
Luckily, I was certified in CPR—it was a requirement of my job. That part didn’t take long at all.
As we went through the various other options, I snapped photos to use in case I ended up having to replicate any of the placement for these devices. Really, it didn’t look like it would be too difficult, and when Dr. Jimson had me practice for myself, it was all easy enough—on a perfectly still doll. I didn’t know how well it would work with a squirming infant.
I strapped the doll into the car seat a couple of times to show that I knew how to do it, and pulled my car around to a side entrance, where we were unlikely to be seen by any human patients. There, one of the nurses, Kelly, loaded the terrarium into my car, buckling it into the front seat. I drove away from the hospital slowly, more anxious behind the wheel that I had been since I was a teenager learning to drive.
Inside the terrarium, Serena raised up on the lower half of her body, peering at me and tasting the air molecules in my car.
“I know,” I said to her. “Things smell different out here, don’t they?”
I chattered to her about all the things we could go do when we got out to my parents’ land. I talked to her as I would a human child, discussing things with the assumption that she would learn language more quickly the more I talked to her.
I supposed it was really the same when it came to shifting. The more she saw it done, the more quickly she would learn to do it, too.
As she coiled in on herself under the lamp, though, I had to admit to myself that I knew exactly why she didn’t have any real interest in shifting right now. Human babies are frustratingly immobile. I didn’t know exactly how different a shifter child’s development was, but if she followed a normal human child development timeline, she was, what? three months? A long time away from even being able to roll over on her own.
As a serpent, she had mobility. Not much more than to the walls of the terrarium they were keeping her in, but mobility, nonetheless.
I didn’t know that I would want to shift, either.
For that matter, I sometimes wondered what it was that had prompted the, when I was a child, to shift at all. I had no idea how long I had been on my own when my father found me, but I had no memories before then. I suspected I had been in serpent form for quite a while. For all I knew, I had never been in human form before the night I shifted so that my father discovered me in my tank the next morning. As I turned into the driveway, and pulled up toward the house and the herpetarium in the back, my father stepped out of the back door and waved.
He was clearly excited to see Serena.
Maybe me, too, but I wasn’t certain. I had pulled to a stop and was smiling widely, when someone else stepped out of the house behind him.