“Pregnant?” I yelled. “There’s no way. Do the test again!”

“I already did it twice,” today’s medical shifter said dryly. “You are most definitely pregnant. It happens, you know. Do you remember what pack the shifter was from? We’ll have the Alpha call over to theirs. And management will have to know—this is going to affect your work.”

Oh, was it ever. But all the pieces fit. Except for the fact that I’d never in my life slept with a shifter.

I sat numbly on the table while he called up to the office. At least he spoke to my mother and not Peregrine, which took that burden off me. She’d have some time to get used to the idea before she got here.

And so would I.

I was having a pup. Or a hybrid, though that was supposed to be impossible. I put a hand on my belly, as if I that would tell me what the fuck was going on down there, but it just felt like belly to me.

“It can’t be.”

He frowned. “I can send you out to have an ultrasound, if you want.”

“But…” I put my hand to my mouth and stared blindly at the lights above us.

"Why don’t you get dressed now. I’m done," the medic said kindly. "There’s a clinic in the city, I’ll see if they can take you this afternoon. I gather it's a bit of a shock."

"You could say that." Dressed. Yes, that was a good idea. I'd rather have this conversation wearing clothes. For once, being naked made me feel more vulnerable, not less. There was no power in this nudity.

I'd just finished buttoning my shirt when someone knocked on the door. The medic looked to me for permission and I nodded. Before I lose my nerve. Not that there was any escaping this.

Ma came through the door—thankfully, alone. "Salem?"

"Hi, Ma." I glanced at the medic, then back to her. "Do you want to talk about this at home?"

She looked at the medic. "You're certain?"

"Unless I've got a bad batch of pregnancy tests. I took some blood samples and I'll send them out for that and to check on a few other things just in case, but he doesn't have any of the symptoms of illnesses that could appear like a pregnancy. It looks like a normal two-month pup, but I’ll call to see if I can get you an ultrasound appointment for this afternoon, if you want to call your mate to run the paperwork for you."

"I’ll do that. Thank you." She turned back to me and I caught of whiff of something a little like anger in her scent. "Might as well go home. I told Peregrine you were sick, and we need to talk about this."

I followed her home. We were quiet all the way there. I assumed she was thinking hard about how she would bring the subject up with me. I was thinking hard trying to figure out how the hell this had happened.

Ma locked the door to the apartment behind us, then went upstairs. I heard her moving from room to room, probably checking to see that we were the only ones in the place, then she came back downstairs.

"Let's make some tea and we'll figure this out," she said in a voice that was much calmer than her scent.

"Ma, I swear, the only ones I've slept with were human."

She held up a hand. "Just let me get the tea made and we can hash it all out then." And she spun on her heel and walked into the kitchen.

Why did I feel like a little pup about to be scolded for breaking a window? I trailed along behind her and took a seat at the kitchen table. She'd put out new place mats after I left this morning—I hadn't seen these before, sunny yellow with lemons and lemon branches embroidered around the edge. It looked like her sewing. Neither of us was much of a hand with a needle for regular stitches, but we both had a knack for the decorative stuff.

Ma puttered around the kitchen, carefully not looking at me. I stared out the window at the back yard and wondered what I was going to do. The way I was now, I couldn't keep working. Besides, I'd start to show...when? Once you were obviously pregnant, they took you off the front of house roster. I could work cleaning rooms—I'd done it for three years until I was old enough to move to front of house—but the credits weren't as good and the work a lot harder. And as an unmated omega... I could just imagine the gossip and innuendos, especially once it got around that I didn't know who the sire was.

"Here, drink some of this. You still look pale." Ma put a mug of milky tea in front of me.

Obediently, I took a sip, and tasted real sugar beneath the canned milk.

"Now," she said, wrapping her hands around her mug and just letting it sit there, like she needed something warm to hug. "Let's figure out what happened."

"You believe me, don't you?" I pleaded.

"You've never been a liar," she said with a sigh. "I didn't want to believe you, but it would be strange if you started now. That's not the issue. Our biggest problem is that you're either pregnant or seriously ill. I'd prefer that it was pregnant."

My jaw dropped and I stared at her. How could she say that? "I think I'd rather be sick."

"No you don't," she snapped back. "You're still young enough that you think it's all romance and lying in bed, but I've seen what these reproductive diseases can do to a person. And they don't all make it out alive." She was frowning, but her scent held only fear and anxiety. "So let's try to figure out who could have gotten you pregnant. The medics will tell us if it's anything else."

"That's the problem, Ma. There is no one. I've never let an alpha near me that way. There aren't any here that I want bad enough to give up everything I have now." She knew how hard I'd worked for that apartment fund. If I mated now, even the old-fashioned way we'd given up decades ago, all that money would belong to my mate. Of course, the apartment would too, but if we sold it to buy something larger, my name would go on the new one beside his. Or hers. Come to think of it, why were we so old-fashioned about credits and so modern about property?

Oh, never mind. Time enough to figure that out later.

Ma rubbed her forehead and seemed to finally remember her tea. "Okay, let's go back then," she said as she placed her mug on the table again. "We only have the one week to look at, really, because if this had happened during your first heat, the second one never would have come on."

I nodded.

"Same for the first half of your second heat," she continued. "That would have stopped within a day. When did you notice a problem?" She got her tablet out of her bag and I watched her sign into our scheduling program and call up my schedule for November. "Here, we'll start from your schedule."

"Ma, those are all humans," I reminded her, but I looked over it, the names entirely unfamiliar now, two months later. "I dunno. I remember needing a new emitter in the room either here or here, I'm not sure..." But I was sure. It was the David night. The long booking. "This is when we changed it out, in between this date and this one." I pointed the two of them out. "Do you think maybe it was a false pregnancy? I remember smelling weird things that night and maybe it tricked my body."

"Certainly, a false pregnancy is a possibility," she mused, staring down at David's name. "What kind of weird things?"

I took a sip of my tea and dug through my memories. "I dunno, like my nose was playing tricks on me, or they'd done something with the pheromones in the emitters. I thought a couple times there was an alpha around somewhere but I couldn't see one. And my date definitely smelled like human." Tasted like one too, now that I thought about it, but Ma was already on the phone, so I sat quietly and watched her in puzzlement.

She put the phone down and looked across the table at me, her expression grim. "We're going to go get our passes to go in to the clinic, and if you are pregnant, we’re going to go sit down with your Da and the Alpha. There's nothing different in the emitters, but there are things that can change a shifter's scent. I never heard of anything that could make them smell human, but if you can do things to smell like a different kind of shifter, that's probably possible too." She tapped her nails against the table, frowning at the schedule. "What do you remember about that long date?"

Uh, okay. "It was good? He was handsome. A little awkward right at the beginning but once we got down to business, he was fine." Except he hadn't been. He'd been desperate and needy and had asked... "I thought, maybe he was one of those humans who went sweet on one of us? He knew a little bit about our people..." I was going to have to tell her, Lysoonka help me. I was going to have to confess. "He asked to see my wolf form."

She jumped to her feet, knocking the chair over onto the floor behind her. "You said no, of course!"

I stared at her mutely. I knew it was wrong. We weren’t dogs, we weren’t a sideshow. We might sell our bodies for pleasure, but shifting for the entertainment of those customers was so wrong we didn’t even really have a word for it.

And still, I’d done it. For him, because he was lonely and I felt sorry for him.

"Salem!"

The slap, when it came, stung like fire, but not as much as her disappointment hurt my heart. I put a hand to my cheek, but I couldn't meet her eyes.

"You silly, foolish boy! What were you thinking?"

"I know. I'm sorry." My eyes began to water, but I wasn't going to cry. I wasn't. I was twenty-two and almost ready to move out on my own. Crying wasn't something I did anymore.

A tear streaked down my unslapped cheek.

“Not a word of this to anyone if you want to keep your position,” Ma said in a tired voice. "Get up, go wash your face. I'll clean up and then we'll go up and see your father and the Alpha. They might have some other ideas on how to find your rogue alpha.”

"Are you going to tell them?" I asked.

She sighed. "I don't know. No.” She held out her hand, making a ‘stand up’ motion with her fingers. “Go, please.”

I went. My cheek had stopped stinging by the time I got up the stairs, but a bright red patch shone on that side of my face. I wet one of the facecloths from the cold water tap and held it to my cheek, staring wide-eyed at my reflection.

Stupid. Stupid, stupid omega. I’d ruined everything, all my plans, my future. Everything.

And worst of all, I knew it had to have been David, because even drowning in the midst of this disaster, my first thought was to throw myself in his arms and have him make everything okay.

Exactly like a mated omega would do.