HAPTER ONE
“When you see him, you’ll feel it deep within your bones.”
This is what my great-great-grandma had told me when she’d been dying from emphysema at age ninety-six. I’d been fourteen.
She’d been an Appalachian woman, my great-great-grandma, from West Virginia. From one of the many coal mining communities there. From “deep mine country,” as she’d told me. She’d been fond of giving life advice to her daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter, and great-great-granddaughter.
“You’ll feel scared and elated all at once, when you see the man you’re meant to spend your life with,” she’d continued, holding my hand on her deathbed. “You’ll feel a quake deep within your bones.” Green eyes closing, she’d fallen asleep before startling awake and continuing, eyes wide open again. “Pay close attention to what he says to you first, Samantha, sweetie… because it’s what he says first that will reveal his greatest fears, and his greatest hopes and dreams to you. You may feel scared, and you may feel… unmoored somehow, but just listen. Just listen to what your man tells you first, because it’ll be a lie. But it’ll also tell you what he truly wants… and it may help you figure out what you truly want in the process.”
Sitting beside my great-great-grandma’s deathbed, holding her hand, at age fourteen, I’d felt a little “scared and unmoored” right then. I’d never met her before. She talked with a funny sort of accent. She gasped for each breath, and when she did, her whole chest rattled and shook. I felt terribly sorry for her. I felt some vague sort of love for her. I wondered if she was crazy.
My great-great-grandma didn’t get to say much to me before my grandma steered me away by separating our hands, gently pulling me up to stand, and then giving me a gentle push in the direction of the door.
She then fixed my great-great-grandma with a small smile before speaking. “Just rest now, Grandma. Samantha doesn’t need any of the old advice from the hills. She’s the new generation. The closest thing she has to a ‘man’ is the lead singer of a boy band called Like My Page. His name is Justin Smith-Donovan-McGee, he’s fourteen years old, I’m sure he doesn’t know that Samantha exists, and I’m sure he doesn’t make her ‘quake’ in any profound sort of way.”
My grandma chuckled at her own comments, but I just frowned at her.
“Yes, Grandma Jeannie, Justin does make me ‘quake.’ And I want to stay here with great-great-grandma Mary. You can’t kick me out. And if you keep trying-”
“Stop it, Samantha. You’ll upset your great-great grandma.”
Underscoring her words, my grandma frowned at me, hard. Great-great-grandma Mary didn’t look “upset” in the least. In fact, she spoke in the strongest, clearest voice she had all day.
“Just let me speak to her, Jeannie. I just…”
Great-great-grandma Mary took a deep breath, and before she could continue, Grandma Jeannie spoke to her, frowning.
“Just listen, Grandma. Samantha is the new generation. Her generation doesn’t understand or need any ‘advice from the hills.’ Girls don’t get married at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen anymore. For Christ’s sake. Samantha’s going to go to college. She’s going to establish a career. Then, she’s going to get married in her late twenties or her thirties, like most women do these days. And when she finally does get married, I’m sure it will be a union based on common interests and goals… maybe they’ll even work in the same career field. It won’t be a marriage based on some ‘voodoo from the hills’… some old-world ‘Appalachian quaking.’ Honestly, Grandma, why would you even talk to Samantha about any of this? About any of this… this old-fashioned folklore nonsense. Samantha won’t feel ‘elated’ or ‘scared’ when she meets her future husband; in fact, she’ll feel… well, I bet she’ll just feel nothing. That’s right. She’ll just feel nothing. That’s how women these days should feel. They should feel just like they’re meeting a fellow business colleague, because that’s probably just how it will be. Isn’t that right, Samantha? Once you’re out of your Justin Smith-Donovan-McGee phase, you’ll meet a man, and it’ll just feel like nothing. Isn’t that right?”
My grandma was pretty much just talking to herself by this point. Because by this point, my great-great-grandma and I were just ignoring her. Great-great-grandma Mary was just looking at me, green eyes sparkling from her half-sitting position in the bed. Nearly to the doorway, I was looking only at her.
“We have the same eyes, little Samantha. Bright green… wide-set.”
In response to the simple fact she’d stated, I just nodded. “I know.”
“Wait for it before you get married… wait for ‘the quake.’ Sometime in your life, someone will make you feel it. Pay close attention.”
I nodded. “I will.”
“Don’t be afraid if you feel scared. Does that make any sense at all?”
“Yes, Great-great-grandma Mary.”
Grandma Jeannie snorted. “All right. That’s just about enough.” Frowning, she made a sweeping motion with her arm, looking right at me. “Go out to the kitchen, Samantha. Go make some sandwiches for your mom and yourself. There’s some turkey and cheese and lettuce in the fridge… I could use a sandwich, too, myself. Please add a little bit of mustard to mine.”
Grandma Jeannie had motioned for me to leave the room again, and I’d left. I’d left, that is, after taking one more quick look at my great-great-grandma, whose eyes were so like my own.
I hadn’t been allowed to sit by her bedside again.
Her breathing had gotten worse. Her chest pain had gotten worse. In addition to emphysema, she also had early stage lung cancer. At her age, and because she’d wasted away to only eighty-something pounds, it was pretty much untreatable.
Her doctor had called in morphine. My mom and grandma had picked it up from the pharmacy and had started giving it to her. It made her quiet. It made her so that she only woke up maybe once every couple of hours, and even then, only briefly.
Two days after our conversation, I sneaked into her room and pressed a white, lined-paper heart into her hand. It read: I love you, Great-great-grandma Mary. I’ll take your advice. I’ll wait for ‘the quake.’ Thank you. Love, your great-great-granddaughter, Samantha
An hour or so later, I’d sneaked into her room again and had seen the heart-shaped note open, pressed against her chest, indicating that she’d read it. She was resting, eyes closed, but she was smiling. I’d backed out of the room without making a sound.
An hour or so after that, I’d heard Grandma Jeannie shriek.
“Gail, get in here! Gail, hurry! She’s stopped breathing! Oh, God. Oh, Gail. Well… this is the right thing, Gail, right? This is how the doctor said it would go!”
Gail was my mom, and she’d soon come flying into the bedroom, having been drawn by her own mom’s shrieks.
This had been the first and last time I’d visited my great-great-grandma. Her daughter, my Great-grandma Liz, had died the year earlier. Massive stroke. Aged seventy-eight. Great-great-grandma Mary’s son, Charles, had also died by this time, also from a stroke, aged seventy-one. He’d left no children, or heirs of any kind. Women alone carried the family bloodline now, with me being the youngest carrier.
The following year, when I was fifteen, Grandma Jeannie died in a car accident, aged fifty-six. This left only my mom and me, and some very distant relatives in the hills of West Virginia. I’d heard they were second cousins, or third cousins, once removed, or something like that. My mom wasn’t even really sure what they were. At any rate, they weren’t a part of our lives up in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
The years passed. I left my teens behind and entered my twenties. Currently, I was twenty-seven, and currently, I was experiencing “the quake.” In the thirteen years since my great-great-grandma had told me to wait for it, I’d slowly come to chalk it up as some sort of an Appalachian myth, or a strange, nonsensical folktale, just like my Grandma Jeannie had basically said it was.
What I was feeling at present was no myth, though. What I was feeling at present was one hundred percent entirely real. Some sort of a quake was rippling through my insides while I stood looking at the man in front of me. I felt a bit scared, for no good reason. I felt a bit elated, again for no good reason. I also felt more than a bit unmoored. In fact, if I were a boat, I would have been one bobbing adrift far out in the ocean, no anchor.
Wearing a neutral expression, the man in front of me extended his hand. “I’m Chief Reed Wallace. Please call me Reed.”
It’s just because he’s so handsome, I thought. That’s why you’re freaking out, Samantha. It’s just because of his looks.
That was certainly plausible, because Chief Reed Wallace’s looks were something to “freak out” over, for sure. I was sure he was the most attractive man I’d ever seen in my life. The very picture of tall, dark, and handsome, he honestly looked like a Hollywood actor, or a model maybe, except just a bit more rugged than the average actor or model, not that this surprised me at all. Most actors and models weren’t bear shifters, entrusted with protecting thousands of lives.
Struggling to remain looking into Reed’s eyes for some reason, I took his hand and began giving it what I hoped was a firm, entirely professional sort of handshake. “It’s nice to meet you, Reed. I’m Samantha Miller. Please call me Samantha.”
After dipping his head in the slightest of nods, indicating that he would, he said that it was nice to meet me as well. The fraction of a second of silence that ensued was too long for me, and I suddenly blurted out a few words.
“You have such a nice voice.”
Right away, I cringed inwardly. Probably outwardly, too. Idiot.
I had no idea why my mouth had seen fit to let pass the words that it had. Other than the fact that those words had been completely true, I supposed. Reed did have a nice voice, although nice didn’t even quite cover it. He had an amazing voice. Deep, rich, and tinged with just a hint of gravel, his voice was only further quaking my insides.
The fact that I was experiencing the mythical “quake” that my great-great-grandma had spoken of was probably the second reason I’d said what I had. Somewhat startled by it, I was recalling her words to me somewhere in the back of my mind, almost like hearing her voice from a distance. I was recalling how she’d told me that I’d feel scared and elated all at once when I met the man I was supposed to spend my life with, which I obviously was, currently. However, a feeling of being extremely flustered was quickly becoming the predominant feeling I was experiencing.
The third reason the words I’d spoken to Reed had just slipped right out of my mouth was probably because I was simply nervous, and had been since the moment I’d arrived in the village he was chief of, which was called Somerset. Really, I’d been low-level nervous during the lengthy drive to the village, too. It wasn’t every day that a woman met the bear shifter that she was being paid to produce a child with.
*
I hadn’t agreed to have a child with a bear shifter just for the money. Or, I had, rather, but not just for the money in and of itself. Not just to have money to blow on a new car or fancy jewelry or something. I wasn’t even into cars or fancy jewelry. The goal of getting the money was to save my mom’s life, and in order to do that, I needed a lot of money, and fast. I needed two hundred and thirty-eight thousand dollars cash, to be exact. This was how much the experimental treatment that might possibly save my mom’s life would cost.
A few years earlier, just about at the tail end of the Great North American Shifter War, she’d been diagnosed with an extremely rare form of blood cancer. It was so rare, in fact, that the oncologists at the prestigious Cleveland Clinic, where she’d been diagnosed, had only ever seen a few dozen of cases of it. They informed my mom and me that this particular kind of cancer appeared to have no genetic component, meaning that I or my future children would almost surely never get it, but this wasn’t even remotely my first concern when my mom was diagnosed. I just wanted to know what needed to be done to cure her, and how fast her treatment could start.
This was when the three oncologists sitting opposite my mom and me had all begin to look distinctly uncomfortable.
“There is no cure,” one of them had said, wincing slightly as she did so. “There’s only ‘buying time’ with this kind of cancer.”
Stunned and horrified, I hadn’t been able to speak.
Calmly taking one of my hands, my mom spoke to the doctor in a clear, unwavering voice, as if she’d been expecting the diagnosis that she’d just received. “How much time can I ‘buy,’ Dr. Anderson? And how do I do that? What treatments do I need to undergo?”
Dr. Anderson responded by saying that she could “buy” maybe three or four years by way of periodic rounds of chemotherapy. “This will slow the progression of the cancer… but it won’t stop it.”
My mom seemed to accept her diagnosis, but I didn’t. And it was only after getting a second opinion, and then a third, that I finally did.
The next three years were a blur of doctor’s appointments, hospital stays, and caretaking. My mom quit her job as office manager at a pediatrician’s office, which was a job she loved and had held for nearly two decades. I quit law school to take care of her. This was no big personal sacrifice to me, because my heart hadn’t been in it anyway. Me becoming an attorney had been more my mom and Grandma’s dream. In fact, around the time of my mom’s diagnosis, I’d been trying to work up the courage to tell her that I wanted to quit law school and pursue a degree in early elementary education instead. This is what I’d originally wanted to go to school for, having decided at ten or eleven that I wanted to be a teacher, but my mom and grandma had convinced me by my early teen years that I was meant for something “better” than “wiping first graders’ noses all day,” as Grandma had once put it. So, I’d somehow wound up in law school.
It was during year three of her periodic chemo treatments that my mom started saying she’d had enough. Enough of the poison, enough of its terrible side effects, enough of the hospital. Enough of it all. She’d added that, thanks to me, she’d checked off most of the things on her “bucket list” and was feeling “ready to go” anyway. Number one on her bucket list had been simply to “grow closer to my daughter—spend lots of time together,” and we’d done that. Number two on the list had been “look out on Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower,” and we’d done that, too. During a several-month break between chemo treatments, when my mom had been feeling decent enough to travel, her best friend, Irma, and I had taken her on a week-long Parisian vacation, going up to the top of the Eiffel Tower with her not once, but three times. Since medical bills had bankrupted my mom by this point, the trip had been funded by generous donations from her friends, and an extremely generous donation from one of the pediatricians she’d worked for.
The third thing on my mom’s bucket list was to scatter my dad’s ashes in a nature preserve near our home in suburban Fort Wayne, and we’d done that. He and my mom had been married a little over ten years when he’d been killed when the semi he drove for a living jackknifed on an icy highway. I’d been not quite nine. Because his death had been so unexpected, and because he’d been a fairly young man at the time, he and my mom had never discussed what he wanted done with his body after death. His mom and brother, who were his only close family members, had both passed away by the time of his accident, so they weren’t able to help my mom figure things out. So, she decided to have my dad cremated, keeping his ashes in a bronze urn in our home, saying that someday, when her “time to go” was near, she’d scatter them in the nature preserve that they’d both loved, and where she wanted her ashes scattered, too.
The fourth and final thing on my mom’s bucket list was simply to “hold a grandchild in my arms,” and very unfortunately, I was unable to help her with this. Not only was I not married or in a serious relationship with a person I’d want to have a child with, I’d barely even dated since my mom had gotten cancer. Men just simply hadn’t been a priority in my life, not that they ever really had been. My mom and grandma had always urged me to prioritize school and achievement over dating, wanting me to establish a career before I even thought about getting married, and I’d always went along with this. This wasn’t to say that I hadn’t had a few serious relationships in my late teens and early-to-mid-twenties, but I’d never had a boyfriend I’d wanted to marry anyway. All of my boyfriends had ultimately disappointed me in one way or another, not to mention that although I’d felt strongly about each of them, I’d never experienced the ‘quake’ that Great-great-grandma Mary had told me to look for.
When my mom began expressing that she was satisfied with what she’d been able to cross off her bucket list and didn’t want to continue with the periodic chemo treatments, I began trying to change her mind, begging her to just keep holding on. Even though the doctors were still saying that her cancer was incurable, I still had a little shred of hope that maybe they were wrong. Maybe one day the chemo would make my mom’s cancer spontaneously go into remission, or maybe one day a cure or a new treatment would be discovered. We just needed to keep buying time for as long as we possibly could, I felt.
No, my mom told me one day at our house, over mugs of tea at the kitchen table. “I’m tired, Sam. I’m tired. No more chemo. The last round was almost more hell than I could take, and I’m not going to go through it again… not just to buy a few more months of life lived while feeling absolutely terrible.”
“But-”
“No… I’m done, Sam. This cancer can’t ever be cured, and I’m ready to let things take their course. I’m ready to let things take their course while I still feel somewhat in control about it all.”
With that, my mom got up from the table, grabbed her cane, and began shuffling out of the kitchen. The cane was a recent purchase, bought only a couple of weeks earlier to help my mom walk in her rapidly-weakening state. Before the purchase of the cane, she’d sometimes have to walk while gripping countertops for support. Once, I’d entered the kitchen to find her sitting on the floor, saying that she’d just needed “a little rest” while making her way from the table to the sink, which was a distance of about fifteen feet. Seeing her in such a debilitated state, I’d begun crying, having a seat on the floor next to her, but she’d told me to not “waste” my tears on her.
“There are a lot of people who have it a lot worse, you know,” she’d said. “There are kids who get this kind of cancer… and I was blessed to have forty-something good years on earth before it got me.”
My mom’s lack of self-pity was one of the things I’d always admired about her. As a young widow, she hadn’t spent a lot of time feeling sorry for herself, either. “Life’s too short to spend time on that,” I’d heard her tell a friend once. Now it was clear that she hadn’t been wrong at all.
Several hours after she’d firmly told me in the kitchen that she wanted to discontinue her chemo treatments, Irma came over to the house, letting herself in as she always did, which my mom and I had never minded at all. Considering how long the two of them had been best friends, Irma seemed like part of our family, to the point that sometimes I even forgot that she technically wasn’t, at least as far as blood went. She and my mom had met about seventeen years earlier when my mom had started a social club in Fort Wayne for widows with children still at home, and they’d been pretty much inseparable ever since, despite a twelve-year age difference, with Irma being older than my mom. Once they’d even dated a pair of brothers, thrilled with the idea that they might one day become sisters-in-law. However, when their relationships both ended, they’d come to the conclusion that they were “basically sisters” anyway, as Irma said, and that becoming sisters-in-law would just be redundant.
When Irma came tearing into the kitchen, brandishing a rolled-up magazine, I jumped about a mile, startled. Lost in thought about my mom and her decision to end treatment, I’d been slowly stirring a kettle of chicken-and-vegetable stew for dinner, almost in a trance. My mom had been in her room ever since our conversation at the table a few hours earlier, telling me that she just wanted to continue being alone for a while when I’d poked my head in briefly.
I’d barely even said hello to Irma when she slammed the rolled-up magazine on the countertop next to me, eyes sparkling and face flushed. “Look at this, Sam. Just look. Here’s hope. Here’s what we’ve been waiting for.”
Thoroughly confused, I unrolled the magazine and looked at the headline of the article that had gotten Irma so excited. Swiss Doctor’s “Cure” for Rare Blood Cancer: Real Deal or Junk Science?
My heart had begun pounding the moment I’d read the word cure, no matter that it was in quotes, and my heart began beating faster still when I began reading the article, quickly seeing that the “rare blood cancer” mentioned in the headline was the exact form that my mom had. By the time I got to the last paragraph of the short article, my heart was galloping so fast that I felt slightly lightheaded.
When asked about the fact that the clinical trial results of his unorthodox radiation-and-herbs therapy hadn’t yet been peer-reviewed, Dr. Hermann simply stated that that was of little importance to him. “My therapy works, and at this point, my patients’ results should be all the proof of efficacy that is needed. Ninety-five percent of patients I have treated in the past three years have been cured, some for over two years, and these results have been verified by research fellows at Harvard University.” Dr. Hermann added that anyone interested in visiting his clinic for therapy should visit his website.
So excited that I was tripping over my words, I asked Irma to please pull out her phone and look up the website, except I actually asked her to please pull out her website and look up her phone. Not even pausing to laugh or correct me, she grabbed her phone from her pocket, obviously knowing exactly what I’d meant to say anyway.
A few minutes later, the two of us finished a cursory tour of Dr. Hermann’s website, including following a link to a short paper written by a Dr. Christina Bennett, and published in a Harvard medical journal, basically stating that Dr. Hermann’s claim of having discovered a cure was true based on patient results, which Dr. Bennett had verified herself.
Despite this, I sank into a chair at the table, feeling like a balloon that had been popped. “Where on earth will I get two hundred and thirty-eight thousand dollars from?”
This was the going rate, cash only, for Dr. Hermann’s “cure” and a five-month stay at his Swiss clinic, which was how long he claimed it took for a patient to be treated.
“Right now, I have about three hundred dollars in my checking and savings combined, and Mom has even less.”
Since I’d been taking care of her, I’d only been able to work part-time, doing secretarial work for a law firm in town for thirteen dollars an hour. And since my mom’s most recent round of chemo, I hadn’t even been able to manage that, taking an indefinite leave of absence from the job because I was scared of leaving my mom home alone in her weakened state.
In response to what I’d asked about how I was supposed to come up with nearly a quarter of a million dollars, Irma suggested we have a spaghetti dinner for charitable donations. “Remember the one we had at my church a few years ago to come up with the money for that special anti-nausea drug that your mom’s insurance refused to cover?”
I did remember. After the expense of the food, that spaghetti dinner had raised about two hundred and eighty dollars, which had been just enough to buy the medication my mom needed, and we’d been incredibly grateful. However, that amount was obviously far short of what Dr. Hermann required for his fee. When I pointed this out, Irma said she realized that, but that we’d just have to have a bigger spaghetti dinner this time.
“We’ll just have to get more churches involved… community groups, too. Maybe we can even buy some radio advertising for the dinner, and-”
“But you know my mom will never go for this. She felt guilty enough with just the first spaghetti dinner. Remember? She said she felt ashamed that a charity dinner was being held for her benefit when it could have been held for a child with cancer, or an ill parent with young kids to raise or something.”
She’d also initially refused to go on the Paris trip when Irma and I had surprised her with the plane tickets. Crying, she’d said that putting the idea on her bucket list had really been “silly” and “selfish” of her, considering that there were sick children in the world. Irma and I had had to do some pretty intense metaphorical arm-twisting before she finally agreed to go on the trip and accept it as a gift from her friends. And this was only after Irma and I had made a not-insignificant donation to the Make-a-Wish Foundation for kids in an effort to assuage my mom’s guilt, using a portion of our spending money for the trip to do it.
In response to what I’d said about my mom never getting onboard with another charity spaghetti dinner, Irma sighed. “Well, all right. Maybe you’re right about that. But, then, where does this leave us?”
I said I had no idea.
We both fell silent.
Irma turned her gaze downcast at the article about Dr. Hermann, frowning, before returning her gaze to my face after a few moments with a sigh. “Well, let’s have a bite of whatever it is you’ve got on the stove while we think. I’m hungry as a bear.”
I said all right and got up to set the table, about to ask Irma if she could go down to my mom’s room and ask her if she felt strong enough to have some dinner up to the table with us. However, before I could, Irma grabbed my arm, big blue eyes wide.
“Sam. Bears. That’s it!”
“What?”
“It’s worth a shot, anyway.”
“What is?”
“Sit back down.”
I did, and Irma went on to ask me if I’d heard about the government program that paid young women a lot of money to marry into various animal shifter groups in the nation in order to produce shifter children.
“The young women have to be what they call ‘gene-positive,’ though, meaning that they have to carry the shifter gene… and not many do.”
Nodding, I said I’d heard about the program. “But what does it have to do with me?”
I couldn’t imagine. As far as I knew, I had no shifter ancestry in my family, so I thought it highly unlikely that I’d turn out to be gene-positive if tested.
Irma answered my question by seeming to read my mind, saying that the National Shifter Mating Program, or NSMP, might have “everything to do with” me, even though I had no shifter ancestry in my family. “See, I’ve heard that some women test gene-positive anyway, probably having some shifter lineage hundreds of years back or something… too far back to trace. And apparently, sometimes the gene still carries itself right on down. This means that there’s at least a small chance that you could have it… and even if it’s only a one-in-a-thousand chance or something like that… well, isn’t a small chance better than no chance? And shouldn’t you get tested just to see? Because if you were to come up as positive… well, maybe you could raise the money for your mom. Maybe you could even meet a wonderful man and start your own family in the process. Lord knows your mom has felt terrible about you basically having to put your life on hold to take care of her while she’s been sick.”
Long story short, I got tested for the gene. And, somewhat unbelievably, I turned up positive for the bear shifter gene. I didn’t just have the gene, though. I had something called the “shifter supergene.” The folks at the NSMP tried to explain it all to me in scientific terms, but never having taken any science classes beyond basic biology in college, I honestly didn’t even understand it all.
Here’s what I did understand. Women possessing the shifter supergene were exceedingly rare, “probably one-in-a-million, literally,” as one of the doctors at the NSMP told me. This made me, and any offspring I produced with a bear shifter, extremely valuable, and not just valuable because all shifter children were valuable, because they’d be crucial to the nation’s continued defense against the Bloodborn shifters in the coming decades. The offspring a “supergene-positive” woman like me produced would be valuable for a different reason, which was that my offspring would be unusually strong. Any baby girls I had would also possess the “supergene” themselves, and any baby boys I produced would become incredibly strong shifters when they reached adulthood. This meant that they’d be crucial “weapons” in the nation’s defense against the Bloodborns.
Another thing I understood was that a “supergene” baby of mine, whether boy or girl, it didn’t matter, was desperately needed by one particular group of bear shifters in the nation right then. The members of this group, who lived some place called Somerset, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, had been injured or something by some biological weapon that the Bloodborn bear shifters had unleashed on them. The maker of the weapon had been killed, but the damage was already done, and now in their weakened state, the bears of the United States Shifter Federation, or USSA, were having great difficulty maintaining their territory and keeping their people safe. However, scientists from the NSMP thought that transfusions of minute amounts of blood from a shifter baby born to a mother possessing the “supergene” could potentially return them all to full strength. A man named Reed Wallace, the leader of the northern USSA bears, had volunteered to impregnate one of the very rare “supergene” women in order to bring a very powerful baby into the world and save his community.
“You won’t even have to marry him or anything if you don’t want to,” a woman from the NSMP told me. “Usually, we require that two people in a Mating Union be married before any payment to the female partner is made, but we’ve decided to leave that part of the deal up to you and Chief Wallace, since he seems to be looking at this chiefly as a business arrangement to help his people.”
Since this was the case, I’d asked if it might be possible for me to just be inseminated, then, but the woman from the NSMP said no.
“See, in the very early days of the program, we tried that with a few couples, but it just didn’t work. One of our scientists could probably explain this better than I can, but it seems that when it comes to shifters mating with human women, even gene-positive ones, the ‘natural’ way of mating works best. Why this is, and why shifter babies aren’t easily created as ‘test-tube’ babies, I’m not sure I could explain properly.”
That was fine. I didn’t think I’d mind having to sleep with a shifter a few times in order to do what I needed to do to possibly save my mom’s life, which was conceive and get paid, which I was beyond eager to do. This was because I was told that I would be paid a cool quarter-million dollars upon becoming pregnant with the child of a bear shifter, payable to me the moment I received a positive pregnancy test administered by a medical professional. I would receive another quarter-million upon live birth of the baby. This was just how much me and my “shifter supergene” were worth to the government, and the USSA bears of Somerset.
This was all how I’d come to be standing in front of Chief Reed Wallace in his driveway on a blustery day in late March. This was all how I’d come to meet the man who’d made me “quake” in the way that my great-great-grandma had told me to wait for.