Page 22 of His Unicorn Alpha (Shifters Sanctuary #3)

W hen I had told my girls that I would meet them soon, I hadn’t actually meant that I would meet them that same day. We weren’t ready. It was too soon. They would be so premature and one of them was already too small, and—

I stopped and took a breath, the pain on Brandt’s face a sharp reminder that I had to keep my shit together.

“Call Eric,” he replied after riding out another contraction. I couldn’t feel his pain through the bond, and I wasn’t sure if that was because he was shielding me from it, or because something in the magic knew not to incapacitate us both. “Let him know to prep the incubators.”

I didn’t understand how he could be so calm about it. About knowing that our girls would need special care for some unknown amount of time. About knowing that they probably wouldn’t be coming home with us for days, if not weeks.

At least being in the incubators will keep them safe and healthy, I reminded myself.

It hadn’t been that long since Eric and Brandt had purchased the supplies for a neonatal nursery in the lab. A handful of weeks, really. Eric had spoken to the staff at the two nearest hospitals, too, letting them know that we may request assistance in order to properly care for three premature infants. For all that Brandt and Eric were both doctors, neither of them had that level of experience or knowledge in pediatric medicine. As far as we knew, Eric’s promises to make healthy donations to the hospitals in question ensured that, when he put in the call for help, we would receive it.

Now that Brandt was in labor, I really hoped that help would arrive.

I climbed out of the tub and headed over to our pile of discarded clothes, digging through them in search of either one of our phones. I grabbed my jeans first and found my phone, bringing Eric’s contact information up before pressing the green call icon.

“Come on,” I huffed into the sound of the call ringing, “come on, come o—oh, thank God,” I cut Eric off as he answered, barely getting out the ‘he’ part of ‘hello’. “Brandt’s in labor.”

I didn’t know whether to be relieved or irritated when Eric barely reacted. “Okay. I’m assuming it’s only the early stages, so we have some time to get organized.”

“He…he said you should get the incubators ready. And, uh, maybe call those doctors or nurses or whoever was on standby to help out with the girls.”

“I’m already on it,” he assured me. “How is he doing? Is he feeling contractions? How far apart are they? Has his birth canal started—”

“How about I put him on the line?” I felt out of my depth and kind of useless as an alpha, but I didn’t want to get the answers wrong. This was my mate and children’s health we were talking about, and I wasn’t a medical professional. I was a makeup artist, for fuck’s sake. Trying not to panic, I thrust the phone in front of Brandt and hit the speaker phone icon on the screen. “You’re on speaker.”

For his part, Brandt gave me an almost amused raise of his eyebrow before he calmly answered Eric’s questions, wincing and rubbing his belly midway through the call.

“Because this is a higher risk pregnancy than the others have been, I think you should come down here as soon as you’re able,” Eric advised, making my pulse spike. “We need to get some steroids into you for their lungs. We can also monitor your progress more closely and can intervene if there are any complications. Are you good with that?”

“Of course,” Brandt agreed readily. “I am currently in the bath, but Micah will help me out and we will be there soon.”

“Yeah, maybe we’ll aim for a water birth next time,” Eric joked, and I felt myself go pale. Oblivious, he said, “See you soon,” and ended the call.

“Micah…” Brandt gently pushed my hand, holding the phone, towards my chest. “I am fine. We are fine.”

No thanks to me, I thought with derision, but I shooed the thoughts away and nodded. “I know. But, they’re still so early…”

“We knew that would be likely,” he soothed. “Multiples usually are. And there are three of them sharing very limited space in here,” he rubbed his bump. “They will do better with space to grow and develop further with adequate medical care. And I” —he paused to grimace— “I will do better once my body is my own again.”

I was still anxious, but I understood that he knew better than me when it came to these things. “Let’s get you out of there, then.”

“I take it back,” Brandt complained hours later, bent over the side of the hospital bed as another contraction wracked his body, “I take it all back. This is torture.”

I rubbed his back, unsure what to say or what to do to help him.

“I cannot even blame you,” he continued to complain, “because I did this to myself.”

“You can blame him for the next one,” Eric informed him with an easy shrug. “And potentially for inducing your labor, too.”

“Eric!” Brandt snapped his head up and glared at his brother.

“Wait,” I looked between them, “what? This is my fault?”

“No.” My mate’s voice was forceful.

Simultaneously, Eric said, “Potentially.”

“How?” I asked.

Eric grinned, clearly happy to have a captive audience for a medical lecture. “Well, sex can induce labor due to a number of reasons, including the hormones released during orgasm, and the lipid compounds in semen can—”

“ Aaargh ,” Brandt interrupted, his fists gripping the sheets so tightly that his knuckles turned white, “could you perhaps focus on your patient, brother?”

“You’re grumpy when you’re in pain, Bee,” Eric’s reply was blithe.

Brandt growled. “I am going to shift and eat you.”

“Then who will deliver your babies?”

Brandt panted and whined, widening his stance. “M-Micah could do it,” he said with a confidence I definitely didn’t agree with. “He is my a-alp- fuck !”

Inside me, my horse whined and stamped his hooves uneasily. I was right there with him. Seeing our mate in so much discomfort was unbearable.

“He is my alpha,” Brandt continued, as if he hadn’t just been close to giving me an aneurism with how much pain he was in, “and instinct would guide — oh, Gods, fuck — I need to push . ”

Eric smirked. “The magic words,” he declared, then dropped to his knees behind Brandt, who was still braced over the lowered hospital bed. He lowered it further still. “Let’s get this party started, hmm?”

“I am going to destroy you,” Brandt muttered at him.

“Yeah, well, before you do…could you move back a little and bend your knees. More of a squat…that’s it, good.” Eric looked up at me, as if sensing how completely useless I felt. “I need you to stay close in case you have to hand me supplies, but rub his back and hold his hands…whatever he needs you to do to get through this, okay?”

I just nodded.

My mate gripped my hand as soon as I offered it to him, and I used my other hand to continue to rub his back and his shoulders while he panted and whined. Eric told him to push when the next contraction crested, and he grunted and growled, squeezing my fingers as he followed the instruction.

“That’s it,” Eric encouraged him, positioned awkwardly where Brandt was squatting so he could keep an eye where it needed to be, “just like that on the next one, too.”

I was surprised when Brandt chose this as his preferred birthing position, having assumed it would be just like in the movies, with the laboring partner reclining on a hospital bed. But he had explained that this was preferable because gravity would work with the babies, not against them, and with three to push out…well, it made more sense to take every advantage he could get.

Still, it didn’t look like the easiest position for Eric to be in, having to watch from an awkward, crouched position on the ground, with a mirror on the floor between Brandt’s spread feet for additional guidance.

Eric didn’t complain, though. For all that he and Brandt (and Sage, when he was around), argued and stirred each other up, they loved and supported each other. This was just another example of that. Eric encouraged Brandt and praised him for every contraction and every push, even while Brandt bitched at him to stop being so patronizing. He just chuckled and kept at it, and I backed him up.

“You’re doing so good, sugar,” I murmured, pressing a kiss to the top of Brandt’s sweaty head. “You’re so strong, and we’re going to meet our girls soon because of you.”

“ Uuugggghh, ” he groaned, “it burns . I cannot… oh God , it’s too much.”

“Baby One is crowning, Bee,” Eric said, “that’s why it’s burning. This is the hard part. Push as hard as you can on the next contraction, okay?”

Brandt let out a strangled sob and shook his head. “I can’t.”

“You can ,” I insisted, squeezing his hand. “You’re a fucking dragon , baby. You can do anything.”

He yowled, not having the time to offer any kind of argument to my words before the next contraction built and crested. “Push, Bran,” I urged. “You’ve got this, and I’ve got you.”

“Almost there,” Eric added. “The next one will do it.”

Brandt was shaking his head in denial, and it broke something inside me to see tears rolling down his cheeks. “It’s too much. Too—” He cut himself off with a sound that was somewhere between a scream and a growl, then he slumped forward, his shoulders going lax.

At the same time, Eric declared, “Head’s out.” He looked up at me and smiled. “I think she looks like you.”

“Of course she does,” Brandt sighed. “I do all the work and she comes out looking like him.”

“She’s one of three,” I reminded him, glad that his humor seemed to be returning to him, “you might have the dominant genes in the other two.”

“Come watch,” Eric told me, and I was torn between holding Brandt’s hand and comforting him, and watching our firstborn enter the world.

Compromising, I kept hold of Brandt’s hand, but tugged it across the narrow, plastic mattress so I could lean around and— “Oh my god.” I was equal parts horrified and enraptured. It was a surreal sight to see a tiny head emerging from my mate’s body. Especially when it was out of an orifice which hadn’t existed until a couple of hours earlier.

I couldn’t tear my gaze away, squeezing Brandt’s hand as Eric coached him through delivering her shoulders. Then, all of a sudden, she was out, in Eric’s hands, taking her first breaths as she let out a warbling cry.

“Oh my god,” I repeated, hearing my own voice wobble. She was so tiny. Smaller than even Lena and Brandi’s babies had been. Like a delicate, porcelain doll…covered in blood and vernix and who knew what the hell else. But she was perfect.

“Congrats, guys, your eldest daughter is here,” Eric said, more for Brandt’s benefit than mine. “Micah, take off your shirt. Skin-to-skin contact is encouraged right now. Sit on the bed and hold her.”

He passed her to me after I was shirtless and helped me position her tiny frame in my far-too-gangly arms. I was convinced I would squish her or drop her.

“Say hi to Papa,” I heard myself say, turning my body and tilting forward so Brandt could see the perfection he had brought into the world. “You made this, sugar,” I told him as he rolled onto his side and reached out a hand to stroke over her soft newborn skin.

Tears blurred my vision watching him and I blinked, not knowing when I had started to cry.

“You’ve only got to do that twice more,” Eric told him, and he turned to level a scowl at his brother.

“You could not let me enjoy the reprieve from the contractions for even a minute, could you?”

Eric just rolled his eyes.

I snickered to myself and silently wondered if this girl in my arms would have the same kind of relationship with her sisters.

The first of the support nurses arrived midway through Brandt birthing our second daughter. The redhaired, human woman blinked in shocked surprise before she beamed brightly at us and scrubbed in, stepping to Eric’s side to help with the birth.

She earned major points for that, as far as I was concerned. Even though she scented as human, and seeing a man giving birth in the middle of rural Iowa must have thrown her for a loop, her professionalism and obvious joy to be a part of the moment instantly made her trustworthy to my alpha.

“And here’s Baby Two,” Eric beamed up at me, supporting our second daughter in his arms. She looked bigger than our firstborn, slightly plumper in the cheeks and belly, though still a scrawny-looking preemie, which was to be expected. The tuft of hair on her head was thicker and darker than the hair on the baby I was still cradling against my chest, and I smirked and leaned forward to kiss Brandt’s cheek.

“Baby Two is all you, sugar,” I told him. “So I told you so.”

My exhausted mate snorted and rolled onto his side again to watch as Eric transferred the baby to my other arm. As with our eldest, Brandt reached up and stroked his index finger down her flailing arm in greeting.

“Hello, precious,” he murmured, and I lost myself to tears again.

“Oh, that’s just too sweet,” the feminine voice startled both me and Brandt, and we looked to the nurse who cringed and held her hands in surrender. “Sorry. I’m so sorry. You’re just such a gorgeous family, you know?”

Brandt raised an eyebrow and looked at me in askance. I shrugged.

Eric chuckled. “You must be Tammy, right? Thanks for just jumping in.”

“It’s my pleasure,” she nodded. “And I am. Tammy, I mean. Hi.”

Her awkward wave and friendly smile only made her seem more endearing. She looked to be roughly my age, with thick red hair like Sage’s tied in a ponytail at the nape of her neck. Her eyes were bright blue, and she had a perfect hourglass figure. I imagined a number of the women in the town might feel threatened by her, if not for her easy smile and genuinely friendly personality. Or maybe even more so because of those things.

“If this is not the most awkward way to meet someone, I do not know what is,” Brandt muttered, then grimaced. “And I believe break time is over.”

Our third daughter came into the world far more quickly than her elder sisters. She was tiny —smaller than the others— and Eric and Tammy seemed to speed up as they worked to get her into an incubator before either Brandt or I could hold her.

My heart broke a little to see our tiny girl with oxygen tubes and a heart rate monitor and various other wires and tubes attached to her frail-looking body, but I knew that this was what was best for her.

With wobbly legs, Brandt climbed onto the bed and Eric guided him through passing the afterbirth while Tammy took our two other daughters and checked their oxygen levels and heart rates, then took their measurements, noting everything down before she smiled apologetically in my direction.

At the same time, with Brandt's labor ending, whatever magic had closed off the bond eased away, and I was able to feel his emotions again. I forced myself to pay attention to Tammy first.

“Their oxygen isn’t quite where it should be, so I think we should get them in their incubators as well. But I’ll defer to you, Doctor Weldman,” she added in Eric’s direction, and he shook his head.

“I trust your judgement on this. I don’t have as much neonatal experience.”

“But…Brandt didn’t get to hold them,” I protested, feeling my heart break all over again. It didn’t seem fair that my mate had gone through that entire ordeal and hadn’t held even one of his daughters.

“Two minutes,” Tammy said, bustling over with both babies in her arms. Brandt accepted them greedily, ignoring whatever Eric was doing to tidy him up post birth.

“Thank you,” Brandt’s voice was choked with emotion, and I felt the overwhelming love come rushing through our recently re-opened bond. I gasped and only barely managed to hold back my own sob as the cascade of feelings seemed to double my own.

Instead, I wrapped my arm around his shoulders and leaned in, pressing my cheek to his as we looked down at two of our babies together. He murmured low greetings to our girls, telling them how much we loved them and that we were so excited for them to meet everyone.

Then our daughters were whisked away by their uncle and his new assistant, and I felt Brandt's despair slam into me with such force that it took my breath away.