Page 3

CHAPTER 3

The baby was naked, and it was a girl. She lay on her back, light pink and rosy, a bit dusty but not hurt or even sunburnt, as far as Diana could tell. Her face was screwed up as if she couldn’t decide whether or not to cry.

And she was a shifter. As Diana crawled over to her, not wanting to alarm her, she could feel it strongly—but also with a faint undertone of ... something . She had never felt anything quite like this before.

“Hi, sweetheart.” Diana was no baby person; she had never changed a diaper in her life. What she did have experience at was soothing scared, hurt people. And a baby was still a person, just a small roly-poly one.

Diana reached carefully for the little girl. As her hands came near the round infant body, the baby seemed to make her decision about whether Diana was a threat or not. She let out a single healthy-sounding squall, and then shifted.

Abruptly, instead of a little girl, there was a baby animal that seemed to consist mostly of legs. It was lying on its back, as the girl had been, and it flailed frantically, waving its legs all over the place.

“Whoa, careful, you’ll hurt yourself!” Or escape into the brush, as the baby evidently had been trying to do when Diana startled her. Diana hadn’t realized that baby shifters’ ability to walk was so advanced compared to their human age. But she didn’t remember learning to walk any more than the next person, and she hadn’t made a habit of being around small babies.

It was hard to tell what exactly the little girl turned into, except that it was something in the general hoofed animal family—deer? Gazelle? Whatever she was, the child thrashed herself upright, more or less—at which point Diana became aware of a brand new problem.

There was something terribly wrong with the little girl’s back. Even as Diana got over her initial wave of shock and horror, the baby flexed some tiny muscles and then Diana realized that what she had initially seen as an awful injury was actually a pair of stubby, unfledged wings that flapped wildly.

“What?” Diana said aloud. No deer had wings. And the rest of the baby was definitely something of the deer-horse-cow variety. Nothing like that had wings because wings were adapted from front legs and that meant this baby had a whole extra pair of limbs on her back.

All of this ran through the analytical part of Diana’s mind, and then she realized that she was about to lose the kid in the thicket. Not wanting to hurt her, but unable to think of anything else to do, she shrugged out of her jacket and slung it as carefully as possible around the struggling child, capturing her as if in a butterfly net.

It was at this point, as she tried to contain about twenty thrashing little hoofed legs, that Luis climbed down from the top part of the wing rather than going underneath as she had.

“No survivors,” he reported, his face and voice grim. “The pilot didn’t make it—what have you got there?” Diana was engaged in trying to contain the child gently, but she heard his voice change when he realized Diana had something alive with her. “Is that a shifter?”

“It’s a kid, a shifter kid. I don’t think she’s hurt. She’s just scared. Give me a hand here.”

Even as she spoke, the struggling bundle collapsed in her arms and suddenly she was holding a jacket-wrapped baby who began to cry.

“Uh,” Luis said as Diana thrust it at him.

“You’re a paramedic, you handle this.”

“I’m not good with babies,” Luis protested, awkwardly taking the bundle. “It really doesn’t come up as often as you’d think!”

“You probably have more experience than I do, which is none!”

“Yeah, but you’re—” Wisely, he hesitated.

“A what? A woman, Luis? Yes, and? It’s not like the parts come with a manual!”

The baby was crying loudly enough, muffled in Diana’s jacket, that she took it back out of pure sympathy. It was true that she had no idea how to hold a baby, beyond vague hints gathered from TV, but she cuddled it close to her body and that seemed to help. The wailing faded to muffled whimpers.

“Luckily it hasn’t been too long since the crash,” she said to Luis over the top of the baby. “She will have been doing okay out here in her shifted form. Oh, stop looking at me like that.” She’d caught his awwww expression. “I said I’m not good with babies, but I’m also not an idiot. I can figure it out on the fly. We need to get back to the helo and report in. What did you find inside? Any sign of her parents?”

“No, it fits the information we got. No one in the plane other than the deceased pilot. There were some ropes and cages and things, which makes sense if they were transporting animals on the way back.”

Diana didn’t ask if the pilot was a shifter. After death, it was impossible to tell, unless they had been caught mid-shift. “I want to take a look.”

Helping each other and passing the baby back and forth, they climbed over the wing. Once they were on the other side, Diana gave the baby to Luis, who held her with a little less nervousness now that she was no longer crying. With her hands free, Diana clambered up the side of the plane’s tilting, damaged fuselage. The side door had popped open in the crash. It looked like this was how Luis had gotten in. Diana leaned inside to have a look.

As Luis had said, the pilot was dead. She didn’t linger on that part, although she noticed in passing that Luis had respectfully covered his face.

Instead she looked around the inside of the cabin. Luis was right, it looked like ropes and some small cages may have been used, or intended to be used, for restraining animals. But there was no sign of any animals now.

Diana leaned out and saw Luis sitting on a rock, jiggling the baby on his knees where it looked like he had been giving her a quick exam. “She’s in good shape, though she’ll need food soon,” he said. “And even more important, fluids. Luckily she hasn’t had much time to get dehydrated, but it’s dry out here and she’s young.”

“And cold,” Diana murmured. But the baby didn’t seem hypothermic. She had probably spent most of the time since the crash in her shift form. She was scared, but not much worse than that, it looked like. She’d been incredibly lucky.

But that left a number of questions, such as why the plane had crashed, how the baby had survived, and whether there had been anyone else on board.

“Once crash investigators start crawling all over this, we will have lost our chance to tuck away anything that gives away the existence of shifters,” she said. “So this is our only opportunity.”

“You want to hold the baby, or?—”

“You seem to be doing fine.”

But they ended up trading off, and Luis was the one who crawled around in the wreckage and eventually came back empty-handed. “I dunno, there’s trash, but I can’t tell what’s useful. You want to look?”

Diana shook her head. “I didn’t see anything at a glance, and if you didn’t either, there’s probably not much that we could find. Let the investigators handle it.”

“You think we’re gonna get in trouble? We’ve basically left fingerprints everywhere and then walked off with evidence.”

“We were first responders at a crash. We did due diligence in checking for survivors. Of course we left traces, it’s impossible not to.”

The baby had fallen asleep in her lap. Diana told herself firmly that this was not a maternal urge stirring in her chest. She stood up carefully, trying not to disturb her burden too much. “One of us can climb holding the—oh, drat it!”

The baby spasmed in her arms and shifted. Suddenly Diana was dealing with legs and wings everywhere. The baby spilled out of the jacket onto the ground, and as Diana hastily crouched down to catch her, Luis said, “What the heck ?”

Right, he hadn’t seen the wings yet.

“She’s not a normal shifter,” Diana explained.

This time, instead of running away, the baby nuzzled against Diana’s chest. Her nose was incredibly soft. Okay, that was definitely a wisp of a maternal urge trying to fight its way out. Diana ruthlessly suppressed it.

The little girl’s shift form was adorable. She had a tapered, delicate muzzle and huge dark eyes surrounded by thick lashes. Her ears were enormous, flattened against her neck as she quivered nervously. Her small nose was black, her fur buff with cream markings. The wings looked like they were growing in buff and cream with black banding, although it was hard to tell since they were still so small, lacking the full growth of flight feathers. Diana guessed she could get airborne by fluttering, and she might have flown or glided in the crash, which was Diana’s best guess for her survival.

But as for what kind of shifter she was, Diana had no idea. She had never seen anything like her before.

“What do you suppose she is?” Diana asked.

“I have absolutely no idea.” Luis crouched down and cautiously petted the tiny wings. The baby wobbled wildly, her legs trying to go all directions at once, and Diana caught her with a hand under her belly. “I mean, if not for—these, I’d say she’s a pronghorn, or some kind of antelope or deer, I’m not sure exactly. But ...”

“There’s no such thing as a winged antelope.”

“Not normally, no.”

The baby decided to stop dealing with her uncooperative legs and lay down with her head in Diana’s lap. She closed her long-lashed eyes.

“Do not say anything,” Diana said to Luis.

“I was just gonna say it’s the cutest darn thing I’ve ever seen.”

“I’ll accept that, but if you say one word about womanly instincts, I will end you.” Lightly stroking the tiny head, Diana looked up the ravine. “Come on, let’s get back up there. We’re already past our check-in by now, I bet. Let’s just hope Caroline didn’t send the entire county emergency department after us.”

It was a difficult scramble up the ravine, passing back and forth the jacket-wrapped baby (now an antelope and evidently determined to stay that way). After a while, Luis went ahead, and Diana finally emerged from the brush—sweaty, covered in leaves and twigs, clutching the baby—to see Luis wave at her from the helicopter.

“No reception on the radio,” he said when she joined him at the machine. The baby was a baby again, snuggled against Diana’s shoulder.

“Right,” she sighed. “We’ll have to take the machine up to get reception and then call it in.” She looked Luis in the face. “You know we can’t let anyone see her shift.”

The paramedic’s face was serious. “I know.”

“Once we’re able to hand off the crash to the investigators, we’ll take her straight back to town.” Diana hesitated. There was a protocol for these situations; the baby should go to a hospital, where she would be thoroughly examined and her parents sought. That was the best thing for her, too, in some ways. But in others ... they had a responsibility to protect her shifter nature from exposure.

“What are you thinking?” Luis asked, chucking the baby under the chin. The little girl waved her arms and grinned.

“Her or me?”

“Either of you.”

“I don’t know if we should report finding her,” Diana said slowly. “Luis, I just don’t know. We gotta contact the SCB about this. They can help with finding a shifter-friendly foster placement and keeping her out of the regular hospital and foster system. But they’re not here, and we can’t get them here in time. We have to decide whether we’re going to report her or not.”

“She didn’t get here on her own,” Luis pointed out. “There wasn’t supposed to be a baby on that flight. She was kidnapped, or—something.”

“I know. And that’s the other thing. What if we enter her into the foster system, and she’s immediately kidnapped again? Or something else happens to her?”

Luis rubbed his mouth with one sturdy hand. “If anyone finds out we falsified a report and hid a baby ...”

“I know. Our careers will be toast.” Diana stroked her palm lightly over the baby’s fuzzy head. “I’ll set my career on fire if it’s needed to do the right thing. I just don’t know what the right thing is. And once the decision is made?—”

“—There’s no going back,” Luis agreed. “I’ll back whatever your move is.”

Diana grimaced. If only there were shifter emergency personnel on the scene, other than the two of them. She and Luis had dealt with shifter-related medical emergencies before, and she had worked with the SCB to help cover up shifter incidents. But there was no one to call in this isolated place, no one but the two of them to make a decision. Once they got in the air and reported in, whatever they told the dispatcher was going to be the account of record.

“Listen,” Luis said quietly. “If it’s her physical welfare you’re worrying about, we can take her to my place to give her a full exam. I have medical supplies there, because I sometimes treat shifters off-books. After that, I don’t know.”

“After that,” Diana said, and the rightness of her choice crystalized even as she spoke, “I know a guy.”