Page 20 of Witchbane
“Did you get hit with a bunch of medical bills?” I asked Liam, having been wondering about it for a while. All those ER visits in which I’d run from as soon as I had been healthy enough to get on my feet.
“No. I looked. I suspect Wesley took care of that.” Liam found us a section of empty seats, and I sat down beside him. He filled out most of the forms for me, indicating where to sign, but asking me a few questions along the way about things like allergies and prior medications.
“Who’s Wesley?” my mother asked.
How to answer that? “A friend of the family.”
“The Volkovs?”
Not really. “You know anything about Dad’s family?” I asked my mom, seeing a section on the medical history about parents. Were they more fae? Or was most of what I had from manifesting regressive genes on my mother’s side?
“No. You know I don’t. Xander said he’d look into them, but never told me what he found.”
“Is there any medical history from your side of the family we should add?” Liam asked her. “Diabetes, cancer?”
“My mother died of lung cancer when I was five. But both my father and I have always been healthy. Even when I was pregnant with Seb, I never had a sick day. He was a good baby.”
Until I’d changed into a fox and become the bane of her existence. I felt Liam stiffen beside me, muscles tense as if he caught my thought, but he said nothing. He added her information to the form and clipped the pen to the top. After a moment he held his hand out again, palm up. I took it, letting the feel of him, his warmth and that gentle flow of calm, cycle through me. I could breathe, despite sitting next to my fuming mother in a human doctor’s office waiting to see some sort of fae doctor. Maybe we’d get answers. Whatever.
It didn’t take long for a nurse to call my name. The woman in scrubs greeted me with a smile. I handed her the clipboard. Liam and my mother had risen with me. “Will they both be coming with you?” The nurse didn’t seem to openly disapprove, I could see her looking at them.
“Only Liam,” I said, pointing to him. “I think he can help describe what’s happening to me.”
My mother began to protest. I shook my head at her.
“No. Liam is my advocate. He helps me focus. You can wait out here.” I followed the nurse through the door, waiting until she closed it behind us on my mother’s fury, and then followed the woman to a scale to be weighed. I had lost weight again. Dammit. Liam had been trying to get me back into a healthy range. I had been eating. I had.
We were led to a small, very normal looking room with a desk attached to the wall and a couple of chairs, along with an exam table. The nurse, whose name was Cindy, took my temperature and blood pressure, all in normal ranges, entered them into the computer, and let us know the doctor would be in soon.
“This is weird,” I told Liam.
“What?”
I waved a hand at the room. “Normal. Usually I only see ERs.”
“Yeah, let’s not do that.”
I laughed. “I’m okay with that. I mean, for a fae doctor, I guess I expected something different?”
“Looks the same as any place I’ve ever brought Korissa.” He pulled out his phone but the Wi-Fi wouldn’t connect. “Sometimes the walls are thick enough in these places that the signal is poor.”
“Or could be fae magic disrupting all the metal wires.”
“Could be,” he agreed. And because he was calm, I was calm. “How’s your stomach?”
“Okay, mostly. The nap helped.” Since it was after noon now, I was hours away from really feeling that crappy morning vibe. “I’m not a morning person.”
Liam grinned. “Really? I hadn’t guessed.”
“And bound to a baker. What kind of karma is that?”
“It’s only the job of the moment. I do enjoy baking. I’ve done a lot of other things in the past. Boring things like banking and factory work.”
“Served in a couple wars.”
“Yes. Those aren’t times I like to reflect on.”
He hadn’t shared a lot of that with me. And I was okay with that. We all had parts of our pasts that made us uncomfortable or unhappy. No reason to dwell there.