Chapter 2 Nate
Nate
Calder got to his feet faster than anyone that big had a right to.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he said, leaning down beside me and looking in the window. “There’s a fucking baby.”
“That must’ve been what the wise men said, too.
Fuck.” Calder grunted something that might’ve been a laugh under other circumstances.
I stared through the window at the curly-haired toddler slumped in the seat nearest me, his—his?
I mean, kids all looked the same, pretty much—eyes closed and arms splayed out limply, and beyond him, at the baby-blanketed lump in a car seat.
I had to move. Every second counted.
But I stood frozen in horror like I’d never known before, and from me, that was a strong fucking statement.
If that baby wasn’t alive, I was going to lose my shit. And probably never be the same again.
Maybe neither of them was alive.
Oh, gods. My head went light and spinny, and I stumbled back a step—right into Calder’s iron bar of an arm, outstretched to catch me.
“Keep it together,” he said—and from someone else it could’ve been mean, or patronizing. But his low, rasping growl of a voice held nothing but bone-deep empathy.
I’d finally heard the story, from my mate’s cousin Jared (who also happened to be my ex and also also Calder’s mate, and I really truly loved trying to explain that little daisy chain to random people who asked how I knew…
literally anyone in my life), of how Calder had ended up becoming Arik’s brother/father in the first place.
And while this giant, glowing-eyed, scowling tower of terror beside me might be twenty-plus years and a million lifetimes of scary shit removed from the twelve-year-old who’d found a starving, abandoned bobcat shifter kitten crying behind a dumpster and bottle-fed the pathetic tiny creature until it thrived, I didn’t think that kind of trauma ever went away.
Gods only knew it hadn’t for me after some of the things I’d seen when I was too young, and I’d had a safe place to figuratively—not a cat or a wolf myself, thank you—lick my wounds for a couple of years now.
Kids who might be dead or dying, fuck. No one could walk away from that unscathed, but the stupid fucking gods couldn’t possibly have picked two people less likely to handle it well than us.
Christ.
“Okay,” I whispered, and tried to clear my throat. I nearly threw up from the effort. “Yeah.”
“I can see this one’s heart beating. Get him out and start warming him up. Don’t know about the baby. I’ll—go around and find out.”
Oh, thank gods. I couldn’t fucking do it. But if this one was alive, seconds counted—and all at once I could move again. I wrenched at the car door with more strength than I usually had, the grinding and screeching of bent metal nearly deafening.
The little boy’s eyes opened as I crowded into the half-open door.
Clear dark brown, framed by soft eyelashes.
With a look in them…I reached out with more of my senses.
Now that I had the car door open they were working again.
What the hell had been up with my not being able to detect their life forces when I’d tried before?
“He’s a shifter, I can feel his magic,” I said as Calder got the door open on the other side.
Well, ripped it off the car and tossed it over his shoulder like I’d throw a piece of cardboard, but details.
My heart was pounding nearly enough to crack my ribs as wide open as this wrecked sedan.
“Is the baby, is the baby, fuck, shit, sorry, don’t repeat that,” I muttered to the toddler, as I reached in and started trying to undo his seatbelt.
“Baby’s alive,” Calder said a second later, and I nearly fainted with relief. “And she’s a shifter too. A werewolf by her scent. There’s an adult woman up front. Human. I think she’s alive, now that I can smell her. Reach up and check.”
I gave up on the seatbelt long enough to crane my neck and try to see into the front of the car, cursed again, and summoned a little ball of mage light, having to focus way too hard for something so simple.
The pale lavender globe hovered up near the roof of the car, letting me see the slumped form of a person in the driver’s seat.
Bending my wrist the wrong way around the headrest made me curse some more, and then I remembered I still had gloves on, and by the time I’d gotten one off, the toddler had expanded his vocabulary a whole lot more. Oops.
Finally I got bare fingers against her neck.
Still warm, faintly. And—thank gods. “She has a pulse,” I told Calder.
“Mama,” said the toddler, his voice a raspy, pitiful little croak.
“Yeah, mama,” I replied, the heavy feeling in my chest and the sting in my eyes making me want to slap myself across the face. I wasn’t sentimental. Fuck. I turned back to get him out of the car. “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of all of you, I promise.”
Maybe I had no basis for that, but I’d never meant anything more, and when he reached his arms up to me trustingly, letting me hoist him out, I couldn’t even pretend not to be all choked up.
***
By twisting road, the crash had happened a good five miles from the pack house.
But as the werewolf ran, it was only about a one-minute flat-out sprint.
When a task required running, I was just as likely to lie down and hope for the best, so I’d definitely mated the right life partner.
Ian had the fight and flight covered for both of us.
Which meant that by the time Calder had gotten me and the kids settled in the back seat of our car with the engine and heater running, and had gone back to evaluate their mom, my quick, frantic text to Ian had already borne fruit.
Ian burst out of the trees first, flowing from huge, tawny wolf to huge, naked human as he did. I never got tired of watching his shift.
I never got tired of seeing him naked, either, but with the baby cradled to my chest in a desperate imitation of the way I’d seen people do it on TV, and the whimpering toddler wrapping himself around both me and the baby, and the fact that both of them smelled like pee, I didn’t have much motivation to ogle my mate.
A moment later, a much smaller furry form slipped between two trees, wavered, grew taller, and resolved into Arik, his long blond hair all tangled around his pale, tattooed body.
He jogged over to the wrecked car and shoved Calder unceremoniously out of the way as only he and Jared would dare to do, going straight for the unconscious woman.
He’d proved his healing skills a dozen times over—I wouldn’t have been alive without his intervention.
Neither would Ian. I allowed myself a deep, shaky breath of relief.
If these gross little kids lost their mother tonight, that’d leave them stuck with me, at least for now.
I wouldn’t wish that on any child. I had all the parental instincts of an oyster.
I’d been mad at Ian, hadn’t I? Incredibly fucking pissed. His bright idea for a romantic night out on New Year’s Eve tomorrow had been a vampire bar in nearby Lancaster, where he’d taken to hanging out sometimes since making friends with one of their enforcers.
Apparently, being the type of overgrown, idiotic perma-fourteen-year-old who thought cheap booze and whacking your friends with pool cues made for a super fun night out transcended supernatural species.
There wasn’t enough room in my skull for my eyes to roll far enough to express my feelings about that. As I’d calmly explained to Ian earlier, mostly, until I got a little worked up, that was because my skull had a fucking brain inside of it, a spatial limitation he didn’t have to deal with.
And I’d keep being angry at him later on, but right now, my wonderful, beautiful, muddy, glowing-eyed mate had opened the car door with almost enough force to send it flying like the one Calder had ripped off, and the deep breath of relief I’d sucked in exited my body as more of a sob.
I wanted to fling myself onto his shoulder and cling to him like the toddler was clinging to me, but these freaking kids were in the way.
“Jesus Christ, baby,” Ian said, crowding into the back seat, gold-sheened blue eyes going all wide. The car’s shocks creaked ominously. “Fuck. That’s a baby!”
Seriously? Just what I needed, another wise-guy wise man. This was turning into the most fucked-up nativity play of all time.
“Yes, Ian. It’s a baby. And her big brother.
I’ve never held a baby before!” I hissed, pressing her against my chest to muffle her hearing.
Although I doubted she could understand me yet and freak out about my lack of experience.
When did babies learn English? Did they have to walk first? “What if I break her?”
Ian leaned in closer to peer down at her. His dick was right at the toddler’s eye level if he turned around, and I resisted the urge to slap a hand over his eyes.
“You need to find some pants,” I said, probably the first time I’d ever even thought those words about Ian. He looked even better out of them, in my expert opinion. “You can’t be naked around kids. That’s weird.”
He glanced up at me, and…oh, gods, here we went again.
Ian turned into a sap around babies, so much so that I wondered sometimes if he’d actually be happier with a female mate.
What did I uniquely have to offer, besides enchanted socks and helpful constructive criticism, that outweighed the prospect of raising his own children?
In the dead of night, while Ian snored contentedly beside me, thoughts like those came out of the termite-gnawed woodwork of our cabin in droves.