Page 23 of Omega Dragon Manny
Instead, I did what anyone in my position could do…I threw money at the problem and went to Shifters for Hire. I told them exactly what I needed and offered pretty much every penny I had in savings. I didn’t want to worry Clark. He’d obviously help withthe money, I knew that, but he was still juggling work. He was better about balancing his time now by saying no to projects he didn’t want or couldn’t handle and such, but it was still a work in progress.
Alpha for Hire came through a few days later. Only catch? We had to go to the midwife.
Clark’s arm was wrapped around me as we settled into bed for the night.
“I need you not to be mad at me,” I said quietly.
“Why would I be mad at you?” He kissed the spot where he’d marked me, his human teeth leaving a gnarly scar that looked more like I’d been in an accident of some sort than anything else.
I thought it was beautiful and caught myself staring at it in the mirror most days.
“On Saturday,” I said, “we need to go on a trip.”
He rolled to face me. “I want to look at you, because I have a feeling this conversation’s going in a direction that’s going to need more than a couple of words.”
He was right. It would.
I told him everything about my belly, my worries, my flight, and about the midwife. I even mentioned how I was paying for it.
“Oh, sweet omega.” He cupped my cheek. “I wish you had come to me. You’ve been carrying this burden all alone.”
“It’s fine,” I said too quickly. “It was my choice. I’ve learned my lesson. It wasn’t a good decision.”
“No,” he said gently, “it wasn’t. But you told me now. And on Saturday, we’ll go see the midwife.”
We brought the babies with us. It was a couple hours’ drive, but a nice one. When we arrived, I expected a cabin in the middle of nowhere, the kind of place dragon midwives usually worked from.
Instead, the midwife’s office was in a strip mall under a sign that readOmega Baby Services, Incorporated.
“Are you sure this is it?” Clark asked.
“I’m sure,” I said, though I didn’t sound it and was now second-guessing myself.
We walked in, holding the kids’ hands as they toddled their way across the tile floor. I had to laugh because every day I walked more like they did, and every day they looked more like big kids learning to run. At some point, we were going to meet in the middle.
“Come on in!” An older dragon met us at the door. “I’ve been waiting. You’re the first dragon I’ve had in a while. Come on back, let’s get you checked out.”
He did a mix of things I half-recognized from human medicine and half didn’t, like when he held a pendulum-like string over my belly, then dabbed essential oils or maybe it was tinctures on my pulse points as he hummed something low under his breath. But he did test after test.
Then he sat back in his chair and said, “Well, I see what you’re worried about. But you don’t need to be.”
The weight that fell from my shoulders was instant. “So the eggs are fine?”
“Well, see, that’s the thing,” he said slowly. “There are no eggs.”
My stomach dropped. “What?”
“You’re having human babies,” he said simply.
“Human?” I blinked. “Is that…possible?”
“Apparently,” he said with a chuckle. “But from everything I can tell, they’re good and healthy. And I shouldn’t have used the term human, that may or may not be true. There just won’t be any eggs. That doesn’t mean they won’t shift later on, it just means they won’t be born in their dragon form.”
He went on explaining everything, but most of it went right over my head because I was too busy focusing on the movement under my hands, the one I’d been mistaking for gas for the past couple of weeks. Oops.
And just as I was coming to terms with that, he added one last surprise.
“Oh, and you know there’stwo,right?”
