Page 7 of Red Boar's Baby

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 hisawwwwexpression. “IsaidI’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.”

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