Page 8 of Red Boar's Baby

“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 wasnota 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 theheck?”

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 andthencall 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.”

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