Brodey, who’d donned shorts, sat on the floor and tried to call BettLynn over to him. She was too busy having fun playing to listen. She’d gone from wobbly to steady and agile on her short little puppy legs in the space of a few minutes.
“I’ll be damned if I have any ideas,” Brodey said, his tone full of stunned shock. “I’ve never heard of anyone this young shifting.”
Jim stared, confused. “Where’s BettLynn?”
Everyone pointed at the wolf-ote puppy.
Lina sat at the dining room table, not far from Juju and Bea’s pen, her chin propped on her palm as she stared at the trio of kids. “This is unbe-fucking-lieveable.”
“What?” Jim asked.
Everyone pointed again.
After a moment, he got it. “Do you mean to tell me my daughter’s a puppy?”
Everyone said, “Yes.”
“How did this happen?” he shrieked. “Change her back! Change her back right fucking now!”
“We can’t,” everyone said.
“She did it herself,” Brodey explained. “She shifted and tried to follow the pack into the woods.”
Jim stared for a minute, a smile slowly breaking out over his face. “Oh, okay. Ha-ha, I get it. Nice joke. Funny. Now where the fuck is my daughter?”
Everyone pointed at the puppy.
Again.
“This is not funny!”
“No shit, Sherlock,” Ain said, also now dressed in shorts and standing there with his arms crossed. “Do we look like we’re laughing?”
“What are we going to do?” Mai tearfully asked.
Elain pulled her phone out. “I’m calling Lacey.”
It took Elain three tries to make the Seer understand what she was saying and that it wasn’t a joke. When several long moments of silence met her, Elain asked, “Are you still there?”
“Yes, dear. I’m just…speechless.”
“Join the club.”
“Have you called Dr. Alberto?”
“I—no.” She looked at Mai. “Call Dr. Alberto,” she said.
Mai jumped up and raced for her cell phone.
“Any other suggestions?” Elain asked her.
“Not really. Other than the occasional in utero shifting that I’ve heard about from Dr. Alberto, the youngest I’ve ever heard of was a child of about four or five. I’ve never heard of a toddler shifting, much less a baby barely a couple of months old. How is she doing otherwise?”
Elain watched as BettLynn circled the boys and then play-bowed them with a cute little yip.
In their pen, Juju and Bea whined and play-bowed her back, their tails also blurry fans of motion.
“Honestly? She’s doing great. She’s running around…like a puppy.”
Another moment of silence from Lacey. Then, “Maybe it’s easier for her to get around shifted,” Lacey carefully said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, maybe with her condition, maybe being shifted mitigates it for her in some way.”
“But she’s a friggin’ baby!”
“I know dear,” Lacey said, trying to calm her, “but keep in mind she’s also a shifter, not a human. I didn’t say it’s the answer. It’s just a thought.”
Micah, Cail on his heels, ran into the living room. “What happened to the baby? Where is she? Is she okay?”
Everyone, including Jim, pointed at the puppy.
“Call me back after you speak with Dr. Alberto. She might have some answers for you that I don’t.”
“Okay. Thanks.” Elain hung up. “She’s got nothing.”
Micah stared at them. “Where the fuck’s my daughter?”
Mai returned, speaking on her cell with Dr. Alberto. Elain walked over to BettLynn and scooped her up despite the sudden vocal protestations from the Beasts. She carried her over to her father. “Micah, this is BettLynn.”
His eyes widened. “Fuck!” he whispered.
“Thank you, Dr. Alberto,” Mai said before hanging up. She walked over and took BettLynn from Elain. “She’s on her way. She said to keep her inside and don’t let her out of our sight.”
“She shifted?” Micah yelled.
Cail laid a hand on his shoulder. “Dude, take it down a notch. You don’t want to scare her or the boys.”
Elain snapped her fingers. “Callie. Duh.” She dialed her friend’s number. Before she could get the full sentence out of her mouth, Callie appeared in the living room, her phone in her hand.
She turned and found Elain as she hung up her phone. “What happened to BettLynn?”
Elain pointed to BettLynn.
Callie’s eyes widened as she slowly walked over to where BettLynn was now struggling to escape her mother’s arms. The Beasts had made their way over to Mai and were trying to pull themselves up using the legs of Mai’s jeans.
“She shifted?” Callie asked.
Everyone nodded.
“Holy fuck!”
“You realize I’m feeling a lot better about my potty mouth now, right?” Lina snarked from the dining room table.
Callie reached out and gently cupped the puppy’s head in her hands. She turned her so she could look into her eyes. “Oh…my…Goddess,” she whispered.
The Beasts’ protests had increased from frustrated mumbles to wails. Mai finally put BettLynn back on the floor, where the puppy promptly sat between the brothers and started licking their faces.
The boys immediately settled, giggling and cooing as they hugged her.
“Well, Callie?” Ain asked. “Any suggestions?”
“I…” She shook her head. “I’m guessing you already called Lacey and Dr. Alberto.”
Everyone nodded.
“Can you find that bitch of an eldest sister of yours and ask her?” Lina asked.
“Um, yeah. I’ll try Gigi, too. I doubt she’ll have any ideas, but Babs has been hard to pin down lately.”
She disappeared again as Elain’s phone started ringing. The screen showed it was Blackie.
“Hey, Elain. Is my wife there?”
“Um, she was.”
His voice immediately changed, sounding tense. “Was? What happened?”
When Elain filled him in, the predictable response followed. “Holy fuck!”
“Exactly. She went to try to find her sisters and see if she could get answers.”
“Oh. Okay. No problem. Um, good luck. Keep me posted.”
She stared at BettLynn, who was now lying, curled tail to nose, between the Beasts. “Thanks. I think we’ll need all the luck we can get.”
“What am I supposed to feed her?” Mai tearfully asked. “I can’t feed my baby dog food.”
Carla put a hand on her shoulder. “Calm down, honey. She shifted herself. She’ll probably shift back when she’s ready.”
* * * *
Callie reappeared after about twenty minutes, reporting no luck in locating her eldest sister, and that Gigi had no suggestions, but sent her best wishes. Ain and Cail went back outside to manage the runners. The first of the runners had already finished when the Beasts started grumbling that they were hungry. Lina made them bottles of formula mixed with cereal, and the boys greedily grabbed them from her and started sucking them down.
Lina sat on the floor with them and looked up at her friends. BettLynn raised her head and started sniffing at the bottles, standing up to walk over to the Beasts, where she nosed at them.
“Maybe try her with a bottle,” Lina suggested.
Mai went and fixed one, but when she knelt down, her daughter pulled away, still more interested in the Beasts than her mom.
Jim sat down close to the boys and took the bottle from Mai. He patted his lap. “Come here, sweetie. Come to Daddy.”
Elain heard the catch in his voice as he said it.
BettLynn looked at him and then walked over, a bounce in her step, her little tail wagging.
He picked her up, turning her onto her back like he usually would, holding the bottle just out of reach. “Will you eat somet
hing for Daddy?”
Elain closely watched him. He seemed seconds from an emotional breakdown.
BettLynn let out a little yip and stretched her head toward the bottle.
“No, sweetheart. Daddy’s little girl needs to eat.”
Before their eyes, BettLynn the puppy was once again BettLynn the baby. Mai let out a relieved sob that she muffled behind her hand.
Fortunately, he’d had BettLynn cradled on her back, because her head flopped back into the crook of his elbow and she let out a frustrated-sounding cry. She reached for the bottle.
“That’s my good girl.” He let her pull the bottle into her mouth and she greedily began sucking on it.
“See?” Carla said from behind Mai. “She can shift herself back.”
Micah left the room and returned a moment later with a diaper and a blanket, which he got around the baby with Jim’s help.
Brodey ran a hand through his hair. “Son of a bitch,” he quietly said. “If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
Elain cleared her throat. “Lacey suggested maybe it has something to do with her Down syndrome.” She felt her face redden when everyone looked at her. “Maybe it helps her out. Shifting, I mean.”
She nodded her head to where BettLynn’s eyes were now half closed as she continued nursing from the bottle. “She can barely hold her head up yet. Maybe Lacey’s right. It’s easier for her to get around shifted. Look how she was playing with the boys. She was obviously happy and having fun.”
“This might not be a bad thing,” Callie added.
“We’ll have to wait until the doctor gets here,” Brodey said, his expression unreadable.
* * * *
Dr. Alberto, unfortunately, had no better ideas. “Lacey’s idea might not be wrong,” she said as she watched the baby, who’d awakened and shifted back into puppy mode during the commotion surrounding the doctor’s arrival.
Carla sat on the couch next to Mai, an arm around her shoulders. The young mother had spent the time waiting in a thick silence Elain felt was more grief and doubt at her own mothering abilities than shock over her daughter’s precocious shifting skills.
Micah and Jim sat on the floor with Dr. Alberto, trying to keep the puppy corralled in an area where the doctor could closely watch her. Removing the Beasts didn’t work, because as soon as Lina tried to separate George and Luka from BettLynn, the boys began screaming and fighting to be reunited with her, and BettLynn started barking and whining as she struggled to get back to them. So now BettLynn sat on a comforter between the two boys, happily playing with them.
“They certainly seem fond of each other,” Dr. Alberto said.
“Ya think?” Lina snarked. “You saw what the Beasts do if we try to separate them. We have to wait until they’re asleep or eating. It’s the only way we can get the three of them apart without World War B starting.”
“World War B?”
“Baby. Or Beasts. Or BettLynn. Take your pick, they put up a stink.”
“You’ve never heard of anyone shifting this young?” Elain asked.
“Never. I mean, I’ve seen in utero shifting. But once they’re born, I’ve never seen a child this young shift. I was on the phone all the way down here, too. Talking with every doctor I know who deals with shifters. They are as gobsmacked as I am.”
“I don’t want her to become some sort of experiment,” Mai quietly said. “I won’t let that happen.”
“No,” the doctor agreed. “Absolutely not. That’s not what I meant at all. You have to remember, the field of shifter babies is so small compared to the normal population that when something extraordinary like this happens, we tend to take notes for future reference.”
“So what can we do?” Micah asked.
The doctor shrugged. “I don’t know. You said she shifted back to eat, correct?”
“Yeah,” Jim said. “I held the bottle out of reach until she did.”
“There you go. I would suggest making sure you keep her away from civilians, so to speak. At least until she’s older and you can explain to her why she can’t shift around them.”
“You mean because she’ll be too retarded to know better?” Mai’s quiet tone silenced the room, more because of the bitterness bristling within her usually gentle voice than her actual words.
Dr. Alberto was the first to speak. “For starters,” she gently said, “I don’t like that word, and not just because it’s not politically correct. In my experience, many kids with Down syndrome, who years ago might have been labeled that, can go on to lead nearly normal lives if they have the right early intervention. We’ve talked about this already. I can’t predict what issues she’ll have. We’ve already ruled out some of the major ones that were my concern, like heart problems.”
“But she still looks like a baby with Down syndrome,” Mai countered.
“So? She is far too young for us to test IQ yet. Her shifter genes might counteract a lot of what the Down syndrome does. Or being shifted really might be helping her. I told you I thought her eyesight and hearing might be impacted, so maybe this is helping her. It’s obvious being shifted counteracts her low muscle tone.”
Micah and Jim got up from the floor and went to sit on either side of Mai while Carla and Elain took their places on the floor with the kids and Dr. Alberto.
Mai laid her head on Micah’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He kissed her forehead while Jim held her hands. “For what, sweetheart?”
Dr. Alberto’s tone turned stern. “Mai, we discussed this, too. You didn’t do anything wrong. Nothing you did or didn’t do could have changed this. Human mothers have babies with Down syndrome all the time. It’s an extremely common birth defect. They have kids with spina bifida and CP and a whole host of other disabilities. The exact conditions it takes to make a ‘perfect’ baby are countless. The true miracle is that so many babies are born healthy and without any issues.”
Mai closed her eyes and silently cried on Micah’s shoulder.
Dr. Alberto addressed her next comments to Micah and Jim. “I’m going to call around and find a counselor for her to talk to, someone used to dealing with our kind.”
He nodded. “We’ll make sure we take her.”
“I’m not crazy,” Mai sniffled.
“No,” Jim said, “but you’re going through a lot of stress right now.”
“And maybe more than a little post-partum depression,” Dr. Alberto said. “Our kind doesn’t usually go through that unless they have a lot of human in them, but it’s not unheard of. I think with the added stress of a special-needs child, and the events surrounding a lot of your pregnancy, it would be wise for you to undergo counseling. You’re still dealing with PTSD, too. Counseling will help you deal with all of that.”
Dr. Alberto got up and went over to Mai, kneeling in front of her so she could rest her hands on the young mother’s knees. “Mai,” she gently said, “for right now, she’s thriving, she’s growing, she’s eating, she’s happy. Please try to stop worrying about the things we don’t know and focus on the positives.”
“I can’t even do normal mom things like other moms do, like take their baby to the park.” She let out a bitter laugh. “Well, sure, the dog park.”
Elain’s heart was breaking for her friend. She wanted to get up and try to help comfort her, but she could already feel the bitter wash of anguish rolling off Mai from across the room, practically toxic, and suspected she wouldn’t be able to tolerate it right then. She looked at Lina and their gazes met. Lina looked as sad as Elain felt and nodded in apparent silent agreement. Lina got up and walked behind the couch where she could rest her hands on Mai’s shoulders.
“Sweetie, you aren’t alone, here,” Lina said. “You’ve got all of us to help you out. Let us shoulder some of this burden for you.”
“You don’t even have to move into the other house if you don’t want to,” Elain suggested. Micah and Jim had been supervising the constr
uction of their house just steps from the Lyalls’ front door. “You can stay here as long as you need to.”
“And if you want,” Lina said, “I’ll come down and stay here for a while, too.”
Mai reached up and patted Lina’s hand. “Thanks, but I can’t ask you to uproot your life like that.”
“It’s not uprooting anything. I might not be able to leave if we can’t sneak out while the Beasts are asleep,” she tried to joke. “I might be begging Ain and the guys to let me live here so I can have some peace and quiet.”
That finally drew a hoarse, soft laugh from Mai. Everyone seized on it and tried to further bolster her spirits.
“She already has two ready-made bodyguards,” Jim said. “Boys who we hopefully won’t have to threaten to kick their asses when they’re older.”
“They’re dragons,” Lina said. “They’re already kicking my ass and they’re not even six months old yet. Your human ass is screwed, buddy.”
Dr. Alberto jumped back in. “I want you to focus on the good here, Mai. She’s already figured out a way to help mitigate some of her challenges. I suspect once we’re able to gauge her level of mental disability, we’re going to find she’s going to have few issues in that department.”
“Really?”
“I can’t promise you, but let’s face it. She’s smart enough to have several doctors scratching their heads, in addition to several dozen shifters. She’s the first of her kind, as far as we know. So what if she ends up with hearing deficits, or problems with her eyesight? She’s an amazing little girl already.”
BettLynn sat on her rump and looked at them, wagging her tail. She let out a happy yip that drew smiles from everyone.
Luka and George smiled and burbled in amusement, enchanted by their playmate.
BettLynn play-bowed the adults on the couch, her tail a happily wagging blur.
“Let her chart her own course,” the doctor said. “And applaud every step she takes along the way. Forget any precepts about the baby she should be and enjoy the baby she is.”
BettLynn whirled around and jumped on Luka, knocking him over and making him giggle as she covered his face with puppy kisses. Then she turned around and bounced onto George, giving him the same treatment.