by Kym Dillon
"I'm taking her back to Chicago," he said suddenly, standing up. "I can't leave her here, I can't let her rot here, this place killed her..."
"I cannot let you take her from this place," Stephanie said, but she knew it was grief and not reason that she was talking to.
"And I'm telling you that you can't stop me," Jax said, taking a step towards her. It would have been terrifying if Stephanie had had the energy left in her to feel terrified. As it was, she simply stared at him, refusing to get out of his way.
"No, I suppose if you decided in all your testosterone fueled male grief and rage that you had to pick up her poor body and throw it over your shoulder, there would be little I could do."
Jax's growl would have sent demons back to hell, but Stephanie was convinced that she was living in her own private hell right now.
"And you would be responsible for spreading this damn disease wherever you took her," Stephanie continued. " You want to take her home? That means taking her through an international airport, Jax. That means exposing an entire traveling population to germs that might still be very viable. Where are all those people going? You're going to the United States, which, let's be honest doesn't always move as fast as it should when it comes to epidemics. What about the people who are going to major population centers like London or Beijing? The people who are going to small rural homes, where there's no professional medical help for miles? You may very well be dooming them to what is happening here, something that Marnie herself would never abide."
It was a low blow, but Stephanie didn't think that anything else would reach the man in his grief. At the moment, she didn't mind fighting dirty.
When Jax still looked unconvinced, she pulled out one last card, the only one she had still to play.
"I think you know... we have a friend in common."
Jax's head shot up, and then he took a more speculative look at her. Stephanie found herself wondering if he thought that she was too plain by far for a man like Noah, and she told herself that that was not something she should be thinking about right now.
"He's not under anyone’s control," she continued, “but I think I could convince him to see my side of things, don't you?"
It was a calculated bid. She had seen Jax in his tiger form, and it was magnificent, but she thought that Noah would be larger still, even stronger. She had no idea if the threat of Noah would bring Jax in line, but Jax finally nodded. It was not fear that had made him back down, but respect.
"You fight dirty, Doctor," he said, but there was a hint of understanding in his voice that hadn't been there before.
Stephanie smiled slightly, letting some of the relief that she felt dribble through.
"That's me using whatever I have at my disposal to keep the world safe, Jax. I swear to you, Marnie's remains will be taken care of. They will not be handled disrespectfully, and we will use them to learn what we can in order to quell this disease. I swear to you. I may not have known her that well or for that long, but I am familiar with her work. As another female in this profession, I know that this is what she would have wanted."
Jax sighed, standing up.
"I know. I know you are right, and this is the only thing that makes the idea bearable."
"Thank you."
"I need to get out of here," he said. "I can't survive this. I'm not a problem. As soon as I am packed, I’ll be leaving. I can't stand this."
Stephanie was mostly certain he was right. Shifter physiology was different from that of humans, given the quick healing and the sudden transformations. However, even if she wanted to, she couldn't think of a way to stop him.
For a moment, Stephanie simply stood in the quiet trailer, aware of Marnie's body in a way that she hadn't been when Jax was there with her. Something in her mind insisted that Marnie was listening, and she shook her head. She was going crazy. This job, this grief, were all driving her crazy, not to mention the unexpected pregnancy.
"What the hell are we going to do?" she asked softly, and then she left Marnie to rest. She had work to do.
8
When Jessica came to tell her that Marnie was alive, Stephanie was so exhausted that it seemed like one more impossibility added to the pile. The girl who had been dead was alive... and she had a cure for the disease.
In her mind, Stephanie was privately calling it a plague, and thanks to Marnie's insight, they had realized it was exactly that. It was an ancient disease that humanity had never learned to heal from. Somehow, it had disappeared for perhaps hundreds of years. An ancient plague needed an ancient solution, and that was where the shifters came in.
Their physiology somehow knew how to fight the disease, and a transfusion of blood from Jax, the miraculous universal donor, saw the people who had been afflicted were well on their way to health.
When Stephanie asked Marnie how she had figured it out, the girl had stuttered and Stephanie had let her off the hook. It was fairly obvious anyway, and Stephanie had no interest in embarrassing her.
At some point, finally, after all of the inoculations had been seen to and after Jax had been given plenty of liquids to replenish his blood supply and to keep him healthy, Stephanie collapsed in her tiny bed.
She was asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow, and it seemed to her later, that it was dreadfully unfair that she had to deal with nightmares on top of everything else. She firmly felt that if you spent the day fighting shifter hyenas that you should be allowed to sleep without any interruptions.
In her dreams, she carried a carefully swaddled baby in her arms. Sometimes it made sad mewling noises, but she didn't have the time to comfort it the way that she ached to. Instead, she had to keep looking for Noah. Noah could protect them. Noah could help them.
When he appeared, however, he looked at her with disdain.
In that moment, she knew that she could never hope to compare to a shifter woman, to any woman. He took the baby from her arms. When she saw her baby clearly, she saw that he had a lion cub's face.
Noah took their child with him, and she knew that she would never see either again. She was left crying in the mist, and there was nothing she could do about it.
She came awake with a start, telling herself that it was all a dream. Her hands stole over her belly, and despite all the doubt and fear in her mind, one certainty came out of it.
"I will not let him take you from me," she whispered. "I won't."
She was unsurprised when Jessica and Marnie decided to leave with the two shifter men afterward. Stephanie supported their decision. There were rumors of a similar illness along their route of travel, and with enough synthesized cure, they could stop the terror before it got a foothold in another village.
Before they left, however, Stephanie cornered Marcus.
"Tell me," she said. "Where is Noah? Are you going to be going to him?"
Marcus shook his head.
"He's still in the south as far as I know," he said. "Council business."
There was a shut off quality to his speech that told her that he could not tell her more even if he wanted to, and Stephanie nodded in defeat.
"Thank you," she said. "Perhaps if you see him before I do, you can tell him that I want to speak with him. It is urgent."
She had no intention of telling Marcus what that urgency might be, but then he grasped her wrist as she turned around. His eyes were wide, his nose twitched as he sniffed the air, and he looked slightly stunned.
"You're pregnant!" he exclaimed, and she glared at him.
"Keep your voice down," Stephanie hissed. "And… yes."
"Is it Noah's?"
She shot him a withering look.
"Do you think I have had time to fool around while all this has been going on?
Marcus held up his hands defensively.
"Yes, all right, that was dumb of me. But a child between a human and a shifter..."
"Is it rare?" asked Stephanie, suddenly nervous. "Are there deformities or illnesses...?"
"Rare, yes,
a little, but no, no illnesses," Marcus said. "But Noah... Noah needs to know."
Stephanie nodded tightly. The relief at his words, however was great.
"He does, and I will tell him as soon as I can."
When she saw Marcus, Jessica, Marnie and Jax hike off into the forest, Stephanie felt a great yearning inside her. She was not a woman who believed in fate or in destiny, but if she was, she had idea that this was what it would feel like.
A germ of an idea sprouted in her mind, and she hurried back to her trailer to plan. The idea was mad to say the least, but as soon as she had conceived of it, she knew that it was the only route open to her.
Marcus fought with himself for two days. The process that he was thinking about was only for emergencies, and the Council would certainly say that this was far from being an emergency.
However, the Council was in Naples, and Noah had done far more for him that the damn Council ever had.
Two nights after they had left the medical camp, when Jax and Marnie were out on a hunt (hunt, Jax had called it, but Marcus suspected that he was actually interested in getting some time alone with his chosen mate), he pulled a bag of purple powder out of his gear.
"What's that?" asked Jessica, looking on curiously.
For a moment, Marcus thought about what it might be like if she were the one pregnant, and he was in South Africa, not knowing that anything was going on at all. That made his decision for him, and he grinned at her.
"This, fierce Jessica, is something that I'm probably not supposed to do."
He dropped a handful of the purple powder into the fire. A plume of pale lavender smoke shot up into the air, and after a moment, an image of Noah's face could be seen.
The older shifter looked at Marcus, eyes dark.
"Marcus? What the hell is going on? Are things going south?"
"Not at all," Marcus responded. "The situation with the artifact I'm carrying is well on its way to being resolved, and Jessica's traveling with me now..."
"So, far less chance that you'll make everyone in near proximity want to kill you, good," said Noah, nodding sagely.
It was well known that shifters without their chosen mates waivered between difficult to get along and downright murderous, and Marcus winced at some of his own behaviors before he could bring Jessica with him. For her part, she merely snickered from the shadows, and he shook his head.
"No, everything's fine. But Noah, Stephanie's pregnant."
If the situation hadn't been so dire, Marcus would have laughed out loud at the look of astonishment on Noah's face. Noah was slightly older than he and Jax were, and the idea of a human/shifter pregnancy was rare enough.
"That's impossible," Noah said flatly. "It's..."
"Unlikely, strange and improbable, but far from impossible," Marcus said. "Noah, I smelled her, she’s pregnant."
Noah's gaze darkened, and if he hadn't been several countries away, Marcus might have been very nervous indeed. As it was, he could see Noah's hands clenching and unclenching, as if he could feel his claws threatening to come out.
"All right," Noah said after a moment. "Stay with her, I'll be there as soon as I can..."
"She's still at the camp," Marcus said, because it was better to get all the bad news out of the way at once. We defeated the hyenas..."
"Hyenas? There were hyenas in the area?"
"Which we defeated," Marcus said calmly. "And I'll point out that your lady Stephanie had something to do with that. As soon as the battle was joined, she stepped right in and climbed up on top of the trailer. It made a difference..."
"She entered battle while pregnant?" Noah demanded, and Marcus and Jessica both winced from his rising tone. Throughout the shifter communities, no one was quite as possessive as a lion, and Marcus thought that that probably went double for a lion who had just found out he was about to be a father.
"She did, and she survived and thrived," Marcus said, a little testily. "She was completely uninjured, and she was a part of the effort to cure the plague."
The only reason that Noah did not explode, Marcus knew, was that he was taking savage control of his own bestial instincts. As it was, his eyes gleamed a leonine gold, and Marcus hid a smile.
"All right. Stay with her. I'm going to be up in..."
"We're two days north already," Marcus said, "Which I was going to say before you got all heated up about the hyenas."
"What? Why in the name of seven hells did you leave her?"
Marcus shot Noah a look that was unafraid.
"Because she's not helpless, Noah. She is strong and courageous, and she has a job to do. And I should remind you, we have a job to do as well. If we have the chalice, that means that the hyenas, any that may be left, and their allies are going to go after us, not her. That means that in the long run, she'll be safer where she is."
Noah had apparently had enough, and no matter how much common sense Marcus was speaking, the idea of his mate and his cub in danger was too much. He changed into his enormous lion form and rushed at them. Jessica, forgetting that the man himself was still in South Africa, shrieked in surprise, but Marcus was ready. He had a bucket of sand nearby, and as soon as Noah leaped, he poured the sand over the fire, causing the fire to wink out and the smoke to dissipate.
"What the hell?" gasped Jessica, wide-eyed. "What would have happened if he had made the jump?"
"Nothing at all," Marcus said with a shrug. "It just seemed impolite to see him jump into a fire. I'm sure he'll figure it out."
Jessica did not seem so sure. She came to sit next to Marcus, and she held one hand almost speculatively over her belly.
"I don't know about that," she mused. "What would you do if you knew that I was pregnant with your child and half a continent away?"
"Tear through hell trying to get to you," he said immediately, and then chuckled. "I'm not worried. Stephanie's clever, and when he's not in a rage, Noah is too. They'll be fine. They'll figure it all out."
Throughout her life, Stephanie had always been clear on what she needed to do. She might not have liked it, and she might not have acknowledged how difficult her task might be, but she always knew when she needed to get a move on.
She could feel the decision nibbling at the back of her mind the next day or so after the shifters and her two doctors left. She tried to ignore it, but soon enough, she realized that she couldn't.
Instead of ignoring it, she gave in. She made sure that her assistants knew how to both synthesize and administer the cure, and she spoke with her contacts at the WHO so that they had a clear idea of what had happened in their camp. She of course left out the information about the shifters, though she did wonder briefly whether that was necessary. If there had been shifters present throughout human history, surely someone knew about them?
It didn't matter.
Stephanie was utterly determined once she had set her mind on something. She made sure to pack as much food, and more importantly, water as she could carry. She had a compass, and her satellite phone, which, while signal would be terrible, it might at least offer her some connection to the outside world if she got into trouble.
Stephanie hesitated over the rifle. It had served her well, but she genuinely didn't like guns. Finally, she slung it over her back with a sigh. It would be better to have it and not need it than to need it and to come up short.
She ignored the tiny voice inside her that was telling her that this was foolishness, that told her that what she was doing was all for a man she would never see again.
There was no way for her to get in contact with Noah. She had his promise, but he hadn't known that she was going to be pregnant. He might have meant that he would return in a year, or even two. She couldn't take that risk. She didn't have a phone number, a last name, even a nationality.
Her only two links to the most exciting man she had ever met were currently marching north, and that meant that that was where she needed to go as well.
A week after she had bid Jessica and M
arnie an emotional goodbye, she set out on the path herself. The medical camp would function well in her absence. There was nothing there for her at all. She started walking her path.
9
Stephanie found after the first day that she tired easily. She had to stop almost every hour, wiping the sweat from her face. More than once, settling into a particularly lovely sunbeam, she had thought that she might fall asleep.
Stephanie shook her head ruefully. Was this what pregnancy did to you? She wasn't an obstetrician, but she had overseen and assisted at her fair share of births. More than once, she had lifted a beautiful, bloody infant for its mother's first kiss. What would it feel like when she was the one groaning on the table, surrounded by people who were trying to help?
There was a part of Stephanie that was guiltily, almost shamefully excited to be getting away from the medical camp. It had been a nightmare for so long. If she thought about it too much, she would start to get shivers and nausea. She suspected that she would feel the effects of being in that place for some time. Post-traumatic stress disorder was insidious; there was even a chance that the chemicals responsible for all that stress could pass on to her child in the womb.
"Sorry, kiddo, I'll try to do better for you as we go on together," she said passing a hand over her stomach.
Stephanie realized with a grimace that she was talking to her belly more as time passed. At first it was because she had no one else to talk to, but at some point, it had turned to a belief that her child could truly hear and understand her, if not take comfort in her voice. She had told other mothers-to-be to talk to their bellies if it helped, but she had never before thought that she would do it.
"Sometime soon, we are going to introduce you to your papa," she said as she continued to walk. "And we'll learn all about what you need, and I'll make sure that we give you everything we can, just so much love, baby."
Stephanie didn't know what kind of encouragement her child could take from her words, but she knew that they comforted her, at least. The words kept her going when she wanted to sit down and cry, when a ravine looked too steep or when the path seemed to peter down to nothing. However, somehow, she always found an extra burst of strength, or her compass was there to show her the way. She might be slowed, but she refused to stop.