The Lion's Surprise Baby

by White, Jade

  And we won’t be able to be around people a lot. Mommy will have to start working at home. That’ll be hard at first, but I’ll sell the apartment and get us some extra money. I’ll have to find some way to explain it to Felicia, work out something to do with the business. But Mommy will find a way, sweetheart; I promise.”

  She held the sleeping lad in the sling a little tighter and shut her eyes, still whispering on. “And putting you in school—I don’t think we’re going to be able to do that. That’s another thing we can’t risk, having you around other kids all the time.” Her voice cracked at that thought. “Oh, baby, I know it’ll be hard because you’ll want friends, other kids, someone to play with. But Mommy will have to homeschool you and work at the same time. I know it won’t be easy and there’ll be times when you won’t like it.

  And we’ll have to find some way to teach you to handle your changes. There’s so much Mommy doesn’t know about when you change and why you change, and how to make you change back when it happens. And I’m still not sure I know how to handle you when you’re the other way, so one of us doesn’t hurt the other. There’s so much Mommy has to figure out.” Her voice cracked again, harder, but she swore to herself that she would not cry. She would need to dig down deep into herself, deeper than she’d ever gone before into her heart and her soul, to find the strength she needed to care for herself and her little boy.

  “We’re going to make it, Daniel, I promise,” she said. “We’ll figure everything out, a piece at a time. No one will find out and no one will hurt us. And no one will take away Mommy’s boy. I promise, baby, it’s you and Mommy. You’ll see…”

  And Tara rocked the sleeping Daniel from side to side, drawing strength just from having him in the sling against her and in her arms and knowing she would make good on her word to her sleeping lad, and protect him from any person or any thing that ever came near them. She was his mother, no matter what. Her baby was her life. Nothing else mattered more than her little boy.

  In that strange way that a person senses he is not alone, with that peculiar sense that tells someone that he is being watched, Tara felt suddenly wary and alarmed, as if little strikes of lightning were dancing up and down her skin, tingling her body with the sensation of being watched. She opened her eyes and took in the darkened roadside again.

  Tara listened closely, sharply, and picked up the faintest sound of twigs snapping and tall grass and undergrowth rustling in the darkened forest on the other side of the road. Did she really hear it, or was it just her maternal protective instincts kicking into overdrive, magnifying any slight, tiny sound into a potential threat? She peered across the road into the blackness under the trees.

  In the cloak of ebony before her, lights appeared. She squinted at them. Could they be only fireflies? They did not move, nor wink on and off, the way fireflies did. They just hung there in the dark—hung there, glowing blue-green…

  Blue-green!

  Tara’s eyes widened. Her mouth dropped open, but she was afraid to utter a sound. Blue-green lights, shining in the forest in the dark!

  The words, “Oh no…!” scratched and crawled their way up her throat, but never made it to Tara’s lips. Before she could give them voice, there was a definite rustling in the undergrowth on the other side of the road, and now the blue-green lights did move. They came with the shapes of creatures half-human and half-feline, out into the open in the starlit night. The figures stood, sleek and sinewy and fur-covered, their tails curling behind them, and did not make another move.

  They only stood and watched. Tara was paralyzed in their gaze. Her every instinct told her to break into a run, but to where? Back down the private road? Into the forest? There was no place to go, and any place she tried to go, the creatures across the road were fast enough to reach first and cut her off. And she was carrying Daniel. What if in her flight from the creatures watching her, she fell and hurt him? The word, “Please…” almost formed on her quivering lips.

  And then, from behind her came a voice: “Tara…”

  Afraid to turn her back on the creatures, but knowing whose voice it was at her back, Tara spun around anyway, and there at the mouth of the road he stood, in the form of a two-legged, thick-maned lion clad in a loincloth. She gasped out his name.

  “Brenton…”

  He made no move towards her. He only looked at her with a sadness in his lion eyes and shook his lion head, making his mane ripple. “We thought you’d probably try something like this,” Brenton said.

  Tara begged him, “Brenton, please just let me go.”

  “Where? Back to Chicago? With my cub? With my son?”

  “Yes.”

  “I told you how it’ll be for the two of you if you take him back there. And you know it’s true. I can’t believe this is really what you want to do, Tara.”

  “It is!” she almost shouted.

  “Why?” he nearly roared. His voice trailed off into a lion’s growl.

  “Because I’m a human being and I live a human life!”

  “Our son is not human.”

  “Part of him is! The part of him that came from me is human! And I need him with me, in my world, my human world! Just let us go!”

  Brenton shook his head again, harder, still growling. “Your human world,” he said. “Just what world is that? You spent a year of your life traveling through other countries, living with people who spoke different languages and had different ways, having everything be new to you, and that didn’t bother you. You liked that. You enjoyed that. You weren’t afraid of that.

  But you’re still afraid of us. You’re still afraid to try to get to know us, to be with us. You know it’s what our son needs, and we’d never do anything to hurt him, and we only want to help you because you’re his mother. We can accept you, but you still can’t accept us. My God, Tara, you’re right about how human you are. I’ve never met anyone so human.”

  She flashed her temper at him. “Don’t you dare mock me!”

  “I’m not mocking you, Tara. But I’m disappointed. I’m disappointed as hell. You know this is wrong, but you won’t think clearly enough to see it. You’re thinking through fear, Tara—though fear. And your fear will get you and our son killed.”

  Tara practically snarled at him, “I will protect him!”

  “There’s too much fear out there, just like yours and much worse,” Brenton warned her. “There’s millions of humans out there, just as scared of our son as you are of us. There are more of them than there are of you, and their fear is bigger than you are. You can’t protect him from your kind.”

  “He’s half MY kind!”

  “That won’t matter. Stay with us. You’ll both be safe with us—with me.”

  Tara stood straight and clutched Daniel in a fierce grip. “What are you going to do, Brenton?” she asked. “Will you force me to stay? Hold me prisoner?”

  “No, Tara, we won’t. We won’t force you to do anything. We’re asking you. I’m asking you—please. We’re not monsters, Tara. What’s waiting for you out there, Tara—that’s who the monsters are. Millions of monsters. I’m begging you, please don’t risk our son’s life. If you leave here with him, you’re as good as throwing him to the monsters.”

  Tara was unmoved. “My car is coming soon. You can’t let the driver see you.” She looked over her shoulder at the other werelions still standing across the road. “You can’t be here when the car comes. You have to leave.”

  Brenton said, “Tara, for the last time, please don’t do this.”

  “The car is coming, Brenton,” she repeated.

  Brenton slumped his man-lion shoulders and bowed his head. He made a sound that was both a growl and a deep, rumbling sigh. He looked up again and past Tara to the rest of his pride. He gestured for them to return to the concealment of the darkened forest.

  Once they were alone, he burned into Tara a look of anguish and sorrow such as she had never seen in all her life. “You’re making a mistake, Tara. You say you love our
son, but you’re putting him and yourself in the worst kind of danger. It’s wrong, and nothing I’ve said to you and nothing I’ve tried to do for you seems to make any kind of difference. You refuse to see how wrong it is.

  But I know one thing, Tara. One day you will see what a mistake you’ve made. One day you’ll see the danger you’ve brought on Daniel, which you won’t be able to get him out of. All I ask is one thing. Keep my phone number. Keep my E-mail. Always have a way to get in touch with me. And if you ever need me, use them. Use them and I’ll be there for Daniel—and you. Promise me, Tara. Go if you have to, but promise me.”

  Shaking but weary of the confrontation, Tara replied simply, “I will.”

  “Then I’ll go. Remember what I said. And take care—of both of you.”

  Brenton turned his back and lashed his lion tail in despair and frustration, and started to lope away into the forest bracketing the private road through which he had come, following her discreetly that way instead of following her openly on the road itself. At the edge of the dark thicket, he turned and looked her way one last time, shining his lion eyes at her. Then he stepped back into the dark and disappeared.

  A few minutes later, the taxi came and Tara quickly bundled herself and Daniel and her bags into it, and the car took off down the road into the night.

  When the taxi was out of sight, Brenton stepped out of the thicket on his side and the rest of the pride emerged on the other side. All but one of the pride stayed where they were. The tall, lean, sinewy female figure of Sylvia crossed the road and joined her son.

  “I couldn’t convince her,” said Brenton. “She’s too scared. She can’t think through her fear. I couldn’t get through to her.”

  “She can’t think clearly now,” said Sylvia, touching her paw to Daniel’s shoulder in the way of a mother comforting her son. “This is all still too new to her. We’ve changed everything she thinks about the world, and probably herself, in one day. She’s a human being. She can adapt, but not as quickly as she’s being expected to adapt now. When she’s alone and she’s calmer, she’ll think more clearly.”

  “And meanwhile, she’ll have my son out there—with them,” Daniel snarled.

  “Yes, son, there is a risk,” said Sylvia. “But we’ve talked about what to do.”

  “The people you know in Chicago, and around there.”

  “Yes, my darling. They know about her and Daniel. And they’ll be watching her. She won’t know they’re there, but they’ll be watching. And if anything happens, they’ll be ready. They’ll step in and they’ll call us.”

  Sylvia, Brenton, and the pride all looked off down the road in the direction Tara’s car went. Sylvia said, “No matter what, that little cub is Morgan Pride. And we will always take care of our own.”

  Brenton said nothing. He only flared his lion nostrils, feeling more helpless than a lion should ever feel.

  _______________

  And so, in that same airport waiting area where she had been twice before, Tara sat with Daniel, awaiting the boarding of the flight for which she had just purchased a one-way ticket. The baby, of course, was flying free. And soon, it relieved her to think, they would both be free—in the air, thousands of feet above Napa and flying away, free of the strange and alien world of men and women who become beasts. Free forever, to live as humans in a human world that made sense.

  Holding Daniel in her arms, Tara rested his little head on her shoulder. Everything would be all right now. She would give her son all the love he would ever need. She would do everything that a mother was meant to do for her baby. And she would watch him grow into a beautiful little boy and a good, strong, proud young man—a man who would, she expected, look just like his father.

  Yes, just like his father—two ways. Both as a young man and as something else. She imagined the way Brenton must have looked as a young lion just coming into adulthood, just getting his mane, strutting up and down on grass in the sun, knowing he was turning the head of every little lioness who came near him.

  Tara frowned, quietly alarmed and stricken with worry. Where she was taking him, wherever they ended up, there would be no young lionesses for him to impress. There would be no young male lions with whom he would compete for their affections. There would only be other boys—human boys, who spoke and acted the way human boys did. Human boys who taunted and bullied and fought like human boys whenever they perceived that some other young person was in any way different than they were.

  What if they taunted and bullied Daniel? What if they chased him, and hit him, and fought with him? And what if, one awful day, they pushed him too far and Daniel slipped? What if he forgot himself and turned on them with not a human boy’s anger—but the wounded fury of a cornered lion? Tara imagined her son’s claws and fangs coming out, and someone getting badly hurt—or worse. What then?

  Daniel himself could end up hurt. And what could she do for him? Take him to a doctor—a human doctor? What could a human doctor do for someone like her son? Her heart froze at one thought she had never considered. What if a human doctor took or otherwise acquired a sample of Daniel’s blood? That physician would find himself or herself testing not the blood of a human boy, but of something not truly human, with proteins and chemistry never seen in any human being. How could Tara protect him then?

  And exposure need not even come from a fight, or from injury or accident. One day, perhaps one day soon, Daniel might be taken ill, sick with something that no medicine that Tara gave him would help. What would she do if she had to take him sick to a doctor—or check him into a hospital? She held him tighter, as if to hold at bay all the awful things that could happen. But no embrace from her could hold off all the things that could possibly go wrong in the days and years to come. Tara’s skin turned pale and cold as a thousand dreadful possibilities went spinning through her mind and she had neither the insight nor the imagination to address any of them.

  Brenton had told her that there were places out there in the human world where his kind recognized each other and met in secret. Perhaps she could find them, turn to them for help. Perhaps they could help her with his training, with his socialization, give him the exposure he needed to others like himself—playmates, friends, advisors. But how would Tara find them? And even if she could, how could she approach them? And would they even trust her, a human with a werelion child? What would they do? Would they try to take Daniel from her, even as other humans might try to hurt him or worse?

  A whole life filled with strange, frightening, inhuman uncertainties closed in around Tara’s thoughts. She felt her mind spinning with dark ideas that she never imagined she would have to think about. Now, as much as she feared anything else, she feared getting on the plane.

  And that was when Daniel opened his little eyes and yawned—and began to purr.

  Tara broke out into a cold sweat. Oh, Daniel, no. Not now. Baby, don’t do that now!

  She pulled the blanket in which she had wrapped him in the sling up over his head, hoping it would somehow block or muffle the sound he was making. But she could still hear it, and worse, she feared that anyone sitting down near her or passing by her would hear it too. The curiosity of a passerby or an onlooker was the last thing she needed. Curiosity—someone else’s— might very well kill the cat.

  Anxiously, Tara snuck a peek under the blanket. Her pulse spiked and a hot flash of dread lit up in her at finding Daniel’s little human boy face morphing into a whiskered lion cub snout, and his little human boy hands shifting into lion cub paws. She did not know what she feared more: someone seeing what was happening under the blanket or someone seeing the mounting fear that she knew must be breaking out on her own face. With a gulp, clutching for dear life onto her calm demeanor, she picked herself, her carry-on bag, and Daniel up from her seat and headed for the exit.

  On the walkway between the airport building and the parking lot, Tara pulled her phone from her carry-on and hit the speed dial. The call was received immediately, and she said, “Bre
nton, we’re at the airport here in Napa. Please come and get us.”

  “I’m on my way,” said Brenton.

  _______________

  The wait was not long. Brenton arrived quickly. As soon as he was there, Tara gave Daniel to him. He waited outside with the cub while she went back into the airport to cancel her flight and retrieve her suitcase. Then, bundling the suitcase into the trunk and taking back Daniel, she climbed into the car with father and cub in the parking lot. Brenton had not even started the car when Tara simply said, “I was wrong.”

  Not that he disagreed, Brenton asked, “What makes you say that?”