Prompt Me Hard - 8. 261 - Kubler Ross

I left the room for six minutes. Six fucking minutes. The mum was sleeping soundly, lying on her side, hand trailing in the cot. Her wife had gone for snacks and supplies, and two minutes no doubt of mad grinning in the canteen telling every single person she’d met that she was a mom now. The baby was healthy, pink and blond, sleeping off the long labour. I went for a break, to check in with Derrin and ask after the kids.

I was gone six minutes. I didn’t know if it had been then that they’d taken him, but I was pretty sure. It might have happened away from here, in their home. But weird shit happens around me. It always has. I hadn’t been there when they’d checked out, and I hadn’t thought anything of it, until now. I didn’t think that Baby Boy Halley had ever left the hospital. At least not by the front doors.

All new parents worried. Mostly new parents worried about nothing at all, and we had lots of back-in-the-first-week visits from mothers and father too anxious to stay home. Generally we in the maternity department dealt with them, paediatrics had bigger problems to deal with. This pair of new parents were worried to, but they were worries about something real.

“He’s not been eating right.”

“He won’t settle, won’t sleep.”

“He doesn’t like us.”

“He seems scared.”

I knew that he wasn’t the same pink and blonde baby the taller woman had given birth to four days ago. There was no way. The baby was subtly different: paler, his eyes darker, his cheeks a little narrower. I took him from his parents and blocked out their worried banter and concentrated on the little bundle of what should have been warm human baby in my arms.

There’s this thing about being the son of an empathic shifter and a practicing Wiccan wolf… weird shit is sort of normal for me. My husband Derrin was patient and made his peace with it, and tried to bring up the little pack of kids we adopted as best he could with all the weird crap that hung around me. Both mothers were close to tears, especially the birth mom, and she was clutching her hands over her abdomen, her natural instincts telling her that this was not the baby she had given life too. What neither woman had said was the thing that was booming in my ears. Well not my ears, because empaths don’t hear feelings with their ears, not that it mattered.

They were revolted by their baby, and they didn’t know why.

The baby stilled quickly in my arms, no longer squirming and crying, simply sniffling as it sensed a power and pattern different from the wash of the humans it was used too. I fingered the little delicate ironwork cross resting on his chest.

“We put it there to protect him.”

Too late… I thought, and took it off, handing it back.

“Your son is allergic to iron.” It was the truth, just not the whole truth.

“Is that all?” The other mother asked, her eyebrow raised. I could tell that she was the more steadfast of the pair, and would be better able to deal with what was going to happen. She also knew that I was, in part, lying.

The baby fae stared up at me, and made a sound entirely unlike a human baby’s gurgle. It was a sound like running water played through an oboe. A fae elf then. Damn… Now that the iron cross was gone, he was instantly happier. A little pale and sickly from the transfer, but not unwell. Being around all the iron and steel in the human world was going to take its toll, but he would probably grow up just fine with slightly more than his fair share of colds, coughs and runny noses.

I looked back at the parents.

Could I really do this to them? The pair of women had probably never had a single run in with any sort of supernatural in their entire lives, and if they hadn’t given birth on floor six, if I hadn’t been on duty, if any number of another thousand factors had swung into play, they would have lived the rest of their lives without ever knowing that anything other than people walked in the sunlight with them. I took a deep breath.

“This isn’t your baby.”

“What?” The second mum snapped.

The birth mother had a far off look in her eyes.

“Terence…”

“Huh?”

“I was going to call him Terence.”

“You still can sweetie,” The woman rubbed her wife’s arm gently, “He’s gonna be fine isn’t he?”

“This isn’t the baby you gave birth to. He’s… well he was swapped.”

Confusion, anger, rage, annoyance at being lied to. I let the emotions wash over me as they came. As they did, I broke apart the energy and fed it into the pattern of my skills. Being an empath gave one rather specific skills, and having a mother so in tune with nature that she was a part of it had helped me to see the world in a way even other shifter’s found weird.

Denial, hot like fire as both women shouted at once as I explained what had happened. Their baby had been taken, another left in his place. An elf child. A fae. A child from a slightly different dimension lying parallel with ours.

Anger the temperature of the inside of the sun, so vehement that it burnt me as it struck. Screaming rage and wailing horror.

Bargaining as they begged me to switch him back. Offered me fistfuls of cash to change things as though I could step back in time and make it all not true.

Depression, crying and moaning, holding each other close and tight, crying over the loss of a baby they barely knew. Their birth sons had been hours old when he’d been taken. They wailed for his loss.

I knew the acceptance would come, but probably not for many years. I gave them my number, both of them, arranged for them to bring the baby, who a desperately hoped they would name something other than Terence (poor kid, no one deserved that), round at the weekend for a better chat.

Ellen and Paige left with the child who was not their son, tears tracks down their cheeks and with definite instructions that they needed to throw away all the iron in their house. I finished my shift that night with a phone call.

“Babe!” Derrin sounded happy, “You on your way home?”

“Yeah. How are the kids?”

“Sky drew you a picture, Bran got into another fight at school. Worrel misses you. He wants a puppy.”

“I’ll shift for him when I get back. Babe?”

“Emmet?” I wanted to crawl down the phone line and be smothered in my husband’s love.

“I think we might be getting some new additions to our extended pack.”