Chapter Twenty-One

Harbor

Being pregnant was wild.

Some omegas had stomach issues, or were tired, or had mood swings. I didn’t come into this completely unaware, but I was woefully unprepared. I could go from not wanting to eat, to needing to eat everything, to feeling like I wanted to be sick—all in the matter of an hour, and in any order. There was no apparent logic to it. All I could do was ride it out.

And the exhaustion. I wasn’t just tired. I was can I make it until at least dinnertime before I go to bed tired. My mates were great about it. They didn’t push me to do more than I could, and they encouraged me to get the sleep that I needed.

And how did I reward them? With mood swings.

One minute, I’d be sitting there watching a movie, starting to doze off, and I’d hear the sink turn on, and I’d snap at them for being loud. It wasn’t loud, and even as I was yelling at them, I understood I wasn’t being rational. I’d actually be thinking it at the same time the words fell from my lips. But could I stop myself? No.

And that’s why, even though the healer’s office said I could wait until twelve weeks alone to see them, I pushed back. I was not going to be doing that. Nope. I needed to see a healer sooner rather than later just in case all of this was a sign that something was wrong.

I made an appointment the second they could get me in because I needed some answers. My hope was they’d change up my prenatal vitamins or tell me to eat more steak or something equally easy. But whatever the case might be, it was better to know than to not know.

Both my mates came with me as we drove to the office. They didn’t realize that I had begged to come in earlier than normal. Heck, they didn’t know that I was concerned at all. They were excited that we might get to see the baby. On that front, I guess I was too, even if they were still in the little blob stage where the ultrasounds don’t look like anything to the trained eye.

When we arrived, they had me fill out a bunch of paperwork and do a bunch of forms on the tablet, which was weird, because one or the other should suffice. But it killed the time until we finally got called back—twenty minutes later than our appointment. The intake nurse took my vitals and brought me into the room, pulling in an extra chair for my mates.

And then we waited.

And waited.

Until finally there was a knock on the door and the healer came in.

We still hadn’t decided if we were gonna stick with the healer the whole way or go over to the midwife, but Dr. Wolfe was a shifter, so we figured we would start here. He had all the medical equipment we might need and openings. It made sense.

“Hello, Dads. Congratulations.” The healer shook each of our hands.

I thanked him, and we went back and forth with him asking me questions and me answering them. He also asked my mates a couple about their family history—things that wouldn’t go on a form because, well, shifters.

“Now let’s see if we can hear this little one’s heartbeat.” He took out a doppler.

Looking for the heartbeat was...terrifying. He kept moving the wand over my belly and saying, “Yeah, it’s probably just too early.”

Something in my gut told me that wasn’t it.

I looked to my mates to find both their faces schooled. They were as scared as I was. And the longer he prodded my belly with the wand, the more scared I became. My eyes were filling with tears, my mind racing to the worst.

“Stay right here.” Dr. Wolfe set the wand down. “Let’s get the ultra sound machine, then we can see your wee one.”

If there was a baby to be seen. Maybe I wasn’t pregnant after all. Mistakes happened, right? Maybe it was a false alarm. And if it was? What then? I wasn’t sure I could handle that. It would break me.

The healer left, coming back in a few minutes later with the ultrasound cart. My blood ran cold. It shouldn’t be this hard. They should be able to find our baby.

And as he put the transducer on, I asked the goddess to please make sure everything was okay. She heard my plea, just not in the way I thought I meant. Everything was beyond okay—just very different than I thought it would be.

“So, the reason you can’t hear the heartbeat is because the shells are in the way.” The healer said, not looking up from the computer screen.

“The...what? The shells?” I had to be hearing him wrong. He wasn’t making any sense.

“Yes, shells. It looks like you have some eggs in there.” He tapped on the screen to show me what he meant. Not that the pictures helped clarify anything.

“Excuse me?” I pushed myself to sit, and he didn’t fight me on it, instead taking the wand and setting it down.

“Yeah, eggs.”

“Makes sense.” Magnus didn’t sound the least bit shocked or concerned.

“How does this make sense?” I wasn’t a chicken.

“Your mate’s a dragon, right?” Dr. Wolfe, expert healer, turned off the machine. “Dragons come from eggs.”

“But I’m a unicorn! That’s not how genetics work.” I would grow babies, not lay eggs. It was the way of my kind for all of recorded history. That wouldn’t suddenly change, would it?

He chuckled. “But it is.”

So it was true. I was going to lay eggs. Eggs that held my babies…which meant babies, not baby. This was a whole lot to take in, and I didn’t even know where to begin asking my questions.

“So I’m guessing you need to learn a little bit about eggs?”

I nodded. “If by a little bit, you mean a lot, I do. And then maybe we could talk about my mood swings a little?”

“Don’t worry, Dad, that’s all part of the egg talk.”

The egg talk that took an hour. I had so much to learn, and it wasn’t like they had books on this stuff. Why weren’t there books?