Jim Gem's Arc

Chapter 23 of 23

Three nights after the birth, the baby woke crying. Jim reached her first. He lifted her from the cradle and held her against his chest. Her cry sharpened. Then he saw it. The black scales on her forearm lifted and spread, climbing past her elbow. The purple glow brightened with each wail. She was too small to reason with, too small to calm with words. Jim's own heart hammered, and that made it worse. He knew the feeling. Emotion pulled the shift up, the way it once pulled his wolf. "Easy," he said. "Easy, little one." He bounced her the way he'd seen others do. The scales kept climbing. He tried humming. Nothing. He held her tighter, and she cried harder, as if his fear leaked straight into her. The purple light washed the stone walls of the keep. Rain from the waterfall hissed beyond the wide door. Jim pressed his lips together and fought his own scale down, but he could not fight hers. He did not know how. "Give her here." Lena stood in the doorway, hair loose, still slow from the labor days behind her. She crossed the room and took their daughter from his arms before he could argue. Lena, who threw flips off the tower for strangers, who ran from the circus when someone saw too much of her, now held something no crowd could teach her to handle. Jim braced for her to freeze. She had gone still and quiet the first time she'd ever seen him shift. He waited for that stillness now. It did not come. Lena settled the baby into the crook of her arm. She began to stroke the small head, slow and even, the same way she'd once stroked Jim's hair to pull his wolf back under his skin. She didn't speak. She just kept her hand moving. The crying thinned. The purple glow dimmed. The scales slid back down the tiny arm, past the elbow, past the wrist, until only the birth-marked line remained. The baby's chest rose and fell in an easy rhythm. She slept. Jim stared. "How did you—" "Same as I do for you." Lena looked up at him. She smiled, tired and sure. "She's got your heart. Fast. Scared. She just needs a hand that isn't scared back." Jim understood then. His fear had fed hers. Lena's calm had fed the opposite. The anchor he'd needed for ten years, his daughter needed too, from the first night. He reached out and laid his palm over the baby's arm. His hand did not shake now. He matched Lena's slow stroke. The baby did not stir. "Let me," he said. Lena passed her over. Jim held his daughter, kept his heartbeat level, and felt the scales stay flat under his fingers. He could soothe her now. But he saw the harder truth waiting. Soon she would grow, and shift, and need more than a soothing hand. He would have to teach her to hold the dragon herself.