Sold to the Prince of the Meldanians

  Sold To The Prince Of The Meldanians

  Hollie Hutchins

  Contents

  1. Nip In the Bud

  2. Ladies Night

  3. Human Goods

  4. Welcome to Meldania

  5. The Royal Family

  6. A Girl and her Alligator

  7. Mommy Issues

  8. Long Live the King

  9. Brothers will be Brothers

  10. An “Easy” Target

  11. Schoolyard Scuffles

  12. A Sore Loser

  13. Brotherly Bond

  14. Long Live the Queen

  More By Hollie

  Sold To The Athim Prince

  Branded By The Black Wolves

  Let’s Be Friends!

  Copyright

  1

  Nip In the Bud

  It was nearing the end of her shift, and Amelia was hanging on by a thread. TB4, the Tulip family’s youngest child, had been crying for three hours straight, not responding to any of Amelia’s tricks to get her to stop. She’d tried a pacifier, a second bottle, rocking the baby while standing up, rocking the baby while sitting down; nothing worked. Amelia was at the point now, where she was pleading with the baby, as if it would hear the desperation and exhaustion in her voice and realize that this poor woman was on the edge of a mental breakdown.

  “Please, baby girl, please,” Amelia said, holding the one-year old in one arm, using her bony hip to support most of the child’s weight. “Just go to sleep. Your mamma will be coming to pick you up soon, and you know how she hates it when you cry.” The baby’s screams grew louder, and Amelia began to hear a ringing in her ear. Instead of getting angry, Amelia put the back of her hand to the baby’s check and caressed. “I know, my little Bud, you’re not happy.” She sighed and said softly, “Neither am I.”

  Her hand still on the baby’s cheek, Amelia noticed that the backs of her fingers felt warm. She brought her touch to TB4’s forehead and the warmth became heat.

  “Oh no.” Amelia shifted the baby to her other hip and her non-dominant hand. She ran to the front room of the nursery, careful not to make too much noise as she passed the closed door of the crib room, where the other two babies presently in her care were sleeping. “No wonder you’re so upset, Baby Bud, you’re not feeling well.” She picked up the phone sitting on the main desk and dialed nine-three-seven.

  The nursery was housed in a building right next door to the only hospital in District Eight, and they were all on the same phone system. A man picked up. “DE Pediatric Emergency, how may I direct your call?”

  “Hi, is Dr. Victoria Alabaster on call tonight?”

  “Yes, she is. May I ask what this is regarding?”

  “Can you please tell her it’s Amelia and that I have an emergency with one of the babies in the nursery.”

  “I will need you to describe the nature of the emergency,” said the man on the other line.

  Amelia hesitated. Depending on how she described the baby’s condition, the hospital would either pay for her treatment or not. If the hospital administrators and the doctors who treated him/her deemed the patient’s ailment to be something preventable, or the cause of a pre-existing condition, then the patient –– or in this case the patient’s parents –– would be responsible for all medical bills. Amelia knew TB4’s could potentially afford to pay the bill, if they stopped partying for a month or two and actually saved. Instead, it was more likely TB4’s mother would refuse treatment the second the hospital called her.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong, exactly,” she said. If she could just get Victoria on the phone, her friend would take care of everything. “I’m new on the job, I’ve never seen anything like this. Please, can you just put the doctor on?”

  The man cleared his throat and took his time to answer. Amelia assumed he was unconvinced and probably more than a little dubious, but it was 3:14 in the morning and she was hoping he was in no mood to push the issue. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll go get her.”

  “Thank you.”

  TB4’s crying had quieted, slightly, and as Amelia waited to hear Victoria’s voice, she cooed, telling her little Bud that everything would be alright. TB4 calmed down, and Amelia couldn’t help but wonder if the baby noticed the shift in Amelia’s demeanor, and if she knew her caretaker finally understood what was wrong.

  “Hello, this is Dr. Alabaster.”

  “Vic, it’s me.”

  “Oh, hey.” Her friend dropped her professional cadence and picked up a more casual one. “What’s going on?”

  “I think Baby Bud–– I mean, TB4, the Tulip baby, might have a fever.” Bud was Amelia’s nickname for TB4, since her last name was Tulip and she was very small for her age, like a flower bud not quite ready to bloom. Because of the high death rate of children under the age of four in District Eight, most parents avoid naming their kids until they are at least a few years old. Instead, they are just given monikers such as TB4 –– which stands for Tulip baby number four. “Her face and forehead are really warm and she’s been screaming non-stop for hours.”

  “Has she eaten anything since you’ve had her?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Look in her ears, is there anything coming out of them?”

  “Coming out of them?” Amelia balanced the phone between her face and shoulder, and went to the side of the desk and flipped the switch, which illuminated the fluorescent lights overhead.

  She had them turned out because no one was scheduled to bring any more children in that night and she figured the darker the nursery, the easier it would be for Bud to fall asleep. Bud started to wail again when the lights flickered on, her eyes squinting through her tears. “I’m sorry, baby, I know this is no fun. Let me just look in your ear for one second.” Amelia lightly, with one finger, guided Bud’s chin to one side and looked in TB4’s right ear, which appeared fine, and then her left ear. A thin line of fluid was flowing from that one, down her earlobe and onto her neck.

  “There is something coming out of her ear,” she said, putting the phone back in her hand. “Does that mean an infection?”

  “Most likely, you need to bring her in.”

  “I can’t leave the other babies. Mercy is supposed to be here in thirty minutes to relieve me, but she’s always late. Can it wait an hour?”

  “It’s not life-threatening,” said Victoria. “It’s just if you can handle her screams for that much longer.”

  Amelia bit her lip and bounced Bud up and down, gently. “I’m worried she is going to wake the other children. I’ll try giving Mercy a call and seeing if she can get here early. Or on time, at least. I’ll be in as soon as I can.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  Amelia hung up without so much as a goodbye and started to dig through the junk drawer in the front desk, looking for the employee log book where Mercy’s number would hopefully be listed. Just as she found Mercy’s name on the list, Bud suddenly stopped screaming all together and laid her head on Amelia’s shoulder.

  Amealia looked down at the helpless creature in her arms, and as a bit of drool seeped from the baby’s mouth into her shirt, she couldn’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of dread seep into her heart. Somehow, this silence was worse than the screaming.

  “You made it,” Victoria said, opening the door to the ER for Amelia and Bud. “And sooner than I was expecting.”

  It had been twenty minutes since they spoke on the phone. “Yeah, well, after a lot of begging, and an agreement for me to cover her shift on Saturday, I got Mercy to leave the party she was at and come in.”

  “Bring her in here.” Victoria motioned for Amelia to follow her into examination room one
. “When did she stop crying?”

  “A minute or two after we hung up,” said Amelia. “I’ve been checking to make sure she’s still breathing and responsive, which she has been, but she seems really out of it.”

  “It’s probably the fever. Can you hold her while I take her temperature?”

  “Sure.”

  Victoria grabbed a tiny thermometer from one of the cupboards in the room, put a new plastic cap on the part that goes in one’s ear, and asked which ear Amelia noticed the liquid coming out of.

  “Her left one.”

  “Okay,” said Victoria. “I will look at that one in a minute. To do this, however.” She walked around to the right side of the baby. “We might as well use the ear that isn’t giving her trouble.”

  She stuck the thermometer in Bud’s ear and pressed the button on the handle. A few seconds later, the thing beeped and the screen read 101.3.

  “That’s pretty high, right? For a baby?”

  “That’s high for anyone,” said Victoria. “But it’s nothing to call home about. Not yet anyway. When is her mother supposed to come retrieve her?”

  “Five, I think,” said Amelia. “She said she had a dinner to go to, which I’m sure meant she was meeting friends at some club. She mentioned something about picking up Bud before her shift starts tomorrow morning.”

  Victoria raised her eyebrows at her friend. “What did you call her?”

  Amelia looked away from her and down at the baby. “It’s just a little nick name.”

  “Ame, we talked about this.” Victoria opened one of the drawers and pulled out another thermometer looking tool, this one more simply designed and without a screen. “You have to stop getting attached to the babies you take care of at the nursery. Most of them don’t make it–”

  “They don’t make it past two, yes, I know the statistics.”

  “I’m not trying to be cruel, I’ve just seen you heartbroken so many times.” Victoria slowly put one end of the tool just inside Bud’s infected ear and pressed a button which illuminated a small light. She looked through the other end with one of her eyes, squinting the other. She put the tool down and stared at Amelia. “It isn’t healthy.”

  Amelia nodded, but didn’t say anything. She wanted to change the subject.

  “It’s a lesson I had to learn to,” Victoria continued. “The first year I was interning here, I was naming all of my patients. Then, after so many losses, I had to get tough, thicken my skin. Otherwise, this job would have killed me.”

  “But I’m not like you,” said Amelia. “I can’t just turn off the emotional side of my brain and be all logic and reason. I’ve tried to detach myself, really, but these kids… Bud, especially, they need me. Or someone like me. You know what their parents are like. They’re… they’re…”

  “Like your parents?”

  Amelia again, could not look her friend in the eye. She stared down at her worn out tennis shoes and the mystery bruise that had appeared on her shin the day before. “That’s one way to put it, I guess.”

  “Anyway,” said Victoria, taking the hint that it was time to talk about something else. “She definitely has an infection, but it’s nothing too serious. I will give her some antibiotics and something that will help her sleep. She can stay here until her mother comes to get her.” She reached out her hands and Amelia reluctantly handed the baby over. TB4 cried out twice, while she was shuffled to another person’s arms, but then was quiet again. Victoria put a hand on the back of the baby’s head. “I will do the paperwork so this looks like something that couldn’t be avoided, although it absolutely could have been.”

  “What do you think caused it?”

  “Looks like a bacterial infection, which I’m sure she got from unsanitary living conditions. She also might have allergies, I’ll test her for them, but let’s hope that isn’t the case. Allergies in babies are much harder to treat, they last indefinitely, and the medicine we have is crazy expensive.” Victoria lowered her voice, though it was unlikely anyone could hear them behind the closed door. “The shifters think babies with allergies aren’t worth treating, since that means they will likely be adults with allergies, and that means they will be weak. Unable to work as hard.”

  “Of course they do.” Amelia rolled her eyes. “The worst part is, I bet Mr. and Mrs. Tulip would agree with them; it won’t be worth it to them to have a sickly child they have to take better care of.”

  Victoria nodded and rocked Bud a few times, who was once again starting to fuss. “You should head home and get some rest. You look beat.”

  “Gee thanks.”

  “I don’t mean it like that…” She smirked. “Well, I do, a little. As your doctor, I'm prescribing you a good night’s sleep.”

  Amelia threw her hands up in the air. “Hey, don’t tell me, tell my family. They are the ones always coming home in the middle of the night, yelling and falling about. I can’t remember the last time I slept an entire night through without getting woken up.”

  Victoria sighed and took the hand she had on TB4’s back off and started digging around in one of the massive pockets of her lab coat. “Sleep at my house. I’m going to be on call until dinner time tomorrow, er, I guess tonight.” She handed Amelia a key card, which had the words “The Lux Lofts” written across it in swoopy, cursive letters.

  “Are you sure?” Amelia looked down at the card and frowned. “I wasn’t complaining so that you would offer your apartment, I hope you know that.”

  “I know that,” said Victoria. “And yes I’m sure. I basically live at the hospital these days, somebody might as well get some use out of the place.”

  Amelia smiled and tucked the card safely in the back pocket of her dirty, illfitting jeans. “If you insist. Will you call me if there are any updates with Bud? And to tell me what her parents say?”

  “If I have time, yes.”

  “Thank you,” said Amelia. “For everything.” She couldn’t properly hug her friend while Victoria was holding the baby, so she reached out and rubbed her hand in gentle circles on Bud’s back. “I know I say this a lot, but I owe you one.”

  “You owe me like a million at this point.”

  “And you never let me forget it.”

  The walk to Victoria’s loft was a safer one than the route Amelia usually took to get home. Her parents’ house, if you could even call it that, was located in East Eight, which was one of the sketchiest neighborhoods in the district. Her parents had purchased it just after they got married, which was about a decade after the war with the supernaturals ended. Three years later, Amelia’s mother, Gwen, was pregnant with twins and their two-person house soon had to house four. Amelia came two years after the twins and they still hadn’t been able to save enough money to move. After that, her parents had a baby pretty much every year, bringing the grand total to seven.

  Around the birth of child number four, Gwen started to drink. Amelia’s dad, Earl, had always had trouble with the stuff, but when he would go on a bender, Gwen was always able to hold the fort down. Not anymore. When she slipped, she slipped fast and hard, never to get sober again. They weren’t bad people, Gwen and Earl Cobbles, but they also weren’t good people. They don’t go out of their way to hurt their children, but they had given up on parenthood a long time ago.

  Amelia’s two older sisters, Kelly and Sasha, both left home when they turned sixteen. She saw them a few times after they moved out, mostly when they stopped by to pick up a forgotten piece of clothing or to see if there was anything valuable lying around they could steal and pawn. Two years back, when they turned twenty, they got married to a pair of shifter brothers who swept them away to a better, more exciting life in District Four. Amelia couldn’t help but be a little jealous of them –– marrying a shifter was one of the best options for a poor human girl living in District Eight. The only problem was, how to find a nice one.

  “Hey watch it!” An angry, suit-clad man yelled over his shoulder, after Amelia and him accidentally collided on
the sidewalk. She’d been lost in thought, staring down at the cracks in the sidewalk, counting the blocks until she was in West Eight, where the Lux Lofts were.

  This was how she was used to walking home; head down, not engaging with anyone she might come across. She didn’t have to be quite so cautious in this neck of the woods, but it had become second nature at this point.

  The Lux building was one of the largest, and nicest, in the district. Towering above her, Amelia tried to count the rows of windows to see how many stories it was, but lost count sometime after forty. The bottom level of the building was occupied by the lobby, an expensive restaurant and bar simply called “Lovely’s,” a gym, a spa, and a small, corner ice cream shop. Amelia was tempted to stop in for a scoop, but remembered that she wasn’t due to get another paycheck for another week and couldn’t afford to splurge.

  Instead, she pulled the keycard out of her pocket and pushed it into the slot in a gold-painted, metal intercom box. The screen above the keypad instructed her to punch in the tenant code that matched the card. Amelia looked down at her palm, where she’d written the two different numbers Victoria told her she’d need to enter. She couldn’t remember which one was for which door, so she simply guessed and tried one.

  5.5.3.4.6.

  The machine beeped angrily at her and the screen flashed red. “Wrong Code.” It said. She tried the other one, remember what Victoria had told her, that she would only be given two chances to put the code in right. After that, the machine would eat the key card and Victoria would have to go through the lengthy, pricey process of getting a new one.

  4.4.2.3.5.

  This time the screen flashed green and said “Access Granted.” Instead of beeping at her, the only sound was that of the main door unlocking. Amelia pulled the heavy glass door and stepped inside the immaculate lobby. The floors were tiled, in a large-square, black and white pattern. The walls were cream with gold trim. There was a massive, jet black front desk sitting in the far left corner. Behind it sat a grouchy older woman, sporting coke-bottle glasses. The decor struck Amelia as tacky, but she wouldn’t have said so out loud –– what did she know about style?