Expensive - Amy Bellows Page 0,47

air around them is thick with moisture and smells of salt. It’s more difficult to fly through, even in the fall, and during the summer, the heat has a weight to it that’s insufferable.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to understand why ice dragon shifters chose a place like this to live.

To the right of the buildings are five landing pads separated by high fencing to ensure privacy. Each of the landing pads has a traditional closet like the one on the roof of my house. After I shift back to my human form, I open the closet and grab a towel from within, drying the sweat off my body. There’s also a robe, a pair of slippers, and a copy of the New York Times. I pull on the robe and step into the slippers but leave the newspaper inside.

Every landing pad has a door that opens to the same hallway. It splits in two directions. According to the signs, one leads to the spa and the other leads to the healing and medical offices. I take a right and end up walking into an airconditioned pathway with doors on both sides that are labeled with the names of doctors and warlocks. I’ve never entered from this direction before. If you arrive by car the entrance to the doctor’s offices are more like storefronts on the outside.

At the end of the corridor I find a door with, “Howard Barnes, Warlock, Prenatal Specialist” on a plaque. Underneath there is a second sign that says, “Entrance granted by appointment only. This is private property and protestors will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Protestors? Do people protest warlocks? I didn’t know that was happening.

Before I can knock, the door swings open and a woman with long, dark hair and rosy cheeks smiles at me. “Welcome. Please note that there’s no photography or recording beyond this point.”

“Okay.”

She leads me through another hallway to a waiting room. Unlike the other doctor’s offices I visited in the Pallisades Ice Bath complex, the room doesn’t have large windows. In fact, the only windows in this room are frosted.

The clientele is different here too. The patients in the other waiting rooms were clearly Blue Bloods. Everything about their clothing and shoes screamed money. But a boy in the corner who can’t be any older than sixteen is wearing a stained T-shirt and a scuffed pair of tennis shoes.

Howard said he only worked with omegas who were already pregnant or had fertility issues. Is this boy already pregnant?

A girl with bright red hair and striking green eyes looks up at me from the other side of the room. She’s frighteningly thin, and her hair is cropped short and uneven—like the photos I’ve seen of people who were recently rescued from the red wolf shifter breeding pits.

That’s when it all makes sense. While most laws are federal and apply to all humans and shifters, every species of shifter has a legislature or guild that protects their legal interests and creates laws specific for that species. Some shifter groups have made abortion illegal. Like red wolf shifters. They’re the most extreme. Red wolf shifters can’t get an abortion even if the omega parent is dying.

But there is a loophole. Ice dragon shifters protect the magic of their warlocks under shifter law. It can’t be regulated—not even when it violates other shifter laws. Which means magical terminations of pregnancies are legal, regardless of the species of the omega seeking one.

I didn’t realize a healer at the Pallisade Ice Baths provided magical abortions. It’s a hotly contested practice. Medical abortions are safer and don’t require a large personal sacrifice.

But if you’re a sixteen-year-old boy or an omega just rescued from the breeding pits and you couldn’t get an abortion legally… maybe it would be worth it.

“Mr. Barnes will see you now,” the woman tells me.

“But what about the other people waiting?”

“They aren’t waiting. They’re contemplating what their personal sacrifice will be. It can be a difficult decision. Especially for our clients who don’t have much even before they walk through these doors. Please come with me. The fewer people who see you, the better.”

She takes me to an office with two sets of couches separated by a coffee table.

“Sit down, and he’ll be with you shortly.” She leaves the office and shuts the door behind her.

I sit on the far couch. There are several pamphlets on the coffee table in front of me. One of them has the words “Alternative