The Skin She's In

by Margo Bond Collins

  His unearthly scream echoed so loudly that I could hear it even in my snake form.

  The crunch of his bones felt more satisfying than I had anticipated, and I reveled in it for what felt like a long time but was only a few seconds before I lost all sense of the world around me.

  When I regained consciousness, the first thing I noticed was how much I hurt.

  The second was that the bear wasn’t dead, though I had apparently broken its back. It lay on the floor several feet from me, whimpering and twitching, so I assumed it was unable to move.

  The third thing was that I was naked and bleeding, parts of my abdomen sliced open. I was afraid to look too closely, worried that I would see internal organs through the cuts.

  I wasn’t all that certain I could move, either.

  But I had to get out of here—I had no idea when, or if, anyone would be coming back for me. So I dragged myself up off the floor, holding my ripped stomach together, and staggered toward the door.

  Chapter 9

  I MANAGED TO SNAG A couple of baby blankets from a shelf on my way out and press them to the wounds, relying on some vague memory from television shows that applying pressure was a good idea.

  Plus, it’ll help keep my internal organs inside.

  Luckily, the wounds I had sustained had shrunk along with my body, so I didn’t have Kodiak-bear-sized claw-marks, though there were still gashes in my abdomen.

  Eduardo had told me once that sometimes shifters could heal their injuries during a shift. I had half-hoped that pulling in the earth magic would help with that.

  Apparently not.

  Though maybe it would have been worse otherwise.

  As I staggered down the hall, Kade ducked out of a room at the end, apparently on his way to back me up against the werebear. When he saw me, he broke into a run.

  I collapsed into his arms. “He’s down, not dead,” I gasped, just as several Shields, including Eduardo, burst into the hallway from the NICU scrub-in room.

  Kade lowered me gently to the floor, gesturing toward the end of the hall with a jerk of his head. “Last room on the left.” Prying my hands away from my stomach, he tugged at the blood-soaked baby blanket I had been clutching. “Let me see what we’ve got here.”

  “How’s the baby?” I managed to whisper.

  “She’s good.” Kade was almost crooning, his tone soothing as he peeled away the blanket. “We’ve got her settled into a new incubator in another room.”

  The nurse from the Contact Isolation room stuck her head out into the hall from the room Kade had been in. “Need me to call a team?”

  Kade’s nod was almost distracted as he poked at my abdomen. “Yes, please. STAT.”

  It occurred to me as if from a distance that STAT wasn’t a good thing, and then everything went black.

  WHEN I AWOKE, I WAS in a bed in a hospital room, bright morning sunshine streaming in through a window.

  I tried to sit up, but a sharp pain shot through my abdomen, stopping me, and the events from the night before came flooding back to me. After I passed out in the hallway, I had a few cloudy memories of someone sticking an IV needle in my arm and being lifted onto a gurney, then wheeled through some hallways.

  Lifting the thin blanket that covered me, I tried to see my stomach, but a hospital gown was draped across me.

  “It’s all bandaged up, anyway,” a cheerful nurse in her fifties with short hair dyed coal-black told me as she bustled into the room. “Dr. Nevala says you’re to leave it alone.” She grinned at me. “In fact, his exact words were that he would feed me to a lamia if I let you pick at it.”

  A shifter, then.

  My huffed laugh hurt. “I’m the only lamia he knows. Well, the only one big enough to feed a nurse to,” I amended.

  She winked at me. “I’m Daria, and I’ll be around until tonight. You can take a look when we change the bandage later.”

  “Do you know what happened last night? After I...” my voice trailed off and I waved my hand in the general direction of my midsection. “Is the baby okay?”

  Daria nodded as she checked the numbers on the machines attached to me and made a few notes on a Post-It notepad that she slipped into her pocket when she was done. “She’s fine. Word is, you took out two wolves and a bear and saved everyone in the room.”

  I shook my head ruefully. “Except myself.”

  “You’re still here, honey. That counts as saving yourself, as far as I’m concerned.”

  I smelled Kade on his way in before I actually saw him—that hot, spicy scent that always blew around him preceded him into the room. He spoke quietly to Daria for a moment, and then she left the room.

  He hadn’t found time to shave yet, and the slightly scruffy scratch of his beard as bent down to kiss me still sent a shiver down my back, even through the haze of pain and medication. I didn’t waste time on pleasantries, though.

  “The baby needs a name,” I said, zeroing in immediately on the one thought that had been running through my mind ever since I awoke. I couldn’t have explained why, but somehow, naming the baby seemed akin to protecting her.

  Maybe even claiming her?

  Kade didn’t even stop to ask why. He simply nodded and said, “Do you have any ideas yet?”

  “Can I use your phone? I want to check something.”

  “Sure.” He pulled it out of his pocket, and I ran a quick internet search.

  “I was thinking that as the first new lamia baby, she should have a name that means peace,” I said, showing him the list I had found. “Maybe Serena?”

  He nodded. “I like it. I’ll let the NICU staff know.”

  As he left, Daria returned. “Okay, sweetie. Let’s get you up and walking.”

  I winced. “Already?”

  With a nod, she folded the covers down to the bottom of the bed. “And when the physical therapist comes in later, she’ll walk you through a couple of shifts.”

  “Shifts?” My voice sounded almost as stunned as I felt.

  Daria laughed. “This is a shifter hospital, honey. We put you through all your paces before we send you home.” She paused, then said, “Try to keep it in the normal size range, though?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Only if you promise to keep the wolves and bears at bay.”

  “You got it, hon.”

  APPARENTLY SHIFTING from one form to another did speed up the healing process a little. Though I didn’t say so aloud, I was fairly certain that my daily visits to Serena helped, as well. At any rate, the more I stumbled around the hospital, the happier all the doctors and nurses were with what they called my “progress.”

  I went to see Marta only once, the day she was due to be released from the hospital. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, dressed in a soft, black, jersey cotton dress, and gingerly holding a small bag in her lap. She flinched when she caught sight of me coming in the door. I didn’t really blame her. I might have saved her from her rapist, but in the end, I was a reminder of a horrible time in her life. That she had been willing to have Serena rather than abort her was amazing. I had planned to thank her, to tell her the baby’s name, but in the end, I decided not to.

  She needed to be released from anything having to do with lamias and other shifters more than she might possibly need to know about the child she had borne.

  “What will you do next?” I asked.

  “I’m leaving,” she said. “Not just the hospital. Texas. I’ve been approved for a transfer, and I’m going...” she paused as if she had been about to tell me where she was headed, but then continued with, “...as far away from shapeshifters as I possibly can.”

  That there were shapeshifters everywhere was just one more thing she didn’t need to know.

  “Take care of yourself. You can always reach out if you need me,” I said. I didn’t hug her goodbye, but I waved at the door.

  Someday Serena would want to know about her birth-mother. I would need to spend a lot of time considering what to tell her because I was c
ertain that Marta would never want to know her child.

  The thought saddened me more than I had anticipated.

  The next day, my own surgeon—not Kade, since apparently he had tagged someone else to do the actual operation to put my innards back inside my stomach—pronounced me almost ready to be released. Kade agreed, but only if I promised to go to his house rather than back to my apartment since the Shields hadn’t finished tracking down all the conspirators who had participated in planning the attacks on Marta and Serena.

  As the only survivor, the Kodiak—a shifter named Bartholomew Jenkins—wasn’t talking. He wasn’t walking, either, something I would feel worse about if he hadn’t tried so hard to kill a premature infant, not to mention her nurse, my boyfriend, and me.

  “The other mothers could still be in danger, too,” I said to Kade, as part of my argument for staying in my own place. “More danger than I’m in.” We were back in my hospital room, but this time I was sitting on the reclining chair by the window, and he was leaning against the wall next to me.

  “No.” His tone was unyielding. “If you don’t agree to go to my house, I’ll have Dr. Smith cancel your release orders.”

  I shrugged. “I could still leave.”

  Kade scowled and I finally relented. “Okay, okay. I’ll stay at your place.”

  His phone buzzed and he checked an incoming text. A broad smile broke out across his face. “We need to go see Serena.”

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “You’ll see when we get there.”

  He almost bounced on his toes all the way down the elevator and through the NICU scrub-in area.

  Serena had been set up in a new room while construction workers repaired the old one and the hospital filed insurance claims against the damaged machinery. The story—the one that had gone to the police and the public—was that Serena’s biological father had broken in to try to kill the child he had wanted to abort, after attacking Marta and failing to kill either her or the baby. I had no idea what paperwork they had presented to back that up, or what would happen to Bartholomew Jenkins, but it had worked well enough as a cover for the hospital’s, and the shapeshifters’, purposes.

  The tear in reality in that room still leaked Earth magic. The other shifters could sense it now, but no one else had been able to use it yet. Eduardo had come to visit me once and he and Kade had speculated that similar tears might be the source of the Earth magic hot spots in other places, as well.

  I didn’t care. I just wanted to make sure that I hadn’t done some sort of irreparable damage to the world by pulling the Earth magic through someplace it wasn’t supposed to go. And despite my physical therapist’s prodding, I refused to use the Earth magic I had torn into the hospital to augment my shifts. I claimed remembering the events was too traumatic, but in reality, I was afraid of what kind of permanent harm I might cause.

  Now, as we walked into the new room, Kelly, the nurse who had carried Serena away from the attack, was standing in front of the incubator, a wide grin on her face. “You ready?” she asked.

  Kade wore an almost identical smile.

  “Ready for what?” I glanced between them.

  Kelly stepped to one side and presented the incubator with a flourish of her arms, like a game-show hostess.

  Inside coiled a juvenile snake—but not any species that I recognized. Not from the animal kingdom, anyway. Her head was a triangular wedge and she had the heat-sensing pits of the pit viper between her eyes and nose. Her body, however, had the pattern and musculature of an albino python.

  “That’s Serena?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer. “She’s a lamia.”

  “She’s a lamia who imprinted her shape on you,” Kade corrected me. “That’s almost exactly what you looked like the night you shifted in front of her.”

  “And you should have seen how fast she shifted, too,” Kelly added enthusiastically. “I turned my back for just a second, and when I turned back around, there she was.”

  She and Kade were still grinning like crazy people—but all I felt was dread.

  “She’s more dangerous that way,” I pointed out.

  “But this means that she’s also trainable,” Kade said. “She can be influenced.” He wrapped one arm around my shoulder and pulled me toward him to kiss the top of my head, careful not to tug too quickly and jostle my injuries. “This is a good thing, Lindi.”

  I tried to see it their way, but I worried about how the rest of the shifters would take this development. If nothing else, the attacks on Marta and Serena had shown us that there were plenty of shapeshifters who still didn’t want the lamia race to return.

  Chapter 10

  I KEPT MY CONCERNS to myself, though, allowing Kade to check me out of the hospital and take me to his house to fuss over me as he settled me in. My adoptive parents had been to see me several times in the hospital, but I had assured them that they could head out on their usual summer research trips, Mom to fulfill a grant she had to use one of the big telescopes out in California, Dad to study spontaneous regeneration—parthenogenesis—in reptiles in Death Valley. At least this year, they were headed to the same part of the world. They were actually planning to take some vacation time together, though I would believe it when I saw it.

  Being alone at Kade’s while he worked got old pretty quickly, but I filled the hours doing CAP-C paperwork, completing my physical therapy exercises, and begging rides to and from the hospital from shifters who worked there so I could visit Serena. I was glad to see she had shifted back to her human form the first time I went to see her after I had been released; I still wasn’t certain her shifting ability was the good thing Kade and Kelly had made it out to be, though I was beginning to realize that a “first shift” was, to a shifter, akin to a “first step” for most human parents.

  Gloria began visiting me every couple of days, usually bringing lunch. It didn’t take long to figure out that she was checking on my mental health after getting caught up in what she saw as a horrible, but random, act of violence.

  She didn’t know this had become my new normal.

  For good or ill, I knew the words to say to minimize her worry.

  While I had been away, there had been no more strange recordings in the CAP-C, and Gloria was convinced it had been a strange technical glitch. “Moreland is inclined to agree with me,” she said one afternoon, taking a bite of her salad and waving her fork in the air as she spoke. “He thinks maybe something caused the microphone to pick up my breathing from the background. Or maybe the officer’s. Anyway, as long as it doesn’t happen again, I’m choosing not to worry about it.”

  Given my recent experiences, I was less certain we hadn’t had an intruder, but I was willing to let it go, at least for now.

  My boredom-busting routine actually helped me recover more quickly than I might have otherwise, and it wasn’t long before Dr. Smith released me to go back to work for a few hours a day. “Nothing too strenuous,” he admonished me, and I pointed out that counseling was rarely a physically taxing job. He didn’t look convinced, but it didn’t matter. I was back at work less than a month after the attack on Serena, and I was glad to have my life getting back to normal.

  The first day, I had Kade drop me off at the CAP-C on his way to the hospital. It was still early. No one else was there yet, but I was looking forward to using the quiet to settle back into my office.

  As soon as I opened the door to my own office, though, I could tell there was something not quite right.

  I flicked my tongue out and tasted the air, testing for what was out of place.

  Something almost rotten, that didn’t belong in my space—but not entirely foreign, either. Not strong enough for humans to pick up, either, probably.

  What the hell?

  I concentrated, allowing my mouth to shift just enough to give me better access to my serpentine sense of smell and let the scent molecules drift over the Jacobson’s organ.

  There.

  The
odor led back to its source in the far corner of my office, and I laughed aloud as I bent over to pick it up.

  Orlando. The suicide-by-wiener kid.

  I had left the envelope full of rotten hot dog behind the night of the attack in the NICU, planning to mail it the next day, and it had never been sent.

  I shook my head and picked it up gingerly with two fingers, then moved to the conference room, where I dropped the package into the only covered trash can in the building. I would give Vance, the child psychologist, a call later and make sure Orlando’s parents had gotten him in for evaluation, even without my written recommendation—or the suicide weapon, either.

  As the metal lid clanged down over the garbage, I turned to leave the room, but something caught my attention—a glint from somewhere along the wall.

  A reflected light from the built-in camera?

  Maybe.

  But my mind jerked back to the day Marta was attacked, when Gloria and Detective Moreland and I had all been listening to the sound of breathing recorded by that same camera system.

  Trying to continue looking calm, I stepped through the door and down the hall a few paces. There, I listened for anything that might give away an intruder.

  Nothing sounded unusual.

  I had at least one additional sense that I could use to check for trespassers, though. I hadn’t shifted the inside of my mouth back to being fully human yet, so taking a deep breath, I allowed the change to flow outward from the Jacobson’s organ, spreading up my face.

  My vision shifted to shades of gray, but I didn’t need to be able to see any longer.

  I had a pit viper’s sensory organs between my eyes and nose, those hollowed-out spaces that allowed me to feel the most minute changes in temperature, almost as if I were seeing them in infrared. The human side of my brain translated the information into images in shades of red and purple, though that wasn’t quite what my reptile senses picked up.