My hands trembled in fear as I pushed the button, anyway, and waited for the call to go through.
The operator who answered didn’t let me get past, “Hi, my name is Lindi Parker, and...” before she was asking me to please hold for a transfer.
The operator knew to expect a call from me.
Something horrible was happening.
I looked up, my eyes wide, to find Kade gazing at me, his eyes narrowed. “You okay?” he asked.
I shook my head mutely. Whatever I was, it wasn’t okay.
“What is it?” he whispered, even as Dr. Jimson came on the other end of the line and said, “Lindi? We need you to get to the hospital right now.”
I felt my knees start to give way at those words, but Kade’s arm was around me instantly, supporting me even as I shook.
“What’s happened?” I wanted to ask more, but I didn’t want to put my fears into words, either.
When Dr. Jimson said, “It’s Serena,” black dots swam through my vision.
“Is she...” I couldn’t even think how to finish that sentence. Alive? Hurt? Dead? None of those words would out of my mouth.
“Kidnapped,” he said.
Chapter 22
I’D BEEN FRIGHTENED before, plenty of times, but I’d never known that terror could burrow all the way down into my bones.
I felt myself groping blindly for Kade, unable to even see where he was, though I knew he stood right beside me.
“I’ll be there in a minute,” I said.
“We have a number of the other Shields at the hospital right now, and they’re organizing a search. I’ll be in my office to answer any questions you have as soon as you get here.”
I don’t even know if I said goodbye or if I simply hung up. The next thing I knew I was already talking, half incoherently.
“I need your truck. I need to go to the hospital. Serena’s gone. They don’t know who took her. I have to go now. I need your keys. I have to go.”
“Slow down,” Kade said. “I’m coming with you. You’re not driving anywhere.” He turned back to face Shadow and Jeremiah, never letting go of me. “Will you be okay until Keeya gets here? It should only be another ten minutes or so.”
Jeremiah nodded. “When you can find a moment to speak with us, or with the matriarch, please let us know if there is anything we can do to help.” He gazed at me, his beautiful brown eyes serious. “We owe you everything. Please do not hesitate to contact us for anything.”
Shadow stepped up beside him and took his hand, her own solemn gaze and nod echoing his words. “Any time.”
Kade bundled me into his truck, and I spent the drive to the hospital staring blindly out the window, remembering every moment I had spent with Serena since she had been born too early to a mother who didn’t want her.
How could I have thought that I might be regretting deciding to take her in?
I hadn’t even known how much she mattered to me until someone tried to take her away.
Tried to.
I hung on to those words, determined to make sure I got her back.
I didn’t even realize I had tears rolling down my face until we were out of the truck and walking into the NICU, where Dr. Jimson met us at the door.
KADE HAD BEEN TALKING on his phone as he walked in behind me, and now came up and put his hand on the small of my back. “I called your parents to let them know what’s happened,” he said.
I nodded numbly, too shell-shocked to even speak.
“Some of the Shields are here helping.” Dr. Jimson gestured around the space that had held Serena’s terrarium and bassinet.
“What happened?” I finally managed to force out from between my frozen lips.
“Excuse me, doctor, but I think you’re needed over there.” The sound of my Shield mentor’s voice distracting the distraught neonatal doctor relieved me more than I had realized it would.
I spun around to find him standing slightly behind me and threw my arms around him. “Eduardo.” After a single, tight squeeze, I stepped back and regained control. “Tell me what we know so far.”
I never would’ve admitted this to anyone else, but the fact that Eduardo looked like a Hispanic version of Clint Eastwood always made me feel like it must make him a better officer. Like somehow Eastwood’s film persona had been magically transported to Ed’s daily life. Luckily, he really was very good at what he did, so I wasn’t that far off.
“It looks like someone got in with a hospital ID. They waited until shift change and came in as if they were taking over. Still tracking down what happened, exactly, but it looks like the on-duty nurse called in sick and this person posed as a replacement for her.”
“Aren’t all the nurses supposed to be vetted before they’re allowed to care for Serena?”
“Yes, but the nurse who was ending her shift really can’t be held responsible for not knowing everyone’s status at any given moment.”
“So whoever it was simply left with the baby?” Kade leaned in to interject. Eduardo opened his hands, palms up, and gave an eloquent shrug—one that managed to convey the idea that if he had been in charge, none of this would’ve happened.
“So what’s been done to find her?” I asked.
“Everything we can think of. You know how this works. We are tracking down every lead and I promise you we will not stop looking until we have found her.”
Although I hadn’t participated in any kidnapping investigations since I’d started as a Shield, I knew the basics. I realized it really would be better if I stayed out of the way during the investigation. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to.
“Take her home?” Kade asked Eduardo. “Is that the best thing we can do?”
I held Eduardo’s gaze briefly with my own. “I want to make sure that you let us know who did this,” I said.
“The Council will take care of him—or them.” Eduardo’s reminder made me want to turn on him and demand to know how he was going to let me punish whoever had tried to take my child away from me.
I needn’t have bothered. He was waiting for me to make eye contact again, and when I did, he gave a solemn nod.
Okay. I was going to have my chance. Eduardo would make sure of it.
If only they could find him now.
With that, I was finally ready to go home and wait.
I couldn’t get myself to leave though. Instead, I stood in the middle of that room as people swirled around me, calling out information that I couldn’t even begin to make sense of, not in this state.
As I stood watching all of the people move around me, gearing up to go find one tiny lost lamia, I flashed inexplicably back to my client telling me, “I may be paranoid, but that doesn’t mean they’re not all out to get me.”
“It’s the werewolves,” I announced. Eduardo tilted his head and gave me a hard look.
“Werewolves?” he asked.
I nodded, and Kade stepped up to fill the inarticulate void I was leaving as I struggled to deal with the fact that my foster daughter was missing.
“They attacked us this morning,” Kade said. “I think she’s right. I think it was a distraction from this, though initially we thought it was... something else.” He quickly edited to keep out any mention of Shadow and Jeremiah. That wasn’t going to do, however. I was going to have to admit everything.
Finally, Kade took me by the hand and led me to a chair. As I took a seat, that chair seemed more real than anything else in the room. It was the kind of reclining rocker that was scattered throughout the various rooms in the NICU, designed for women to nurse infants.
The leather on it was a faded robin’s-egg blue, worn and a little cracked along the folds. The armrests had been touched so often that the shiny varnish had worn down to bare wood in some places and was crackling and flaking away in others.
I was still examining it carefully when my father walked in. Enough of the staff had seen him around to mostly ignore him. What they couldn’t ignore, however, was the fact tha
t Shane-the-grad-student-Wills had walked in behind him, looking around with great interest at the room—and paying careful attention, I noted, to the terrarium where Serena had spent her time in her serpent form.
At the sight of Shane, I leaped up and scurried over to them.
“Dad,” I said disapprovingly, “you cannot bring him here.”
My father shrugged and said, “He already knows all about it.”
“That doesn’t mean he has to be invited to every family crisis,” I hissed at him, my consonants going distinctly sibilant.
“Serena needs our help. Shane has information.”
I shook my head and glanced around for Kade to moral support, but once again, he had disappeared.
My father reached out and grabbed me by the shoulders. “Lindi. Listen to us. Shane got a call this morning from someone he didn’t know, but he thinks they were trying to ask questions that would help them take care of someone like Serena.”
“Or, now that I know she’s missing, Serena herself,” Shane said.
“How would they even know to find you?” Kade said, reappearing by my side—apparently, he’d been talking to Eduardo, who now stood beside him.
“I have a page on the University website.”
“What did they say to you?” I asked.
“And how did you know they were talking about Serena?” Kade said.
“I didn’t at first,” Shane replied. “Some guy called early this morning asking questions about how to care for an unusual snake species—what to do if they didn’t know what she ate or how much to feed her or what kind of living conditions she needed. Honestly, it was the use of the pronoun she that clued me. Then some of the details that they gave seemed odd, like they couldn’t tell me if it was a viper or a constrictor and wouldn’t say where it had come from. And then finally one of them called it ‘the baby.’ After what I saw this weekend, I knew it had to be either Serena or another child like her.”
“There are no other children like her. Yet,” I half muttered.
“What did you tell them?” Kade interjected urgently.
“I told them that I would meet them and help them figure out how to care for the juvenile they were dealing with.”
“Do you think they realize your connection to Dr. Parker?” Eduardo said, gesturing at Dad.
“It wouldn’t be that hard to figure out if someone was looking.” Dad’s voice was matter of fact. “But they would have to know where to start looking, and that Lindi’s my daughter and that I’m on the faculty.”
“And it sounded like they honestly had picked up their phone and looked up the first herpetology specialist they could find,” Shane added.
“You agree to meet them?” Eduardo asked.
“Yes. They gave me an address.” Shane pulled a slip of paper out of his pocket and handed it over to Eduardo. I snatched it out of his hand and read off the local address aloud.
“Got it?” I asked. I sure hoped so, because I wasn’t giving it to them again. That’s where I was headed, and I didn’t much care if they went with me or not.
I WAS OUT THE DOOR and halfway down the hallway toward the exit when I remembered that we had come in Kade’s truck rather than my car. With a curse, I stopped and spun around to march back, only to find Kade, Dad, Shane, and Eduardo following close behind me.
“Anyone else coming?” I asked.
Eduardo made eye contact with me and gave me a significant look before he replied. “I told him to give us a fifteen-minute head start.”
Good. That meant I’d have time to decimate the fuckers who had taken Serena away from me, even for a single morning.
I had turned and was racing down the hall again before they even caught up with me. In the parking lot, I waited impatiently for Kade to click open the locks, my anger and anxiety roiling around inside me without any place to go.
Eduardo rode with us, Shane with Dad in his truck. I don’t know about the other vehicle, but ours was filled with a tense silence—one full of barely leashed violence that I could taste like the slice of a sharp silver knife against the roof of my mouth, bright and hard and glittering. My rage glittered, hard like diamonds, and I would use it to grind them into dust. When we got to the small, dingy white clapboard house, I was out of the truck before it even stopped moving. Without really consciously noting what I was doing, I pulled earth magic to me as I moved through a front lawn scraggly with weeds. Bright sparkles of power burst up through the ground and flowed toward me in a great shining river of light that coiled around me and sank into my skin, so much that even Shane, who normally would have been unable to see anything unusual, said, “Is Lindi glowing?”
Without stopping, without even pausing, I stepped up onto the minuscule front porch, pushed out my hand as if I were opening the door with one shove, and without making any contact physically, blew the doorway and its frame into a million shattering pieces that rained around me as I flew through that barrier.
As soon as I was inside, I pulled the magic into myself as deeply as it would go, shoving it down into my very DNA until I was packed to bursting with this magical energy.
Then I raised my arms above me and bellowed, “Let my child come to me!” With that, I took hold of the magic and twisted, turning it around inside me so that I shifted, but retained even more of the earth magic than I ever had before.
My shift exploded through me like I assume stepping on a land mind would feel, ripping flesh and bone—but in this case, slamming it back together in a new form. And that new shape was my battle form—the giant, half viper, half constrictor—but with a difference. This time, I retained my ability to speak.
“Where is Serena?” It was sibilant and vibrated in a register I could never have managed with my human voice, but it was still definitively mine.
With the viper pit perception, I saw when the werewolves in the back room shifted position, but only a tiny bit.
Those cowards were hiding.
The thought of it enraged me even further, and I moved down the hallway, flipping my tail back and forth and destroying the walls and door frames as I went.
Serena, once again in serpent form, whipped around when she caught sight of me, and I swear I saw a tiny trail of sparkles surrounding her.
I didn’t have time to look more closely though, because the three werewolves in the room all leaped toward me at once.
In the earlier fight, I had worried that killing them might not be the right thing to do.
Now, I had no qualms about it at all.
But I was in tight quarters, without the room to maneuver that I would need to fully take out the werewolves, to rip them apart as I wanted to.
Not physically, anyway. But I could destroy them with magic. I knew it—just as I knew, on some level, that doing so would rip a rift in reality like nothing I had seen before.
Nonetheless, I sent my senses questing out around me, and then down into the ground, searching for even the tiniest hold on the power I knew existed around me.
A growl from behind me broke my concentration, and I was just spinning around to evaluate the new threat when three sleek, furred shapes leaped past me and onto the wolves.
Two hyenas—Jeremiah and, I assumed, the matriarch—and Kade, in his mongoose form.
The room had one window, covered by blinds, and immediately after the other shifters had entered the room, a giant silver-headed ax crashed through the window, ripping down the Venetian blinds. As soon as the ax itself was out of the way, Eduardo, in coyote form, bounded through the newly open space and began harrying the wolves from behind. I glanced up to see Shadow’s smiling face radiating sheer berserker glee as she swung the ax around to drop the blinds off of it. While everyone else and the wolves engaged, I moved to the terrarium and lowered my face beside it.
Serena raised up on the lower third of her body, straining toward me and I tilted my nose into the enclosure far enough for her to be able to slide onto it. I found myself wishing for hands to hold onto her, bu
t she balanced carefully, and I felt her there, her body touching my outward skin but cueing me to her presence in more ways, too.
I began backing out of the room.
As much as I wanted to complete the battle, I knew it was more important for me to get Serena out of there.
I tugged the earth magic into me one last time, claiming it deep and asking it to change me back to my usual human self. The sparkles entered me and swirled and exited and entered again, eventually draining away back into the rift I had created. The returned magic made it smaller but didn’t take it away entirely.
I made my way down the now-demolished hallway, and when I reached the living room, I found two more wolves, these dead and stretched out across the living room floor. Shadow stood over them with her ax, beaming proudly.
“It seems there is a place for me here, after all,” she said.
I dipped my head once to show her that I understood. What I wanted to say was, “it was never any doubt of it.” But for now, a nod would have to do.
We had all shifted outside, I presumed. We would need to shift back to our human selves inside.
From the bedroom, I heard a yelp, and I started to move, certain that was Kade’s voice. But again, I stopped myself. Instead, I glanced at Shadow, who nodded and headed to the back room to aid the others.
By ourselves for only an instant, Serena and I simply sat, communing with each other, even without words.
In a few minutes, everything went silent. It was only a few seconds after that that everyone in my group came pouring out into the hallway, though it had felt like ages.
“Everyone okay?” I asked.
“Everyone but your boy Kade here,” said Eduardo. Kade shook his head and held up one crooked, bleeding hand.
“I missed one coming at me,” he said. “I’ll get it dealt with once this mess is all taken care of.”
From outside, my dad called in, “Is it safe to come in yet?”
“Come on,” I said.
We stood around, staring at one another. The matriarch was still back in the room with the wounded werewolves.
The Skin She's In Page 14
