The Skin She's In

by Margo Bond Collins

  Beside me, Shane moved silently. Eduardo remained in contact with the rest of the hospital’s security teams, but the crackle of the walkie-talkie faded as I narrowed my concentration to just that single bright trace connecting me to my prey.

  As I followed it, the feeling I had that they were still in the hospital grew stronger and stronger—right up to the moment when I opened a door leading into an empty parking lot.

  Their trail ends here.

  I spun around checking for anything more, extending all my senses, but found only the end of the road. Shane ducked outside to take a look around and came back in shaking his head.

  That’s when I realized they must have doubled back. It would explain both the end of the trail and my certainty that they were still inside.

  But when I actually turned around and followed the trail, it simply led back around to the maternity ward.

  I waited by the staff elevator with Shane while Eduardo moved to check Evangeline’s room again.

  After only a few seconds, he pushed through the door. “Nothing,” Ed said, shaking his head.

  Somehow, along the way, the infant’s abductors had created a trail that looped around and around from the NICU to the maternity ward and back again.

  Nothing in between led away from the path—but the infant wasn’t there, either.

  The baby and its abductor were nowhere to be found.

  Dammit.

  That initial fury I’d felt at the baby’s disappearance swelled inside my chest and flashed outward, running from head to tail.

  I will kill the wolves.

  The thought came unbidden, clear and certain, and I could barely shove it down enough to keep my human mind in control of my actions.

  I swung back down through the NICU, still taking the nurses’ back way to avoid seeing any humans. Only as I was getting close to Room Five again did I realize what had happened.

  Speeding up, I hit the door and threw it open, just in time to see one of the wolves—a man in an expensive suit, not Frank himself, but one of the ones who had been with Frank earlier.

  He was clutching the infant lamia in its serpent form, wrapped around his wrist.

  The baby was still a constrictor, still an infant, and it was in his possession. And whatever he was doing, he had opened that window into other realities.

  Glancing back over his shoulder, the man flashed a wolfish grin at me and dove through the open space.

  The last glimpse I had of him was of his form retreating from me, growing smaller and smaller even as I threw myself after him, aiming for that tear in reality, just in time to see it shimmer and change.

  Only Shane’s hand grabbing my still-human arm held me back from jumping through at the very last moment. Even so, I turned on him, hissing, and he leaped away from me.

  When I turned back around, the wolf and infant were gone, both of them.

  THE SHOCK SENT ME CRUMPLING to the ground, shifting back into my human form.

  Kelly, used to working in a shifters’ hospital, gathered a hospital gown and wrapped it around me.

  Too wrapped up in trying to figure out where’d we gone wrong, I barely noticed her thoughtful gesture.

  I had no way of knowing where or when or how they’d disappeared—or how to get them back.

  This is what they intended all along. Get the babies and take them through that window between worlds.

  But how had they known that window had existed at all?

  They’ve been studying me.

  The answer came to me with a certainty as absolute as the knowledge that they’d somehow planned to take the baby through a window before I realized that the holes in this world served as windows to other worlds.

  Again, rage welled up in me, but this time I tamped it down.

  Frank wasn’t with them.

  I considered the implications of that fact.

  No, Frank might not have been the one who took the new lamia infant. But he was definitely spearheading the group.

  He’s the one I need to take down.

  As I stared at the tear in reality that I’d created, Kade’s voice came crackling through the radio in Eduardo’s hand. “Ed, is Lindi nearby?”

  “Yes,” Eduardo said. “One of the wolves took the juvenile lamia through an Earth-magic spot.”

  Kade cursed. “Let me talk to her.”

  Eduardo handed me the radio. “I’m here, Kade.”

  “We have another issue,” Kade said. “I’m taking Evangeline into surgery, and I’m worried the other two babies aren’t going to make it.”

  “But she was okay just a minute ago,” Shane burst out.

  “Things can turn fast in a situation like that,” Kelly murmured, drawing Shane away from the conversation.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked into the walkie-talkie.

  Kade paused, and I could imagine him blinking at me a couple of times as he worked through the possibilities of what he was about to say. “Is there anything you can do with Earth magic to help them?”

  Pulling my mind back from the abduction wasn’t easy. All I wanted to do was blast a new hole in reality right back to where the werewolf had taken the lamia.

  The baby needs a name. I can’t keep calling it ‘the lamia infant.’

  I didn’t have time for naming children now, though. I needed to send all of my gathered energy to help Evangeline and her other two babies.

  “I guess I can try,” I said.

  We would go after the other baby once I knew how.

  For now, I needed to concentrate on pulling mother and babies through what had apparently become their difficult birth.

  Guess I’m going to have to try to continue saving lamia babies, after all.

  Chapter 30

  “I DON’T KNOW IF I CAN do anything that will actually help.” I rubbed the heel of my hand over my face. “Everything I have ever done that uses magic has been in the middle of a fight. I know how to use this power offensively, in a fight. I don’t know if I will be able to use it to help the children. I don’t know if I can use the power to heal.”

  “We’ve given Evangeline steroids to help develop the babies’ human lungs. Try to reinforce that with the magic, if you can,” Kade suggested. “The more they can develop before they’re born, the better.”

  In the other hallway—the one I had just left in my fruitless circle around the hospital—the obstetrician was preparing to perform surgery on Evangeline. And I knew Evangeline was scared, that she had entered into this pregnancy against her will, that part of her probably hoped the babies would die.

  I couldn’t hope the same.

  And that meant that in the end, I would do everything I could to save them.

  “Okay. I don’t want to draw on any new spots—I don’t want to create a new hole in the world. And if I can help it, I don’t want to make this one any bigger. So I am going to stand right here and do what I can with the power that is already leaking through.”

  “I think that’s a good plan.” Kade’s voice came through in a burst of static.

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, attempting to center myself in the power that was already here.

  I could feel it sliding across my skin, the barest whisper of a crackling spark. Whatever it was I had seen earlier—that window between places—was gone. I didn’t need to worry about it right now.

  That’s what I told myself, anyway.

  I pushed the thoughts about it to the back of my mind. Right now, I needed to focus on sending healing power to Evangeline and the infant lamias.

  I began coiling that sparkling energy back into the center myself, as if it were the snake and I were just a container.

  I had always felt the energy as something unusual, something outside myself, but now I felt it also as something other than just a tool to be wielded. I needed to incorporate it fully into myself and send it out again—not as a weapon this time, but as a life force.

  This will never work, some part of me wh
ispered.

  I heard others coming in, felt it as Kelly pointed them to various places in the room. I didn’t know the strategy behind her placement of everyone, but when I opened my eyes to peek, I saw she had put people in a semicircle behind me, as if they stood there to add power to my own—including Shane, Eduardo, Janice and her team, and Daria, the nurse who’d looked after me during my recovery following my last battle in this room.

  I don’t know if adding their strength to mine worked in any real way, or if their presence simply bolstered my self-confidence. Either way, I felt the power that coiled down inside me settle in, take root, and begin to twine its way through my entire body, becoming part of me, one with me.

  Though my eyes were closed, I could see the glow of magic spreading through the room.

  Behind me, I heard Daria gasp—then several others. The sound startled me enough that I blinked several times. When I realized what had shocked them, my eyes stayed open.

  That window into another place had opened again. This time, it was a different place—at least for a few seconds. I saw through it and out across a vast, empty landscape of sand and rock and nothing else.

  “Almost there,” I whispered. “I’ll need to be able find that woman again later.”

  “Are you positive you can return to what you saw?” Kelly asked.

  “I’m sure of it. I know I can get back to it if I simply concentrate.” I should probably have focused on spooling in more magic, but every instinct I had told me that finding that woman again would lead to stronger magic.

  I followed my intuition and pushed against the window.

  It shimmered again.

  I stared out across an ocean sunset.

  The image blurred and shimmered and this time it was a jungle scene, complete with a wildcat draped across the limb of the tree, its tail swinging lazily as it watched me. I couldn’t tell if the intelligence in its eyes meant it was shifter or if it was simply a big cat.

  Another shimmer, and for an instant, I saw a city street busy with cars—slightly different in design from our own—flashing by on the streets.

  Shimmer.

  And we were back on that ruined cityscape. The woman I had seen earlier now knelt in front of the window as I saw it, but she had fallen backward in some kind of trance. Four men grabbed her and held her, kept her from landing on the broken concrete behind her.

  Her back arched convulsively, and then she sat up straight, her arms still flung out to the sides, her eyes blazing a white light that matched the sparkles I had seen the first time I had encountered one of these tears in reality.

  She threw her arm forward, pointing toward us, her mouth moving as she spoke, but I couldn’t hear a word she said.

  A bright pink bolt of lightning-like power shot out of her fingertip and through the window between our worlds.

  When the power that she had flung from that hand hit me, I found myself beginning to shift against my will, against my volition.

  My vision changed as the world around me went gray, everything moving to black and white as usual.

  I rushed to try to strip off my clothing before my legs changed, merging in that split second of terror as I moved from many-limbed to serpentine. I dropped to the ground and allowed my clothes to slide away from me.

  Whatever this was, it wasn’t natural, and I wasn’t okay with it.

  I pushed back against the power, drawing on what I had already stored inside me to attempt to control the shift, to control how I changed. And in that tug-of-war between the other woman’s power and my own, I felt reality tear again, the white light changing to the bright, multicolored sparkles I’d seen in the last battle against the werewolves.

  Dammit.

  I needed to focus on the babies, on Evangeline, on the infants being born right now.

  I don’t have time for this shit.

  I rose up again, taller than I had been, even with the serpentine tail, having managed to maintain my human torso.

  The entire process had only taken a few seconds, despite the way time stretched out for me when I shifted.

  Everyone still stood at a semicircle around me, watching that window between worlds.

  It shimmered again, but in a different way. A form—humanoid, shadowy, and growing larger—seemed to move toward us from somewhere across the distant reaches of reality itself. It reminded me of the receding form of the abductor shortly before.

  Ignore it.

  I coiled more power into myself, preparing to send it to Evangeline, but also not wanting to give up the potential tactical advantage of that power in case whatever was coming toward us posed a danger.

  As the shape grew closer, I realized it wasn’t simply humanoid—it was human. And male. The man dove through the window headfirst. Everyone around me gasped, and I realized that the other people in the room hadn’t been able to see him moving toward us. Not as I had.

  He fell to the ground just in front of me, then scrambled to his feet, looking me up and down, then around frantically as if attempting to find something, anything to hang on to.

  For the first time, I heard what seemed like sound coming through the world-holes.

  A whisper.

  A promise, it said. No matter where you go, no matter where you travel, my love travels with you.

  I shook my head, uncertain of what that meant.

  Then the window slammed closed, and the power that had been pouring into me from the other side dropped away.

  My body tried to snap back into its human form, painfully, and it was all I could do to keep from dropping to the ground in agony again.

  But I maintained control over my form.

  The man who’d come through the window—though I guess we ought to call it a door now, some inner voice suggested—froze in place, staring at me.

  “Ah, hell,” he said in a thick Texas accent. “I don’t think I’m where I’m supposed to be.”

  When no one responded to him, his eyes narrowed, and his jaw tightened as he glanced around at the other inhabitants of the room. “I’ve got just one question for y’all.” He crossed his arms and settled back on his heels.

  “Are any of y’all werewolves?”

  Chapter 31

  “MOVE OUT OF THE WAY,” I ordered the newcomer. “We’ll talk in a minute.”

  He raised his eyebrows at my tone but sauntered toward the side of the semicircle we had created—almost as if he was used to taking orders.

  Eduardo and I exchanged nods, and the were-coyote moved around to meet him and make sure he didn’t cause any problems.

  I pushed away all thought of window-travelers, focusing instead on my original task—sending power and strength to Evangeline and the babies still waiting to be born in their human forms.

  I gathered the power that I had coiled and stored inside me. After scooping it up, I imagined separating it into three separate balls of energy.

  Then, I spooled it out, sending it as threads up through the hospital, all the force and strength and life energy that had been held inside me, stolen from the hotspots in the earth—all of it I sent to Evangeline and the babies.

  And then I let it move from me into the three of them a little at a time, just enough to keep from overwhelming them all at once.

  Live, I told them.

  Grow.

  Develop.

  I pictured the babies doing just that—growing, developing.

  Becoming.

  Love.

  By the end, that was all I have left to send—love.

  And when I’d sent that out, as well, I crumpled to the ground, every ounce of magical energy drained out of me and given so that the next generation of lamias might live.

  WHEN I WOKE, I’D BEEN placed in a hospital bed myself. I blinked, glancing around the room to see what monitors I might have been connected to.

  None.

  So perhaps I wasn’t the patient after all.

  I sat up and rubbed my hand across my eyes. From beside my bedside, Dari
a glanced up from her magazine.

  “Oh good,” she said. “I’m glad you’re awake. We thought you might be able to use some rest.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “You passed out. Probably simply exhaustion, but we wanted to make sure, so we kept you here for a while. We ran some IV fluids through you, and Dr. Nevala said not to let you go until he’d had a chance to take a look at you.” She glanced at her watch. “His shift should be ending soon.”

  “I’m okay now,” I said, sitting up and rubbing my eyes with a yawn, but eager to learn what I’d missed. “What happened to the babies?”

  Several expressions passed across Daria’s face in rapid succession. “The one is still gone—no one has figured out where the shifters might have taken it. The other two were born healthy and happy, though.”

  At that moment, Kade came in with Janice.

  “You ready to get out of here?” he asked.

  “I feel like I ought to be searching for the baby,” I said.

  Janice shook her head. “We have people out looking already.”

  “But he took the infant through that Earth-magic portal, or whatever it is.”

  “Yes,” Janice said. “And we’ve got those shifters—other than you—who are the most adept at using the Earth magic working on figuring out what, exactly happened.”

  “What about the wolves who threatened us?”

  “Your new jaguar friend and his crew are assisting in guard duty for those who need it.”

  “And spy duty against the wolves,” Kade added. “We sent Jeremiah and Shadow home to rest, too. We’ll all be needed tomorrow.”

  “Your herpetologist friend and several nurses are with the infants. Eduardo’s set guards down there and has our local Shields on alert,” Janice said. “You can join them tomorrow.”

  “Where’s that guy who came through the portal to our side?”

  “Eduardo’s taking him back to his place,” Janice said.

  “He seems harmless as far as anyone can tell.” Kade sat down on the edge of my bed. “Seriously, you don’t have to try to take care of everyone. We’ve got it under control.”