The Skin She's In

by Margo Bond Collins

  Kade returned my smile. It was a nice moment—we hadn’t had enough of those lately, what with all the various attacks on us.

  I didn’t know if we were going to get to have much time alone together ever again, in fact—not with the rate at which the lamia babies seem determined to enter the world.

  “That said,” Kade continued as we exited the elevator on the floor that held the maternity wing, “we don’t know much at all about lamia birth, so I think we should continue to try to be ready for anything.”

  Apparently he was absolutely right, because after Kade took us down the hall to scrub in, as we entered the delivery room, one of the nurses began saying, “okay, Evangeline, it’s almost time to push.”

  Kade blinked, and then almost visibly pulled his doctor persona on around him. “Well,” he muttered to Shane and me, “that went faster than I anticipated.”

  Pulling a pair of gloves out of the dispenser on the wall and snapping them on, he moved over to join the nurses by Evangeline’s bed. “Tell me what we have here,” he said in what I had come to consider his doctor-voice.

  One of the nurses, someone I didn’t know, said, “It looks like one of the infants is determined to come on out.”

  “How far is she dilated?”

  “Oh, not fully,” the nurse replied. “But if you take a look at the last sonogram we did, you’ll see that Baby C is...” She paused for a second as if searching for the right word. “Well, that one has a much smaller circumference than the other two.”

  I hadn’t spoken to Evangeline yet. Of all the women Scott had impregnated, she was arguably the one suffering from the worst post-traumatic symptoms. Although she hadn’t come out and said so, I was fairly certain the only reason she hadn’t aborted was that she held some pretty strict religious beliefs about the sanctity of life.

  She had also convinced herself that everything she had seen during her captivity—especially the sight of Scott’s mother in her half-serpent form—was the effect of some kind of nightmarish drug, or maybe hypnosis.

  Even now, she walked around with a half blank look in her eyes, as if waiting for all of this to be over.

  All of us had learned pretty quickly to avoid words like snake or serpent around the pregnant women—or even lamia, as some of them had figured out that’s what Scott’s mother was.

  This was particularly important around Evangeline, as she had, more than once, gone into full-blown, screaming panic attacks when confronted with the idea that she might be carrying one of the shifters.

  Hence the nurse’s careful phrasing. And as I moved to stand behind Kade, where I could see the monitor, I saw what she meant. Evangeline was carrying three babies. Two were in human form. But the third, in its snake form, was poised to take advantage of its smaller size and make an exit now.

  “Oh, I see what you mean,” Shane breathed behind me. He leaned in over my shoulder. “What form is that? Constrictor?”

  I thumped his hand with mine and shook my head when I caught his gaze. “Come out in the hall with me for a minute,” I said.

  It didn’t take long to get Shane all caught up on the necessity of keeping the snake-talk down to a minimum. After all, he was a herpetologist—he’d been around plenty of people who made him shut up about his work.

  Back inside the room, I let Evangeline know that I was there, willing to help in any way I could. Despite the fact that I had helped save her from Scott, she still clearly thought of me as part of that particularly horrible time in her life and wanted nothing to do with me. “The best thing you can do for me,” Evangeline said, “is take three giant steps back.”

  “Got it,” I said holding my hands up and backing away. I went more than three steps, too. I moved all the way out of her line of sight.

  Best she not even know I’m here.

  I leaned against a wall and waited.

  I hated not having anything to do, but I realized that my job would come later. And yet I wanted to be here for the births.

  Kade sent one of the nurses out to arrange for an additional incubator to be brought in. He didn’t say so out loud in front of Evangeline, but I knew that it was one of the special designs he had arranged to have shipped to the hospital—made specifically for baby lamia.

  And I watched from several feet away as Evangeline pushed to help the first infant be born. I realized at that moment that Kade had told the nurses to stand back for a reason—although Shane was guessing that this lamia was in a constrictor form as a snake, he wasn’t certain. For all they knew, they would have a brand-new baby viper on their hands, and the last thing they wanted to have to do was deal with a venomous snake bite in the maternity ward.

  As a mongoose-shifter, Kade had a natural resistance to snake bites—more so than any of the other shifters who worked at the hospital.

  Until that moment, it had never occurred to me to wonder how I might respond to the snakebite. I assume that I was largely immune, at least in my own serpent forms, but I had no idea how my human shape would deal with a venomous bite.

  None of the vipers in dad’s herpetarium had ever even tried to bite me.

  Shane, as a trained herpetologist, had donned a set of heavy gloves over his hospital gloves, and had a small, collapsible stick with a hook on the end.

  I knew it shouldn’t bother me to think of him handling the newborn lamia with a stick, but the sight of it pissed me off. I had to remind myself that he meant no disrespect.

  And then the newborn lamia, a constrictor after all, was being bundled into the incubator, out of sight, and taken down to the special room of the NICU that had been devoted initially to shifter babies, and now to the lamias being born in this hospital.

  I was torn between following the snake baby downstairs and staying behind to wait for the other two to be born. Undecided, I waited too long to travel with the nurse who went with the incubator.

  So I was still in the room with Evangeline when the hospital alarms went off.

  I knew, even before Kade’s phone began buzzing, that it had to do with the baby.

  I’d made the wrong choice.

  Chapter 28

  I TOOK OFF RUNNING down the hallway toward the elevator, wishing I knew where the stairwell was on this floor. By the time the elevator got to my floor, Shane and hospital security guard had caught up with me.

  “Where’s Kade?” I asked.

  The elevator dinged and the three of us piled on, even as Shane answered, “He’s staying in the delivery room with Evangeline.”

  I nodded once. “Any news?” I asked the guard.

  He shook his head. “Nothing so far.”

  I realized when we hit the bottom floor that I didn’t even know where to go. However, they had been headed toward the NICU, so I figured that was my best bet.

  When I got there, it had been shut down. The nurses were turning away the regular human mothers, as well as the shifter mothers with babies who weren’t lamias.

  Luckily, Kelly, the nurse who’d cared for Serena, was working the desk. She waved me through, along with the security guard. “Go ahead and scrub in, but do it fast,” she said.

  She glanced behind her nervously, almost as if expecting someone to come along and stop us from going in. Then she followed us down the hallway, giving us a quick update as we went.

  “The nurse was bringing the new baby down to the NICU—the back way, where none of the parents or patients would see them—all we know for sure is that she got on the elevator and it stopped once on the third floor. When it got down to the first floor, she’d been knocked out and the incubator was empty.”

  I skidded to a halt in the middle of the hallway. “Did the abductors have enough time to get out of the hospital?”

  Kelly shook her head. “I have no idea. Whatever they did to the nurse, it was fast. The elevator wasn’t even stopped on that floor long enough to start beeping. It was planned out pretty slick.”

  The security guard stayed long enough to hear this, then swerved off int
o some other part of the NICU—someplace I’d never been.

  “I can show you the path they were going to take,” Kelly said, but she glanced around nervously as she made the offer.

  With the absolute certainty that the new lamia baby had been taken, I felt a cold anger wash over and through me.

  “No, I don’t want you to get in trouble,” I said. “They’re long gone from that route, anyway.” I stood still and felt a certainty come into me along with that cold rage.

  “I need to go back to Room Five,” I said—back to the room where Serena had stayed until so recently.

  Back to the room where I had defeated the shifters who had come in to destroy us, where I had ripped a hole in the fabric of reality.

  Back to the room that held more power than any other place in the hospital.

  It pulled at me, its power drawing me to it like a magnet.

  Although I’ve never told anyone, I still felt that energy every time I walked into the hospital. And I knew I could somehow use it to get this baby back.

  As I entered the room, the magical spot threw out glittering sparks, as if in welcome. I hadn’t always been able to recognize these spots, these thin places in the world that leaked magical energy. Not until Kade and Eduardo had taught me to see them. But now that I could, I realized that I had some sort of mystical, metaphysical, magical connection to them.

  As I had said just that morning—God, had it really been so recently?— I was coming to the conclusion that it was my responsibility to figure out what these were, why they were here, what kind of problems they might cause or maybe even solve.

  But in any case, somehow, I knew they were mine to deal with.

  And right now, it was mine to use.

  Like Janice, I was certain the wolves were the ones who had come to take the baby. Underneath that icy calm that I had wrapped around me, some part of me was terrified that they would kill the infant lamia before we could save it.

  That just means I have to work faster.

  But whatever was going to happen next, it had to have three parts: Find the wolves. Get the baby back. Put the wolves down for good.

  I turned to Kelly. “Janice said to leave a message with the hospital operator if there was an emergency. See if maybe we can get her on the phone—if the operator can route us through to her? I want to talk to her before I start this.”

  She nodded and moved across the room to the landline NICU phone. As we waited, I circled that magical rift in reality.

  “Is there something significant about that spot?” Shane asked.

  I’d forgotten he couldn’t see it, probably couldn’t sense anything about it at all. “It’s kind of a magical hotspot. I’m hoping I can use it to help find where they took the baby.”

  “I’ve got Janice,” Kelly said, holding out the phone.

  I took it from her to give Janice a quick update on the situation, only to discover she already knew what was going on.

  “I’m going to see if I can pull on some of the Earth magic energy and learn more,” I said. “I don’t know if it’ll work, but it ... feels right.”

  “I trust your instincts,” Janice said. “If they got out of the hospital with the infant, I’ll start coordinating a search.”

  “I’m sure it was the wolves.” My words came out through clenched teeth.

  “I am, too. But they’ll hide it. So you need to be prepared to do whatever’s necessary to find them.”

  I hung up, but her words stayed with me, stoking the anger inside me.

  I let it build until I could draw on it, use it. Then I moved back to stand directly in front of the magical spot.

  As the rage poured through me, I pulled on that power I carried within. When that wasn’t enough, I reached outside myself to find the source of the energy, drawing it through me and around me until I was surrounded by a sparkling, shimmering light.

  Tiny sparkles of energy danced through the power I pulled on. I drilled into my body and down into the center of myself, where I coiled it into a tight circle, wrapping around and around like a ball of yarn until it was dense and heavy.

  It was like unstitching reality to move it into me.

  The more I drew on it, the more the space in front of me unraveled. In some distant part of my mind, I knew I didn’t really want to do this. But by then it was too late.

  That hole in the world just kept getting wider.

  When I had built up enough of the energy in me, I began to use it as if I were knitting a new reality from inside myself. It powered my shift as I pulled myself up to my full human height and let the change overtake me.

  Usually, my vision is the first thing to change, going gray. This time, however, I controlled the shift more carefully—I wanted to terrify the wolves and their allies with my sheer presence.

  And then I want to rip them apart.

  I started with my legs. They melded together in a way that usually made me drop to the floor. But this time, I added size even as the skin on my thighs roughened into scales and my feet melded together into a single tail.

  I had enough space, enough growth, to coil in on myself and not lose any of my height.

  The more magic I pulled into myself, the more I grew.

  I let the shift continue to rise above my belly button. And then I allowed the rest of my skin turned to scales—the bright blues and greens of a jungle snake, contrasting with my human hair and eyes.

  I was still me, but I was a version of me that no one had ever seen before. I was the color of jewels in sunlight, the size of a tree, and I carried the power of the world in the center of myself.

  As I turned to go find the wolves, I caught a glimpse of the hole in the world I’d made.

  And for the first time, I saw through it into another place.

  It was like looking through a fogged mirror or window, slowly clearing. As it shimmered into view, I first saw buildings, high spires pointing into the air and squat cubes stacked atop one another in a city skyline that I did not recognize.

  As the image resolved, it became not simply a city, but a ruined city—a desolate, gray space, where flashes of lightning crackled in the distance.

  And then someone moved into my vision, a woman stepping into my line of sight.

  She was tall and dark-haired, thin and muscular. Her clothes were odd—like some strange amalgamation of the Wild West and a Renaissance fair. A bodice over blue jeans with boots and a cowboy hat.

  Her wide, gray eyes stared back at me in astonishment.

  She could see me as well as I could see her. We stared at one another for the space of a heartbeat, and then she turned away.

  When she did, a bolt of power flew out from her to me, connecting us for an instant, shocking me with the strength of the magic it poured into me.

  The vision clouded over again—but I had made a hole in the world that actually went somewhere, somewhen, someplace so very other from where I was now that I don’t know I could have imagined it if I had tried.

  Moreover, that place had just given me a jolt of power like nothing I had ever felt before.

  The sound of Kade’s voice from the hallway broke the spell and I pulled myself away, knowing that if I survived the coming battle, I would have to eventually determine what exactly it was that I had done to create the holes in reality.

  And try to close them, too.

  But for right now...

  As I turned around, sliding along the floor, my hair floated out around my head, borne aloft on the energy I’d drawn from that other realm.

  “Let’s go find these assholes and take them out,” I said.

  Chapter 29

  THEY’RE STILL IN THE hospital.

  I could feel it, sense it.

  I can taste it on the magic of the air.

  Kade strode into Room Five, still speaking to someone behind him. When he saw me, he stopped, wide-eyed. Eduardo moved in around him, and he stopped, too.

  “Wow,” Kade breathed, after a long, silent moment
.

  “Impressive,” Eduardo conceded.

  Shane didn’t have to say anything at all. Even in my black-and-white vision, his approval shone through his gaze.

  With just a flick of my tongue, I could taste the sincerity of their admiration. And part of me—that part that I tried so hard to shove down, to keep subjugated to my human side—that part accepted their response as my due.

  You’re not some creepy snake-queen, Lindi, my conscience reminded me.

  No, but I might be losing my mind.

  Admonishing all the feuding parts of my personality to shut the hell up, I said, “I’ll find the wolves and retrieve the infant.”

  With my serpent tongue, the S on the end of wolves turned super-sibilant, turning word to wolvesssss.

  Kade nodded. “I’ll go back to Evangeline, then. She’s still in labor with the twins, but everything was progressing fine.”

  He turned and left without another word.

  “You know where the wolf and the juvenile are?” Eduardo asked. He kept a slight distance from me, as if something about me bothered him. I wanted to ask why, but I didn’t have time right now.

  “Not yet,” I hissed, and moved out of the room. Eduardo and Shane followed me.

  I headed down a corridor that I had never really paid attention to before, racing toward what I was certain was the wolf who had stolen the infant lamia—the baby who didn’t even have a name, who didn’t know that it could be human, who didn’t have any kind of positive role model unless I could save it from the wolves.

  The nurse, Kelly, had stayed behind to call in reinforcements—the hospital staff cleared out my path as I told them where I was headed. The whole place was still under lockdown, so it was easy enough to keep the human patients in their rooms.

  I quickly realized that the path I was taking was the back route Kelly had talked about the nurses using to transport infants to the NICU.

  Focusing all my attention on the scent-taste-feel of the wolf carrying the baby lamia, I worked on blocking out all other input.