More Than Skin Deep (Shifter Shield Book 3)

by Margo Bond Collins

  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 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 a 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 that 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 leapt 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 els
e 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 that 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 leapt 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 leapt 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 axe crashed through the window, ripping down the Venetian blinds. As soon as the axe 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 axe 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 in to the enclosure far enough for her to be able to slide up on it. I found myself wishing for hands to hold onto her, but she balanced carefully, and I felt her there, her very presence touching my outward skin, but cuing 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 away entirely.

  I made my way down the now demolished hallway, and when I reached the living room, I found two more walls, these dead and stretched out across the living room floor. Shadow stood over them with her axe, 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 back 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.

  “You know,” Shane said from the doorway, “every last one of you is naked. You’re not going to be able to drive back to the hospital like that.”

  I glanced around. He was absolutely right. This was another issue I have not had a chance to talk to anyone about since I had become a foster parent: how was I supposed to keep Serena clothed—assuming I couldn’t keep her bound to her human form. And I was guessing that in this kind of circumstance, the answer to that question was simply “you can’t.”

  Yet I was about to have to deal with a lot brand-new stuff. I glanced down at the juvenile snake shifter in front of me, and smiled.

  Yeah, it was gonna be a fun ride.

  Epilogue

  Five hours later, we sat in folding chairs scattered around the small Shifter Shield office—me, Kade, Eduardo, Jeremiah, and Shadow. Janice, the current leader of the Shifter Council, had been and gone, taking our statements in between. I pulled a slice of pizza from the box sitting atop the main desk, and offered it to Kade, who held Serena in his uninjured arm. She had taken human form for him, happily snuggling into his arms and taking a bottle, though she had stayed in her serpent shape the entire time she had been with me. I wondered
if that was going to be a pattern. I’d had Dr. Jimson come examine her over here, but had refused to let her out of my sight since we saved her from the werewolves.

  I still didn’t have everything straight, though I was beginning to get a better picture of what exactly had happened.

  “Were you there when Janice and the Shields questioned the survivors from this morning’s attack in the parking lot?” I asked Jeremiah and Shadow. Shadow shook her head, as Jeremiah said, “I was. They didn’t get much information out of them, though apparently the plan to attack you was an escalated timeline from something else they had put in motion a while ago—the fact that Shadow and I came here to you seem to the wolves to be serendipitous timing.”

  “None of them seemed, from what little I overheard, to have any knowledge of what the one I killed in the lead-in on the road from Georgia said to me.” Shadow shrugged.

  “It sounds like this was a one-off, then.” Kade bounced Serena in his arm.

  “What did you do at the house?” Shadow asked me. “I could only see part of it, but it looks like it left behind some kind of… wound in the world.”

  “Yes, were going to have to discuss that,” Eduardo said, back to being my mentor and instructor now that the crisis was over.

  I felt bad about what I done to save Serena. There really were now two brand-new tears in reality, all because of me. Was beginning to wonder if disability had been part of why the shifters had originally wanted to take out lamia in the first place.

  I shrugged. “I think we need to see if we can figure out what these cracks are, anyway. I seem to be the only one who could create them, even if I’m not the only one who can use them, so I think we need to see if we can figure out—is this a lobbying ability, or a Lindi ability?” I put down the uneaten half a slice of pizza, suddenly no longer hungry.

  “I agree,” Kade said. “It might be time for us to put some effort into determining the source of all those magical hotspots we know of.”

  Everyone looked sober for a moment, reflecting on what that might entail.