The Skin She's In by Margo Collins (online e book reader .txt) 📕

the single entrance into the room, Kade had time to spare one look for me before the door splintered around the lock in strips of some man-made material, and the wall around the doorframe broke into chunks. The entire door, frame and all, crashed inward under the weight of what looked like a Kodiak bear.

Wolves and bears.

Holy hell.

Kade had told me that the werewolves were elitist assholes, but he hadn’t mentioned anything about were-bears at all.

But the bear wasn’t my problem at the moment. The wolves were.

I inhaled deeply once and concentrated on the feeling I’d had during practice with Eduardo when I shifted instantly, but focused on controlling the form of my shift, too. In that brief instant, everything I knew about shifting flashed through my mind in something like panic.

Most shifters have some degree of control over their shifts—they can shift completely from human to animal, or partially, as the nurse had by popping her claws. With enough practice, Kade had told me, some shifters could control the size of their animal forms up to roughly their human sizes for the smaller animals (imagine a 180-pound coyote for a moment), and down to their human size for the large ones (that same 180 pounds doesn’t seem quite as intimidating if it’s a Kodiak).

As far as we knew, though, lamias were the only shifters who could gain total control over both form and size. I could turn into any kind of snake I wanted to be, and according to shifter legend, I could turn into something giant.

I had come close, once, when I was fighting against this infant’s grandmother.

Now I was fighting for the baby’s life.

I needed to be as big as the biggest bear on the planet.

Or bigger.

And I needed to get that way fast.

Here in the hospital, I was far away from what Kade called “Earth magic”—the effervescent force I had drawn on out by the river both when I shifted instantly and when I shifted into that larger form.

It didn’t matter. I had to try to make it work, anyway.

On the exhale, I imagined tugging at the air around me to get at that space behind the everyday world where the Earth magic hovered. If the spaces near the Paluxy River were thin spots where the magic seeped into our world from wherever it usually stayed, then there was a way to get to the magic from anywhere.

I simply needed to tear a hole in the fabric of reality.

Everything around me seemed to switch into slow motion.

The wolf in front of me crouched down, preparing to pounce. The giant bear, having moved inside the door and reared up, raised its paw to swipe at Kade. The other werewolf’s jaws stretched wide as it lunged toward the nurse’s throat.

I had enough time to take all this in before everything changed into a snake’s vision of shades of black and white and gray. As usual, my eyes had shifted first.

In an ordinary shift, my hearing would change next, sounds muffling as I moved to my serpentine shape.

But this was no ordinary shift.

I felt it when that fabric of reality gave way, heard it as a sound so deep inside me that my shifting bones rattled with it, a ripping that seemed to come from all around and within me, so that my very cells seemed to give way with it.

The blast that followed poured glittering light into the world, like a thousand exploding disco-balls filled with glass shards of pure power, all slicing into me.

I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound came out—or if it did, I couldn’t hear it over the deafening roar of my own shift. I couldn’t see anything other than the blinding glow of white-hot power, either, and for a long moment, I wasn’t aware of anything other than pure, jagged pain throughout every part of me in an eternal second that I was sure would never end.

As the noise and light faded away, I realized that no one else had experienced it.

But from the way everyone had frozen, staring at me, they all realized that I had shifted.

I sat with my lower half coiled into a circle on the floor, my upper half reared up, as if I had been preparing to strike, even mid-shift.

And from how small they all looked, I was every bit as big as I had hoped to be.

Chapter 8

KADE RECOVERED HIS wits first, reaching out to one side to grab that large piece of medical equipment he had deemed too expensive to risk only moments ago, and slinging it with all his shifter might into the Kodiak’s stomach. The bear whoofed out air as it bent double and Kade took that opportunity to draw the machine back and ram it into the bear’s head. Even with my diminished serpentine sense of hearing, there was a noticeable sound of crunching glass and screeching metal, along with the scraping vibrations running through the ground and air and into my skin.

I swayed once as I turned my head to survey the room completely. The werewolf that had been preparing to pounce on me was moving backward, and the nurse had managed to slide away from the other one as it stared at me.

Uncoiling one lower loop, I skimmed the top part of my body over the closest wolf and twirled myself around him. I could feel my fangs preparing to pump poison, even as the muscles of my body tightened around the wolf’s body. Apparently I had managed to re-create the battle form I had used before, a hybrid snake that was both venomous viper and constrictor. The wolf yelped once before I squeezed hard enough to cut off his breath.

I stopped for an instant to consider what I should do. If I killed him, I would have yet another death on my conscience. My parents had worked hard to raise me with human ethics and morals, and my training as a children’s counselor had only amplified