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

While part of my brain focused on ignoring the pain, another part clicked through tactics, analyzing the situation the way Eduardo had been teaching me to. The bear had picked his attack spot fairly well—high up enough on my body that I couldn’t get a good striking angle with my head. Clearly he knew I had venomous capabilities. But he had missed, or maybe had no way to know, that I could also function as a constrictor.

My skin hung off me in long, tattered, bloody strips, but the nurse was almost to the door with the baby, Kade not far behind. I had to give them time and space to get out safely, so I looped and twisted, crawling the bottom half of my body up the rest of me toward the spot where the bear hung on tightly, beating at me as if he hoped to claw me in two.

For all I knew, he did.

I wasn’t going to give him that chance.

My lower body might not be quite as strong as my upper and middle portions, but it wasn’t that much weaker.

While the bear focused on clawing, I coiled around and around without ever touching him, until I lay on the ground in loops, like a discarded rope.

Then, once I was in place, I waited for Kade and the nurse to get out of the room. Kade went first, leaning out to check for possible attackers, still brandishing the breast-pump on its wheeled stand. The part of me that was cataloging details knew I ‘d find that funny later.

If I had a later.

I was beginning to get dizzy from pain, and possibly blood-loss.

The nurse followed him, stepping carefully over the rubble surrounding the door, clutching the bundle under her shirt to her chest.

As soon as I could no longer see them, I checked for the earth magic. I could still feel it, seeping through the tear I had created in reality. My tongue flickering out of my mouth, I drew in a deep breath and felt the glimmering specks flashing against the vomeronasal organ in the roof of my mouth, sparkling with power.

Then I tightened my body all at once, pulling the coils tight around the bear swiftly, even as I focused on shifting. The combined power of my serpent body constricting around him and shifting to the smaller human form had the effect I had hoped for: it practically snapped him in half.

His unearthly scream echoed so loudly that I could hear it even in my snake form.

The crunch of his bones felt more satisfying than I had anticipated, and I reveled in it for what felt like a long time but was only a few seconds before I lost all sense of the world around me.

When I regained consciousness, the first thing I noticed was how much I hurt.

The second was that the bear wasn’t dead, though I had apparently broken its back. It lay on the floor several feet from me, whimpering and twitching, so I assumed it was unable to move.

The third thing was that I was naked and bleeding, parts of my abdomen sliced open. I was afraid to look too closely, worried that I would see internal organs through the cuts.

I wasn’t all that certain I could move, either.

But I had to get out of here—I had no idea when, or if, anyone would be coming back for me. So I dragged myself up off the floor, holding my ripped stomach together, and staggered toward the door.

Chapter 9

I MANAGED TO SNAG A couple of baby blankets from a shelf on my way out and press them to the wounds, relying on some vague memory from television shows that applying pressure was a good idea.

Plus, it’ll help keep my internal organs inside.

Luckily, the wounds I had sustained had shrunk along with my body, so I didn’t have Kodiak-bear-sized claw-marks, though there were still gashes in my abdomen.

Eduardo had told me once that sometimes shifters could heal their injuries during a shift. I had half-hoped that pulling in the earth magic would help with that.

Apparently not.

Though maybe it would have been worse otherwise.

As I staggered down the hall, Kade ducked out of a room at the end, apparently on his way to back me up against the werebear. When he saw me, he broke into a run.

I collapsed into his arms. “He’s down, not dead,” I gasped, just as several Shields, including Eduardo, burst into the hallway from the NICU scrub-in room.

Kade lowered me gently to the floor, gesturing toward the end of the hall with a jerk of his head. “Last room on the left.” Prying my hands away from my stomach, he tugged at the blood-soaked baby blanket I had been clutching. “Let me see what we’ve got here.”

“How’s the baby?” I managed to whisper.

“She’s good.” Kade was almost crooning, his tone soothing as he peeled away the blanket. “We’ve got her settled into a new incubator in another room.”

The nurse from the Contact Isolation room stuck her head out into the hall from the room Kade had been in. “Need me to call a team?”

Kade’s nod was almost distracted as he poked at my abdomen. “Yes, please. STAT.”

It occurred to me as if from a distance that STAT wasn’t a good thing, and then everything went black.

WHEN I AWOKE, I WAS in a bed in a hospital room, bright morning sunshine streaming in through a window.

I tried to sit up, but a sharp pain shot through my abdomen, stopping me, and the events from the night before came flooding back to me. After I passed out in the hallway, I had a few cloudy memories of someone sticking an IV needle in my arm and being lifted onto a gurney, then wheeled through some hallways.

Lifting the thin blanket that covered me, I tried to see my stomach, but a hospital gown was draped across me.

“It’s all bandaged up, anyway,” a cheerful nurse in her fifties with