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

“If you don’t agree to go to my house, I’ll have Dr. Smith cancel your release orders.”

I shrugged. “I could still leave.”

Kade scowled and I finally relented. “Okay, okay. I’ll stay at your place.”

His phone buzzed and he checked an incoming text. A broad smile broke out across his face. “We need to go see Serena.”

“What’s up?” I asked.

“You’ll see when we get there.”

He almost bounced on his toes all the way down the elevator and through the NICU scrub-in area.

Serena had been set up in a new room while construction workers repaired the old one and the hospital filed insurance claims against the damaged machinery. The story—the one that had gone to the police and the public—was that Serena’s biological father had broken in to try to kill the child he had wanted to abort, after attacking Marta and failing to kill either her or the baby. I had no idea what paperwork they had presented to back that up, or what would happen to Bartholomew Jenkins, but it had worked well enough as a cover for the hospital’s, and the shapeshifters’, purposes.

The tear in reality in that room still leaked Earth magic. The other shifters could sense it now, but no one else had been able to use it yet. Eduardo had come to visit me once and he and Kade had speculated that similar tears might be the source of the Earth magic hot spots in other places, as well.

I didn’t care. I just wanted to make sure that I hadn’t done some sort of irreparable damage to the world by pulling the Earth magic through someplace it wasn’t supposed to go.  And despite my physical therapist’s prodding, I refused to use the Earth magic I had torn into the hospital to augment my shifts. I claimed remembering the events was too traumatic, but in reality, I was afraid of what kind of permanent harm I might cause.

Now, as we walked into the new room, Kelly, the nurse who had carried Serena away from the attack, was standing in front of the incubator, a wide grin on her face. “You ready?” she asked.

Kade wore an almost identical smile.

“Ready for what?” I glanced between them.

Kelly stepped to one side and presented the incubator with a flourish of her arms, like a game-show hostess.

Inside coiled a juvenile snake—but not any species that I recognized. Not from the animal kingdom, anyway. Her head was a triangular wedge and she had the heat-sensing pits of the pit viper between her eyes and nose. Her body, however, had the pattern and musculature of an albino python.

“That’s Serena?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer. “She’s a lamia.”

“She’s a lamia who imprinted her shape on you,” Kade corrected me. “That’s almost exactly what you looked like the night you shifted in front of her.”

“And you should have seen how fast she shifted, too,” Kelly added enthusiastically. “I turned my back for just a second, and when I turned back around, there she was.”

She and Kade were still grinning like crazy people—but all I felt was dread.

“She’s more dangerous that way,” I pointed out.

“But this means that she’s also trainable,” Kade said. “She can be influenced.” He wrapped one arm around my shoulder and pulled me toward him to kiss the top of my head, careful not to tug too quickly and jostle my injuries. “This is a good thing, Lindi.”

I tried to see it their way, but I worried about how the rest of the shifters would take this development. If nothing else, the attacks on Marta and Serena had shown us that there were plenty of shapeshifters who still didn’t want the lamia race to return.

Chapter 10

I KEPT MY CONCERNS to myself, though, allowing Kade to check me out of the hospital and take me to his house to fuss over me as he settled me in. My adoptive parents had been to see me several times in the hospital, but I had assured them that they could head out on their usual summer research trips, Mom to fulfill a grant she had to use one of the big telescopes out in California, Dad to study spontaneous regeneration—parthenogenesis—in reptiles in Death Valley. At least this year, they were headed to the same part of the world. They were actually planning to take some vacation time together, though I would believe it when I saw it.

Being alone at Kade’s while he worked got old pretty quickly, but I filled the hours doing CAP-C paperwork, completing my physical therapy exercises, and begging rides to and from the hospital from shifters who worked there so I could visit Serena. I was glad to see she had shifted back to her human form the first time I went to see her after I had been released; I still wasn’t certain her shifting ability was the good thing Kade and Kelly had made it out to be, though I was beginning to realize that a “first shift” was, to a shifter, akin to a “first step” for most human parents.

Gloria began visiting me every couple of days, usually bringing lunch. It didn’t take long to figure out that she was checking on my mental health after getting caught up in what she saw as a horrible, but random, act of violence.

She didn’t know this had become my new normal.

For good or ill, I knew the words to say to minimize her worry.

While I had been away, there had been no more strange recordings in the CAP-C, and Gloria was convinced it had been a strange technical glitch. “Moreland is inclined to agree with me,” she said one afternoon, taking a bite of her salad and waving her fork in the air as she spoke. “He thinks maybe something caused the microphone to pick up my breathing from the background. Or maybe the officer’s. Anyway, as long as it doesn’t happen again, I’m choosing not to worry about it.”

Given my recent experiences, I was