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

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 want 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 I 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 leaped 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 else coming?” I asked.

Eduardo made eye contact with me and gave me a significant look before he replied.