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

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 than 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 leaped 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 leaped 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 ax crashed through the window, ripping down the Venetian blinds. As soon as the ax 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 ax 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 into the enclosure far enough for her to be able to slide onto it. I found myself wishing for hands to hold onto her, but she balanced carefully, and I felt her there, her body touching my outward skin but cueing 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 it away entirely.

I made my way down the now-demolished hallway, and when I reached the living room, I found two more wolves, these dead and stretched out across the living room floor. Shadow stood over them with her ax, beaming proudly.

“It seems there is a place for me here, after all,” she