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

I dipped my head once to show her that I understood. What I wanted to say was, “it was never any doubt of it.” But for now, a nod would have to do.

We had all shifted outside, I presumed. We would need to shift back to our human selves inside.

From the bedroom, I heard a yelp, and I started to move, certain that was Kade’s voice. But again, I stopped myself. Instead, I glanced at Shadow, who nodded and headed to the back room to aid the others.

By ourselves for only an instant, Serena and I simply sat, communing with each other, even without words.

In a few minutes, everything went silent. It was only a few seconds after that that everyone in my group came pouring out into the hallway, though it had felt like ages.

“Everyone okay?” I asked.

“Everyone but your boy Kade here,” said Eduardo. Kade shook his head and held up one crooked, bleeding hand.

“I missed one coming at me,” he said. “I’ll get it dealt with once this mess is all taken care of.”

From outside, my dad called in, “Is it safe to come in yet?”

“Come on,” I said.

We stood around, staring at one another. The matriarch was still back in the room with the wounded werewolves.

“You know,” Shane said from the doorway, “every last one of you is naked. You’re not going to be able to drive back to the hospital like that.”

I glanced around. He was absolutely right. This was another issue I had not had a chance to talk to anyone about since I had become a foster parent: how was I supposed to keep Serena clothed—assuming I couldn’t keep her bound to her human form. And I was guessing that in this kind of circumstance, the answer to that question was simply “you can’t.”

I was about to have to deal with a lot of brand-new stuff. I glanced down at the juvenile snake shifter in front of me and smiled.

Yeah, it was gonna be a fun ride.

Chapter 23

FIVE HOURS LATER, WE sat on folding chairs scattered around the small Shifter Shield office—me, Kade, Eduardo, Jeremiah, and Shadow. Janice, the current leader of the shifter Council, had come to take our statements and left again.

I pulled a slice of pizza from the box sitting atop the main desk and offered the slice to Kade, who held Serena in his uninjured arm. She had taken human form for him, happily snuggling into his arms and taking a bottle, though she had stayed in her serpent shape the entire time she had been with me. I wondered if that would be a pattern. I had refused to let her out of my sight since we saved her from the werewolves. I had even had Dr. Jimson come over here to examine her.

I still didn’t have everything straight, though I was beginning to get a better picture of what exactly had happened during all the craziness.

“Were you there when Janice and the Shields questioned the survivors from this morning’s attack in the parking lot?” I asked Jeremiah and Shadow as I pulled my own slice out of the pizza box. Shadow shook her head, as Jeremiah said, “I was. They didn’t get much information out of them, though apparently the plan to attack you was an escalated timeline from something else they had put in motion a while ago—the fact that Shadow and I came here to you seemed to the wolves to be serendipitous timing.”

“None of them seemed, from what little I overheard, to have any knowledge of what the one I killed in the lead-in on the road from Georgia said to me.” Shadow shrugged.

“It sounds like this was a one-off, then.” Kade bounced Serena in his arm.

“What did you do at the house?” Shadow asked me. “I could only see part of it, but it looks like it left behind some kind of... wound in the world.”

“Yes, we’re going to have to discuss that,” Eduardo said, back to being my mentor and instructor now that the crisis was over.

I felt bad about what I had done to save Serena. There were two brand-new tears in reality, all because of me. I was beginning to wonder if that ability to rip the world had been part of why the shifters had originally wanted to take out lamias in the first place.

I shrugged. “I think we need to see if we can figure out what these cracks are, anyway. I seem to be the only one who could create them, even if I’m not the only one who can use them. Is this a lamia ability, or a Lindi ability?” I put down my own uneaten half-slice of pizza, suddenly no longer hungry.

“I agree,” Kade said. “It might be time for us to put some effort into determining the source of all those magical hotspots.”

Everyone looked sober for a moment, reflecting on what that might entail.

I expected none of us really knew.

We were still engrossed in our individual thoughts when the door to the office swung open and two people rushed in and shut it behind them.

They both had shiny dark hair, but whereas the woman was small and fair, with skin so pale I could almost see the blue veins running under it, the man was taller and darker—though he, too, had a blue sheen to his hair.

They gazed around at all of us, their eyes wide and slightly crazed. The woman wore her arm bandaged. It must’ve been a really horrific wound because even from here I could smell the shifter on her—she should have been able to heal anything less than major trauma. He was a shifter, too, though of an entirely different sort. The air around her tasted of freedom, flight, and air, whereas he smelled of leafy, dark jungles. And cat.

Whatever their specific shifter animals might be, they were at the very base a cat and a bird.

Yet another odd shifter pairing.

I seemed to be collecting those. Starting with