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

Tomás blew out a relieved breath. “Thanks, doc.”

“You’re welcome. You can go up and see them anytime.” He gave them the room numbers and they hurried to catch the next elevator.

“We’ll catch up in just a minute,” Janice said, waving them on without us.

She turned to me. “I’m sending someone for clean phones so we can keep in touch. In the meantime, use the hospital phone lines if you have to call out, okay? And if there’s an emergency, leave a message with the hospital operator. I’ll check in with her every half hour or so.”

I nodded. “I plan to stick around while Evangeline’s in labor. I’m not going anywhere for a while.”

“Good. I’ll be in touch.” She touched me on the arm. “And don’t worry. We’ll take care of the wolves. They’re not going to be a problem.”

“Thanks.” I hadn’t realized how much I relied on Janice’s warm, calming presence to make my crazy new world feel normal.

Shane joined me and Kade on the elevator, while everyone else followed Janice. “When I left earlier,” Kade said, “Evangeline still had a ways to go before the babies were born—but they were doing well, all of them.”

I nodded, but didn’t answer, still worried about the wolves and their threats. But I inhaled deeply and squared my shoulders, preparing to put on a good show for Evangeline.

“What’s the standard gestation time for a lamia?” Shane asked Kade.

My boyfriend turned his hand up. “Uncertain, really. All shifter gestations that I know of are shorter than their human counterparts—but often much longer than their animal forms might suggest. That often means that our young are born in their animal forms and don’t shift until later—that gives them a chance to allow the human side to finish developing.”

Shane nodded and made some encouraging noises. “But Serena didn’t do that, did she?” he asked. “What form was she born in?”

“Human,” I said. “She didn’t change into a serpent form until she’d seen me shift.”

“She still prefers to be a snake when Lindy is around,” Kade said.

“I can’t blame her,” I said with a grin. “She’s a lot more mobile that way, and she seems to have imprinted on me in that form. But she much prefers snuggling in her human form with Kade.”

Kade returned my smile. It was a nice moment—we hadn’t had enough of those lately, what with all the various attacks on us.

I didn’t know if we were going to get to have much time alone together ever again, in fact—not with the rate at which the lamia babies seem determined to enter the world.

“That said,” Kade continued as we exited the elevator on the floor that held the maternity wing, “we don’t know much at all about lamia birth, so I think we should continue to try to be ready for anything.”

Apparently he was absolutely right, because after Kade took us down the hall to scrub in, as we entered the delivery room, one of the nurses began saying, “okay, Evangeline, it’s almost time to push.”

Kade blinked, and then almost visibly pulled his doctor persona on around him. “Well,” he muttered to Shane and me, “that went faster than I anticipated.”

Pulling a pair of gloves out of the dispenser on the wall and snapping them on, he moved over to join the nurses by Evangeline’s bed. “Tell me what we have here,” he said in what I had come to consider his doctor-voice.

One of the nurses, someone I didn’t know, said, “It looks like one of the infants is determined to come on out.”

“How far is she dilated?”

“Oh, not fully,” the nurse replied. “But if you take a look at the last sonogram we did, you’ll see that Baby C is...” She paused for a second as if searching for the right word. “Well, that one has a much smaller circumference than the other two.”

I hadn’t spoken to Evangeline yet. Of all the women Scott had impregnated, she was arguably the one suffering from the worst post-traumatic symptoms. Although she hadn’t come out and said so, I was fairly certain the only reason she hadn’t aborted was that she held some pretty strict religious beliefs about the sanctity of life.

She had also convinced herself that everything she had seen during her captivity—especially the sight of Scott’s mother in her half-serpent form—was the effect of some kind of nightmarish drug, or maybe hypnosis.

Even now, she walked around with a half blank look in her eyes, as if waiting for all of this to be over.

All of us had learned pretty quickly to avoid words like snake or serpent around the pregnant women—or even lamia, as some of them had figured out that’s what Scott’s mother was.

This was particularly important around Evangeline, as she had, more than once, gone into full-blown, screaming panic attacks when confronted with the idea that she might be carrying one of the shifters.

Hence the nurse’s careful phrasing. And as I moved to stand behind Kade, where I could see the monitor, I saw what she meant. Evangeline was carrying three babies. Two were in human form. But the third, in its snake form, was poised to take advantage of its smaller size and make an exit now.

“Oh, I see what you mean,” Shane breathed behind me. He leaned in over my shoulder. “What form is that? Constrictor?”

I thumped his hand with mine and shook my head when I caught his gaze. “Come out in the hall with me for a minute,” I said.

It didn’t take long to get Shane all caught up on the necessity of keeping the snake-talk down to a minimum. After all, he was a herpetologist—he’d been around plenty of people who made him shut up about his work.

Back inside the room, I let Evangeline know that I was there, willing to help in any way I could. Despite the fact that I had helped save her from Scott, she still clearly thought of me as part of that particularly horrible time in her life