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

and wanted nothing to do with me. “The best thing you can do for me,” Evangeline said, “is take three giant steps back.”

“Got it,” I said holding my hands up and backing away. I went more than three steps, too. I moved all the way out of her line of sight.

Best she not even know I’m here.

I leaned against a wall and waited.

I hated not having anything to do, but I realized that my job would come later. And yet I wanted to be here for the births.

Kade sent one of the nurses out to arrange for an additional incubator to be brought in. He didn’t say so out loud in front of Evangeline, but I knew that it was one of the special designs he had arranged to have shipped to the hospital—made specifically for baby lamia.

And I watched from several feet away as Evangeline pushed to help the first infant be born. I realized at that moment that Kade had told the nurses to stand back for a reason—although Shane was guessing that this lamia was in a constrictor form as a snake, he wasn’t certain. For all they knew, they would have a brand-new baby viper on their hands, and the last thing they wanted to have to do was deal with a venomous snake bite in the maternity ward.

As a mongoose-shifter, Kade had a natural resistance to snake bites—more so than any of the other shifters who worked at the hospital.

Until that moment, it had never occurred to me to wonder how I might respond to the snakebite. I assume that I was largely immune, at least in my own serpent forms, but I had no idea how my human shape would deal with a venomous bite.

None of the vipers in dad’s herpetarium had ever even tried to bite me.

Shane, as a trained herpetologist, had donned a set of heavy gloves over his hospital gloves, and had a small, collapsible stick with a hook on the end.

I knew it shouldn’t bother me to think of him handling the newborn lamia with a stick, but the sight of it pissed me off. I had to remind myself that he meant no disrespect.

And then the newborn lamia, a constrictor after all, was being bundled into the incubator, out of sight, and taken down to the special room of the NICU that had been devoted initially to shifter babies, and now to the lamias being born in this hospital.

I was torn between following the snake baby downstairs and staying behind to wait for the other two to be born. Undecided, I waited too long to travel with the nurse who went with the incubator.

So I was still in the room with Evangeline when the hospital alarms went off.

I knew, even before Kade’s phone began buzzing, that it had to do with the baby.

I’d made the wrong choice.

Chapter 28

I TOOK OFF RUNNING down the hallway toward the elevator, wishing I knew where the stairwell was on this floor. By the time the elevator got to my floor, Shane and hospital security guard had caught up with me.

“Where’s Kade?” I asked.

The elevator dinged and the three of us piled on, even as Shane answered, “He’s staying in the delivery room with Evangeline.”

I nodded once. “Any news?” I asked the guard.

He shook his head. “Nothing so far.”

I realized when we hit the bottom floor that I didn’t even know where to go. However, they had been headed toward the NICU, so I figured that was my best bet.

When I got there, it had been shut down. The nurses were turning away the regular human mothers, as well as the shifter mothers with babies who weren’t lamias.

Luckily, Kelly, the nurse who’d cared for Serena, was working the desk. She waved me through, along with the security guard. “Go ahead and scrub in, but do it fast,” she said.

She glanced behind her nervously, almost as if expecting someone to come along and stop us from going in. Then she followed us down the hallway, giving us a quick update as we went.

“The nurse was bringing the new baby down to the NICU—the back way, where none of the parents or patients would see them—all we know for sure is that she got on the elevator and it stopped once on the third floor. When it got down to the first floor, she’d been knocked out and the incubator was empty.”

I skidded to a halt in the middle of the hallway. “Did the abductors have enough time to get out of the hospital?”

Kelly shook her head. “I have no idea. Whatever they did to the nurse, it was fast. The elevator wasn’t even stopped on that floor long enough to start beeping. It was planned out pretty slick.”

The security guard stayed long enough to hear this, then swerved off into some other part of the NICU—someplace I’d never been.

“I can show you the path they were going to take,” Kelly said, but she glanced around nervously as she made the offer.

With the absolute certainty that the new lamia baby had been taken, I felt a cold anger wash over and through me.

“No, I don’t want you to get in trouble,” I said. “They’re long gone from that route, anyway.” I stood still and felt a certainty come into me along with that cold rage.

“I need to go back to Room Five,” I said—back to the room where Serena had stayed until so recently.

Back to the room where I had defeated the shifters who had come in to destroy us, where I had ripped a hole in the fabric of reality.

Back to the room that held more power than any other place in the hospital.

It pulled at me, its power drawing me to it like a magnet.

Although I’ve never told anyone, I still felt that energy every time I walked into the hospital. And I knew I could somehow use it to get this baby back.

As I entered the room, the magical spot threw