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

When she did, a bolt of power flew out from her to me, connecting us for an instant, shocking me with the strength of the magic it poured into me.

The vision clouded over again—but I had made a hole in the world that actually went somewhere, somewhen, someplace so very other from where I was now that I don’t know I could have imagined it if I had tried.

Moreover, that place had just given me a jolt of power like nothing I had ever felt before.

The sound of Kade’s voice from the hallway broke the spell and I pulled myself away, knowing that if I survived the coming battle, I would have to eventually determine what exactly it was that I had done to create the holes in reality.

And try to close them, too.

But for right now...

As I turned around, sliding along the floor, my hair floated out around my head, borne aloft on the energy I’d drawn from that other realm.

“Let’s go find these assholes and take them out,” I said.

Chapter 29

THEY’RE STILL IN THE hospital.

I could feel it, sense it.

I can taste it on the magic of the air.

Kade strode into Room Five, still speaking to someone behind him. When he saw me, he stopped, wide-eyed. Eduardo moved in around him, and he stopped, too.

“Wow,” Kade breathed, after a long, silent moment.

“Impressive,” Eduardo conceded.

Shane didn’t have to say anything at all. Even in my black-and-white vision, his approval shone through his gaze.

With just a flick of my tongue, I could taste the sincerity of their admiration. And part of me—that part that I tried so hard to shove down, to keep subjugated to my human side—that part accepted their response as my due.

You’re not some creepy snake-queen, Lindi, my conscience reminded me.

No, but I might be losing my mind.

Admonishing all the feuding parts of my personality to shut the hell up, I said, “I’ll find the wolves and retrieve the infant.”

With my serpent tongue, the S on the end of wolves turned super-sibilant, turning word to wolvesssss.

Kade nodded. “I’ll go back to Evangeline, then. She’s still in labor with the twins, but everything was progressing fine.”

He turned and left without another word.

“You know where the wolf and the juvenile are?” Eduardo asked. He kept a slight distance from me, as if something about me bothered him. I wanted to ask why, but I didn’t have time right now.

“Not yet,” I hissed, and moved out of the room. Eduardo and Shane followed me.

I headed down a corridor that I had never really paid attention to before, racing toward what I was certain was the wolf who had stolen the infant lamia—the baby who didn’t even have a name, who didn’t know that it could be human, who didn’t have any kind of positive role model unless I could save it from the wolves.

The nurse, Kelly, had stayed behind to call in reinforcements—the hospital staff cleared out my path as I told them where I was headed. The whole place was still under lockdown, so it was easy enough to keep the human patients in their rooms.

I quickly realized that the path I was taking was the back route Kelly had talked about the nurses using to transport infants to the NICU.

Focusing all my attention on the scent-taste-feel of the wolf carrying the baby lamia, I worked on blocking out all other input.

Beside me, Shane moved silently. Eduardo remained in contact with the rest of the hospital’s security teams, but the crackle of the walkie-talkie faded as I narrowed my concentration to just that single bright trace connecting me to my prey.

As I followed it, the feeling I had that they were still in the hospital grew stronger and stronger—right up to the moment when I opened a door leading into an empty parking lot.

Their trail ends here.

I spun around checking for anything more, extending all my senses, but found only the end of the road. Shane ducked outside to take a look around and came back in shaking his head.

That’s when I realized they must have doubled back. It would explain both the end of the trail and my certainty that they were still inside.

But when I actually turned around and followed the trail, it simply led back around to the maternity ward.

I waited by the staff elevator with Shane while Eduardo moved to check Evangeline’s room again.

After only a few seconds, he pushed through the door. “Nothing,” Ed said, shaking his head.

Somehow, along the way, the infant’s abductors had created a trail that looped around and around from the NICU to the maternity ward and back again.

Nothing in between led away from the path—but the infant wasn’t there, either.

The baby and its abductor were nowhere to be found.

Dammit.

That initial fury I’d felt at the baby’s disappearance swelled inside my chest and flashed outward, running from head to tail.

I will kill the wolves.

The thought came unbidden, clear and certain, and I could barely shove it down enough to keep my human mind in control of my actions.

I swung back down through the NICU, still taking the nurses’ back way to avoid seeing any humans. Only as I was getting close to Room Five again did I realize what had happened.

Speeding up, I hit the door and threw it open, just in time to see one of the wolves—a man in an expensive suit, not Frank himself, but one of the ones who had been with Frank earlier.

He was clutching the infant lamia in its serpent form, wrapped around his wrist.

The baby was still a constrictor, still an infant, and it was in his possession. And whatever he was doing, he had opened that window into other realities.

Glancing back over his shoulder, the man flashed a wolfish grin at me and dove through the open space.

The last glimpse I had of him was of his form retreating from me, growing smaller and smaller even as I threw myself after him,