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

aiming for that tear in reality, just in time to see it shimmer and change.

Only Shane’s hand grabbing my still-human arm held me back from jumping through at the very last moment. Even so, I turned on him, hissing, and he leaped away from me.

When I turned back around, the wolf and infant were gone, both of them.

THE SHOCK SENT ME CRUMPLING to the ground, shifting back into my human form.

Kelly, used to working in a shifters’ hospital, gathered a hospital gown and wrapped it around me.

Too wrapped up in trying to figure out where’d we gone wrong, I barely noticed her thoughtful gesture.

I had no way of knowing where or when or how they’d disappeared—or how to get them back.

This is what they intended all along. Get the babies and take them through that window between worlds.

But how had they known that window had existed at all?

They’ve been studying me.

The answer came to me with a certainty as absolute as the knowledge that they’d somehow planned to take the baby through a window before I realized that the holes in this world served as windows to other worlds.

Again, rage welled up in me, but this time I tamped it down.

Frank wasn’t with them.

I considered the implications of that fact.

No, Frank might not have been the one who took the new lamia infant. But he was definitely spearheading the group.

He’s the one I need to take down.

As I stared at the tear in reality that I’d created, Kade’s voice came crackling through the radio in Eduardo’s hand. “Ed, is Lindi nearby?”

“Yes,” Eduardo said. “One of the wolves took the juvenile lamia through an Earth-magic spot.”

Kade cursed. “Let me talk to her.”

Eduardo handed me the radio. “I’m here, Kade.”

“We have another issue,” Kade said. “I’m taking Evangeline into surgery, and I’m worried the other two babies aren’t going to make it.”

“But she was okay just a minute ago,” Shane burst out.

“Things can turn fast in a situation like that,” Kelly murmured, drawing Shane away from the conversation.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked into the walkie-talkie.

Kade paused, and I could imagine him blinking at me a couple of times as he worked through the possibilities of what he was about to say. “Is there anything you can do with Earth magic to help them?”

Pulling my mind back from the abduction wasn’t easy. All I wanted to do was blast a new hole in reality right back to where the werewolf had taken the lamia.

The baby needs a name. I can’t keep calling it ‘the lamia infant.’

I didn’t have time for naming children now, though. I needed to send all of my gathered energy to help Evangeline and her other two babies.

“I guess I can try,” I said.

We would go after the other baby once I knew how.

For now, I needed to concentrate on pulling mother and babies through what had apparently become their difficult birth.

Guess I’m going to have to try to continue saving lamia babies, after all.

Chapter 30

“I DON’T KNOW IF I CAN do anything that will actually help.” I rubbed the heel of my hand over my face. “Everything I have ever done that uses magic has been in the middle of a fight. I know how to use this power offensively, in a fight. I don’t know if I will be able to use it to help the children. I don’t know if I can use the power to heal.”

“We’ve given Evangeline steroids to help develop the babies’ human lungs. Try to reinforce that with the magic, if you can,” Kade suggested. “The more they can develop before they’re born, the better.”

In the other hallway—the one I had just left in my fruitless circle around the hospital—the obstetrician was preparing to perform surgery on Evangeline. And I knew Evangeline was scared, that she had entered into this pregnancy against her will, that part of her probably hoped the babies would die.

I couldn’t hope the same.

And that meant that in the end, I would do everything I could to save them.

“Okay. I don’t want to draw on any new spots—I don’t want to create a new hole in the world. And if I can help it, I don’t want to make this one any bigger. So I am going to stand right here and do what I can with the power that is already leaking through.”

“I think that’s a good plan.” Kade’s voice came through in a burst of static.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, attempting to center myself in the power that was already here.

I could feel it sliding across my skin, the barest whisper of a crackling spark. Whatever it was I had seen earlier—that window between places—was gone. I didn’t need to worry about it right now.

That’s what I told myself, anyway.

I pushed the thoughts about it to the back of my mind. Right now, I needed to focus on sending healing power to Evangeline and the infant lamias.

I began coiling that sparkling energy back into the center myself, as if it were the snake and I were just a container.

I had always felt the energy as something unusual, something outside myself, but now I felt it also as something other than just a tool to be wielded. I needed to incorporate it fully into myself and send it out again—not as a weapon this time, but as a life force.

This will never work, some part of me whispered.

I heard others coming in, felt it as Kelly pointed them to various places in the room. I didn’t know the strategy behind her placement of everyone, but when I opened my eyes to peek, I saw she had put people in a semicircle behind me, as if they stood there to add power to my own—including Shane, Eduardo, Janice and her team, and Daria, the nurse who’d looked after me during my recovery following my last battle in this room.

I don’t know if adding their strength to mine