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

worked in any real way, or if their presence simply bolstered my self-confidence. Either way, I felt the power that coiled down inside me settle in, take root, and begin to twine its way through my entire body, becoming part of me, one with me.

Though my eyes were closed, I could see the glow of magic spreading through the room.

Behind me, I heard Daria gasp—then several others. The sound startled me enough that I blinked several times. When I realized what had shocked them, my eyes stayed open.

That window into another place had opened again. This time, it was a different place—at least for a few seconds. I saw through it and out across a vast, empty landscape of sand and rock and nothing else.

“Almost there,” I whispered. “I’ll need to be able find that woman again later.”

“Are you positive you can return to what you saw?” Kelly asked.

“I’m sure of it. I know I can get back to it if I simply concentrate.” I should probably have focused on spooling in more magic, but every instinct I had told me that finding that woman again would lead to stronger magic.

I followed my intuition and pushed against the window.

It shimmered again.

I stared out across an ocean sunset.

The image blurred and shimmered and this time it was a jungle scene, complete with a wildcat draped across the limb of the tree, its tail swinging lazily as it watched me. I couldn’t tell if the intelligence in its eyes meant it was shifter or if it was simply a big cat.

Another shimmer, and for an instant, I saw a city street busy with cars—slightly different in design from our own—flashing by on the streets.

Shimmer.

And we were back on that ruined cityscape. The woman I had seen earlier now knelt in front of the window as I saw it, but she had fallen backward in some kind of trance. Four men grabbed her and held her, kept her from landing on the broken concrete behind her.

Her back arched convulsively, and then she sat up straight, her arms still flung out to the sides, her eyes blazing a white light that matched the sparkles I had seen the first time I had encountered one of these tears in reality.

She threw her arm forward, pointing toward us, her mouth moving as she spoke, but I couldn’t hear a word she said.

A bright pink bolt of lightning-like power shot out of her fingertip and through the window between our worlds.

When the power that she had flung from that hand hit me, I found myself beginning to shift against my will, against my volition.

My vision changed as the world around me went gray, everything moving to black and white as usual.

I rushed to try to strip off my clothing before my legs changed, merging in that split second of terror as I moved from many-limbed to serpentine. I dropped to the ground and allowed my clothes to slide away from me.

Whatever this was, it wasn’t natural, and I wasn’t okay with it.

I pushed back against the power, drawing on what I had already stored inside me to attempt to control the shift, to control how I changed. And in that tug-of-war between the other woman’s power and my own, I felt reality tear again, the white light changing to the bright, multicolored sparkles I’d seen in the last battle against the werewolves.

Dammit.

I needed to focus on the babies, on Evangeline, on the infants being born right now.

I don’t have time for this shit.

I rose up again, taller than I had been, even with the serpentine tail, having managed to maintain my human torso.

The entire process had only taken a few seconds, despite the way time stretched out for me when I shifted.

Everyone still stood at a semicircle around me, watching that window between worlds.

It shimmered again, but in a different way. A form—humanoid, shadowy, and growing larger—seemed to move toward us from somewhere across the distant reaches of reality itself. It reminded me of the receding form of the abductor shortly before.

Ignore it.

I coiled more power into myself, preparing to send it to Evangeline, but also not wanting to give up the potential tactical advantage of that power in case whatever was coming toward us posed a danger.

As the shape grew closer, I realized it wasn’t simply humanoid—it was human. And male. The man dove through the window headfirst. Everyone around me gasped, and I realized that the other people in the room hadn’t been able to see him moving toward us. Not as I had.

He fell to the ground just in front of me, then scrambled to his feet, looking me up and down, then around frantically as if attempting to find something, anything to hang on to.

For the first time, I heard what seemed like sound coming through the world-holes.

A whisper.

A promise, it said. No matter where you go, no matter where you travel, my love travels with you.

I shook my head, uncertain of what that meant.

Then the window slammed closed, and the power that had been pouring into me from the other side dropped away.

My body tried to snap back into its human form, painfully, and it was all I could do to keep from dropping to the ground in agony again.

But I maintained control over my form.

The man who’d come through the window—though I guess we ought to call it a door now, some inner voice suggested—froze in place, staring at me.

“Ah, hell,” he said in a thick Texas accent. “I don’t think I’m where I’m supposed to be.”

When no one responded to him, his eyes narrowed, and his jaw tightened as he glanced around at the other inhabitants of the room. “I’ve got just one question for y’all.” He crossed his arms and settled back on his heels.

“Are any of y’all werewolves?”

Chapter 31

“MOVE OUT OF THE WAY,” I ordered the newcomer. “We’ll talk in a minute.”

He raised his eyebrows at my tone but sauntered toward the side of the