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

and met Gloria’s concerned gaze. “A friend of mine was attacked just now. She’s in the hospital.” If she noticed my hesitation around the word friend, she gave no indication.

“Go to her,” she said instantly. “I’ll keep you posted on anything we learn about this.”

Moreland turned from saying goodbye to the sound tech. “Did I hear you say someone was attacked?”

“I don’t know much yet.” At some point, I would have to tell them something about the house full of children I was about to begin counseling.

But not yet.

Not until I was absolutely certain that the first of those children would even survive the night.

Chapter 4

AT THE HOSPITAL, I realized that rushing to get there might have been a little foolish. There was nothing more that I could do there than I could have done at work. And at least at the CAP-C, I would have been able to keep busy. In the waiting room at Kindred, all I could do was try to look up statistics on premature babies.

I wished I had been able to speak to, or at least see, Marta before she was rushed to surgery. I knew that was more out of my selfish need for some kind of reassurance than any belief that I could have helped.

We had never discussed what she might want to do about the baby if both their lives were at risk. She had been too far along in her pregnancy for a simple termination and hadn’t seemed to want one, anyway.

If they had to choose between the baby and Marta, I had to believe that Kade would choose Marta.

Wouldn’t he?

Surely a fully formed human life took priority over an ... unfinished baby.

Unfinished baby shifter.

That was the rub. I honestly didn’t know if Kade and the other Kindred doctors would value a shifter infant—developed to term or not—over a human mother.

I groaned aloud and dropped my head into my hands. This waiting business was terrible. Standing up and walking around the hospital didn’t help, either—I had tried it. I ran into too many other shifters, some of whom I knew.

I couldn’t bring myself to socialize.

I could barely bring myself to stay human. There might not be any better public place to shift if it came down to it, but for all that, it was still public. There were plenty of humans around.

Just not in this surgical waiting room, where one of the nurses had led me when I came reeling up to the check-in desk in the emergency room. “Dr. Nevala said you should wait here, and he would come to you as soon as your cousin was out of surgery.”

Cousin. So that would be the fiction for the non-shifter staff. I could live with that.

Here I was all alone.

I poured another cup of the sludgy coffee and tried to cover the taste with creamer and sugar. I gave up when it began tasting more like syrup than anything drinkable.

It seemed like hours before Kade swung around the doorframe, as usual seeming to take up much more room than he should have. I flicked my tongue against my lips nervously, trying to get a sense of his mood.

Tired.

That was all that brushed through me from him.

Too afraid to say anything, I simply waited.

He ran a hand across his eyes, and I tried to brace myself for bad news. Any bad news. The worst news.

“They’re both okay.”

All the air seemed to whoosh out of me at once, and I deflated against the back of the chair I sat in.

“For now, anyway,” Kade continued. “The baby is on a ventilator to help her breathe, but that’s not uncommon at this stage. We didn’t have time to help her lungs develop any more quickly.”

“And Marta?”

“Pretty badly beaten. We repaired the internal injuries.” He closed his eyes briefly. “They both have a long recovery ahead of them.”

“Can I see either of them?”

“Marta’s still out. We’re going to keep her under until tomorrow. The baby ...” He waggled his hand in the air in a so-so motion. “It probably wouldn’t hurt, but she’s still being checked in. Later would be better.”

Glancing past him through the doorway to make sure no one was nearby, I lowered my voice. “Any sign that she’s a lamia?”

“None. Yet.”

“Would you be able to tell?” I realized that in all my discussions with him about shifter babies, I had missed some important questions. “If she inherited the weresnake gene, how soon is she likely to shift?”

Oh, God. Could that be a problem?

Seeing the panic on my face, Kade wrapped one arm around my shoulder and pulled me in close. “Usually not for a while—several weeks, at least—but even if she does, it’ll be okay. We’ve got her in the shifter ward. It’s set up as a contact isolation ward, so only approved visitors are allowed, and they’re all screened.”

“But what can I do?” My voice pitched up at the end of the question, turning it into more of a wail.

“Go home and rest. Go back to work. Whatever you want to do. Nothing is going to change overnight. It’ll all be okay.”

Easy for him to say. He had been in the operating room for the last several hours, actually doing something helpful.

Now that the immediate crisis had passed, though, I was feeling the effect of the anxiety. “You staying up here tonight?”

He nodded. “You going back to my place or yours?”

I paused. It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder—I had simply assumed I would go to his house. “Mine,” I said firmly. I needed to keep my own space.

Right?

With a sigh, Kade nodded. “Okay. Call me when you get done with work tomorrow and we’ll come back up here to see the baby.”

His words sent a shiver through me, but I couldn’t quite pin down the exact reason. Anticipation, surely, and a touch of anxiety.

Sheer terror? my internal smartass suggested.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said to Kade, turning my face up to claim a kiss and firmly ignoring that mocking