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

Marta was okay. The baby was okay.

That would have to be enough for now.

I could examine my own emotions later.

When I got home, though, I couldn’t sleep. Instead, I tossed and turned all night, wishing I had gone to Kade’s instead.

By 6:00 the next morning, I was up and dressed and headed to the nearest big-box store.

Kade had told me that the baby would be in the hospital for a while longer, but I knew, from other conversations, that the shifter community really didn’t know that much about lamia babies. Really, for all he knew, an infant already in serpent form would be ready to go home in a week.

Never mind that Marta’s baby wasn’t in serpent form.

Never mind that none of us were ready to have a baby come home in a week.

Hell, construction on the group home wasn’t even done yet.

That simply meant that we needed a backup plan.

And that meant I had to go shopping.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a good enough counselor to know when I’m losing my mind. I knew that the idea of bringing one or more shifter infants into my own home was insane—especially if someone had set out to hurt that shifter infant.

For that matter, Kade and I didn’t even have a home—we had two homes. Separate homes. He had a house and I had an apartment. We had only recently exchanged keys.

And yet, at six o’clock in the morning, I was shopping the baby department in Walmart. Yes, I knew it was insane.

But sometimes, you simply have to work with the life you’re handed.

Chapter 5

BY THE TIME I HIT MY office at 8:30, I had a car-trunk and backseat full of all the things the most popular baby site on the internet told me were “necessities.”  Never mind that I didn’t know what half of them were.

For someone who works with kids, I’m pretty clueless about the mechanics of dealing with infants.

I was kind of glad that no one else had any more experience with lamia babies than I did.

Except, of course, my own parents—though they didn’t get me until I was a toddler, around the equivalent of two human years old, according to their best guess. Kade said most shifter children aged along a similar timeline to humans, instead of following the aging path of their animal counterparts. That accorded with what I knew of my own childhood experience after Dad found me out there in the West Texas desert.

A text message from Kade reassured me that Marta and the baby were both fine and that he would clear me to visit them that evening.

I managed to get caught up on paperwork before my first appointment that morning, but I didn’t get a chance to speak to Gloria as I had hoped.  But she had clients already waiting for her in the waiting room when she arrived, and a steady stream of people through her office all morning long.

It’s a busy day in the child-protection biz.

I sighed at the thought. Every day was eventful in this business, and I was sure I would never get used to that fact. Almost everyone in the shifter community continued to assure me that my “natural” instinct should be toward cold-blooded, emotionless behavior, the likes of which they had all been used to seeing from lamias. However, my adoptive parents had encouraged me to focus on my human side, the parts of me that were nurturing and loving.

Anyway, my dad—a herpetologist by training and a college biology instructor by profession—said that the idea that snakes are unemotional is a myth. He prefers to call them “choosy.”

I don’t know who’s right, but I do know that I am more than my inner reptile. And the part of me that cared about others remained horrified by the way humans, supposedly the creatures capable of the most empathy, were capable of the kinds of atrocities against children that I dealt with in my office every day.

It was precisely one of those atrocities that I was railing against when I finally did make it into Gloria’s office sometime that afternoon.

“It was long-term, continued abuse over years, and the girl’s mother knew about it.” I all but spat out the last words, pacing back and forth the six paces across my boss’s office in front of her desk. “She didn’t want to lose her boyfriend—or more likely, her access to whatever he had her strung out on.” I heaved a sigh and flung myself down into one of the upholstered chairs against the wall, scrubbing across my face with my hands.

“Any word from the bio-dad?” Gloria asked.

“Nothing. No one has heard from him since the child was an infant.”

She nodded, her blond curls bouncing as she made a note. People who didn’t know her often made the mistake of thinking she was soft, simply because she looked like some artist’s idea of a sweet, round, cookie-baking mama.

Gloria was all of those things.

Also, she was one of the toughest women I’ve ever met when it came to confronting child-abusers. Our District Attorney loved it when he could call on her to testify in a case. She was precise and clear and harsh when it came to dealing with people who hurt kids.

“How is your friend who was attacked yesterday?” she asked as she finished her comments in the case file we had been discussing.

“Okay. Kade and his team went ahead and delivered the baby. A girl. They’re both still in intensive care, but Kade said I could go by and visit tonight.”

“Is this someone you’ve talked about?”

I gave a quick shake of my head. “Probably not.”

Definitely not. No. This is the woman who was carrying Scott’s weresnake rape-baby I didn’t tell you about.

“She’s a fairly new friend,” I added. “I met her through Kade.”

More or less.

Thankfully, Gloria didn’t follow up on that line of questioning. “That’s still going well, I take it?”

I couldn’t help but smile at the thought of my relationship with Kade. “Very.”

Gloria laughed