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

reminding them that, as the intake form noted, I was required to report it to parents and authorities if a child showed any possibility of harm to himself or others.

In this case, I suspected Vance Kimbell, the psych over at the children’s hospital, would want to admit Orlando for a few days.

Technically, I wasn’t supposed to let the child anywhere near his weapon of choice again. But I wasn’t willing to dig in his backpack for a baggie of rotten hotdog, either. So before I called his parents back in, I addressed a transfer envelope to Vance and had Orlando fish out the foul package. I carefully avoided testing the air around us as the child handled the packet, but the almost-rotten scent lingered. After he had dropped the baggie of greenish meat into the self-sealing envelope, I carefully closed it and gingerly set it on the floor in the far corner of the room.

Orlando’s parents reacted much as I expected them to—she by fluttering around, on the verge of hysterics, and he with stoic snarls. In their defense, they did genuinely seem to care about their child’s wellbeing, so I gave Orlando about a 75% chance of coming through this okay. Even higher, if Vance could get through to the parents enough to give them some effective tools for coping with one another and their child.

Really, those weren’t bad odds, given the majority of kids I saw in my line of work.

Maybe what I did for a living had turned me into a cynic, but I was pretty certain that most people were, in one way or another, seriously screwed up. Anyone who got their kids to adulthood without pregnancy, jail, or both, was doing a pretty good job.

That thought reminded me of the lamia babies that would soon be at least partly my responsibility, and my stomach tightened.

For all that I knew about how to help troubled children, I was still terrified at the thought of being the moral center of these babies’ world.

Chapter 6

THAT SENSE OF TERROR hadn’t really let up even by the time I got to the NICU ward after work that evening, but I forced it down and ignored the way my stomach churned as Kade signed me in to see the baby. Our plan was to spend half an hour checking in on the potential new lamia, then go out to dinner somewhere. Before I got the note from Eduardo, I had been hoping for a long night in together after that, but Kade was on-call, so I guessed I’d had about a 50/50 chance of going home alone after we ate, anyway. At least this way I would get in some training on my lost date night.

Still, I wasn’t willing to give up my chance to meet the child, even if skipping it would have meant more time with Kade.

“How’s Marta doing?” I asked as we scrubbed in inside the locked ward.

Kade shrugged. “She’ll be okay. She’s in a lot of pain, and it’s going to take a while for her to heal, but she’ll survive.”

“Any news on who might have done it?”

He shook his head. “The Shields are looking into it. You’ll have a better chance of learning more about that tonight than I will.”

“What about the human police?” An attack in broad daylight meant it had almost certainly been recorded.

“Yeah, they have a case open, too, though I doubt they’ll learn much.”

The alarm timing our scrubbing beeped, and we dried our hands, then cycled through another set of locked doors, all designed to protect the infants within. Kade led me down a long hallway to a door with a sign that read “Contact Isolation Ward.”

Inside, there was one clear incubator bassinet with portholes we could reach through. I didn’t, though. Instead, I took a seat next to it and stared through at the tiny being inside, connected to the outside world through a tangle of wires and tubes clipped out of the way. She was human-shaped with bright pink skin and a shock of dark hair atop her head. Her arms and legs were spindly, but her hands and feet were perfectly formed.

“Hello there,” I said quietly, and when I spoke, she opened her eyes and looked directly at me.

At that moment, all my fear fell away.

“Oh,” I whispered. “Oh, dear. I am so screwed.”

From behind me, I heard Kade’s deep chuckle, and the heat that always poured off him when we were together seemed to almost double. I leaned back into it and glanced up at him as he leaned over me.

“Can I hold her?” I asked tentatively.

“Not yet. She’s still too small. Maybe a couple of weeks, depending on how she does.” He slipped one hand past the clear vinyl that covered the portal into the bassinet. “But look.” Slipping his forefinger under her hand, he waited.

It didn’t take long for her to grab his finger in her tiny grasp. “You try,” he said, gently disentangling himself from her.

The air inside the incubator was warm and slightly moist, and her fingers stronger than I expected. From inside, a rush of warm air brushed across me, and I drew it in over my tongue, tasting the various complexities of her scent.

Although it had never actually happened, I was always a tiny bit afraid that babies would smell like food to me.  All they had ever smelled of, though, was human infant. Mildly interesting, something that I needed to watch carefully in case it behaved erratically, but nothing that concerned me directly, as a general rule.

This child, though, smelled like family.

“What are all the wires?”

Kade patiently explained them to me—leads attached to the baby’s skin that monitored her heartbeat, blood pressure, and oxygen level and a tube into her nose that delivered nutrition straight to her stomach.

“She needs a name,” I said after he called her “the baby” for the third time.

That blast of heat rolled off Kade again, and I glanced up at him to find him