The Skin She's In Read online

  He laughed again but leaned down to kiss my neck in a way that sent shivers down my spine. “I like watching you act maternal. So I guess if you don’t ever want kids, then yes, you should be worried. Otherwise, I think we’re fine.”

  I blinked. We hadn’t gotten to the “do you want children” stage of our relationship yet. We had only barely gotten past the “someone’s been trying to kill us” stage and into the “let’s be a couple” part.

  Until I met Kade and learned about the oddities of shifter genetics, I had actually assumed that children were off-limits to me, either because I wouldn’t be able to have babies with humans, or because I would never be able to tell anyone about my shifter abilities.

  Now I knew better, but I hadn’t made up my mind about what I wanted to do.

  I did know, however, that anytime Kade started putting out that much heat, it worked for me. So if watching me be nice to children was a turn-on for him, I could go with it. As long as he kept nuzzling my neck like that.

  He stood up straight. “I’ll be back in a minute. I want to take a look at her chart before we leave.”

  I leaned my forehead against the clear glass and spoke to the infant inside. “Okay, sweetheart. I will come up with a name for you soon. I promise.” Her cloudy, gray-blue eyes opened wide again, almost as if she recognized my voice, and I shook my head in disbelief. I was fairly certain I knew this feeling, or something close to it, anyway.

  It was an awful like falling in love.

  Biting down on my lip, I tried to convince myself that I was not responsible for this tiny person inside the clear box.

  But I knew better.

  As I prepared to leave, whispering a soft goodbye to the baby and standing to move toward Kade, a shrill alarm blared through the room, causing all three adults inside to jump.

  “What is that?” I demanded, pitching my voice loud enough to be heard over the screeching noise.

  “Someone has broken into the NICU,” Kade said as he and the nurse both began checking various machines. Kade picked up the receiver of a phone unit connected to the wall and spoke into it, shoving one finger into his other ear to block out the alarm.

  When he hung up, he issued a few terse commands to the nurse. I didn’t understand what he was telling her to do, but I knew it couldn’t be good. She hustled across the room to the door and began inputting a series of codes into the keypad by the lock.

  Kade’s eyes blazed a violent shade of orange-gold as he turned to speak to me again. “And whoever it is, he’s headed straight this direction.”

  Chapter 7

  THE NURSE AND I EACH backed up, so we stood directly in front of the new baby’s incubator, one on each side. I didn’t know what kind of shifter the nurse was, but she was growling deep in her throat, and sharp claws had popped out of her fingertips. I was glad to have her on our side.

  A hundred different thoughts ran through my mind, but they all came down to the single realization that all of this was directed against the lamia infant.

  The attack on Marta hadn’t been coincidental.

  Someone—some shifter, I corrected myself silently—wanted the lamia infants destroyed before they were even born, and was willing to kill innocent, traumatized human mothers to do it.

  And they thought the lamias were monsters.

  A calm voice came over the loudspeaker, calling a “Code Silver” and a “Code Brown,” and directing all patients, staff, and visitors to “shelter in place.” I didn’t know what the color codes meant, but I knew a shifter hospital had to have something in place for shifter emergencies, and I was guessing this counted.

  Almost as soon as the announcement ended, someone, or something, began slamming against the locked door into the Contact Isolation NICU room. Kade reached to one side and grabbed what looked like a heavy piece of equipment, and for a moment, it looked as if he planned to use it to block the doorway. Then he frowned, shook his head, and moved it away, instead. “Too expensive,” I heard him mutter.

  I was so busy watching him decide what to do, and so distracted by the shuddering of the door, that I was taken utterly by surprise when the ceiling panels above me collapsed and two animals dropped down, almost directly on top of me.

  I didn’t even have time to be thankful for Eduardo’s lessons, because I was too busy putting them into action. Before the creatures, both of them large and furry and growling, had time to land, I was already out from under them. The more strategic move would have been to get out into the open center of the room, where I would have space to maneuver. My instinct, though, was to protect the child, so I found myself shoving the incubator up against the back wall and flattening myself against it.

  The nurse didn’t fare as well, at least not immediately—one of the creatures had managed to knock her to the ground, and she was alternately lashing out at it with her clawed hands and attempting to protect herself from its teeth and claws. I didn’t have time to help her, though, as the other animal—a wolf, I could see now—had hit the floor on all four feet and gained its balance quickly and was now circling to try to get around me.

  From his post in front of the single entrance into the room, Kade had time to spare one look for me before the door splintered around the lock in strips of some man-made material, and the wall around the doorframe broke into chunks. The entire door, frame and all, crashed inward under the weight of what looked like a Kodiak bear.

  Wolves and bears.

  Holy hell.

  Kade had told me that the werewolves were elitist assholes, but he hadn’t mentioned anything about were-bears at all.

  But the bear wasn’t my problem at the moment. The wolves were.

  I inhaled deeply once and concentrated on the feeling I’d had during practice with Eduardo when I shifted instantly, but focused on controlling the form of my shift, too. In that brief instant, everything I knew about shifting flashed through my mind in something like panic.

  Most shifters have some degree of control over their shifts—they can shift completely from human to animal, or partially, as the nurse had by popping her claws. With enough practice, Kade had told me, some shifters could control the size of their animal forms up to roughly their human sizes for the smaller animals (imagine a 180-pound coyote for a moment), and down to their human size for the large ones (that same 180 pounds doesn’t seem quite as intimidating if it’s a Kodiak).

  As far as we knew, though, lamias were the only shifters who could gain total control over both form and size. I could turn into any kind of snake I wanted to be, and according to shifter legend, I could turn into something giant.

  I had come close, once, when I was fighting against this infant’s grandmother.

  Now I was fighting for the baby’s life.

  I needed to be as big as the biggest bear on the planet.

  Or bigger.

  And I needed to get that way fast.

  Here in the hospital, I was far away from what Kade called “Earth magic”—the effervescent force I had drawn on out by the river both when I shifted instantly and when I shifted into that larger form.

  It didn’t matter. I had to try to make it work, anyway.

  On the exhale, I imagined tugging at the air around me to get at that space behind the everyday world where the Earth magic hovered. If the spaces near the Paluxy River were thin spots where the magic seeped into our world from wherever it usually stayed, then there was a way to get to the magic from anywhere.

  I simply needed to tear a hole in the fabric of reality.

  Everything around me seemed to switch into slow motion.

  The wolf in front of me crouched down, preparing to pounce. The giant bear, having moved inside the door and reared up, raised its paw to swipe at Kade. The other werewolf’s jaws stretched wide as it lunged toward the nurse’s throat.

  I had enough time to take all this in before everything changed into a snake’s vision of shades of black and white and gray. As usual, my eyes had shifted first.

&n
bsp; In an ordinary shift, my hearing would change next, sounds muffling as I moved to my serpentine shape.

  But this was no ordinary shift.

  I felt it when that fabric of reality gave way, heard it as a sound so deep inside me that my shifting bones rattled with it, a ripping that seemed to come from all around and within me, so that my very cells seemed to give way with it.

  The blast that followed poured glittering light into the world, like a thousand exploding disco-balls filled with glass shards of pure power, all slicing into me.

  I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound came out—or if it did, I couldn’t hear it over the deafening roar of my own shift. I couldn’t see anything other than the blinding glow of white-hot power, either, and for a long moment, I wasn’t aware of anything other than pure, jagged pain throughout every part of me in an eternal second that I was sure would never end.

  As the noise and light faded away, I realized that no one else had experienced it.

  But from the way everyone had frozen, staring at me, they all realized that I had shifted.

  I sat with my lower half coiled into a circle on the floor, my upper half reared up, as if I had been preparing to strike, even mid-shift.

  And from how small they all looked, I was every bit as big as I had hoped to be.

  Chapter 8

  KADE RECOVERED HIS wits first, reaching out to one side to grab that large piece of medical equipment he had deemed too expensive to risk only moments ago, and slinging it with all his shifter might into the Kodiak’s stomach. The bear whoofed out air as it bent double and Kade took that opportunity to draw the machine back and ram it into the bear’s head. Even with my diminished serpentine sense of hearing, there was a noticeable sound of crunching glass and screeching metal, along with the scraping vibrations running through the ground and air and into my skin.

  I swayed once as I turned my head to survey the room completely. The werewolf that had been preparing to pounce on me was moving backward, and the nurse had managed to slide away from the other one as it stared at me.

  Uncoiling one lower loop, I skimmed the top part of my body over the closest wolf and twirled myself around him. I could feel my fangs preparing to pump poison, even as the muscles of my body tightened around the wolf’s body. Apparently I had managed to re-create the battle form I had used before, a hybrid snake that was both venomous viper and constrictor. The wolf yelped once before I squeezed hard enough to cut off his breath.

  I stopped for an instant to consider what I should do. If I killed him, I would have yet another death on my conscience. My parents had worked hard to raise me with human ethics and morals, and my training as a children’s counselor had only amplified that training.

  Then I glanced down and saw the nurse, whose name I hadn’t ever even asked, struggling to stand up next to the incubator. Her hand slapped once against the side, then slid down, leaving a bloody handprint behind. The werewolf must have slashed her when I wasn’t looking. The copper smell of blood—that scent that did taste like food on my tongue—wafted up to me.

  Without a second thought, I contracted sharply around the wolf, snapping its spine. Then I dropped it on the floor and whipped my tail out to knock the other wolf off its feet. The nurse, only a few feet away, froze in her attempt to stand, her eyes wide and frightened.

  Deliberately, I turned my face away from her, telling her as clearly as I could that I would not hurt her. I felt, more than heard, as she continued to pull herself to her feet to check on the infant.

  The wolf, too, was attempting to scrabble to his feet. His paws skidded a little on the white tile floor, and I reveled for a moment in how easily my scales slipped along to bring me closer. Really, though, it was dropping my upper half down next to him that underscored exactly how huge I had grown in this shift. My head alone was almost as big as the wolf.

  When I opened my mouth and unhinged my jaws, the werewolf peed itself.

  With one fang, I pierced him through the neck as he turned to run. I didn’t even bother to pump out additional venom. The fang itself almost beheaded the wolf, and he was dead by the time I withdrew it.

  The nurse was standing and had managed to wrap one arm in a bandage before beginning to check the machinery attached to the baby, so I assumed she was doing well enough for the moment.

  My view of Kade, however, was obscured by the bear, who had my mongoose-shifter backed into a corner. I didn’t think he had had time to shift—and even if he had, I knew that his ability to shift into larger forms was limited, so he was almost certainly, at best, a human-sized half-mongoose, or a mongoose-sized mongoose, either one with shifter strength that far outstripped an average human, but nothing compared to a giant bear-shifter.

  As I reared up higher, rising to balance on the last third of my body, I got a better look around the bear. Kade had managed to barricade himself behind several other medical machines and had some sort of machine on a pole that he was swinging in an arc in front of himself—either to actually attempt to hit the bear or to at least keep the bear from reaching in and swiping at him. Some kind of tubing slung around from it and slapped the bear across the nose, causing it to jerk back a little.

  Kade redoubled his grip and swung the machine like a baseball bat, just as I recognized it for what it was: a breast-pump. This time, he managed to whack the bear across the snout with the boxy machine end of the pump, and the Kodiak took several steps backward.

  I used the bear’s distraction to whip my tail around its feet and tug backward. I was hoping to knock it over completely, but it managed to land on its front paws so that I held its back paws up in a sort of wheelbarrow pose. Still, I was able to drag it backward several feet as it scrabbled against the tile and fought its way loose of my constricting coils, and the scuffle gave Kade a chance to dart out of the corner and around to my side.

  That left us facing one really pissed-off Kodiak-shifter, though. I was bigger than it was, but I hadn’t been training to fight very long. Apparently, the bear had. It circled around us in a way that I recognized as being part of my own Shield training.

  Glancing back at the nurse, I saw that she had the baby out of the incubator, swaddled in a blanket, and tucked inside her own shirt. I had no idea how safe it really was for the baby to be out of its bassinet—Kade had told me I couldn’t even hold her yet—but getting her out of the room was a definite priority. With a nod at me, the nurse began sliding along the wall, headed in the general direction of the demolished door. Kade, catching the direction of my stare, moved around behind me in order to guard the nurse’s retreat.

  I swung my head back around to face the bear, determined to divert its attention from the nurse’s escape. In my momentary distraction, though, it had moved closer, and now it lunged out and wrapped its heavy arms around my torso in a literal bear-hug. His enormous claws dug into my back, and pain shot up along the sides of my spine. With a roar, the bear ripped his front paws away from me, taking chunks of scales and flesh with them.

  Ignore the pain. Protect the child. Ignore the pain. Protect the child.

  The mantra pounded through my mind in time to the beat of my pulse. Flicking my tongue out, I could taste my own blood as the molecules flowed across the Jacobson’s organ in my mouth.

  I threw myself into attacking the bear-shifter, whipping my tail around in counterpoint to the upper half of my body. Blood droplets flung off me as I slung myself from side to side, hitting him with all the force I could muster.

  He redoubled his own attack, clawing at me every chance he got, growling and roaring so loudly that the machinery around the room shook with it. He crashed into first one medical device, and then another, using his paws to rip at my thrashing body until he once again hooked his front claws deep into me and drew his back feet up to kick at me, his back claws digging into the front of my body.

  While part of my brain focused on ignoring the pain, another part clicked through tactics, analyzing the situation the way Eduardo had been teac
hing me to. The bear had picked his attack spot fairly well—high up enough on my body that I couldn’t get a good striking angle with my head. Clearly he knew I had venomous capabilities. But he had missed, or maybe had no way to know, that I could also function as a constrictor.

  My skin hung off me in long, tattered, bloody strips, but the nurse was almost to the door with the baby, Kade not far behind. I had to give them time and space to get out safely, so I looped and twisted, crawling the bottom half of my body up the rest of me toward the spot where the bear hung on tightly, beating at me as if he hoped to claw me in two.

  For all I knew, he did.

  I wasn’t going to give him that chance.

  My lower body might not be quite as strong as my upper and middle portions, but it wasn’t that much weaker.

  While the bear focused on clawing, I coiled around and around without ever touching him, until I lay on the ground in loops, like a discarded rope.

  Then, once I was in place, I waited for Kade and the nurse to get out of the room. Kade went first, leaning out to check for possible attackers, still brandishing the breast-pump on its wheeled stand. The part of me that was cataloging details knew I ‘d find that funny later.

  If I had a later.

  I was beginning to get dizzy from pain, and possibly blood-loss.

  The nurse followed him, stepping carefully over the rubble surrounding the door, clutching the bundle under her shirt to her chest.

  As soon as I could no longer see them, I checked for the earth magic. I could still feel it, seeping through the tear I had created in reality. My tongue flickering out of my mouth, I drew in a deep breath and felt the glimmering specks flashing against the vomeronasal organ in the roof of my mouth, sparkling with power.

  Then I tightened my body all at once, pulling the coils tight around the bear swiftly, even as I focused on shifting. The combined power of my serpent body constricting around him and shifting to the smaller human form had the effect I had hoped for: it practically snapped him in half.