Kade bundled me into his truck, and I spent the drive to the hospital staring blindly out the window, remembering every moment I had spent with Serena since she had been born too early to a mother who didn’t want her.
How could I have thought that I might be regretting deciding to take her in?
I hadn’t even known how much she mattered to me until someone tried to take her away.
Tried to.
I hung on to those words, determined to make sure I got her back.
I didn’t even realize I had tears rolling down my face until we were out of the truck and walking into the NICU, where Dr. Jimson met us at the door.
KADE HAD BEEN TALKING on his phone as he walked in behind me, and now came up and put his hand on the small of my back. “I called your parents to let them know what’s happened,” he said.
I nodded numbly, too shell-shocked to even speak.
“Some of the Shields are here helping.” Dr. Jimson gestured around the space that had held Serena’s terrarium and bassinet.
“What happened?” I finally managed to force out from between my frozen lips.
“Excuse me, doctor, but I think you’re needed over there.” The sound of my Shield mentor’s voice distracting the distraught neonatal doctor relieved me more than I had realized it would.
I spun around to find him standing slightly behind me and threw my arms around him. “Eduardo.” After a single, tight squeeze, I stepped back and regained control. “Tell me what we know so far.”
I never would’ve admitted this to anyone else, but the fact that Eduardo looked like a Hispanic version of Clint Eastwood always made me feel like it must make him a better officer. Like somehow Eastwood’s film persona had been magically transported to Ed’s daily life. Luckily, he really was very good at what he did, so I wasn’t that far off.
“It looks like someone got in with a hospital ID. They waited until shift change and came in as if they were taking over. Still tracking down what happened, exactly, but it looks like the on-duty nurse called in sick and this person posed as a replacement for her.”
“Aren’t all the nurses supposed to be vetted before they’re allowed to care for Serena?”
“Yes, but the nurse who was ending her shift really can’t be held responsible for not knowing everyone’s status at any given moment.”
“So whoever it was simply left with the baby?” Kade leaned in to interject. Eduardo opened his hands, palms up, and gave an eloquent shrug—one that managed to convey the idea that if he had been in charge, none of this would’ve happened.
“So what’s been done to find her?” I asked.
“Everything we can think of. You know how this works. We are tracking down every lead and I promise you we will not stop looking until we have found her.”
Although I hadn’t participated in any kidnapping investigations since I’d started as a Shield, I knew the basics. I realized it really would be better if I stayed out of the way during the investigation. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to.
“Take her home?” Kade asked Eduardo. “Is that the best thing we can do?”
I held Eduardo’s gaze briefly with my own. “I want to make sure that you let us know who did this,” I said.
“The Council will take care of him—or them.” Eduardo’s reminder made me want to turn on him and demand to know how he was going to let me punish whoever had tried to take my child away from me.
I needn’t have bothered. He was waiting for me to make eye contact again, and when I did, he gave a solemn nod.
Okay. I was going to have my chance. Eduardo would make sure of it.
If only they could find him now.
With that, I was finally ready to go home and wait.
I couldn’t get myself to leave though. Instead, I stood in the middle of that room as people swirled around me, calling out information that I couldn’t even begin to make sense of, not in this state.
As I stood watching all of the people move around me, gearing up to go find one tiny lost lamia, I flashed inexplicably back to my client telling me, “I may be paranoid, but that doesn’t mean they’re not all out to get me.”
“It’s the werewolves,” I announced. Eduardo tilted his head and gave me a hard look.
“Werewolves?” he asked.
I nodded, and Kade stepped up to fill the inarticulate void I was leaving as I struggled to deal with the fact that my foster daughter was missing.
“They attacked us this morning,” Kade said. “I think she’s right. I think it was a distraction from this, though initially we thought it was... something else.” He quickly edited to keep out any mention of Shadow and Jeremiah. That wasn’t going to do, however. I was going to have to admit everything.
Finally, Kade took me by the hand and led me to a chair. As I took a seat, that chair seemed more real than anything else in the room. It was the kind of reclining rocker that was scattered throughout the various rooms in the NICU, designed for women to nurse infants.
The leather on it was a faded robin’s-egg blue, worn and a little cracked along the folds. The armrests had been touched so often that the shiny varnish had worn down to bare wood in some places and was crackling and flaking away in others.
I was still examining it carefully when my father walked in. Enough of the staff had seen him around to mostly ignore him. What they couldn’t ignore, however, was the fact that Shane-the-grad-student-Wills had walked in behind him, looking around with great interest at the room—and paying careful attention, I noted, to the terrarium where Serena had spent her time in her serpent form.
At the sight of Shane, I leaped up and scurried over to them.
“Dad,” I said disapprovingly, “you cannot bring him here.”
My father shrugged and said, “He already knows all about it.”
“That doesn’t mean he has to be invited to every family crisis,” I hissed at him, my consonants going distinctly sibilant.
“Serena needs our help. Shane has information.”
I shook my head and glanced around for Kade to moral support, but once again, he had disappeared.
My father reached out and grabbed me by the shoulders. “Lindi. Listen to us. Shane got a call this morning from someone he didn’t know, but he thinks they were trying to ask questions that would help them take care of someone like Serena.”
“Or, now that I know she’s missing, Serena herself,” Shane said.
“How would they even know to find you?” Kade said, reappearing by my side—apparently, he’d been talking to Eduardo, who now stood beside him.
“I have a page on the University website.”
“What did they say to you?” I asked.
“And how did you know they were talking about Serena?” Kade said.
“I didn’t at first,” Shane replied. “Some guy called early this morning asking questions about how to care for an unusual snake species—what to do if they didn’t know what she ate or how much to feed her or what kind of living conditions she needed. Honestly, it was the use of the pronoun she that clued me. Then some of the details that they gave seemed odd, like they couldn’t tell me if it was a viper or a constrictor and wouldn’t say where it had come from. And then finally one of them called it ‘the baby.’ After what I saw this weekend, I knew it had to be either Serena or another child like her.”