The elevator dinged and the three of us piled on, even as Shane answered, “He’s staying in the delivery room with Evangeline.”
I nodded once. “Any news?” I asked the guard.
He shook his head. “Nothing so far.”
I realized when we hit the bottom floor that I didn’t even know where to go. However, they had been headed toward the NICU, so I figured that was my best bet.
When I got there, it had been shut down. The nurses were turning away the regular human mothers, as well as the shifter mothers with babies who weren’t lamias.
Luckily, Kelly, the nurse who’d cared for Serena, was working the desk. She waved me through, along with the security guard. “Go ahead and scrub in, but do it fast,” she said.
She glanced behind her nervously, almost as if expecting someone to come along and stop us from going in. Then she followed us down the hallway, giving us a quick update as we went.
“The nurse was bringing the new baby down to the NICU—the back way, where none of the parents or patients would see them—all we know for sure is that she got on the elevator and it stopped once on the third floor. When it got down to the first floor, she’d been knocked out and the incubator was empty.”
I skidded to a halt in the middle of the hallway. “Did the abductors have enough time to get out of the hospital?”
Kelly shook her head. “I have no idea. Whatever they did to the nurse, it was fast. The elevator wasn’t even stopped on that floor long enough to start beeping. It was planned out pretty slick.”
The security guard stayed long enough to hear this, then swerved off into some other part of the NICU—someplace I’d never been.
“I can show you the path they were going to take,” Kelly said, but she glanced around nervously as she made the offer.
With the absolute certainty that the new lamia baby had been taken, I felt a cold anger wash over and through me.
“No, I don’t want you to get in trouble,” I said. “They’re long gone from that route, anyway.” I stood still and felt a certainty come into me along with that cold rage.
“I need to go back to Room Five,” I said—back to the room where Serena had stayed until so recently.
Back to the room where I had defeated the shifters who had come in to destroy us, where I had ripped a hole in the fabric of reality.
Back to the room that held more power than any other place in the hospital.
It pulled at me, its power drawing me to it like a magnet.
Although I’ve never told anyone, I still felt that energy every time I walked into the hospital. And I knew I could somehow use it to get this baby back.
As I entered the room, the magical spot threw out glittering sparks, as if in welcome. I hadn’t always been able to recognize these spots, these thin places in the world that leaked magical energy. Not until Kade and Eduardo had taught me to see them. But now that I could, I realized that I had some sort of mystical, metaphysical, magical connection to them.
As I had said just that morning—God, had it really been so recently?— I was coming to the conclusion that it was my responsibility to figure out what these were, why they were here, what kind of problems they might cause or maybe even solve.
But in any case, somehow, I knew they were mine to deal with.
And right now, it was mine to use.
Like Janice, I was certain the wolves were the ones who had come to take the baby. Underneath that icy calm that I had wrapped around me, some part of me was terrified that they would kill the infant lamia before we could save it.
That just means I have to work faster.
But whatever was going to happen next, it had to have three parts: Find the wolves. Get the baby back. Put the wolves down for good.
I turned to Kelly. “Janice said to leave a message with the hospital operator if there was an emergency. See if maybe we can get her on the phone—if the operator can route us through to her? I want to talk to her before I start this.”
She nodded and moved across the room to the landline NICU phone. As we waited, I circled that magical rift in reality.
“Is there something significant about that spot?” Shane asked.
I’d forgotten he couldn’t see it, probably couldn’t sense anything about it at all. “It’s kind of a magical hotspot. I’m hoping I can use it to help find where they took the baby.”
“I’ve got Janice,” Kelly said, holding out the phone.
I took it from her to give Janice a quick update on the situation, only to discover she already knew what was going on.
“I’m going to see if I can pull on some of the Earth magic energy and learn more,” I said. “I don’t know if it’ll work, but it ... feels right.”
“I trust your instincts,” Janice said. “If they got out of the hospital with the infant, I’ll start coordinating a search.”
“I’m sure it was the wolves.” My words came out through clenched teeth.
“I am, too. But they’ll hide it. So you need to be prepared to do whatever’s necessary to find them.”
I hung up, but her words stayed with me, stoking the anger inside me.
I let it build until I could draw on it, use it. Then I moved back to stand directly in front of the magical spot.
As the rage poured through me, I pulled on that power I carried within. When that wasn’t enough, I reached outside myself to find the source of the energy, drawing it through me and around me until I was surrounded by a sparkling, shimmering light.
Tiny sparkles of energy danced through the power I pulled on. I drilled into my body and down into the center of myself, where I coiled it into a tight circle, wrapping around and around like a ball of yarn until it was dense and heavy.
It was like unstitching reality to move it into me.
The more I drew on it, the more the space in front of me unraveled. In some distant part of my mind, I knew I didn’t really want to do this. But by then it was too late.
That hole in the world just kept getting wider.
When I had built up enough of the energy in me, I began to use it as if I were knitting a new reality from inside myself. It powered my shift as I pulled myself up to my full human height and let the change overtake me.
Usually, my vision is the first thing to change, going gray. This time, however, I controlled the shift more carefully—I wanted to terrify the wolves and their allies with my sheer presence.
And then I want to rip them apart.
I started with my legs. They melded together in a way that usually made me drop to the floor. But this time, I added size even as the skin on my thighs roughened into scales and my feet melded together into a single tail.
I had enough space, enough growth, to coil in on myself and not lose any of my height.
The more magic I pulled into myself, the more I grew.
I let the shift continue to rise above my belly button. And then I allowed the rest of my skin turned to scales—the bright blues and greens of a jungle snake, contrasting with my human hair and eyes.
I was still me, but I was a version of me that no one had ever seen before. I was the color of jewels in sunlight, the size of a tree, and I carried the power of the world in the center of myself.
As I turned to go find the wolves, I caught a glimpse of the hole in the world I’d made.
And for the first time, I saw through it into another place.