I had no way of knowing where or when or how they’d disappeared—or how to get them back.
This is what they intended all along. Get the babies and take them through that window between worlds.
But how had they known that window had existed at all?
They’ve been studying me.
The answer came to me with a certainty as absolute as the knowledge that they’d somehow planned to take the baby through a window before I realized that the holes in this world served as windows to other worlds.
Again, rage welled up in me, but this time I tamped it down.
Frank wasn’t with them.
I considered the implications of that fact.
No, Frank might not have been the one who took the new lamia infant. But he was definitely spearheading the group.
He’s the one I need to take down.
As I stared at the tear in reality that I’d created, Kade’s voice came crackling through the radio in Eduardo’s hand. “Ed, is Lindi nearby?”
“Yes,” Eduardo said. “One of the wolves took the juvenile lamia through an Earth-magic spot.”
Kade cursed. “Let me talk to her.”
Eduardo handed me the radio. “I’m here, Kade.”
“We have another issue,” Kade said. “I’m taking Evangeline into surgery, and I’m worried the other two babies aren’t going to make it.”
“But she was okay just a minute ago,” Shane burst out.
“Things can turn fast in a situation like that,” Kelly murmured, drawing Shane away from the conversation.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked into the walkie-talkie.
Kade paused, and I could imagine him blinking at me a couple of times as he worked through the possibilities of what he was about to say. “Is there anything you can do with Earth magic to help them?”
Pulling my mind back from the abduction wasn’t easy. All I wanted to do was blast a new hole in reality right back to where the werewolf had taken the lamia.
The baby needs a name. I can’t keep calling it ‘the lamia infant.’
I didn’t have time for naming children now, though. I needed to send all of my gathered energy to help Evangeline and her other two babies.
“I guess I can try,” I said.
We would go after the other baby once I knew how.
For now, I needed to concentrate on pulling mother and babies through what had apparently become their difficult birth.
Guess I’m going to have to try to continue saving lamia babies, after all.
Chapter 30
“I DON’T KNOW IF I CAN do anything that will actually help.” I rubbed the heel of my hand over my face. “Everything I have ever done that uses magic has been in the middle of a fight. I know how to use this power offensively, in a fight. I don’t know if I will be able to use it to help the children. I don’t know if I can use the power to heal.”
“We’ve given Evangeline steroids to help develop the babies’ human lungs. Try to reinforce that with the magic, if you can,” Kade suggested. “The more they can develop before they’re born, the better.”
In the other hallway—the one I had just left in my fruitless circle around the hospital—the obstetrician was preparing to perform surgery on Evangeline. And I knew Evangeline was scared, that she had entered into this pregnancy against her will, that part of her probably hoped the babies would die.
I couldn’t hope the same.
And that meant that in the end, I would do everything I could to save them.
“Okay. I don’t want to draw on any new spots—I don’t want to create a new hole in the world. And if I can help it, I don’t want to make this one any bigger. So I am going to stand right here and do what I can with the power that is already leaking through.”
“I think that’s a good plan.” Kade’s voice came through in a burst of static.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, attempting to center myself in the power that was already here.
I could feel it sliding across my skin, the barest whisper of a crackling spark. Whatever it was I had seen earlier—that window between places—was gone. I didn’t need to worry about it right now.
That’s what I told myself, anyway.
I pushed the thoughts about it to the back of my mind. Right now, I needed to focus on sending healing power to Evangeline and the infant lamias.
I began coiling that sparkling energy back into the center myself, as if it were the snake and I were just a container.
I had always felt the energy as something unusual, something outside myself, but now I felt it also as something other than just a tool to be wielded. I needed to incorporate it fully into myself and send it out again—not as a weapon this time, but as a life force.
This will never work, some part of me whispered.
I heard others coming in, felt it as Kelly pointed them to various places in the room. I didn’t know the strategy behind her placement of everyone, but when I opened my eyes to peek, I saw she had put people in a semicircle behind me, as if they stood there to add power to my own—including Shane, Eduardo, Janice and her team, and Daria, the nurse who’d looked after me during my recovery following my last battle in this room.
I don’t know if adding their strength to mine worked in any real way, or if their presence simply bolstered my self-confidence. Either way, I felt the power that coiled down inside me settle in, take root, and begin to twine its way through my entire body, becoming part of me, one with me.
Though my eyes were closed, I could see the glow of magic spreading through the room.
Behind me, I heard Daria gasp—then several others. The sound startled me enough that I blinked several times. When I realized what had shocked them, my eyes stayed open.
That window into another place had opened again. This time, it was a different place—at least for a few seconds. I saw through it and out across a vast, empty landscape of sand and rock and nothing else.
“Almost there,” I whispered. “I’ll need to be able find that woman again later.”
“Are you positive you can return to what you saw?” Kelly asked.
“I’m sure of it. I know I can get back to it if I simply concentrate.” I should probably have focused on spooling in more magic, but every instinct I had told me that finding that woman again would lead to stronger magic.
I followed my intuition and pushed against the window.
It shimmered again.
I stared out across an ocean sunset.
The image blurred and shimmered and this time it was a jungle scene, complete with a wildcat draped across the limb of the tree, its tail swinging lazily as it watched me. I couldn’t tell if the intelligence in its eyes meant it was shifter or if it was simply a big cat.
Another shimmer, and for an instant, I saw a city street busy with cars—slightly different in design from our own—flashing by on the streets.
Shimmer.
And we were back on that ruined cityscape. The woman I had seen earlier now knelt in front of the window as I saw it, but she had fallen backward in some kind of trance. Four men grabbed her and held her, kept her from landing on the broken concrete behind her.
Her back arched convulsively, and then she sat up straight, her arms still flung out to the sides, her eyes blazing a white light that matched the sparkles I had seen the first time I had encountered one of these tears in reality.