She threw her arm forward, pointing toward us, her mouth moving as she spoke, but I couldn’t hear a word she said.
A bright pink bolt of lightning-like power shot out of her fingertip and through the window between our worlds.
When the power that she had flung from that hand hit me, I found myself beginning to shift against my will, against my volition.
My vision changed as the world around me went gray, everything moving to black and white as usual.
I rushed to try to strip off my clothing before my legs changed, merging in that split second of terror as I moved from many-limbed to serpentine. I dropped to the ground and allowed my clothes to slide away from me.
Whatever this was, it wasn’t natural, and I wasn’t okay with it.
I pushed back against the power, drawing on what I had already stored inside me to attempt to control the shift, to control how I changed. And in that tug-of-war between the other woman’s power and my own, I felt reality tear again, the white light changing to the bright, multicolored sparkles I’d seen in the last battle against the werewolves.
Dammit.
I needed to focus on the babies, on Evangeline, on the infants being born right now.
I don’t have time for this shit.
I rose up again, taller than I had been, even with the serpentine tail, having managed to maintain my human torso.
The entire process had only taken a few seconds, despite the way time stretched out for me when I shifted.
Everyone still stood at a semicircle around me, watching that window between worlds.
It shimmered again, but in a different way. A form—humanoid, shadowy, and growing larger—seemed to move toward us from somewhere across the distant reaches of reality itself. It reminded me of the receding form of the abductor shortly before.
Ignore it.
I coiled more power into myself, preparing to send it to Evangeline, but also not wanting to give up the potential tactical advantage of that power in case whatever was coming toward us posed a danger.
As the shape grew closer, I realized it wasn’t simply humanoid—it was human. And male. The man dove through the window headfirst. Everyone around me gasped, and I realized that the other people in the room hadn’t been able to see him moving toward us. Not as I had.
He fell to the ground just in front of me, then scrambled to his feet, looking me up and down, then around frantically as if attempting to find something, anything to hang on to.
For the first time, I heard what seemed like sound coming through the world-holes.
A whisper.
A promise, it said. No matter where you go, no matter where you travel, my love travels with you.
I shook my head, uncertain of what that meant.
Then the window slammed closed, and the power that had been pouring into me from the other side dropped away.
My body tried to snap back into its human form, painfully, and it was all I could do to keep from dropping to the ground in agony again.
But I maintained control over my form.
The man who’d come through the window—though I guess we ought to call it a door now, some inner voice suggested—froze in place, staring at me.
“Ah, hell,” he said in a thick Texas accent. “I don’t think I’m where I’m supposed to be.”
When no one responded to him, his eyes narrowed, and his jaw tightened as he glanced around at the other inhabitants of the room. “I’ve got just one question for y’all.” He crossed his arms and settled back on his heels.
“Are any of y’all werewolves?”
Chapter 31
“MOVE OUT OF THE WAY,” I ordered the newcomer. “We’ll talk in a minute.”
He raised his eyebrows at my tone but sauntered toward the side of the semicircle we had created—almost as if he was used to taking orders.
Eduardo and I exchanged nods, and the were-coyote moved around to meet him and make sure he didn’t cause any problems.
I pushed away all thought of window-travelers, focusing instead on my original task—sending power and strength to Evangeline and the babies still waiting to be born in their human forms.
I gathered the power that I had coiled and stored inside me. After scooping it up, I imagined separating it into three separate balls of energy.
Then, I spooled it out, sending it as threads up through the hospital, all the force and strength and life energy that had been held inside me, stolen from the hotspots in the earth—all of it I sent to Evangeline and the babies.
And then I let it move from me into the three of them a little at a time, just enough to keep from overwhelming them all at once.
Live, I told them.
Grow.
Develop.
I pictured the babies doing just that—growing, developing.
Becoming.
Love.
By the end, that was all I have left to send—love.
And when I’d sent that out, as well, I crumpled to the ground, every ounce of magical energy drained out of me and given so that the next generation of lamias might live.
WHEN I WOKE, I’D BEEN placed in a hospital bed myself. I blinked, glancing around the room to see what monitors I might have been connected to.
None.
So perhaps I wasn’t the patient after all.
I sat up and rubbed my hand across my eyes. From beside my bedside, Daria glanced up from her magazine.
“Oh good,” she said. “I’m glad you’re awake. We thought you might be able to use some rest.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“You passed out. Probably simply exhaustion, but we wanted to make sure, so we kept you here for a while. We ran some IV fluids through you, and Dr. Nevala said not to let you go until he’d had a chance to take a look at you.” She glanced at her watch. “His shift should be ending soon.”
“I’m okay now,” I said, sitting up and rubbing my eyes with a yawn, but eager to learn what I’d missed. “What happened to the babies?”
Several expressions passed across Daria’s face in rapid succession. “The one is still gone—no one has figured out where the shifters might have taken it. The other two were born healthy and happy, though.”
At that moment, Kade came in with Janice.
“You ready to get out of here?” he asked.
“I feel like I ought to be searching for the baby,” I said.
Janice shook her head. “We have people out looking already.”
“But he took the infant through that Earth-magic portal, or whatever it is.”
“Yes,” Janice said. “And we’ve got those shifters—other than you—who are the most adept at using the Earth magic working on figuring out what, exactly happened.”
“What about the wolves who threatened us?”
“Your new jaguar friend and his crew are assisting in guard duty for those who need it.”
“And spy duty against the wolves,” Kade added. “We sent Jeremiah and Shadow home to rest, too. We’ll all be needed tomorrow.”
“Your herpetologist friend and several nurses are with the infants. Eduardo’s set guards down there and has our local Shields on alert,” Janice said. “You can join them tomorrow.”
“Where’s that guy who came through the portal to our side?”
“Eduardo’s taking him back to his place,” Janice said.