In Someone Else's Skin, Margo Collins [best books to read for women .TXT] 📗

My instantaneous calculations were based as much on emotion as on logic. Still, I didn’t have time to second-guess myself. My magic flared into life and the guard crumpled to his knees with an inarticulate noise, dropping his own shock-stick on the way down.

Now that both guards were under control, I shifted my upper half back to my human form. I handed the shock-sticks to Shane and Coit. “Keep that one under control,” I ordered, pointing to the one Coit had helped subdue. I turned to Grant. “Bring that one.”

We left them like that, Shane threatening to poke the guard with a shock-stick and retraced our steps down the hallway. Grant followed me, one claw shoved through the guard’s uniform. As the snake-shifter could neither stand and walk nor shift and slither, the werewolf dragged him along the ground.

When we got to the first empty cell that had not had its hinges removed, I gestured toward it. “In there.”

“Why imprison this one?” Grant asked. His words came out mangled by his shifted teeth, but they were still recognizable.

I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to reveal my thinking to someone who had been my enemy less than two hours earlier. But Grant was currently my ally, so I answered with a shrug, “He is too hurt to walk and I’m not sure he’d be willing to shift to talk to us.”

Grant nodded and I focused on the lock mechanism, pushing my power at it until it sparked and melted, and the door would no longer open.

“Now,” I said, “Let’s go get my babies back.”

Chapter 9

Back at the elevator, Shane and Coit stood over the other guard, each with one foot on the lamia male like big-game hunters in a photo.

Only this big game looked half human and was still alive.

“We know where the babies are,” Shane announced proudly, waving his shock-stick around. The lamia male on the ground beneath his shoe flinched. Maybe because they’d used the sticks to get the information. Either that, or the guy just knew how awful the weapons really were.

I gestured toward the lamia. “He told you?”

“Yep,” Coit said. “Directions and all.”

“Bring him with us. We may need him.” Everything in my training, in all the things my parents had taught me, told me it was wrong to take a guard as a hostage. It was wrong to hurt another creature to force it to give me what I wanted.

But I didn’t care. I needed to get to the babies. “Lead on.”

Shane and Coit hauled the guardsman to his feet and we all piled into the elevator. Inside, the guard pushed several buttons labeled with unfamiliar symbols in a particular pattern.

As much as I hated to waste time fighting when we could be headed home with the babies, we had lucked out having the guards show when they did—the inability to read the written form of whatever those buttons said could have been a big problem.

I was ready to get back home where I understood how things work, even if life there was more dangerous than it had ever been before.

Even if there were werewolves coming after me.

Remembering that sent a shiver through me. I had no idea what was going on there. I’d left Kade and Serena behind, and for all I knew, they were dead now.

No. I pushed the thought back down. If I let myself think that, it would cripple me. I needed to believe that Kade had gotten Serena home safe, and that the others helping us—Shadow and Jeremiah, Bron and Tomas—managed to help save the other lamia baby, too.

I glanced at Grant out of the corner of my eye. At least I had him to give me information about what to expect when we got back home.

God, I hope we get back home.

But right now, I needed to make sure we got out of this building alive and with the babies.

“How many guards are in the building?” I asked our guard-turned-captive.

He threw a worried glance my direction. “Maybe twenty total.”

“How many of them are likely to use magic against us?”

This time, the look he gave me was startled, confused. “Magic?”

“Like the power I used against you?”

He shook his head. “Only the queen’s line has that kind of ability.”

Now I was the one with the confused expression. “The queen’s line?”

“Amalya and her relatives.”

“Okay, then. Are any of her relatives guards?”

This time the guard laughed aloud but clamped down on it so that it sounded more like a bark of surprise. “All the guards are male,” he said, as if that explained everything.

“Are you telling us that only the Queen’s female relatives can use magic like Lindi does?” Shane waved a hand toward me in a circle, as if encompassing everything about me that allowed me to do magic.

“Of course. None of the queen’s clan do menial work. They are treasured. It is our duty to attend to them.”

Coit frowned, his gaze flickering between the guard and me. “So what you’re saying is that Lindi here is a snake princess?”

A snake princess?

Great. And how the hell had Coit been able to put that all together so quickly when it hadn’t even occurred to me?

Somehow I didn’t think being a lamia princess would put me in the good graces of everyone who was so determined to eliminate all lamias from existence.

Shifters back on the world I was from were supposed to be more democratic than that. They had a Council—or rather, a whole bunch of councils, both local and national.

Everyone got a voice.

Right up until a wolfman came along and beheaded the Council leader, anyway.

Then left her head on a pile of body parts for me to find.

I clenched my teeth against the mental image that almost overwhelmed me.

“Titles like that don’t even matter,” I said. “That may be how things work here, but not back on our own world.”

The guard chewed his lip, the scales of his lower body rippling anxiously.

“What is it?” I demanded.