Lucky for me, I had people on my side, as well. People who were willing to fight for us, even though they didn’t even know us.
People who were determined to help us.
Some of them paid for it with their lives.
When the werewolves showed up at the hospital, determined to take the newborn lamias—maybe to kill them, maybe to do something even worse—I learned that I could use my lamia power to rip holes in our world and use them as portals to other worlds.
One of the werewolves got away with a baby lamia.
Kade held onto Serena.
And I grabbed the other two lamia babies and jumped through a portal, followed by two men—Shane, who was a herpetology graduate student of my father’s, and Coit, a man who had used one of my portals to jump into our world from somewhere else.
I left Kade and Serena, my two greatest loves, behind.
And I didn’t know if I would ever be able to return.
Chapter 1
“I don’t know how to get us out of here.”
Making the admission almost hurt physically. Like I was having it dragged out of me, being tortured until I confessed to it, although neither man with me had said anything at all for the last thirty minutes.
The three of us sat in a barn in the middle of a field on a world that was not our own.
At least, I assumed it was a barn. It was shaped like a geodesic dome, rounded at the top and covered in panels that might’ve been solar panels—but looked an awful lot like scales. Everything inside the building was circular, too. Even the hay bales were round—but small enough that a regular person could maneuver them, not like the giant ones in the fields in Texas where I had spent all my life. At least, all my life I could remember.
The space inside the barn was divided out into circles, as well—they might have been stalls, but if they were, they were round ones.
The rest of this world that we had seen wasn’t quite like home, either. It was similar—it had fields and barns and we were sitting on hay, after all, having moved in here to get out of the scorching sunlight outside.
But that sunlight cast different shadows and burned a little more orange than I was used to. Even the smells here were a little different—the grass outside a little sharper than our own back in Texas, the hay inside a little sweeter.
I had brought us here when I jumped through a portal I had created with my magic in order to save two lamia babies from the werewolves who had been trying to kidnap them.
The infant lamias were both currently coiled around my wrist, resting comfortably. The two men—Coit and Shane—were also resting, albeit not quite as comfortably as the babies. They didn’t have serpent shapes they could shift into.
The men had followed me through the rift for different reasons. Coit wasn’t from my world. He had been lost for a while, having accidentally slipped into another dimension and stayed there until he thought he saw a way home.
As it turned out, it wasn’t his world. But he’d tumbled into the middle of our battle and decided that he didn’t want to be on the side of werewolves who stole babies.
Shane, on the other hand, was a resident of the Earth I inhabited. He was also a graduate student in herpetology and had been fascinated with me ever since my adoptive father had introduced us. I was quite certain he followed me and the babies in order to have an even better chance of studying lamias close-up.
Neither man answered me, so I continued, hoping I could figure something out if I kept talking. As if saying something aloud made it true.
“Once I regain a little more of my magical strength, I’ll try again to open a portal. But I’m not sure my magic works the same way on this land as it does back home.”
“We need to get food and water,” Coit said. “That was the first thing I learned when I landed on Larkin’s world. We need to get a sense of the locals, figure out how we’re going to provide for ourselves while we’re here.”
His words made my stomach knot up. This was the second time he had traveled between dimensions, and he was still looking for his way home. What made me think I could get us home?
Part of me believed I’d be able to sense where home was. Like it would have some kind of pull on me or something. But it was just a guess. More of a hope, really.
“That would mean we couldn’t stay here too long,” Shane said. “But we have water in kind of a trough outside—and I’m wondering if it might not be better to stay here until the sun goes down and it cools off. At least this way, we’re close to where we came through. Maybe Lindi will have a better chance of getting us home there.”
I shook my head. “I tried there. On the other side, back home, I’ve been making—I don’t know what to call them—thin spots? holes?—in reality wherever I punch through with my magic. Here, I can’t even draw on the power that I’m used to.”
Including the power I’d pulled from what Coit called “Larkin’s world.”
I didn’t say that part aloud.
Coit and Shane stared at me expectantly, as if they were waiting for me to say more.
“I’m not sure I can get us back,” I finally clarified.
Apparently, neither of them felt quite as urgent about that as I did. I guess that’s what comes of traveling with a dimension-hopping lunatic and a man obsessed with my species.
I, on the other hand, was beginning to feel desperate. I hadn’t managed to save all the lamia babies. A werewolf had managed to grab one and take it through one of my magical thin spots. I needed to find that
