I had to figure out a way to track it.
Still, I was absolutely certain that Kade would come for me.
By all rights, Kade and I should never have even been together. He was part of a clan of mongoose shifters, natural enemies to the lamia.
I was a snake shifter. He was a snake hunter.
Of course, by the time I’d figured out what I was, pretty much all shifters were snake hunters. The lamias had been eradicated—at least, that’s what everyone thought until I showed up. And plenty of shifters wanted to wipe me out, too, and the babies. Thus the fleeing through dimensions.
“If we leave this barn, we will be striking out in some random direction,” I pointed out. “We don’t know where anything is—if there’s anything else at all. For all we know, this barn might be the only vestige of civilization for five hundred miles.”
Shane laughed at that. “But it wouldn’t hurt us to go on a short hike to figure it out, would it?”
I shook my head at him. “Weren’t you the one who was just arguing that we should stay here?”
“I’m flexible.” He shrugged.
“You have a vote?” I asked Coit.
“Let’s move. I’m getting antsy just sitting here.”
Blowing out a harsh breath, trying to exhale my fear with it, I rubbed my eyes and stood up. “Then let’s go.”
Outside, the sun had started to go down. I hadn’t realized I had any kind of internalized sense of east or west, but something about the direction of the sunset felt wrong to me.
This whole world feels wrong. Guess it’s time to start exploring it.
“Which direction, boss-lady?” Shane asked.
I closed my eyes, trying to reach out with my magic, hoping for anything to help me figure out what to do.
Nothing.
I picked a direction at random. “That way.”
The three of us—five, if I counted the baby lamias still wrapped around my wrist in snake form—started up the slight incline toward whatever was waiting for us on the other side of the slight ridge ahead.
Chapter 2
“Looks like you picked the right direction.” Shane turned his head to look up and down the road my choice had led us to. “Got any other ideas?”
I had absolutely no way of knowing which direction we should take. Dragging the air in over my half-shifted Jacobsen’s organ gave me no new information. The whole place tasted and smelled a little wrong.
So instead of trying to figure it out, I left it up to fate. Sort of.
Okay, fine. I eeny-meeny-miney-moe’d it.
We ended up taking a right.
And then I did the same thing at the next crossroads and took a left.
For all that this world was different from our own, there were similarities, too. The roads were paved with something that looked kind of like asphalt, even though it smelled a little different. Fences made out of wooden posts strung with wire ran along the sides of the road. Tall grasses in the bar ditches showed that no one had mowed there in a long time, though of course the fences themselves suggested civilization of a sort.
We had stopped for a long, final drink of water from the water cisterns outside the barn before we left, and I had made sure that the infant lamias had some, too. But if we didn’t come across more fairly soon, I was going to have to suggest we turn around.
I had kept track of the turns we’d made and was certain I could find my way back to the barn. At least we had water there—though food would eventually become a problem.
Nonetheless, despite all the things about this journey could have been horrible, I found myself feeling more cheerful than I had in a long time.
I was worried about what was happening back at home, of course. The werewolves and their allies wanted to eliminate the possibility of any more lamias in their world. One of them had a lamia baby and was on the run.
But there were currently several women still pregnant with lamia infants—more than one of them carrying multiples. That these babies were a product of rape, the women traumatized and terrified, only heightened my concern. I didn’t trust the werewolves and their allies not to harm the women in their rush to eliminate the babies.
But I also trusted the people I’d left behind to protect those women. Shadow had been trained as a werewolf hunter and could match up against any of them. Her boyfriend, Jeremiah, was a hyena shifter, and between the two of them, I suspected they could take down anyone who came their way.
Thomas was a tough jaguar shifter from Mexico, and his partner, Bronwyn, was a raven shifter—smart as hell, even if she was still recovering from an injury.
And then there was Kade. He was a doctor, and the women carrying the lamia babies were his patients. He would protect them to the ends of the Earth. Beyond, even.
And Kade had lots of support.
With all of them on the case, they would take care of things back home. Including Serena, the first of the lamia babies to be born, and the child I was beginning to regard as my own.
The babies on my wrist began to move as if sensing my emotions. I switched them to my shoulder, letting them wrap lightly around my neck. It would make for an easier ride.
We had been walking for a couple of hours when something in the distance caught my attention, a rumbling vibration through the ground alerting me to a change. I turned around to discover a car—or at least a vehicle—moving up behind us. It was bright green, low-slung and broad, a little bit like a sports car in our own world. This one made hardly any noise as it moved, though. I was pretty sure it had no wheels, either. It floated about a foot off the pavement, like one of those maglev trains. The windows were dark-tinted so that I could barely see a figure in what would have
