I hope whoever is driving it is friendly.
It slowed to a halt beside us and hovered there for a second before settling gently to the ground. A window, a circular piece of glass rather than the rectangle I expected, slid down into the panels of the door. A woman’s face peered out at us.
“Are you okay? Do you need help?” She leaned toward us. “You need a ride?”
I stared at her open-mouthed for a long second. “You speak English?”
She frowned. “I’m sorry. I don’t know that language.”
What the hell?
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I glanced over at Coit, who gave me a shrug and muttered to me, “I think there’s some connection between worlds. I understood people in Larkin’s world, too.”
Larkin. I wondered if someday he’d call my Earth “Lindi’s world.” It sounded like a theme park.
Anyway, the woman spoke English—or whatever they called it here. I decided just to go with it. I could figure it out later.
“We were hoping to be headed toward the town.” I wasn’t sure what else to say.
“You’re going to Capital City?” She looked friendly enough, but I hated to give any more information than I absolutely had to. “Well—”
“Yes,” Shane cut in smoothly. “We need a ride if you can offer one.”
The driver looked him up and down, and her grin grew broader. “Sure, come on in.”
Something about that grin is familiar.
I shook off the thought as she opened the door wide, revealing a woman who wasn’t human at all.
Or rather, only the top half of her body was human. The bottom half was coiled around a kind of pole positioned between the two front seats. There was a similar pole in the middle of the back seat.
That’s why the grin had looked familiar—in the sense of “from the same family.”
We were looking at another lamia.
One who was driving a car specifically designed for a snake shifter.
Somehow, in my frantic desire to get the new lamia infants out harm’s way, I had opened a portal to not just any other dimension—but instead, to a dimension that was apparently full of my kind.
At least full enough to warrant cars that allowed snake shifters to drive them easily.
We were on a lamia home world.
Chapter 3
“You’re not from around here, are you?”
The lamia woman eyed us as she tapped a few buttons and the car started up again, moving smoothly down the road.
“What gave us away?” Shane managed to convey a friendly smile through the tone of his voice. It was impressive. Then again, I was pretty sure he and the lamia were flirting. He had held open the door for Coit and me to climb into the back seat while he took the front seat next to her.
“Well, your clothes for one. There’s no way you could shift in those... what are they? Split skirts?”
She gestured at the blue jeans I wore.
I glanced at her own clothes. She wore a shirt much like any that I might see on earth in my own dimension, but it was paired with a skirt draped around her lower half.
Wow. A world geared toward being able to shift. That would be amazing.
“These are all the rage where we come from,” Coit said. How he managed to do it without a trace of irony, I couldn’t tell.
We introduced ourselves—first names only, though it wouldn’t matter here.
“I’m Salara,” the lamia woman said. “And what are the babies’ names?” She gestured at my neck and I realized she would have recognized the infant lamias for what they were from the very beginning.
“We haven’t given them names yet,” I prevaricated. Not that it wasn’t technically true. We had been far too busy being on the run to think about baby names. “We are gathering our favorite baby names before we decide.” Also not technically a lie.
“I’ve always thought if I ever have children, I would like to name a girl Eve,” Salara said.
I had to bite down on the inside of my lip to keep from snickering. Clearly, Eve didn’t carry the same connotations in this world that it did in mine.
“How far is it to the city?” Shane asked, changing the subject, much to my relief.
Salara gave him a number in some measurements I didn’t understand. Luckily, she followed it up with, “It shouldn’t take more than half an hour or so to get there, depending on where you want to go.” She frowned a little as she glanced around at all of us again. “Where do you want to go? Are you visiting friends or something?”
“We’re just tourists,” Shane said. He was really better at lying than I had anticipated.
Salara made a noncommittal noise and said, “So you’re wanting to go to the Registry Bureau, then?”
That didn’t sound entirely positive—not in the tone Salara said it in, anyway.
“At some point, yes.” I tried to remain as vague as possible. “But I’m not sure we have all the information they would need.”
“You’re traveling without papers, aren’t you?”
Shit. This was going to be a bigger problem than I had anticipated.
Not that I’d planned for any of it.
“How much trouble will we be in if I say yes?” I reached up to gently run my fingers along one of the babies’ bodies. She had started getting antsy the more anxious I got.
“No trouble at all with me,” Salara said. “I don’t think we should all have to register, anyway. But if any of the Sentinels catch you, you could end up in big trouble.”
Sentinels. That sounded like military.
“What happens if we show up to register without the papers?” Shane asked, cutting straight through to the heart of the issue.
“At best, you’ll get a sympathetic clerk who will cut you a break, give you an ID, and let you go on your way.”
“And at worst?” Coit asked.
“At worst, the Sentinel on duty will arrest you, the magistrate will have you imprisoned, and no
