The Skin She's In

by Margo Bond Collins

  It didn’t matter how I imagined it, though.

  It was clear.

  There was someone inside the building. Someone who was shaped like a human, but who burned hotter than any human I had ever met.

  A shapeshifter.

  Inside the wall, close to the camera and recording system.

  Right now.

  And I was all alone and recovering from a major injury.

  Oh, hell.

  ATTEMPTING TO APPEAR casual, I walked down the hall toward the bathroom that shared a wall with the conference room. I needed to figure out how the shifter had gotten inside the wall, and how I might get him or her back out.

  A panel allowing people to take the camera in and out of its hiding place was the only opening I knew of, but I checked the bathroom wall as carefully as I could without knocking on it to check for hollow spots.

  After only a few minutes, I gave up on subtlety. For all I knew, the shifter on the other side could sense me as well as I could sense it.

  Instead, I quickly checked all the adjoining spaces.

  No obvious entrance into the wall existed.

  Finally, I shifted my face back to its normal human form and marched into the conference room, where I stood directly in front of the camera. The power light blinked on.

  Apparently whoever was in there wanted this recorded.

  Fine.

  I raised my voice a tiny bit and spoke to the flashing light. “I know you’re in there. If you don’t come out in the next two minutes, I’m going to turn into a snake and bite you, and then you’ll have to go to the emergency room. If I let you.”

  If any of my colleagues ever saw the recording, I would have to explain my odd threat.

  Then again, Gloria and I both admired the psychiatrist who had installed speakers into his electrical outlets and used them to communicate with a delusional patient in order to break into the patient’s fantasies and disrupt them.

  Threatening a camera with turning into a snake might not take much explanation at all, in this line of work.

  The panel hiding the camera popped open a few inches, and even through the wall, I could feel the heat of a shifter’s change.

  I was ready when the small, brown animal leaped to the ground and tried to dash between my legs. With my own shifter swiftness, my hand darted down and I grabbed it. Luckily, the camera was unlikely to have caught that motion, since it was below the lens’s field of vision. I wouldn’t have to explain how I had moved so quickly.

  I did, however, hold the animal up by the scruff of the neck for the camera to record. “Check it out, y’all,” I said. “It was a squirrel we heard on the recording. All clear now.”

  Then I tossed it in a cardboard box and taped the top shut. Leaving a note behind for Gloria, I took the odd package over to Janice’s.

  “I WAS TRYING TO GET proof that the lamia-bitch was unfit to take care of children.” An hour later, Hank sat on the sofa in Janice’s living room, surrounded by several other Shields and Council members, and spoke sullenly.

  “How did that work out for you?” I asked.

  Janice shot a quelling look my direction, and I held my hands up in surrender.

  “I assume you found nothing?” Yeah, she was better at this than I was.

  “No. But I would have, with more time.” He sneered at me, and I bit down on the inside of my cheeks in order to keep from saying something rude in return.

  “Very well.” Janice turned to Ed, who stood impassively beside her. “He’ll need to be contained until we determine what to do with him. I think the lions have the best system for that. Will you see to it?”

  He nodded and grabbed the prisoner by the shoulder.

  “Wait,” I said. “I have one more question for you—it’s not really that important, but I have to know. Why did you change to your human form while you were in the wall? Why not stay a squirrel?”

  For a moment, I thought he wasn’t going to answer. When he did, he sounded surly. “I kept wanting to chew through the cords on the camera.”

  Chapter 11

  “HEY, KADE!” I CALLED out as I entered his house several weeks later. “You here?”

  “In the kitchen.”

  I probably could have guessed that from the amazing smells wafting from that direction.

  Note to self: always date a were-mongoose who can cook.

  He didn’t look up from whatever it was he was sautéing in the pan, but he spoke as soon as I was close enough for him not to have to shout. “How did the appointment with Dr. Smith go?”

  “It went great. I am cleared for all activity.”

  “Yeah?” The raised eyebrow asked a question, but the lascivious grin that went with it let me know he was on board with the idea.

  “Yep. Anything goes.”

  “Well, then,” he said, turning off the fire on the stove, “I think these vegetables can wait.”

  Shifter-swift, he slipped around the counter and caught me up in a kiss.

  I melted into the heat of it for a long moment. When he began walking us toward the bedroom, though, I pulled away.

  “Wait,” I said, laughing even as I pushed against his chest. “There’s more. I need to talk to you.”

  “Okay.” He stopped, instantly serious, but didn’t let go of me. I loved all of those things about him.

  I only hoped he loved me enough for what I was about to tell him.

  “Serena is getting released this week, too.”

  A smile broke out across his face. “That’s great news.”

  “There’s more.” I bit my bottom lip, then took a deep breath. “I want to go with her.”

  “To get her settled in her new home? Of course.”

  “No. I mean permanently. I want to live with Serena. And the other baby lamias. In the group home.”

  This time Kade did let go of me, taking a half step back. I instantly missed his warmth, his touch. But I was sure this was the right step for me.

  “I’m not ready for something like that,” he said.

  “I know.” My voice was soft.

  “So...” he trailed off, brow knitted in thought. I gave him a moment to let it sink in. “Where does that leave us?” he finally asked.

  “I think, in some ways, it leaves us exactly where we are now.” I watched his eyes anxiously. “We’re dating. We’re a couple. I’ll just have ... some new responsibilities.”

  “I’m not opposed to the idea, you know,” he said.

  “I know.” This time, I said the words with a smile. “And I hope that someday you’ll decide to join us. But for now, this is where I need to be, what I need to be doing.”

  “Being a substitute parent.”

  I shrugged. “Yes.”

  “Will you ever get a night off?” A single spark flickered in the depths of his golden-brown eyes.

  “Isn’t that what babysitters are for?”

  The spark turned to a gleam, and his eyes began to churn. Sliding his arms around me, he pulled me up against his body and met my lips with his own. The fervor of my kiss matched his intensity and heat. “Babysitters, huh?” he said against my mouth as I wound my arms around his neck. “Guess we’d better make the most of our free time while we have it.” And then he picked me up and carried me to the bedroom.

  Chapter 12

  LESS THAN A WEEK AGO, I’d decided to become a foster mother to at least eight weresnakes.

  I was already regretting my decision.

  Well, not regretting exactly.

  More like... fretting about it.

  Maybe more than eight, actually—the doctors caring for the women pregnant with those shifters were only now beginning to determine how many babies there were.

  Don’t get me wrong. I like kids. As a children’s counselor, I have to. And the weresnake thing didn’t bother me. After all, I’m a snake shifter myself.

  Despite all that, the prospect of taking care of a whole pile of baby lamias—and all that would entail—was beginning to really
sink in, and I was becoming more and more anxious by the day.

  Especially during those times when I was working my second job as a Shifter Shield—a kind of guardian employed by the shifter Council to police our local shifter population.

  Like most other policing jobs, this one involved long stretches of boredom, punctuated by adrenaline-inducing terror.

  Not that different from counseling in some ways, come to think of it.

  Usually, I would have been every bit as happy to avoid the hair-raising moments in both jobs. But at the moment, I would’ve welcomed almost anything that distracted me from obsessing over my impending foster-motherhood.

  As it was, though, nothing exciting had happened in several days—good for the shifter community, bad for my skyrocketing anxiety levels. So on this Wednesday night, I sat in the tiny Fort Worth, Texas, office rented by the Council for the Shields, where I was manning the telephone lines, the shifter version of 911.

  I’d already put in a full day at the CAP-C. In fact, I’d skipped my lunch period to go out to a local women’s shelter and run a group counseling session for the kids there. After work, I had rushed to make it to the Shield office before Layla, a werecoyote Shield, finished her shift.

  Now I stared at the old-fashioned phone on the desk, willing it to ring as my stomach growled. I was bored and hungry and anxious—not a good combination for anyone, much less a snake shifter.

  “The ER is slammed tonight. I’ll be lucky to get away before morning,” Kade said when I called to see if he’d bring food by the office after his own shift.

  “Thanks anyway,” I managed to respond, more-or-less politely.

  Crossing my arms, I snarled at my own cell phone as I dropped it on the table.

  If the Council hadn’t rejected my proposal to allow us to have Shield calls routed through to our personal cell phones, I wouldn’t have been stuck here.

  “But no,” I muttered aloud in my most sarcastic tone. We all had to take our turns sitting in the office. Even if an emergency call came in, I’d have to send out the on-call Shields.

  Besides, the Council insisted on maintaining a physical office where shifters could report problems directly. I had argued against it vehemently in one of our meetings, but to no avail.

  So, of course, I was the one on duty when the panicked couple showed up to send my already chaotic life spiraling into absolute madness.

  THE DOOR OF THE OFFICE slammed open, hitting the wall behind it so hard I was afraid it would leave a dent. A couple dashed in and shut the door behind them. The man threw the deadbolt and scanned the rest of our limited additional security. While he did this, the small woman strode up to the desk and purposefully placed both hands flat on the surface. She leaned forward, almost into my personal space, and said, “We need to see the lamia.”

  I assumed she meant me—since I was the only adult snake-shifter in the area, and perhaps in existence, she almost had to. However, the enormous ax sticking up over her head from between her shoulder blades suggested that perhaps I didn’t need to see them—not without getting a sense of who they were and why they were invading my workspace.

  I work with frantic people for a living, though, both in my job as a counselor and as a type of police officer for the Shields. I pulled on my counselor face—smooth, bland, and only mildly interested in whatever it was that had gotten my clients (or in this case, the ax-wielding blonde and her boyfriend) stirred up.

  I leaned back in the office chair and tented my fingers in front of me. “Why do you need to see her?”

  “She is the only one we will talk to,” the woman ground out from between clenched teeth. Her eyes were the pale, almost-white blue of a Siberian Husky’s, and they glared at me with a cold fury, barely banked.

  I raised one eyebrow and waited. It was a technique I found I used as much as a Shield as I did as a children’s counselor. People want to fill silences.

  In the meantime, I used the few seconds of quiet as an opportunity to study the pair.

  In terms of appearance, they were exact opposites. She was leggy, but tiny, with incredibly pale skin and long hair so blonde it was almost white. He was taller, a light-skinned black man with luminous brown eyes.

  Pulling in a breath across the half-shifted Jacobson’s organ in the roof of my mouth, I parsed out what I could of their scents. They were obviously lovers, their individual scents interwoven so completely that it was difficult to differentiate them.

  Difficult, but not impossible.

  He was some kind of shifter—a type I’d never smelled before—and she was...

  Well, she was baseline human. There was something else there that I had never encountered before, though. To my weresnake senses, it smelled wild but didn’t taste like anything shifter or animal. Yet it carried that fizz along the edge, like a lightly carbonated drink, that suggested its owner belonged to the world of the paranormal.

  Yeah—whatever she was, she was definitely supernatural.

  “Maybe I can help you?” I asked.

  They exchanged a look full of information that I couldn’t interpret, and then the man stepped up. “We must speak to the lamia. She is, we believe, the only one who might believe us—might trust us.” His voice was musical, the words spoken in the lilting accent of an African country.

  I chewed on the inside of my bottom lip as I considered the couple in front of me. I inhaled another breath, trying to taste intentions in the molecules of air. All my senses were telling me that they were nervous, but not actively hiding anything. They weren’t lying. They definitely thought I would be able to help them.

  After a long moment, I nodded and sat up straight. “I’m Lindi Parker. I’m the one you’re looking for.”

  The blonde woman stood up straight, pushing herself off with the hands she had never taken from the desk. The man slumped a little in relief, and then he stood up straight, as well.

  “You are?” the woman said suspiciously. The man simply ran his hand along her back. Again they glanced at each other—but this time I knew what they were communicating about. It was a silent discussion over what to do next, and more importantly, whether or not they even believed me. I gave it a few seconds, and then I broke the silence.

  “Would you like proof?” I asked, pushing my chair back from the desk and standing.

  “Yes,” the woman said sharply, even as the man made a demurring sound and gesture. They both stopped speaking and looked at one another in surprise.

  These two might be lovers, but they are not used to working together.

  I filed the intuition away, hoping to examine it later. Closing my eyes, I focused on shifting only my face, allowing my mouth to widen, my chin to slope back a bit, and my skin to harden into scales. I could tell when my eyes shifted because everything went black and white.

  When I flicked my tongue out into the air this time, I tasted more of the others’ motives.

  No. They’re definitely telling the truth.

  Whatever other reasons they might have for wanting to talk to “the lamia,” they genuinely believed that seeing me was their only hope.

  I let the partial shift fall away and my human features took its place.

  “You wanted to see me,” I said. “Now you have. So tell me, who are you?”

  I’d already begun to think of the woman as the dominant one of the pair, so I was a little surprised when she stepped aside and let the man begin speaking.

  “I am Jeremiah Diphiri,” he said in his beautifully melodic voice, and its cadence, similar to that of a storyteller, clued me in—this part of the meeting had been carefully rehearsed before they ever entered my office.

  That suggested they both viewed him as being the more believable of the pair—at least they thought I was more likely to buy whatever he was about to tell me.

  And the woman might be running this show, after all.

  “I was a member of the hyena delegation sent to Savannah, Georgia to negotiate a territory exchange,” Jeremiah Diphi
ri continued.

  “I heard that was happening.” I waved my hand a little, inviting him to continue.

  “While there, I met Shadow.” He gestured at the woman, who took over the narrative.

  “Shadow Glass,” she said, introducing herself by her full name. “I’m a Hunter.”

  She paused as if she expected a reaction to that announcement. I heard the capital letter in the term, but I had no idea what she meant, so I simply nodded.

  More information to examine later.

  I wished I had a notepad to take notes.

  Jeremiah took up the story again. “The werewolves learned of my liaison with a Hunter and turned on us.”

  I winced in sympathy. Wolves bear-shifter were tough fighters.

  And I certainly knew what it meant to be part of an unusual pairing in the shifter world.

  As they continued their story, I learned that Jeremiah and Shadow had been kidnapped, held and tortured, and barely fought their way out again—only to discover that they were being followed.

  And that’s when things got wild.

  If these two had been almost any of the other shifters I had met since I first stumbled into this world, I would have expected their words to be tumbling all over one another as they told the story.

  Instead, Jeremiah had a natural kind of reserve that came out in that beautiful voice and his subdued, but graceful, motions.

  At first glance, Shadow Glass appeared to have the same kind of reserve. But after watching her for a moment, I began to recognize something entirely different in her movements. They both paced as they told the story, but Jeremiah circled around the edges of the office, always keeping me in his sights, never going behind me, never turning his back on me.

  Shadow’s strides were more direct. She crisscrossed the room in a series of hatch marks that always returned to the center point of the room, right in front of my desk.

  She didn’t hesitate to turn her back on me. Clearly, I didn’t frighten her.

  More tellingly even than those differences were the distinctions between how they carried their anxiety. Shadow and Jeremiah were both nervous, tired, and afraid—worn threadbare. When he realized he was slumping, Jeremiah made a conscious effort to straighten his shoulders and lift his chin—a warrior in the face of greater odds—but I sensed in him and in his roundabout circuit of my room a willingness to go outside the normal rules if necessary.