The Skin She's In

by Margo Bond Collins

  It had been an even longer time since I’d had to consider how to deal with an ethical conundrum like this. Supposedly, the only exceptions to confidentiality were if the clients were going to hurt themselves or someone else, or in the case of a court order.

  I shook my head. None of that applied.

  I pulled in a deep breath and picked my purse up off the seat beside me. When I sat up straight again, a flash of something caught my attention outside the passenger side window—something moving close to a neighbor’s house.

  When I peered out with my human eyes, I couldn’t see anything. Shifting might help with that. Rumors of snakes’ poor eyesight were only partially true—it depended on the snake species. As a weresnake with access to a variety of serpent forms in any combination, my eyesight as a snake was not bad, by any means. However, it wasn’t attuned to the same kinds of things as human vision.

  Carefully trying to look unconcerned, I stepped out of the car. But I spent that moment focusing intently on shifting only those parts of me that allowed me additional sensory input: my eyes, nose, tongue, Jacobson’s organs, and viper pits.

  I moved slowly, turning around to duck back into the car as if I had forgotten something, giving myself enough time to scan the area around the neighboring house with my serpent vision, particularly effective in low light.

  There.

  In the shadows between the two houses, the vague outline of something large and darker than the shadows around it. At the same moment, I flicked out my tongue to gather air molecules and pulled them in over my Jacobson’s organs even as I used my heat sensors in my viper pits.

  The heat sensors translated to something like infrared, and the hulking shadow lit up with mammal heat. But that didn’t give me anything more than a vague shape, either.

  It was the air that told me the most. Individual scent molecules lingered from passersby during the day. In that cross between taste and smell, I sensed the sharp copper of somebody’s injury—on the sidewalk, under the faint smell of the child’s sweat. Maybe a skinned knee? Not what I was looking for. In any case, I tasted the day’s joy, and fear, and anxiety—all of that human.

  But from the direction of the intruder next door, one scent was much stronger. Mammal, furred, and predatory. I tasted the oils on its skin and smelled the meat on its breath.

  Werewolf.

  The memory of Shadow telling me what her werewolf opponent had said came rushing back. They planned to wipe us all out.

  The spell of the predator seemed to encircle me, heightening every one of my serpent senses. Without my volition, my fangs snapped into place, and I felt myself sliding into my more reptilian nature. I fought off the shift, however, keeping it only partial. Moving all my carried items to my left hand, I cut my right free, prepared to fight if necessary. If this wolf were local, he would already know that I had been training with a Shifter Shield mentor, Eduardo, a werecoyote who had been training me in hand-to-hand combat, both in my human form and in my serpent form.

  So I guess that would be hand-to-no-hands.

  I expected the werewolf to come toward me, to attack as I walked up the sidewalk to Kade’s front door. I kept my viper pit sensors trained on him, but he didn’t come toward me. Instead, he slowly moved deeper into the shadows.

  If I had been entirely human and had caught a glimpse of him, I suspect I would’ve said he melted away. However, between my infrared style vision and my heightened sense of smell, I was able to tell exactly what he did—back away slowly, then turn and leap over a fence, cut through the backyard until he reached an alleyway in the back. I breathed out a sigh, though I wasn’t sure if it was of relief or disappointment that I hadn’t actually gotten to use my newfound skills. In either case, I let my serpent self go and then pushed the shift away entirely.

  I’d need to shift sometime soon—otherwise, I would lose control over it entirely at some point. That would be bad for a number of reasons.

  Not least of all because shifting in the middle of a counseling session would be likely to cause a client no end of trauma.

  The thought made me snicker, and the return of my sense of humor let me know that I was completely human again—or at least, as completely human as I ever got.

  KADE HAD GIVEN ME A key to his place, but our relationship was still new enough that I wasn’t entirely comfortable using it. Therefore, I rang the doorbell even as I opened the door, as I always did.

  Kade stuck his head out from the kitchen and waved me toward him, then pointed at the phone in his hand as he continued speaking into it.

  I nodded and moved toward the coffee machine, where Kade had a pot of decaf going.

  I dropped my purse onto the kitchen table, poured myself a cup of coffee, then settled in to read texts on my own phone and listen in, in case it was Council business. I knew he’d take the call to another room if it were private.

  “Back up,” he was saying. “How did he get hooked up with her?” Pause. “I get that, but how does a hyena shifter end up paired up with a Hunter?” If I’d had a mammal predator’s ears, they would have pricked up at the question. As it was, I simply found myself pulling more air molecules into my mouth and over my half-shifted Jacobson’s organ.

  I didn’t get any extra information that way—it was a response born out of instinct. Instead, I focused on concentrating on my human hearing.

  “We are absolutely certain they are together still?” Kade read as surprised, not as worried. I allowed two tiny pits to form on my face, using them as a viper does to gauge body heat.

  No change there, either.

  “Okay, one more time. Why do we think they are headed to this part of Texas?” He listened carefully, making a few encouraging noises as he listened. “No,” he said, clearly agreeing with someone. “That’s the last kind of trouble we need. I’ll put the word out among my staff. Thanks for letting me know.” As he hung up, I let my half-shifted features fall back into their normal human state.

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  “Janice,” Kade answered shortly.

  The current leader of the shifter Council. That she was the one calling about Jeremiah and Shadow meant that the issue had already escalated as high as possible on a local level. I needed to tell Janice and Kade about the guests at my house.

  And that put me right back in my quandary.

  Counselors are ruled by a code of professional ethics that includes a strict client confidentiality. If someone comes to me and even thinks that he or she is speaking to me as a counselor, I am required by law to keep that confidential.

  I had always interpreted that particular part of the code more strictly than many of my colleagues. As a snake shifter, I had spent all of my life—at least as much of it as I remembered—fighting to keep my human side ascendant. Shifters had banded together to eliminate the lamia because my people were both powerful and ruthless.

  I was different because I grew up with human foster parents, and because I fought to keep my empathy for others alive. For me, that included interpreting various sets of rules fairly strictly. As a child, I’d had my parents to help me determine what constituted appropriate behavior. Their love and care had helped me internalize almost all of those in ways I hoped to be able to mimic. I wanted to instill the same behavior in the children I would soon be caring for.

  As an adult, I often relied on rules and regulations, studying them until I had a clear sense of what was expected and why.

  Dilemmas like this one shook me less now than they had only a few years ago, but it didn’t make dealing with them any easier.

  I had a hyena-shifter and a Hunter holed up in my apartment. I’d promised not to tell anyone where they were. Kade expected a hyena-shifter and a Hunter to show up and cause problems sometime soon.

  Two different sets of moral imperatives were about to come crashing headlong into one another in my world—the one that said I had to keep the clients’ confidentiality and the one that said I shouldn’t lie to my boyfriend. />
  It was a lot like an unpleasant word problem in math.

  No matter what, my life was about to get complicated.

  Better get all the information I could.

  I took a swig of my coffee.

  “What’s a hunter?”

  Kade dropped his phone onto the table and stared at me blankly as if I had asked something exceptionally stupid.

  “I mean, I know what a hunter is—I did grow up in Texas, after all. But you said it like it meant something else. Like a Hunter.” I tried to give the word the same inflection I’d heard in his voice while he talked on his cell.

  My boyfriend shook his head and blinked at me. “No, you’re right. Janice didn’t mean some local deer hunter.”

  Despite the fact that he’d just gotten home from his shift at the hospital and almost certainly wanted to take a shower and tumble into bed for some much-needed sleep, Kade dropped into a dining-room chair and rubbed his hands across his eyes. “Hunters are ...” His voice trailed off for a few seconds. “I thought they were fictional, to be honest. They’re some ancient cult, or order, or something. Monster hunters.”

  “And the monsters they hunt are ...?” I let my question dangle as I stood up to pour myself another cup of coffee.

  “Us. Shifters.”

  “All of us? Not only lamias?” Not, in other words, only the snake-shifters like me.

  Kade nodded. “Any kind of shifter is fair game, apparently.”

  So for once, I wouldn’t have been the only one in danger—if, of course, Shadow meant any of us harm.

  I didn’t want to say it made for a nice change. But if anyone had asked...

  “And one of them is coming here? Who’s he planning to hunt?” I pulled out a chair across from Kade, slid into it, and leaned my elbows on the table.

  “It’s a she, not a he. And she’s not coming to hunt anyone, as far as we know. She’s on her way to Texas with one of the hyena-shifters who went to Georgia to meet with the werewolves about a territory concession. They’re driving in from Savannah, probably arriving this afternoon or this evening.” Kade squeezed his eyes shut and gave his head a little shake as if trying to dislodge some internal image.

  Probably the idea of a Hunter traveling with a shifter. He caught my eye, then said, “I know what you’re thinking. It would never happen. Hunters and shifters? No way.”

  “You mean, like lamias and mongoose-shifters?” Joy tinted the smile threading through my words. “No. That could never happen.”

  Kade ran his fingers through his short-cropped hair and around to the back of his neck. Interlacing his fingers, he leaned his head back far enough to look up at the ceiling for a few seconds.

  I guess on some level, I had decided that until I had more information, it was more important to maintain confidentiality for the pair at my place than it was to tell Kade the truth.

  I hoped it didn’t catch up with me anytime soon.

  He turned to me, a puzzled expression on his face. “There is something odd going on here.”

  “Like what?” I did my best to keep my anxiety out of my voice, but I wasn’t certain I’d be able to do it. Kade was particularly good at reading other shifters and even better at reading me.

  Luckily—or maybe unluckily, depending on how I looked at it—he was too distracted by the mystery at hand to take special note of how I was acting.

  “Keeya, the hyena matriarch, is furious, claiming that a Hunter kidnapped one of her Shields. Hunters don’t take prisoners. They destroy shifters.”

  “Why hadn’t I heard about Hunters until recently? What are they? Why do they put everyone in such a tizzy?”

  He cut his golden-tinged eyes my direction and tilted his head. “You know the story of Little Red Riding Hood?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, there are a couple of versions of it—none of them entirely correct from our perspective, of course.”

  “Werewolves and a little girl?” I asked.

  “More or less. The little girl was bait—a trainee from a Hunter family. They enlist them early. The ones who survive go on to become pretty adept at what they do.”

  “And what they do is kill werewolves?”

  “What they do is kill anything they consider unnatural. That’s pretty much all shifters, not just werewolves.”

  “So the little girl was bait for a werewolf, who was then killed by the...” I close my eyes to try to remember the rest of the fairytale. “The Huntsman in the woods, right?”

  Kade opened his hands wide as if handing me something. “And there you have your Hunter. The hero of the story for humans, the villain for shifters.”

  An image of Shadow’s face flashed across my mind. With that giant ax, she could definitely be an image of terror—especially to many of the shifter children I knew. I needed to find out more about what had changed her mind about shifters—especially shifters who weren’t Jeremiah.

  But not right now.

  “Anyway,” Kade said, running a hand over his short-cropped dark hair, “the matriarch of the hyena clan has requested a meeting with some of the Council members.” He looked as if he were about to say something else, but whatever it was, he kept it to himself.

  “What do you think she’s going to ask?”

  “It could be anything from a search party to a killing raid to an official request for unspecified aid.”

  “Should I go?” I asked.

  Kade look startled. “Oh. I don’t think so. We may call you in if she requests help from the Shields, but I can’t imagine you need to be there for any other reason.”

  “You are headed out now, aren’t you?”

  He sighed. “Yeah. Can we hold off talking about Serena until I get back?”

  “We can, but I don’t think it’s going to be necessary, really—as long as you promise to keep being the supportive whatever you are.” I grinned at him, even as I poked at him a little.

  He laughed aloud and pulled me in for a quick kiss. “I promise I will support whatever you decide to do with these children,” he said. Then he dropped another kiss on my forehead and turned me loose. “Just let me know what you need from me. Remember, I come from a huge family—I’m not at all worried about you taking this on.” He grabbed his keys and wallet from a stand beside the back door, then paused and shot me a level look. “As long as you’re absolutely certain that it’s what you want to do, I’m on board.”

  Then he was out the door, leaving me in the kitchen to worry about what I was going to say to my houseguests when I got back home.

  Chapter 16

  AS IT TURNED OUT, I didn’t have to open up the conversation at all. Shadow was waiting inside the door, ready to pounce when I came in. “What have you learned?” she demanded.

  “Things might be getting a little complicated,” I said.

  She jerked away from me and turned, pacing back and forth in my small apartment’s living room. “It was complicated before,” she said. “What’s changed?”

  From his spot reclining on my sofa, Jeremiah watched Shadow carefully, his eyes tracking her every movement.

  “Your matriarch has apparently been informed that her hyena Shield was kidnapped by a Hunter.”

  I waited for the explosion that I assumed would come after that statement. However, Shadow took the energy that was fueling her pacing and coiled it back in on herself. She became utterly still.

  “So the wolves are turning all of the shifters against us.” Her eyes narrowed into a squint and her mouth tightened.

  “We knew this would be difficult,” Jeremiah said. “There is nothing she can do, or that the werewolves can do, that makes our path any more difficult than it would be for any shifter and Hunter to follow.”

  His words weren’t directed at me, but the sound of Jeremiah’s voice was soothing.

  Hell, I could sit and listen to him read the phone book, and I suspected I would feel calmer.

  Somehow that wasn’t what I had expected from a hyena shifter, g
iven the unnerving sound of a full hyena’s laugh.

  Shadow was nodding. “Okay, so what do we need to do?” She took all her contained energy and moved over to sit next to Jeremiah. She pulled her hair over one shoulder and began plaiting it into a long, blonde braid.

  “I think we should wait until tomorrow, after she’s had time to put whatever she’s going to do into motion, and then we should reach out to her.”

  “Why wait until after?” I asked the hyena shifter.

  “Keeya will not want to be embarrassed by having her meeting interrupted. She’s a kind leader, but she’s a very proud woman. If we wait until the morning, we should be able to speak to her when she is alone. That will give her time to determine how she wants to present this to the Council.”

  I nodded, though my inclination would be to get it over with as soon as possible.

  “Sounds good,” I said. This meant that the hyena and Hunter problem would be off my desk by the time I picked up Serena. I was all for that.

  I considered leaving a message for Kade to call me back when he got home. However, I couldn’t decide whether it would be better to confess everything now or wait until I had more information about what the matriarch was planning to do.

  In the end, I opted to wait. It might’ve been cowardice on my part, but I preferred to think of it as continuing my counselor confidentiality for as long as necessary.

  I would get Jeremiah and Shadow’s permission to tell Kade everything, I promised myself. But not until after they had planned out their next move.

  I CREATED AN EMAIL account and logged Jeremiah into it the next morning.

  “Use this to send me a message when you get everything sorted out. No one should be able to trace it,” I said. “I’ve taken this afternoon off from work, and I am picking up Serena, my...” I paused over what to call her, then decided to keep it simple. “My foster child, at 3:30. I should be available any time from noon to three if you want backup or moral support for whatever you end up doing.”