The Skin She's In

by Margo Bond Collins

  Jeremiah nodded. “Thank you. You’ve done so much for us already that I don’t know how we can ever repay you.”

  “Pay it forward,” I said with a smile.

  As I left the apartment, I finally allowed myself to show how relieved I was that the hyena and the Hunter were no longer going to be my problem. I still wasn’t certain I’d made the right move by allowing them to stay with me, and I was certain Kade would have some choice words about it when he learned the whole story. But in my defense, I hadn’t known anything about the Hunters before one showed up on my doorstep. So I hadn’t realized the potential danger I was putting myself in as a shifter. Yet, it seemed to be working out okay in the end.

  On the drive to work, I routed my phone through my car stereo and called my father.

  “Hey, Dad. I have a favor to ask. It’s kind of a big one, and it’s kind of immediate.”

  “What do you need?” he asked. I pictured his sun-weathered face, eyes lined from squinting against the West Texas desert sky during his many outings as a herpetology professor.

  “Serena’s doctor thinks that she’ll do better learning to shift between human and reptile if she spends some quality time with me. I’d like to bring her out to the ranch this weekend if I can.”

  “Of course,” Dad said. “You know you’re always welcome, sweetie. And I look forward to spending more time with her.”

  “Maybe we can even get her to shift so mom might want to spend more time with her, too,” I said, laughing. Mom wasn’t anti-serpent, by any means—I don’t think any mother ever loved a child more than she loved me. But I also knew that she was much more likely to bond to Serena’s human infant form than Serena as a juvenile serpent. Dad had already fallen in love with her, from visiting her at the hospital, so that was no problem. In any case, I knew it wouldn’t take long for those two to become doting grandparents to however many infant lamias I brought home.

  The ranch was a perfect place for me to spend this weekend. Kade was on duty in the ER, so he wouldn’t be around, anyway. And I was ready to get out of my own apartment and let the Jeremiah and Shadow situation resolve itself without me around.

  Finally, it had been some amount of time since I had shifted into my most common snake form and spent time with Suzy, the enormous python I particularly liked to snuggle up with when I went out to the ranch.

  I wondered how Suzy would feel about being a grandmother figure to Serena, too.

  For the first time, I was more excited than anxious about bringing Serena and the other infant lamias into my life.

  GLORIA HADN’T BEEN thrilled at my request for time off to “work with my foster-daughter’s doctor to develop her treatment plan,” but there really hadn’t been much she could do about it—not only did I have some time off built up, but the CAP-C had a generous parental leave policy that applied to adopted and foster children, too. It would’ve been hypocritical for them not to, of course, since their entire reason for existing was the well-being of children.

  And although I knew Gloria wanted to look out for me, I was irritated at her response to my decision to take in and work with these infants.

  At any rate, though, there was no way for her to stop me, and after a morning meeting with the teenager who swore she had never been diagnosed as paranoid—a session in which we did not get very far since she still insisted everyone she knew was out to get her—I left for the rest of the day during my lunch break.

  When I got back to my apartment, Jeremiah and Shadow were waiting eagerly.

  “So what did the matriarch say?” I asked since I could tell they were both eager to let me know.

  “Keeya is planning to have us meet her on Monday morning,” Jeremiah said. “We will call her early that day and ask her where to meet.”

  I glanced at Shadow. She wasn’t thrilled with the arrangement, from the looks of her, but she seemed content enough to go along with it for now, anyway.

  “I realize it is an imposition,” Jeremiah was saying, “but could we possibly...”

  “You can stay here,” I said. “I’ll be away this weekend, but you can use my computer and contact me via that email I created for you if you need to. And I stopped by a grocery store. There should be enough supplies here to get you through the weekend—be careful, and if anything comes up, you know how to reach me.” The two nodded, and to my surprise, Jeremiah, who seemed so reticent, reached out to give me a quick hug. Shadow did not follow his example, but she did nod gravely to me and gave a half wave as I headed toward the door.

  It wasn’t the clear, clean break and ending that I had been hoping for, and I wasn’t going to be able to tell Kade about those two the next time I talked to him as I had hoped, but it looked like their situation was wrapping up fairly soon. At any rate, I didn’t think I needed to worry about them over the weekend. I hadn’t seen any sign of werewolf surveillance since going to Kade’s house, and I assumed if they suspected the hyena and Hunter had reached out to me, they would be watching me pretty closely. Just to be sure, I engaged my reptilian senses on the way out to my parking spot.

  Nothing. I headed off to the hospital feeling pretty confident that everything here was going to turn out okay.

  Shows what I know.

  AT THE HOSPITAL, DR. Jimson helped me gear up for Serena. He had been glad to learn that I was taking her to my parents’ ranch—even happier to discover that my father was a herpetologist. “So you’ll have everything you need for a juvenile serpent, I presume,” he said. I nodded—anything I didn’t have, Dad certainly would.

  “I’m more concerned about what to do if she shifts into a human infant form.” My hands tightened into fists at the thought of it—not so much that I was worried about dealing with the baby, but this baby had come quite a bit early for a human, and I was worried that there might be some human infant difficulties that she would have to deal with.

  I knew premature human babies often had trouble. Right? God, it had been so long since I had taken my child development courses that I could hardly remember. I knew that some of them ended up with pretty severe developmental delays, but professionally, I tended not to see them until they were in school. I sometimes got the younger sibling of one of my clients in for a family session, but my work mostly dealt with children five years and up.

  Dr. Jimson was watching me with a slight smile. “Dr. Nevala was down here earlier making sure we had everything ready to go for you on that account,” he said. I blinked, startled by the comment. “Kade was here?”

  Jimson smiled wider, and said, “Fluttering around every bit as nervous as any new father.”

  I didn’t even answer that. I didn’t know what to say, for one thing. Like a “new dad?” Not, apparently, like a “supportive... whatever.”

  I brushed the thought aside. I’d deal with it later. “What did you come up with?” I asked.

  “First of all, we’re going to send her with you in a fairly standard terrarium with a warming lamp. I’ll help you secure it in the front passenger seat where you can keep an eye on it. I’m also having a traditional children’s car seat installed in the back seat. I’ll give you a quick lesson in how to use it, and then, if she shifts while you are driving out there, you should pull over immediately and move her from the terrarium to the infant seat.”

  I didn’t even know what to say to that. The thought of her shifting while I was out on the highway made my head spin and my stomach clench. Surely she wouldn’t do that, though. Right?

  Suddenly I wished I had waited until Kade could come with me. At least then I would’ve had someone else in the car to keep an eye on Serena.

  Plus, I wouldn’t have minded seeing some of this new-father behavior for myself.

  Dr. Jimson was still speaking. “I’m also sending a monitor for her heart rate and oxygen level. If she shifts while you are out at the ranch, you will need to hook her up to this and keep track of it. You’ll have a small oxygen tank that you can use if she needs it as you bring her back into tow
n.” He pointed out each of these items as he went through them, and I found myself nodding almost by rote, overwhelmed by all the possible things that might happen. Terrified by what might go wrong.

  Dr. Jimson pulled out an infant-sized doll, complete with floppy head and arms, from a cabinet that ran along the side of the room.

  “This is our CPR doll. We’ll use her to show you how to hook everything up and what to do in case of an emergency.”

  Luckily, I was certified in CPR—it was a requirement of my job. That part didn’t take long at all.

  As we went through the various other options, I snapped photos to use in case I ended up having to replicate any of the placement for these devices. Really, it didn’t look like it would be too difficult, and when Dr. Jimson had me practice for myself, it was all easy enough—on a perfectly still doll. I didn’t know how well it would work with a squirming infant.

  I strapped the doll into the car seat a couple of times to show that I knew how to do it and pulled my car around to a side entrance, where we were unlikely to be seen by any human patients. There, one of the nurses, Kelly, loaded the terrarium into my car, buckling it into the front seat. I drove away from the hospital slowly, more anxious behind the wheel than I had been since I was a teenager learning to drive.

  Inside the terrarium, Serena raised up on the lower half of her body, peering at me and tasting the air molecules in my car.

  “I know,” I said to her. “Things smell different out here, don’t they?”

  I chattered to her about all the things we could go do when we got out to my parents’ land. I talked to her as I would a human child, discussing things with the assumption that she would learn language more quickly the more I talked to her.

  I supposed it was really the same when it came to shifting. The more she saw it done, the more quickly she would learn to do it, too.

  As she coiled in on herself under the lamp, though, I had to admit to myself that I knew exactly why she didn’t have any real interest in shifting right now. Human babies are frustratingly immobile. I didn’t know exactly how different a shifter child’s development was, but if she followed a normal human child development timeline, she was, what? three months? A long time away from even being able to roll over on her own.

  As a serpent, she had mobility. Not much more than to the walls of the terrarium they were keeping her in, but mobility, nonetheless.

  I didn’t know that I would want to shift, either.

  For that matter, I sometimes wondered what it was that had prompted me, when I was a child, to shift at all. I had no idea how long I had been on my own when my father found me, but I had no memories before then. I suspected I had been in serpent form for quite a while. For all I knew, I had never been in human form before the night I shifted so that my father discovered me in my tank the next morning. As I turned into the driveway and pulled up toward the house and the herpetarium in the back, my father stepped out of the back door and waved.

  He was clearly excited to see Serena.

  Maybe me, too, but I wasn’t certain. I had pulled to a stop and was smiling widely when someone else stepped out of the house behind him.

  Chapter 17

  IT WAS A MAN, ABOUT my age, tall and muscular. He wore close-fitting Levi’s, a plaid button-down with the sleeves rolled up, and a cowboy hat pushed partway back on his head.

  His face was tanned, and he had the same kind of crows’ feet around his eyes that Dad did, though not as defined yet. I couldn’t tell for sure, but I thought his hair was slightly blonde. What I did know was that I had no idea who this guy was, and he was standing between me and the herpetarium.

  I needed to get Serena in there without him seeing her. If he knew anything about snakes at all, he would realize that she was not your normal reptile.

  I got out of the car and shut the door behind me. My shoes crunched on the gravel as I moved toward the two men. “Hey, Dad. Am I early?” I tried to give him an easy out. Surely he had simply forgotten what time I was coming or had failed to notice the time—he was, after all, a fairly typical absent-minded professor. It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.

  “No, not at all,” Dad boomed. “Come on over and meet Shane.” He placed his hand of the younger man’s back and ushered him forward a little.

  I nodded, slightly hesitantly. “Hello.”

  Shane—whoever he was—touched the brim of his hat and said, “Hi. Nice to meet you.”

  “Shane is working on his dissertation. He’s currently my star grad student. I’m expecting great things out of him.”

  Shit. What was Dad thinking? This guy didn’t only know something about snakes—if he was one of Dad’s grad students, he knew practically everything about snakes. How the hell was I going to get Serena past him? I turned my shoulder on Shane a little, trying to convey my outrage to Dad with my eyes. He either didn’t get it, or he ignored it. I guessed the latter.

  “So where’s Serena?” he asked jovially.

  For the first time in ages—again, since I was a teenager—I had the most unbelievable urge to snap my fangs down at my father.

  Of course, that would be even worse than letting Shane the grad student see Serena.

  “She’s in the car. I’ll get her.”

  Maybe I could at least get her inside and settled without Dad’s student looking on.

  No such luck. As soon as he saw me wrestling with the terrarium, he practically leaped at the chance to help.

  “Let me give you hand with that.”

  “Oh, better not. She is a little anxious around new people and tends to be cranky. Also, I think she has a bit of a delicate system.” I threw pretty much every comment I had ever heard my father make about a touchy snake in his care.

  Shane the grad student fell back a step, so he wasn’t entirely oblivious—which is more than I can say for a lot of Dad’s grad students over the years. Herpetologists tend to be overwhelmingly geeky scientists without much in the way of social skills. When it comes to humans, anyway.

  I kept my back mostly turned to Shane as I staggered toward the herpetarium. “Open the door for me, Dad,” I called out.

  As he held the door for me, and I slid by, I said, “May I talk to you for a moment, please?”

  Inside the building where Dad kept most of his serpent specimens, I turned around to him and hissed, “What do you think you’re doing, bringing a graduate student out here when you knew Serena and I were coming to work on shifting?”

  Dad regarded me with his steady gaze. After a long, silent few seconds, he crossed his arms and leaned back against one of the shelves that ran alongside the wall at desk height. “Honestly? I’m thinking that it might be useful for you to have another herpetologist who knows about you. Especially now that you’re going to be taking on so many others.”

  “You don’t get to decide that for me.” The sheer audacity of him bringing someone into the biggest secret of my life without asking me first took my breath away. Before this moment, I would’ve said that I trusted him implicitly. He had been my rock—the stability in my life that allowed me to learn who I was and still connect to the human world around me.

  “And if I had asked, what would you have said?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t even have an answer to that question. I couldn’t have said anything but no. Especially now that I had joined the wider shifter world, I didn’t have the right to tell anybody else what was going on.

  “I hoped that maybe if you met him, got a chance to know him, you might be willing to at least consider the possibility.” Dad shrugged, but I saw a hint of red around his ears—a clear sign that he felt pretty strongly about what he was saying. It didn’t always give away what the emotion he was feeling was—maybe embarrassment, or anger, or excitement—but he was definitely invested in whatever reasoning he had come up with to do this. Mom and I had made fun of him for that emotional tell for years.

  I pressed a hand to my forehead. “Let me get Serena settled, and I�
�ll come in and make nice with your grad student. But then, you take him somewhere else while I take Serena out to my sunning rock. We’re going to spend this afternoon together in our other forms.”

  Dad nodded. “Okay.” He started to head toward the door, but then turned and glanced back at me. “Will you at least try to keep an open mind about the possibility?”

  I narrowed my eyes at him.

  “Just think about it. If he were on the staff at that group home you’ve been talking about, it could possibly save y’all a lot of trouble.”

  “We have shifter doctors. Kade is going to be one of them.”

  “And you’ve told me yourself that your Dr. Nevala and the others up at Kindred Hospital don’t have any real experience with your kind.”

  “Neither does your grad student,” I pointed out.

  Dad sighed and pushed the door open. “Just consider it. Please, for me.”

  I listened until I heard the squeaking hinges on the screen door leading into the house. Then I turned to Serena and began making sure her terrarium had everything she might need for the short amount of time I planned to be inside talking to Shane the grad student. “I know he means well,” I said to Serena as I puttered around making sure everything was perfect. “But this has to be the worst plan he’s ever come up with. I don’t see how he possibly could’ve run that by mom before he did it. I know you haven’t met my mom yet. You’ll see her this weekend. She has a class this afternoon—your grandma. I think you’ll really like her. And I know she wants to hold on to you in your other shape.”

  Serena regarded me with her steady gaze, and I reached in to stroke her head.

  WHEN I GOT INSIDE, Dad had a cup of coffee waiting for me, exactly the way I liked it. His version of a peace offering.