The Skin She's In

by Margo Bond Collins

  “So if I am your supportive whatever, I want you to know that it’s not in the sense of someone who is likely to take off at the first sign of trouble. I am in this with you, if you’ll have me.”

  At that, the tears trembling on the ends of my lashes fell slipping down across my face and onto the sheets. Kade reached out and gently wiped one off the tip of my nose.

  “And that,” I whispered huskily, “is why I love you.”

  Kade grinned. “So does that mean I get to stick around?”

  “I really hope you will.”

  Until that moment, I hadn’t known that a man’s kiss could signal his total commitment.

  Several hours later, I said sleepily, “My car is still out at the ranch. I’ll need to go get it so I can take Jeremiah and Shadow back to their car tomorrow.”

  “I’ll go trade it out for my truck after I drop you off at work in the morning if that’s okay. Then we can all go in your car.”

  “Okay,” I agreed, and let myself quit thinking about it for a while.

  It was the first thing I thought of when I woke up the next morning, though.

  “Kade,” I said, shaking him awake. “Let’s leave early enough for me to go by the apartment and see what Jeremiah and Shadow have heard.”

  He blinked at me several times before nodding. As he sat up and put his feet on the floor, I admired the strong, muscular lines of his back. I reached out and touched him, and he smiled over his shoulder at me before standing up to go make coffee for us. I had to admire the view as he walked away, too.

  I had been unbelievably attracted to him ever since the first time I’d met him, and I think some part of me had been afraid that there was nothing more to it than some kind of weird shifter pheromones. Last night it reminded me of the other things I liked about him—his compassion, his desire to work with people as a healer. And always, the way he seemed to get me, to understand what I meant without any explanation at all.

  I stretched, luxuriating in the knowledge that he really wanted to be with me.

  It wasn’t just hot shifter sex.

  Though I was glad that came with it, too.

  When we got to my apartment a little over an hour later, Jeremiah and Shadow were already awake.

  “Any word from the matriarch yet?” I asked.

  “She wants to meet us at the hyena packs meeting room.” Jeremiah sounded deeply relieved.

  “Apparently, it’s something like a community hall in a neighborhood,” Shadow said, her voice tinged with a hint of surprise, and maybe wonder. “I never knew that shifters lived so much like other people.”

  I shrugged. “That’s probably not surprising since you are being trained to kill them—you can’t be allowed to look at your enemy as if they are human. Not when you’re a soldier,” I said.

  “I suppose not. But why train our children to be Hunters at all?” Her white-blue eyes were troubled, and she stared at me as if waiting for an actual answer.

  “That may be something you spend the rest of your life figuring out,” I said. I probably shouldn’t have done this, but as far as I was aware, I was the only counselor who knew enough about shifters for her to even discuss these things with. So I forged ahead. “If you’d like, you can come in and see me when all this is over. We can talk about some of the things that I suspect you’ll be facing as you come to terms with your past life and your current surroundings.”

  She swallowed visibly but then nodded. “My people don’t believe in talking about our troubles,” she said.

  “But you may be developing an entirely new set of beliefs, anyway,” I replied. “Seems like a good time to give therapy a try and see how you feel about it for yourself, as opposed to buying into what other people have taught you. But it’s entirely up to you—just let me know if you ever want to make an appointment.”

  Jeremiah was watching me carefully, his head tilted to one side, taking into account everything I had said, and everything I hadn’t.

  He might be a good Shield, but I suspected he would be a good counselor, as well.

  He certainly had the observational skills for it.

  It seemed to me, in fact, that pretty much the entire shifter community could use a whole raft of counselors—ones who understood their particular issues.

  As far as I knew, those few shifters who saw therapists had to change their stories to fit human expectations. There was no way to truly get at the heart of the issues they had to deal with, given their need for secrecy.

  Yep. Shifter counseling. I might be looking at my next career move.

  With a grin, I waived the other two outside with me. The plan was to take the two of them back to Shadow’s car, and then presumably go our separate ways from there, though I would make sure they didn’t want me to follow them to the hyena clubhouse.

  Kade had exited the truck and was leaning casually against the door. “Hi, guys,” he said, and I grinned a little bit at his distinctly un-Texan greeting.

  “This is Dr. Kade Nevala,” I said. “Kade, this is Jeremiah Diphiri and Shadow Glass.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Jeremiah said in his lyrical voice. Shadow simply nodded. Her hand kept clenching and unclenching at her side, and I wondered if she was feeling the lack of the giant ax on her back.

  It had to be hard for her, going into an entire den of the very creatures she had spent her life training to kill.

  Yep. Shifter counseling.

  “So are we going now?” Kade asked. “Time to go get your car?”

  “Yeah—I don’t think it’s going to be a problem. We’re heading up to the strip mall by the highway. Do you know where that is?”

  “Yep,” Kade said. “That’s easy enough.”

  I hesitated for a moment, trying to decide if I should offer the front seat on the passenger side to one of them, and finally decided it would be too awkward. Anyway, they would probably want to sit together. I knew I would if I were in their position.

  Kade managed to keep some semblance of conversation stumbling along as we drove through the suburban towns that ringed Fort Worth. But I could tell both Jeremiah and Shadow were anxious about this meeting, no matter how positive they had wanted to seem.

  “Just tell her what you told me,” I said. Jeremiah nodded, but Shadow stared out the window.

  As we approached the parking lot where we had left Shadow’s car, I glanced around carefully. All the other cars occupants did the same, albeit in different ways. It was, however, easy to tell that we were a group of wary creatures. In humans, I would call that kind of hypervigilance a sign of stress, or possibly PTSD.

  I thought of Gloria’s recent attempt to arrange for an intervention.

  She definitely had a point, though she didn’t really have any sense of the extent of the issue.

  At any rate, none of us saw anything.

  I don’t know how we missed it.

  Chapter 21

  KADE PULLED IN NEXT to Shadow’s car, and we all piled out. I was saying something supportive and probably slightly inane to the other two when the werewolves attacked.

  We parked in a far corner, around the side of the building, with nothing but a field stretching away off to one side. I presume that’s where they had been.

  As it was, they seemed to spring up out of nowhere, snarling, growling, and snapping, most of them in their animal form, but a few of them in some half-shifted state, like something out of an old horror movie.

  I saw Shadow reach behind her as if going for her ax. When it wasn’t there, she crouched down and reached into the black motorcycle boots she wore, pulling two sharp, wicked-looking blades out of some hidden scabbards there. She spun around, her braid whipping out in a way that made her look more dangerous than ever.

  The wolves had the jump on us. We would have to buy each other time if we were going to shift to fight them.

  Instinctively, Kade and I put our backs together, providing cover for each other as the wolves ringed Shadow’s car. I concentrated long enough
to let my vision gray out and my fangs to descend.

  I couldn’t see what kind of shift, if any, Kade was doing, but as we turned slightly, our backs pressed against one another, I saw that Shadow and Jeremiah were moving together in a similar way.

  The more I was around those two, the more I liked them.

  I didn’t see any visible change on Jeremiah, but I heard a low-pitched growl coming from his direction.

  I didn’t know how a hyena shifter would stack up in a fight with a wolf shifter, but it seemed like I had heard somewhere that natural-born hyenas were pretty fierce.

  As we stood in the early morning light, none of us making the first move, I wondered for a moment what it would be like to live in a shifter world where I didn’t get attacked by werewolves periodically.

  “Why don’t you tell us what you want,” I called out.

  None of them specifically answered, but one of them laughed, an ugly sound in the sunshine.

  Jeremiah answered him with a laugh of his own—an eerie, high-pitched sound that carried more menace in it than the wolf’s laugh had.

  I knew I needed to pull on some of the earth magic in order to gather enough power to shift into a form that could really defeat these guys. But we weren’t anywhere near a natural point of magic. As far as I sent my questing senses out, I couldn’t feel anything.

  If I was going to use that magic against the werewolves, I would have to punch a hole through reality to make it happen.

  The last time I’d done that, I created some strange rift that still leaked magical particles into the hospital. None of us knew how to close it, or how to stop it. So far, it hadn’t shown any specific negative effects, but I was terrified that it would—that I had done something to damage my world. Serena’s world.

  No. Before I attempted to draw on any kind of magic, we needed to try to defeat them with what we had on hand—our human forms, our shifter selves, and Shadow’s evil looking knives.

  Just as I made that decision, the first of the wolves lunged at us, going directly for Shadow. She spun to face him, her knives flashing bright, and so fast that I didn’t even see them slide in and back out, and didn’t see her get close enough to cut the wolf—but with a yelp, he was dancing back, holding one paw up in the air as his leg dripped bright blood onto the parking lot.

  That seemed to be the cue for all the other werewolves to join in.

  But the one with a hurt leg was out, at least for the moment, breaking the numbers closer to even. I hissed and tasted the air, the acrid smell of their violent determination coating my mouth with a single overlay of the bright fresh blood just spilled.

  Kade swung around to snap at the face of one who got a little too close to me, and I used that time to shift even more, allowing my lower body to slide into a constrictor’s shape. I kept my upper body mostly in its normal form—hands could be remarkably useful for grappling—and changed out my face so I could read everyone’s positions with the heat detectors of the viper pits to the side of my nose.

  When they were formed, everything around me sprang up into something that my still-mostly-human mind translated as infrared. Hot red outlines showed me where everyone was. Kade stood behind me, as clearly visible as if I faced him. To my right, Shadow and Jeremiah moved as if they were one person, two-faced and many-armed. All around us, the wolves darted in and out, snapping at us and trying to take us down much as natural-born wolves did.

  As one werewolf in full wolf form lunged toward me, I whipped my tail around and used it to grab her around the midsection and slam her to the concrete, where I pinned her as I began squeezing.

  She snarled, turning her head back to try to sink her teeth in me even as she scrabbled against the asphalt.

  I let her struggle for a moment more, my human sympathies still ascendant, before I allowed my serpent nature to rise to the surface. I felt everything go cold and still, and then I tightened that coil in one quick, convulsive motion. Her back snapped and she yelped once, then lay panting.

  I stared at her dispassionately, considering whether to kill her.

  I knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that I would regret it, no matter what I did—if I let her live, I would have to deal with her later, and my serpent brain would be angry with me for not dealing with the problem more efficiently. If I killed her now, I would probably feel human guilt for not giving her a chance at redemption.

  I didn’t have to decide right then, though, because another werewolf, this one in wolf-man shape, leaped at me from above. I whipped out of his way, tripping him with my tail. Jeremiah, still in human form, jumped in to hold him down, and Shadow sliced his throat in one quick, decisive motion.

  No hesitation there.

  I couldn’t decide if I was envious or horrified.

  I HAD DECIDED TO FINISH shifting entirely in order to take advantage of more constrictor strength, despite the fact that I knew it would drop me down to the size of a large python without the benefit of additional earth magic, when all the wolves, and also the hyena and mongoose on our side stopped, their ears perking up as they turned toward that field stretching away.

  I couldn’t hear anything, but when I concentrated, I felt the vibration of it through the ground—something high-pitched.

  Shadow and I looked at each other, and in a single glance communicated our intention to keep fighting. I swung about and wrapped myself around one of the wolf-men, twining and coiling around him until he was captured in my serpent embrace, and I came face-to-face with him—my human upper body pressed against his, leaning back just far enough to stay out of the range of his snapping lupine teeth.

  I began squeezing, holding him still as he thrashed, but more importantly, keeping him from noticing when Shadow moved in behind him and sliced his Achilles tendons with those brutal, sharp knives of hers.

  All of this happened in mere seconds, while the other wolves were distracted by whatever they were hearing from the field. This wolf’s screeching howl broke the tableau, and the wolves began loping away, out into the field, leaving the wounded and dead behind.

  I lowered the injured wolfman to the ground and slid my lower body away from him, leaving him whimpering.

  More than half of their attacking number had been wounded or killed. The wounded ones worked to try to shift past their pain. Usually, a single shift was enough to heal minor wounds. Some of the more major ones might take a few days.

  “What do we do with them now?” I asked.

  Shadow looked as if she wanted to answer that with a definitive “kill them” but Jeremiah shook his head at her, and apparently his silent veto won.

  Kade reached into his pants pocket and pulled out his cell phone. “I’m going to call Keeya. I think it’s time for a more open meeting than we’ve had so far.”

  I caught a flash of terror crossing Shadow’s face—not the sort of thing she would show openly, but she was definitely anxious about moving into the open among shifters.

  Jeremiah was nodding, however. “I’m concerned by the continuing attacks,” he said. “I worry that they will not stop unless Shadow is adequately protected.”

  “I can protect myself,” Shadow said.

  “But you can’t be expected to protect yourself and me and anyone who comes into contact with you.” Jeremiah’s normally musical voice echoed with the ring of steel underneath it. He wasn’t going to back down on this one.

  “I agree,” I said. “If you are formally recognized by the Council, then you have the right to Shifter Shield protection, and we can make sure that all situations are dealt with.”

  “Absolutely.” Kade raised one arm and waved two fingers in the air in a quick vote. “If you’re going to have to deal with asshole werewolves, then it’s best not to deal with them alone.” Without looking down, he gave a swift kick to the ribs of the werewolf whose Achilles tendons Shadow had severed. “And you’re not allowed to shift back to human,” he said to the wolfman at his feet. “Not until the Shield officers come to gather you
up and take you off to await whatever they’ve got planned for you.”

  Kade began dialing, and Shadow moved closer to stand over the injured werewolves, her sharp knives twirling around her hands, apparently effortlessly.

  I stared off into the distance, watching the field where the other werewolves had disappeared. Had there really been some kind of high-pitched whistle? Clearly a prearranged signal. But why stop attacking us? They still had enough wolves standing to put up a pretty good fight—I don’t know that we would have come out of it as entirely unscathed as we had if the werewolves hadn’t flipped, simply turned and run away.

  Something about this was not right. I wandered through and among the downed werewolves, pacing as I thought. As I walked by Kade’s truck, I noticed through the window that my own cell phone was lighting up with a call. Glancing around to make sure none of the injured were attempting to shift and heal themselves, I opened the door and pulled the phone out of the center console, where I usually kept it when I rode with Kade.

  The screen showed a missed call from Kindred Hospital. I frowned, certain that this could not mean anything good. Most of my calls from Kindred came from Kade, and he was right here.

  That just left Serena. My stomach clenched as I swiped over to the phone’s screen and saw that I had missed not one but five calls from the hospital.

  For an instant, I knew without any doubt at all that I did not want to return the calls.