More Than Skin Deep (Shifter Shield Book 3)

by Margo Bond Collins

  * * *

  I had dumped everything onto my desk and was staring at the jumble trying to determine where to start—the state of my desk seemed to mimic the state of my mind at the moment, and I needed to work on finding my way into the case files for the day.

  I picked up my appointment calendar, to double check that I didn’t have anything scheduled specifically until this afternoon.

  No.

  Good. That should allow me to catch up on some of the paperwork I have pending.

  I had opened up my computer and started typing up one of the intake forms I had completed at the women’s shelter, when Gloria, my boss, poked her head around my door. At the same time, she knocked on it lightly.

  “Hi, Lindi.” She stepped partway inside my office, flashing one of her trademark smiles at me.

  Gloria was older than I by about twenty years, with bright blond curls and a sweet, round face that hid a sometimes frighteningly sharp mind.

  If anyone I knew in my normal, human life was going to figure out my secret life as a shapeshifter, it would be Gloria.

  Right now, she had her unnervingly incisive gaze focused directly on me. I worked not to squirm under that steady regard.

  “When you are walking down the hall a minute ago, did I hear you say something about Serena’s doctor considering sending her home?”

  Oh, hell. I really didn’t want to talk to her about this yet. I knew I would have to eventually, especially if I put Serena on my health insurance—another odd thought, since when I was a child, my parents had avoided taking me to any doctors, too afraid that someone would see some abnormal see. But the kindred Hospital, where Kade worked, was a full-service medical facility, and though it didn’t say so on its promotional materials, it offered a complete range of services to both human and shifter patients.

  After several beats of silence too long, I finally answered Gloria. “It’s under discussion.”

  “I have a client leaving,” she said “would you be willing to come in and talk to me in about fifteen minutes?”

  No.

  That was the last thing I wanted to do.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Under normal circumstances—anything before three months ago—I would not have hesitated to tell Gloria about everything going on in my life.

  Then again, back then, my world had been neatly separated into different segments. I’d had my human job, my shifters secret, and my entirely human—if not exactly normal, given the fact that they were both absent-minded professors and scientists—parents. I had rarely dated, and then only casually.

  From Gloria’s perspective, it must have looked like my life was spinning crazily, maybe out of control, and definitely in some new and unexpected directions.

  I just know she’s going to suggest I get treatment for PTSD after the whole Scott debacle.

  Watching the clock for those fifteen minutes to pass distracted me from getting anything useful done. When I made my way to her office, she was waiting for me, sitting at her desk. She very carefully had not placed anything in front of her—a notepad would make it seem too much like the counseling session, even though she and I both knew that that wasn’t far off from what she was about to do.

  It wouldn’t be an actual counseling session, of course. It would be unprofessional for her to practice counseling on a colleague—or anyone with whom she had a dual relationship.

  But it’s not all that easy to quit being a counselor. And we both knew it.

  I slid into the seat across from her.

  Gloria’s eyebrows pulled down into a V over her nose as she studied me, trying to decide how to begin this conversation. I withdrew into my usual wait-and-see mode, despite wanting to jump in to forestall whatever was coming.

  “I think it’s great what you and Kade are doing,” she finally said, “helping out with some of the unwanted babies at his hospital.” She paused for a long while as she tapped her fingers together in her lap. “But I have some concerns about the thought of you actually adopting any of them. Or even fostering them.”

  Crap. Here it was. The lecture I’d been expecting ever since she’d figured out our plan.

  “You know as well as I do that PTSD comes in a number of different forms.”

  PTSD. I knew it.

  And she didn’t know the half of it.

  “Gloria,” I began.

  And then I paused, having no real idea of where to go from there. If I told her that she didn’t have all the information, she would ask for more, and I couldn’t give it to her. Not without the Council’s approval. It struck me for the first time exactly how strange that was. I had spent all my life believing I was the only shifter around and dealing with the inherent loneliness of that. I had resented it. What I had never done was realize exactly how much freedom it gave me. Until I had joined the Shields and agreed to take a place in the shifter world, I hadn’t had to answer to anyone other than my family—and since I had moved out on my own, not even them.

  Gloria was still waiting for a response, using my own silence technique against me.

  “I understand that this seems odd,” I said. “But I want you to know that it’s nothing I am taking lightly. It’s nothing that I’m doing without considering any number of ramifications.”

  “But can you really understand all the potential consequences this might have?”

  “No. Then again, can anyone about to become a new parent say that they understand all of the possible consequences of that decision?”

  Gloria open the hand, conceding the point. “I don’t want to see you do this—make some irreparable move—and then realize that perhaps your motives were as clear as they seemed at the time.”

  I laughed softly. “Gloria, you know better than anyone else that no one’s motives are ever direct or clear or pure.”

  She laughed, nodding and acknowledging that point, as well. “Just promise me that you will see somebody, talk to somebody about what happened with Scott, before you sign any kind of finalizing paperwork.”

  I nodded. “Okay.” I could promise that much. A little counseling never hurt anyone, and if it would ease Gloria’s anxiety about me, I’d do it for her.

  And, truth be told, I’m sure I did have lingering issues surrounding the events that Scott had initiated in his attempts to repopulate the lamias of the world.

  Those issues weren’t really anything I could tell a counselor about—not if I didn’t want to end up with a schizophrenic diagnosis of my own.

  * * *

  At lunch, I took food back to my apartment for the hyena and Hunter. I was balancing soft drinks and a giant bag of tacos, trying to unlock my door, when I heard the locks clicking open inside.

  The door flew open and Shadow stepped into view, her giant axe positioned to strike if necessary.

  “It’s me,” I said. “I brought lunch.”

  Shadow didn’t apologize, but she nodded and moved her axe back to its apparent spot right inside my door.

  “I didn’t know what you liked, so I picked up tacos. I assume you’re probably a carnivore,” I said to Jeremiah.

  “Yes,” he said. “Thank you, and I am quite happy with your choice.” His voice hadn’t lost any of the musicality from the night before.

  I plucked out a single taco for myself and handed the rest of the food over to Jeremiah. He and Shadow fell on it as if they were starving.

  For that matter, they might’ve been. I wasn’t entirely certain what I had in my pantry, but I was sure it wasn’t anything even remotely as appetizing as a taco from Tito’s.

  I sat down in one of my kitchen chairs, and tried best to determine how to broach the subject I’d been considering on and off all morning. “Have the two of you come up with a plan yet?” I finally said, after everyone had eaten a little.

  Shadow shook her head, even as she said, “Sort of. We want to approach Jeremiah’s alpha—”

  “Matriarch,” Jeremiah correcte
d.

  That’s right. Not all of the shifter clans used the typical alpha-male structure. Suddenly Jeremiah’s relationship with Shadow made more sense to me—he came from a matriarchal society, so of course he would be interested in a woman who was willing to take charge.

  I shook my head a little, reminding myself that it was not necessary to psychoanalyze every single person I met.

  “So why haven’t you contacted her already?” I asked.

  A single glance at Shadow showed that she, too, was waiting for an answer to that question. She stared at Jeremiah with both eyebrows raised and her head slightly tilted to one side, her long, white-blonde hair sliding over one shoulder.

  “I left Savannah without permission.” Jeremiah’s liquid brown eyes glanced from one to the other of us. “I abandoned my position as both a protector of my matriarch and as a Council Shield.”

  At that, I came to attention. “You’re a Shield?”

  He nodded, a single dip of his head. “I am.”

  “Why didn’t you say that before? Why can’t we simply call in the Shields on this?”

  “There are a number of wolves in the Shields,” Jeremiah said. “I fear that any report made officially as a Shield will make its way back to the werewolves.”

  I hadn’t said so aloud to anyone else, but after the events in the NICU the week before, I had begun to worry about that as well.

  I stared at the two of them for a long, silent few seconds and then nodded. “I will help you communicate with your matriarch. Would you prefer to have her come here, or should we attempt to set up a meeting someplace neutral?”

  “Is your apartment not neutral?” Shadow asked, a hint of amusement in her tone.

  “Someplace else neutral,” I corrected.

  “I will let the two of you and Keeya decides that,” Jeremiah said.

  That was all we had time to determine before I had to head back to the office for the first of my afternoon appointments.

  * * *

  “Has anyone ever diagnosed you as paranoid?” I asked the teenage girl slumped down in the chair in my office glowering at me.

  She sat quietly for a long time as I counted the seconds in my head, waiting for a response.

  After she’d stood the silence as long as she could, she bugged her eyes out, clenching her jaw as she bowed her chest out toward me aggressively.

  Her stance engaged every one of my own predatory shifter instincts—I desperately wanted to pop my fangs out at her in that moment.

  “Diagnosed me as paranoid? Like who?” she asked suspiciously.

  It was all I could do to keep from toppling over laughing, and her question deflated my incipient antagonism entirely.

  “Guess not,” I managed to respond, keeping my expression serious.

  My client continued to glare at me, however. “The thing is,” she said, her tone perfectly serious, “just because they diagnose you as paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not looking for a way to get you.”

  * * *

  By the end of the day, I was thoroughly exhausted, but I knew I needed to go see Kade. If nothing else, I wanted to talk to him about Serena—not to have him help me make my decision, but to help me figure out how to best manage what I already knew I wanted to do.

  Serpent-Serena would be coming home with me soon.

  I simply wanted to make sure I was as prepared as possible for what that might entail.

  I didn’t want to admit as much, but Gloria’s attempted intervention earlier had shaken me. I was self-aware enough to know that I still had some post-traumatic responses to the events I’d been through in the last few months.

  My human side did, at least.

  And Gloria didn’t even know some of the worst of it. She didn’t know that I had helped kill Scott. I had participated in his execution, a punishment ordered by the Council for his murder of several local shifter children.

  The fact that I was about to begin raising his children sometimes bothered me, as well. Since I had begun working as a children’s counselor, I had become more and more convinced that much of what we are is encoded in our DNA.

  But I was also living proof that DNA can be overcome by the right combination of love and training.

  My serpent side was perfectly content with the way things had worked out. It also remained unworried about the lamia children.

  But it wasn’t my snake-self that wanted to talk to Kade, either.

  I shook my head and worked to pull my mind back around to the idea that both the snake and the human were part of the larger “me.”

  Many of the shifters I know easily talk about their animal forms as if they’re somehow separate. They say things like, “That really made my inner cat sit up and meow,” or “I had to push my raccoon back down inside.” Like the animal is a whole other entity, waiting to come out. And maybe for some of them, it is.

  I can’t afford that kind of separation between my inner snake-self and my inner human-self. If I did, it would be far too easy to give in, to separate myself from the actions my serpentine nature often urges me to take—to do heinous things and then disavow my responsibility for them.

  Maybe if I’d grown up around other shifters, it would be different. Maybe I would have no trouble truly separating my human self from my shifter animal.

  But that doesn’t work for me.

  And if I had my way, it wouldn’t work for the lamia children I helped raise, either.

  Chapter 4

  I was beginning to wish I hadn’t promised Jeremiah and Shadow not to tell anyone that they were here. Or at least, I was beginning to regret not making an exception of Kade in that.

  This was the first time I’d kept anything from him since we began dating. Granted, it had not been that long in the overall scheme of things, but we had been through some pretty serious events in our short relationship. I wasn’t used to not being able to ask for his advice. As I pulled up in front of his house that evening, I considered what it might mean to me to break that trust—and then I even had to think about what I meant by those words. Whose trust was I breaking? Kade’s, as my boyfriend? Or Jeremiah’s and Shadow’s, as two people who were not quite my clients?

  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 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 s
hape, 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, third, 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 seem 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.