Thin Skinned

by Margo Bond Collins

  Thin Skinned

  A Lindi Parker Shifter Shield Prequel

  Margo Bond Collins

  Thin Skinned © 2019 Margo Bond Collins

  All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Thin Skinned: A Lindi Parker Weresnake Prequel

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Thin Skinned

  Sometimes, being a snake shifter just isn’t scary enough.

  Lindi Parker wants to spend her life helping people—it’s why she became a counselor in the first place.

  The one thing she absolutely does not want to do is let anyone know that she’s actually a snake shifter.

  Occasionally, those two goals come into conflict. She just didn’t expect it to happen the first week at her new job.

  But here she is, a python-shaped stowaway in a car engine, hurtling toward a showdown with a group of drug dealers planning to spirit a child out of the country.

  This might require a little creativity.

  And a little more poison behind her fangs.

  When she accepts a new job, Lindi takes on more than she anticipated in this prequel to the bestselling Shifter Shield urban fantasy novel Under Her Skin!

  Chapter 1

  I think I have an ethics problem.

  I realized half a second after the thought passed through my mind that it probably was not the most pressing issue I had to deal with.

  I was, after all, curled into the engine of a car racing along at seventy miles per hour.

  More significantly, I was in my snake shifter form. The one I tried never to let anyone but my family see. The one I avoided taking in public. The car was almost certainly headed from north central Texas straight down to Mexico, and unless I figured out a way to kidnap a child from its parents and sneak away, I was probably going with it. Assuming I didn’t get caught first—and possibly also killed for being a snake in the engine.

  A week before, I’d never had problems like this. Of course, a week before I was still a grad student finishing up my training as a licensed counselor.

  Now I was a contract counselor for Sams & Sams & Associates, a law firm that did a lot of work on behalf of children.

  I was also a python in a car engine—oddly enough, also on behalf of a child.

  I’d started my new job—as a counselor, not a python—four days ago. That was the day before I met Paige Beaumont and her parents.

  On paper, my new employers were a typical firm specializing in family law. In reality, almost half their cases involved acting as the amicus or ad litem attorney for a child—a lawyer appointed to see to the best interests of the child in a court case. Usually a custody case.

  When she’d hired me, Yolanda Sams had warned me that the law firm she and her husband Keith owned was behind and would put me to work immediately. Keith had reiterated the comment. And they hadn’t been lying when they told me they would throw me in to sink or learn to swim from the first day.

  “Come on, Lindi,” Yolanda had said. “I’ll show you to our file room. If ever you don’t have anything assigned to you, you can come in and read up on our current and pending cases.”

  I never had a chance to do that—I got handed a case on day two. That first case dealt with Baby Paige. That’s what her family called her—I assumed she was named after someone else who was the adult version of the Paige in that family.

  I did some quick brushing up on the case before they came in on my first full day in the office, sitting down at the desk in my tiny side office and flipping through the manila file folders that Yvette Barnes, the attorney acting on behalf of Baby Paige, had passed to me that morning after a quick staff meeting.

  My firm’s job was to figure out what was in the child’s best interest. My job was to make sure the child was cared for. And that meant I had to interview everyone involved.

  Basically, the case came down to the fact that Baby Paige’s aunt, Courtney, wanted to take custody of her, in no small part because Baby Paige’s parents had recently been arrested for distribution of cocaine and methamphetamines.

  Drug dealers. Fabulous. Still, that didn’t preclude their right to raise their child. I knew that much. And I was trying to keep an open mind, though I kind of wanted to declare in the aunt’s favor right up front.

  But that wasn’t my job. I needed to assess the entire situation. I read through the attorney’s notes on the aunt’s comments. Her argument was that unless Paige’s parents got clean, they were in no shape to maintain custody, and that their recent arrests proved that.

  “I’m stable, and my sister and her husband are not,” Courtney Mingus said almost as soon as she sat down in the comfortable, upholstered chair across from me. She wore jeans and a t-shirt, neither fancy, but both clean, and her dark brown hair was pulled away from her pale face in a low ponytail. Her file said she was mid-twenties, my age, but I would have put her about five years older.

  “They’re both drug addicts,” she continued, “and I suspect they’re drug runners, too.” She glanced off to one side and chewed her lip. “I think they might even be meth producers. Baby Paige stays at my house more often than not—or at least, she did until I suggested it might be better that I take her even more often. As soon as that happened, that damn Hale glared at me and grabbed Paige away from Lori. I haven’t seen my sister or the baby since. I know he’s the one who convinced her to start keeping Paige away from me. He’s shifty, and mean, and he’s got my sister all messed up.”

  I nodded and made understanding counselor noises. “So what will you do once you have custody?”

  “Well, not let her spend too much time around meth-addled addicts, for one thing.” Courtney’s voice went tight.

  “Have you considered what it would mean to bring Paige into your life full-time?” I was flying blind here—I didn’t know exactly what kinds of questions the attorneys might ask, and Yvette had pitched this as a meeting for me to get to know all the players. So in some ways, it didn’t matter what I asked, as long as, at the end of the session, I had a sense of who the aunt was.

  “It would make everything so much easier.” Courtney’s eyes grew misty. “Half the time, Lori calls me when I’m already partway through my day to ask if I can change everything around to take Paige. I do it, of course, because I can’t leave the baby without somebody to care for her. But if she lived with me, I could set a schedule for her. She loves routine.” She opened her eyes wide as if begging me to understand.

  “Most babies do,” I agreed.

  “Right? If I could set a routine up for her that she could follow all the time, s
he would be much happier. And healthier, too. I’m convinced they forget to feed her when they’re high.”

  I shrugged one shoulder. “It’s not uncommon among addicts,” I said. I was trying not to agree too hardily—after all, I wasn’t supposed to be taking sides yet. But I also carefully shifted the roof of my mouth just enough to create the Jacobson’s organ that was there in my serpent form. Carefully, I drew air over it, trying to parse out the scents of the tangle of emotion-chemicals Courtney was putting out into the air.

  She definitely believed what she was saying—her earnestness floated in a light coating atop the general anxiety she felt about being here, combined with a dash of dark worry that splashed through her scent whenever she mentioned the baby.

  By the end of our hour-long meeting, I didn’t doubt that Courtney wanted what was best for Baby Paige. I just wasn’t sure that ripping an eighteen-month-old away from her parents was the best way to achieve that.

  I’d have to talk to the parents to see how that went.

  I had no idea how bad things were about to get.

  Chapter 2

  I didn’t end up by accident working in an office with attorneys who helped kids.

  I knew from early on in college that I needed to help people in some way. It was deeply important to me, in the ways of those things that make up who we are at our very core.

  Because I was a snake shifter, I, of course, had a secret. The kind of absolutely enormous, life-shattering secret that in theory, all my counseling professors would have said could not—should not—be borne alone. Of course, none of those professors had ever met a snake shifter before.

  As far as I knew, there were no other snake shifters besides me.

  Here’s the deal. Both my parents—my adoptive parents—were scientists. Mom was an astronomer who spent half her summers out in the deserts of West Texas staring through a telescope, and the rest back in a lab dealing with computer readings.

  My father was a herpetologist. That means he specialized in, you guessed it, snakes. Depending on where the research took them, they often spent their summers apart. Except for the summer I came into the lives. Don’t get me wrong, they weren’t all snuggled up together anywhere—they were too busy gathering data. But they were at least in the same part of the country. Ours. Central Texas, with some trips out to the West Texas desert.

  And of course, my father was one who found me. My discovery could have made him rich beyond his wildest dreams, even as it turned me into a lab experiment for the rest of my life.

  But when Daddy brought home a juvenile snake that he didn’t recognize and put it in the terrarium one night only to wake up to find me, a little, towheaded human, curled up in there the next morning, he didn’t let it make him rich.

  He let it make him a father.

  As usual, Mama followed Daddy’s lead, as she did on all things humanitarian. Don’t get me wrong. Mama definitely had a soft spot for animals and children. But Dad was definitely the one who taught me to be part of the human world.

  It took me a good long time, too. They decided I was the equivalent of about two years old in human age when I ended up with my family. I completely nonverbal, and it was another ten years before I could control my shifting ability enough to go to school with other kids. So perhaps it’s not surprising that I would become a counselor. I wasn’t terribly well socialized, comparatively, and I was interested in figuring out how to be as human as I could possibly be.

  I wanted to help other children find better lives, just like I had. I might not be able to ever track down others of my own kind, but I could channel that desire into a career that helped improve children’s lives.

  So I’d looked specifically for jobs that would allow me to do that—and pay off my student loans at the same time.

  I’d never be rich. But working for attorneys, I would be able to meet my career goals easily.

  As long as I could stand to sit through a lifetime’s worth of meetings like the one with the Beaumonts. To say that the meeting with Paige’s parents the next day did not go very well would have been an understatement.

  Or an outright lie. Like all the ones they sat there and told me about how the arrests were a mistake and they would never do drugs. Ever.

  I knew something was off the instant Mary Catherine, the receptionist, showed them in. She gave me a significant look from behind their backs as she showed them in, then shut the door as she shook her head.

  That can’t be good.

  Lori and Hale Beaumont were high, to begin with. Even if I hadn’t been able to tell from the way they twitched jerked, I would have smelled it on them.

  When they arrived, I had already shifted the inside of my mouth, so I could taste their responses. I’d learned early on to sift out truth and lies from the way people smelled. Only complete psychopaths could hide their chemical responses.

  Drug addicts, I was discovering, couldn’t hide anything.

  I also discovered that meth smells oddly like cat urine.

  Lori Beaumont sat close to her husband on the sofa I had pushed up against one wall—the seating option with the best view of the rest of the room, and one that Hale Beaumont had chosen.

  As I explained my role in this process, she twitched, and he glared at me, a flat, baleful stare.

  “So,” I said, opening the conversation with a pleasant tone, “tell me the main reason you’d like to keep Paige with the two of you.”

  “Because she’s ours,” Hale snarled. “That bitch doesn’t have any right to her.”

  “You mean Courtney?”

  “Yeah. She can’t just come in and take our baby,” he continued, his tone suggesting he was already getting himself riled up. “We can take better care of her than anyone else can.”

  He leaned forward aggressively as if daring me to contradict him, his very posture a threat.

  I didn’t take my gaze off him. Instead, I waited until his twitchy wife was distracted, and I blinked once, a long, slow blink that allowed my eyes to shift underneath my eyelids.

  When I opened them again, I knew I stared at him through reptilian eyes, because my vision had gone black and white.

  Hale gasped and jerked back away from me, his aggression lost in the surprise of my stare.

  His wife wheezed at his sudden movement and pulled away from him, then made a strange squeaking noise and dropped her hands down into her lap.

  But Hale couldn’t quit looking at me—the mammal predator suddenly finding himself the prey of the reptile. He was frozen in my gaze, and I knew I could hold him there as long as I wanted.

  The smell of warm urine filled the room, tinged with cat-piss-scented meth chemicals.

  Lovely.

  I blinked again to let him go and willed my eyes back to their human shape. And then I continued speaking as if nothing strange had happened. “What would you two be willing to do to make sure Paige is safe and happy with you?”

  Shaking, Hale stood up and held a hand out to his wife. “Come on, Lori. We’re leaving. This bitch isn’t going to be on our side.”

  The thing is, he wasn’t wrong. Truthfully, I knew everything I needed to know at this point. Anyone who would come into a meeting as important as this as strung-out as they were could not be the best caretakers for the child. Especially not when there was a loving, caring, willing caretaker available to Paige.

  And okay—I shouldn’t have frightened him with my snake eyes. But I hated being threatened. Even nonverbally. Maybe especially nonverbally. It engaged my snake-self, completely bypassing all my careful human training.

  I knew I should work to avoid being so thin-skinned, so quick to anger. I hoped that would come with time. I was already better about it than I’d been when I’d started my training as a counselor.

  I blew out a breath as they stormed out. As the door slammed behind them, I rubbed my hands over my eyes.

  At least I won’t have to deal with them again.

  Yeah. I actually thought that.

&
nbsp; Chapter 3

  I was foolish enough to assume I’d be able to write up my report to the attorneys, who would send it back to me for any corrections before they took it into the court, and I’d be done with the Beaumonts forevermore.

  Courtney Mingus would get Baby Paige, and we would all live happily ever after.

  Except for the Beaumonts, but in my mind at that point, they were the villains of the piece. And also except for the couch in my office, which actually had not one, but two pee-stains on it.

  “Oh, yuck,” I muttered. I checked under the sink in the office bathroom and then in the supply closet of the tiny kitchenette. Nothing that would even come close to cleaning out something like that.

  I need upholstery cleaner.

  I blew out a breath and checked my watch.

  They’d been my only appointment of the day. I needed to write my report and begin reviewing other case files. But there was no way I was going to be able to work in my office. Not with my shifter-enhanced sense of smell.

  With a shake of my head, I ducked into the front to let Mary Catherine know what had happened and that I was headed out to get cleaning supplies.

  “Oh, that’s disgusting. They both had accidents on your sofa? How horrible.”

  “I know. And I can’t stay in there until I do something to clean it up.”

  “Okay. Let me know if we need to have it professionally cleaned, as well.”

  “Oh, I’m sure we will,” I said. “Anything I do today will be a stopgap measure.”

  Mary Catherine laughed and brushed her long, straight dark hair back. “My job is never boring.”

  “And I bet mine won’t be, either.” We both chuckled as I headed toward the back exit that led straight out to the tiny employees’ parking lot.

  Neither of us had any idea how true those words would be.

  OUTSIDE, I OPENED MY car door and slung my purse into the passenger seat, standing outside to let some of the Texas heat dissipate before I got inside.