In Someone Else's Skin

by Margo Bond Collins

  “My pack will rip me to shreds.”

  “Come after us again, and I will rip you to shreds.”

  Grant threw back his head and laughed aloud. “I know I shouldn’t like you. But I think maybe I do. You got it, snake chick.”

  “Fine, wolf boy. It’s a deal.”

  An abstracted expression flickered across Grant’s face.

  “Before you shift,” I hastened to add, “tell us anything you’ve noticed. Are there any guards or forces that we might encounter in the building? Anyone we might need to fight on our way out?”

  “Only the ones around the queen. I think they’re relying on some kind of technology or something down here.”

  “Not enough guards to spare?” I guessed.

  “Possibly.” Grant shrugged.

  Though given the size of this place, that would mean Queen Amalya’s people hadn’t been reproducing for years. Maybe for generations. The city had been in the when we had driven through it—lots of buildings, but no people. Not nearly as many as a city the size of this one should have.

  I shook off the thought. As long as I got the babies back, the lack of new lamias in the lamia world wasn’t my problem.

  Grant’s shift took longer than I had anticipated—long enough that I wondered if perhaps the dampening magic on the cuffs really was having an effect on his ability to change into his wolf form, his claims to the contrary notwithstanding.

  Even through the thick plastic material making up the walls that separated us, I heard his bones popping and grinding as they split and reformed, and my own desire to shift was triggered by the sound. If not for the cuffs, I think I might have shifted with him, just out of sympathy.

  I watched in fascination at the slow-motion change going on in front of me. The change of man to wolf—or at least to a form in between—proceeded like something out of a horror movie.

  His muscles knotted and twisted, bulking up so much that his shirt split at the seams.

  Hair sprouted in tufts at his wrists and shoulders as his ears and snout elongated. His head whipped back and forth, twisting his neck as his canine teeth grew longer and sharper.

  The strong muscles of his thighs bulged as his legs bent. The claws that had burst out of his fingers earlier grew even longer.

  He strained against the manacles holding him until the bar between them twisted and broke. The metal clattered to the ground and Grant turned a lupine grin my direction.

  Coit and Shane watched the change in fascination.

  As soon as the manacles popped apart, Shane bent back down to examine the plastic hinges. “I don’t think these can be very strong,” he announced. He put his finger against a particular point. “If you simply put some pressure here—more than a human could, but I don’t think it’s out of your reach—I think they will come apart.”

  Grant, now in his half-wolf, half-man form, nodded and punched at the door hinge once, then again. On the third strike, a cracking sound ripped through the air. Grant grunted in satisfaction, and then gave it one more hard hit.

  “Hurry up,” Coit muttered, peering up and down the corridor. Not that anyone had come through in all the time we had been here—no guards, no visitors, nothing. That fit with my theory that there weren’t enough lamias to employ any as full-time dungeon guards.

  That fit what I knew about my own world, too—that for all the lamias had been feared, had been considered dangerous, there had been relatively few of them.

  Grant finally burst through the door, leaving it dangling behind.

  Then he repeated the process from outside my cell.

  The longer the pounding noises went on, the more nervous I got, until I found myself tapping my foot and muttering. “Come on, come on. Speed it up.”

  Ripping my manacles off actually seem be easier for Grant than removing his own had been. But when I finally spun around, free from the handcuffs, I realized Grant’s enormous clawed wolfman hands were bleeding.

  I couldn’t help the rush of sympathy I felt for him. As angry as I still was over the kidnapping of the infants, my parents’ training overrode that feeling. I had spent my whole life practicing empathy. Now I couldn’t simply put it aside, even for someone who should be my enemy. I reached out toward him. “Let me help.”

  At Grant’s answering growl, though, I pulled my hands back and held them up, taking a step back. “Never mind.”

  I turned and stripped quickly, my back turned to all the men.

  Shifters were remarkably unconcerned with nudity, given their tendency to change forms between skin and fur (or scales, in my case) at will. But I had grown up with humans and maintained some modicum of modesty.

  Finally free to use my shifter abilities, I put them into effect immediately, allowing myself to drop into the space where my own bones popped and cracked. Where the world went from color to black and white as my eyes moved to a slitted serpent’s gaze. Where my legs fused into one long continuous body and my arms disappeared, melting into the rest of me.

  I dropped to the floor, coiling my body beneath me, but focusing on the plastic door to Shane’s cell. Although I was strong, I didn’t have the punching power of a werewolf.

  I did, however, have some kind of magic. Even here, although I had been unable to open a portal, and the magic felt slippery and thick, I was still able to grab some of it and focus it toward the hinges.

  Shane, who had gone back to examining them, jumped backward when the hinges began melting in front of his face. “What the—”

  He glanced up at me, his gaze impressed.

  I turned my attention to Coit’s cell door as Shane gave his own a solid kick. The door popped off its hinges, and Shane stepped out. Seconds later, Coit did the same.

  “Time to get the hell out of Dodge,” Coit said, his strong accent threading through the words, turning them into a drawl so thick it was almost a parody of a Texas accent.

  I focused on shifting my mouth just enough to be able to speak. The words came out in a sibilant hiss. “No. First we find the babies.”

  As we moved down the hallway, I didn’t dare consider the possibility that the infants were not in this building at all. I had to assume that if we were right and there weren’t enough lamia children being born, Queen Amalya would want to keep these babies near her.

  If I’d known of any other way to get to the floor with the queen’s chamber, I would have taken it.

  Instead, I melted the hinge mechanisms on several more doors as we made our way back down the hallway until we got to the elevator.

  The gold-toned metal doors opened on two guards holding shock-sticks, who froze for a split second before leaping toward us to attack.

  Chapter 8

  These two looked like the same ones who had taken us down to the dungeon—though for all I knew, it was common for the snake guards to travel in shifted pairs, one with the bottom half of his body shifted, the other with the top half in serpent form.

  In any case, whether they were the same two men or not, the security officers weren’t expecting anyone to be wandering through the building they were guarding, while we at least knew that we were watching for guards—so really, we had the element of surprise more on our side.

  Not to mention the numbers. We outnumbered them two to one.

  The werewolf had both claws and strength, and Coit was a brawler, big and strong and apparently used to fighting. Those two jumped in immediately.

  Shane, more of an academic than a fighter, stepped back to give them more room.

  And I focused my hinge-melting magic in the guards’ direction.

  One of the men began screaming as my magic burned through his shirt at his shoulder, the closest open spot I could find.

  Coit assessed the situation rapidly, landing the blow he’d already been in the middle of throwing against the guy’s jaw and ducking out of the way to give me more room to work.

  The blow knocked the shock stick out of the guard’s hand and sent it spinning across the white-tiled
floor.

  Despite his burning shoulder and bruised face, the lamia male flicked out his serpentine lower half, snake-strike fast, and knocked Coit’s feet out from beneath him.

  The guard turned his attention toward me, and I steeled myself for a magical battle.

  But no magic appeared. The guard lunged for me instead. From flat on his back, Coit flipped around and grabbed hold of the guard, grasping his shifted lower body and pulling it backward, away from me.

  I had time to dance out of the way, sliding along my own shifted body.

  The snake coiled around Coit, tightening around the human’s body just as Coit’s arms tightened around the snake.

  In a battle of the constrictors, a snake would always win. I had to do something quick to help.

  With Coit hauling back on the snake guard, I was able to focus my magic at the point where his lower and upper body halves met.

  It functioned like a groin kick would for a human male—a kick that left behind glowing, burning embers.

  His snake half clenched before it released, and Coit took the opportunity to scramble to his feet, knocking the guard off-balance.

  With that guard momentarily under control, I turned my attention to Grant and the other guard as they danced across the hallway, back and forth. The snake kept striking toward Grant, aiming to sink its fangs into him anywhere.

  But Grant’s werewolf reflexes allowed him to duck out of the way again and again.

  But the two were evenly matched, and Grant hadn’t managed to get a hit against the guard any more than the guard been able to strike him.

  But this guard wasn’t using magic, either. There was something weird about that. I stored the information in the back of my mind to examine later.

  Magic. I could use my magic to kill him.

  I didn’t want to kill a guard who was simply doing his job.

  I didn’t really want to kill anyone if I could help it. Besides, we might need at least one of these guys for more information. They were certain to know where the lamia babies were.

  Because of the way he had shifted, the guard’s body changed from human to snake at the neck. I was afraid to hit him with my magic at that point for fear of killing him outright.

  I considered hitting his most vulnerable human bits, but part of me worried about an actual groin strike. In a world where fertility might be a problem, I was unwilling to take that option away from anyone.

  Sometimes that moral compass my adoptive human parents had instilled in me was a real pain in the ass.

  I had spent my life assuming I was the only one of my kind, that I would never have a normal relationship or a family other than the one who had adopted me. I had thought I wouldn’t be able to have my own children. I had mourned that loss of choice. And even a split-second consideration of destroying this man’s ability to reproduce reminded me too much of what it was like to fear that for myself.

  So instead, I focused my power toward his knees, using the burning power to attack the bone beneath the skin. It was bound to cause painful, possibly even horrific injuries, but as a shifter, he should be able to heal that damage eventually.

  My instantaneous calculations were based as much on emotion as on logic. Still, I didn’t have time to second-guess myself. My magic flared into life and the guard crumpled to his knees with an inarticulate noise, dropping his own shock-stick on the way down.

  Now that both guards were under control, I shifted my upper half back to my human form. I handed the shock-sticks to Shane and Coit. “Keep that one under control,” I ordered, pointing to the one Coit had helped subdue. I turned to Grant. “Bring that one.”

  We left them like that, Shane threatening to poke the guard with a shock-stick and retraced our steps down the hallway. Grant followed me, one claw shoved through the guard’s uniform. As the snake-shifter could neither stand and walk nor shift and slither, the werewolf dragged him along the ground.

  When we got to the first empty cell that had not had its hinges removed, I gestured toward it. “In there.”

  “Why imprison this one?” Grant asked. His words came out mangled by his shifted teeth, but they were still recognizable.

  I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to reveal my thinking to someone who had been my enemy less than two hours earlier. But Grant was currently my ally, so I answered with a shrug, “He is too hurt to walk and I’m not sure he’d be willing to shift to talk to us.”

  Grant nodded and I focused on the lock mechanism, pushing my power at it until it sparked and melted, and the door would no longer open.

  “Now,” I said, “Let’s go get my babies back.”

  Chapter 9

  Back at the elevator, Shane and Coit stood over the other guard, each with one foot on the lamia male like big-game hunters in a photo.

  Only this big game looked half human and was still alive.

  “We know where the babies are,” Shane announced proudly, waving his shock-stick around. The lamia male on the ground beneath his shoe flinched. Maybe because they’d used the sticks to get the information. Either that, or the guy just knew how awful the weapons really were.

  I gestured toward the lamia. “He told you?”

  “Yep,” Coit said. “Directions and all.”

  “Bring him with us. We may need him.” Everything in my training, in all the things my parents had taught me, told me it was wrong to take a guard as a hostage. It was wrong to hurt another creature to force it to give me what I wanted.

  But I didn’t care. I needed to get to the babies. “Lead on.”

  Shane and Coit hauled the guardsman to his feet and we all piled into the elevator. Inside, the guard pushed several buttons labeled with unfamiliar symbols in a particular pattern.

  As much as I hated to waste time fighting when we could be headed home with the babies, we had lucked out having the guards show when they did—the inability to read the written form of whatever those buttons said could have been a big problem.

  I was ready to get back home where I understood how things work, even if life there was more dangerous than it had ever been before.

  Even if there were werewolves coming after me.

  Remembering that sent a shiver through me. I had no idea what was going on there. I’d left Kade and Serena behind, and for all I knew, they were dead now.

  No. I pushed the thought back down. If I let myself think that, it would cripple me. I needed to believe that Kade had gotten Serena home safe, and that the others helping us—Shadow and Jeremiah, Bron and Tomas—managed to help save the other lamia baby, too.

  I glanced at Grant out of the corner of my eye. At least I had him to give me information about what to expect when we got back home.

  God, I hope we get back home.

  But right now, I needed to make sure we got out of this building alive and with the babies.

  “How many guards are in the building?” I asked our guard-turned-captive.

  He threw a worried glance my direction. “Maybe twenty total.”

  “How many of them are likely to use magic against us?”

  This time, the look he gave me was startled, confused. “Magic?”

  “Like the power I used against you?”

  He shook his head. “Only the queen’s line has that kind of ability.”

  Now I was the one with the confused expression. “The queen’s line?”

  “Amalya and her relatives.”

  “Okay, then. Are any of her relatives guards?”

  This time the guard laughed aloud but clamped down on it so that it sounded more like a bark of surprise. “All the guards are male,” he said, as if that explained everything.

  “Are you telling us that only the Queen’s female relatives can use magic like Lindi does?” Shane waved a hand toward me in a circle, as if encompassing everything about me that allowed me to do magic.

  “Of course. None of the queen’s clan do menial work. They are treasured. It is our duty to attend to them.”

  Coit
frowned, his gaze flickering between the guard and me. “So what you’re saying is that Lindi here is a snake princess?”

  A snake princess?

  Great. And how the hell had Coit been able to put that all together so quickly when it hadn’t even occurred to me?

  Somehow I didn’t think being a lamia princess would put me in the good graces of everyone who was so determined to eliminate all lamias from existence.

  Shifters back on the world I was from were supposed to be more democratic than that. They had a Council—or rather, a whole bunch of councils, both local and national.

  Everyone got a voice.

  Right up until a wolfman came along and beheaded the Council leader, anyway.

  Then left her head on a pile of body parts for me to find.

  I clenched my teeth against the mental image that almost overwhelmed me.

  “Titles like that don’t even matter,” I said. “That may be how things work here, but not back on our own world.”

  The guard chewed his lip, the scales of his lower body rippling anxiously.

  “What is it?” I demanded. “Whatever you thinking, you might as well spit it out.”

  “There are no lamias indigenous to other worlds,” he said. “If you are from another world, your roots are here.”

  I was still staring at him open-mouthed when the elevator doors slid open.

  AT LEAST THIS TIME there weren’t any guards waiting to jump us when the elevator door opened. We would have been ready for them, though.

  As soon as the elevator came to a stop, Coit and Grant moved in closer to the prisoner and grabbed his arms, one on each side.

  I peeked out, peering around the edge of the door. I found only a long white hallway, stretching back toward the snake’s-head section of the building.

  I nodded and waved two fingers forward like I’d seen the leader of a military team on TV do.

  Okay. So that motion was also something Eduardo had taught me when I was doing my training to be one of the Shifter Shield guard members. It still felt ridiculously cinematic to me.