The Skin She's In

by Margo Bond Collins

  And after half an hour with Shane—whose last name was Wills—I saw why Dad had been eager to have him help with the infant snake shifters’ care. He was polite, thoughtful, and knowledgeable. If he had already known about the shifter world, he would have been a shoo-in for the position of snake pediatrician.

  However, he wasn’t—he didn’t know about us, and it wasn’t my place to tell him.

  “So your dad said you came out here to take a weekend off?” Shane said.

  “Yeah.” I took a drink of my coffee and watched him over the rim of the mug.

  “So what are you planning for this afternoon?”

  “Oh, I thought I’d go for a little bit of a hike. Stretch my legs, maybe do a little communing with nature.” I shot my dad a significant look, willing him to remember his agreement to keep Shane Wills away from my favorite rock. Dad tipped his head a little bit to let me know he got the message.

  “Well, you have fun. I think your dad’s got plans to keep me busy working all afternoon.”

  I hoped he had equal plans—or at least equally developed plans—for explaining why the terrarium with the touchy juvenile snake I had brought in was empty when they got back out there after Serena and I left for our time together.

  I decided not to worry about it. Instead, I drained my coffee from my cup and said my goodbyes.

  “Maybe I’ll see you again before long,” Shane said—more hopefully than I would have preferred.

  “Maybe so,” I said without any particular inflection. I went over and dropped a kiss on Dad’s cheek. “I hate you,” I whispered in his ear.

  Dad grinned and said aloud, “I love you too, sweetheart.”

  Shaking my head in rueful amusement, I went back out to gather Serena and carry her with me to the broad, flat rock I had claimed as my own years before.

  We got out there at just the right time of day—the sun high in the afternoon sky, halfway down toward evening but still shining brightly. The rock had soaked up all the day’s heat, and I set Serena into my favorite hollow. Her bright green coils undulated slightly as she luxuriated in the warmth. With a quick glance around to make sure Dad really had corralled Shane into some kind of work and he hadn’t followed me, I stripped out of my jeans and T-shirt, folding them and placing them atop my shoes beside the rock. Then, I stretched as far into myself as I could, willing the shift to happen.

  As usual, I saw the magic of the shift swirling around me and I knew now, as I had not before, that the magic could be harnessed. It wasn’t as strong here as it was out by the river, where Eduardo and I trained and where Kade had taken me to teach me about earth magic. But I could still see some of it, and after the attack in the NICU, I knew that if the situation were bad enough, I’d be able to punch through whatever divided us from the magic that simmered right under the surface of our world. I could take it and make it my own.

  But there were consequences to that we still had not entirely figured out.

  So for now, I let my sense of that magic drop away and simply melted into the shift.

  As usual, there was a moment of panic when my arms and legs fused and I became only serpent, only body. But with it came an amazing sense of freedom and I took a moment to ripple the muscles of my body, to taste the air around me fully in a way I hadn’t in days, maybe weeks.

  I had told Shane that I was going to commune with nature. It wasn’t a lie. In the air around me, I scented a coyotes’ den not terribly far away, its inhabitants gone, either for good or at least for the moment. Insects chirped close by in the grass. I considered stopping for a snack but decided I needed to move to work with Serena. Sliding up onto the hot, dry rock, I felt it scrape against my belly in a way that felt right. The sand slipped away from my tail as I pulled the last of myself up beside the juvenile, who had raised up in interest, flicking her own tongue out to get a taste of what I was doing. Slowly, I coiled myself around her, allowing her to fully taste my intentions. After a few moments, spent winding herself around me in a twirling spiral, as if she knew we were meant to be together, Serena settled down and slid up next to me, a coil within my coil so that she rested her head next to mine.

  And together, we dozed.

  Or rather, she did. I simply watched the setting sun move toward the horizon, saw the shadows shifting and lengthening, smelled the world around me changing in all the tiny ways that humans so rarely notice. The small things low, low to the ground, in the grass, the things I missed living in the city.

  I loved my human life. And I was learning to appreciate my life as a shifter. I liked being part of a community of other people who had the same—or at least similar—abilities.

  But it didn’t leave much time for me to be Lindi the serpent. Lindi the counselor and Lindi the Shifter had been taking up all my time.

  It was good to get back home, get out into a snake’s world, and just be for a while.

  By the time I got back to the house and got Serena settled again in the terrarium, Mom was home cooking dinner.

  Yeah. It was good to have some things that remained the same, no matter what else might change.

  Chapter 18

  SATURDAY AFTERNOON, I stood in front of the terrarium chatting with Serena. When I glanced down, I noticed something different about her bright green snake body. The colors were beginning to change, and the scales were smoothing out. Even as I watched, her body began to plump out and small appendages poked out of her side. Bright sparkles swirled around her. Unlike the earth magic that I saw when I shifted, these were multicolored, like tiny Christmas fairy lights glittering around her.

  She was absolutely beautiful.

  As I stood enthralled, I heard the door to the herpetarium open behind me.

  “Dad, come look,” I exclaimed. “Serena is finally shifting!”

  “She’s what?”

  The voice that answered me was not my father’s.

  By the time I spun around to try to intercept him, Shane was already standing next to me, staring into Serena’s enclosure, his mouth hanging wide open.

  “What the...?” His voice trailed off.

  I tried to interpose myself between him and Serena, but he was already peering down into the terrarium.

  Serena’s shift was almost complete.

  And Dad’s grad student had seen it.

  I didn’t want to leave an infant human in the snake enclosure for any longer than I had to. I needed to get her into the house and check all her vitals—and all of that machinery was in the house.

  For the first time, I realized how ridiculous it had been to assume that she wouldn’t shift while we were out in the snake house.

  I shouldered Shane out of the way, and he stumbled a little, still too shocked to have any real response.

  “You realize, of course,” I said, as I clutched the tiny baby to my chest, “that no one will believe you.”

  I made eye contact with him and let my vision go gray, a sure sign that my eyes had shifted to serpent form.

  A protective adrenaline rushed through me, and I let my fangs snap into place—a move I’d never actually made but had often fantasized about. “If you expose her to danger, I will come for you.” The S’s hissed with my most snake-like sibilance.

  I let my eyes shift back to human, retracted my fangs, and gave him a sunny smile. “If you tell anyone what happened here, they’ll think you’re insane.”

  Without another word, I turned on my heel and marched into the house, where I attached the miniature electrodes to Serena’s tiny, naked body.

  She was perfectly fine.

  I was trembling.

  I STOOD IN MY OLD BEDROOM over the bed, where I spread out a small baby blanket and used it to swaddle the now-human Serena exactly as the doctor had showed me at the hospital. I was breathing hard, unable to calm down after the interaction with Shane.

  The thumping of masculine footsteps up the stairs didn’t help my mood at all. I scooped Serena up in my arms and held her protectively. Turning to face the
door, I narrowed my eyes, preparing to respond to either my father or Shane.

  But who came through the door was actually Kade. An inarticulate cry escaped me, and I all but flew to him—at least as much as an arm full of human baby Serena would allow. He wrapped us both up into his arms, creating a protective cage that held us safe, at least for the moment.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  I didn’t answer immediately, instead standing up on my tiptoes to press my lips to his. Everything about him seemed perfect in that moment. The fact that I didn’t have to stretch too much to kiss him. The amazing sense of presence he always projected into any space. The way his eyes swirled with hot, golden sparks after I’d kissed him. The fact that even as I stood there holding an infant, I felt his body’s reaction to mine as it pressed hard against me.

  “I’m glad to see you, too,” he said, his voice crawling low in his throat. He pulled me tighter against him for a moment then put both his hands on my shoulders and took a slight step back away from me. His beautiful, brown-gold eyes examined me carefully. Then he reached out to take Serena from me.

  He gazed down at her in his arms as he moved to the bed and sat down. Glancing up at me, he asked, “How long has it been since she shifted?”

  I checked my watch. “Maybe ten or twelve minutes?”

  “I’m a little surprised she’s not crying yet. That’s hungry work.” With a sure touch, he shifted her from one arm to his shoulder and balanced her there with one hand as he used the other to dig through the small black diaper bag Dr. Jimson had sent with me.

  He pulled out a bottle of baby formula, already prepackaged, and a separate nipple from another section of the bag.

  “Put these together for me?” He held out the items. I took them, a little bemusedly, and began figuring out how they all fit together.

  When I had the bottle ready, I handed it to him. He had spent the intervening few minutes talking to Serena, his voice sweet and quiet.

  “Is this what ‘supportive whatever’ looks like?” I asked as I handed him the bottle. He slipped it into Serena’s mouth, and once she was suckling happily, he grinned up at me.

  “This is exactly what supportive whatever looks like.”

  I dropped onto the bed next to him, sitting as heavily and suddenly as if my knees had actually given out. In actuality, they only felt like they had. “I think I might love you more right now than I ever have before,” I said, leaning my head over to rest it on his shoulder.

  “Now,” he said, “tell me what you were so angry about when I came in.”

  So I did. Everything, from my dad inviting Shane the grad student to come hang out, apparently in the actual hopes that he would see Serena changing, to the moment when I had shoved past Shane and out of the herpetarium entirely.

  By the time I finished talking, I was furious all over again. “And it’s like he has completely betrayed everything he ever knew about me. We spent my entire childhood keeping what I was a secret—and from what I’ve learned about the shifter world, that might have been what kept me alive. If people had known—if shifters had known—that I was a survivor of whatever extermination program y’all had put in place, I probably would’ve been assassinated. I do not want for these children to face something that terrible.”

  “And absolute secrecy is the only model you have for dealing with a dangerous situation like this?”

  I glared at him. “Don’t try to use counselor-speak on me. I know what you’re doing.”

  Kade moved Serena to his other arm, and I forced myself not to melt at the sight of him handling her so competently, so calmly.

  “I did go to medical school, you know,” he said. “We had a pretty substantial psychiatric series. I did a rotation in psych.”

  Shaking my head, I reached out and took Serena from him, holding her up onto my shoulder and patting her back. “No. It’s not the only possibility. But yes, it is my childhood model for dealing with a potentially dangerous situation that involves children who are also shifters.”

  “Have you considered possibly giving your father’s idea a try?” Kade’s gaze was a little too direct, a little too innocent.

  “You’re in on this, aren’t you?” I asked.

  He stretched out on his side on the bed, cupping his head in the hand on his propped-up elbow so that his biceps bulged.

  “Don’t try to distract me by posing like some pinup boy,” I said, trying hard not to laugh.

  Kade snorted and began trying other poses for me. “What about this one? Is this distracting enough?”

  “Scoot over, you smartass.” I slid Serena onto the bed between us and stretched out beside Kade. I put my head down along my arm and looked up at him. “Do you really think it’s a good idea?”

  His mouth twisted a little as he considered. “I’m just not sure it’s a bad idea. It may be an impossible idea, at this point. Now that he’s seen a shift, he may run screaming in the other direction.”

  “About that...”

  “What did you leave out?” Kade’s voice was flat.

  “When I told him that no one would believe him? I might have shifted my eyes and teeth a little.”

  Kade shook his head, but he didn’t actually seem bothered by it.

  “As long as he didn’t get pictures, no one will ever believe him. And with the things they can do with photo manipulation, no one would believe him anyway.”

  I heaved a sigh of relief. I didn’t want to admit how much my instant, furious reaction had been worrying me.

  “Okay,” I said. “If that little incident didn’t send him screaming into the wilderness, I will consider the possibility that someone like Shane Wills the grad student might be helpful as we attempt to raise up to eight snake shifter babies.”

  “There’s no we in this. I’m merely the supportive whatever, remember?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Sure you are.” I reached my hand over to run it along the side of his face. “So what are you doing out here, anyway? Not that I’m not glad to see you, but I thought you were on duty all weekend at the hospital.”

  “One of the other ER doctors had a request in to see if anyone could switch out for a different weekend next month—I thought I’d take him up on it and come see how you girls are doing.”

  Yeah, right. Supportive whatever, my ass.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” I said aloud. “But you may have come out here for nothing. Dr. Jimson wanted me to bring Serena back in if she shifted. I should probably go do that now.”

  “Why don’t you let me drive the two of you back into town?” Kade asked.

  “But my car is out here.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe we could come out again tonight and shift.” He looked at me with raised eyebrows. All too often, our shifting time spent together ended up with us back in our human forms having wild, passionate sex in the dirt.

  “I think that sounds like an absolutely perfect idea,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  He gathered up all the baby gear, and as we went down the stairs, I asked him, “Why are you so good with infants?”

  “I have seven siblings of my own,” he pointed out. “I’ve been surrounded by cousins, siblings, nieces, nephews—there have been children around me all my life. “

  “Until you moved to Texas,” I said, realizing something for the first time. “Did you move here to get away from your enormous family?”

  We moved outside, and Kade deposited all of Serena’s equipment in the back of his truck.

  “Not so much to get away from them,” he said as he opened the door to my backseat and began expertly unstrapping the baby seat. “More like get away from the constant surveillance that came with them.”

  I nodded as if I actually understood what it might be like to have an enormous extended family.

  Of course, with all the children who were likely to be coming into my life, it looked like I might be on deck to find out.

  “Okay, we’re ready to go. Give her to me.”

&nbs
p; When Kade gotten her settled into the baby seat, all strapped in and ready to go, she looked unbelievably tiny and frail. “What if she shifts back on the way into town?” I asked.

  “Well, better a snake in the baby seat than a baby in the snake cage, I suppose.”

  “What do shifter parents do?”

  Cage shrugged. “Probably the same thing human parents do. Improvise a lot.”

  I shook my head. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  I had just stepped up on the truck’s running board when the door of the herpetarium opened, and Shane strode out.

  He froze at the sight of me, but only for an instant. He drew in a bracing breath, then kept walking toward me.

  Kade watched him, his head tilted in a way that made me think of his golden furred mongoose form, alert and listening, with one ear canted to catch anything that might come its direction.

  Shane gave a respectful nod to Kade, but his attention was focused on me. “Can I talk to you for a minute before you leave, Lindi?” he asked, his tone diffident.

  “Okay.” I stepped down, back onto the ground, and moved around to the front of the truck, where I stood with my arms crossed over my chest defensively. “I’m going to get the air conditioner running to keep Serena cool,” Kade said, and tactfully moved into the cab of the truck, where he could sit and watch without actually listening in on us—or at least that would be true if he were human. As a mongoose, his hearing was keen. He wouldn’t be missing anything.

  I walked away from the running engine, closer to the herpetarium door. “What do you need?” I asked, trying to keep my voice neutral.

  Shane looked over his shoulder toward Kade, as if trying to make sure he couldn’t overhear.

  “Kade knows everything,” I said, careful not to give away Kade’s own shifter secret.

  “Of course he does,” Shane murmured, before glancing up to gaze into my eyes. “Whatever it was that I saw,” he began, “whatever it is that you and the... baby?... juvenile?”

  “Infant,” I supplied.

  He nodded. “Okay. Infant. Whatever it the two of you are, I’m not going to do anything to hurt you. I am a scientist, but I’m not looking to get myself ostracized from the scientific community. I know that I would be a complete laughingstock. Treated like some cryptozoologist. I don’t want that, not at all. I do not want to ruin my career any more than you want me to ruin your life by outing you.”