More Than Skin Deep (Shifter Shield Book 3)

by Margo Bond Collins

  I glanced at Shadow. She wasn’t thrilled with the arrangement, from the looks of her, but she seemed content enough to go along with it for now, anyway.

  “I realize it is an imposition,” Jeremiah was saying, “but could we possibly…”

  “You can stay here,” I said. “I’ll be away this weekend, but you can use my computer and contact me via that email I created for you, if you need to. And I stopped by a grocery store. There should be enough supplies here to get you through the weekend—be careful, and if anything comes up, you know how to reach me.” The two nodded, and to my surprise, Jeremiah, who seemed so reticent, reached out to give me a quick hug. Shadow did not follow his example, but she did nod gravely to me and gave a half wave as I headed toward the door.

  It wasn’t the clear, clean break and ending that I had been hoping for, and I wasn’t going to be able to tell Kade about those two the next time I talk to him as I had hoped, but it looked like their situation was wrapping up fairly soon. At any rate, I didn’t think I needed to worry about them over the weekend. I hadn’t seen any sign of werewolf surveillance since going to Kade’s house, and I assumed if they suspected the hyena and Hunter had reached out to me, they would be watching me pretty closely. Just to be sure, I engaged my reptilian senses on the way out to my parking spot.

  Nothing. I headed off to the hospital feeling pretty confident that everything here was going to turn out okay.

  Shows what I know.

  * * *

  At the hospital, Dr. Jimson helped me gear up for Serena. He had been glad to learn that I was taking her to my parents’ ranch—even happier to discover that my father was a herpetologist. “So you’ll have everything you need for a juvenile serpent, I presume,” he said. I nodded—anything I didn’t have, Dad certainly would.

  “I’m more concerned about what to do if she shifts into a human infant form.” My hands tightened into fists at the thought of it—not so much that I was worried about dealing with the baby, but this baby had come quite a bit early for a human, and I was worried that there might be some human infant difficulties that she would have to deal with.

  I knew premature human babies often had trouble. Right? God, it had been so long since I had taken my child development courses that I could hardly remember. I knew that some of them ended up with pretty severe developmental delays, but professionally, I tended not to see them until they were in school. I sometimes got the younger sibling of one of my clients in for a family session, but my work mostly dealt with children five years and up.

  Dr. Jimson was watching me with a slight smile. “Dr. Nevala was down here earlier making sure we had everything ready to go for you on that account,” he said. I blinked, startled by the comment. “Kade was here?”

  Jimson smiled wider, and said, “Fluttering around every bit as nervous as any new father.”

  I didn’t even answer that. I didn’t know what to say, for one thing. Like a “new dad?” Not, apparently, like a “supportive… whatever.”

  I brushed the thought aside. I’d deal with it later. “What did you come up with?” I asked.

  “First of all, we’re going to send her with you in a fairly standard terrarium with a warming lamp. I’ll help you secure it in the front passenger seat where you can keep an eye on it. I’m also having a traditional children’s car seat installed in the back seat. I’ll give you a quick lesson in how to use it, and then, if she shifts while you are driving out there, you should pull over immediately and move her from the terrarium to the infant seat.”

  I didn’t even know what to say to that. The thought of her shifting while I was out on the highway made my head spin and my stomach clench. Surely she wouldn’t do that, though. Right?

  Suddenly I wished I had waited until Kade could come with me. At least then I would’ve had someone else in the car to keep an eye on Serena.

  Plus, I wouldn’t have minded seeing some of this new-father behavior for myself.

  Dr. Jimson was still speaking. “I’m also sending a monitor for her heart rate and oxygen level. If she shifts while you are out at the ranch, you will need to hook her up to this, and keep track of it. You’ll have a small oxygen take that you can if she needs it as you bring her back into town.” He pointed out each of these items as he went through them, and I found myself nodding almost by rote, overwhelmed by all the possible things that might happen. Terrified by what might go wrong.

  Dr. Jimson pulled out an infant-sized doll, complete with floppy head and arms. From a cabinet that ran along the side of the room.

  “This is our CPR doll. We’ll use her to show you how to hook everything up and what to do in case of an emergency.”

  Luckily, I was certified in CPR—it was a requirement of my job. That part didn’t take long at all.

  As we went through the various other options, I snapped photos to use in case I ended up having to replicate any of the placement for these devices. Really, it didn’t look like it would be too difficult, and when Dr. Jimson had me practice for myself, it was all easy enough—on a perfectly still doll. I didn’t know how well it would work with a squirming infant.

  I strapped the doll into the car seat a couple of times to show that I knew how to do it, and pulled my car around to a side entrance, where we were unlikely to be seen by any human patients. There, one of the nurses, Kelly, loaded the terrarium into my car, buckling it into the front seat. I drove away from the hospital slowly, more anxious behind the wheel that I had been since I was a teenager learning to drive.

  Inside the terrarium, Serena raised up on the lower half of her body, peering at me and tasting the air molecules in my car.

  “I know,” I said to her. “Things smell different out here, don’t they?”

  I chattered to her about all the things we could go do when we got out to my parents’ land. I talked to her as I would a human child, discussing things with the assumption that she would learn language more quickly the more I talked to her.

  I supposed it was really the same when it came to shifting. The more she saw it done, the more quickly she would learn to do it, too.

  As she coiled in on herself under the lamp, though, I had to admit to myself that I knew exactly why she didn’t have any real interest in shifting right now. Human babies are frustratingly immobile. I didn’t know exactly how different a shifter child’s development was, but if she followed a normal human child development timeline, she was, what? three months? A long time away from even being able to roll over on her own.

  As a serpent, she had mobility. Not much more than to the walls of the terrarium they were keeping her in, but mobility, nonetheless.

  I didn’t know that I would want to shift, either.

  For that matter, I sometimes wondered what it was that had prompted the, when I was a child, to shift at all. I had no idea how long I had been on my own when my father found me, but I had no memories before then. I suspected I had been in serpent form for quite a while. For all I knew, I had never been in human form before the night I shifted so that my father discovered me in my tank the next morning. As I turned into the driveway, and pulled up toward the house and the herpetarium in the back, my father stepped out of the back door and waved.

  He was clearly excited to see Serena.

  Maybe me, too, but I wasn’t certain. I had pulled to a stop and was smiling widely, when someone else stepped out of the house behind him.

  Chapter 6

  It was a man, about my age, tall and muscular. He wore close-fitting Levi’s, a plaid button-down with the sleeves rolled up, and a cowboy hat pushed partway back on his head.

  His face was tanned, and he had the same kind of crows’ feet around his eyes that Dad did, though not as defined yet. I couldn’t tell for sure, but I thought his hair was slightly blonde. What I did know was that I had no idea who this guy was, and he was standing between me and herpetarium.

  I needed to get Serena in there without him seeing her. If he knew a
nything about snakes at all, he would realize that she was not your normal reptile.

  I got out of the car and shut the door behind me. My shoes crunched on the gravel as I moved toward the two men. “Hey, Dad. Am I early?” I tried to give him an easy out. Surely he had simply forgotten what time I was coming, or had failed to notice the time—he was, after all, a fairly typical absent-minded professor. It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.

  “No, not at all,” Dad boomed. “Come on over and meet Shane.” He placed his hand of the younger man’s back and ushered him forward a little.

  I nodded, slightly hesitantly. “Hello.”

  Shane—whoever he was—touched the brim of his hat and said, “Hi. Nice to meet you.”

  “Shane is working on his dissertation. He’s currently my star grad student. I’m expecting great things out of him.”

  Shit. What was Dad thinking? This guy didn’t only know something about snakes—if he was one of Dad’s grad students, he knew practically everything about snakes. How the hell was I going to get Serena past him? I turned my shoulder on Shane a little, trying to convey my outrage to Dad with my eyes. He either didn’t get it, or he ignored it. I guessed the latter.

  “So where’s Serena?” he asked jovially.

  For the first time in ages—again, since I was a teenager—I had the most unbelievable urge to snap my fangs down at my father.

  Of course, that would be even worse than letting Shane the grad student see Serena.

  “She’s in the car. I’ll get her.”

  Maybe I could at least get her inside and settled without Dad’s student looking on.

  No such luck. As soon as he saw me wrestling with the terrarium, he practically leapt at the chance to help.

  “Let me give you hand with that.”

  “Oh, better not. She is a little anxious around new people, and tends to be cranky. Also, I think she has a bit of a delicate system.” I threw pretty much every comment I had ever heard my father make about a touchy snake in his care.

  Shane the grad student fell back a step, so he wasn’t entirely oblivious—which is more than I can say for a lot of Dad’s grad students over the years. Herpetologists tend to be overwhelmingly geeky scientists without much in the way of social skills. When it comes to humans, anyway.

  I kept my back mostly turned to Shane as I staggered toward the herpetarium. “Open the door for me, Dad,” I called out.

  As he held the door for me, and I slid by, I said, “May I talk to you for a moment, please?”

  Inside the building where Dad kept most of his serpent specimens, I turned around to him and hissed, “What do you think you’re doing, bringing a graduate student out here when you knew Serena and I were coming to work on shifting?”

  Dad regarded me with his steady gaze. After a long, silent few seconds, he crossed his arms and leaned back against one of the shelves that ran alongside the wall at desk height. “Honestly? I’m thinking that it might be useful for you to have another herpetologist who knows about you. Especially now that you’re going to be taking on so many others.”

  “You don’t get to decide that for me.” The sheer audacity of him bringing someone into the biggest secret of my life without asking me first took my breath away. Before this moment, I would’ve said that I trusted him implicitly. He had been my rock—the stability in my life that allowed me to learn who I was and still connect to the human world around me.

  “And if I had asked, what would you have said?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t even have an answer for that question. I couldn’t have said anything but no. Especially now that I had joined the wider shifter world, I didn’t have the right to tell anybody else what was going on.

  “I hoped that may be if you met him, got a chance to know him, you might be willing to at least consider the possibility.” Dad shrugged, but I saw a hint of red around his ears—a clear sign that he felt pretty strongly about what he was saying. It didn’t always give away what the emotion he was feeling was—maybe embarrassment, or anger, or excitement—but he was definitely invested in whatever reasoning he had come up with to do this. Mom and I had made fun of him for that emotional tell for years.

  I pressed a hand to my forehead. “Let me get Serena settled, and I’ll come in and make nice with your grad student. But then, you take him somewhere else while I take Serena out to my sunning rock. We’re going to spend this afternoon together in our other forms.”

  Dad nodded. “Okay.” He started to head toward the door, but then turned and glanced back at me. “Will you at least try to keep an open mind about the possibility?”

  I narrowed my eyes at him.

  “Just think about it. If he were on the staff at that group home you’ve been talking about, it could possibly save y’all a lot of trouble.”

  “We have shifter doctors. Kade is going to be one of them.”

  “And you’ve told me yourself that your Dr. Nevala and the others up at Kindred Hospital don’t have any real experience with your kind.”

  “Neither does your grad student,” I pointed out.

  Dad sighed and pushed the door open. “Just consider it. Please, for me.”

  I listened until I heard the squeaking hinges on the screen door leading into the house. Then I turned to Serena, and began making sure her terrarium had everything she might need for the short amount of time I planned to be inside talking to Shane the grad student. “I know he means well,” I said to Serena as I puttered around making sure everything was perfect. “But this has to be the worst plan he’s ever come up with. I don’t see how he possibly could’ve run that by mom before he did it. I know you haven’t met my mom yet. You’ll see her this weekend. She has a class this afternoon—your grandma. I think you’ll really like her. And I know she wants to hold on to you in your other shape.”

  Serena regarded me with her steady gaze, and I reached in to stroke her head.

  * * *

  When I got inside, Dad had a cup of coffee waiting for me, exactly the way I liked it. His version of a peace offering.

  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, the that 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.