Thin Skinned

by Margo Bond Collins

  It was stuffed with money.

  Chapter 6

  Yep. There was definitely cash inside this dead body. Lots of cash.

  I wriggled around some more, working to get a sense of where the cash was hidden.

  Inside her torso, I finally decided. Or at least inside her dress. I wasn’t about to open it up to check, though.

  If I didn’t see it, I didn’t have to report it. Right?

  I really need to get my hands on a copy of the counselor’s ethical code.

  But I’d have to get hands, first.

  So maybe that could mean that I don’t have to report anything that happens when I’m in my serpent form?

  Human rules were not designed to deal with snake shifters.

  I had no good way to put this in a report, anyway. What would I write? While slithering through the dead woman’s casket, I tasted the smell of cold, hard cash.

  No. Just no.

  I continued toward the package Ron had hidden under her. But once again, my attention was snagged by something along the way.

  This time, I completely froze.

  The woman wore a large, metal pendant. In my shifted vision, it glinted silver in a tiny beam of light filtering in through the lid, but for all I knew, it might have been gold or even bronze.

  That wasn’t what caught my attention, though.

  Engraved on the pendant was an image of a figure that was half-snake, half-woman.

  I stared at it for a long moment, folding the air around it into my mouth in tiny little flicks of my tongue. The pendant was old—older than the chain, though both carried the woman’s scent buried deep within them. But the pendant held more—other women’s scents, soaked so thoroughly into the metal that it was practically bound to it.

  And now that I could taste the molecules, it was clearly made of gold. The figure of the woman was worn down, but still clearly visible, her serpentine lower half coiled into a perfect coil, her naked upper half crowned by spirals of hair twisting and looping in shapes that echoed that coil.

  The center of the piece had been touched so often that the image’s naked breasts had been worn away to mere hints of curves.

  That Abuela had cherished this pendant was clear.

  So why was she being buried with it? It seemed like the kind of item that would be passed down.

  Unless she wasn’t an abuela at all. Maybe she didn’t have anyone to leave it to? Or maybe her grandchildren hadn’t wanted it, a new generation that scoffed at the beliefs of their elders, the simple things they cherished.

  Like a pendant with an image of a snake-lady on it. An image of someone like me, maybe?

  I’d never met anyone else like me before.

  Granted, it wasn’t an image of a form I often took. My human parents had encouraged me to take the shape of either a human or a snake, not the strange, half-shapes in between.

  But as a teenager, I had practiced, out on the ranchland I grew up on, far away from anyone else’s prying eyes.

  I had practiced shifting each part of my body separately. So now, I could shift only my vomeronasal organ to test the scent of a room, or I could allow a viper’s heat-sensing pits to form beside my nose in order to scan a room for heat signatures even in the dark.

  I knew without a doubt that I could take the form of a human body bearing a snake head. And I could take a form almost precisely like the one on Abuela’s pendant, with a human upper half and a serpentine lower half.

  It wasn’t like I didn’t know there must be others like me out there somewhere. Obviously, I was unlikely to be some kind of genetic freak, a one-of-a-kind monstrosity without any precedent.

  Even if I’d felt that way sometimes while I was growing up.

  I’d seen images like this before, too, back when I’d felt lost and alone in the world and gone searching for them. It wasn’t like the concept was new to me. But this was the first time I’d seen an image of a snake shifter as anything other than a curiosity in a book or an image on a website.

  It was the first time I’d seen it in connection to a real person.

  And of course, curse my rotten luck, that person was dead.

  I needed to find out more about who this Abuela was. For the first time, I took a careful look at her. Her hair was gray and wavy, her skin softly wrinkled and folded.

  She really did look kind and grandmotherly, like someone’s abuela. Someone who should be loved and treated well after death. Not shoved around and stuffed full of cash and used as a way to sneak into countries.

  It was disrespectful. And hateful.

  For the first time since I’d followed my instincts and stowed away in the Beaumonts’ engine, I felt actual anger. I hadn’t even had a chance to see Baby Paige up close yet—even though she was the one I was doing all of this for—but I’d spent a significant amount of time with Abuela, and what was happening here was unconscionable.

  If I’d had hands, I would have run them over my face in irritation. Instead, I let the tip of my tail twitch once, twice—and on the third time, it accidentally thumped against the inside of the coffin. I instantly held it still.

  “What was that?” Lori’s voice sounded panicked.

  Baby Paige let out a wail.

  “What was what?” In my imagination, Hale didn’t even bother opening his closed eyes to acknowledge his wife’s distress. He sounded bored enough to be sitting there half-asleep. “And God, Lori. Shut that kid the hell up.”

  Lori ignored his comment about the baby. “It sounded like it came from inside the coffin.”

  “No way. You’re imagining things. You need another hit.”

  “I am not hallucinating.” Lori’s voice rose. “Dammit, Hale. You never believe what I tell you.”

  Ron’s voice interrupted Hale. “No. I heard it, too. She’s right. It sounded like it came from inside the coffin.”

  “Something inside shifted, then,” Hale replied. “You know, like a box of cereal? Contents may settle during shipping.”

  Another male voice spoke in Spanish, and Ron answered him in the same language. I didn’t like not knowing what was going on out there.

  But then I heard footsteps coming closer.

  Dammit. They were about to open the coffin. I was sure of it. My time as a passive bystander—or by-hider, anyway—was almost over. And I had no idea how I was going to deal with being found, either.

  I withdrew to the bottom of the coffin again—but I wasn’t able to pull my entire body under the fabric. Not without sliding under Abuela’s skirt. And that just seemed way too impolite. She’d been through enough.

  I was still contemplating my options when the top half of the coffin flipped open and light streamed in.

  Chapter 7

  “Nothing there,” Ron announced. “Nada.”

  I knew that word. I didn’t know the spate of Spanish that followed after. But I was coiled and ready to move when the bottom half of the casket flew open because I could tell it was coming.

  As soon as the light hit my eyes, I flowed up and out the back corner of the casket, away from the side where the two men, Ron and his Spanish-speaking companion, stood.

  Both men leaped backward, cursing in two different languages. I slipped under the closest row of seats and began sliding toward the front of the airplane, searching for a place to hide.

  I heard Ron yelling, but made out only one line in his scrambled screeching. “Yes. I said there’s a motherfucking snake on the plane!”

  Someone laughed, and Ron cursed again.

  The problem with being the snake on the plane is that there aren’t really that many good hiding spots for snakes. Not big ones, anyway.

  I finally managed to get myself wedged into what I suspected was designed to be a trash receptacle in a small kitchenette in the center of the plane.

  I stayed there for all of two minutes with the drug-runners alternating between tearing up the plane and howling in laughter at Ron’s frantic shouts before I decided that the last thing I wante
d was to be cornered when they finally, inevitably found me.

  So I peeked back out and made my way from hidden corner to hidden corner.

  Right up until the moment someone else saw me and gave a shout. “Holy shit, he wasn’t lying. There really was a python in the casket!”

  Once I’d been spotted, it was inevitable that they’d start talking about ways to kill me. As a general rule, humans aren’t that forgiving of reptiles ending up in their spaces. Especially not snakes.

  One of the smugglers casually pulled a gun on me, prepared to shoot. His fellow travelers in the airplane began waving their arms frantically and shouting at him in Spanish, presumably to keep him from actually following through with that plan.

  For a full thirty seconds after he lowered his weapon, I was certain that I was going to survive this trip. But then another one of the men aboard—I counted four passengers in addition to Lori and Hale—pulled out a knife.

  It was a scary knife, too—one of those giant Bowie knives, made for hunting and scraping the insides out of animals.

  And wereanimals, apparently.

  Just the sight of it made me hiss in dismay.

  “Did you hear that?” Ron demanded. “Damn thing just threatened us. That’s what it means when they hiss like that.”

  What? It is not! I wanted to yell at him, but of course, I couldn’t.

  I tried to retreat back the way I’d come, but the people on board had been busy piling up objects to block my way under the seats.

  Even worse, another man stood back there, also holding a knife.

  I was trapped. I flicked my tongue out, trying to test for any weaknesses. When that didn’t work, I concentrated carefully, letting the heat-sensing pits of a viper develop in my face, hoping the extra sense would show me some hidden space on the plane that I’d missed before.

  Nothing.

  I contemplated actually fighting the men with the knives.

  No go. I mean, I could kill them. Even in my current shape, I could disrupt the blood-flow to a human’s brain and knock him out in mere seconds. It didn’t take long after that to cause death. And I was able to mimic the form of any snake, to take on all its characteristics, so I could shift into a viper easily enough, or an elapid snake. A bite from, say, a black mamba or a cobra could kill a man.

  But I wasn’t willing to do that.

  It would be murder, as far as I was concerned, and everything in my upbringing screamed at me that it was deeply wrong.

  I couldn’t allow myself to be killed, either—my natural self-preservation instincts screeched against that just as much.

  That didn’t leave me many options. If I tried to squeeze one man until he passed out, the other would attack me with his knife.

  They planned to kill me. I could see it in their eyes. And they were moving in closer at every moment, trying to corner me. If I struck out in any direction, they would see it as an attack.

  That left only one option.

  Shit. I’m really going to have to do it.

  Slowly, I rose as high on my lower body as I could, almost half my body height. Both men reacted by tightening their grips on their knives. But instead of striking out at them, as they both clearly expected me to do, I began concentrating on shifting.

  My parents had worked to convince me never to show my serpent form to anyone—and even more than that, to never show anyone that I could shift between forms.

  Even as I began to change, I could almost hear my father telling me that getting outed as a weresnake was the worst thing that could possibly happen to me. “They’ll take you away from us, Lindi, lock you in a lab somewhere to study you. I couldn’t bear that.”

  As I concentrated on allowing the molecules of my body to swim back into their other form, I found my internal vision of my form slipping back and forth, snake to human and back to snake.

  Everything around me disappeared for a moment as my eyes shifted, and in that instant, an image of Abuela’s pendant flashed through my mind, and I realized what it reminded me of: a saint medal, the kind Catholics wore.

  A snake goddess.

  Was that what she was?

  Was that what I was?

  When my eyes cleared again, I realized that my focus on the snake goddess’s form had left me in that particular shape—my usual human self in the top half, disconcertingly naked, and the form of a snake in my lower half.

  I glanced around for something to cover myself with and saw nothing.

  And then the man holding the Bowie knife let out a shrill scream, dropped his blade, and fell to the floor, huddled face-down with his forehead touching the carpeting.

  Chapter 8

  “Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte!” the man on the floor was shouting, but his voice was muffled.

  The two other men took up the shout. “Santa Muerte, Santa Muerte!”

  I knew enough Spanish to understand that they were shouting something about Saint Death—but something about the term niggled at the back of my mind, too.

  Was that the image on the pendant Abuela wore? Saint Death?

  And she looked like me?

  I liked my interpretation of her being a snake goddess better.

  Baby Paige added to the noise by setting up a weeping howl. For the first time, I glanced over at them. Lori was clutching the toddler to her, holding her tightly around the middle. Lori’s own expression was stunned, her mouth hanging open and her eyes wide as she stared at me. Hale looked more confused and angry than stunned, but I wasn’t sure if that was his usual expression or not.

  But Baby Paige was fascinated. She wasn’t screaming because Lori was hurting her. She was screaming because she wanted to come to me.

  The baby stretched her arms out to me, grasping for me, asking me to pick her up and hold her. Without the adults’ preconceived ideas about snakes, Baby Paige was fascinated by me.

  I could feel my face soften when I looked at her, and she stopped crying for an instant and clapped her hands and laughed.

  Lori, seeing that interchange, jerked the baby away, spinning around so Paige couldn’t see me anymore. “You monster,” she shrieked. “You stay away from my baby. You can’t have her.”

  That seemed to jerk Hale out of his stupor. He scowled fiercely, glaring back and forth between the baby and me. He’d missed the interplay, but he was ready, as ever, to announce his claim over the child.

  I didn’t have a chance to answer Lori, though, because instantly, other people from around us in the plane started shouting, too.

  “What the hell is going on back here?” Phil stomped in from where he’d apparently been hanging out with the pilot. We made eye contact first and he frowned as if trying to place my face. Then he took two steps closer and saw my coils supporting me below the top half of my body. His face went completely blank and he stumbled to a halt. “What—” he started but couldn’t find words to finish his question.

  “What are you?” Ron finally managed to spit out.

  I considered how to answer him. But Hale answered for me first. “That’s our—that’s the counselor.”

  I had to clench my jaws to keep from snickering. Especially when Ron said, “What the fuck kind of counselor is that?”

  “Santa Muerte!” one of the Spanish speakers insisted.

  I shrugged. “I’m the one who’s going to make sure that Lori and Hale don’t leave the country with Baby Paige.”

  “You're a little too late for that,” Phil said. “We will be landing in Mexico pretty soon.” He gave me a thoughtful once-over. “You think she’d be worth anything?” he asked Ron.

  Ron flipped his knife up into his hand and set it down gently on the closest seat. “You want to take her to the circus, you can work out how to catch her. You didn’t see her when she was a fucking snake all over.”

  “What would you say she is now?” Phil asked.

  “I’m voting for hallucination.” Ron took a step back, bringing as much distance between him and me as he possibly could.r />
  I took the opportunity to move a little closer to the casket.

  A plan was forming in the back of my mind. I was hoping I would not have to use it, but the less frightened Phil and his men became of me, the more likely it grew that I would need to do something to change that.

  I caught Phil’s gaze sliding slimily over my exposed breasts.

  I turned to Ron and pointed. “You. Get me a shirt out of someone’s bag. I know somebody has to have one.”

  He scowled, but he reached into an overhead compartment and pulled out a small suitcase.

  The shirt he tossed me look like it was probably his own—slightly worn, Western cotton, button-up. It strained across my breasts, but it covered them, at least.

  I made eye contact with Phil as I buttoned it up, dragging his gaze up from my chest. “You don’t want the amount of poison that will get you,” I said in my flattest voice.

  He made a noncommittal noise. “So you say.”

  The whole time I’d been putting on the shirt, I had allowed myself to drift along on my slightly undulating coils, getting closer and closer to the casket.

  “Now that’s dealt with,” I said, “I need someone to tell me what, exactly, these guys mean when they say Santa Muerte.”

  The man who had been bowing at my feet had grown silent as I spoke, watching me through narrowed eyes. I didn’t know if it was because he did or did not believe that I was whatever Santa Muerte might be. But I was fairly sure that whatever he was thinking, he was still my best possible chance of getting out of this alive.

  Oh, and also without getting hauled off to a lab and experimented on by scientists for the rest of my unnaturally shortened life.

  “It’s a local saint near their home,” Phil said, dropping down into one of the seats and draping his arms over the back of it. He rested his chin on his wrists and watched me with a lazy grin on his face.

  I didn’t like that expression. It suggested that he thought he had the upper hand somehow. I moved a few inches closer to the casket.

  Finally, the term Santa Muerte clicked for me. I had read an article about it when I was in grad school, the death-saint figure that was cropping up among South and Central American Catholics. She was like a cross between a saint and a skeleton, almost a voodoo figure, and was said to look out for those in dangerous positions. For this reason, she was a favorite of drug runners.