In Someone Else's Skin

by Margo Bond Collins

  In Someone Else’s Skin

  Lindi Parker Shifter Shield Book 3

  Margo Bond Collins

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  In Someone Else's Skin

  About In Someone Else’s Skin

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  In Someone Else’s Skin

  A Paranormal Romance & Urban Fantasy

  Copyright © 2020 by Margo Bond Collins

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval systems, without prior written permission of the author except where permitted by law.

  Published by Bathory Gate Press

  Granbury, Texas

  THE CHARACTERS AND events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  About In Someone Else’s Skin

  Lindi Parker is scared out of her mind—and for a snakeshifter, that’s saying something.

  When Lindi grabbed the latest newborn lamias and leaped into the unknown, she knew she was risking all their lives.

  But the alternative—allowing the faction that wants to eliminate all lamias on sight to capture them—meant certain death.

  Now she’s faced with a brand-new enemy in an unknown land and all she wants to do is to get back home.

  This time, her status as a Shifter Shield won’t save her.

  Prologue

  Less than six months ago, I didn’t know there were any other shapeshifters in the world. For all I knew, I was some aberration, a weird science experiment gone wrong and abandoned in the west Texas desert.

  I don’t know how old I was when Dad found me. He’s a biology professor who specializes in snakes—a herpetologist who brought home what he thought was an adolescent individual of a new species, a snake that flared its hood like a cobra. He was stunned to find a toddler curled up in the tank the next morning, and even more surprised when he actually saw me shift from one form to another.

  Finding a new breed of snake would have made him famous, at least among certain circles.

  Finding a weresnake made him a father.

  That he was willing to take me in and make me part of his family once he realized that I was a snake shifter is, I think, a testament to how kind he and my mother are. The fact that they were able to train me up into a decent human being (at least, I think so) was always, as far as I was concerned, proof that nurture can overcome nature.

  My adoptive parents taught me early on to avoid anything that might give me away—medical exams were not a possibility, so I never went to a hospital. They homeschooled me until I was twelve and they were sure I had my shifting under control so I could go to school with other children.

  And while I worked to control my shifting, I learned to be more human than serpent. Dad always said that I should remember that I was a person first—that whatever else I might be, I was human. His lessons had helped me learn to control my desire to shift into my snake form. To do that, I ignored the other part of me as much as I could, keeping it pushed as far under my humanity as possible. And I can control it now, almost perfectly.

  But in doing so, I lost something, too. I lost a part of myself by hiding it away from everyone, including myself.

  I hid who and what I was all the way through college, then through graduate school, where I studied to become a counselor. I went to work with children at a local advocacy center, hoping to help other children like I’d been helped—even though I was certain there were no other children just like me.

  Then a young girl killed her abuser—and in the hospital, I met Dr. Kade Nevala, the sexiest man I’d ever seen. And I learned there were lots of other shifters in the world, including Kade, who turned out to be a shifter himself.

  But I also learned everyone thought I was the only one just like me—a snake shifter. A lamia.

  Kade told me lamias had been feared and hated, killed on sight until they were all eliminated. His clan, mongoose shifters, were instrumental in wiping out the lamias.

  Without someone like my parents to teach them how to care, how to draw upon their humanity as a balance to their snake sides, they had all been more snake than human.

  Cold-blooded.

  That’s what Kade said, anyway. And I believed him. Without my parents to guide me, I was certain I would never have learned compassion for the people with whom I interacted every day.

  And for a while, everything Kade said made sense. After all, we got pulled into a missing-children case that eventually led us to discover one other lamia who had escaped the purge. She’d spent her time using the oddities of shifter reproduction, our ability to crossbreed with one another and with humans, to try to rebuild the lamia race by means of requiring her own lamia-gene-bearing son to rape human women.

  I had helped save the women, killing the other lamia and helping put her son to death.

  But the lamia’s plan sort of worked, anyway. Several of the raped women had borne weresnake babies, and my own training led me to want to help raise them.

  It looked like the world would soon have a lamia clan again. I bonded with the firstborn lamia child, Serena, and had been about to become foster mother to a whole nest of snake shifter children. I joined the local shifter enforcer group, the Shifter Shields, training with them at night and continuing to work as a counselor during the day, even as Kade and I worked to build our fledgling relationship.

  For a short time, I thought everything might work out.

  But I was wrong.

  The shifter Council in Texas, where I lived, was eventually willing to accept me—but other shifters were not. One wolf pack in particular had heard there was a lamia loose in Texas and set out to kill me.

  Lucky for me, I had people on my side, as well. People who were willing to fight for us, even though they didn’t even know us.

  People who were determined to help us.

  Some of them paid for it with their lives.

  When the werewolves showed up at the hospital, determined to take the newborn lamias—maybe to kill them, maybe to do something even worse—I learned that I could use my lamia power to rip holes in our world and use them as portals to other worlds.

  One of the werewolves got away with a baby lamia.

  Kade held onto Serena.

  And I grabbed the other two lamia babies and jumped through a portal, followed by two men—Shane, who was a herpetology graduate student of my father’s, and Coit, a man who had used one of my portals to jump into our world from somewhere else.

  I left Kade and Serena, my two greatest loves, behind.

  And I didn’t know if I would ever be able to return.

  Chapter 1

  “I don’t know how to get us out of here.”

  Making the admission almost hurt physically. Like I was having it dragged out of me, being tortured until I confessed to it, although neither man with me had said anything at all for the last thirty minutes.

  The three of us sat in a barn in the middle of a field on a world that was not our own.

  At least, I assumed it was a barn. It was shaped like a geodesic dome, rounded at the top and covered in panels that might’ve been solar panels—but looked an awful lot like scales. Everything inside the building was circular, too. Even the hay bales were round—
but small enough that a regular person could maneuver them, not like the giant ones in the fields in Texas where I had spent all my life. At least, all my life I could remember.

  The space inside the barn was divided out into circles, as well—they might have been stalls, but if they were, they were round ones.

  The rest of this world that we had seen wasn’t quite like home, either. It was similar—it had fields and barns and we were sitting on hay, after all, having moved in here to get out of the scorching sunlight outside.

  But that sunlight cast different shadows and burned a little more orange than I was used to. Even the smells here were a little different—the grass outside a little sharper than our own back in Texas, the hay inside a little sweeter.

  I had brought us here when I jumped through a portal I had created with my magic in order to save two lamia babies from the werewolves who had been trying to kidnap them.

  The infant lamias were both currently coiled around my wrist, resting comfortably. The two men—Coit and Shane—were also resting, albeit not quite as comfortably as the babies. They didn’t have serpent shapes they could shift into.

  The men had followed me through the rift for different reasons. Coit wasn’t from my world. He had been lost for a while, having accidentally slipped into another dimension and stayed there until he thought he saw a way home.

  As it turned out, it wasn’t his world. But he’d tumbled into the middle of our battle and decided that he didn’t want to be on the side of werewolves who stole babies.

  Shane, on the other hand, was a resident of the Earth I inhabited. He was also a graduate student in herpetology and had been fascinated with me ever since my adoptive father had introduced us. I was quite certain he followed me and the babies in order to have an even better chance of studying lamias close-up.

  Neither man answered me, so I continued, hoping I could figure something out if I kept talking. As if saying something aloud made it true.

  “Once I regain a little more of my magical strength, I’ll try again to open a portal. But I’m not sure my magic works the same way on this land as it does back home.”

  “We need to get food and water,” Coit said. “That was the first thing I learned when I landed on Larkin’s world. We need to get a sense of the locals, figure out how we’re going to provide for ourselves while we’re here.”

  His words made my stomach knot up. This was the second time he had traveled between dimensions, and he was still looking for his way home. What made me think I could get us home?

  Part of me believed I’d be able to sense where home was. Like it would have some kind of pull on me or something. But it was just a guess. More of a hope, really.

  “That would mean we couldn’t stay here too long,” Shane said. “But we have water in kind of a trough outside—and I’m wondering if it might not be better to stay here until the sun goes down and it cools off. At least this way, we’re close to where we came through. Maybe Lindi will have a better chance of getting us home there.”

  I shook my head. “I tried there. On the other side, back home, I’ve been making—I don’t know what to call them—thin spots? holes?—in reality wherever I punch through with my magic. Here, I can’t even draw on the power that I’m used to.”

  Including the power I’d pulled from what Coit called “Larkin’s world.”

  I didn’t say that part aloud.

  Coit and Shane stared at me expectantly, as if they were waiting for me to say more.

  “I’m not sure I can get us back,” I finally clarified.

  Apparently, neither of them felt quite as urgent about that as I did. I guess that’s what comes of traveling with a dimension-hopping lunatic and a man obsessed with my species.

  I, on the other hand, was beginning to feel desperate. I hadn’t managed to save all the lamia babies. A werewolf had managed to grab one and take it through one of my magical thin spots. I needed to find that baby.

  I had to figure out a way to track it.

  Still, I was absolutely certain that Kade would come for me.

  By all rights, Kade and I should never have even been together. He was part of a clan of mongoose shifters, natural enemies to the lamia.

  I was a snake shifter. He was a snake hunter.

  Of course, by the time I’d figured out what I was, pretty much all shifters were snake hunters. The lamias had been eradicated—at least, that’s what everyone thought until I showed up. And plenty of shifters wanted to wipe me out, too, and the babies. Thus the fleeing through dimensions.

  “If we leave this barn, we will be striking out in some random direction,” I pointed out. “We don’t know where anything is—if there’s anything else at all. For all we know, this barn might be the only vestige of civilization for five hundred miles.”

  Shane laughed at that. “But it wouldn’t hurt us to go on a short hike to figure it out, would it?”

  I shook my head at him. “Weren’t you the one who was just arguing that we should stay here?”

  “I’m flexible.” He shrugged.

  “You have a vote?” I asked Coit.

  “Let’s move. I’m getting antsy just sitting here.”

  Blowing out a harsh breath, trying to exhale my fear with it, I rubbed my eyes and stood up. “Then let’s go.”

  Outside, the sun had started to go down. I hadn’t realized I had any kind of internalized sense of east or west, but something about the direction of the sunset felt wrong to me.

  This whole world feels wrong. Guess it’s time to start exploring it.

  “Which direction, boss-lady?” Shane asked.

  I closed my eyes, trying to reach out with my magic, hoping for anything to help me figure out what to do.

  Nothing.

  I picked a direction at random. “That way.”

  The three of us—five, if I counted the baby lamias still wrapped around my wrist in snake form—started up the slight incline toward whatever was waiting for us on the other side of the slight ridge ahead.

  Chapter 2

  “Looks like you picked the right direction.” Shane turned his head to look up and down the road my choice had led us to. “Got any other ideas?”

  I had absolutely no way of knowing which direction we should take. Dragging the air in over my half-shifted Jacobsen’s organ gave me no new information. The whole place tasted and smelled a little wrong.

  So instead of trying to figure it out, I left it up to fate. Sort of.

  Okay, fine. I eeny-meeny-miney-moe’d it.

  We ended up taking a right.

  And then I did the same thing at the next crossroads and took a left.

  For all that this world was different from our own, there were similarities, too. The roads were paved with something that looked kind of like asphalt, even though it smelled a little different. Fences made out of wooden posts strung with wire ran along the sides of the road. Tall grasses in the bar ditches showed that no one had mowed there in a long time, though of course the fences themselves suggested civilization of a sort.

  We had stopped for a long, final drink of water from the water cisterns outside the barn before we left, and I had made sure that the infant lamias had some, too. But if we didn’t come across more fairly soon, I was going to have to suggest we turn around.

  I had kept track of the turns we’d made and was certain I could find my way back to the barn. At least we had water there—though food would eventually become a problem.

  Nonetheless, despite all the things about this journey could have been horrible, I found myself feeling more cheerful than I had in a long time.

  I was worried about what was happening back at home, of course. The werewolves and their allies wanted to eliminate the possibility of any more lamias in their world. One of them had a lamia baby and was on the run.

  But there were currently several women still pregnant with lamia infants—more than one of them carrying multiples. That these babies were a product of rape, the women traumatized a
nd terrified, only heightened my concern. I didn’t trust the werewolves and their allies not to harm the women in their rush to eliminate the babies.

  But I also trusted the people I’d left behind to protect those women. Shadow had been trained as a werewolf hunter and could match up against any of them. Her boyfriend, Jeremiah, was a hyena shifter, and between the two of them, I suspected they could take down anyone who came their way.

  Thomas was a tough jaguar shifter from Mexico, and his partner, Bronwyn, was a raven shifter—smart as hell, even if she was still recovering from an injury.

  And then there was Kade. He was a doctor, and the women carrying the lamia babies were his patients. He would protect them to the ends of the Earth. Beyond, even.

  And Kade had lots of support.

  With all of them on the case, they would take care of things back home. Including Serena, the first of the lamia babies to be born, and the child I was beginning to regard as my own.

  The babies on my wrist began to move as if sensing my emotions. I switched them to my shoulder, letting them wrap lightly around my neck. It would make for an easier ride.

  We had been walking for a couple of hours when something in the distance caught my attention, a rumbling vibration through the ground alerting me to a change. I turned around to discover a car—or at least a vehicle—moving up behind us. It was bright green, low-slung and broad, a little bit like a sports car in our own world. This one made hardly any noise as it moved, though. I was pretty sure it had no wheels, either. It floated about a foot off the pavement, like one of those maglev trains. The windows were dark-tinted so that I could barely see a figure in what would have been the passenger seat in my world. At least in the country I’d grown up in.

  I hope whoever is driving it is friendly.

  It slowed to a halt beside us and hovered there for a second before settling gently to the ground. A window, a circular piece of glass rather than the rectangle I expected, slid down into the panels of the door. A woman’s face peered out at us.