Under Her Skin (5 page)

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe humans can smell emotions and intentions, at least sometimes. Because when Scott wheeled his big, black pickup into the CAP-C parking lot, he didn’t shut it off immediately. Instead, he rested his forearms on the steering wheel and turned his head to face me. “I think we should do this some other time.”

I pretended not to understand. “Scott, we go out to lunch all the time.”

“I mean, some time that isn’t lunch. I think we should go out.” His intent gaze bored into mine. “Dinner, drinks, a movie.”

“Like a date?” I kept my tone light, unsure of my real response.

“Not
like
a date. An actual date. This weekend. Friday?”

“Okay.” I drew the word out, nodding. “But we take it very slowly from there.”

He grinned. “You seem pretty sure there’s going to be a ‘from there.’”

“Don’t be an ass.” I opened the door and swung my legs out, then glanced back at him over my shoulder. “You know you want a ‘from there.’” I hopped down to the ground and sashayed to the door without looking back.

I was grinning as I stepped into my office to grab a mint and touch up my makeup, and I heard Scott whistling as he stopped to speak to Gloria, who had, as usual, chosen lunch at her desk. She had, in the past, joined us occasionally for lunch, but those instances grew rarer as her case-load picked up.

I had wondered more than once if her absence was one of her unsubtle attempts to get me to date more.

If so, it might be working.

Kade was already in the records room when I returned. I don’t know if he ever even left for lunch.

“Enjoy your break?” he asked. His mild tone belied the sheer rage that still boiled off him. He radiated so much heat that it was almost too much to bear. I shifted away from him, and from his quick glance, he noticed the move.

“I always enjoy lunch with Scott.” I worked to match his outward tone. Initially, I didn’t address the emotional tenor of the discussion.

Hell, I didn’t even understand the undertones at play here.

Kade continued flipping through manila file folders too quickly. I wasn’t sure he could even read their labels, much less review the contents.

After a long pause, I decided to dive into the conversation I’d been avoiding all day.

As I stood up to shut the door, Kade’s manic folder examinations slowed. I still tasted his anger fizzing through the air, but it slowed a little as curiosity threaded through it—a line of sharp inquiry, like lime in an over-carbonated soda.

I leaned against the door, my hands still on the doorknob behind me. “I don’t know anything about....” Pausing, I listened to make sure no one was walking down the hall, flicked my tongue out against my lower lip to test the currents, make sure we were truly alone. Still, I wasn’t willing to be specific, just in case someone overheard us. “About your world.”

The sparks of anger filling the room subsided further as one corner of Kade’s mouth twisted up. “The world of medicine?”

Okay. I could work with that. “Yeah. Sure. Medicine. The thing is, I don’t know how ... doctors ... interact. I don’t know the rules. And because I’ve never been around ... doctors ... I don’t read them very well.”

He dropped the folder he was holding into a stack in front of him and his hands finally stilled as he stared at me. After a long pause, he tilted his head. “You’re not like any other ... counselor ... I’ve ever met, or even heard about. You defy everything I’ve ever been taught about your kind.”

“And that makes you angry?”

“It confuses me.” He paused, and his smile turned wry. “And being confused makes me angry.”

I pushed away from the door without opening it again. “If we’re really going to work together, I think maybe we should have a more detailed conversation. Somewhere safe. Not here, not Kindred.”

Kade nodded. “My place?”

My heart thudded at the thought of being alone with him in his territory, and I couldn’t tell if the reaction was terror or anticipation.

Maybe a little of both.

If he could hear my reaction, he gave no outward sign of it. But his scent darkened, and his temperature rose.

I imagined an infinite loop of reaction and response in the confined space of anyplace that could be called his, and shuddered. “Someplace a little more public,” I suggested. “Or at least outdoors.”

“Agreed.” He nodded.

“Sundance Square?” I suggested. “It would keep us from being overheard, I suspect. At least by anyone who knew us.”

“I’m on duty at Kindred tomorrow and Thursday,” he said. “How about Friday night?”

“Oh.” I stuttered a little. “I can’t. Not Friday. I have plans.”

“So change them.”

“Why don’t you change your work schedule around?”

“That’s not so easy for a doctor to do.”

“And you think it’s easy for me to just change my plans around entirely? That doesn’t seem quite fair.”

The air had begun sparking against my tongue again.

“And it’s no good getting mad about it,” I said. “I can have as much of a personal life as I want, even if it confuses and angers you.”

“With humans?” he hissed. “With that investigator for the DA?”

“Is that such a bad thing, having a relationship with someone?” I counted off on my fingers. “He’s smart, he’s funny, he’s attractive as hell.”

That elicited an actual growl from the were-mongoose.

“Oh,” I said. “Is that jealousy?”

“No,” he snarled. “That’s concern for the human.” His voice rose at the end of his statement, and I put my hands up, palms out, to placate him.

“We need to put this conversation on hold,” I said. “I’ll see if I can change my plans for Friday. What’s a good alternative day for you if I can’t?”

The level of heat rolling off him dropped a tiny bit. “I could do Sunday.” His arm twitched, and I glanced down at it just long enough to see a muscle contract, as if he were holding off a shift.

And God help me, I was glad to be able to elicit another reaction from him.

I wasn’t entirely certain what that said about me. Maybe that my inner snake was currently winning the never-ending battle between compassion and a cold-blooded desire to win, to survive, to take down whatever prey I found.

It was a battle I fought on some level almost every day. Apparently today, my serpentine self wanted to watch Kade Nevala squirm.

I pushed that desire down, hard, along with the errant thought that my mammal side might be okay with some squirming, too.

This wasn’t going to help us catch a serial killer, or save any children.

“Got your list ready?” I asked.

Kade nodded tersely, and I once again settled into the search for common patients and clients.

At the end of the day, I needed comfort.

Kade and I hadn’t had any real luck in our search, though we had about a morning’s worth of files to go through the next day.

But all those children, in pain.

I had worked with most of them. One at a time, it was easy to take their pain, walk them through the issues that brought them to me—rape, incest, physical and emotional abuse. Horrors that no children should ever have to see.

Sometimes it made me think I shouldn't hope to have any children of my own. I wasn’t even sure I could—I didn’t know a damn thing about a shapeshifter’s reproductive system. Would the shifting kill off any developing fetus? Or would it shift along with me?

For that matter, I didn’t even know if I was an egg-laying snake or a viviparous snake who would give birth to live snakes. Both kinds exist in nature, but I didn’t even know if I was natural—or some sort of freak of nature. Or maybe magical. Mystical.

Monstrous.

Anyway, I wasn’t willing to test any theories through trial and error, so I had decided a long time ago that I would never have children of my own.

Instead, I helped save other people’s hurt and abandoned children.

The unloved, unwanted, mistreated offspring of another race entirely.

The irony of a snake offering comfort to humans wasn’t lost on me.

And after a whole day of reminders of the ways that people damaged one another, I wanted to be reminded that people could also be kind. Could love children who weren’t even their own.

So I headed out to my parents’ ranch.

When I pulled my Camry across the cattle guard laid over the culvert, the dust that flew up around me smelled like home.

Dad’s truck was gone, so I swung through the house, calling out for Mom as I went. She wasn’t home, either, but steaks marinating in a bowl on the counter suggested that they would be home for dinner.

I could wait. Television didn’t sound appealing, though.

Late-afternoon sunlight slanted through the kitchen window, illuminating tiny dust-motes dancing in the air. Opening the back door, I surveyed the streaks of sunlight stretching across the porch.

Not warm enough.

Dad kept the herpetarium door unlocked most of the time, despite the fake rock that Mom had given him years ago to hide an extra key. He kept losing the extra key, too.

Today wasn’t the first time I’d been glad of that fact.

The interior of the room was warm and dim, the heat lamps turned on in about half the terrariums.

Drawing in the slightly musty smells on deep breath, I flicked out my tongue to take the emotional temperature of the room.

Nothing unusual had disrupted these snakes’ lives recently.

If they could taste my disquiet, I had no sense of it.

I stopped by and spoke to a few of my favorites—Suzy, the albino python, in particular. When I was younger, I had thought I might be able to actually communicate with some of Dad’s specimens.

Maybe I could.

Or maybe it had simply made me feel better to believe that these animals, too, were part of my heritage.

In any case, Suzy always seemed to exude a deep, abiding calm. An internal serenity completely different from anything humans had to offer.

I needed that today.

Unlike the previous night in the hospital, I had time to prepare for this shift. Locating the key to the shed on one of the top shelves (not an uncommon place for Dad to leave it), I set it out in its hiding place and flipped the bolt to the locked position. The locked door would let Dad know I was inside—he would knock before he unlocked it and came in, so I would be able to let him know if I hadn’t shifted yet.

Removing the screen lid from Suzy’s terrarium, I set it to the side and let my hand drift across her white and yellow body. She flicked her tongue out, then rubbed her head alongside my arm, the rest of her coils rippling out and over. Making space for me next to her.

Who says snakes don’t have feelings?

Quickly, I stripped out of my clothes, folded them neatly, and set them on the floor next to the terrarium lid. I pressed my torso up against the glass outside Suzy’s enclosure, leaning down into it just a little.

Then I shifted.

In the herpetarium, the moment of panic that came with losing arms and legs flickered, then disappeared, subsumed by the sense of belonging I always felt here.

For the first time ever, I wondered if shifting among my own kind would eliminate that feeling altogether.

As the world around me grayed out entirely, I flicked my tail up into the air and slid into Suzy’s enclosure.

The python slid out of my way, making room for me inside the circle of light shed by the heat lamp.

With an internal sigh, I coiled as tightly as possible next to Suzy. She drew herself across the glass floor, rustling in the aspen bedding as she encircled me, drawn to the heat generated by the shift and remaining from my mammal form.

Or maybe because she realizes I need comfort?

I didn’t know for sure, but I preferred the latter.

Once we were arranged, twisted together and resting, I let my mind rest, along with my body.

It was easier to do in this form.

Lamia form.

The thought drifted across my mind, then was gone, simply another piece of information to process—not consciously, but in my back-brain, along with the muted sounds of the other reptiles as they breathed and moved, the feeling of heat soaking in to my muscles from the lamp, the distant smell of the mice in the freezer that Dad would feed the snakes later in the week, the comforting touch of Suzy’s length against me, the tastes that drifted across the Jacobson’s organ in the top of my mouth, offering information that had no mammalian equivalent.

It was good to come home.

I don’t know how much time had passed when Dad came into the herpetarium.

He walked straight to Suzy’s terrarium. He knew me that well.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he said, dropping his hand down to run a finger across the top of my head, then down my neck and along my spine. The muscles along my sides rippled in concert.

I don’t know if full-blood snakes can love.

But I know that I do.

“Mom’s in the house cooking if you want to shift and dress and join us for dinner.” His voice came through muffled, as did all sounds, bouncing off the tiny cochlear bones in my head. The longer I stayed in serpentine form, the more difficult it would become to translate those sounds into words.

I don’t know how long I had been living as a snake when Dad first found me, but when I first shifted, I couldn’t speak—whether because I had never learned how, or because I had forgotten, we didn’t know.

As a teenager, I had shifted in a fit of pique over some rule Mom and Dad had implemented and didn’t shift back for two weeks. I had never told my parents, but my decreasing understanding of what they said to me had been my primary motivation for coming back into human form.

That, and the realization that I had almost stopped caring what they were saying to me.

If I hadn’t had years of Dad’s training in how to be a human, I don’t know if I would have been able to come back to myself.

More clearly than words, though, I had always felt—smelled, tasted—my parents’ intentions and emotions.

I liked to think that their love could draw me back from any edge.

As Dad withdrew and I pulled myself up to shift back to my human form, I considered the implications of my personal history.

Kade Nevala said lamias were feared and hated. Killed on sight, it sounded like.

Without someone like Dad to teach me how to care, how to draw upon my humanity as a balance to my snake side, how might I have turned out?

Cold
.

The inner voice spoke with absolutely certainty.

There’s a reason “cold-blooded” is used to describe sociopaths.

I shivered a little as I pulled my pants up over my hips, despite the remaining warmth from the heat lamp and my quickly-warming mammal blood. Without my parents to guide me, I would never have learned to have compassion for the people with whom I interacted every day.

And the children I worked with now? How would I feel about them?

Prey.

I sent up a tiny, thankful prayer to whatever deity might listen to a weresnake raised as a human.

As I opened the shed door and stepped out into the last rays of the sunlight, I realized something important.

I had never actually asked Kade if the murdered girls were shapeshifters.

I had assumed it, but I hadn’t gotten confirmation.

I needed to know for sure.

And I needed to know how likely it was that a shapeshifter was the one hunting them.

If I could imagine seeing them as prey, surely other shifters could, as well.

* * *

“Hey, ladybug!” Mom called out as soon as I opened the back door. She was bent over, digging around in the refrigerator for salad ingredients, judging by the plastic box of baby spinach she held out behind her. “See if that’s still any good.”

I took it from her and opened the lid, peering inside. “You hid it from yourself in the rotter again, didn’t you?”

“It’s called a crisper, smartass.” She came up with a bag of carrots and a single zucchini squash, only slightly shriveled at one end. “Check these, too, while you’re at it.” Pushing her glasses up on her nose and patting her graying brown hair back into place, she peered around the kitchen. “What did I do with the pepper?”

If Dad was the heart of our little family, Mom was the brains—just not in the usual sense. Also a college professor, she was a true intellectual, at least inasmuch as she spent most of her time up in her own head. She always said Dad kept her grounded. Dad joked that her version of grounded was only halfway into the stratosphere. She was an astrophysicist. They had met in graduate school, and she had followed him to the plains of North Central Texas to support his career, rather than heading off to work for NASA or someplace with a good telescope. That’s how I knew for sure that she loved him. And how I knew he loved her? He supported her every summer as she headed off to those fabulous telescopes to do her research, then welcomed her home again every fall when she returned to teaching classes at a local college and to him.

Still in love, after all these years.

Yet another way they taught me about being human.

And for the first time, it occurred to me that Dad’s love of snakes, with their apparent disinterest in him, might have made him Mom’s perfect partner.

Today was a day for all kinds of revelations.

I moved to the sink to check the vegetables, rinsing and scrubbing the useful ones, tossing the rest into the compost bin.

Mom finally located the pepper and began twisting the grinder over the steaks. “How’s work?” she asked.

“Weird,” I said, after a long moment. Flicking a spinach leaf going to slime into the silver, plastic-lined trash can on the counter, I added, “We’re working with the police on some murder cases.”

Despite her usual acceptance of the fact that most of my work was strictly confidential, this gave Mom pause. “Anything you can talk about?”

“Not about the case itself, exactly. But there’s something I want to discuss with you and Dad.”

“Okay.” She took a plate out of the cabinet. “Over dinner.” With a fork, she stacked the three steaks onto the dish, then handed it to me. “Dad’s got the grill going. Take these to him.”

I stared down at the meat. “How did you know I was coming?”

A beatific smile floated across her face. “Mother’s intuition.”

“Seriously, Mom?”

This time, she gave shrug and a laugh. “Okay. There’s a meteor shower tomorrow night. I’m hoping to take some students out to see it, and I thought it might be nice to make something for your father. Otherwise, he’ll just eat a bowl of cereal while he reads the latest journals.”

Yep. He might keep her grounded, but she took care of him, too, in her own way.

Everything I knew of love came from these two people.

And a giant albino Burmese python named Suzy.

* * *

“So tell us what’s up at work,” Dad said before scooping up the last forkful of steak from his plate.

I had no idea when Mom might have told him I was having work issues, but they often seemed to function in tandem like that.

When I was younger, I had sometimes wished for a partner like that—someone who could all but read my mind, who would know what I needed and offer it, just because he loved me.

That was before I learned the reality of my situation.

Before I figured out that I couldn’t risk sharing my secret unless I also wanted to risk having that secret made public.

How could I be sure I could trust anyone with something that big?

But now, I knew there were other shapeshifters.