Under Her Skin (12 page)

I was so entranced with the sensations that it took me a long moment to realize that Kade was watching me, his churning golden eyes shining through the white haze that now surrounded me.

He hadn’t dressed while I shifted, and I had to focus to keep my gaze on his face, rather than allowing it to drift lower.

His slight grin suggested that he knew exactly what I was doing, but he didn’t say anything, so I didn’t, either.

Then he began to change forms again, and I realized that the exhaustion I usually felt after rapid shifting was missing entirely.

That spicy smell I associated with Kade—half mesmerizing, half terrifying—intensified as his human body almost melted away, dropping him onto all fours, the shimmer enclosing him and twisting the very air around us.

The wave of power accompanying his shift sucked the air out of my lungs.

When the sparkles cleared and I could breathe again, Kade stood in front of me in his mongoose shape, somewhat bigger than the ones I’d seen online, if my sense of scale could be trusted. Then again, it was possible that, as with his human shape, Kade simply exuded power past his actual size.

In any case, it set off every internal warning I had—all my instincts were screaming at me to fight or run.

The bitter taste of adrenaline flooded my mouth and my senses sharpened.

Seconds later, I felt my own shift begin, my body forcing me to take the shape it instinctively knew was best for fighting.

With a deep breath, I pulled the shift back, keeping my arms and legs clearly separated. Still, my vision grayed out—no matter how hard I concentrated, I couldn’t keep my eyes human in the face of Kade’s mongoose form.

The white sparkles coalesced around the mongoose in front of me and began to fade.

“Now you.” Kade’s voice echoed through the shimmer circling around him. “But I want you to try a new shape this time.”

I had to focus to keep my teeth from sliding into fangs, to be able to use my human voice. “New? I’m a snake shifter. I shift into a snake. Period.”

“But I’d guess it’s the same snake shape every time, right?” Kade dropped the magic around him, and the glow faded, leaving only afterimages burned into my eyes.

Warily, I nodded.

“You’re not just a snake shifter. You’re a lamia. You can take any serpent shape you want.”

I couldn’t see his face any longer, but my gaze must have reflected my skepticism.

“How well do you know snakes?” he asked.

I laughed. “My father is a herpetologist. There’s not much I don’t know about snakes.”

“What’s your go-to form?”

“Something close to a cobra.”

“Then I want you to try for something different, like a constrictor.”

“You know your snakes, too.”

“I’m a mongoose. I have to. It was part of my training from early on.”

“What do I do?” I continued to carefully keep my eyes focused on his face.
Whatever you do, don’t look down
.

“Pull at the Earth magic as you shift again.” He seemed utterly unconcerned about his own nakedness.

“And then what?”

“Concentrate. Try pulling the Earth magic deep inside. Hold the shape in your mind as you shift.”

“I don’t think I can.” My shapeshifting wasn’t conscious, not really. I didn’t imagine myself into my snake shape. I just
changed
.

Even the ability to hold back the change was something I’d had to learn as a child, and it hadn’t come easily. Only the fear of shifting in the middle of a school day, combined with a desire to socialize with other children, had finally worked to allow me to maintain my human form under stress.

Except, apparently, the stress of dealing with a certain mongoose shifter.

“You can do this.” Kade’s voice was soft and insistent. “Hold the form in your mind. Then be the shape you need.”

Suzy
. An image of her comforting bulk flashed through my mind.

“Python,” I said aloud.

Kade nodded approvingly. “Good choice.”

I pictured Suzy, imagined her length stretched out before me, first in full-color human vision, then, as I initiated the shift, in the shades of gray that characterized my serpentine sight.

Kade’s voice came to me as if from a distance, echoing off ear bones already beginning to change and through the scales covering my head. “Now. Find the Earth magic. Feel it surround you. Let it move through you. Bring it into you.”

Once again, I let the power of the place slide into me, flickering through my skin. I worked to pull even more of it through every pore, until it ignited an answering spark inside me. In that moment, I burned, hotter than any reptile ever could—a heat that flashed from one end of my body to the other. If I could have screamed, I would have. But when it was over, the shift was complete and I stretched across the ground, my serpent shape longer and stronger than usual.

I twirled around on myself and saw, in shades of gray, a typical python pattern across my back.

It worked
.

Stretching out my entire length, I reveled in the feel of my body, the strength of this shift. Why hadn’t I ever known I could shift to more than one form?

The answer came to me instantly: because no one had been around to teach me.

Whatever had happened to my parents—whether they had abandoned me on purpose, or I had wandered away, or they had been killed by someone like Kade and I had simply been missed—the end result had been that I was left without a shapeshifting mentor.

Although a small part of me resented that, and may have even resented Kade for the role his people had played in the near-extinction of the lamias, I also had to admit that with their training, I would almost certainly have become a cold-blooded killer.

The total opposite of what I’d become: a nurturer and a protector for kids who needed me.

As it was, almost no one knew how much I had to repress that side of myself. Virtually every time I had to work with a child abuser and he (for it was almost always a man) began attempting to justify his actions, I found myself drifting into daydreams of forcing him to endure exactly those things he had inflicted on his victims.

I knew that most abusers had themselves been abused. In that moment, I never cared.

And the desire was even more difficult to shake off in my serpent form.

Up until now, though, that form wouldn’t have been useful against human males. It was too small, too powerless.

But as a python—a large one, at that—I would be able to take on those men.

Kade’s voice interrupted my spiraling thoughts. “Now, without shifting back to your human form, I want you to take another shape.”

I tilted my head at him inquisitively and darted my tongue out into the air.

He certainly smelled serious–and more dangerous than he did when I was a human. Less enticing.

Pulling my attention back to the shift at hand, I considered my options. I wasn’t certain I could even do this.

Maybe another constrictor?

As if he were reading my thoughts, Kade said, “And this time, I want you to take a hybrid form. We’ll start with a hybrid snake. Maybe a combination of a viper and a constrictor? That should be sufficiently complicated.” He barked a short laugh, a sound that I suspected sounded like this mongoose form. “We can put off a human/snake hybrid for another night.”

Right. As if this wasn’t going to be enough.

I couldn’t close my eyes to concentrate as I pulled up the Earth magic this time. So I simply focused on the tiny glimmers in the air.

What would I want to keep of each form?

How could I mix viper and constrictor?

The answer came to me instantly. Viper’s head. Constrictor’s body.

I concentrated on the form of a pit viper’s head, on changing only that part of my body.

Cobra
.

Triangular head. Top fangs, a venom reservoir. Flaring hood.

Pythons already had heat-sensing pits, but as I shifted, they coalesced into one deeper pit on each side of my head, growing even more sensitive with the addition of a heat-sensing membrane.

It was like shifting to ultraviolet vision. I could sense Kade’s body heat before. But now, every part of him was lit up, bouncing off my senses like a beacon, every inch radiating information to me.

As my form finished shifting, I pulled the upper third of my body up and flared my hood, weaving back and forth in front of Kade.

The mongoose shifter took an unconscious step back, then forced himself to stop. His golden eyes began to churn in a way I had only seen when he kissed me, and his body heat spiked as he worked to keep from shifting, too.

I hadn’t understood why the lamias had been such formidable enemies—not really. Not against werewolves, or large-mammal shifters.

But now? I got it.

I was a twenty-foot long serpent with the muscular strength of a python and the venomous capacity of a cobra of equal size.

Those child molesters I daydreamed about hurting wouldn’t have a chance.

And neither would the other shapeshifters, if I ever decided to take them on.

I was more powerful than I had ever realized.

By the time we left the park, I had taken on three other hybrid snake shapes and was equal parts starving and exhausted.

Once again in my human form, I slumped against the headrest in the passenger seat.

“Food first,” Kade announced, glancing over at me. “Then rest.”

The next thing I knew, the smell of hamburgers drew me out of a deep sleep just as Kade turned the Jeep back onto the highway.

“Here. These are yours.” He handed one of several paper sacks to me, and I pulled out a stack of cheeseburgers.

Shifting always left me ravenous. Apparently that was true of other shifters, as well. We ate without speaking, Kade using one hand to drive and the other to steadily consume burgers until there was nothing left but wrappers in the paper sacks.

With my stomach full, I leaned my temple against the window glass and stared up at the stars in the sky, wondering how I might actually use the hybrid forms I had just learned.

“Can all shifters take on more than one animal form?” I didn’t take my eyes off the sky.

“No. Most of us can learn to control size to some degree, and almost all of us can manage a human/animal hybrid. But I don’t know of any shifters other than lamias who can take on multiple forms of a single animal.” Kade’s voice was matter of fact, but his words sent a shiver up my spine.

“So I’m still different from all of you?”

I could almost feel the displaced air from Kade’s shrug. “We’re all different. The first thing I learned in my training to treat shifters is that werewolf biology is different from bobcat shifter biology, and those are both different from mongoose shifter.”

“But it is biology? Whatever makes us shift, I mean. It’s not magic.”

Kade’s sharp laugh carried more than a hint of surprise. “Now you’re getting into theology. I would say yes. Even in our world, everything comes down to science. But I know that some people would disagree with me. Eduardo Valencia, the Shield we saw at the Council meeting? He calls the place we just left the Holy Circle.”

“You called that power
Earth magic
,” I pointed out.

“I don’t have a better name for it. I might as easily have called it
geologic energy
. I could change terms, if you prefer.”

“No.” My eyelids were tugging down again. “Just trying to figure all of this out.”

Kade’s gentle voice came to me as if from far away as I drifted off again. “It’s life, Lindi. There’s nothing to figure out. You just live it.”

When Kade woke me up to tell me we had reached my apartment, those words were still ringing in my ears.

It’s life … you just live it
.

It wasn’t a philosophy I had lived by. Both my adoptive parents were scientists. They had taught me to question everything. Add to that curiosity a need to obsessively control my actions, or risk giving away the biggest secret I’d ever known, and I had been left with a tendency to analyze everything. Maybe even over-analyze.

I didn’t do spontaneous.

Until now.

When the doctor walked me to my door, I unlocked it, then turned and took a single step toward him.

He froze at the movement, but it was the stillness of one predator sizing up another.

The wave of spicy heat rolling off him told me everything I needed to know about his own desires. Without a word, I wrapped my arms around his neck.

Bending down, he brushed his lips against mine, the heat of the contact nearly searing in its intensity.

Sweeping his hands down my back and under my thighs, he lifted me up until I could wrap my legs around his waist. Then he held me with one hand while he pushed the door open. Kicking it shut behind us, he carried me easily down the hall, his tongue darting in and out of my mouth, filling me with the burning heat of him.

Shifting energy rolled up my back, and I could feel the skin along my spine shift from serpentine to human, back and forth, shivering from my neck down to the base of my back. The sensation pushed me forward, crushing me against Kade’s chest, pulling a whimper from deep in my throat.

An answering growl rose from Kade, and at the same moment I heard the sound of tearing cloth, I felt the mongoose shifter barely avoid puncturing my skin with the claws he’d just sprung.

I tightened my legs more firmly around him, felt his erection press against me as his breathing grew more ragged.

I pulled away long enough to point. “That way. ”

At the end of the hall, I fumbled for the doorknob and Kade pushed my bedroom door open with his booted foot and slid us onto the bed without breaking the kiss. The shapes of his fingers more under his own control, he gently pulled my t-shirt off, then deftly unhooked the black cotton bra I’d worn underneath—some part of my mind determined to ignore the attraction between us, insisting that if I wore my plainest underwear, I wouldn’t end up in bed with him.

Yeah, right.

From frantic kisses, Kade slowed to deliberate movements, sliding the straps off my shoulders and placing soft, hot kisses everywhere they touched.

When my bra hit the floor, I sat up and tugged at the bottom of Kade’s own shirt, adding first it and then his jeans to the growing pile at the foot of my bed.

This time, when we both ended up naked, I stared my fill, then ran my hand along the hard planes of Kade’s stomach. Then his mouth was everywhere, and I could no longer think clearly. When he entered me, so much heat surrounded us that I worried for a moment about spontaneous combustion. As we moved together, the air around us shimmered, red-hot sparks shining in my eyes, reminiscent of the cooler, white diamond sparkles of Earth magic in Kade’s Holy Circle.

The last few moments were a blur of scales and fur, the two of us only barely holding on to our basic human shapes, and only out of the most primitive of needs, until the heat from our joining exploded into something exquisite, both of us crying out within moments of one another.

Afterwards, we slept in a tangle of arms and legs, once again fully human, but still unwilling to completely disengage from one another.

At some point in the early hours of the morning, I heard Kade whisper, “I’ve got to go to the hospital. I’ll see you soon.”

Part of me worried that we needed to talk about what had happened—but the rest of me decided it could wait.

As it turned out, that was the wrong decision.