Under Her Skin (15 page)

Whatever. I still had my mammalian ability to regulate my own body temperature, important given the fact that I was walking straight into the chilly airstream.

I don’t know how long I walked, trusting my serpent senses to warn me before I bumped into cave walls, before I sensed a change in the air current I was following. That hint of smoke had grown stronger, and it was coming in from a different direction, a separate strand of wind, weaving itself in and around the colder, cleaner breeze I had been following. This one smelled of campfires—wood and dirt, with an under layer of humanity.

Soon afterwards, the floor beneath my feet began to tilt upwards. Up and out, I hoped. The wood smoke scent grew ever stronger, until I reached a place where the two scents, the cold air and the smoke, came from different directions.

Finally, I opened my eyes.

I was unsurprised to realize that my eyes had, indeed, shifted, and that what I could see in the dim light flickering in from an unknown source was all in black and white.

But I was extraordinarily surprised to see, dancing in front of my eyes, the flickering, twinkling lights of the Earth magic Kade had shown me. I hadn’t realized it was there, but when I concentrated, I could feel it thrumming beneath my feet and through the walls surrounding me.

Blinking away the sparkles, I took stock. I stood at a T-junction in the path, the cold air blowing in from one direction, the wood smoke from the other.

The smart thing to do would be follow the breeze to the closest exit, get the hell out of here, and find a way to get home. I didn’t know what Scott had in mind, but knocking a girl out and stuffing her into a cave rarely led to a pleasant outcome.

Not even on the third date.

But every instinct I had told me that whatever he had planned was wrapped up in whatever was going on in the cavern to my right, the one with the smoke and the people. The one that I definitely should avoid.

So I turned right.

Every so often, I passed fissures in the rock. Streams of air blew out from some of them, but none of them seemed to lead to obvious passages. And none of the breezes were as strong as the one I followed, so I stayed in the main tunnel, trying to remain quiet as my shoes scuffed along the pebble-strewn floor.

I kept my eyes open the whole time now and checked the air more often, hoping for some warning if someone moved toward me.

No one did.

Instead, I followed the smell of smoke up a well-worn path until the scent was joined by flickering firelight. At that point, I slowed and listened, but my partial shift had apparently included my ears. I heard some sort of movement and the echoing of a high-pitched voice, but not well enough to make out words.

A few yards further, the tunnel curved away to the left. I peeked around the corner. The tunnel widened into an entrance to another cavern. Firelight reflected from the walls, and as I watched, sparks shot up into the air from the fire somewhere inside.

I ducked back, flattening myself against the wall.

Not for the first time, I cursed my limited serpent hearing. My sense of smell almost made up for it, but not entirely. Again, I tasted the air. The tang of humanity that had been merely an undertone to the smoke earlier now threatened to overwhelm it, a stench of fear and anger, of unwashed bodies, at least ten of them. And mingling with it all, the smell of ... Scott.

What the hell was going on?

Moving slowly enough to avoid making any noise, I pulled on the Earth magic, hard, drawing it into myself as much as possible, pulling it around me. I didn’t know if it could conceal me, but I wanted to try.

This time, I concentrated on my serpentine skills. Not the physical form, but my ability to slide silently along the floor, to move unnoticed, to blend with the world around me. I was an unseen predator, camouflaged by my very skin.

My movements smoothed out even as the sparkles popped in front of my eyes, shimmering and dancing. Gliding gracefully, I skimmed across the ground and up to the cavern entrance.

The room was large and round, with stalactites hanging down from the ceiling. Blackened rocks surrounded the fire pit in the middle of the room, and most of the smoke rose up through a small chimney-hole in the ceiling, leaving soot smudges in a circle around it. The flickering firelight didn’t reach the walls, though, leaving most of the room without illumination. Boxes lined the edges of the room, covered with dark tarps.

I saw Scott first, leaning on what initially looked like a box. Movement inside it caught my attention, though, and I realized it wasn’t solid. It had thick metal bars. And inside the cage was what looked like a human woman. Scott was leaning over her, talking to her as she cowered as far away from him as possible, her arms wrapped around her naked body.

The flavor of lust roiled off Scott, and the more she cringed, the stronger the taste became.

Then I realized that the scent of fear came from several points in the room.

All of the boxes were cages, and they all contained women. And every one of them was terrified of the sound of Scott’s voice.

I might have moved in at that point, except that another figure slithered out of a recess in the very back of the room.

This one was female, too, but was only human from the waist up.

The rest of her was all snake.

There was another lamia in the world.

And Scott knew her.

* * *

The lamia was older, probably earlier fifties, assuming we aged like humans.

Something else to ask Kade, if I lived through this.

Her snake half was huge, big enough to support the torso of an average-size woman, and the pattern of scales blended in nicely with the floor and walls of the cavern, very much as I had imagined myself moments earlier.

She didn’t wear a shirt, and her breasts swung pendulously as she moved into the room. Her hair looked like it hadn’t seen a brush in far too long. I suspected it would be blonde if it were washed and brushed—and if I had my human, color vision. But it hung in long hanks, almost like dreadlocks.

As she moved toward Scott, she said something I couldn’t make out, then flicked her own tongue out, testing the air around her.

And then she froze in place, like a snake catching the scent of prey—which I guess she was.

Only I suspected that for the first time in a long time, I was the prey.

I pulled the sparkling Earth magic closer around me, tightening it like a cloak, even as I wished I could better hear what the lamia woman was saying. As if in response to my wish, my ears shifted back to their human form, and I heard a sibilant female voice. “There is someone here, Scott.”

My erstwhile date stood up straight and glanced around. “You’re imagining things, mother. Don’t be paranoid.”

Mother? Oh, hell. I was in deep trouble.

I didn’t know if the Earth magic was really keeping them from noticing me, but just in case, I concentrated on pulling it even tighter around me.

“You should not have brought her,” the lamia said in apparent continuation of an earlier discussion.

About the girl in the cage, or about me?

“She’s different, Mother,” Scott said. “She’s a shifter.”

Scott’s mother was a lamia. Holy shit.

“We’ve tried other shifters before. It didn’t work.” The mother slithered closer to him, shaking her head. Beads knotted into the dreadlocks clicked as she moved.

Her son didn’t look at her as he picked up a canvas tarp from the floor and draped it over the cage. From inside came a whimper, whether from terror or relief, I couldn’t tell. Neither Scott nor his mother paid any attention to the noise, but Scott carefully smoothed out the covering as he spoke. “She’s a snake shifter, Mother.”

The lamia’s attention had turned elsewhere, but at his words, she whipped around toward him, beaded dreads flying out around her head. Her lower body undulated wildly as she advanced on her son, the end of her tail twitching wildly, like some crazed Medusa.

“You found another lamia?” she hissed, leaning over Scott. He cringed away from her in much the same way that the girl in the cage had cringed from him. “And you brought her here? Without telling me?”

Scott covered his head with both arms as his mother moved closer, raising up on the tip of her tail and looming above him. Her eyes narrowed and her nostrils flared as she leaned over him. Even as far away as I was, I could taste the bitter flavor of fear as it roiled off him.

How awful was this woman, if her own son feared her that much?

Almost certainly as bad as the rest of the lamias, whose extermination had been accepted among other shapeshifters. Maybe worse. After all, her son—and maybe she?—had at least a dozen women in cages in a cave.

And I was dating the son-of-a-bitch.

Was
being the key word.

As Daniel Moreland so often said, some sons-a-bitches needed killing.

I was pretty sure Scott was one of them.

“Take me to her,” the lamia said.

Crap. I needed to retreat.

There was no way I was going to let Scott and his mother find me again. For as long as they didn’t know where I was, I had the upper hand. I couldn’t stay here, though, even with the sparkling magic pulled around me.

As silently as possible, I stepped backwards, stopping briefly when a pebble rolled under my mostly bare foot. When the lamia and her son didn’t look up or raise an alarm, I moved more quickly, feeling my way back down the hallway.

Around the curve in the tunnel and halfway back to the T-junction, I heard them behind me. Rather than risk being caught, I ducked into one of the fissures in the wall, wedging myself in as tightly as possible. There was no air flowing through this one, no possible back exit. If they found me now, I was trapped. My heart pounded in my chest and I held my breath, concentrating as hard as I could on pulling the Earth magic into myself.

The sparkles in my vision grew so intense that I closed my eyes entirely, relying upon other senses to tell when the two passed my cramped hiding spot. I could smell them coming, Scott tasting of flop-sweat and terror, his mother of ... something colder. Darker. Something I had never scented before.

Something that called to a part of me I had worked hard to suppress.

I shivered, despite my determination to remain perfectly still.

Scott was talking as they moved past me. “But the genetics are right. She’s the best shot we’ll ever have.” His wheedling tone was nothing like anything I had heard from him before.

“Perhaps. But we need to know who she is, first. Where did she come from?” The rustling of the lamia’s scales passing by called to me, touching a deep yearning in my heart that I hadn’t even known was there. The same feeling that drew me to coil up with Suzy in my father’s herpetarium.

The call of like to like.

I shoved the desire away, tamping it down with a ferocity that came of the knowledge that as much as I longed to know more of my own species, this woman was not the way to do it.

This was a woman who seemed to be encouraging her son in some sort of genetic experiment.

She and I were not of a kind, even if we shared a species—or merely a phylum.

Ultimately, that was what drew me back to the cavern with the cages.

I couldn’t simply leave all those women locked up, even if I planned to go for help. Whatever it was that Scott and his mother were doing, I didn’t believe it could possibly be good.

So when I stepped out of the crevasse after they had made another turn in the tunnel, instead of following the stream of cold air to what I presumed was the exit, I made my way back to the room with the firelight and tarpaulin-covered cages.

Having grown used to the sensory input my partial shift gave me, I almost forgot to transform back into my human shape before I ripped the cover off the first cage. At the last minute, though, I was hit with the image of a woman’s screams drawing the lamia and Scott back before I could get any of the women out.

As it turned out, though, I was the one who almost screamed when I removed the canvas from the cage nearest the door.

Like the other woman I had seen, the girl in this cage was naked and cowering at the back of her enclosure. She was young, too, no more than sixteen or seventeen.

And she was heavily pregnant.

* * *

The pregnant woman in the cage didn’t scream, but it she did whimper and cringe into the back corner. When she finally looked up and realized that I wasn’t Scott or his mother, she burst into motion, scrabbling across the bottom of the enclosure toward me.

“Get me out of here.” Her voice was hoarse, as if she had screamed her throat raw.

Maybe she had.

“I don’t know how,” I whispered, fumbling with the heavy padlock that kept the door closed. “Do you know where the key is?”

She shook her head mutely, tears gathering in the corners of her eyes.

A knot formed in my stomach as I glanced around at the room full of crates, then back to the pregnant woman. “How many of you are there?”

With a shrug, she used the back of her hand to dash the moisture from her eyes. “It varies. Depends on how the ...” Pausing, she glanced down at her swollen belly and sneered. “How the breeding program is going.”

Bile rose in my throat. I had to ask, though I already knew the answer. “What’s the goal of all this?”

“Monsters.” Her ravaged voice dropped even lower. “He wants to make more monsters, just like his mother.”

I had let that psycho kiss me.

Dear God.

“Who’s there?” an anxious voice wavered from one of the other covered boxes. “Please help us.”

Part of me wanted to uncover every one of the miniature cells lining the room, look every single woman in the eye, let her know that help was coming.

But I didn’t have time.

“I’m going to get you out of here,” I said, raising my voice a little. “I’m going to get us all out of here. Please just hold on a little longer.”

The woman in the uncovered cage stared at me blankly, disbelieving.

“What’s your name?” I asked, squatting down next to the cage until we were eye-to-eye.

“Carrie,” she said.

“I’m coming back for all of you. But for that to happen, I’m going to have to put the canvas back over this box. Can you handle that, Carrie?” When she didn’t answer immediately, I wrapped my fingers around the bars, covering her own hand. “I’m going for help. I will be back.”

Carrie’s mouth tightened, but she nodded.

She held my gaze with her own as I dropped the covering back over her.

Breeding program.

Kill off the other shapeshifters’ children. Make his own.

It really was a diabolical plan.

Horrific.

I shuddered as I made a quick circuit of the room, hoping that Scott might have left the keys somewhere visible, even though I was absolutely sure they were on that enormous, jangling keychain of his.

If only I’d grabbed it when I had the chance.

I was going to have to get out of the cavern system entirely, go for help. And I needed to do it before the lamia and her son returned.

“I’ll be back,” I said again, just loudly enough for everyone to hear me.

The sound of quiet sobbing followed me as I slid out of the room and down the passageway.

When I reached the crack in the wall I had hidden in earlier, I stopped to listen. Hearing nothing, I once again shifted my mouth and jaw enough to taste the air. The scent of Scott and his mother flavored the air, but the tang of their passing wasn’t new. They were still down in the cavern, presumably searching for me.

At the T-junction, the draft from outside grew stronger, blowing away any other smells. If I went that way, my own scent would be blown back toward the cavern.

Scott’s mother would be able to tell which way I had gone.

Still, there was no way in hell I was sticking around. The floor of the tunnel tilted up toward the surface, and with the loss of information from the cavern scents, I found myself running, ignoring the way the occasional pebbles along the ground cut into the soles of my feet.

By the time I reached the cavern entrance, I was panting and running so hard that I almost ran outside without looking where I was going. At the last minute, though, I skidded to a halt, grabbing one side of the cave entrance and hanging on tightly.

I found myself high on a cliff wall, dangling above the river below—the Paluxy, I assumed, though for all I knew, I could have been out for hours and hours and they could’ve carried me to a river even farther away from Fort Worth.

But dawn was still far from beginning to cast a pink glow on the horizon, and nothing about my situation suggested I had been out for more than a short while. I wasn’t hungry or thirsty. I hadn’t even needed to pee when I woke up.

That also meant that no one had missed me yet.

I wasn’t on call this weekend, so no one would expect me at work until Monday.

And after our last discussion, Kade wouldn’t be expecting me to come back at all.

I was on my own, and all of those poor women back there in those cages were counting on me to save them.

Taking a deep breath, I leaned out to assess the cliff face. It wasn’t really perfectly vertical. It only seemed that way from my human perspective. There were small outcroppings of rock. Small plants had taken root in the cliff and grew straight out into the air.

Nothing strong enough to hold a human’s weight.

But a snake could make it.

Not a large snake—nothing the size of Suzy, or even my usual shifting form.

But something small and quick could make it down to the river. I glanced upwards, too, but didn’t know where the cliff-top came out. At least by following the riverbed, I should eventually come to some form of civilization.

I only hoped it would be soon enough for the women inside.

Taking a deep breath, I focused on Kade’s instructions, imagining the shift I wanted to make, always holding my goal in my mind.

Again, I pulled on the Earth magic, surrounding myself with it, pulling it into me, through me. Color leached from the world as my eyes changed first.

Small.

Fast.

To the river, then home.

This time, the shift ripped through me, a burning pain that cauterized my limbs to me, ripping away mass and replacing it with pure, blazing magic, white-hot and searing.

If I could have screamed, I would have.

Instead, when I came out of the change, I was already moving.

Down toward the river. Dropping from a clump of grass to a stone ledge only an inch wide, sliding over to catch the next plant.

Always down.

I lost track of time.

The sun came up fully, warming me even as the last of my mammalian heat faded.

At some point, I felt the vibrations of shouts, almost understood the words. But they were human words, human needs. They had nothing to do with me. I was small and quick, slipping past other creatures unnoticed, stopping only long enough to scent the air, find the next way down toward the water.

Once, the scent of rodent in the air drew me, and I almost stopped to hunt. But some compulsion drove me on.

Down.

To the water.

When I finally reached the river, I paused, confused.

I wasn’t thirsty. Why had I come to the water?

What now?

Smoke drifted through the air.

Danger
.

But contained. Not a grass fire.

Human
.

The word campfire flashed through my mind.

Campfire
.