Under Her Skin (6 page)

“It’s not at work, exactly, though it’s tangentially connected,” I said.

“Sounds like it’s something you want to avoid discussing.” That was Dad all over—he inevitably went straight to the heart of the matter. Even though I had come out here planning to tell them everything, I didn’t exactly want to talk about it.

Dad would say—had said, many times, when I was younger—that those were exactly the things that needed to be dragged out into the light.

As I had so often done before, I grit my teeth and blurted it out to them. “I met another shapeshifter.”

Mom gasped, and Dad slowly lowered the napkin he had been using to wipe his mouth. Setting it carefully on the table, he tilted his head inquisitively. “Another weresnake?”

“No.” I tried to decide how much to tell them. Kade hadn’t exactly said that his own existence as a shifter was a secret, but everything about his actions thus far—along with the fact that there were no reputable news stories about shapeshifters among us—suggested that he wouldn’t want me to tell anyone.

Finally, I settled on the generic outlines. “Another animal form, a mammal. He’s a doctor, and we’re working on a case together.”

Mom shoved her glasses up. “How did you discover that he is also a shapeshifter?” Her voice was precise and direct. I could imagine her taking scientific notes as I spoke.

These were the only people in the world I trusted entirely. I told them everything I had learned so far from Kade. That I was a lamia, that lamias were considered extinct, that they were unwelcome in the shifter community at large.

As I wrapped up, Dad nodded thoughtfully. “I’m not entirely surprised. When no one came for you, I assumed that either your immediate family was gone, or that your kind didn’t tend to its young very long. Given your human form, the latter seemed unlikely.”

“Did you suspect there were other shifters out there?” I tried to keep my tone level, but some of my outrage seeped through, anyway.

Dad raised one shoulder in a half-shrug. “It’s a reasonable assumption, Lindi. It seemed at least possible.”

“Well, I didn’t.” I slumped back in my seat. “I guess I didn’t want to think about it at all.”

“I was surprised that you never wanted to search out your birth parents,” Mom said, standing to begin clearing plates from the table. “Most adopted children do, you know.”

I rose to help, gathering the salad bowl from the middle of the table. “Most adopted children don’t have to consider the difficulties of searching for a snake family.”

“So you did consider it, then.” Dad followed us into the kitchen, opening the refrigerator to put away the dressing and butter.

In another family, this might have been an uncomfortable discussion, but Mom and Dad had always supported me. My decision to avoid researching my roots had been perfectly logical.

Or at least, I had thought so at the time.

Now I wondered if I had been frightened of what I might find.

Dad’s next statement drove that idea home. “You know I would have helped you. We might not have found anything, but we could have searched together.”

I closed my eyes briefly as I nodded. “Yeah. I know.”

“Do you want to try now?” His warm hand on my shoulder felt like support, but tears pricked my eyelids, anyway.

“I think maybe I’d better not.”

If they were really all dead, it would be like losing them all over again—and for the first time.

And if they weren’t dead?

I was afraid that finding them might be dangerous to us all.

The next morning, Kade and I found something in the CAP-C files almost immediately.

I had been reading out client names from the file headers, becoming increasingly bored with the repetitious work, when I said, “Preston Bryant.”

“Wait.” Kade flipped through a computer printout he’d been perusing. “Bryant? Open that one. Check for a sister? A Kirstie.”

I scanned the intake socio-economic information. “Yep. She’s right here.”

“Then we’ve got a match.” He glanced at the rest of his list. “So do we keep going, or do we call in reinforcements?”

I hadn’t asked before, had been almost actively restraining myself from it, but now I had to know. “Are the Bryants shapeshifters?” I whispered as I leaned toward him, glancing at the open door.

His gaze flicked to the door and back, too, and he nodded, holding up one finger.

Picking up a pen, he scratched a word onto a sticky pad next to him.

It took me a moment to work out what it said.

Definitely a doctor’s handwriting. Or maybe a mongoose’s.

Wait.

Fine. But I wasn’t planning to wait for long.

* * *

Later, after Kade had left for a shift at the hospital, I had three back-to-back CAP-C appointments. Two were court-ordered evaluations, the first for a divorcing couple in a custody fight, the second for a toddler, a little boy whose father had been accused of physical abuse. The final meeting of the day was with a teenage girl whose sexual-abuse outcry against a teacher had gained some media attention recently. It had also led to some pretty vicious threats from classmates who called her a liar, among other things.

All in all, it was about as rough as my days got—or at least, as rough as they had gotten before I had to spend my time looking at slides of dead girls.

By the time midday rolled around, I was ready to be left alone with the silence in my mind, so when Gloria stuck her head in and asked, “Want to get lunch today?” I simply groaned in response.

“That bad?” she asked.

“Worse. I’m going to stay behind and catch up on paperwork here.”

My boss waggled her fingers in farewell and shut my office door behind her.

I hadn’t been entirely honest, though.

Peeking out the curtain over my window, I waited for everyone to pile into their cars and drive away.

Then I began watching the YouTube videos I had searched for that morning, before the parade of children in pain had begun its march through my office.

Every single video was entitled Mongoose vs. Snake—or some version of it.

And in all of them, the mongoose won.

I hadn’t really known what a mongoose looked like. In my mind, they were long and wiry, like a weasel. I hadn’t been entirely wrong, but the animals in these clips were more muscular and compact.

And fast. Damn, were they fast.

The snakes didn’t have a chance.

I watched the golden-furred creature in the latest video leap out of the way of the striking cobra. It used the serpent’s movement as a chance to bite down, just behind the head, rendering the snake helpless.

The skin on the nape of my own neck prickled in response.

Where were the videos where the snake won? Did people hate snakes so much that they refused to upload videos with different outcomes?

Or was this the inevitable end of any conflict between mongoose and snake?

The virtual extinction of lamias suggested that the mongoose always won.

After all, Kade hadn’t mentioned his people being wiped out.

“Screw this,” I muttered, closing out the window.

Most of the records of the murdered girls’ families were gone. Jason and Scott had taken the primary files to the DA’s office. But I still had my case notes, the ones I used to write up my reports. Flipping through the records for Preston Bryant’s family, I found an address.

I was beginning to be certain that all of these people were shapeshifters.

So why had none of them recognized me as a lamia? Why only Emma Camelli and Kade Nevala?

I didn’t see any other connections among the families. Jason and Scott hadn’t, either.

But maybe, now that I knew about the shifters, I could find out something that the ADA and the investigator couldn’t.

A glance at my calendar showed me that my next appointment wasn’t until 2:00.

I scribbled out a note to let Gloria know where I’d gone and stuck it to her office door on my way out.

* * *

The street leading to the Bryant’s home started out narrow and paved, albeit cracked, but petered out to a rutted track in the weeds by the time it reached their yard. Like many in this neighborhood, the house itself had once been a mobile home, but was now permanently settled on this scrap of rocky land.

I hadn’t been out here before, and even if I had, Gloria or one of the other counselors would have come with me. Home visits weren’t unusual, but we rarely made them alone. Occasionally, parents were less than thrilled with the information their children gave out in counseling. Often, they were afraid that we would call Child Protective Services to take their children away.

Sometimes we did.

There hadn’t been any notes in the file about the Bryants having any such concerns. And although it had been almost a year since I had seen them, I recalled then-ten-year-old Preston Bryant as being clean and well-spoken. My memory of his sister Kirstie was fuzzier. I had spoken to her only once or twice. The family had landed in my office when a neighbor’s gun-shooting rampage had ended with the boy taken hostage for an hour before being shoved out the door as the neighbor shot himself.

The family had been too poor to pay for counseling services, but the mother had persevered until Victim’s Services had referred them to us.

Not once had I suspected they might be anything other than they appeared: a poor, but loving family of humans.

And there had been no indication that they recognized me as a fellow shapeshifter.

Leaving my car in the overgrown grass of the yard, I picked my way to the rickety steps leading up to the tiny landing at the front door. The doorbell didn’t echo inside the house, as far as I could tell, so I pulled open the screen and knocked on the door, as well.

While I waited, the screen door propped open against my back, I opened up my serpent senses to see if my animal side could detect anything unusual.

No additional body heat anywhere nearby, though the sun shining down warmed the top of my head.

I licked my lips, letting my tongue linger long enough to taste the air around me.

Grass. Dirt.

The mechanized smell of oil and gas coming from my car, still warm in the yard. The pickup beside it had been cold for some time.

People.

And under it all, something else.

Something wild.

Not spicy and hot, like Nevala, but not completely different from him, either.

Fur and claws.

Something feline.

The door swung open just as I recognized the scent, and Preston Bryant froze in place, hand still on the door, eyes wide as he stared at me.

“Move, Preston. It’s that counselor. Let me say ‘hi’.” His little sister shoved him two stumbling steps sideways to take his place. She drew in a deep breath to speak to me, but the words never came.

Whatever she identified in that breath, whatever her shapeshifter senses picked up from me, pushed any other considerations to the side, and instead of saying something, she screamed.

It wasn’t an ordinary scream, either—nothing that could have come from the throat of a six-year-old child. It echoed through the neighborhood with a snarl at the end of it.

I recognized that sound. Not from my shapeshifter senses, but from having spent summers camping with my father as he searched for new specimens, as far outside of civilization as we could get.

It was the scream of a bobcat.

I stared at the little girl in horror, even as my own inner snake reared up, trying to take over. My vision shifted between colors and gray as I fought against the shift.

“It’s me. Lindi Parker. I’m here to talk to your parents.” The strain of fighting the shift echoed through my voice. A door in the back of the house opened, and the temperature of the room rose at the same time the scent of feline against my tongue intensified. I tamped down harder on my serpent side, even as the children’s mother, in what I now recognized as her human form, padded into the room, accompanied by a full-grown bobcat by her side.

“Step away from the door, kids.” She reached out and gathered her children to her, then gently pushed them into the room behind her. The girl’s hand trailed across the bobcat’s back as she passed him.

I held myself perfectly still as Rita Bryant’s gaze ran up and down me, landing finally on my face, her brows knitted in confusion. “This isn’t new, is it,” she said, the words more statement than question. Running her hands through the fur of the cat beside her, she asked, “How did we miss it before?”

She didn’t seem to expect an actual answer, so I simply turned my palms up in a gesture somewhere between
I don’t know
and
I come in peace
. “I’d like to discuss that, if you’re willing.”

At her glance over my shoulder, I stiffened, uncertain whether it would be wiser to turn or stay perfectly still. As a compromise, I allowed just a tiny sliver of my inner snake to seep to the surface to test the air.

A blast of heat and fur slammed into me, overriding all other sensory input, and I carefully twisted around to look behind me.

While I had been stifling my inner nature in an attempt to radiate non-threat to the Bryants, at least a dozen bobcats had flowed silently into the grass between me and my car. Three or four of them were sitting, tufted ears perked forward. But the rest crouched, back ends twitching as they prepared to pounce.

As a child, I had gone through a phase of desperately wanting a kitten, but Dad had reminded me that I was likely to frighten any cat.

These cats weren’t frightened. But I was terrified.

I wasn’t used to being prey.

Human. I am human.

Turning my back on those glowing, predatory eyes was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

I drew on every ounce of counselor training I’d ever had and focused on infusing my voice with it. “Ms. Bryant, I would never hurt you or your family.” I spoke softly. “I am here to help you. I promise. Please talk to me.”

The bobcat beside her growled a little, an answering wave of heat behind me alerting me to the other cats as they took a step forward.

Rita Bryant held up one hand. “You were a shifter when you helped us before. Why didn’t you tell us?”

“I didn’t know.”

Another low growl, another wave of heat.

“I mean I didn’t know that your children were shifters. I knew I was, of course. I thought maybe I was the only one.”
Calm, Lindi. Remain calm.

The sound of a car bumping up the lane made me want to turn around and look, but every instinct I had insisted that I remain perfectly still. No one else moved, either, not even when the vehicle pulled into the Bryants’ yard and stopped.

Finally risking a glance behind me, I realized that the black Jeep had parked behind my car.

Great. Now I’m blocked in.

I had turned back to face the Bryants, when the slamming of the Jeep door brought a different scent to me—spicy, hot, and unmistakable.

Kade Nevala.

I couldn’t decide whether to be irritated or thankful.

Maybe a little of both.

“Hello, Rita,” he called out.

“Dr. Nevala.” Ms. Bryant said, her tone neutral.

“Hi, Lindi,” he said, all too cheerfully for my taste.

“Kade.” I aimed for flat, but a slight quaver ran through the word.

He moved up onto the tiny porch beside me, opening the screen door wider and placing a hand on my back in an oddly comforting gesture of support. “What do you say we take this inside?”

When he took one step into the house, the Bryant family backed up, just a little. Kade’s fingertips exerted the tiniest bit of pressure, and I followed him. Inside seemed safer than outside, anyway. At least in here, there was only the one fully shifted bobcat. One set of claws to dodge, rather than a dozen.

Before he shut the screen behind us, Kade spoke to the assembled cats. “You’re all welcome to stay, of course. We may be a while, though. And I give you my word that your clansmen and kits will be safe.” He smiled, his voice dropping once again from formal into cheerful. “And you might want to see what you can do to be a little less conspicuous. I could see you from half a block away. Your neighborhood is private, but it’s not that secluded.”

At his words, the bobcats began to melt away, until only two remained, and those two laid down in the tall, slightly browned grass so that only someone actively looking for them would notice the black-and-tan fur pattern and ear tufts among the native vegetation that passed for a yard.

With a sigh of relief, I let Kade shut the door behind us.

I was totally unprepared when he spun on me and grabbed my upper arms, almost shaking me in his anger. “What the hell were you thinking?” he demanded. “You could have gotten yourself killed. Or worse, exposed these people to the rest of the world.”

I shrugged him off, his accusations kindling an answering anger in me. “I knew these people, Kade. I worked with them for months, had no indication at all that they might be dangerous. And you, with all your secrets. I don’t see you offering up any information about who’s a shifter and who’s not. It’s not like I had any information to go on at all. So this is all your fault.”

Rita Bryant interrupted my mini-tirade. “Dr. Nevala? I think we could use an explanation here. I’m right, aren’t I? This woman is a lamia.” She paused, eyeing me up and down again. “What is she doing here? Why is she still alive?”

The little girl, who had been standing silently, peeked around from behind her mother. When she spoke, she flashed tiny elongated fangs—the kind of partial-shift hangover I remembered from my own childhood. “Yeah, Dr. Nevala,” she said. “Why haven’t you killed the bad snake lady yet?”

At her words, Kade grabbed me again, though this time the impetus behind it seemed more like protection than irritation.

I pushed out of his hold, anyway. “What are you doing here? How did you even find me?”

He unclamped his clenched jaw only long enough to respond. “I’m on the evening shift tonight at the hospital. I thought I’d drop by your office to see how you were doing. Everyone was returning from lunch, so I followed them in. Instead of you, I found a note announcing that you were coming out to visit some of the very people you were supposed to be avoiding.”

“Avoiding? You’re working with her?” Rita Bryant stepped in close enough to keep from being cut out of the conversation. Part of me was glad she no longer felt threatened by my presence. The rest of me wished she’d shut up so I could have it out with Dr. Mongoose.

“Let’s all have a seat and talk about this like rational humans.” Kade’s voice was back to being warm and coaxing. My head spun with his changing verbal cues.

“Do you know what she is?” Rita Bryant demanded again.

“Yes. And I know something about
who
she is, too,” the doctor replied. He took another step inside, and I followed him. The Bryant family fell back at our inexorable approach, but not in fear. I tasted the air, found something buttery and smooth flowing between Kade and the Bryants.

It was respect, I realized. They respected the doctor, this strange mongoose shifter who had followed me out to their home. I might have frightened them, but if he said I was trustworthy, they were going to believe it.

At least somewhat. The bobcat still carefully kept himself between me and the children, and when Rita tried to step forward, he sat down on her feet. We all stared at one another for a long moment. “Johnny,” Rita finally said, “why don’t you go on back and change. Dr. Nevala is here, and he’ll watch us. We’re okay.”

After a long, hard look at me, the cat padded away. “Y’all have a seat,” Rita said, gesturing toward the living room area. “I’ll get us something to drink. And Johnny’s going to need food. You want anything?” Her words were directed at the doctor. She wasn’t comfortable enough to speak directly to me, at least not in any hospitable way.

But Kade glanced at me, taking in the short shake of my head before answering for both of us. “No, thanks.”

The children sat huddled on the couch, staring at me as if we hadn’t spent hours together in my office working through the trauma of Preston’s kidnapping.

A sudden thought made me sit up straight, and the children both jerked a little. “Last year,” I said. “The man who held you hostage?” It had taken us two weeks to come up with a term Preston could live with—something that allowed him to deal with his trauma, but did not, as he said, make him “feel like a baby.” Thus “kidnapped” had been eliminated. “Besides,” he had said, “he didn’t take me anywhere. We were right in my living room.”

This living room
, I realized, looking around with new eyes.

“What about that man?” Rita said, her tone riding the line between polite and hostile.

“Was he a shapeshifter, too?” I held my breath, waiting for the answer. Would the knowledge have changed anything about how I had counseled Preston? Probably not.

“No.” Rita’s reply was short.

“But he saw Preston shift,” Kirstie offered. Rita shook her head at her daughter, but in the irrepressible way of children, Kristie burbled on. “Mr. Vazquez moved in next door without getting the clowder’s permission first, ‘cause he didn’t know he needed it, and by the time they found out, it was too late, but then he was out in his back yard, and he seen Preston turn cat.”

With a sigh, Rita moved toward the kitchen.

Kirstie leaned forward, confidingly. “Mr. Vazquez was peeing. Outside. In his own human shape.”

“He didn’t have any other shape, dummy,” Preston said, bumping his sister with his shoulder.

I had heard the part about the kidnapper’s tendency to urinate outside. No one had mentioned any other shapes in our counseling sessions.

This kind of information-spilling was probably why I had seen Kirstie only occasionally during my time with Preston.

Rita came back in with a pitcher and passed around lemonade, giving up on trying to keep her daughter quiet.

Attempting to keep the children quiet was useless, of course. I had heard the rest of the story, anyway. And the longer I sat there with them, the more the Bryant children fell into their old habits of confiding in me.

I felt myself relax.

This will be okay.

And then Johnny Bryant walked into the room in, as Kirstie would have said, his own human shape, wearing nothing but a low-slung pair of jeans.

I was beginning to realize that although our shifter and human shapes were different, there were some similarities. Like a bobcat, Johnny Bryant wasn’t particularly large, but he was muscular and compact. Like Kade, he radiated more power than his size should have allowed—unlike Kade, though, that power didn’t call to me in any way.

“What is she doing here?” Johnny Bryant asked, running a hand through his tawny-blond hair.

“I came out to talk to the children,” I began, but the bobcat shifter cut me off.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” he said.

Kade’s calm reply helped me maintain my own cool. “She really is here to talk to the kids, Johnny.”

“You vouching for her?” The man’s scowl suggested that having Kade speak up for me would only barely make up for my mere existence.

“Yes.” The single syllable sent a wave of relief through me. I hadn’t realized until now exactly how anxious I had been that Kade might not fully believe me when I said I had no desire to hurt anyone.

“We should report her to the Council.” Rita’s soft tones cut through Johnny’s masculine glare.

“Absolutely not,” Kade said. “She hasn’t done anything to hurt anyone. I will
introduce
her to the Council soon. Anyway, if I understand correctly, she did quite a lot to help your children last year.”

Preston, still sitting on the couch, had unthinkingly reached down to clasp his sister’s hand. “She did, you know,” he said. “We talked about how I was held hostage, not kidnapped, and that the bad man was gone, and none of it was my fault. And she has a lot of toys in her office.” His spirited defense of me made me smile, and he essayed a shaky grin back at me.

His mother, watching the exchange, said hesitantly, “She did help Preston.” Her eyes narrowed and she spoke more forcefully. “But I still don’t know how we missed what she is. And I don’t know how you can stand to be around her.” She pointed at Kade. “Aren’t you supposed to protect us from things like her?”

I froze at the way she spat out the word ‘thing.’ As if I weren’t a real person at all, despite all the ways I had helped her family.

Despite the fact that we were both shapeshifters—that both of us might be considered ‘things’ by the humans surrounding us.