The Skin She's In by Margo Collins (online e book reader .txt) 📕

“Yes,” the woman said sharply, even as the man made a demurring sound and gesture. They both stopped speaking and looked at one another in surprise.

These two might be lovers, but they are not used to working together.

I filed the intuition away, hoping to examine it later. Closing my eyes, I focused on shifting only my face, allowing my mouth to widen, my chin to slope back a bit, and my skin to harden into scales. I could tell when my eyes shifted because everything went black and white.

When I flicked my tongue out into the air this time, I tasted more of the others’ motives.

No. They’re definitely telling the truth.

Whatever other reasons they might have for wanting to talk to “the lamia,” they genuinely believed that seeing me was their only hope.

I let the partial shift fall away and my human features took its place.

“You wanted to see me,” I said. “Now you have. So tell me, who are you?”

I’d already begun to think of the woman as the dominant one of the pair, so I was a little surprised when she stepped aside and let the man begin speaking.

“I am Jeremiah Diphiri,” he said in his beautifully melodic voice, and its cadence, similar to that of a storyteller, clued me in—this part of the meeting had been carefully rehearsed before they ever entered my office.

That suggested they both viewed him as being the more believable of the pair—at least they thought I was more likely to buy whatever he was about to tell me.

And the woman might be running this show, after all.

“I was a member of the hyena delegation sent to Savannah, Georgia to negotiate a territory exchange,” Jeremiah Diphiri continued.

“I heard that was happening.” I waved my hand a little, inviting him to continue.

“While there, I met Shadow.” He gestured at the woman, who took over the narrative.

“Shadow Glass,” she said, introducing herself by her full name. “I’m a Hunter.”

She paused as if she expected a reaction to that announcement. I heard the capital letter in the term, but I had no idea what she meant, so I simply nodded.

More information to examine later.

I wished I had a notepad to take notes.

Jeremiah took up the story again. “The werewolves learned of my liaison with a Hunter and turned on us.”

I winced in sympathy. Wolves bear-shifter were tough fighters.

And I certainly knew what it meant to be part of an unusual pairing in the shifter world.

As they continued their story, I learned that Jeremiah and Shadow had been kidnapped, held and tortured, and barely fought their way out again—only to discover that they were being followed.

And that’s when things got wild.

If these two had been almost any of the other shifters I had met since I first stumbled into this world, I would have expected their words to be tumbling all over one another as they told the story.

Instead, Jeremiah had a natural kind of reserve that came out in that beautiful voice and his subdued, but graceful, motions.

At first glance, Shadow Glass appeared to have the same kind of reserve. But after watching her for a moment, I began to recognize something entirely different in her movements. They both paced as they told the story, but Jeremiah circled around the edges of the office, always keeping me in his sights, never going behind me, never turning his back on me.

Shadow’s strides were more direct. She crisscrossed the room in a series of hatch marks that always returned to the center point of the room, right in front of my desk.

She didn’t hesitate to turn her back on me. Clearly, I didn’t frighten her.

More tellingly even than those differences were the distinctions between how they carried their anxiety. Shadow and Jeremiah were both nervous, tired, and afraid—worn threadbare. When he realized he was slumping, Jeremiah made a conscious effort to straighten his shoulders and lift his chin—a warrior in the face of greater odds—but I sensed in him and in his roundabout circuit of my room a willingness to go outside the normal rules if necessary.

Hyenas both hunt and scavenge, I reminded myself.

Shadow? Not so much. She coiled her anxiety in on herself, pulling it deeper and deeper until she was a spring ready to explode, the quivering kinetic energy she held only barely contained.

I half expected her to pull that giant ax out of its holster on her back and start swinging it into my office furniture.

“So then you left Savannah?” I asked, prompting them to continue their story.

“Until that time, we had no clear idea of why the werewolves had captured us,” Jeremiah said. “Other than disgust at our relationship.”

“But you found out later?” I found myself falling into my typical counselor’s mode of asking questions rather than asserting facts.

“Oh, yes,” Shadow practically hissed. “We stopped for fuel in Alabama. By that time, both of our...” She glanced at Jeremiah and frowned as if remembering an argument. “Both our groups,” she continued, “were beginning to look for us in earnest. We had turned our cell phones off in the hopes of avoiding any surveillance.”

“We wanted to leave the major thoroughfares,” Jeremiah took over the narrative smoothly. “So in addition to fuel, we were purchasing paper maps. We were not entirely certain where we were headed, though I had convinced Shadow that my people were likely to be more accepting of an... outsider... than hers might be.” Again, a twitch on Shadow’s face suggested there was more to that conversation in terms of their interpersonal relationship.

But right now, I was much less interested in them as a couple than I was in learning about their overall situation.

Still, I had to force myself not to derail the discussion by asking why, precisely, their two communities might despise one another—especially since I was apparently supposed to already know.

I’d thought I was the only shifter in the joint with a whole pile of enemies.

“Jeremiah was inside the gas station and I was