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

“I will let the two of you and Keeya decide that,” Jeremiah said.

“One more thing,” I said. “I think we should move your car out of my apartment complex. Too many people know I live here.”

“Where can we leave it?” Shadow asked.

“There’s a strip mall across a field not far from here. Easy to get to on foot, but the surface-road route is a little twisty. It might provide some cover for you.”

“Sounds good,” Jeremiah said, but he glanced at Shadow for approval first.

“I’ll follow you there and bring you back in my car. That’ll minimize scent trails.”

“Let’s go,” Shadow said.

That was all we had time to do before I had to head back to the office for the first of my afternoon appointments.

“HAS ANYONE EVER DIAGNOSED you as paranoid?” I asked the teenage girl slumped down in the chair in my office glowering at me.

She sat quietly for a long time as I counted the seconds in my head, waiting for a response.

After she’d stood the silence as long as she could, she bugged her eyes out, clenching her jaw as she bowed her chest out toward me aggressively.

Her stance engaged every one of my own predatory shifter instincts—I desperately wanted to pop my fangs out at her at that moment.

“Has anyone diagnosed me as paranoid? Like who?” she asked suspiciously.

I half-expected her to look around for people wanting to sneak in and diagnose her, and it was all I could do to keep from toppling over laughing. Her question deflated my incipient antagonism entirely.

“Guess not,” I managed to respond, keeping my expression serious.

My client continued to glare at me, however. “The thing is,” she said, her tone perfectly serious, “just because they diagnose you as paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not looking for a way to get you.”

BY THE END OF THE DAY, I was thoroughly exhausted, but I knew I needed to go see Kade. If nothing else, I wanted to talk to him about Serena—not to have him help me make my decision, but to help me figure out how to best manage what I already knew I wanted to do.

Serpent-Serena would be coming home with me soon.

I simply wanted to make sure I was as prepared as possible for what that might entail.

I didn’t want to admit as much, but Gloria’s attempted intervention earlier had shaken me. I was self-aware enough to know that I still had some post-traumatic responses to the events I’d been through in the last few months.

My human side did, at least.

And Gloria didn’t even know some of the worst of it. She didn’t know that I had helped kill Scott. I had participated in his execution, a punishment ordered by the Council for his murder of several local shifter children.

The fact that I was about to begin raising his children sometimes bothered me, as well. Since I had begun working as a children’s counselor, I had become more and more convinced that much of what we are is encoded in our DNA.

But I was also living proof that DNA can be overcome by the right combination of love and training.

My serpent side was perfectly content with the way things had worked out. It also remained unworried about the lamia children.

But it wasn’t my snake-self that wanted to talk to Kade, either.

I shook my head and worked to pull my mind back around to the idea that both the snake and the human were part of the larger “me.”

Many of the shifters I know easily talk about their animal forms as if they’re somehow separate. They say things like, “That really made my inner cat sit up and meow,” or “I had to push my raccoon back down inside.” Like the animal is a whole other entity, waiting to come out. And maybe for some of them, it is.

I can’t afford that kind of separation between my inner snake-self and my inner human-self. If I did, it would be far too easy to give in, to separate myself from the actions my serpentine nature often urges me to take—to do heinous things and then disavow my responsibility for them.

Maybe if I’d grown up around other shifters, it would be different. Maybe I would have no trouble truly separating my human self from my shifter animal.

But that doesn’t work for me.

And if I had my way, it wouldn’t work for the lamia children I helped raise, either.

Chapter 15

I WAS BEGINNING TO wish I hadn’t promised Jeremiah and Shadow not to tell anyone that they were here. Or at least, I was beginning to regret not making an exception of Kade in that.

This was the first time I’d kept anything from him since we began dating. Granted, it had not been that long in the overall scheme of things, but we had been through some pretty serious events in our short relationship. I wasn’t used to not being able to ask for his advice. As I pulled up in front of his house that evening, I considered what it might mean to me to break that trust—and then I even had to think about what I meant by those words. Whose trust was I breaking? Kade’s, as my boyfriend? Or Jeremiah’s and Shadow’s, as two people who were not quite my clients?

It had been an even longer time since I’d had to consider how to deal with an ethical conundrum like this. Supposedly, the only exceptions to confidentiality were if the clients were going to hurt themselves or someone else, or in the case of a court order.

I shook my head. None of that applied.

I pulled in a deep breath and picked my purse up off the seat beside me. When I sat up straight again, a flash of something caught my attention outside the passenger side window—something moving close to a neighbor’s house.

When I peered out with my human eyes, I couldn’t see anything. Shifting might help with that. Rumors of snakes’ poor eyesight were only