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

as high as possible on a local level. I needed to tell Janice and Kade about the guests at my house.

And that put me right back in my quandary.

Counselors are ruled by a code of professional ethics that includes a strict client confidentiality. If someone comes to me and even thinks that he or she is speaking to me as a counselor, I am required by law to keep that confidential.

I had always interpreted that particular part of the code more strictly than many of my colleagues. As a snake shifter, I had spent all of my life—at least as much of it as I remembered—fighting to keep my human side ascendant. Shifters had banded together to eliminate the lamia because my people were both powerful and ruthless.

I was different because I grew up with human foster parents, and because I fought to keep my empathy for others alive. For me, that included interpreting various sets of rules fairly strictly. As a child, I’d had my parents to help me determine what constituted appropriate behavior. Their love and care had helped me internalize almost all of those in ways I hoped to be able to mimic. I wanted to instill the same behavior in the children I would soon be caring for.

As an adult, I often relied on rules and regulations, studying them until I had a clear sense of what was expected and why.

Dilemmas like this one shook me less now than they had only a few years ago, but it didn’t make dealing with them any easier.

I had a hyena-shifter and a Hunter holed up in my apartment. I’d promised not to tell anyone where they were. Kade expected a hyena-shifter and a Hunter to show up and cause problems sometime soon.

Two different sets of moral imperatives were about to come crashing headlong into one another in my world—the one that said I had to keep the clients’ confidentiality and the one that said I shouldn’t lie to my boyfriend.

It was a lot like an unpleasant word problem in math.

No matter what, my life was about to get complicated.

Better get all the information I could.

I took a swig of my coffee.

“What’s a hunter?”

Kade dropped his phone onto the table and stared at me blankly as if I had asked something exceptionally stupid.

“I mean, I know what a hunter is—I did grow up in Texas, after all. But you said it like it meant something else. Like a Hunter.” I tried to give the word the same inflection I’d heard in his voice while he talked on his cell.

My boyfriend shook his head and blinked at me. “No, you’re right. Janice didn’t mean some local deer hunter.”

Despite the fact that he’d just gotten home from his shift at the hospital and almost certainly wanted to take a shower and tumble into bed for some much-needed sleep, Kade dropped into a dining-room chair and rubbed his hands across his eyes. “Hunters are ...” His voice trailed off for a few seconds. “I thought they were fictional, to be honest. They’re some ancient cult, or order, or something. Monster hunters.”

“And the monsters they hunt are ...?” I let my question dangle as I stood up to pour myself another cup of coffee.

“Us. Shifters.”

“All of us? Not only lamias?” Not, in other words, only the snake-shifters like me.

Kade nodded. “Any kind of shifter is fair game, apparently.”

So for once, I wouldn’t have been the only one in danger—if, of course, Shadow meant any of us harm.

I didn’t want to say it made for a nice change. But if anyone had asked...

“And one of them is coming here? Who’s he planning to hunt?” I pulled out a chair across from Kade, slid into it, and leaned my elbows on the table.

“It’s a she, not a he. And she’s not coming to hunt anyone, as far as we know. She’s on her way to Texas with one of the hyena-shifters who went to Georgia to meet with the werewolves about a territory concession. They’re driving in from Savannah, probably arriving this afternoon or this evening.” Kade squeezed his eyes shut and gave his head a little shake as if trying to dislodge some internal image.

Probably the idea of a Hunter traveling with a shifter. He caught my eye, then said, “I know what you’re thinking. It would never happen. Hunters and shifters? No way.”

“You mean, like lamias and mongoose-shifters?” Joy tinted the smile threading through my words. “No. That could never happen.”

Kade ran his fingers through his short-cropped hair and around to the back of his neck. Interlacing his fingers, he leaned his head back far enough to look up at the ceiling for a few seconds.

I guess on some level, I had decided that until I had more information, it was more important to maintain confidentiality for the pair at my place than it was to tell Kade the truth.

I hoped it didn’t catch up with me anytime soon.

He turned to me, a puzzled expression on his face. “There is something odd going on here.”

“Like what?” I did my best to keep my anxiety out of my voice, but I wasn’t certain I’d be able to do it. Kade was particularly good at reading other shifters and even better at reading me.

Luckily—or maybe unluckily, depending on how I looked at it—he was too distracted by the mystery at hand to take special note of how I was acting.

“Keeya, the hyena matriarch, is furious, claiming that a Hunter kidnapped one of her Shields. Hunters don’t take prisoners. They destroy shifters.”

“Why hadn’t I heard about Hunters until recently? What are they? Why do they put everyone in such a tizzy?”

He cut his golden-tinged eyes my direction and tilted his head. “You know the story of Little Red Riding Hood?”

“Of course.”

“Well, there are a couple of versions of it—none of them entirely correct from our perspective, of course.”

“Werewolves and a little girl?” I asked.

“More or less. The little girl was bait—a trainee from a Hunter family.