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

Shows what I know.

AT THE HOSPITAL, DR. Jimson helped me gear up for Serena. He had been glad to learn that I was taking her to my parents’ ranch—even happier to discover that my father was a herpetologist. “So you’ll have everything you need for a juvenile serpent, I presume,” he said. I nodded—anything I didn’t have, Dad certainly would.

“I’m more concerned about what to do if she shifts into a human infant form.” My hands tightened into fists at the thought of it—not so much that I was worried about dealing with the baby, but this baby had come quite a bit early for a human, and I was worried that there might be some human infant difficulties that she would have to deal with.

I knew premature human babies often had trouble. Right? God, it had been so long since I had taken my child development courses that I could hardly remember. I knew that some of them ended up with pretty severe developmental delays, but professionally, I tended not to see them until they were in school. I sometimes got the younger sibling of one of my clients in for a family session, but my work mostly dealt with children five years and up.

Dr. Jimson was watching me with a slight smile. “Dr. Nevala was down here earlier making sure we had everything ready to go for you on that account,” he said. I blinked, startled by the comment. “Kade was here?”

Jimson smiled wider, and said, “Fluttering around every bit as nervous as any new father.”

I didn’t even answer that. I didn’t know what to say, for one thing. Like a “new dad?” Not, apparently, like a “supportive... whatever.”

I brushed the thought aside. I’d deal with it later. “What did you come up with?” I asked.

“First of all, we’re going to send her with you in a fairly standard terrarium with a warming lamp. I’ll help you secure it in the front passenger seat where you can keep an eye on it. I’m also having a traditional children’s car seat installed in the back seat. I’ll give you a quick lesson in how to use it, and then, if she shifts while you are driving out there, you should pull over immediately and move her from the terrarium to the infant seat.”

I didn’t even know what to say to that. The thought of her shifting while I was out on the highway made my head spin and my stomach clench. Surely she wouldn’t do that, though. Right?

Suddenly I wished I had waited until Kade could come with me. At least then I would’ve had someone else in the car to keep an eye on Serena.

Plus, I wouldn’t have minded seeing some of this new-father behavior for myself.

Dr. Jimson was still speaking. “I’m also sending a monitor for her heart rate and oxygen level. If she shifts while you are out at the ranch, you will need to hook her up to this and keep track of it. You’ll have a small oxygen tank that you can use if she needs it as you bring her back into town.” He pointed out each of these items as he went through them, and I found myself nodding almost by rote, overwhelmed by all the possible things that might happen. Terrified by what might go wrong.

Dr. Jimson pulled out an infant-sized doll, complete with floppy head and arms, from a cabinet that ran along the side of the room.

“This is our CPR doll. We’ll use her to show you how to hook everything up and what to do in case of an emergency.”

Luckily, I was certified in CPR—it was a requirement of my job. That part didn’t take long at all.

As we went through the various other options, I snapped photos to use in case I ended up having to replicate any of the placement for these devices. Really, it didn’t look like it would be too difficult, and when Dr. Jimson had me practice for myself, it was all easy enough—on a perfectly still doll. I didn’t know how well it would work with a squirming infant.

I strapped the doll into the car seat a couple of times to show that I knew how to do it and pulled my car around to a side entrance, where we were unlikely to be seen by any human patients. There, one of the nurses, Kelly, loaded the terrarium into my car, buckling it into the front seat. I drove away from the hospital slowly, more anxious behind the wheel than I had been since I was a teenager learning to drive.

Inside the terrarium, Serena raised up on the lower half of her body, peering at me and tasting the air molecules in my car.

“I know,” I said to her. “Things smell different out here, don’t they?”

I chattered to her about all the things we could go do when we got out to my parents’ land. I talked to her as I would a human child, discussing things with the assumption that she would learn language more quickly the more I talked to her.

I supposed it was really the same when it came to shifting. The more she saw it done, the more quickly she would learn to do it, too.

As she coiled in on herself under the lamp, though, I had to admit to myself that I knew exactly why she didn’t have any real interest in shifting right now. Human babies are frustratingly immobile. I didn’t know exactly how different a shifter child’s development was, but if she followed a normal human child development timeline, she was, what? three months? A long time away from even being able to roll over on her own.

As a serpent, she had mobility. Not much more than to the walls of the terrarium they were keeping her in, but mobility, nonetheless.

I didn’t know that I would want to shift, either.

For that matter, I sometimes wondered what it