More Than Skin Deep (Shifter Shield Book 3) Read online

  More Than Skin Deep

  A Shifter Shield Book (#3)

  Copyright © 2017 by Margo Bond Collins

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval systems, without prior written permission of the author except where permitted by law.

  Published by Bathory Gate Press

  Granbury TX

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Laugh Out Love: A Shifter Shield Novella Copyright © 2016 by Margo Bond Collins

  About More Than Skin Deep

  Shifting’s more than skin deep. Terror goes to the bone.

  Having eliminated the shifter community’s stalker and agreed to care for a pile of new baby lamias, child counselor and weresnake Lindi Parker believes she’ll be able to settle into her newly domestic life with her mongoose-shifter boyfriend, Kade Nevala.

  But she didn’t count on being on duty at her new job as a Shifter Shield when a hyena-shifter shows up requesting asylum—along with his girlfriend. She’s a Hunter from a hereditary clan of monster trackers, and a semi-mythical figure of dread among shifters. Worse, they have an entire werewolf pack after them, howling for their blood.

  And now they’re coming for Lindi, too.

  About More Than Skin Deep

  More Than Skin Deep

  A Lindi and Kade Shifter Shield Book

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Epilogue

  Laugh Out Love

  A Shifter Shield Novella

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Love The Shifter Shield Series? Be sure to leave a review!

  Acknowledgments

  Next in the Shifter Shield Series

  The Shifter Shield Series

  Lindi & Kade Books

  Join the Shifter Shield Star Newsletter

  Join The Vampirarchy, Margo’s Street Team

  About the Author

  More Than Skin Deep

  A Lindi and Kade Shifter Shield Book

  Margo Bond Collins

  Chapter 1

  Less than a week ago, I’d decided to become a foster mother to at least eight weresnakes.

  I was already regretting my decision.

  Well, not regretting exactly.

  More like… fretting about it.

  Maybe more than eight, actually—the doctors caring for the women pregnant with those shifters were only now beginning to determine how many babies there were.

  Don’t get me wrong. I like kids. As a children’s counselor, I have to. And the weresnake thing didn’t bother me. After all, I’m a snake shifter myself.

  Despite all that, the prospect of taking care of a whole pile of baby lamias—and all that that would entail—was beginning to really sink in, and I was becoming more and more anxious by the day.

  Especially during those times when I was working my second job as a Shifter Shield—a kind of guardian employed by the Shifter Council to police our local shifter population.

  Like most other policing jobs, this one entailed long stretches of boredom, punctuated by adrenaline-inducing terror.

  Not that different from counseling in some ways, come to think of it.

  Usually I would have been every bit as happy to avoid the hair-raising moments in both jobs. But at the moment, I would’ve welcomed almost anything that distracted me from obsessing over my impending foster-motherhood.

  As it was, though, nothing exciting had happened in several days—good for the shifter community, bad for my skyrocketing anxiety levels. So on this Wednesday night, I sat in the tiny Fort Worth, Texas, office rented by the Council for the Shields, where I was manning the telephone lines, the shifter version of 911.

  I’d already put in a full day at the CAP-C—the Children’s Advocacy and Protection Center where I worked with children who needed help. In fact, I’d skipped my lunch period to go out to a local women’s shelter and run a group counseling session for the kids there. After work, I had rushed to make it to the Shield office before Layla, a werecoyote Shield, finished her shift.

  Now I stared at the old-fashioned phone on the desk, willing it to ring as my stomach growled. I was bored and hungry and anxious—not a good combination for anyone, much less a snake shifter.

  “The ER is slammed tonight. I’ll be lucky to get away before morning,” Kade Nevala, my mongoose-shifter physician boyfriend said when I called to see if he’d bring food by the office after his own shift.

  “Thanks anyway,” I managed to respond, more-or-less politely.

  Crossing my arms, I snarled at my own cell phone as I dropped it on the table.

  If the Council hadn’t rejected my proposal to allow us to have Shield calls routed through to our personal cell phones, I wouldn’t have been stuck here.

  “But no,” I muttered aloud in my most sarcastic tone. We all had to take our turns sitting in the office. Even if an emergency call came in, I’d have to send out the on-call Shields.

  Besides, the Council insisted on maintaining a physical office where shifters could report problems directly. I had argued against it vehemently in one of our meetings, but to no avail.

  So of course I was the one on duty when the panicked couple showed up to send my already chaotic life spiraling into absolute madness.

  * * *

  The door of the office slammed open, hitting the wall behind it so hard I was afraid it would leave a dent. A couple dashed in and shut the door behind them. The man threw the deadbolt and scanned the rest of our limited additional security. While he did this, the small woman strode up to the desk and purposefully placed both hands flat on the surface. She leaned forward, almost into my personal space, and said, “We need to see the lamia.”

  I assumed she meant me—since I was the only adult snake-shifter in the area, and perhaps in existence, she almost had to. However, the enormous axe sticking up over her head from between her shoulder blades suggested that perhaps I didn’t need to see them—not without getting a sense of who they were and why they were invading my workspace.

  I work with frantic people for a living, though, both in my job as a counselor and as a type of police officer for the Shields. I pulled on my counselor face—smooth, bland, and only mildly interested in whatever it was that had gotten my clients (or in this case, the axe-wielding blonde and her boyfriend) stirred up.

  I leaned back in the office chair and tented my fingers in front of me. “Why do you need to see her?”

  “She is the only one we will talk to,” the woman ground out from between clenched teeth. Her eyes were the pale, almost-white blue of a Siberian Husky’s, and they glared at me with a cold fury, barely banked.

  I raised one eyebrow and waited. It was a technique I found I used as much as a Shield as I did as a children’s counselor. People want to fill silences.

  In the meantime, I used the few seconds of quiet as an opportunity to study the pair.

  In terms of appearance, they were exact opposites. She was leggy, but tiny, with incredibly pale
skin and long hair so blonde it was almost white. He was taller, a light-skinned black man with luminous brown eyes.

  Pulling in a breath across the half-shifted Jacobson’s organ in the roof of my mouth, I parsed out what I could of their scents. They were obviously lovers, their individual scents interwoven so completely that it was difficult to differentiate them.

  Difficult, but not impossible.

  He was some kind of shifter—a type I’d never smelled before—and she was…

  Well, she was baseline human. There was something else there that I had never encountered before, though. To my weresnake senses, it smelled wild, but didn’t taste like anything shifter or animal. Yet it carried that fizz along the edge, like a lightly carbonated drink, that suggested its owner belonged to the world of the paranormal.

  Yeah—whatever she was, she was definitely supernatural.

  “Maybe I can help you?” I asked.

  They exchanged a look full of information that I couldn’t interpret, and then the man stepped up. “We must speak to the lamia. She is, we believe, the only one who might believe us—might trust us.” His voice was musical, the words spoken in the lilting accent of an African country.

  I chewed on the inside of my bottom lip as I considered the couple in front of me. I inhaled another breath, trying to taste intentions in the molecules of air. All my senses were telling me that they were nervous, but not actively hiding anything. They weren’t lying. They definitely thought I would be able to help them.

  After a long moment, I nodded and sat up straight. “I’m Lindi Parker. I’m the one you’re looking for.”

  The blonde woman stood up straight, pushing herself off with the hands she had never taken from the desk. The man slumped a little in relief, and then he stood up straight, as well.

  “You are?” the woman said suspiciously. The man simply ran his hand along her back. Again they glanced at each other—but this time I knew what they were communicating about. It was a silent discussion over what to do next, and more importantly, whether or not they even believed me. I gave it a few seconds, and then I broke the silence.

  “Would you like proof?” I asked, pushing my chair back from the desk and standing.

  “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, having recently taken on a couple of wolves—and a bear-shifter. They were all 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 axe 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 is a couple than I was in learning about their overall situatio
n.

  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 outside, when an enormous SUV pulled up beside my car.” A faint flush of anger highlighted Shadow’s cheekbones, and her eyes hardened into chips of freezing, blue-white ice at the memory. “It was exactly like the one they had driven in Savannah.”

  “From inside the convenience store, I saw Shadow pull her weapon.” Jeremiah gazed at me intently, those liquid brown eyes of his solemn. “You understand, do you not, that to force a Hunter to draw her axe in self-defense is perhaps the most dangerous action a shapeshifter could take?”

  I was still too new to the entire shifting world to know anything of the sort—someone had clearly forgotten to fill me in on the importance of Hunters—but I simply made an encouraging noise and nodded for them to continue.

  “Despite the public setting, I had to defend myself.” Shadow’s gaze practically dared me to disagree.

  “Inside the store, the single employee prepared to call the police. I stopped him.” Jeremiah’s simple statement chilled me—as a counselor, anyway. As a lamia, if I were entirely honest, it didn’t bother me at all. Since I am made up of some of each, I suppose the final tally was somewhere in between.

  At any rate, it seemed best to ask.

  “Stopped him?” I hoped I wouldn’t have to prod any further for clarification.

  The hyena-shifter’s slight smile suggested he knew exactly what I was asking. “He was merely restrained.”

  I nodded and turned back to Shadow’s part of the story. “And then?”

  “I killed the werewolves,” she said simply. Then she ruined the impression of calm precision by adding in tones of irritation, “It was a messy kill. We removed the bodies, but to a location all too nearby. The amount of blood on the asphalt was impossible to clean entirely. And the store clerk is an unfortunate loose end.”