A Generation of Vipers (Shifter Shield Book 2) Read online

  Kade and Ed chatted at the door for a moment, but when Kade invited the Shield in for a beer, I tightened around my boyfriend's waist. I was pissed at Ed, and didn't really want him hanging around any longer. Kade simply slipped his hand in between me and his side, gently reminding me not to let my emotional response get the better of me, and not to be rude to the other members of our community—a reminder I needed much more often as a snake than I did as a human.

  Ed declined, anyway, so it didn't matter.

  The portion of my mind that always remained human, remained Lindi, chastised me for pouting. I had agreed to join the Shields, to be part of Ed's team, and to allow him to train me. At no point had I put any restrictions on that training.

  So if I didn't like the outcome of that agreement, my choices were simple: accept it, or seek to change it.

  Or continue to be a pouting python, but there was nothing to be gained in that.

  With an internal sigh, I reared up and bobbed my head a couple of times at Ed, who smiled that surface-level smile of his and nodded in acknowledgment of my silent farewell.

  As Kade shut the door, I slid around him, feeling the heat of his torso slipping along my underbelly, the softness of his skin calling me to touch all of it with all of me. With his fingertips, he absently caressed my chin as he picked up a wineglass in the kitchen and finished what was left in it.

  "Let's go to bed, Lindi," he said quietly, then took my face in his hands and planted a kiss on the top of my head.

  People think snakes don't have emotions.

  They're wrong.

  We have desires, too.

  I discovered I wasn't too tired to shift back into my human shape, after all.

  Chapter 3

  I didn't write up those reports that night. In fact, I forgot about them entirely until I was on my way to the CAP-C the next morning.

  I cursed aloud.

  It's not like I could tell my boss Gloria why I hadn't completed them, either.

  No, it would be one more reason for Gloria to tilt her blond head, narrow her eyes, and ask if I had gotten counseling yet for tangling with Scott Carson recently. The police were still looking for the District Attorney's former investigator in conjunction with the murder of several local children—they had no idea that the shifter community had tried him, sentenced him, and executed him.

  No one outside the shifter community knew that he had held a number of women in a cave and attempted to impregnate them with lamia babies.

  So of course Gloria had no idea that I was preparing to help raise the children he had … fathered seemed like too kind a word.

  Sired.

  The children he had sired on their unwilling mothers.

  There wasn't enough counseling in the world for the kinds of issues I was dealing with. Not that I didn't think counseling would help; it would. I would figure it out—find a way to talk to someone in coded terms that allowed me to sort through the issues I faced.

  Just not yet.

  I pulled into my parking space behind the CAP-C building and slipped in through the back door. I heard Gloria speaking to someone in her office as I unlocked the door to my own space and slipped inside.

  With any luck, I could finish the reports before she finished her current meeting.

  The reports weren't complicated, or even time-consuming—one court-ordered family counseling session for a divorcing couple, one child-abuse case that would almost certainly need to go to trial, and one intake session for a child who had reported sexual abuse.

  Even after almost four years at the CAP-C, working with abused and damaged children, the sex-abuse cases never failed to horrify me. I guess that was good—the day I stopped feeling that sickening combination of revulsion and heartbreaking sorrow was the day I had lost my ability to help the children I had trained to serve.

  I might spend my evenings with shapeshifters—sparring with a werecoyote, sleeping with a weremongoose, learning the shifters' Council business from a werebadger—but I spent my days dealing with the actions of the real monsters.

  I had the first two cases entered into the system by the time Gloria made her way to my office, and was working on the final report by going back over the eight-year-old boy's intake interview, pausing the digital recording to make note of particular information as necessary.

  "Almost done with the Wallace write-up?" she asked, poking her head around the doorframe.

  "Come in and listen to this." I pointed at the screen with the pen in my hand, using the other to tap back a few seconds on the recording.

  The video started back up, the little boy telling Gloria about the day he had spent with his "uncle"—an unemployed boyfriend of the mom's the child had been left alone with for days on end. In the background of the conference room, a uniformed officer sat quietly, working to remain unobtrusive.

  I paused, then rewound again.

  Gloria shook her head. "Sounds like a fairly standard boyfriend-did-it scenario to me."

  "Not the boy. Listen to the background noise."

  Snakes technically don't hear anything—so unlike many mammal shifters, my hearing isn't enhanced in my animal form, much less in my human form. But even I could make out something deep and rhythmic being picked up by the camera's microphone.

  "Who else was in there with you?" I asked my boss.

  Her brows knitted. "Just the boy, the officer, and me." She closed her eyes in order to better listen. After a moment, she opened them again and stared at me in horror. "Is that. …" She paused, as if to shake away the idea, but then came back around to it. "Is that someone breathing?"

  "I think it might be. We need to see if we can find someone tech-savvy enough to strip out the sound and enhance it."

  With a nod, Gloria sprang into action, picking up my office phone and hitting one of the saved numbers. "I hope you're wrong," she said to me, just before asking to be transferred to Detective Daniel Moreland.

  * * *

  I hadn't meant for the strange noise behind the recording to take attention away from my late reports, but waiting for Detective Moreland to get back to us did have the beneficial effect of allowing me to catch up on my work.

  Even if I did catch myself trying to think of what might have made that creepy breathing noise.

  During my lunch break, I called and left a message on Kade's voicemail. I wanted to get another shifter's take on the breathing sounds I'd picked up. Preferably a shifter with better hearing than mine.

  He wasn't anywhere to be found, though. I was guessing some emergency had come through the ER at Kindred Hospital—mostly a facility for shapeshifters, but sometimes used by the unwary general public, as well.

  By two o'clock, Gloria and I were ensconced with the detective and a sound tech in some kind of recording studio—the twenty-something guy wasn't an official police contractor, but Moreland said he had the best ears in the business.

  I half-suspected he was a shifter from the way his scent buzzed on my tongue, but if so, he wasn't of a type I had encountered before. His movements were quick and sharp, and alternated with moments of perfect stillness as he listened to the sounds coming through his headset.

  ""I've boosted that background sound," he said, flipping a toggle on the switchboard in front of him, "and dropped down everything else as much as possible." The sound came out of speakers all around us, heavy and deep—and definitely breathing.

  "Can you tell anything about where it was coming from?" Gloria asked. "What part of the room?"

  "And why the recorder picked it up but no one in the room heard it?" I added.

  Moreland squinted into the distance, considering. "Was the breathing closer to the recording source than they were?"

  The tech nodded, even as Gloria shook her head. "Not possible," she said. "The recorder is built into the wall."

  My phone buzzed against the inside of my purse. When I saw it was Kade calling, I murmured an excuse to step away from the g
roup and into the small anteroom.

  "What's up?" I asked.

  "Marta's been attacked." His words were clipped, hurried, and I could hear the noises of the hospital in the background. "They're bringing her in, but the EMT thinks we're going to have to take the baby now."

  "Now?" I tried to do some quick calculations, but my mind wasn't working right. "It's months early."

  "Twenty-eight weeks. In humans, that would give the child a 90% shot at survival in a top-notch neo-natal facility like ours."

  Out of habit, I lowered my voice, even though no one else was around. "And a lamia child?"

  His shrug came through his tone. "No one really knows."

  "Who did this?" I paused as a thought struck me. "Was it someone who knew what kind of child Marta was carrying?"

  "No idea." I hadn't thought it possible for Kade to sound any more curt until he clipped out those words. "They're pulling up now. I'll be in touch."

  "I'll be there." Sheer rage at that thought of someone attempting to harm Marta and her baby slipped into my voice, but I didn't know if Kade heard it—he was already gone, his voice barking orders to his medical staff the last sound transmitted through the phone as he swiped it off.

  I stood perfectly still for a moment, trying to calm my breathing, but instead, all I could do was think of the last time I had met her for an ultrasound, when she had held my hand and squeezed it as she watched the screen. "I can't keep the baby," she had said without looking up at me. "But you'll make sure she's okay, right? Not like…" Her voice trailed off, but I knew what she meant.

  "I'll make sure."

  Remembering my words now, my anger swelled again, and the colors of the room blinked out, muted in an instant to shades of black and white and gray.

  If I didn't control myself, I would end up doing that insta-shift thing I'd pulled the other night with Eduardo and wind up exposing the whole were community.

  Even as the thought crossed my mind, I heard the door to the recording studio room open behind me, and closed my eyes to concentrate on pulling the shift back down inside me.

  "You okay?" Gloria asked, coming up beside me and placing one hand on my shoulder. The warmth of her hand seemed to pull me back into my human body. One long shudder traveled down my spine, leaving me oddly calm in its wake.

  "Seriously, is something wrong?" my boss said. Opening my eyes, I checked out of the corner of my eyes.

  Color vision.

  My pupils should be back to normal now, human-round rather than serpent-slitted.

  With a deep breath, I nodded and met Gloria's concerned gaze. "A friend of mine was attacked just now. She's in the hospital." If she noticed my hesitation around the word friend, she gave no indication.

  "Go to her," she said instantly. "I'll keep you posted on anything we learn about this."

  Moreland turned from saying goodbye to the sound tech. "Did I hear you say someone was attacked?"

  "I don't know much yet." At some point, I would have to tell them something about the house full of children I was about to begin counseling.

  But not yet.

  Not until I was absolutely certain that the first of those children would even survive the night.

  Chapter 4

  At the hospital, I realized that rushing to get there might have been a little foolish. I didn't have any more that I could do there than I could have done at work. And at least at the CAP-C, I would have been able to keep busy. In the waiting room at Kindred, all I could do was try to look up statistics on premature babies.

  I wished I had been able to speak to, or at least see, Marta before she was rushed to surgery. I knew that was more out of my selfish need for some kind of reassurance than any belief that I could have helped.

  We had never discussed what she might want to do about the baby if both their lives were at risk. She had been too far along in her pregnancy for a simple termination, and hadn't seemed to want one, anyway.

  If they had to choose between the baby and Marta, I had to believe that Kade would choose Marta.

  Wouldn't he?

  Surely a fully formed human life took priority over an … unfinished baby.

  Unfinished baby shifter.

  That was the rub. I honestly didn't know if Kade and the other Kindred doctors would value a shifter infant—developed to term or not—over a human mother.

  I groaned aloud and dropped my head into my hands. This waiting business was terrible. Standing up and walking around the hospital didn't help, either—I had tried it. I ran into too many other shifters, some of whom I knew.

  I couldn't bring myself to socialize.

  I could barely bring myself to stay human. There might not be any better public place to shift, if it came down to it, but for all that it was still public. There were plenty of humans around.

  Just not in this surgical waiting room, where one of the nurses had led me when I came reeling up to the check-in desk in the emergency room. "Dr. Nevala said you should wait here and he would come to you as soon as your cousin was out of surgery."

  Cousin. So that would be the fiction for the non-shifter staff. I could live with that.

  Here I was all alone.

  I poured another cup of the sludgy coffee and tried to cover the taste with creamer and sugar. I gave up when it began tasting more like syrup than anything drinkable.

  It seemed like hours before Kade swung around the doorframe, as usual seeming to take up much more room than he should have. I flicked my tongue against my lips nervously, trying to get a sense of his mood.

  Tired.

  That was all that brushed through me from him.

  Too afraid to say anything, I simply waited.

  He ran a hand across his eyes and I tried to brace myself for bad news. Any bad news. The worst news.

  "They're both okay."

  All the air seemed to whoosh out of me at once, and I deflated against the back of the chair I sat in.

  "For now, anyway," Kade continued. "The baby is on a ventilator to help her breathe, but that's not uncommon at this stage. We didn't have time to help her lungs develop any more quickly."

  "And Marta?"

  "Pretty badly beaten. We repaired the internal injuries." He closed his eyes briefly. "They both have a long recovery ahead of them."

  "Can I see either of them?"

  "Marta's still out. We're going to keep her under until tomorrow. The baby …" He waggled his hand in the air in a so-so motion. "It probably wouldn't hurt, but she's still being checked in. Later would be better."

  Glancing past him through the doorway to make sure no one was nearby, I lowered my voice. "Any sign that she's a lamia?"

  "None. Yet."

  "Would you be able to tell?" I realized that in all my discussions with him about shifter babies, I had missed some important questions. "If she inherited the weresnake gene, how soon is she likely to shift?"

  Oh, God. Could that be a problem?

  Seeing the panic on my face, Kade wrapped one arm around my shoulder and pulled me in close. "Usually not for a while—several weeks, at least—but even if she does, it'll be okay. We've got her in the shifter ward. It's set up as a contact isolation ward, so only approved visitors are allowed, and they're all screened."

  "But what can I do?" My voice pitched up at the end of the question, turning it into more of a wail.

  "Go home and rest. Go back to work. Whatever you want to do. Nothing is going to change overnight. It'll all be okay."

  Easy for him to say. He had been in the operating room for the last several hours, actually doing something helpful.

  Now that the immediate crisis had passed, though, I was feeling the effect of the anxiety. "You staying up here tonight?"

  He nodded. "You going back to my place or yours?"

  I paused. It hadn't occurred to me to wonder—I had simply assumed I would go to his house. "Mine," I said firmly. I needed to keep my own space.

&
nbsp; Right?

  With a sigh, Kade nodded. "Okay. Call me when you get done with work tomorrow and we'll come back up here to see the baby."

  His words sent a shiver through me, but I couldn't quite pin down the exact reason. Anticipation, surely, and a touch of anxiety.

  Sheer terror? my internal smartass suggested.

  "I'll see you tomorrow," I said to Kade, turning my face up to claim a kiss and firmly ignoring that mocking inner voice.

  Marta was okay. The baby was okay.

  That would have to be enough for now.

  I could examine my own emotions later.

  When I got home, though, I couldn't sleep. Instead, I tossed and turned all night, wishing I had gone to Kade's instead.

  By 6:00 the next morning, I was up and dressed and headed to the nearest big-box store.

  Kade had told me that the baby would be in the hospital for a while longer, but I knew, from other conversations, that the shifter community really didn't know that much about lamia babies. Really, for all he knew, an infant already in serpent form would be ready to go home in a week.

  Never mind that Marta's baby wasn't in serpent form.

  Never mind that none of us were ready to have a baby come home in a week.

  Hell, construction on the group home wasn't even done yet.

  That simply meant that we needed a backup plan.

  And that meant I had to go shopping.

  Don't get me wrong. I'm a good enough counselor to know when I'm losing my mind. I knew that the idea of bringing one or more shifter infants into my own home was insane—especially if someone had set out to hurt that shifter infant.

  For that matter, Kade and I didn't even have a home—we had two homes. Separate homes. He had a house and I had an apartment. We had only recently exchanged keys.

  And yet, at six o'clock in the morning, I was shopping the baby department in Walmart. Yes, I knew it was insane.

  But sometimes, you simply have to work with the life you're handed.

  Chapter 5

  By the time I hit my office at 8:30, I had a car-trunk and backseat full of all the things the most popular baby site on the internet told me were "necessities." Never mind that I didn't know what half of them were.