The Skin She's In Read online

  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.

  For someone who works with kids, I’m pretty clueless about the mechanics of dealing with infants.

  I was kind of glad that no one else had any more experience with lamia babies than I did.

  Except, of course, my own parents—though they didn’t get me until I was a toddler, around the equivalent of two human years old, according to their best guess. Kade said most shifter children aged along a similar timeline to humans, instead of following the aging path of their animal counterparts. That accorded with what I knew of my own childhood experience after Dad found me out there in the West Texas desert.

  A text message from Kade reassured me that Marta and the baby were both fine and that he would clear me to visit them that evening.

  I managed to get caught up on paperwork before my first appointment that morning, but I didn’t get a chance to speak to Gloria as I had hoped. But she had clients already waiting for her in the waiting room when she arrived, and a steady stream of people through her office all morning long.

  It’s a busy day in the child-protection biz.

  I sighed at the thought. Every day was eventful in this business, and I was sure I would never get used to that fact. Almost everyone in the shifter community continued to assure me that my “natural” instinct should be toward cold-blooded, emotionless behavior, the likes of which they had all been used to seeing from lamias. However, my adoptive parents had encouraged me to focus on my human side, the parts of me that were nurturing and loving.

  Anyway, my dad—a herpetologist by training and a college biology instructor by profession—said that the idea that snakes are unemotional is a myth. He prefers to call them “choosy.”

  I don’t know who’s right, but I do know that I am more than my inner reptile. And the part of me that cared about others remained horrified by the way humans, supposedly the creatures capable of the most empathy, were capable of the kinds of atrocities against children that I dealt with in my office every day.

  It was precisely one of those atrocities that I was railing against when I finally did make it into Gloria’s office sometime that afternoon.

  “It was long-term, continued abuse over years, and the girl’s mother knew about it.” I all but spat out the last words, pacing back and forth the six paces across my boss’s office in front of her desk. “She didn’t want to lose her boyfriend—or more likely, her access to whatever he had her strung out on.” I heaved a sigh and flung myself down into one of the upholstered chairs against the wall, scrubbing across my face with my hands.

  “Any word from the bio-dad?” Gloria asked.

  “Nothing. No one has heard from him since the child was an infant.”

  She nodded, her blond curls bouncing as she made a note. People who didn’t know her often made the mistake of thinking she was soft, simply because she looked like some artist’s idea of a sweet, round, cookie-baking mama.

  Gloria was all of those things.

  Also, she was one of the toughest women I’ve ever met when it came to confronting child-abusers. Our District Attorney loved it when he could call on her to testify in a case. She was precise and clear and harsh when it came to dealing with people who hurt kids.

  “How is your friend who was attacked yesterday?” she asked as she finished her comments in the case file we had been discussing.

  “Okay. Kade and his team went ahead and delivered the baby. A girl. They’re both still in intensive care, but Kade said I could go by and visit tonight.”

  “Is this someone you’ve talked about?”

  I gave a quick shake of my head. “Probably not.”

  Definitely not. No. This is the woman who was carrying Scott’s weresnake rape-baby I didn’t tell you about.

  “She’s a fairly new friend,” I added. “I met her through Kade.”

  More or less.

  Thankfully, Gloria didn’t follow up on that line of questioning. “That’s still going well, I take it?”

  I couldn’t help but smile at the thought of my relationship with Kade. “Very.”

  Gloria laughed aloud. “So I see.”

  I smiled but shook my head. “I actually didn’t come in to talk about any of that.”

  “Not even the Kavanaugh case?”

  “No. I wanted to see if you had heard anything else from Moreland about that weird recording.” What I didn’t say was that something about it was bothering me, but I couldn’t pinpoint why, exactly. I suppose I could have brought up an intuition—Gloria wouldn’t have seen anything particularly odd in that—but out of long habit, I kept quiet about anything that might be attributable to my unusual nature.

  “Not as of this morning, but I haven’t checked my messages lately.” Her voice trailed off as she tapped at her phone. Then she shook her head. “No. Nothing. I’ll see if I can reach him.”

  I checked my own phone while she was occupied, though I suspected Kade was at home asleep between his hospital shifts, and Moreland would let Gloria know of any breaks in that case.

  Eduardo, though, had sent a text. It had only a time—10 p.m.—and coordinates. I assumed I was supposed to track down the coordinates and meet him there at the designated time.

  I huffed a sigh, and Gloria raised an eyebrow in my direction, but I shook off the implied question.

  The week before I had found my Shield mentor’s spy vs. spy missions mildly amusing.

  Today, I was simply irritated.

  Again.

  At least he left me enough time to go visit Marta and the baby.

  I wondered if the baby had been given a name.

  Marta had never intended to keep the child—but we had never discussed who would name it, either.

  As with everything else, we had all assumed we had months left.

  Oh, hell. Was I supposed to name the baby?

  My eyes flew wide open, and I must have jumped, because Gloria said, “Is everything okay?”

  “I’m fine. I just remembered that I have a client due in about ten minutes and I ha
ven’t looked over his file. A parent made the appointment for depression, if I’m remembering right, so it’s probably something I can refer to a private practitioner.” Not a lie, exactly. It simply wasn’t the real reason I had flinched. At Gloria’s nod, I hauled myself up out of her chair and headed back to my office to prepare to deal with adolescent angst.

  Thirty minutes later, I had finally ushered Orlando’s tightly wound parents into the waiting room so I could talk to the thirteen-year-old alone. I found that working my way through the standard questionnaire without parental influence could be invaluable when making an initial assessment. Much as I might have wanted to, I couldn’t simply say that living with those two people would turn me into a depressive, too.

  “So you say that sometimes you think about hurting yourself?” Honestly, I didn’t think this was fair to ask as a yes-or-no question. Luckily, there was a follow-up.

  “Do you have a plan for it?” We sat in matching wing-back chairs across from one another, just far enough that I could lean in and out of his space as necessary to help develop rapport.

  Orlando nodded, his shifty-eyed glance flicking up toward the ceiling.

  “Would you be willing to tell me about that plan?”

  “Right here in my backpack,” he said, his hand twitching down toward the floor.

  Without even consciously thinking that he might be reaching for a weapon, I moved shifter-fast to intervene in between him and the bag, crouching protectively over it on the floor so that his questing fingers brushed against my shoulder blades before he jerked his hand away. When I glanced up, his brown eyes had grown huge and round.

  “You’re really quick,” he said in tones of awe.

  “Why don’t you tell me about the plan for now?” I suggested. “Maybe you can show me later.”

  “Okay. Sure.”

  When I moved back into my seat, I dragged the backpack toward me, keeping one hand on the fabric loop at the top.

  “So what’s your plan?” I asked again.

  Orlando’s face scrunched up and he hunched his shoulders up around his neck. “I’ve got this hot dog.”

  He paused, and I blinked several times. “A hot dog?”

  “Yeah. You know. Like a wiener?”

  “Okay.” I drew the word out, trying not to sound too incredulous.

  “It’s in a baggie, in my backpack, somewhere down at the bottom.”

  I fell back on the repetition technique of counseling. “A hot dog wiener in a baggie in your backpack.”

  “I took it from the school cafeteria a couple of weeks ago. I had it wrapped in a napkin, but it was getting all squashed, so I got a baggie from home.” He paused. “You want to see it?”

  Not until I figure out how it connects to your death-plan, kiddo. “Not yet. Just keep telling me about this hot dog.”

  “So. I figure, once it’s been in my backpack for long enough, it’ll go bad, right?”

  Oh, no. I was beginning to see where this was heading. I was going to have to draw on every serious counseling face I had ever made.

  Poker-face time.

  “And then, when I’m ready, I will eat it and it will poison me,” he finished triumphantly.

  “Mmmhmm,” I managed to murmur noncommittally, jotting a few incoherent notes down on the legal pad in my lap.

  “The thing is,” Orlando added, tapping at one gangly arm with a forefinger, “I’m not sure it’s going bad enough. I think maybe it has too many preservatives or something.” He pointed at the backpack. “You want to see it now?”

  “No, thank you.” I managed to keep my tone serious, quashing laughter in part by blowing out a sad-sounding sigh. “Unfortunately, because you have what is called suicidal ideation and a definite”—if not precisely effective—“plan of action, I’m afraid I’m going to have to confiscate your...” Here I ran out of words momentarily. Normally, I would say weapon, but that wasn’t quite right. And I wasn’t about to say wiener. “...Baggie,” I finally managed. “And I’m going to suggest your parents take you to a specific psychiatrist I know.”

  Orlando slumped back in the chair, but he didn’t look surprised. After all, I had opened the session by reminding them that, as the intake form noted, I was required to report it to parents and authorities if a child showed any possibility of harm to himself or others.

  In this case, I suspected Vance Kimbell, the psych over at the children’s hospital, would want to admit Orlando for a few days.

  Technically, I wasn’t supposed to let the child anywhere near his weapon of choice again. But I wasn’t willing to dig in his backpack for a baggie of rotten hotdog, either. So before I called his parents back in, I addressed a transfer envelope to Vance and had Orlando fish out the foul package. I carefully avoided testing the air around us as the child handled the packet, but the almost-rotten scent lingered. After he had dropped the baggie of greenish meat into the self-sealing envelope, I carefully closed it and gingerly set it on the floor in the far corner of the room.

  Orlando’s parents reacted much as I expected them to—she by fluttering around, on the verge of hysterics, and he with stoic snarls. In their defense, they did genuinely seem to care about their child’s wellbeing, so I gave Orlando about a 75% chance of coming through this okay. Even higher, if Vance could get through to the parents enough to give them some effective tools for coping with one another and their child.

  Really, those weren’t bad odds, given the majority of kids I saw in my line of work.

  Maybe what I did for a living had turned me into a cynic, but I was pretty certain that most people were, in one way or another, seriously screwed up. Anyone who got their kids to adulthood without pregnancy, jail, or both, was doing a pretty good job.

  That thought reminded me of the lamia babies that would soon be at least partly my responsibility, and my stomach tightened.

  For all that I knew about how to help troubled children, I was still terrified at the thought of being the moral center of these babies’ world.

  Chapter 6

  THAT SENSE OF TERROR hadn’t really let up even by the time I got to the NICU ward after work that evening, but I forced it down and ignored the way my stomach churned as Kade signed me in to see the baby. Our plan was to spend half an hour checking in on the potential new lamia, then go out to dinner somewhere. Before I got the note from Eduardo, I had been hoping for a long night in together after that, but Kade was on-call, so I guessed I’d had about a 50/50 chance of going home alone after we ate, anyway. At least this way I would get in some training on my lost date night.

  Still, I wasn’t willing to give up my chance to meet the child, even if skipping it would have meant more time with Kade.

  “How’s Marta doing?” I asked as we scrubbed in inside the locked ward.

  Kade shrugged. “She’ll be okay. She’s in a lot of pain, and it’s going to take a while for her to heal, but she’ll survive.”

  “Any news on who might have done it?”

  He shook his head. “The Shields are looking into it. You’ll have a better chance of learning more about that tonight than I will.”

  “What about the human police?” An attack in broad daylight meant it had almost certainly been recorded.

  “Yeah, they have a case open, too, though I doubt they’ll learn much.”

  The alarm timing our scrubbing beeped, and we dried our hands, then cycled through another set of locked doors, all designed to protect the infants within. Kade led me down a long hallway to a door with a sign that read “Contact Isolation Ward.”

  Inside, there was one clear incubator bassinet with portholes we could reach through. I didn’t, though. Instead, I took a seat next to it and stared through at the tiny being inside, connected to the outside world through a tangle of wires and tubes clipped out of the way. She was human-shaped with bright pink skin and a shock of dark hair atop her head. Her arms and legs were spindly, but her hands and feet were perfectly formed.

  “Hello there,” I said q
uietly, and when I spoke, she opened her eyes and looked directly at me.

  At that moment, all my fear fell away.

  “Oh,” I whispered. “Oh, dear. I am so screwed.”

  From behind me, I heard Kade’s deep chuckle, and the heat that always poured off him when we were together seemed to almost double. I leaned back into it and glanced up at him as he leaned over me.

  “Can I hold her?” I asked tentatively.

  “Not yet. She’s still too small. Maybe a couple of weeks, depending on how she does.” He slipped one hand past the clear vinyl that covered the portal into the bassinet. “But look.” Slipping his forefinger under her hand, he waited.

  It didn’t take long for her to grab his finger in her tiny grasp. “You try,” he said, gently disentangling himself from her.

  The air inside the incubator was warm and slightly moist, and her fingers stronger than I expected. From inside, a rush of warm air brushed across me, and I drew it in over my tongue, tasting the various complexities of her scent.

  Although it had never actually happened, I was always a tiny bit afraid that babies would smell like food to me. All they had ever smelled of, though, was human infant. Mildly interesting, something that I needed to watch carefully in case it behaved erratically, but nothing that concerned me directly, as a general rule.

  This child, though, smelled like family.

  “What are all the wires?”

  Kade patiently explained them to me—leads attached to the baby’s skin that monitored her heartbeat, blood pressure, and oxygen level and a tube into her nose that delivered nutrition straight to her stomach.

  “She needs a name,” I said after he called her “the baby” for the third time.

  That blast of heat rolled off Kade again, and I glanced up at him to find him watching me with a deep hunger blazing inside his swirling, golden eyes.

  Glancing at the nurse monitoring the systems several feet away, I lowered my voice. “Does that ...” I paused, trying to find some other words, then gave up and went with the thought that kept running through my mind. “Does me talking about babies turn you on or something? Should I be worried?”