Chapter 6
It was a man, about my age, tall and muscular. He wore close-fitting Levi’s, a plaid button-down with the sleeves rolled up, and a cowboy hat pushed partway back on his head.
His face was tanned, and he had the same kind of crows’ feet around his eyes that Dad did, though not as defined yet. I couldn’t tell for sure, but I thought his hair was slightly blonde. What I did know was that I had no idea who this guy was, and he was standing between me and herpetarium.
I needed to get Serena in there without him seeing her. If he knew anything about snakes at all, he would realize that she was not your normal reptile.
I got out of the car and shut the door behind me. My shoes crunched on the gravel as I moved toward the two men. “Hey, Dad. Am I early?” I tried to give him an easy out. Surely he had simply forgotten what time I was coming, or had failed to notice the time—he was, after all, a fairly typical absent-minded professor. It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.
“No, not at all,” Dad boomed. “Come on over and meet Shane.” He placed his hand of the younger man’s back and ushered him forward a little.
I nodded, slightly hesitantly. “Hello.”
Shane—whoever he was—touched the brim of his hat and said, “Hi. Nice to meet you.”
“Shane is working on his dissertation. He’s currently my star grad student. I’m expecting great things out of him.”
Shit. What was Dad thinking? This guy didn’t only know something about snakes—if he was one of Dad’s grad students, he knew practically everything about snakes. How the hell was I going to get Serena past him? I turned my shoulder on Shane a little, trying to convey my outrage to Dad with my eyes. He either didn’t get it, or he ignored it. I guessed the latter.
“So where’s Serena?” he asked jovially.
For the first time in ages—again, since I was a teenager—I had the most unbelievable urge to snap my fangs down at my father.
Of course, that would be even worse than letting Shane the grad student see Serena.
“She’s in the car. I’ll get her.”
Maybe I could at least get her inside and settled without Dad’s student looking on.
No such luck. As soon as he saw me wrestling with the terrarium, he practically leapt at the chance to help.
“Let me give you hand with that.”
“Oh, better not. She is a little anxious around new people, and tends to be cranky. Also, I think she has a bit of a delicate system.” I threw pretty much every comment I had ever heard my father make about a touchy snake in his care.
Shane the grad student fell back a step, so he wasn’t entirely oblivious—which is more than I can say for a lot of Dad’s grad students over the years. Herpetologists tend to be overwhelmingly geeky scientists without much in the way of social skills. When it comes to humans, anyway.
I kept my back mostly turned to Shane as I staggered toward the herpetarium. “Open the door for me, Dad,” I called out.
As he held the door for me, and I slid by, I said, “May I talk to you for a moment, please?”
Inside the building where Dad kept most of his serpent specimens, I turned around to him and hissed, “What do you think you’re doing, bringing a graduate student out here when you knew Serena and I were coming to work on shifting?”
Dad regarded me with his steady gaze. After a long, silent few seconds, he crossed his arms and leaned back against one of the shelves that ran alongside the wall at desk height. “Honestly? I’m thinking that it might be useful for you to have another herpetologist who knows about you. Especially now that you’re going to be taking on so many others.”
“You don’t get to decide that for me.” The sheer audacity of him bringing someone into the biggest secret of my life without asking me first took my breath away. Before this moment, I would’ve said that I trusted him implicitly. He had been my rock—the stability in my life that allowed me to learn who I was and still connect to the human world around me.
“And if I had asked, what would you have said?”
I shook my head. I didn’t even have an answer for that question. I couldn’t have said anything but no. Especially now that I had joined the wider shifter world, I didn’t have the right to tell anybody else what was going on.
“I hoped that may be if you met him, got a chance to know him, you might be willing to at least consider the possibility.” Dad shrugged, but I saw a hint of red around his ears—a clear sign that he felt pretty strongly about what he was saying. It didn’t always give away what the emotion he was feeling was—maybe embarrassment, or anger, or excitement—but he was definitely invested in whatever reasoning he had come up with to do this. Mom and I had made fun of him for that emotional tell for years.
I pressed a hand to my forehead. “Let me get Serena settled, and I’ll come in and make nice with your grad student. But then, you take him somewhere else while I take Serena out to my sunning rock. We’re going to spend this afternoon together in our other forms.”
Dad nodded. “Okay.” He started to head toward the door, but then turned and glanced back at me. “Will you at least try to keep an open mind about the possibility?”
I narrowed my eyes at him.
“Just think about it. If he were on the staff at that group home you’ve been talking about, it could possibly save y’all a lot of trouble.”
“We have shifter doctors. Kade is going to be one of them.”
“And you’ve told me yourself that your Dr. Nevala and the others up at Kindred Hospital don’t have any real experience with your kind.”
“Neither does your grad student,” I pointed out.
Dad sighed and pushed the door open. “Just consider it. Please, for me.”
I listened until I heard the squeaking hinges on the screen door leading into the house. Then I turned to Serena, and began making sure her terrarium had everything she might need for the short amount of time I planned to be inside talking to Shane the grad student. “I know he means well,” I said to Serena as I puttered around making sure everything was perfect. “But this has to be the worst plan he’s ever come up with. I don’t see how he possibly could’ve run that by mom before he did it. I know you haven’t met my mom yet. You’ll see her this weekend. She has a class this afternoon—your grandma. I think you’ll really like her. And I know she wants to hold on to you in your other shape.”
Serena regarded me with her steady gaze, and I reached in to stroke her head.
* * *
When I got inside, Dad had a cup of coffee waiting for me, exactly the way I liked it. His version of a peace offering.
And after half an hour with Shane—whose last name was Wills—I saw why Dad had been eager to have him help with the infant snake shifters’ care. He was polite, thoughtful, and knowledgeable. If he had already known about the shifter world, he would have been a shoo-in for the position of snake pediatrician.
However, he wasn’t—he didn’t know about us, and it wasn’t my place to tell him.
“So your dad said you came out here to take a weekend off?” Shane said.
“Yeah,” I took a drink of my coffee and watched him over the rim of the mug.
“So what are you planning for this afternoon?”
“Oh, I thought I’d go for a little bit of a hike. Stretch my legs, maybe do a little communing with nature.” I shot my dad a significant look, willing him to remember his agreement to keep Shane Wills away from my favorite rock. Dad tipped his head a little bit to let me know he got the message.
“Well, you have fun. I think your dad’s got plans to keep me busy working all afternoon.”
I hoped he had equal plans—or at least equally developed plans—for explaining why the terrarium with the touchy juvenile snake I had brought in was empty when they got back out there after Serena and I left for our time together.
I decided not to worry about it. Instead, I drained my coffee from my cup and said my goodbyes.
“Maybe I’ll see you again before long,” Shane said—more hopefully than I would have preferred.
“Maybe so,” I said without any particular inflection. I went over and dropped a kiss on Dad’s cheek. “I hate you,” I whispered in his ear.
Dad grinned and said aloud, “I love you too, sweetheart.”
Shaking my head in rueful amusement, I went back out to gather Serena and carry her with me to the broad, flat rock I had claimed as my own years before.
We got out there at just the right time of day—the sun high in the afternoon sky, halfway down toward evening but still shining brightly. The rock had soaked up all the day’s heat, and I set Serena into my favorite hollow. Her bright green coils undulated slightly as she luxuriated in the warmth. With a quick glance around to make sure Dad really had corralled Shane into some kind of work and he hadn’t followed me, I stripped out of my jeans and T-shirt, folding them and placing them atop my shoes beside the rock. Then, I stretched as far into myself as I could, willing the shift to happen.
As usual, I saw the magic of the shift swirling around me and I knew now, as I had not before, the that magic could be harnessed. It wasn’t as strong here as it was out by the river, where Eduardo and I trained and where Kade had taken me to teach me about earth magic. But I could still see some of it, and after the attack in the NICU, I knew that if the situation were bad enough, I’d be able to punch through whatever divided us from the magic that simmered right under the surface of our world. I could take it and make it my own.
But there were consequences to that we still had not entirely figured out.
So for now, I let my sense of that magic drop away and simply melted into the shift.
As usual, there was a moment of panic when my arms and legs fused and I became only serpent, only body. But with it came an amazing sense of freedom and I took a moment to ripple the muscles of my body, to taste the air around me fully in a way I hadn’t in days, maybe weeks.
I had told Shane that I was going to commune with nature. It wasn’t a lie. In the air around me, I scented a coyotes’ den not terribly far away, its inhabitants gone, either for good or at least for the moment. Insects chirped close by in the grass. I considered stopping for a snack, but decided I needed to move to work with Serena. Sliding up onto the hot, dry rock, I felt it scrape against my belly in a way that felt right. The sand slipped away from my tail as I pulled the last of myself up beside the juvenile, who had raised up in interest, flicking her own tongue out to get a taste of what I was doing. Slowly, I coiled myself around her, allowing her to fully taste my intentions. After a few moments, spent winding herself around me in a twirling spiral, as if she knew we were meant to be together, Serena settled down and slid up next to me, a coil within my coil so that she rested her head next to mine.
And together, we dozed.
Or rather, she did. I simply watched the setting sun moved toward the horizon, saw the shadows shifting and lengthening, smelled the world around me changing in all the tiny ways that humans so rarely notice. The small things low, low to the ground, in the grass, the things I missed living in the city.
I loved my human life. And I was learning to appreciate my life as a shifter. I liked being part of a community of other people who had the same—or at least similar—abilities.
But it didn’t leave much time for me to be Lindi the serpent. Lindi the counselor and Lindi the Shifter had been taking up all my time.
It was good to get back home, get out into a snake’s world, and just be for a while.
By the time I got back to the house and got Serena settled again in the terrarium, Mom was home cooking dinner.
Yeah. It was good to have some things that remained the same, no matter what else might change.