A Generation of Vipers (Shifter Shield Book 2) (2 page)

* * *

After I left Janice's house, I met Eduardo for a training session.

When Ed had spoken up for me at the Council meeting where they decided whether or not to allow me to remain a member of the were community, he had specifically requested that I join the Shields, the protective arm of the ruling group. It had been a strategic move, but apparently he planned to follow through on his promise to bring me up to speed as a shifter-style cop.

So during the day, I worked as a counselor at the Children's Advocacy and Protection Center, or the CAP-C, and a few evenings a week, I got pummeled by my mentor.

Sometimes my beatings took place when I was in serpent form and Eduardo was a werecoyote. Other times, like now, we sparred in human form in order to train me to fight under any conditions.

Right now, my condition was exhausted, and Ed's last leg-sweep had knocked me to the ground.

I lay there panting, unwilling to get up. "That's it," I said, wrapping my forearms across my eyes. "I quit. I'm wiped. I'm bruised. I'm all done."

"You going to use that line the next time someone's out to kill you?" Ed circled around me, the slight smile on his lips never quite meeting his eyes. Truth be told, I thought Ed might be more cold-blooded than me, all things considered. I didn't know what it might mean that he had asked me to be on his Shield team—and had apparently specifically planned to train me himself.

I didn't want to disappoint him, though, so I dragged myself up off the dusty ground and once again took a fighting stance.

"Tell me again why I can't shift in the middle of a confrontation?" I asked.

"It takes attention and energy to shift. You may not be able to spare those."

"Right," I muttered, striking out at him with one fist and missing. Ed seemed to flow away from my hands and feet, and I was always reaching out too far, overextending myself.

If I was such a crap fighter, why had he asked to have me on his team?

Part of the answer was that it had been an attempt to save me.

But there was more. I could tell. My counselor's instincts practically shouted at me to find out the reasons, that they would be important later.

Either that, or I was too curious for my own good.

Probably the latter.

"Even now, you're distracted." Without any other warning, Eduardo did some complicated strike-and-twist that shoved against my shoulder and practically spun me around. That he caught me before I hit the ground only proved that I was completely inept.

"I told you I was done," I said, hanging from his grip as if we were dancing and he had just dipped me low toward the ground. "I still have reports to write up tonight."

The werecoyote had intimidated me even before he went all Mr. Miyagi on me. Now he practically terrified me. Only the fact that I was a reptile in my other form kept him from scenting it on me—and I wasn't even sure of that. I didn't know how long it would last, either. Kade said he was beginning to be able to discern my mood from my scent at any given moment.

Luckily, my professional training had taught me to remain impassive in a variety of counseling situations, so I was generally also able to keep my expression clear, at least.

Now, though, I let a little bit of my irritation shine through. "I need to go home, Ed. Let me up."

For the first time all night, his smile made it to his eyes.

Right before he dropped me.

* * *

I didn't mean to shift. Usually, Ed is right. It takes concentration and energy to change into my lamia from—not to mention a boat-load of intention.

This time, though, I did it unconsciously, and quickly, whipping away from Ed's hand in my serpent form before I ever hit the ground.

All around me, bright sparkles spun and glittered indicating we were in an Earth-magic circle, one of the areas that allowed us to draw additional energy during our shifts.

That explained why Ed had chosen this particular spot.

Had he provoked me to shift on purpose?

Flicking my tongue out, I pulled air in over the Jacobson's organ in my mouth that allowed me to analyze the molecules around me.

His pleased surprise at the shift fizzed through me, crisp and light. I didn't taste any deception, didn't smell any intent behind the action.

I had never yet met anyone who could lie with his scent.

Doesn't mean it's impossible.

I slithered out of the torn remains of my clothing and coiled in the dirt, continuing to assess Ed's reaction.

"Okay,
la serpiente
. You've made your point. It's time to head home." Squatting in front of me, he held out one arm invitingly. "Let's go."

Grudgingly, I twined around his forearm, hoping he would sense my own irritation. If he did, though, it didn't make any difference to his scent. All the way home, he chatted amiably, as if I were not a python in his passenger seat. And when he dropped me off at Kade's house, he simply said, "We had a hard training session. She may be too tired to shift back this evening."

Kade's heat drew me to him, and I wrapped myself around his waist, sliding my head up and around his neck to rest on his shoulder. I stared balefully at Ed, even though I knew that my gaze probably didn't convey any emotion at all to the werecoyote.

Not for the first time, I noticed that although other shifters also burned hotter than humans, only Kade's heat had the power to draw me in, make me want to wrap myself around him, no matter what form I was in.

No one else's mere scent made me dizzy with desire, or caused me to shift uncontrollably—though now I could add "beating me up and dropping me to the ground" to my list of Reasons to Shift Without Warning.

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.

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 group 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."