Under Her Skin (17 page)

The scent of horror stained him, rotting the sweetness of his fear.

And threading through it all, permeating every other smell, was his connection to his mother. I don’t know how I had missed it before—though perhaps its very pervasiveness had fooled me into thinking it was simply part of his own scent, rather than something foreign that had wormed its way into his signature smell.

In any case, I now recognized it as maternal and serpentine. As something that shouldn’t be there, a cancerous rot at the very core of his identity.

With a hiss, I reared back, preparing to strike. Scott threw himself backwards, falling to the ground and scrabbling away from me, one hand up to ward me off as the other clawed the dirt behind him, either to find a weapon or to pull himself toward safety.

His words vibrated through the ground and air, though as I sank deeper and deeper into this form, it took me longer than usual to parse out their meaning. “Please don’t. Don’t hurt me. Lindi, no.” His pleading made me angrier than ever, certain as I was that at least some of his victims—only children—must have begged for their lives, as well.

The women he had raped had probably implored him to stop, too.

He wasn’t going to get any more mercy than he had given.

But as I drew back, I felt a wave of heat flow across my face, alerting me to another presence behind me.

Even as I whipped around to assess the new threat, that same scientific part of my mind noted that in this shift, I had apparently taken on the characteristics of more than one species of snake. Suzy, a constrictor, wouldn’t have been able to sense body heat the way I had. Pit vipers did that.

Be the change you need.

Apparently I had.

I took in the scent of the new arrival at the same moment that I saw her.

Scott’s mother, in her hybrid shape—top half human, bottom half snake.

Using the back quarter of my body, I coiled around Scott and held him in place, tightening my grip as he tried to pull away.

Constrictor
.

Flicking my tongue out, I weaved back and forth, waiting for the right moment to strike, my fangs retracted.

Viper
.

“Mama, help,” Scott gasped. When she didn’t respond, he tried again. “Mother.
Tanith
.”

Her name.

It seemed fitting that I know her name before I ended her life.

I had just enough time to realize that her traditional lamia form was really crappy for fighting when Tanith began to morph, her face elongating and the crown of her head flattening into the triangular skull of a viper.

None of the Earth magic sparkled around her, though.

Could she possibly be limited to only one shape?

No time to consider the options now.

I knew from practice on my family’s ranch that in my usual serpent shape, I could strike about two-thirds of my body length. I had never struck another person, though. And this person was the only other weresnake I had ever met.

I had no choice.

While I still towered over her, I struck.

Tanith was fast enough, and practiced enough, to whip mostly out of range, but I managed to graze the side of her neck with one fang.

With the very last of her human speech, she snarled, “Bitch.” The last of the word faded out on a hiss, and she pulled the bottom half of her body around so she could rear up higher, trying to match my height, her mouth wide open, jaws unhinged and ready to clamp down on me.

She wasn’t as long—or as big—as I was, though, and her serpent form incorporated only one breed of snake. The fact that she had gone for the viper form could play out in my favor, as I was, presumably, as immune to her venom as I had been to my fathers’ vipers. She would have to try to injure my face and head enough to kill me—because, it suddenly occurred to me, there was no other possible outcome. One of us was going to die today.

I needed to do something with Scott, though. I couldn’t continue to hold him still and fight his mother at the same time.

I could kill him, squeeze the breath and life out of him, but the Council wanted him alive for questioning.

Only one idea occurred to me. Tightening my tail around him, I lifted him up several feet and slammed him back down to the ground. His mother hissed at his scream, slithering to one side as she looked for an opportunity to strike.

I matched her move, weaving back and forth to meet her, then pulling around so all she could see was the portion of my body below my neck, offering no effective purchase for her to strike.

Again, I lifted Scott, this time looping another coil of my constrictor body around him to change the angle of my hold so his legs dangled as far above the ground as I could manage while still sliding out of the other lamia’s attack zone.

This time when I smashed him down to the ground, I felt the crack of leg bones breaking, even through the reverberation of his shriek.

Scott wouldn’t be walking anywhere soon.

The sound of his whimpers sent his mother into a frenzy, striking toward me in short jabs, all easily evaded, until a white-hot burst of fire exploded in my body, ripping down toward my tail. I jerked away from the lamia long enough to discover that Scott had jabbed a Bowie knife into me, slicing a trail of pain through my lower back.

All it took was that instant of inattention for Tanith to sink her fangs into the back of my head.

Stunned, I pulled away, but the lamia twirled around and around, using her body to tighten her grip on me, even as Scott dragged himself closer again and drove his knife through my tail, pinning it to the dirt below.

The human part of my mind froze, overcome by sheer animal instinct. Ignoring the pain, I ripped my tail up, flinging the knife away, and began whipping back and forth, fighting to escape Tanith even as she struggled to maintain her hold.

My frantic motions slammed Scott against the rock face of the cliff, and I lost track of him.

Then, through the coils wrapped around my eyes, I caught a glimpse of a diamond sparkle dropping through the air. Surprised into stillness, I let it touch down on my damaged tail section, where it counteracted the painful burn with a soft warmth.

A healing heat.

Focus, Lindi.

As Tanith clenched her jaw tighter and continued to slide her body around mine to hold my own mouth shut, I forced myself to remain motionless and concentrated on drawing the power surrounding me into myself.

Be the change you need to be.

The muscles of my body knitted together, the scales sliding over them, the wound closing.

Then I began to grow, pulling more and more of the Earth power into my body. Tanith’s jaws creaked and the space between her coils expanded. Light flowed into the space, bringing more and more of the glittering sparkles in contact with my scales. They flew in flurries into my eyes, piling up and crusting over them until I saw nothing but silver shine.

The feel of Tanith’s hold on me melted away until it was little more than a nuisance as the power soaked into me. It filled my skin until it overflowed, sliding in and through and over me, and I expanded with it.

Shaking off Tanith’s clasp seemed almost like an afterthought.

Through the euphoria pouring out of me, a vibration thrummed into my underbelly, pounding across the ground, accompanied by a high-pitched howl.

Somehow, I knew it was Kade in his animal form, returning for me.

When the golden mongoose burst into the clearing, he skidded to a halt, taking in the scene in a quick glance. Scott lay crumpled against the cliff wall, either dead or unconscious. Tanith, on the other hand, was still very much alive, rearing back and hissing, watching every move I made, circling around the clearing.

I moved closer to Kade, and he stepped up to stand beside me, growling low in his throat.

Only then did I realize that Tanith had maneuvered herself close enough to Scott to wrap her lower body around his.

Using her shifter strength, she pulled him away from the cliff, hissing the whole time.

The Earth magic thrummed through me, tying me to Kade as he snarled, and I knew the moment we should strike, together.

His leap placed him on the back of Tanith’s neck, even as I used my constrictor coils to rip Scott away from her again, and my viper fangs to tear into her throat.

The skin tore away from the bloody gouges we left, showing white and fleshy on the underside as we ripped it away from her.

In the end, Scott lay sobbing on the ground as we ripped his mother to shreds in front of him.

If he’d been anyone else, I might have felt sorry for him.

As it was, I felt as cold-blooded about it as any snake could.

She was a predator, and she needed to die. And once she was dead, the evidence of her giant serpentine body needed to be hidden—some of it buried, the rest of it hidden in the caves above.

I would have happily turned my attention to Scott once Tanith had been dismembered and the pieces disposed of, but Kade stopped me, shifting back to his human form and urging me to do the same. “Do you hear that? Someone’s coming up the riverbed.”

Even once I had changed back, I couldn’t hear what Kade heard.

Mammal hearing might be nice. But today, I would take lamia power over it.

“What should we do?” I asked. I pulled my borrowed clothes out of the crevasse where I’d left them and donned them again.

I was getting used to being naked in front of Kade. Seemed like it might end up being a regular part of shifter life.

“We drag Carson to the cavern. Then I’ll distract the hikers,” Kade said, the corner of his mouth crooking up in a smile of unholy glee that was utterly at odds with the seriousness of his tone. “You get the women out of here. Eduardo should be on his way. He’ll help.”

“What about the police?” I asked. “Should we alert them?”

“No.” The gold flecks in Kade’s eyes began to churn—not like they did for me, but with the beginning of his shift. “We’ll take care of it.”

“
We
being you and me and Eduardo?”

“If we need to bring the rest of the Council in, we will.” His shoulders twitched, and he rolled his head around with a crackling noise. “But first, we take those women out of their cages.” The last word came out on a hiss, but he still pulled me to him and kissed me, hard, his lips against mine a promise.

“I’ll meet you at the CAP-C,” I said, then turned without waiting for an answer.

Inside the cave, the women were silent, watching me with big eyes.

“She’s dead,” I said. When no one responded, I began searching for a key. I knew PTSD when I saw it. It would take more than one lamia’s death for these women to be okay again.

“There’s a key inside that box,” one woman finally said, pointing to a container across the room from her.

Once I’d found the key, I began moving around the room, unlocking cages.

Still the women simply sat inside.

“Come on,” I whispered, pulling open the first cage door and reaching in to help the woman inside move out and stand up straight. She placed one hand against her back and stretched, her pregnant belly sticking out in front of her. Then she shivered, wrapping her arms around herself and rubbing her hands up and down to her shoulders.

I glanced around, searching for something to drape over her, finally spying a stack of towels in a corner. “There,” I said, pointing at them as I moved toward the next cage. “Grab those and start handing them out.” They weren’t much, but maybe they could help stave off hypothermia.

To be honest, I was a little afraid to check inside the rest of the crates—not because I didn’t know what I might find, but because I was fairly certain I did know what I would find.

I was right. As I moved from cage to cage, popping open the locks and guiding women out to stand close to the fire in the center of the room, I encountered more blank stares and haunted gazes than I cared to consider.

I might be taking them out of this room, but I wasn’t sure I could ever take them out of the hell they were in.

I wasn’t sure any counselor could.

But I was going to do my best to help find one who was willing to try.

In the end, there were ten of them, six visibly pregnant.

And the thing none of us knew hung heavy in the air: pregnant with what?

Janice stepped forward and placed her hand lightly on my shoulder. “You don’t have to stay, you know.” The Council leader’s dark brown eyes were kind, but her smile didn’t quite meet them.

I licked my lips, tasting the air to see if she meant the words, but all I could capture were the various scents of anger, from disgust to rage, emanating from the small crowd around me. Shaking my head, I shrugged. “I need to see this through. I found him. I should be here...” My voice trailed off.

“When justice is done?” Eduardo’s deep voice echoed from beside me. The Shield had indeed shown up at the cavern, just as I was leading the women up to the road at the top of the cliff. He, along with several other Council members, had been invaluable in the days since as we worked to help reintroduce the women into their world—and began introducing them into ours.

The children—the ones we had been able to save at the hotel, and Kirstie Bryant, as well—had all survived.

Janice dropped her hand. “Well, be warned. Shifter law is not for the faint-hearted.” She nodded at each of us in turn, then headed toward the knot of people surrounding Scott.

“I’m not even sure shifter law and justice are the same thing.” Kade’s warm hand settled into the small of my back, and I leaned into it, drawing comfort from the heat that poured from his body into mine. He swung a leather backpack off his shoulder and dropped it at his feet.

“Maybe not,” Eduardo said, “But it’s the closest thing we have.”

Kade tilted his other hand, palm open, toward the other man in a gesture that resembled acknowledgement, but also managed to convey doubt.

As the Shield slid into the group, slipping past people with barely a ripple, I turned into Kade’s embrace. “I’m glad you’re here,” I said, keeping my voice low despite knowing that most of the shifters here could hear me perfectly well.

“I haven’t decided whether I’m glad you’re here,” he replied, but his crooked smile took away any sting the words might have had otherwise. “But since you are, I’m glad I’m here with you.” The gold flecks in his eyes churned slowly, and more of his body heat washed over me like a tide.

Some secret message seemed to move through the crowd at that moment, silencing everyone almost simultaneously. Like everyone around me, I turned my eyes toward the center of the clearing, where Janice had stepped up onto the makeshift stage of several large boulders moved into place by some of the stronger shifters.

“Welcome,” she said, her middle-aged, motherly appearance at odds with the hardness of her tone. “We come together tonight to pass judgment upon Scott Carson. He is one of our own, accepted for his shifter blood, though not himself a shifter. The prisoner may rise.”

Though his clothes were dirty and his broken bones, set and bandaged by Kade, meant that he sat in a straight-back chair rather than standing, Scott looked otherwise healthy—three days in one of his own cages had done him less harm than it had the women he had kept prisoner there.

The lack of regular, consistent beatings and rape had probably helped with that.

Rage welled up in my throat, and glittering Earth magic swirled around me. I pushed the incipient change back down.

Not yet.

Janice continued. “The Council has examined all the evidence gathered by our own Shields, by Dr. Kade Nevala, and by the lamia, Lindi Parker.” A murmur swept through the crowd, and several heads swiveled toward me. I kept my eyes trained on Janice and the tableau in the clearing. Scott stared stoically ahead, not meeting anyone’s gaze.

I wondered if he knew what was going to happen here tonight.

For just a moment, part of me mourned for the man I thought I had known. That man had believed in truth and in kindness. His easy laugh had charmed me, and his ready smile lifted my heart.

The man in this open-air court was not the one I had cared for.

This man was cruel, caring only for himself, for his grasp at power.

He wanted authority and control, but not the accompanying accountability.

And I was beginning to truly understand that the strength flowing through me with each shift came with a responsibility to those around me.

As Janice recited the long list of charges against Scott—kidnapping, rape, murder—an electric charge sparked through the air, jumping from shifter to shifter as the full extent of the prisoner’s crimes became clear to everyone.

Diamante sparkles of magic began to swirl through the entire clearing, twirling around individual shifters in eddies of power that intensified with each word that Janice spoke. “In all of these charges, the Council finds Scott Carson guilty.” Silver glints coalesced into steady streams of power coming together just above us. Janice ignored the light-show. “The sentence for these crimes is death, to be carried out immediately.” As she pronounced the sentence, a bright light flashed above us, and power poured down onto us like a shower of glitter—but this glitter landed with a white-hot sizzle and sank down into my skin, leaving faint, luminous pinpricks behind.

I could feel it sinking down into my very core, infusing every part of me with power.

I knew I should probably be worried, but I couldn’t help breathing in even more of the magic, drawing it into my lungs, letting it pulse through my veins and into my heart, feeling it burn into my bones.

The bright sheen across my eyesight came from inside.

This was what Scott had wanted—I could see the envy, the anger in his eyes as he watched the magic pass him by.

Too human.

I wondered how often his mother had told him he was too human to ever be enough for her.

For an instant, I felt sorry for him.

Then I remembered all the things he had done in his attempt to create the new lamia race his mother had so wanted, all the children he had murdered and women he had hurt, and the instant passed.

This was justice, no matter how ambivalent Kade felt about it.

From the center of the clearing, Janice turned to the men guarding Scott and spoke again, her voice reverberating with new energy. “Let us begin.” A circular wave of her hand over her head indicated all sides of the clearing, and a shimmering dome slipped into being around us.

That’s when Scott began to struggle in earnest, screaming and struggling as the guards fought to hold him still.

Without thinking about it, I moved toward them. Kade’s hand caught my upper arm, and I turned to stare into his eyes. “I can be the shift we need,” I said, a small, sad smile tugging at one corner of my lips. After a searching gaze, he nodded and released me.

I touched one of the dome walls as I passed it. It was hard and cold, like glass, but a jolt of electricity shocked my fingers as I pulled them away.

Janice stood utterly still as I made my way to her. She didn’t speak, but she met my eyes and gave one decisive nod. She stepped off the rock dais and two of the men Kade had pointed out as bear shifters at the Council meeting pulled the top boulder away, setting it off to the side. Then they joined the guards holding Scott, pulling him up from the chair and taking him to the now-flat rock pile, where they hoisted him atop the altar-shaped rock.

The only sounds inside the dome were Scott’s renewed screams, bouncing off the glittering walls. Drawing on the new power inside me, I sank into the shift. The world turned gray and I felt my jaw unhinge as my tongue split. The ache in my teeth let me know when my fangs were ready.

I didn’t finish the transformation. I didn’t need to.

Circling behind Scott, I gestured to the men holding him to pull his arm straight and tilt his head to one side. One of the shifters ripped the prisoner’s collar away from his shoulder. He resisted, but his human strength was no match for the shifters holding him.

Bending at the waist, I sought out the wild pulse at his neck, then moved away from it.

I didn’t want him to die.

Not yet.

Finding the perfect spot, I reared back, then struck, my fangs springing down into my mouth as I moved, piercing Scott’s flesh and pumping their venom out in waves.

After only a few seconds, I pulled myself back, some internal sensor warning me that any more might kill him.

Pushing down the euphoria that came with the strike, I forced myself to transform again. By the time I could speak again, Scott had stopped struggling, though his eyes rolled wildly from side to side.

“There,” I said, panting with the exertion of two shifts so close together. “He’ll be paralyzed for several hours, at least.”

“We shouldn’t need that long,” Janice said.

I didn’t look back as I made my way to Kade, grasping his hand tightly in my own and leaning my forehead against his.

“This is justice,” I whispered. But I didn’t know who I was trying to convince, Kade or myself. The were-mongoose simply squeezed my hands, then released them to pull me in close to him. I let him hug me for a moment before I turned around to face my actions.

The dome held us all there until it was done, and I forced myself to watch all of it.

The families of the murdered shifter children went first.

They started with his thumbs.

Because of my paralyzing venom, he couldn’t even scream. By the time almost every member of the shifter community present had moved past the prisoner, there was barely an inch of Scott’s body that had not been sliced, removed, or mutilated.

The shifters were remarkably organized, moving in an orderly line, each person partially shifting and inflicting one injury, none quite lethal. Claws and teeth were their only weapons.

To their credit, none of them appeared to relish the task.

I might have vomited, otherwise—or fainted.

Scott had passed out repeatedly, but each time, Janice had drawn on the shimmering magic surrounding us, and he had regained consciousness. His blood poured down the sides of the rock, and yet, because of my venomous bite, he could do no more than twitch in agony.

No one spoke.

Kade didn’t take his gaze off the human being tortured to death, but he didn’t participate in it, either.

When the last member of the winding line had solemnly inflicted a final horrific injury by using a single claw to slice a circle around Scott’s left eyebrow and peel it from his face, Kade stepped forward. “Enough,” he said. “Let it be done.”

Janice gazed around the clearing, as if waiting for dissent. Finding none, she nodded. “It is done,” she said.

At that, Kade sprang into action, grabbing the backpack he had dropped earlier and pushing through the other shifters until he reached the human at the altar. “Untie him,” he said to the guards, who had remained motionless during the whole ceremony. The biggest of them, one of the bear shifters, moved first, his enormous fingers surprisingly nimble as they plucked at the knot in the rope.

“You’ll have to hold him,” Kade said, unzipping the backpack. “He can’t balance himself.” Pulling out a pre-filled syringe, he leaned over so Scott could see his face. “Scott? Can you hear me? Do you understand what I’m saying? Just blink if you understand.” Then he blanched as he realized that at some point Scott’s eyelids had been carefully removed. But Scott’s eyes were tracking Kade, and their twitching seemed to indicate understanding.

“I’m going to give you something to make the pain go away,” Kade said, tapping the syringe to check the contents, then sliding the needle carefully into the bloody remains of Scott’s arm.

The maimed human’s eyes rolled up into his head and the quivering attempts at movement finally stopped as he once again lost consciousness. This time, Janice allowed him to remain so.

Kade stared down at the man, his jaw tightening as he squared his shoulders.

“What now?” I asked.

“Now I kill him,” the doctor said, bending down to pull a second syringe from his bag, then stopping again.

I didn’t think anyone else could see the slight tremor in Kade’s hand.

I stared down at the motionless form on the altar-rock, little more than a limp, bloody rag at this point. I didn’t feel any more anger. I knew that I should have felt pity, but I didn’t even have that left.

“Do it,” I said.

Kade didn’t wait for Janice’s okay. He simply slid another needle into Scott, and with a final sigh, the criminal who had terrorized the shifter community blew out his last breath.