“And you should have seen how fast she shifted, too,” Kelly added enthusiastically. “I turned my back for just a second, and when I turned back around, there she was.”
She and Kade were still grinning like crazy people—but all I felt was dread.
“She’s more dangerous that way,” I pointed out.
“But this means that she’s also trainable,” Kade said. “She can be influenced.” He wrapped one arm around my shoulder and pulled me toward him to kiss the top of my head, careful not to tug too quickly and jostle my injuries. “This is a good thing, Lindi.”
I tried to see it their way, but I worried about how the rest of the shifters would take this development. If nothing else, the attacks on Marta and Serena had shown us that there were plenty of shapeshifters who still didn’t want the lamia race to return.
Chapter 10
I KEPT MY CONCERNS to myself, though, allowing Kade to check me out of the hospital and take me to his house to fuss over me as he settled me in. My adoptive parents had been to see me several times in the hospital, but I had assured them that they could head out on their usual summer research trips, Mom to fulfill a grant she had to use one of the big telescopes out in California, Dad to study spontaneous regeneration—parthenogenesis—in reptiles in Death Valley. At least this year, they were headed to the same part of the world. They were actually planning to take some vacation time together, though I would believe it when I saw it.
Being alone at Kade’s while he worked got old pretty quickly, but I filled the hours doing CAP-C paperwork, completing my physical therapy exercises, and begging rides to and from the hospital from shifters who worked there so I could visit Serena. I was glad to see she had shifted back to her human form the first time I went to see her after I had been released; I still wasn’t certain her shifting ability was the good thing Kade and Kelly had made it out to be, though I was beginning to realize that a “first shift” was, to a shifter, akin to a “first step” for most human parents.
Gloria began visiting me every couple of days, usually bringing lunch. It didn’t take long to figure out that she was checking on my mental health after getting caught up in what she saw as a horrible, but random, act of violence.
She didn’t know this had become my new normal.
For good or ill, I knew the words to say to minimize her worry.
While I had been away, there had been no more strange recordings in the CAP-C, and Gloria was convinced it had been a strange technical glitch. “Moreland is inclined to agree with me,” she said one afternoon, taking a bite of her salad and waving her fork in the air as she spoke. “He thinks maybe something caused the microphone to pick up my breathing from the background. Or maybe the officer’s. Anyway, as long as it doesn’t happen again, I’m choosing not to worry about it.”
Given my recent experiences, I was less certain we hadn’t had an intruder, but I was willing to let it go, at least for now.
My boredom-busting routine actually helped me recover more quickly than I might have otherwise, and it wasn’t long before Dr. Smith released me to go back to work for a few hours a day. “Nothing too strenuous,” he admonished me, and I pointed out that counseling was rarely a physically taxing job. He didn’t look convinced, but it didn’t matter. I was back at work less than a month after the attack on Serena, and I was glad to have my life getting back to normal.
The first day, I had Kade drop me off at the CAP-C on his way to the hospital. It was still early. No one else was there yet, but I was looking forward to using the quiet to settle back into my office.
As soon as I opened the door to my own office, though, I could tell there was something not quite right.
I flicked my tongue out and tasted the air, testing for what was out of place.
Something almost rotten, that didn’t belong in my space—but not entirely foreign, either. Not strong enough for humans to pick up, either, probably.
What the hell?
I concentrated, allowing my mouth to shift just enough to give me better access to my serpentine sense of smell and let the scent molecules drift over the Jacobson’s organ.
There.
The odor led back to its source in the far corner of my office, and I laughed aloud as I bent over to pick it up.
Orlando. The suicide-by-wiener kid.
I had left the envelope full of rotten hot dog behind the night of the attack in the NICU, planning to mail it the next day, and it had never been sent.
I shook my head and picked it up gingerly with two fingers, then moved to the conference room, where I dropped the package into the only covered trash can in the building. I would give Vance, the child psychologist, a call later and make sure Orlando’s parents had gotten him in for evaluation, even without my written recommendation—or the suicide weapon, either.
As the metal lid clanged down over the garbage, I turned to leave the room, but something caught my attention—a glint from somewhere along the wall.
A reflected light from the built-in camera?
Maybe.
But my mind jerked back to the day Marta was attacked, when Gloria and Detective Moreland and I had all been listening to the sound of breathing recorded by that same camera system.
Trying to continue looking calm, I stepped through the door and down the hall a few paces. There, I listened for anything that might give away an intruder.
Nothing sounded unusual.
I had at least one additional sense that I could use to check for trespassers, though. I hadn’t shifted the inside of my mouth back to being fully human yet, so taking a deep breath, I allowed the change to flow outward from the Jacobson’s organ, spreading up my face.
My vision shifted to shades of gray, but I didn’t need to be able to see any longer.
I had a pit viper’s sensory organs between my eyes and nose, those hollowed-out spaces that allowed me to feel the most minute changes in temperature, almost as if I were seeing them in infrared. The human side of my brain translated the information into images in shades of red and purple, though that wasn’t quite what my reptile senses picked up.
It didn’t matter how I imagined it, though.
It was clear.
There was someone inside the building. Someone who was shaped like a human, but who burned hotter than any human I had ever met.
A shapeshifter.
Inside the wall, close to the camera and recording system.
Right now.
And I was all alone and recovering from a major injury.
Oh, hell.
ATTEMPTING TO APPEAR casual, I walked down the hall toward the bathroom that shared a wall with the conference room. I needed to figure out how the shifter had gotten inside the wall, and how I might get him or her back out.
A panel allowing people to take the camera in and out of its hiding place was the only opening I knew of, but I checked the bathroom wall as carefully as I could without knocking on it to check for hollow spots.
After only a few minutes, I gave up on subtlety. For all I knew, the shifter on the other side could sense me as well as I could sense it.
Instead, I quickly checked all the adjoining spaces.
No obvious entrance into the wall existed.
Finally, I shifted my face back to its normal human form and marched into the conference room, where I stood directly in front of the camera. The power light blinked on.