Usually, I would have been every bit as happy to avoid the hair-raising moments in both jobs. But at the moment, I would’ve welcomed almost anything that distracted me from obsessing over my impending foster-motherhood.
As it was, though, nothing exciting had happened in several days—good for the shifter community, bad for my skyrocketing anxiety levels. So on this Wednesday night, I sat in the tiny Fort Worth, Texas, office rented by the Council for the Shields, where I was manning the telephone lines, the shifter version of 911.
I’d already put in a full day at the CAP-C. In fact, I’d skipped my lunch period to go out to a local women’s shelter and run a group counseling session for the kids there. After work, I had rushed to make it to the Shield office before Layla, a werecoyote Shield, finished her shift.
Now I stared at the old-fashioned phone on the desk, willing it to ring as my stomach growled. I was bored and hungry and anxious—not a good combination for anyone, much less a snake shifter.
“The ER is slammed tonight. I’ll be lucky to get away before morning,” Kade said when I called to see if he’d bring food by the office after his own shift.
“Thanks anyway,” I managed to respond, more-or-less politely.
Crossing my arms, I snarled at my own cell phone as I dropped it on the table.
If the Council hadn’t rejected my proposal to allow us to have Shield calls routed through to our personal cell phones, I wouldn’t have been stuck here.
“But no,” I muttered aloud in my most sarcastic tone. We all had to take our turns sitting in the office. Even if an emergency call came in, I’d have to send out the on-call Shields.
Besides, the Council insisted on maintaining a physical office where shifters could report problems directly. I had argued against it vehemently in one of our meetings, but to no avail.
So, of course, I was the one on duty when the panicked couple showed up to send my already chaotic life spiraling into absolute madness.
THE DOOR OF THE OFFICE slammed open, hitting the wall behind it so hard I was afraid it would leave a dent. A couple dashed in and shut the door behind them. The man threw the deadbolt and scanned the rest of our limited additional security. While he did this, the small woman strode up to the desk and purposefully placed both hands flat on the surface. She leaned forward, almost into my personal space, and said, “We need to see the lamia.”
I assumed she meant me—since I was the only adult snake-shifter in the area, and perhaps in existence, she almost had to. However, the enormous ax sticking up over her head from between her shoulder blades suggested that perhaps I didn’t need to see them—not without getting a sense of who they were and why they were invading my workspace.
I work with frantic people for a living, though, both in my job as a counselor and as a type of police officer for the Shields. I pulled on my counselor face—smooth, bland, and only mildly interested in whatever it was that had gotten my clients (or in this case, the ax-wielding blonde and her boyfriend) stirred up.
I leaned back in the office chair and tented my fingers in front of me. “Why do you need to see her?”
“She is the only one we will talk to,” the woman ground out from between clenched teeth. Her eyes were the pale, almost-white blue of a Siberian Husky’s, and they glared at me with a cold fury, barely banked.
I raised one eyebrow and waited. It was a technique I found I used as much as a Shield as I did as a children’s counselor. People want to fill silences.
In the meantime, I used the few seconds of quiet as an opportunity to study the pair.
In terms of appearance, they were exact opposites. She was leggy, but tiny, with incredibly pale skin and long hair so blonde it was almost white. He was taller, a light-skinned black man with luminous brown eyes.
Pulling in a breath across the half-shifted Jacobson’s organ in the roof of my mouth, I parsed out what I could of their scents. They were obviously lovers, their individual scents interwoven so completely that it was difficult to differentiate them.
Difficult, but not impossible.
He was some kind of shifter—a type I’d never smelled before—and she was...
Well, she was baseline human. There was something else there that I had never encountered before, though. To my weresnake senses, it smelled wild but didn’t taste like anything shifter or animal. Yet it carried that fizz along the edge, like a lightly carbonated drink, that suggested its owner belonged to the world of the paranormal.
Yeah—whatever she was, she was definitely supernatural.
“Maybe I can help you?” I asked.
They exchanged a look full of information that I couldn’t interpret, and then the man stepped up. “We must speak to the lamia. She is, we believe, the only one who might believe us—might trust us.” His voice was musical, the words spoken in the lilting accent of an African country.
I chewed on the inside of my bottom lip as I considered the couple in front of me. I inhaled another breath, trying to taste intentions in the molecules of air. All my senses were telling me that they were nervous, but not actively hiding anything. They weren’t lying. They definitely thought I would be able to help them.
After a long moment, I nodded and sat up straight. “I’m Lindi Parker. I’m the one you’re looking for.”
The blonde woman stood up straight, pushing herself off with the hands she had never taken from the desk. The man slumped a little in relief, and then he stood up straight, as well.
“You are?” the woman said suspiciously. The man simply ran his hand along her back. Again they glanced at each other—but this time I knew what they were communicating about. It was a silent discussion over what to do next, and more importantly, whether or not they even believed me. I gave it a few seconds, and then I broke the silence.
“Would you like proof?” I asked, pushing my chair back from the desk and standing.
“Yes,” the woman said sharply, even as the man made a demurring sound and gesture. They both stopped speaking and looked at one another in surprise.
These two might be lovers, but they are not used to working together.
I filed the intuition away, hoping to examine it later. Closing my eyes, I focused on shifting only my face, allowing my mouth to widen, my chin to slope back a bit, and my skin to harden into scales. I could tell when my eyes shifted because everything went black and white.
When I flicked my tongue out into the air this time, I tasted more of the others’ motives.
No. They’re definitely telling the truth.
Whatever other reasons they might have for wanting to talk to “the lamia,” they genuinely believed that seeing me was their only hope.
I let the partial shift fall away and my human features took its place.
“You wanted to see me,” I said. “Now you have. So tell me, who are you?”
I’d already begun to think of the woman as the dominant one of the pair, so I was a little surprised when she stepped aside and let the man begin speaking.
“I am Jeremiah Diphiri,” he said in his beautifully melodic voice, and its cadence, similar to that of a storyteller, clued me in—this part of the meeting had been carefully rehearsed before they ever entered my office.
That suggested they both viewed him as being the more believable of the pair—at least they thought I was more likely to buy whatever he was about to tell me.