Inside the terrarium, Serena raised up on the lower half of her body, peering at me and tasting the air molecules in my car.
“I know,” I said to her. “Things smell different out here, don’t they?”
I chattered to her about all the things we could go do when we got out to my parents’ land. I talked to her as I would a human child, discussing things with the assumption that she would learn language more quickly the more I talked to her.
I supposed it was really the same when it came to shifting. The more she saw it done, the more quickly she would learn to do it, too.
As she coiled in on herself under the lamp, though, I had to admit to myself that I knew exactly why she didn’t have any real interest in shifting right now. Human babies are frustratingly immobile. I didn’t know exactly how different a shifter child’s development was, but if she followed a normal human child development timeline, she was, what? three months? A long time away from even being able to roll over on her own.
As a serpent, she had mobility. Not much more than to the walls of the terrarium they were keeping her in, but mobility, nonetheless.
I didn’t know that I would want to shift, either.
For that matter, I sometimes wondered what it was that had prompted me, when I was a child, to shift at all. I had no idea how long I had been on my own when my father found me, but I had no memories before then. I suspected I had been in serpent form for quite a while. For all I knew, I had never been in human form before the night I shifted so that my father discovered me in my tank the next morning. As I turned into the driveway and pulled up toward the house and the herpetarium in the back, my father stepped out of the back door and waved.
He was clearly excited to see Serena.
Maybe me, too, but I wasn’t certain. I had pulled to a stop and was smiling widely when someone else stepped out of the house behind him.
Chapter 17
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 the 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 leaped 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 to 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 maybe 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.”