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.
Chapter 3
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”—the mom’s boyfriend, an unemployed man 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?”