Read Under Her Skin for Free Online

blinked his golden eyes in surprise. “You really don’t know?”
    Clenching my teeth against further exclamations, I gritted out, “Tell me what I am.”
    “You’re a lamia,” he said.
    “That’s a snake shifter?” I thought I had dealt with all of my abandonment issues in my training to become a counselor—in order to gain my license, I had to go through hours and hours of therapy myself, both to learn the techniques and so my professors and mentors could be sure I wasn’t too messed up myself to work with others.
    I had never tried to hide the fact that I had been adopted as a child—just that the parents who abandoned me had been able to turn into snakes. That kind of claim can get you banned from working with anyone at all, at least as a professional counselor.
    Despite the hours of counseling, though, I apparently still had deep reserves of abandonment issues, because instead of asking Kade, “What else do you know?” I burst into tears.
    Some part of me expected Kade to move into his professional persona—don’t pediatricians have to deal with weepy patients on a fairly regular basis?—but his ability to deal with sobbing weresnakes apparently matched mine to stay as cool and calm as I had intended during this encounter. He stared at me, open-mouthed, then managed to pat me on the shoulder.
    It took a few moments, but I finally pulled myself together enough to speak again. “Tell me everything.”
    Kade nodded, and drew in a deep breath.
    “Like I said, you’re a lamia, and traditionally, it would be my job to kill you.”
    “You’ve said that already,” I noted.
    “Yeah, but it seemed like a good idea to go back to the beginning.” A slight smile quirked up the corner of Kade’s mouth. “I wasn’t entirely sure you’d heard all of that last bit.”
    I narrowed my eyes at him. “If it’s your job to kill me, then what are you?”
    “I’m a ...” Kade paused, chewing on his bottom lip a bit, then shook his head. “Might as well say it. I’m a mongoose shifter.”
    “A what?” My tone almost conveyed the disbelief I felt.
    He held his hands up in front of him as if shielding himself from my potential ridicule. “I know. It sounds stupid. But if you think about it, it’s no stranger than a snake shifter.”
    Suddenly, I flashed back on Jason saying we would have to “ferret out the information,” and it made me want to giggle. Or mongoose out the rest, anyway.
    I considered the possibilities for a moment. “So if there are were-snakes and ...” I paused, shaking my head. “And were-mongooses ... mongeese? Anyway, if you and I exist, then ...”
    “Then what other types of shifters are there?” Kade crooked one eyebrow up at me, and I nodded rapidly, just in case the expression meant he was about to turn the potential for ridicule around on me. He shrugged. “Just about any kind you can think of, probably. I don’t know all of them, though we get our fair share through here.”
    I hazarded a guess. “Werewolves?”
    “Oh, yeah. Probably more of them than anything else, though not as many here as in other parts of the country, I understand.” He began ticking them off on his fingers. “And the other major predators—various big cats, like lions and tigers.”
    I couldn’t stop myself. “And bears?”
    He blew out a sigh, but he grinned as he said, “Yes. And bears. But others, too—mostly mammals, like raccoons and badgers. More rabbits than you’ll ever realize. They’re good at hiding.”
    I could tell he was skirting around something that was going to be unpleasant, so I prodded him. “And non-mammals?”
    “Fewer of them—I suspect it’s from a basic incompatibility of human and non-mammalian systems, though I’m not certain.”
    Letting myself get sidetracked for a moment, I asked, “Aren’t you their doctor? Shouldn’t you know things like that?”
    “Probably. But until recently, the elders just called it magic and left it at that. There was no such