I worked not to touch her dead flesh as I slid up beside her, choosing to cross up and over her torso as opposed to feeling her hands touching me as I moved beside them. The whole thing was more than a little terrifying.
About halfway across her, I smelled that strange, almost musty smell again. Death, yes, and some kind of embalming chemicals—but there was more, too. Something else. Something familiar.
I flicked my tongue out and back in, tasting the air around me, separating out the molecules to identify, categorize, and catalog them.
And suddenly, as surely as I knew that I was in a casket with a dead body, I also know something very important about that body.
It was stuffed with money.
Chapter 6
Yep. There was definitely cash inside this dead body. Lots of cash.
I wriggled around some more, working to get a sense of where the cash was hidden.
Inside her torso, I finally decided. Or at least inside her dress. I wasn’t about to open it up to check, though.
If I didn’t see it, I didn’t have to report it. Right?
I really need to get my hands on a copy of the counselor’s ethical code.
But I’d have to get hands, first.
So maybe that could mean that I don’t have to report anything that happens when I’m in my serpent form?
Human rules were not designed to deal with snake shifters.
I had no good way to put this in a report, anyway. What would I write? While slithering through the dead woman’s casket, I tasted the smell of cold, hard cash.
No. Just no.
I continued toward the package Ron had hidden under her. But once again, my attention was snagged by something along the way.
This time, I completely froze.
The woman wore a large, metal pendant. In my shifted vision, it glinted silver in a tiny beam of light filtering in through the lid, but for all I knew, it might have been gold or even bronze.
That wasn’t what caught my attention, though.
Engraved on the pendant was an image of a figure that was half-snake, half-woman.
I stared at it for a long moment, folding the air around it into my mouth in tiny little flicks of my tongue. The pendant was old—older than the chain, though both carried the woman’s scent buried deep within them. But the pendant held more—other women’s scents, soaked so thoroughly into the metal that it was practically bound to it.
And now that I could taste the molecules, it was clearly made of gold. The figure of the woman was worn down, but still clearly visible, her serpentine lower half coiled into a perfect coil, her naked upper half crowned by spirals of hair twisting and looping in shapes that echoed that coil.
The center of the piece had been touched so often that the image’s naked breasts had been worn away to mere hints of curves.
That Abuela had cherished this pendant was clear.
So why was she being buried with it? It seemed like the kind of item that would be passed down.
Unless she wasn’t an abuela at all. Maybe she didn’t have anyone to leave it to? Or maybe her grandchildren hadn’t wanted it, a new generation that scoffed at the beliefs of their elders, the simple things they cherished.
Like a pendant with an image of a snake-lady on it. An image of someone like me, maybe?
I’d never met anyone else like me before.
Granted, it wasn’t an image of a form I often took. My human parents had encouraged me to take the shape of either a human or a snake, not the strange, half-shapes in between.
But as a teenager, I had practiced, out on the ranchland I grew up on, far away from anyone else’s prying eyes.
I had practiced shifting each part of my body separately. So now, I could shift only my vomeronasal organ to test the scent of a room, or I could allow a viper’s heat-sensing pits to form beside my nose in order to scan a room for heat signatures even in the dark.
I knew without a doubt that I could take the form of a human body bearing a snake head. And I could take a form almost precisely like the one on Abuela’s pendant, with a human upper half and a serpentine lower half.
It wasn’t like I didn’t know there must be others like me out there somewhere. Obviously, I was unlikely to be some kind of genetic freak, a one-of-a-kind monstrosity without any precedent.
Even if I’d felt that way sometimes while I was growing up.
I’d seen images like this before, too, back when I’d felt lost and alone in the world and gone searching for them. It wasn’t like the concept was new to me. But this was the first time I’d seen an image of a snake shifter as anything other than a curiosity in a book or an image on a website.
It was the first time I’d seen it in connection to a real person.
And of course, curse my rotten luck, that person was dead.
I needed to find out more about who this Abuela was. For the first time, I took a careful look at her. Her hair was gray and wavy, her skin softly wrinkled and folded.
She really did look kind and grandmotherly, like someone’s abuela. Someone who should be loved and treated well after death. Not shoved around and stuffed full of cash and used as a way to sneak into countries.
It was disrespectful. And hateful.
For the first time since I’d followed my instincts and stowed away in the Beaumonts’ engine, I felt actual anger. I hadn’t even had a chance to see Baby Paige up close yet—even though she was the one I was doing all of this for—but I’d spent a significant amount of time
