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.”
“We have shifter doctors. Kade is going to be one of them.”
“And you’ve told me yourself that your Dr. Nevala and the others up at Kindred Hospital don’t have any real experience with your kind.”
“Neither does your grad student,” I pointed out.
Dad sighed and pushed the door open. “Just consider it. Please, for me.”
I listened until I heard the squeaking hinges on the screen door leading into the house. Then I turned to Serena and began making sure her terrarium had everything she might need for the short amount of time I planned to be inside talking to Shane the grad student. “I know he means well,” I said to Serena as I puttered around making sure everything was perfect. “But this has to be the worst plan he’s ever come up with. I don’t see how he possibly could’ve run that by mom before he did it. I know you haven’t met my mom yet. You’ll see her this weekend. She has a class this afternoon—your grandma. I think you’ll really like her. And I know she wants to hold on to you in your other shape.”
Serena regarded me with her steady gaze, and I reached in to stroke her head.
WHEN I GOT INSIDE, Dad had a cup of coffee waiting for me, exactly the way I liked it. His version of a peace offering.
And after half an hour with Shane—whose last name was Wills—I saw why Dad had been eager to have him help with the infant snake shifters’ care. He was polite, thoughtful, and knowledgeable. If he had already known about the shifter world, he would have been a shoo-in for the position of snake pediatrician.
However, he wasn’t—he didn’t know about us, and it wasn’t my place to tell him.
“So your dad said you came out here to take a weekend off?” Shane said.
“Yeah.” I took a drink of my coffee and watched him over the rim of the mug.
“So what are you planning for this afternoon?”
“Oh, I thought I’d go for a little bit of a hike. Stretch my legs, maybe do a little communing with nature.” I shot my dad a significant look, willing him to remember his agreement to keep Shane Wills away from my favorite rock. Dad tipped his head a little bit to let me know he got the message.
“Well, you have fun. I think your dad’s got plans to keep me busy working all afternoon.”
I hoped he had equal plans—or at least equally developed plans—for explaining why the terrarium with the touchy juvenile snake I had brought in was empty when they got back out there after Serena and I left for our time together.
I decided not to worry about it. Instead, I drained my coffee from my cup and said my goodbyes.
“Maybe I’ll see you again before long,” Shane said—more hopefully than I would have preferred.
“Maybe so,” I said without any particular inflection. I went over and dropped a kiss on Dad’s cheek. “I hate you,” I whispered in his ear.
Dad grinned and said aloud, “I love you too, sweetheart.”
Shaking my head in rueful amusement, I went back out to gather Serena and carry her with me to the broad, flat rock I had claimed as my own years before.
We got out there at just the right time of day—the sun high in the afternoon sky, halfway down toward evening but still shining brightly. The rock had soaked up all the day’s heat, and I set Serena into my favorite hollow. Her bright green coils undulated slightly as she luxuriated in the warmth. With a quick glance around to make sure Dad really had corralled Shane into some kind of work and he hadn’t followed me, I stripped out of my jeans and T-shirt, folding them and placing them atop my shoes beside the rock. Then, I stretched as far into myself as I could, willing the shift to happen.
As usual, I saw the magic of the shift swirling around me and I knew now, as I had not before, that the magic could be harnessed. It wasn’t as strong here as it was out by the river, where Eduardo and I trained and where Kade had taken me to teach me about earth magic. But I could still see some of it, and after the attack in the NICU, I knew that if the situation were bad enough, I’d be able to punch through whatever divided us from the magic that simmered right under the surface of our world. I could take it and make it my own.
But there were consequences to that we still had not entirely figured out.
So for now, I let my sense of that magic drop away and simply melted into the shift.
As usual, there was a moment of panic when my arms and legs fused and I became only serpent, only body. But with it came an amazing sense of freedom and I took a moment to ripple the muscles of my body, to taste the air around me fully in a way I hadn’t in days, maybe weeks.
I had told Shane that I was going to commune with nature. It wasn’t a lie. In the air around me, I scented a coyotes’ den not terribly far away, its inhabitants gone, either for good or at least for the moment. Insects chirped close by in the grass.
