In Someone Else’s Skin
Lindi Parker Shifter Shield Book 3
Margo Bond Collins
Table of Contents
Title Page
In Someone Else's Skin
About In Someone Else’s Skin
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
In Someone Else’s Skin
A Paranormal Romance & Urban Fantasy
Copyright © 2020 by Margo Bond Collins
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval systems, without prior written permission of the author except where permitted by law.
Published by Bathory Gate Press
Granbury, Texas
THE CHARACTERS AND events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.
About In Someone Else’s Skin
Lindi Parker is scared out of her mind—and for a snakeshifter, that’s saying something.
When Lindi grabbed the latest newborn lamias and leaped into the unknown, she knew she was risking all their lives.
But the alternative—allowing the faction that wants to eliminate all lamias on sight to capture them—meant certain death.
Now she’s faced with a brand-new enemy in an unknown land and all she wants to do is to get back home.
This time, her status as a Shifter Shield won’t save her.
Prologue
Less than six months ago, I didn’t know there were any other shapeshifters in the world. For all I knew, I was some aberration, a weird science experiment gone wrong and abandoned in the west Texas desert.
I don’t know how old I was when Dad found me. He’s a biology professor who specializes in snakes—a herpetologist who brought home what he thought was an adolescent individual of a new species, a snake that flared its hood like a cobra. He was stunned to find a toddler curled up in the tank the next morning, and even more surprised when he actually saw me shift from one form to another.
Finding a new breed of snake would have made him famous, at least among certain circles.
Finding a weresnake made him a father.
That he was willing to take me in and make me part of his family once he realized that I was a snake shifter is, I think, a testament to how kind he and my mother are. The fact that they were able to train me up into a decent human being (at least, I think so) was always, as far as I was concerned, proof that nurture can overcome nature.
My adoptive parents taught me early on to avoid anything that might give me away—medical exams were not a possibility, so I never went to a hospital. They homeschooled me until I was twelve and they were sure I had my shifting under control so I could go to school with other children.
And while I worked to control my shifting, I learned to be more human than serpent. Dad always said that I should remember that I was a person first—that whatever else I might be, I was human. His lessons had helped me learn to control my desire to shift into my snake form. To do that, I ignored the other part of me as much as I could, keeping it pushed as far under my humanity as possible. And I can control it now, almost perfectly.
But in doing so, I lost something, too. I lost a part of myself by hiding it away from everyone, including myself.
I hid who and what I was all the way through college, then through graduate school, where I studied to become a counselor. I went to work with children at a local advocacy center, hoping to help other children like I’d been helped—even though I was certain there were no other children just like me.
Then a young girl killed her abuser—and in the hospital, I met Dr. Kade Nevala, the sexiest man I’d ever seen. And I learned there were lots of other shifters in the world, including Kade, who turned out to be a shifter himself.
But I also learned everyone thought I was the only one just like me—a snake shifter. A lamia.
Kade told me lamias had been feared and hated, killed on sight until they were all eliminated. His clan, mongoose shifters, were instrumental in wiping out the lamias.
Without someone like my parents to teach them how to care, how to draw upon their humanity as a balance to their snake sides, they had all been more snake than human.
Cold-blooded.
That’s what Kade said, anyway. And I believed him. Without my parents to guide me, I was certain I would never have learned compassion for the people with whom I interacted every day.
And for a while, everything Kade said made sense. After all, we got pulled into a missing-children case that eventually led us to discover one other lamia who had escaped the purge. She’d spent her time using the oddities of shifter reproduction, our ability to crossbreed with one another and with humans, to try to rebuild the lamia race by means of requiring her own lamia-gene-bearing son to rape human women.
I had helped save the women, killing the other lamia and helping put her son to death.
But the lamia’s plan sort of worked, anyway. Several of the raped women had borne weresnake babies, and my own training led me to want to help raise them.
It looked like the world would soon have a lamia clan again. I bonded with the firstborn lamia child, Serena, and had been about to become foster mother to a whole nest of snake shifter children. I joined the local shifter enforcer group, the Shifter Shields, training with them at night and continuing to work as a counselor during the day, even as Kade and I worked to build our fledgling relationship.
For a short time, I thought everything might work out.
But I was wrong.
The shifter Council in Texas, where I lived, was eventually willing to accept me—but other shifters were not. One wolf pack in particular had heard there was a lamia loose
