In Someone Else's Skin, Margo Collins [best books to read for women .TXT] 📗

My stomach dropped. “So either we risk walking around without papers and getting arrested or we risk getting arrested when we go in to get papers. Is that right?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say it’s right. It is, however, what is likely to happen.” Salara shook her head. “Recent attitudes toward immigrants have been awful. I don’t care what side of the continent you’re from. Everyone deserves a chance.” She cut her eyes toward me, then took another look at my two companions. “Even lamia women who like slumming it with humans.”

“Slumming it?” Coit asked indignantly. “That’s not slumming it. Humans are—”

“—not the dominant race,” Shane guessed.

Salara slanted a look at him. “Of course not. I mean, we think of ourselves as a fairly progressive society. But even here, humans are often considered second-class citizens. I hate to say it, but it’s true. You haven’t really gotten away from the kind of bigotry you might have experienced in your own country.”

So. A lamia-run society with built-in bigotry toward humans, but a liberal political group that wanted to accept humans. That’s what I was getting out of Salara’s conversation.

I leaned forward from the back seat, hanging onto one of the poles that separated the two seats. “What do you suggest we do?”

Salara narrowed her eyes at me in the rearview mirror. “If you go to the Bureau and apply for papers, they are going to ask a lot of questions about your relationship with these two men.” Her eyes flicked to the baby resting around my neck, then to the one coiled around my wrist. “And there’s a good chance they’ll want to make sure your babies are in a safe place.”

“I assume that’s by their definition of ‘safe’?”

She nodded. “That’s why I stopped to pick you up. If you’re walking into the city, I assume you don’t have the resources you would need to fight the government, right?”

“Exactly right.” I leaned back against the seat and stared out the window at the green fields rolling by. Apparently, I had jumped us out of one bad situation and quite possibly straight into another.

Salara was silent, too, as she fiddled with some of the buttons on the dashboard—buttons that apparently allowed her to drive hands-free. Which would, of course, be necessary for a snake shifter.

I might not think much of what I was hearing about the government, but I loved this car.

“Is there anywhere we can stay without papers?” Coit asked. “Someplace we could maybe find work?”

Salara chewed on her bottom lip slowly, and the lower half of her body tightened and loosened around the pole she gripped—almost reflectively, as if she were using her whole body to think.

“Yes. I know some people who will help you,” she said finally, as if having come to some momentous decision.

“Why?” I asked, suspiciously. I didn’t like to count on luck.

“It’s what they do. And I haven’t done enough to support immigrants,” Salara said. “I don’t know how you got to this point, but I am willing to help from here on out—at least until you get a little settled.”

So. We had lucked into hitching a ride with a bleeding-heart liberal snake chick.

Yeah. I might not like to trust in luck, but apparently, I was about to.

Soon after, the fields turned to the city outskirts. But it wasn’t quite like any city I was used to. The buildings were long, low, domed shapes—quite literally snaking along the side of the road.

All the buildings here were shaped like that first barn we had entered. I wondered as we drove into the city and the buildings grew denser, leaving only winding roads between them, if they ever built upwards instead of out.

I got my answer, more or less, as we drove through what I suspected was downtown—where the buildings were two or three times as tall—but still rounded. The only right angles in the whole place were where the buildings met the ground.

Coit glanced at the buildings and gave a little shudder, as if they were far too different from anything he was used to for him to be comfortable. Shane, on the other hand, was fascinated, staring at the domes with their circular windows.

Salara began pointing out landmarks. “That’s the municipal building, where you would be going to get your papers at the Registry Bureau.” She chewed on her bottom lip for a second. “I think we should look into getting you some temporary papers.”

“That’s a possibility?” I asked.

At the same moment, Shane asked, “How can we do that?”

Salara shrugged. “I’ve heard stories. I’m not entirely sure, but the people I know can help us find out.”

“When you say temporary, do you mean fake?” Coit asked in his usual blunt manner.

“Probably.” Salara laughed a little. “I’m not used to dealing with illegal aliens. Sorry. But I will do everything I can to help.”

This was all too much of a coincidence. Had something drawn me to this world, that particular place? Or was it really coincidence that I had landed us in a lamia world where literally the first person who passed on the road would be willing to help us?

My gut told me there was no accident to it at all, that my magic it had something to do with it.

If only I knew how to make that magic work on command.

Then maybe we could go home instead of having to rely on the liberal lamia’s help.

Chapter 4

The service roads we drove on were as serpentine as the buildings, twisting around and around. There were no straight angles. Something like roundabouts served instead of intersections, and I quickly lost any sense of direction I might have had.

I realized that I spent so much time when I was growing up focusing on my human side, trying so desperately to fit into the human world, that I might have lost some of the elements of my snake-brain.

Or least buried them so deeply that I couldn’t pull them back up instantly.

These