Skin Deep

by Lily Luchesi

  “So nice that you know your mythology,” Hermes muttered.

  “Not so nice for you.” Jade waved a hand at a table and suddenly a bottle appeared there that had been disillusioned so he couldn’t see it. It looked like milk was inside, with bits of God knew what floating around in it.

  “Volant!” Jade cast, sending the bottle flying at Hermes. He waved his wand, but it was too late and the bottle collided with it, sending the potion all over him. Some of it got into his mouth, up his nose, choking him.

  As he spluttered and choked, he was pushed by a wave of energy and sent flying into the far wall. He hit his head, rendering him momentarily dizzy. He’d always hated fighting, and was never much good at it.

  Jade was at him, holding him down with magic as she reached out and snatched his wand from his grasp. He was powerless to stop her.

  “Each god and goddess has one weakness that could lead to their death,” she said. “Yours is inactiveness. The less you move, the more you die, moment by moment. By now you should be feeling the effects of that potion. Just a little sleeping draught, something we learn as children.”

  He was feeling it, an intense weariness in his limbs that had nothing to do with the magic holding him. He tried to move, to break her spell and get the potion out of his system, but he was stuck. His heart beat an erratic tattoo in his chest as he realized that this was it. This was how he was going to die, after millennia of life.

  Jade held up Caduceus and said, “Ypnos.”

  Hermes was panicking; he needed to get the information to Angelica, but he was too sleepy...his appendages weighed three tons each, and he couldn’t think straight. Exhaustion overtook him, and the last thing he saw was Jade snapping his wand in half before he passed into oblivion, his last thought that he let his friend down.

  * * *

  “Fuck, that hurt! ...C’mon, let go!”

  Angelica was holding both of Daniel’s arms behind his back while her knee was pressing into the bottom of his spinal cord. At his insistence, she let go of his arms and let him fall forward onto the mats on the floor of the PID training room, his breath coming in pained gasps. He rolled onto his back, groaning from the pain.

  “This is hopeless,” Daniel muttered, sitting up and crossing his legs under him. His curls were plastered to his face with sweat and he had a black eye.

  “You keep trying to beat me head-on,” Angelica said. “You can’t defeat a vampire with brute strength: you’ve got to be inventive, cunning. A hidden blade in the sleeve, a syringe filled with dead man’s blood or garlic oil or holy water. That kinda thing.”

  Danny chuckled from his spot as a spectator. So far Angelica had worked the young mortal over, but she had made sure to teach him what he was doing wrong and give him ways to fix his problems.

  “You find this funny? Come take my place, Pops,” Daniel said.

  “I did, when I started here. Believe me, she kicked my ass just as bad as she’s kicking yours,” Danny replied. “And back then she was only a half-vampire.”

  Angelica held her hand out and helped Daniel up. “You’re good, though. I bet with a little more training you could kick a shifter’s ass. We don’t really need you to fight the skin changer, but we still wanted to train you just in case. All PID employees are under a watch now, as you know.”

  Daniel nodded. “Good to know, because I bet I’d be ripped apart.” He sat down next to Danny, toweling the sweat from his face.

  Angelica pressed a button and a human intern came in, carrying a tray with three drinks on it. Two were small, four ounce cups of fresh blood for the vampires, and a tall glass with dark red liquid for Daniel.

  He took the glass and glanced inside, taking a sniff. “What the fuck is this?”

  Danny and Angelica shared a glance, and she tried hard not to smile. The drink was your typical protein “green” drink: kale, spinach, apple, carrot, beets, cilantro, celery, ginger, and cucumber. With an added vial of vampire blood to strengthen the human agents. There had been a bit of a mix up with the drink and Danny’s...understanding of what was inside of it, which was the reason for the look.

  “Just drink it. That thing kept me alive when I was human,” Danny said, downing the blood in one go.

  Daniel took a sip, grimaced, and said, “Oh, this tastes like death. I can’t picture anyone making this and thinking, ‘oh yeah, people are gonna think this stuff’s great’.”

  “What’s good for you is always either painful or disgusting. Suck it up,” Angelica said. “C’mon, Danny, we haven’t sparred in ages.”

  He arched an eyebrow. “You don’t count our continuous mental sparring a workout?” He stood up and stretched. “All right. I promise I’ll go easy on you.”

  Angelica threw her head back and laughed, remembering again why she loved her husband so much. “Sweetie, you have delusions of grandeur and that’s just so cute.” She grabbed a sword from the wall mount and tossed Danny two sheathed blades. He wasn’t a fan of longswords, but those were what Angelica had been trained with long ago, when her father was still human. Guns were useful, but she didn’t use them unless she had to.

  “This is gonna be fun to watch,” Daniel said, sitting back on the bench as he finished his drink. Angelica noticed that his eye was no longer purple and swollen, but greenish and old, as if the bruise had been made days ago instead of half an hour.

  The doors to the training room burst open and Sean stood at the threshold. Angelica needed to take one look at him to know that there was something wrong.

  Lowering her sword she asked, “What now?”

  He let out a shaky sigh. “You’re not gonna like this one, Angie. ...Put the blade down before I tell you.”

  She dropped the sword and stared at him, her annoyance masking her fear. She’d been in the game long enough to be able to have a sixth sense about certain events, and she feared that the skin changer had struck again, closer to home this time.

  “It’s Hermes. One of the Coven members found him...found his body. He’s in the hospital, but there’s something wrong,” Sean said.

  Angelica ignored the stabbing pain in her heart as she simply walked out of the room, heading to the hospital wing. Danny, Sean, and Daniel all followed her, but she paid them no mind.

  In the hospital, Hermes looked strangely small as he lay stock still in the hospital bed. A machine was helping his mortal body breathe on its own. His skin was ashy grey, almost like stone. She reached out to touch his hand and when she felt its texture, she realized it was stone.

  Hermes was dying.

  “What happened?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

  “One of our witches saw that the doorway to an abandoned restaurant was broken and she went inside to see what was going on, and she found him there....With this.” Sean held out an evidence bag that contained a large wooden staff that had been broken into pieces.

  Seeing that, Angelica now knew a little more about what happened. She rolled up his sleeve and saw that his enchanted tattoo, the way he protected Caduceus. The wand was gone, and the snakes had stopped moving.

  Someone had found out Hermes’ one weakness, and they’d exploited it. Without the staff, no one could waken him, and every minute he lay there he would slowly turn to stone until no life remained inside of him.

  Tears gathered in her eyes and she covered her mouth with her hands, not wanting the sobs to escape. Not here, not now. Hermes would have hated that.

  Arms came around her from behind and Danny pulled her to his chest, where she turned to bury her face, smearing his shirt with her running mascara.

  “This has gone too fucking far. I don’t know what this thing’s goal is, but what it got was one angry vampire on their hands, and God help them when I finally see them face-to-face.”

  She pulled away from Danny, furtively wiping her eyes. “Did anyone see anything? Or just his body?”

  Sean jumped into action and said, “Security camera caught him with a woman I assume is his murd
erer, but I can’t ID her. The ID comes up as someone who hasn’t had any activity on her social security number since around twenty-fourteen.” He pulled out his phone and projected the footage on the plain white wall before them.

  Hermes was walking down Michigan, admiring the lights, when a woman with dark, eggplant-colored hair seemed to appear out of nowhere and bump right into him. Already the witch had broken a law, by teleporting. Teleportation was considered tampering with space-time and was illegal within the PID and all Covens around the world unless there was a life-or-death emergency that could be proved to officials.

  But when the witch began to lead Hermes down a side street, her face was shown to the camera, and Angelica thought she was seeing things.

  “Jade!”

  “You know her?” Daniel asked.

  “Yeah...but she was young a century ago. I thought she was dead...which means she used an illegal immortality spell or elixir like Fiona did,” Angelica said. “So she’s working for the skin changer…”

  Sean shut the phone and said, “It appears to be so. But there’s more. We should sojourn to your office, though. This is...exclusive information.”

  Angelica nodded.

  “I’ll be going, then,” Daniel said.

  “No, it’s okay. You’re in this far. You should know as much as you can,” Angelica said. Danny and Sean looked surprised, but she now knew they needed all the help they could get. They needed Daniel to be as in the loop as possible.

  “I hope it’s something good, Sean. Because I want this skin changer dead, and if it was because of something to do with Hermy, the better,” she said, sitting behind her desk. She felt awkward wearing workout gear in the office, but she didn’t want to take the time to change.

  Sean nodded, bringing in a third chair so everyone could sit around the desk. “I think it is at least a good lead. When the Coven member found Hermes, he was basically untouched. Which meant his tablet, which he had in his pocket of all places, was still intact. He was coming to see you tonight, I think. He found something.”

  Sean handed Angelica a small tablet computer with an old newspaper clipping pulled up from the Tribune’s website.

  ‘Tragedy At Local Nightclub’, taking place in twenty-ten, a century ago. The club was called Poison Pleasures, and Angelica owned it. Unfortunately, she’d been unable to stop the local mortal police from catching wind of the on-site execution, but she’d been able to cover it up after the fact.

  A vamplet had come in from the East Coast and tried to overtake her, and she’d killed her. It had been easy and a little fun, too, but Angelica barely remembered it, until now. It was all coming back to her.

  The vamplet’s name had been Scarlette, and she had been friends with Jade, the witch who had killed Hermes, and a freelance hunter named Dakota.

  “What does this have to do with the skin changer?” Angelica asked once she’d explained who Scarlette was to Danny and his descendant.

  “Flip to the next image, he made notes,” Sean said. “They’re not clear to me, but maybe you can make heads or tails of it.”

  Angelica flipped to the next image, which was a grainy camera shot of Scarlette at the club. All you could see of Jade and Dakota were their backs. Hermes’ notes were half in English, half in Greek, and they really didn’t make sense. ‘Camera girl’ was on one side, ‘who’s she’ was on Jade’s side, and ‘was she just the beginning’ was by Scarlette’s head.

  “Hermes thought that these three tied in with the skin changer somehow,” she said, showing the others the photo.

  “Well, we know Scarlette is dead. Jade’s around, definitely working for the skin changer. Whatever happened to the blonde?” Daniel asked.

  “Freelance hunters are always disappearing, whether they quit hunting or die on the job,” Angelica replied.

  “Pleasant,” Daniel muttered. “Unless…”

  All three stared at him expectantly.

  “Unless what?” Sean asked.

  “Unless the blonde is the skin changer. Hermes told you he saw a blonde on the security cameras near the murders. It fits.”

  Angelica’s mouth dropped but it made sense, somehow. She’d never liked Dakota or Jade very much, and her gut feelings about people were rarely wrong. And now they had two real suspects. She glared down at the photo and said, “If that’s the case, neither of them are getting away from me this time.”

  Chapter Ten

  “All right...all we gotta do is figure out what the skin changer — and by connection, Jade — wants from you, exactly,” Danny said. “First time they tried, they used Scarlette, a vamplet, to attack rogues in hopes of...what again?”

  Angelica sighed. “Scarlette wanted to take my place. She killed the rogues to prove she was better than me.”

  “Okay,” Sean said. “The skin changer is now changing tactics and killing your allies as opposed to your enemies. To what end?”

  “To show, again, that she’s a shitty leader.” Daniel looked panicked as he said that and added, “Not that you are, but the SC wants people to think that.”

  “Thanks for the clarification,” she replied, rolling her eyes. “But you’re right. She — we’re assuming it’s Dakota, and I knew her as a woman so I’ll refer to her as one unless she shows up as a man now — wants people to see that I can’t protect my own. First killing employees. Then turning into Frieda, trying to cause a rift between Danny and I. Then she realized that Hermes got as close as possible to ID’ing her and she sent Jade — who always was her closest friend — to finish him off. To take away another piece on the chessboard.”

  Danny nodded slowly. “Take down the pawns and the King to get to the Queen.”

  “I’m not a queen. I’m the Empress. She’d do well not to forget that.” Angelica felt her fangs elongating and forced them back. Her anger was dangerous right then, especially with a mortal in the room. And right then they needed answers, not emotions.

  “Do you think they’ve been planning it this long? Since twenty-ten?” Daniel asked.

  It was a good question. “No. I think she left not long after I killed Scarlette, just in case the vamplet had told me about her. Jade left the Coven here and went to Florida in twenty-fourteen. I don’t think she even knew about the plot back then. Dakota wouldn’t have put all her eggs in one basket like that.”

  “You think it’s just the two of them?” Sean asked.

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “Scarlette did say that not all paranormals are happy with my dictatorship.”

  Danny snapped his fingers. “They’re not working alone; at least, I don’t think so. Remember when those vamps attacked the kids last month? We said it was weird that they’d make trouble now. Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence. Maybe this Dakota woman is stirring up paranormal unrest.”

  “Then we need to nip it in the bud before she can get more people on her side,” Angelica said. “Sean, get word out about her and her ploy. Make sure it goes global, to every PID division around the world. And send out a BOLO to human police here in Chicago, with Dakota and Jade’s descriptions. They can’t stop them, but they can track them.”

  Sean nodded and stood up to go and get the information out when there were screams from the floor below.

  “Oh come on! We’ve got enough to deal with,” Angelica complained. They all hurried toward the stairwell to get to the level below, where many of the agents worked at cubicles, fielding cases and researching clues. The agents were all abuzz, pointing out a room down the way where the screams had originated.

  That’s where they now headed, and Angelica saw that it was the break room. This late at night, the vampires would be getting their first fifteen-minute break, and perhaps some werewolves as well.

  Angelica made sure that the fridge was always stocked with fresh blood bags and organs for her employees, and Sean had kept it up. Inside the break room was a horror show. Four vampire agents were writhing on the floor, one coughing up blood, two bleeding from the eye sockets, and a
fourth tearing at her own throat.

  “What the Hell happened?” Angelica asked. “Daniel, go call for the medics in the hospital wing.” I so did not sign up for all this.

  Daniel scurried out of the room.

  Danny walked over to the open refrigerator and Angelica could see half-empty blood bags. One had spilled, turning the white plastic inside a bright, almost cartoonish red. He bent down and sniffed. “Holy water. Someone tampered with the blood supply.”

  Angelica looked at the four poisoned vampires and felt ill. They were too far gone to have their blood replenished to cleanse their systems of the holy water. They’d be dead within twenty minutes, in agony all the while.

  “Sean, pull up security footage of this room and see who tainted the blood,” she said.

  Sean nodded and left, almost bumping into Daniel, who had returned with doctors who bent over and examined the ailing vampires.

  “You need to dispose of everything in there,” Angelica said. “God knows what else might be poisoned. Damn it! That wouldn’t have happened if I could still go out in daylight! I could have caught who it was!”

  Danny placed his hand on her shoulder and said, “You couldn’t know that. Even if you could walk about in the day, even if we’d never left...it still would’ve happened the moment we declared our rule. You prevented this from happening sooner when you faked your death all that time ago.”

  She sighed, knowing he was right and hating it because ‘helpless’ was not a word she usually used to describe herself, and that was essentially what he was saying. This had been inevitable, and she was helpless to prevent it. Well, that might be true, but she was sure as Hell not going to let it continue. They had no idea who they were dealing with.

  “Is there anything I can do?” Daniel asked.

  “Yeah, watch the tapes with Sean. Two eyes are better than one,” Danny said. Angelica smiled a little. Danny didn’t often take the initiative in cases, so if Daniel could make him take charge a bit more, that would be great. He often forgot that they were equals, usually deferring to her for a plan or orders.