Second Skin

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “I’m tired, is what I am. Is there a reason you chose me out of all the people in the gods-damn city to harass, Bryson?”

  He clenched his fist, unclenched it, eyes roaming anywhere but my face. Finally he gritted, “I already told you. I need your help.”

  “David, I told you . . . waxing is the only way to get all the hair off your back.”

  “Gods above and daemons below . . . ,” he started.

  I cut him off with a gesture and dug my car keys out of my gym bag. “The answer is no, David. Whatever it is, no.”

  “It’s a murder case,” he said. “Wilder, you gotta give me an assist here . . . I am in over my goddamn head.”

  Strange as it was to hear Bryson on the verge of begging for something, especially from me, I held firm. “I don’t investigate murders anymore. Now can I go home?”

  My cell phone buzzed against my hip. The caller ID blinked DMITRI. “Hold on,” I instructed Bryson, who stood obstinately in front of my car with a hangdog look.

  “This bed is awfully big without you in it.” Dmitri’s voice sounds like dark red wine spilled on pale skin, Eastern Europe blended up with clove smoke.

  “Hi, honey,” I said flatly. Bryson gave me the eye, like I’d just started speaking in Esperanto.

  “Do you know what I wanna do to you right now? I’d start right between your thighs . . .”

  “Sure, no problem. Gotta go.” I slapped the phone shut and jerked open my door. “The answer is still no, Bryson.” I turned the Fairlane’s engine over with a roar. “Either get out of my way or be my speed bump.”

  “It’s weres!” Bryson yelled at me. “Dead weres! Four of them so far!”

  I hit the gas and squealed out of the motor pool lot before he could finish, leaving him in a trail of exhaust.

  At home, I unlocked the front door of the cottage softly. The sky was still light at the very edges, over the water, pink and frayed like glimpsing silk through a torn skirt. “Dmitri, you awake?” I called. It was a courtesy. Dmitri could scent me as soon as I stepped out of the car in the little circular driveway that pushed up against my broken-down rental cottage on the edge of the dune.

  “Up here.” He didn’t sound husky and pleasant anymore. I kicked off my flip-flops and climbed up the stairs to the bedroom rather more slowly than a woman coming home to her sexier-than-anything were boyfriend who had given up his pack and his entire life to warm her bed should climb.

  “Hey,” I said, sticking my head around the door. “Thanks for waiting up for me.”

  The lights were off but I didn’t have a problem seeing Dmitri wrapped in nothing at all atop my sheets. It was stuffy in the room, stale and unpleasant, and I sneezed.

  “If you’re sick, do me a favor and don’t spread it around.”

  “Oh gee. Hex you, too.” I sat down on the edge of the bed and slipped out of my sweats, rolling over to lie next to Dmitri. He shoved me away. “Get off. It’s too hot.”

  “Oh gods,” I hissed at him. “Look, I’m sorry. I was tied up when you called and I came straight home to apologize. I didn’t realize that tonight was the night we both acted like twelve-year-olds.”

  There was silence for a long time, and I listened to Dmitri breathe and smelled his sweat mixed in with beer and a little bit of soap. “I’m sorry, too,” he said finally. “Just . . . I heard someone else’s voice, and I assumed . . .”

  “Sweetie.” I took his hand in the dark. “My captain is a man. I work with four guys. Hell, even my manicurist has a penis.”

  He stiffened again. “Was that your manicurist I heard on the call?”

  “No,” I said, moving my free hand over his stomach, fingers scrubbing in small circles. I stopped, thinking about the desperate way Bryson had followed me.

  “Who was it, Luna?” Dmitri sucked in his breath.

  “It doesn’t matter. It was nobody I want to keep thinking about.”

  He jerked away from me and sat up with a snarl. “Tell me who was fucking there with you! I can smell him all over your skin!”

  I sat up too, rod-straight, and we quivered silently with our backs turned to each other. “It was David Bryson,” I said. “He accosted me in the locker room after I was washing the blood spatter from a suicide jumper off me, and he followed me out to my car and I have had a really shitty gods-damn night, by the way, so thanks for asking and you have sweet dreams.”

  I snatched my pillow and the blanket from the bed and started to storm out, but noticed just before I reached the door that my pillowcase was decorated with blood droplets.

  Those hadn’t been there when I’d left for work. “Dmitri?” I said.

  He rolled over with a snarl. “Oh no,” I exclaimed, grabbing him by the shoulder and rolling him back toward me. “What on earth . . .”

  His face was puffy at the jaw and his left eye blackened. The orbital bone was scraped. The cuts had already healed over, but the old blood remained. I reached over Dmitri and turned on the bedside lamp, bumping his side as I did so. He hissed in pain when I brushed his ribs.

  “Okay,” I said, as I surveyed the cut lip, the array of bruises on his torso and fresh scars on his knuckles. “Don’t tell me. You went down to the slaughterhouse and beat up some meat, and the meat won.”

  “Funny,” he muttered. “Real funny.”

  Guilt sucker-punched me. “I’m sorry. I didn’t see . . . what happened? I’m sorry we fought.” My words tumbled like gangly things, not sure of their legs. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled again.

  “No big deal,” Dmitri said, throwing a hand over his eyes. “Just a misunderstanding.”

  I got off the bed and walked around to his side, and stood over him with my hands on my hips, glaring, until he rolled his eyes. “Bleeding all over the house?” I said. “That pretty much defines ‘Big Deal.’ Who did this to you?”

  Dmitri sighed. “I walked down a street I thought was safe, and it wasn’t. Territory had shifted. I got jumped.”

  “By what, a Transformer?” I said. The bruising was bad. Dmitri was tough, and big, and had daemon-powered blood running in him, a bite that turned him from were to something else whenever he got too angry or too . . . anything. The bite made him black out and a host of other unpleasantries, but it also made him damn near invulnerable. This shouldn’t have happened.

  “Six or seven weres from some pack running things on Cannery Street now,” he said. “They came up on me fast, had baseball bats, mostly. And one of those police batons. Anyway. I knew you’d freak out so I thought we could discuss it after I healed.”

  “This shouldn’t have happened,” I said, out loud. “You weren’t doing anything wrong. You don’t even have pack status anymore. What would they gain from beating you?” I bit my lip. “How did they beat you?”

  I was babbling like a cop, trying to work through the permutations and find the conclusion, close the case. Dmitri showed his teeth. “I disrespected them.” His fists worked. “They were within their rights, fucked up as it is. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I wouldn’t understand?” I demanded, my old anger coming back.

  “You never had to deal with pack law,” said Dmitri. “You get off easy whenever you run into territorial borders because you’re so damn willful. I just hope you never hit on a pack with a better hand at dominating other weres than you.”

  “Gee, thanks for the thought,” I snapped. Silence again for a minute while we both tried to stay calm. Finally I tamped down my frustration and got myself under control. I was getting good at that lately. “Do you need an ice pack?”

  “No.”

  “I still don’t understand why you got into a fight in the first place,” I said. “Can’t you just back off, accept that they’re dominant?” I knew that you could, from experience. That sometimes you had no choice.

  “I could,” Dmitri said, his eyes swimming with black. “But I didn’t.”

  Oh, Hex it. My skin was full of thorn-pricks in that moment, as the air around me grew cold.
“Dmitri. What did you do to those weres?”

  His eyes were full black now, the daemon blood coming even as we sat there, calm. “Nothing they didn’t deserve.”

  My own were instincts snarled Get away but Dmitri lunged across the bed and grabbed me before I could move. He was so much faster with the daemon bite . . .

  One hand held the side of my face. The other traced down my body, rough palm on my bare skin. Over my hips, past the V of my thighs. My body responded to him, but my brain was busy thinking Oh shit as I stared into his black eyes.

  “Dmitri,” I said softly. “Tell me what you did.”

  His hand stopped moving, just shy of its goal. “I didn’t want to,” he said, in a voice so small and wounded I wasn’t even sure it was his. “I was gonna walk away but one of them said something, about my mate . . . about you. They knew who I was, who you were, and I . . .”

  I shut my eyes, all of the fear and tension running out, leaving me rubbery.

  “I have no standing in the Redbacks,” said Dmitri. “If they got through me to you, I could do nothing. So when I felt it, the darkness coming on . . . I let it take me.”

  He’d let go of me, and I caught him this time, wrapped my arms around him. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”

  “You shouldn’t be around me now,” Dmitri said roughly. He put us at arm’s length. “I just . . . I need to just forget.”

  “No,” I said. “You need to not be alone. And this city needs not to have were packs running loose. Gods-damn animals.”

  “Luna, the packs . . . it’s just the way things are.” Dmitri sighed. “Times change. The packs have been jumpier than ever since that O’Halloran thing, and your department choking out the drugs and brothels downtown hasn’t helped, either. You want to do something, tell Vice to ease off.” He found a pair of shorts and put them on, and crawled under the sheet. “Please. Just go and let me heal.”

  “Don’t do this,” I gritted. “After what you just told me . . . please don’t shut down on me.”

  Dmitri didn’t answer, just gave a long shuddering sigh as his body tried to work through the daemon inside it and the injuries without.

  After another long quiet minute, I went downstairs before I said something bitchy and insensitive.

  On the sofa, I lay in high dudgeon for a long time, making myself be as still as possible except for breathing until the urge to tear and hurt had died down to a level where I wouldn’t rip the neck out of the first person to cross my path.

  The were had a lot of trouble staying at bay in me sometimes, but I had a lot of experience keeping it in.

  One thing was clear as the bruises and the blood on Dmitri’s body—whatever was in him was getting stronger, and the man I’d met was slipping away. Something cold and black as Dmitri’s eyes uncoiled in my gut at the thought, the whisper that one day I’d wake up next to a stranger, who killed without a thought and didn’t know the difference between me and prey.

  Also clear was the fact that I wasn’t going anywhere, even though the thought of seeing Dmitri change made me sick.

  “Shouldn’t this be easier by now?” I asked the darkness. Dmitri had tossed away his future with the Redbacks to be here with me, when his pack elders had forbidden us from being together. He’d chosen me. That should be enough. Should be, but that awful black thing was still there, laughing at me.

  The dark didn’t have any nugget of wisdom for me. It was more of a constant companion than an adviser, anyway.

  The little digital clock on the wall of the kitchen told me it was nearly morning. I picked up the phone and dialed anyway. Dmitri would hear me upstairs if I spoke normally, and it spoke to the depth of my discomfort that I didn’t particularly care.

  “Mmhello?” Bryson muttered into the receiver. “Whossat?”

  “David, it’s Luna.”

  “Seven hells, Wilder, it’s goddamn four AM”

  “Five AM,” I said. “You need to set your clock ahead.”

  “You call me up to be Mr. Science or is there a good reason for waking me out of a dead sleep?”

  I worried the antenna of the cordless set and thought very, very hard about what I was going to say. Bryson was the person I probably came closest to hating during my time at the Twenty-fourth. He was rude, obnoxious, and mentally still living in a frat house somewhere. Plus he was a lousy cop, and his need for “help” might mean he couldn’t figure out how to organize his case reports in the little colored folders.

  “Wilder! Yo! Stop curling your hair and talk to me, babe!”

  “Gods give me strength,” I muttered. “Look, David, I . . . I’ve reconsidered.”

  His breath wuffed out on the other end of the line. “You mean it?” he said softly. “Hex it, Wilder, you just saved my ass.”

  “Hey,” I said. “I’m just agreeing to take a look at the case file. Nothing else. Got that?”

  “Whatever. I’ll meet you at Sam’s Donut Bungalow at seven.”

  “Bryson, seven is early.”

  “Well, sweetie-pie, that’s when I come on duty so that’s when we’re gonna meet up. Slap on some cold cream and get to work on your beauty sleep.”

  “Did anyone ever tell you you’re a real asshole, Bryson?”

  “My ex-wife, two girlfriends, my mother, and my aunt Louise. She was never really right in the head, though.”

  “Good night,” I said, hoping he could feel me rolling my eyes through the phone lines, and hung up.

  I growled in my throat at the drive downtown through rush-hour traffic, which did absolutely nothing to improve my mood. I contemplated putting the revolving light on my dash, but there was nowhere to go on the Siren Bay Bridge. The BMW in front of me lurched ahead and then laid on its horn.

  My head started to pound, the light off Siren Bay dazzling my eyes. I flicked on the Fairlane’s scratchy radio and put my forehead on the steering wheel. The last time I’d been on the bridge was months ago, and that time I’d taken the direct route down by jumping two hundred feet to the bay. It figured that the first time I came back I got trapped on the damn thing.

  Over Pearl Jam wondering where oh where could their baby be? I almost didn’t hear the rumble underneath my feet, down deep in the bones of the bridge. It wasn’t the sound of rocks rubbing together that you hear in films, more of a great hum, and then a groan as the tarmac under the Fairlane started to ripple.

  The most frightening thing was that it wasn’t magick. Magick pinpricks my skin and makes my head ache and my stomach flip over. There was none of that here. Something in the earth was tossing and turning and taking me with it.

  Bridge cables started to twang all around us and slowly the honking horns and engine noise cut out as the bridge began, ever so slightly, to sway.

  “Hex me,” I hissed. The Fairlane sloughed sideways into the minivan stalled in the next lane. A rivet came loose from a cable with a spang that could take teeth out of someone’s head and hit my windshield, penetrating halfway and leaving a galaxy of spider cracks.

  “Get out! Run for it!” the woman in the van screeched at me, and I tended to agree with her. The span was bouncing now, car alarms howling and people screaming.

  The bridge gave out a great, final moan and then a rift appeared in the tarmac in front of the Fairlane, just a foot or so, jogging downward and away from me.

  Silence reigned, and the only whisper of sound was the bay wildly washing back and forth below the span. The traffic in front of me jerked into motion, everyone who could drive forward moving at the same time. I pressed my foot down hard, the Fairlane jolting over the break in the asphalt.

  I pulled out my cell, struggled for a signal, and then managed to find a circuit and dial Bryson. “David, it’s Luna. Hate to say it, but I’m gonna be a little bit late.”

  It took me almost an hour to get off the bridge, and as I crawled through downtown Nocturne City smoke and brick dust turned my nostrils into the Sahara. I got around police and emergency cordons with my shie
ld and made it to Highland Park, which appeared relatively unscathed, a mere hour and a half late.

  Sam’s Donut Bungalow is exactly what it sounds like: a Craftsman bungalow painted hot pink and converted into a donut shop, yellow umbrellas flapping gaily in the wind kicked up by the earthquake. One of the windows had cracked across the giant cruller painted on the glass, but otherwise the building was untouched.

  I found Bryson lounging in a booth at the back wall, mirrored aviator shades tilted down over his eyes. He’d worn the eggplant suit today.

  “Out late partying with Erik Estrada?”

  He tilted the glasses down and glared at me. “About time you got your cute ass in here.”

  “Gee, sorry for inconveniencing you, Bryson. In case you were too busy putting gel in your hair, let me remind you of the giant Hexed earthquake that happened while I was on the bridge.”

  Flipping a hand, he signaled a waitress in pink shorts and a white top embroidered with the name KANDEE for coffee. “Bring me a bear claw, doll. And for the little lady . . . ?” Bryson tilted an eyebrow at me in a pose I assumed was meant to be dashing.

  “A broken nose for you if you keep calling me ‘little lady.’ Could I get two coconut-cream-filled with no sprinkles, a maple bar, and an éclair with chocolate filling and chocolate frosting?”

  The waitress and Bryson both stared at me for a few seconds too long. “What?” I spread my hands after she walked away. “Were metabolism. If I don’t eat I’ll be hungry again in an hour.”

  “You’re a freak, Wilder,” Bryson said mildly. He stirred three packets of sugar into his coffee took a sip, winced. “Hate this stuff. Got an ulcer now, of all things. This goddamn case is twisting me up so badly I can’t close my eyes without seeing the crime scene photos.”

  Fortunately Bryson sounded angry, not upset, so I was spared from having to comfort someone who’d once routinely tried to slap me on the ass.

  “Why exactly am I the only person who can help you with this, David?”

  The waitress put down our food and I polished off the cream-filled donuts while Bryson rooted in his scuffed case for a file folder, dog-eared on all the edges, the tab filled out in his crooked grade school printing.