Second Skin

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “Sure,” I said, disentangling myself. “I gotta go, Sunny.”

  In the car, I turned off Bryson’s classic rock. “Okay,” I said. “Laurel Hicks had a reason to be afraid of big nasty evil. She may not have seen what killed Bertrand, but she was damn sure scared of it.”

  “This case was supposed to get simpler, not weirder,” Bryson muttered.

  I leaned my head on the passenger’s window. The sun glared down at me and I put a hand over my eyes. “I think that we have to accept that fact that Lautrec’s killer may not have been a were.”

  Bryson hit the steering wheel. “Hex me. What, then? The Invisible Man snuck up and put a round in his head?”

  “It could have been a blood witch,” I said, thinking of some of the things I’d seen Alistair Duncan do. “Or a familiar, or a daemon, or even just a very, very skilled plain human.” I rubbed my forehead. “What matters is that Laurel believed she was being stalked by something, which means she knows more than she told you.”

  “You believe she was?” Bryson said.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t believe in nameless evil. There’s enough of it that has a face. We’ll find the perp.”

  Bryson swore again, but before he could get up a good head of steam his cell phone shrilled. He jabbed the SPEAKER button. “Yeah?”

  “Detective Bryson?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Laurel Hicks, Detective.” Her voice was cloudy with tears and hysteria.

  “Ah,” said Bryson, rolling his eyes at me. “What can I do for you, Miss Hicks?”

  “I want you to give back what you took,” she whispered. “Give it back. It’s mine!”

  I shook my head at Bryson, mouthing no.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Miss Hicks,” said Bryson. “We haven’t taken anything from you. You feeling okay?”

  “It’s mine!” Laurel Hicks shrieked. “Now I don’t have anything . . . to keep me safe . . .”

  Bryson stabbed the END button on the phone and cut Laurel off mid-sob. “Crazy broad.”

  I didn’t say anything to the contrary as he peeled out of Sunny’s driveway.

  “You owe me,” Bryson stated after we were back on the highway to the city.

  “For what? Would you bitch if I took a rabbit’s foot off some guy’s key chain?”

  “If that guy was batcrap crazy and he called me about it, yeah!”

  “You asked for my help, David,” I reminded him. “Drop me at home.”

  He had to take the long way along surface roads since the Siren Bay Bridge remained closed from earthquake damage, but I still got a pang when Bryson screeched to a stop in front of my cottage. “My lady. Your palace awaits.”

  “You’re welcome, by the way,” I said as I got out of the car. “Feel free to send a fruit basket for all the help I gave you.”

  “Hey!” Bryson protested. “What about those damn weres? I’m no closer to solving this!”

  “No,” I said, “but you’re being a jerk and pissing me off. Call me if you dig anything up.”

  “Wilder . . .” Bryson started to say something and then snorted, rolling his eyes. “Forget it. I can break this thing without you and your freaky damn magickal sidekicks.”

  I smiled indulgently. “Sure, David. You let me know when you get yourself stuck in the tar pits again.”

  He gunned the engine and roared away, looking as mightily irritated as a guy wearing a forest-green suit and driving a dirty Ford Taurus can look. I flipped a hand after him, and then walked down to the beach rather than toward the house. Handy as Bryson was for taking out my frustration, it didn’t change what was waiting for me at home. I didn’t want to be a Redback, and that should predicate a conversation that started Hey, Dmitri, sweetie, I don’t want to be a Redback.

  But if I said it, he might leave, and a surly Dmitri at home was better than the months and months when he’d been away from me, when I’d drifted on the currents, weightless and depressed.

  “Fuck,” I groaned, putting my head on my knees. Used to be, the guy cheated on me, and I kicked him out, or I threw a vase at his head and he kicked me out. When had it gotten so goddamn complicated?

  It had gotten dark and I went in, and felt like an idiot when I realized Dmitri wasn’t even there for me to avoid him.

  Sure, a part of me would have liked to find wine and candles and a contrite apology in the form of a few hours of athletic sex, but an empty house was a relief. I showered and decided to take a nap, curled up in my big queen bed alone, like I’d been doing for quite some time before Dmitri came along.

  Now I stretched out my arms and legs to cover the spot where he usually lay, but it was still a long time before I fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 7

  I woke from a dream about being chased through a 7-Eleven by cowboy-suited versions of Bryson, Dmitri, and Ricardo Montalban—go figure—to a small, insistent chirping.

  My pager vibrated on the nightstand, ready to throw itself off the edge. I grabbed it up and saw the code for an urgent scramble of Tac-3 at the plaza. “Crap,” I said, fumbling for my shoes and some real clothing. The clock on my nightstand read 11:30 PM. Another half an hour and Tac-3 would have been off their twenty-four-hour on-call rotation and I could have slept the night away in peace. But that would be lucky, and lately I was the black cat and broken mirror of luck.

  Dmitri still hadn’t come home.

  Was he lying in some alley, beaten beyond recognition by a pack like the Loup? Or was he avoiding me like I’d been avoiding him?

  The second option seemed way more likely, considering how our last conversation had gone. I got dressed and headed downtown.

  The streets of Nocturne weren’t deserted at night, not by any stretch. Things crept away from my headlights on two or four legs, and plain humans stumbled drunkenly down Devere Street near Nocturne University. It was Saturday night, it was summer, they were in high spirits. Beer and pheromones drifted past my nose.

  A clutch of drunks lurched in front of the Fairlane and I hit the brakes, depressing the horn. They glared at me with bleary eyes and moved out of the way as I turned into the plaza. The lot was deserted except for Fitzpatrick’s SUV with the #1 DAD bumper sticker, Batista’s sporty silver bullet, a plain van from the cleaning company, and Eckstrom’s Japanese bike. Allen was late, as usual.

  “You oughta watch where yer goin’, lady!” one of the drunks shouted at me from the entrance to the lot.

  “Hex off!” I shouted back. “Keep your drunk ass out of traffic and it won’t be a problem!”

  He started toward me, his two friends attempting to hold him back. He was small and stocky, a ponytail and a plaid cowboy shirt with silver buttons that shone under streetlights undoubtedly designed to make him look like a badass loner, but he didn’t scare me.

  “You want to punch a police officer outside her work?” I asked him, squaring my shoulders. “Be my gods-damn guest.”

  He lunged again and his friends lost their grip. I shifted my weight into a stance and turned my body to present the smallest target. Getting punched in the gut is no fun for anyone, especially when I get up and hit them back. I didn’t need an excessive-force complaint, which with the typical were strength is almost a given.

  Just before he came in swinging range, I caught a whiff of his scent. He smelled like cigarettes and dust and burnt brush on a dry wind.

  He didn’t smell like booze.

  “Shit,” I said out loud.

  Peripherally, I heard the door of the cleaner’s van roll back and I whipped around to see two more men with the same dark hair and eyes and leather-colored skin egress the vehicle and come for me.

  I went for my gun in its waist rig, but the drunk grabbed my wrist and twisted it behind me.

  “Hold still!” he hissed. “Don’t fight with us, bitch.”

  Kicking out and back, aiming for his knee, I connected instead with Ponytail’s crotch. He was a lot shorter than me, and he went down to one knee,
sweat popping along his jaw and hairline, nostrils flared out. But he didn’t fall, and he didn’t scream. Tough little bastard.

  One of the false cleaning crew wrapped his arms around my torso, crushing my rib cage and lifting me off the ground as I thrashed and screamed. Fitzy and Eckstrom and Javier had to hear me, inside their bunker of stone. Someone had to notice a lone woman accosted by five men.

  “Fuck off!” I shrieked, struggles degenerating into panicked twitching as I lost air. My attacker didn’t seem overly perturbed. He wasn’t built but he was very, very strong.

  Stronger than me. Maybe even stronger than Dmitri. And that, boys and girls, is Bad News for Our Heroine.

  “Let . . . go!”

  “Shhh!” my attacker said. “Mauthka! She’s fucking strong! Get the injection ready!”

  The other cleaner grabbed a black nylon kit bag, like you’d carry deodorant and nail files and toothpaste in, and pulled out a disposable syringe. He primed it like battle medics in old movies do and grabbed me by the hair, jerking my neck to one side. I felt the bird’s-wing beat of my carotid against my taut skin.

  I caught the eye of the man with the needle. “Please don’t.”

  He looked back at me with no flicker of remorse or hesitation. “It’s the way things are, Officer Wilder,” he said in a pleasantly soft voice that, in another time and place, I would have been glad to have at my hospital bedside.

  The needle pricked as it went in and I saw gold halos in front of my eyes. I felt my limbs deaden, and my struggles stopped. My heart beat in a slow-motion thub-thub.

  I wondered how the men had known my name. I wondered why they had chosen me to take. I wondered if I’d be lucky enough to die quickly.

  The cotton haze of unconsciousness slipped over me before I could think of any answers to my questions.

  Sunlight, a bar across my eyelids that burned them to dazzling whorls, woke me.

  “Ungh,” I mumbled. My jaw and all my joints were stiff as if they’d been tarred, and my tongue was glued to the roof of my mouth.

  “Hey, hey,” said a voice. “She’s awake.”

  “Mauthka, that was fast,” said another. “Doc, how much did you give her?”

  “Enough,” he said. “She won’t be doing cartwheels for another couple of hours.”

  “We’re here,” said a third participant and my rolling, creaking world gently rippled to a stop.

  Smell is usually the first thing to come back after I’ve been drugged, and I got whiffs of gasoline, frying oil from fast food, old carpet. Iron and sweat.

  The sun was still in my eyes when the door of the van rolled back and bathed my whole body in light. Sunrise. I’d been out for a few hours, but nothing too serious. Now it would be on with the mutilation and the sewing of skinsuits, I guessed. Testing how well my legs and feet reacted, I determined I couldn’t run just yet.

  “Get her out,” said a fourth. Ponytail’s harsh voice from before everything had gone totally FUBAR. I attempted to snarl, snapping my teeth in the direction of the sound.

  “Watch it!” Ponytail snapped. “Get rid of her, man. You don’t want to be around when she wakes all the way up . . . trust me.”

  Someone shoved what felt like a steel-toed boot into my side, which my brain noted dimly and then I hit ground, soft and foliage-covered, and rolled down an incline, the flashes of green and orange from the trees and the sky painting themselves into an ugly smear across my vision.

  I came to a stop against what I assumed was one of the huge evergreens converging around me to give shade. Every part of me hurt, in that detached, feverish way that only happens when you are well and truly flying.

  Also, I was naked.

  “Hex this,” I whispered, through my sandy lips. I was trying to yell, but all that came out was a wheeze.

  Inch by inch, I pushed feeling and motion back into my joints. I’d gotten the crap beat out of me by a were before—drugs had nothing on Joshua Mackelroy’s fists and feet. I was better than this. Stronger. Even if my clothes had disappeared.

  Get up, Wilder. Get your naked ass moving.

  I managed to lean up against the tree and curl into a ball. The sun would be all the way up soon and I just had to find some sort of temporary clothing and then get to a road. My abductors had driven in. There would be a way out.

  This theory calmed me until I realized it was getting darker, not brighter. I squinted through the tops of the evergreens, then levered myself up and, scraping my hips and butt on the bark, managed to look around. Shadows were long through the tree limbs and dozens of small skittering sounds started up as rabbits and squirrels and gods-knew-what-else came out to feed.

  “Crap,” I hissed. “Crap, crap, crap.”

  I was outside, with no clothes and no light, in the gathering darkness. In a few hours it would be dark, and I had no idea where I was.

  And a few hours after that, the full moon would rise.

  After I cried, and screamed, and yelled for help with no answers, I started to walk. Back up the hill I found tire tracks pressed into the soft needle covering of the forest floor. “Gotcha, you fuckers,” I muttered. I followed the tracks, wincing at the stabs on the soles of my bare feet and the branches and needles lashing everything else, but otherwise feeling pretty good until I fetched up on the bank of a rocky, rushing stream. The tire tracks disappeared on the other side.

  “Gods-damn it!” I shouted to the forest at large. A flock of small birds took flight at my yelling.

  I’m a suburban girl and a city woman. I never liked camping and all that back-to-nature shit. Weres feeling some connection to the natural world never held sway with me. I like pavement. I like the smell of mist from Siren Bay mingled with steam from the utility tunnels below Nocturne City’s streets. I liked Laundromats, all-night diners, movie theaters, and indoor plumbing.

  Clothes and shoes and hair care products, too.

  “GI Jane, you are not,” I muttered, trying to follow the stream, planting my sore feet in soft moss along the bank without falling into the shallow water. The bastards who attacked me must have driven down the riverbed. Therefore, if I followed it I would find them and subsequently kick their asses hard enough to cause their ancestors discomfort.

  Just as long as I did it before moonrise. If I found them afterward, there would be precious little left over for anyone to prosecute.

  It was starting to get really dark now, blue-velvet light my only guide between the trees and rocks that hugged close to the bank. This forest was primeval, away from any sort of influence, and it was closer and darker and bigger than I had any conception of.

  I decided that, should I come through this with my life and dignity intact, I was never leaving the Nocturne City limits again.

  The stream wound and dipped through the low places, and I started to hear rushing ahead, the low roar of constant motion after I’d been walking long enough to cause my thighs and calves to glow with pain. “Oh, thank the bright lady,” I muttered. I’d lost track of time, but it was full dark, and a silver paleness was starting to creep across the sky.

  A highway wasn’t ideal, but I’d trade some trucker seeing me naked for a lift back to the city before I phased here, in the open. I had to be close to the mountains, at least two hours from Nocturne. It would be a close call.

  The sound grew louder, and then abruptly the land dropped away, and I groaned. A waterfall tipped off the rocky cliff and down to the pool below, creating the bubbling hush that I’d mistaken for traffic.

  Sometimes, having were senses really sucks.

  I went to my knees on the edge of the cliff and felt the first prickle of honest-to-gods panic crawl its insidious little path up my spine. I let out a snarl, more to reassure myself than anything. Panic kills, in the line of duty or anywhere else. I wasn’t going to be one of those documentaries about girls who went into the woods, Little Red Riding Hoods who only turned up when hikers unearthed their skeletons years down the line.

  The clouds peel
ed back to send a shaft of moonlight down on the little crevasse where the waterfall ended and I hissed, scuttling under an evergreen’s outstretched branches. If it touched me, I was Hexed to the seven hells.

  And then, soundlessly, the moonlight showed me something else. It appeared in the tree line at the edge of the pool, a flicker in the corner of the eye. No more substantial than smoke, it whisked from trunk to trunk and hesitated, all the trailing parts of it flowing back into a cohesive whole at the edge of the water.

  Great. I was lost in the woods and it had only taken a few hours for the hallucinations to set in.

  I shivered as the temperature dropped. Fog licked around my ankles and spilled out from the stream, thickening fast enough that it couldn’t be anything natural.

  My heart started to thump faster against my ribs, the thudding of blood all that came to my ears. The night noises had stopped.

  I pressed myself against the tree trunk, knowing that I stood a better chance of hiding than making a break for it without being able to see anything in the thick, moisture-laden mist that had grown up through the trees. I could be cool and calm. I could be sensible.

  Behind me and far off, a branch cracked, then, after a long pause, another. Closer. The mist swirled, leaving streamers of moisture along my cheeks and shoulders and breasts, and my own breath puffed out against the cold.

  Then my ears pricked to a body breathing in concert with my own. Every hair on my body stood on end, and it had nothing to do with the temperature.

  “Hex you,” I whispered. I would never, ever show whoever was out there how helpless and bare I felt at that moment.

  Closer still now, a low meaty chuckle, born from a throat that wasn’t human, responded. The laughter deepened and ran together and ended as a low, spine-twisting snarl.

  Fuck sensible. I gathered my legs under me, sprang to my feet, and ran like beasts from all seven hells were chasing me.

  Trees loomed and sped past through the fog and the weak moonlight, and more than once I felt a rock or a broken branch slice at my feet and legs, but I kept running.