Second Skin

by Caitlin Kittredge

  But my nightmares were the worst they’d ever been. Laurel dead, Laurel alive, Wendigo tearing me apart, every murder victim I’d ever worked asking me why, why, why I didn’t save them. And I knew all the time that their deaths were on my hands.

  Finally, I dreamed that I smelled Dmitri’s distinctive mix of cloves and were and himself, spicy and heady like some open-air bazaar in another part of the world, and I knew he was gone, and that the scent of him was all that remained.

  When my eyes flicked open under the persistent sunlight, I saw I wasn’t dreaming, at least not wholly.

  “Hey, darlin’,” Dmitri said from the chair across the room. “You’ve looked better.”

  “Felt better,” I said.

  “Thought you were going to go kick down the Wendigo’s door.”

  “I got sidetracked,” I muttered, reaching for a pitcher of water left by the bed and not managing it.

  Dmitri got up and poured me a glass, then sat on the edge of the bed. “Sidetracked, you? By what?”

  “The gnawing dead,” I said, sinking back into the stiff pillows. I tried to growl but it came out more like a frustrated cough. I hurt in places I hadn’t imagined existed the night before, and the painkillers had lost the battle against my were physiology and worn off.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked Dmitri when he pushed my hair off my forehead.

  “That Bryson guy,” he said. “Called and told me that you had some serious trouble at the morgue and you were hurt.”

  “Did you come down to say I told you so?” I said. “If so, consider it said and let me suffer in peace, okay?”

  “I came to say I’m sorry,” Dmitri said. Of course, I couldn’t just be beat up and have bad breath from hospital food. I had to seem like the world’s bitchiest girlfriend on top of it.

  “Oh” was what I said out loud. “Well. Um. Thanks.”

  “I shouldn’t have pushed you,” Dmitri said simply. “I want to give this another try. I didn’t leave the Redbacks just to wander around this goddamn city, getting drunk by myself because I can’t stop thinking about you, because I’m afraid of what the fucking daemon bite might do. I’m not gonna be afraid to stand by you.”

  I poked him on the arm, to cover the twist my stomach gave at his words. “Are you sure you’re Dmitri? Switch bodies with a hopeless romantic lately?”

  He grabbed my hand and pressed the fingers to his lips, then pulled me close and kissed me. I squealed when he pulled against what felt like a needlepoint design stitched into my arm and shoulder. Dmitri winced. “Sorry!” He held up my forearm and examined the bloody swath of bandages and the many neat stitches that decorated me like a map of railroad tracks. “Hex me, Luna. What got you?”

  “I wish I knew, I really do,” I growled. “Because I would find them and shove their heads up their mutant asses.” I flopped back against the stiff stack of hospital pillows. “I got them, though. Even Lautrec. But I was . . .” I pressed my lips together. Responsible for an innocent woman’s death.

  Dmitri cocked his left eyebrow. “Thought Lautrec was dead.”

  “Yeah, so did I.”

  He fluffed my pillow to prop me up. “The doctor said you could go home when you were ready. Need a lift?”

  I bit my lip. I wanted Dmitri back. I was lonely, and life was hard and occasionally fraught with the walking dead. But how long before we got back on the merry-go-round of fighting over every gods-damn thing?

  Hell. I wasn’t famous for making good decisions and I wasn’t about to tarnish my reputation. “I’d love to go home,” I said. Dmitri pulled me close and kissed the top of my head.

  “No more fighting.”

  “Not for at least a good hour and a half,” I said. “I think that’s how long it will take for my stitches to start itching. After that, all bets are off. Ask Sunny about the time I sliced my finger open with a pedicure file.”

  I got up and found my clothes on the small table under the window. I had just started to slip out of my back-less hospital robe when the door banged open and Bryson appeared, in a seersucker jacket and white pants, clutching a bouquet of daisies like a nightmarish, unshaven candy striper.

  “Oh man!” he said when he saw me. “Sorry, Wilder! I’m averting my eyes!”

  “I’m naked here, David!” I yelled at him.

  “Yeah, I can see that.”

  “Get out,” Dmitri snarled, showing his fangs. Bryson yelped and ducked back into the hall.

  “You decent?” he said.

  “I am now,” I said, pulling on my mostly shredded T-shirt and zipping my jacket over it.

  Bryson came back in. “Sorry. I just wanted to come by and make sure you were still in mostly one piece.” He stuck out his hand. “Yuri, right? I’m Dave Bryson.”

  “Dmitri,” said Dmitri, not taking the proffered hand. “Luna’s told me about you.”

  Bryson paled slightly. “Uh, listen. That stuff . . . uh . . . what she said I may have done . . . I’m very, very sorry.”

  Dmitri’s eyes went to full black. “You better be. You caused her a lot of pain. I don’t like you.”

  “Oh gods,” I said, putting myself between the two. “Lay off the testosterone, okay? David doesn’t need any more body hair.” I took the daisies out of Bryson’s fist. “Thank you, Bryson. These were very thoughtful.”

  He gave me a weak smile. “Not the only reason I came down here.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “We found Carla. Morgan thinks I’m going to bring her in on my own, but fuck me if I walk into another den of werewolves solo.”

  “Bryson, you could get axed from the force if I go with you,” I said.

  He lifted one shoulder. “Better unemployed than dead to my way of thinking, Wilder.”

  Dmitri put his arm around my shoulder. “The only place Luna is going is home with me.”

  I ducked out from under Dmitri’s embrace and took his hands. “Sweetheart, I gotta go. This is my job.” I begged him, silently, not to put up the same old fight.

  Dmitri’s jaw tightened. “I’ll come with you. You’re in no condition to be running around in the field.”

  “No you won’t,” I said. I put my hand out and pressed it against his chest. What I was about to do hurt far worse than anything yet today, but Dmitri had brought it on himself. The daemon bite could get us both into trouble.

  “What do you mean, ‘No’?” Dmitri’s face twisted. Bryson watched us both like we were caged animals at a circus.

  “I mean . . .” I took a breath so my voice wouldn’t tremble. “I don’t want your help, Dmitri, and I don’t need your help so just leave me alone and let me do my job without pulling your stupid macho crap!”

  “Luna, stop it,” he said in a low voice.

  “Me?” I threw out my arms. “What am I doing, Dmitri? You’re the one with a monster inside, the one who scares me, and the one that I can’t have around on this case. You got that, or should I send you a text message?”

  “Damn,” Bryson muttered. “That’s cold.”

  “Oh, shut up,” I said. “Dmitri won’t accept that I can’t do this anymore. I can’t let him be beside me while the daemon is in him.” That part was true, and I blinked hard to dispel tears.

  Dmitri stood there, nonplussed, while I turned my back and jerked my head at Bryson to move along. I didn’t let myself look back at Dmitri. It was for his own good. If I looked back, he might see I didn’t mean it.

  In the hallway, Bryson let out a whistle. “Damn, Wilder. Your boyfriend is some piece of work. He got any priors?”

  “If you don’t want to live life with a straw to breathe through, Bryson, I suggest you keep your opinions to yourself.”

  “No kidding,” he muttered. “Carla’s living down by the water, some squatter’s place on the old piers.”

  “I know it,” I said. Were packs congregated in Waterfront. Too many people, too few police, easy to blend in with human junkies and criminals and fade right out from vi
ew.

  “Can’t wait to get this over with,” said Bryson. In the parking lot he threw a hand over his eyes and cursed. “It just keeps getting gods-damn hotter. It’s like I’m in my own little circle of hell.”

  “I can’t accept that,” I said, shucking my jacket. Torn shirt be damned. In hundred-degree heat, I could work the grunge look. “Because if this is your hell, that means you and I share a hell, and that’s something I’m just not ready to deal with.”

  That quieted Bryson down enough to drive us down the hill to the Waterfront. There was a sheet on Carla on the dash, a missing persons report from six years back. She was a heavyset teenager, lots of black eye-liner, hair spiked and purple. Disappeared from behind a club on Magnolia Boulevard. Survived by a mother, who had made up several iterations of a HAVE YOU SEEN ME? poster that were appended to the report.

  Whatever torments federal prison visited on Joshua, they would never be enough.

  Bryson started sweating again as we pulled up outside the Serpent Eye pack house. He made me get out of the car first. I left Carla on my seat, glaring out from her yearbook photo. I hoped she was tough, a survivor, but I wasn’t counting on it. Joshua liked them vulnerable.

  “David, I never thought I’d say this,” I said when Bryson pounded on the mental bulkhead, “but I think you should do the talking.”

  “What? Why?” Bryson demanded. “I can’t talk to these gods-damn people. They hate me!”

  “They’re gonna hate me more,” I said. “Trust me.”

  “Why, Wilder? Just tell me!” Bryson hissed.

  I jerked my collar down and exposed the four round marks on my shoulder. “This scar means that the were who bit me was a Serpent Eye. I took off. That’s insulting. They’ll probably try to beat me up.”

  Bryson blinked at me for a second. “Well, damn. Why didn’t you just say so? Don’t gotta do the show-and-tell.”

  The door rolled back and we were faced with a man who could have been a roadie for Whitesnake, or just really reluctant to wash his hair. “What?” he demanded.

  “Police,” said Bryson, flashing his shield. I offered up my silver badge, smiling and praying that he wouldn’t scent us. The tangy stench of Waterfront did a pretty good job of covering, but Serpent Eyes weren’t dumb, just mean.

  “Get a warrant and come back,” said the roadie, starting to shut the door.

  “Whoa whoa whoa, my friend,” said Bryson, shoving his white loafer into the gap. “We don’t need any search warrant to speak with a material witness.”

  “Huh?” said the roadie, scratching behind his ear. Bryson rolled his eyes.

  “Son, move your ass out of our way and go buy some conditioner. We’re here on business.”

  The roadie stepped aside when Bryson shoved him, and I slipped past. His nostrils flared when I brushed against him. “Hey . . .”

  “One word,” I told him, “and I will rip off your manly parts and turn them into a Wiener schnitzel.”

  He paled and backed away from us.

  The warehouse on the pier was rotted, many panels in the glass roof open to the sky, the walls like the rib cage of an ancient metal juggernaut. Rough-hewn boards creaked under our feet, and everything was damp and filmed with salt.

  The Serpent Eyes had set up tents and boxes on the main floor of the pier, plus a few shanties made from scrap metal. Electrical wires spat as droplets of water splashed into their transformers, crisscrossing the open space above our heads and giving the air a harsh, burnt taste. Smoke from camp stoves mingled with the pungent scent of seaweed and bay water.

  If this was what I had missed out on with Joshua, I can’t say I was shedding any tears.

  “We’re looking for Carla Runyon!” Bryson caterwauled, stopping at the center of the open space. I’d never thought his obnoxious bellow would be of any use, except as a repellent to rodents and small children, but I’ve been wrong before. “Carla!” Bryson yelled again. “We just want to talk to you!”

  “I’m Carla,” said a voice from among the tents and smoke. “Quit yelling, okay? Some of us are trying to sleep.”

  Carla was a lot older than her last picture, still weighted with poseur-goth makeup, cigarette wrinkles puckering the corners of her mouth. Her hair had grown out at the roots to mop-water blond. She was thinner now, too, and her shredded fishnet stockings and black velvet dress barely clung to her frame.

  “Could you come here please, miss?” Bryson said, beckoning.

  “No,” said Carla. She pulled a cigarette from her garter belt and lit it. “You can talk to me from right there.”

  I was starting to like Carla.

  “Miss, we have reason to believe your life may be in danger,” said Bryson.

  Carla snorted. “Buddy, you looked around? I’m in danger from sons of bitches like you every Hexed day of my life. You’re not telling me anything new.”

  “Look, lady, just get your ass over here!” Bryson yelled.

  “Hey, leave her alone,” said someone from the crowd.

  “Yeah,” another agreed.

  “Fuckin’ cops, always coming down here and hassling us . . .”

  “She ain’t just a cop,” said the roadie from the door. “She’s one of us. She’s a disrespectful fucking rogue.”

  Having thirty-five hostile sets of eyes suddenly fix-ate on you is a little bit like having your hand shoved against a hot grill. It’s uncomfortable as hell and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it except twitch.

  A few of the Serpent Eyes growled and showed their teeth in displays of dominance. I kept still, arms at my sides, and didn’t let any of the phase show on my face. If it had been just me, I might have tried to growl back, but I wasn’t going to present a threat with a plain human around.

  “She’s Insoli now,” said the roadie. “Somebody oughta teach her to respect territory.”

  “Aw, Christ,” Bryson muttered. I would have told him that once weres catch the scent of an outsider, the deities pretty much agree that you’re on your own, but before I could speak the second earthquake hit.

  It started in the soles of my feet, as before, but this time the noise and the thunder were all around me.

  The camp stoves tumbled over, spilling coals and fuel across the wood, and a tent caught fire with a whoosh. The Serpent Eyes screamed, running and falling, trampling over one another. Bryson grabbed on to me as the floor bucked under our feet. “Gods damn it! We gotta get out of here!”

  “Wait!” I shouted at him. Carla was still standing there. Her cigarette fell out of her slack lips, and a larger Serpent Eye slammed into her, sending her to the ground.

  I shoved my way through the throng of people milling around in panic, trying to get to her. “Carla! Stand up!”

  She had curled herself into a ball, making her body small, the way women who are used to taking a beating do it. A passing were caught me just under the ribs and all my air went out, stars spinning in front of my eyes. I dropped to one knee, and then howled as something small and jagged lanced my back.

  With a sound like a glacier breaking, the hundreds of glass panes in the roof of the pier began to splinter, the smaller shards raining downward like a shower of frozen droplets.

  “Shit.” I grabbed Carla by the back of her dress and rolled us both under the outcropping of one of the metal shanties. “Bryson, get under cover!”

  He pressed himself back against one wall, cursing and covering his eyes. The screams of the Serpent Eyes were louder than anything.

  “Get off me!” Carla yelled. “Let me go!” She was almost as stubborn as I was. I could understand why Joshua had picked her out.

  Pieces of the shanty fell around our ears, and with a great moan, like a legendary beast surfacing from the deep, the walls of the pier expanded and then bowed inward, the metal supports bending like cheap coat hangers.

  The quake stopped, and there was the kind of silence that only people who survive bombs and tornadoes and trauma ever get to hear. A dead space, so quiet t
hat even breathing seemed impossible.

  “Man! Look at this shit! This was a brand-new jacket!” Bryson yelled, brushing glass chips off his shoulders and out of his hair. “Jesus line-dancing Christ, what the Hex is going on in this city?”

  Sound came back to me, sobbing and screams from trapped weres, and the crash of debris dropping into the bay. I rolled Carla over and checked her pulse. Strong and fast, like an animal’s heart under my fingers. Thank the bright lady.

  “Wilder!” Bryson shouted at me. “We gotta get moving! This whole place could go under!”

  Human-size chunks of the floor had been ripped off their iron nails by the quake, but I got Carla up and we half stumbled through the glass and debris to Bryson, who took her other arm.

  The floor groaned and tilted under our feet, one end of the pier beginning to collapse now that the walls and pilings could no longer sustain its weight.

  “Sometime this year, Wilder,” Bryson panted as we dragged Carla free. The Serpent Eye’s pack house gave one final outcry and then settled at a distinctly downhill angle, seawater boiling around the end where the pilings had collapsed.

  “I can’t swim,” Bryson told me. We made it back to the doors among the crush of Serpent Eyes, none of whom stopped to help us. The door was half crushed, stuck fast in its frame. I put my shoulder against the collapsed bulkhead and heaved with all of my were strength. The hinges groaned and the bolts rotated out of their holes, far too slowly.

  “Come on, Luna!” Bryson shouted. “Harder!”

  “You think it’s so easy . . . ,” I gasped. “Get your . . . fat ass . . . up here . . . then.” I hit the bulkhead again, and with a shriek both from the metal and my injured shoulder the door gave way, crashing outward to let in dusty sunlight.

  Outside, it was how I imagine the Hex Riots must have smelled and sounded. Dust and smoke filled the air, making it so thick and stale I could barely see up the hill to Highland Park. The skyscrapers down the waterfront rose out of the turmoil like fingers with all their flesh stripped, and sirens and car alarms droned, mingling to make one constant whine of chaos.

  Bryson pulled out his cell phone, leaving me to lay Carla out on the pavement and check her vitals. “This is David Bryson at Pier Twenty-nine. I need fire and rescue, stat. I know the city’s gone crazy but we got civilian casualties down here.” He listened for a minute, his mouth going tight. “Listen, lady, I’m a Nocturne City detective, so quit fuckin’ arguing with me and get some goddamn ambulances down to the piers!” He slapped the phone shut and paced in a circle. “You believe this, Wilder? It’s like the end of the world.”