Second Skin

by Caitlin Kittredge

“Told you so, Wilder,” he said. He gathered up the map and the photos, separating out the ones of Carla. “Say one thing for this fruitcake, he knew his job. This is good, detailed surveillance. He’d been on to Carla for months. All of them, a four-month lead on the murder at least.”

  I half turned my head. “Really?” The disturbed stirring of illogical evidence turned to something colder and more pressing, like being suspended by a cable over a dark space with skittering, hungry sounds at the bottom. That feeling always engulfed me when there was more to a case than I realized.

  “Yeah,” said Bryson. “The weres never made him, either. So much for your sniffers, eh?”

  “There’s no sense in that,” I said. “If Jason was hunting prey, he wouldn’t stalk them for four months. Wendigo are hungry, always, and they’re good predators.” Probably better than weres and definitely better than me, but I didn’t articulate that part. “There’s no reason to do it like this.”

  “Let’s finish this search,” said Bryson. “I can feel my clothes starting to grow fungus.”

  “Polyester doesn’t mildew,” I said halfheartedly. Bryson went over to the tiny kitchen and began rattling cabinets, and I examined the rest of Jason’s space with a perfunctory eye. The wall over the bed was sunken just a bit, but what really caught my eye was the fact that the plaster was new and free of mold. I rapped my knuckles against the spot and got a hollow popping sound in return. “There’s something back here,” I said to Bryson.

  “Hang on, I got a pocketknife,” he said. I drew back my fist and punched through the plaster, digging away the chunks of joint compound from the hole and revealing a small square space set between the joists and the brick of the outside wall. “Never mind,” Bryson said with a sigh.

  A little shelf held a leather bag stuffed full of dried-out herbs and a small circle of flat stones surrounding a squat black statue with a distended belly and a huge mouth replete with roughly carved teeth.

  “What the Hex is that?” said Bryson. “Some kinda shrine?”

  I picked up the herbs and sniffed. They had a sharp tang that wasn’t familiar to me. The stones seemed to be regular riverbed rocks like the type Sunny and I used to collect for Aunt Delia in the summer when drought dried up the streams. Together, nothing about the elements of the odd, secret altar suggested menace, but the hairs on my neck went stiff all the same as I examined all the pieces of ritual.

  “I don’t know,” I murmured to Bryson. “It was hidden back here for a reason. I’ve never seen anything like it, really. Witches use casters to focus, not statues.” Though who knew what Wendigo used. How had I not asked Lucas these questions?

  Because he had nice eyes and a fantastic chest, that’s why. Idiot.

  “Maybe it’s the statue,” said Bryson. “It could be gold on the inside, like. Some kind of Maltese Falcon deal.”

  “Let’s see,” I said, and picked it up.

  The magick hit me like stepping in front of an express train, and threw me off my feet and backward into the center of the damp, crumpled rug. I felt it in me like teeth in my flesh, magick so dark and dense that it stole air from my lungs.

  I screamed, back twisting as the were clawed for the surface of my mind. The phase gripped me unawares as the thing fed me more and more power. I thrashed, unable to loosen my rigid fingers from the splintery grooves of the statue.

  Through the black vortexes in front of my vision I saw Bryson pull his gun, change out the clip for another he carried in his inside pocket, and aim at me.

  I howled, the were meeting his challenge and I knew, impossible as it was without a full moon to do it under, that I would change and kill him. The dark magick was forcing my phase, just as Alistair Duncan had once forced his plain human son to become a wolf . . .

  “No,” I choked, under a pain that was a thousand times worse than the phase. My muscles and bones rippled and bucked under my skin like the city in the throes of the earthquake. “No,” I snarled. There was a time when I could not hold back the phase, but it would not be now.

  I pushed against the were, shaking like a plucked string and fighting with every bit of myself that was still me to keep the phase at bay. I was stronger than this. The days when I feared the phase were gone. “You are not me,” I hissed at the were.

  The pain peaked to an unbearable crescendo and then I felt it lessen, inch by inch, over my skin. My rigor-tight grip on the statue finally lessened and I threw it down. It rolled into a corner and thumped against the wall.

  Bryson lowered his weapon, flipping the safety on with his thumb. “Wilder?”

  “I’m okay,” I gasped. I was soaked in sweat and my fingertips and gums started to bleed as my fangs and claws receded. “I’m okay . . .”

  I got to my knees and Bryson extended a hand to help me up. “What the Hex was that?” he asked.

  “Bad magick,” I said. “Do me a favor and get that thing. I can’t touch it.”

  “Yeah . . . okay,” said Bryson, picking the thing up like the massive wooden jaws might close around his fingers. “You sure you’re all right?”

  I didn’t feel all right, but I pulled my shoulders back and nodded, keeping my jaw tight and swallowing blood. “What’s with you changing the clip of your gun? You do that every time you have to shoot? It’s cramping your style.”

  “Nah,” said Bryson. “I went to one of those basement stores down by the university when I caught this case and got some were-proof ammunition. For insurance.”

  I splashed rusty water on my face from Jason’s sink. “Insurance?”

  “Silver bullets,” said Bryson. He threw up his hands when I glared at him. “Don’t look at me like that! I gotta look out for myself!”

  “You better hit whatever you’re aiming at with a kill shot,” I said. “Otherwise it just pisses us off. And I’ve seen you qualifying at the range. I think you’d be better off with some Mace and a good pair of running shoes.” My bicep still bore a faint streak of scarring from where a silver slug had plowed through the flesh one night almost a year ago.

  Bryson ejected the clip of silver and I snatched it from him, putting it in my back pocket. “Your insurance is canceled. I’m not going to explain to some enraged pack leader why you panicked and plugged one of their charges with a damn Van Helsing round.”

  “Those bullets cost a hundred and twenty bucks!” Bryson complained.

  “Overpriced,” I said, popping my back to ease out the last kinks of the abortive phase. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Grumbling, Bryson picked up the statue and followed me.

  I called Sunny after Bryson dropped me off on the corner of Devere across the street from Second Skin Tattoo. “How long will it take you to get downtown? I’ve got something you need to see.”

  The statue was dangling from my elbow, wrapped in a layer of plastic shopping bags and shoved inside a gym bag from the trunk of Bryson’s car. The odor of socks and athelete’s foot ointment wafted around me, and I tried to hold the bag farther away.

  “Luna, I have a life,” said Sunny. “I have to pick Grandma up at the airport and I have lunch plans.”

  “Look, Sunny, I don’t ask unless it’s life or death,” I said. “Blow off Grandma this once.”

  “You ask a lot more than life or death,” she said.

  “You ask every time you get yourself into something you can’t handle because you have a big mouth and a short temper.”

  “Sunny,” I said quietly. “This isn’t about me. I need you. I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

  “Hmph,” she said. “For you to admit you have no clue is pretty rare, I will say. Isaidll come, but only until Grandma calls me to come get her.”

  “Thank you,” I breathed. “Meet me in Perry’s shop. I need a second opinion about something.”

  “Can you dial down the cryptic a bit?” Sunny said. “You sound shaky. What’s happened?”

  “Tell you when you get here,” I said, feeling the statue’s magick crawling across the
air and over my skin. “Just get here

  fast.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Perry’s shop was as dim as the inside of a black cat, and blaring something post-industrial from the speakers mounted in the corners. The man himself was sitting on a rolling stool with his back to me, wispy salt-and-pepper ponytail trailing over his neck. He was working on a client who looked like an undead cheerleader—a violently blond girl with breasts that could have floated her across Siren Bay, strapped into a leather vest and shredded cutoff shorts. She’d topped the look off with boots, fishnets, and the grinning demon’s head Perry was tattooing in the crevice of her cleavage.

  “Perry,” I said. “Perry!” to cut into the music. He stopped the needle and spun on his stool.

  “Well, well, well,” he purred. “Detective Wilder. I thought I smelled something sweet in the air.”

  “I’m talking to Perry,” I said to his dead, cloudy gray eye and twisted lips. “Not to you.”

  The bad side of his face, bulging eye and burn-victim skin, hissed at me and he rotated all the way around. “Sorry about that,” said Perry, scrutinizing me with his good eye. “The ink, you know . . . I get into it. Been a hell of a long time, Wilder. Thought you didn’t love me no more.”

  “Now, you know that could never happen,” I said.

  “Excuse me,” said the pep squad reject. “I’m not paying you to chitchat.”

  “Go back to waving your pom-poms or something,” I said. I drew the statue out of the bag, careful to hold the evidence wrapper by the edges, and showed it to Perry. “Got any idea what this is?”

  “Hot damn,” said Perry. He got off his stool and limped over to me, his leg brace catching the low light. A long time ago, something had happened to Perry that trapped . . . well . . . not Perry in half of his body. You had to be careful which side you talked to, depending on the answer you wanted.

  “This is some hard-core mojo,” said Perry. “I was doing tats in Wyoming about ten years back and I ran across some medicine men working with fetishes. Nasty-ass for whoever they turned it on.”

  “This was used by Wendigo,” I said. “It’s for what that I don’t know.”

  “Right, right,” said Perry. “Looks like a hunger god. The shapeshifters got one they call Wiskachee. Supposed to crawl up from the ground and devour your enemies, or something.”

  I felt a little cold air on the back of my neck, just enough to ruffle the hairs. “Is that so.”

  “Bunch of bullcrap if you ask me,” said Perry. He extended the fetish to me but I put my hands up.

  “One touch of that thing is more than enough.”

  Sunny arrived then, jangling the bell on the door. “Hi, Perry.”

  “Sunflower.” He nodded. “Anyway, the shapeshifters feed Wiskachee, honor him with his fetish worship while he sleeps, and he wakes up and makes them all motherfuckin’ Superman.” Perry snorted. “Or something like that. Not like I sat in on Mythology One-oh-One or nothin’.”

  “They . . . feed him?” said Sunny. Perry set the fetish on the counter, where it glared at me balefully. I stuck my tongue out at it when he turned his back.

  “Wendigo drink blood, and from it they draw their power,” said Perry. “The legends of Wiskachee speak of an unceasing, all-consuming hunger that will someday swallow the world unless the god is appeased regularly with the blood of the faithful.”

  I wondered if the little statue was the reason Jason Kennuka had plunged to his death. Had his wild Wendigo buddies convinced him to donate a little bit of his faithful blood? The dark magic that wrapped the fetish in layers dense as razor wire spoke to something pushing Jason to jump off that ledge.

  “Like I said, crap,” said Perry. “I ain’t saying that Wiskachee and his magick aren’t real, but that business about the end of the world—do you know how many bargain-basement necromancers spout the same shit?” He stumped over to the cash register to ring up the irate coed. “Wendigo are first-class freaks . . . you know their burial grounds are underneath the whole city? Shallow graves all over the damn place. Gave the caster witches a turn when they were building up back in the 1800s. At any rate, Luna . . . you find anything else like that fetish, bring it here. I’ll add it to the collection.”

  “I won’t live long enough if I ever brush up against something like that again,” I said.

  Perry gave a wet laugh that came out the twisted side of his mouth. “We all gotta go sometime, Wilder. Might as well make it with a bang.”

  In the hallway, as we walked to the stairwell, Sunny looked at my face. “You’re thinking. That face always means you’re thinking. What are you worried about?”

  “I’m not worried,” I said. “I’m frustrated and confused.”

  She worried her lip. “About what?”

  I banged open the stairwell door, stamping harder than I had to on the narrow stone steps. “About how I’m going to explain all of this god-summoning, human-killing madness to someone who doesn’t believe in any of it.”

  With most grief-stricken relatives, By the way, your brother was a religious nut who threw himself off a building for Hungry Jesus will get you outraged sobs at best and fisticuffs or restraining orders at worst.

  But then again, Lucas hadn’t been straight with me, either. I snarled as Sunny and I walked through the university gates. “What’s so gods-damn hard about being honest, Sunny?”

  “The truth hurts,” she said.

  “Me putting a foot in their ass is going to hurt the Wendigo a lot more,” I grumbled.

  Sunny pulled me back as I, in my righteous indignation, almost walked into traffic. She punched the button for the crosswalk light and shook her head. “Calm down, Luna.”

  “I’ve had a shitty-ass day,” I said. “You go ahead and be calm. I’ll stay over here in my rage bubble, thanks.”

  “What’s really rare is for you not to be in a rage bubble,” Sunny said. If it was anyone but her, I would have slapped the smug taste right out of her mouth, and I was considering it with Sunny when I caught the scent of wet dog over my shoulder. I whipped around and saw the green sedan parked directly across the street from Sunny’s convertible.

  “Wait here,” I said to Sunny, starting to walk.

  “Luna, what . . . ,” she called, but I held up a hand, going to the passenger’s-side window and looking in.

  Donal Macleod’s pet were was hunched over the steering wheel cursing and trying to fidget a digital camera’s battery back into its slot. I walked around the car into the street, flashing my badge at a car that honked, and then put my elbow through his window.

  He yelped and scrambled away from the shards as I reached in, grabbed him by the back of his collar, and hauled him, kicking and screaming, out the broken window and into the road.

  “Why the fuck are the Warwolves following me?” I shouted.

  “There’s a truck coming!” he screamed. A few hundred feet up Devere Street, a semi barreled toward us, horn blatting.

  “Then you’d better answer fast,” I said.

  “I’m just following orders!” he cried.

  “In about five seconds you’re going to be just a bunch of meat in the middle of the road. Good luck following them then.”

  “Donal told me to!” he said finally. “He said to follow you and make sure you were doing the job! We had to get justice for Priscilla! Pack justice!”

  The semi was close enough for me to feel the heat from the engine. I jerked the Warwolf to the side and sent him sprawling on the hood of his car. He was gasping, sweat pouring down his face. “You crazy bitch . . .”

  “None crazier,” I said. I took my handcuffs off my belt. “How much did you hear?”

  “Everything,” he gasped. “Filthy, stinking monsters.”

  Pendantics are so unattractive. I thumped the Warwolf on the back of the head. “Roll over and put your hands behind you before I throw you into traffic again.”

  He did as he was told. I like that in a suspect. I got the handcuffs on on
e of his wrists and started to reel off his Miranda. “You have the right to remain . . . oof.”

  His foot came up and back and got me in the gut, the tender section just above the belly button that makes all of your air vacate your body at once. I doubled over on my knees in the gutter between the sedan and a fire hydrant, making loud sucking sounds as I tried to breathe.

  The Warwolf took off up the sidewalk, spinning Sunny around as she tried to catch him by the jacket, my handcuffs jangling merrily from his wrist.

  That was the second time I’d lost my handcuffs to a recalcitrant were, and I vowed then and there it would be the last.

  Sunny crouched next to me. “Luna, are you all right?”

  “No . . . ,” I wheezed, and then abruptly retched and vomited onto the pavement. “Better . . . now . . .”

  “Come on, hon,” said Sunny, maneuvering me gently to my feet. “Let’s get you home.”

  “No . . . ,” I insisted. “I gotta . . . get that guy . . . before he tells the other packs and screws the case.”

  “If you vomit in my car,” said Sunny matter-offactly, “I am going to kill you slowly. Buckle up.”

  I protested, but by the time Sunny supported me upstairs to bed, the combined events of the day had piled on my shoulders and all I wanted to do was sleep.

  I rocketed out of a muddled dream about Lucas and blood on naked skin and an ancient, aching hunger inside of me to the telephone shrieking next to the bed. Sunny had left a scrawled note on my pillow. Gone to airprt., back after G-ma @ home.

  I jerked the old-style rotary phone out of its cradle. “Yeah?”

  “Luna?” the voice said. I recognized it immediately, straight and biting as edged metal.

  “Lucas.”

  “I hope you don’t mind me calling,” he said. “I need to know what the morgue hours are so I can identify Jason and . . . well . . . I thought it’d be better to call you.”

  Gods, why did he have to sound so lost? Maybe I was just turning into a paranoid gun-toting nut who saw everyone as a liar. It would be easier to believe if 90 percent of the people I came in contact with in daily life weren’t liars, of one stripe or another.