Second Skin

by Caitlin Kittredge

  I fired my gun straight up into the air, the report rolling away like a miniature thunderclap down the alley and back from the stone walls all around us. “Everybody settle the fuck down!”

  Donal stepped closer, arms crossed. “Stand aside, girl. There’s more to this than your little mind can handle. Last warning you’re going to get.”

  “Just go, Luna,” Lucas said, smiling at Donal the way a psychopath smiles at a pretty blond. “I can handle this. I want to.” His tongue flicked out, rose-pink. “I’m still hungry.”

  “No,” I said. “I won’t. I’m not a member of your pack, Macleod. The treaty doesn’t apply to me, and I offered Lucas my protection. Lucas is here to help me find the person who killed Priscilla, so if anyone has a problem with that, then you can go Hex yourselves.”

  Donal smiled and tilted his head. “So be it, Insoli.” He grabbed me by the shoulders, lifted me off the ground, and tossed me in one smooth movement that I never would have seen coming from someone his age, were or not.

  I spun, my vision turning into a blur of neon and grinning were faces, and then I hit the brick wall next to the door of El Gato, splitting my lip and bloodying my nose. My gun slid away underneath a Dumpster, and I was paralyzed for a few seconds as flashbulbs went off in my brain.

  “Set yourselves on him!” Donal howled, and the Warwolves closed in on Lucas, the tall one catching him in the gut with a kick that doubled him over. I saw Donal pull out a short steel baton from his pocket and close in on the group. It may not have been the full moon, but that didn’t mean five rage-fueled weres couldn’t damage Lucas and me beyond recognition.

  “Get up, Luna,” I muttered, making it to my knees. My mouth tasted of hot iron, my blood and the scent of Lucas’s fear mingling hotly on my tongue. I went for Donal, since he was the skinniest and totally involved in hitting Lucas’s hunched back with a baton.

  Donal had a mess of shaggy red hair hanging beyond his collar, and that was what I grabbed for, jerking his head backward and ruining his balance. I put my foot between his, exerting backward pressure on his knee while I used the reins of his hair to push his head forward. When my sweep had doubled Donal over, I brought my other knee up and into his face with enough force to make his nose crunch like someone had just stepped on a box of crackers.

  Donal grunted and dropped the baton, holding his nose and hissing invective at me.

  A blow caught me low in the back and I got spun around, going down on one knee and wheezing as flames spread up and down my left side. “Back off,” said the tall goon. “I don’t want to hurt you. You’re a waste of my time.”

  He moved into a stance that was far more formal and trained than the Thai boxing I employed to beat on punching bags and thugs, watching me intently as I tried to think of something witty and biting to retort. Ow was all that sprang to mind, so I just got up and went for him, trying to duck his defenses.

  I got a hit in the jaw and in the gut for my trouble. Goonie was faster than me, and I was willing to bet he actually worked at his arts instead of relying on punching harder than the other guy. I blocked one of his blows with my forearm but he dipped and got me in the midsection again, and down I went, on the ground eye level with Lucas. His eyes were wide and tinged with silver as two Warwolves hit him.

  “Stop,” I gritted. “Leave him alone . . .”

  Donal landed on me, his legs on either side of my hips, pinning me down. “I should tear your throat out,” he snarled, his voice thick from blood and his shattered nose. His face was a spatter painting of red and white, blood smeared to his cheekbones and down his chin, bringing his scars into relief.

  “Get off me!” I cried, trying to throw him off, but he twisted a hand into my hair and in what I can only assume was the bright lady’s sense of supreme irony held me down with it.

  Lucas had gone still under the thug’s fists, and I groaned. “Oh gods . . .”

  “Keep quiet,” said Donal. “The last thing we need is the ruddy police down on us.” His fangs grew as he crouched over me. They were long and ocher, needles more than teeth. I imagined a vampire would have such teeth, that when Donal was finished murdering me he’d swallow my blood down.

  “Luna.” The voice was so low I doubted any of the squealing, snarling weres heard it, but I twisted my head around and met Lucas’s eyes. They were slitted and silver, but he stared directly at me. I saw him work one hand free from the goon, and he sent Donal’s steel baton rolling toward me.

  I grabbed it up and snapped it open. Donal roared at me and I glared back. “Chew on this, you Dracula freak.” I whipped the baton sideways across his face, heard a howl, and saw one of his red fangs fly free as blood spurted afresh from his mouth. Donal rolled off me, grasping his face and cursing.

  “You may never be pretty again,” I told him. “But on the bright side, there wasn’t much there to work with before.”

  Goonie hit me from behind, throwing his entire weight into the blow, but I shifted and lowered my shoulder and he went spinning over it to land on his back, gasping. I lifted my foot and kicked him in the throat. The were beat in my blood and I honestly didn’t care if I killed the Warwolf or not. He’d challenged me and I was answering in the most final way I knew how.

  “Stop!” Donal’s voice rang off the walls of the alley as my gunshot had a few moments before. He held a squirming Lucas by the neck, big hands on either side of the Wendigo’s jaw. “Stop or I break his neck,” Donal said. He twisted Lucas’s head to the side for emphasis.

  Lucas’s face was swollen and his nose and mouth were bleeding, but he didn’t so much as grunt in pain, just glared steadily ahead at nothing.

  “None of this had to happen,” I said, feeling my breath rip in and out of my lungs with a hot, weightless tug. The Warwolf squirmed under my foot and I pressed down harder. “Hold still,” I snarled. To Donal I said, “Both of us let go at the same time. Everybody walks away.”

  Donal shook his head. “That won’t happen, missy. We’re teaching this filth a lesson one way or another.”

  “He didn’t do anything!” I bellowed. “He’s not what you should be afraid of!”

  Donal laughed once, short and dry and more like a cough. “Oh, you poor girl. How he has you fooled. You’re loyal as a panting dog to that sweet smile and those melting eyes, aren’t you?”

  “Patronizing the person who decides whether your friend’s windpipe stays in the same shape is not the brightest move,” I warned. “Might wanna shut it.”

  “You never should have gotten in our way,” Donal said, twisting Lucas’s neck farther.

  “You never should have made me,” I said, lifting my foot in a threat.

  “Donal,” his thug croaked, “maybe we should reconsider this . . .”

  “You keep your mouth shut, puppy!” Donal shouted. Under his grip, Lucas shivered. It was the slightest of movements, one almost any bystander would mistake for fear. But Lucas looked at me as he did it, and his lips spread in the barest smile. Underneath, his mouth filled, under my eyes, with silver-tipped fangs.

  “Oh, Lucas . . . ,” I said. “No . . .”

  “That’s the end. I warned you . . . ,” Donal started, moving to snap Lucas’s neck, but he cut off as Lucas heaved under him. “Bright lady!” Donal swore, struggling to hold Lucas.

  Lucas’s features melted together, his hair sloughing and his ears pointing and pinning themselves close to his head. His body lengthened and became little more than skeleton and sinew bound up in gray, mottled flesh. His teeth and tongue elongated and his eyes gleamed pure silver. Talons ripped free from his fingers, trailing threads of skin and dried blood.

  With a cry, Lucas wrenched the bottom half of his body 180 degrees around, his spine popping out under his skin. His feet scrabbled for purchase against the brick and he opened his mouth impossibly wide and hissed at Donal.

  Donal shrieked and grabbed his ears, scuttling away from Lucas on his rear end.

  Goonie had gone dead-still under me. “W
hat on the burnt, Hexed earth is going on?”

  I took my foot off his throat and hauled him to his feet. The three other thugs had long since vanished. Smart bastards. “What’s going on is that you better run like hell if you don’t want to be next.”

  The Wendigo turned the upper half of its body around to match its hips and legs, bones and muscle sliding and rebuilding under its slick hide. Donal let out a whimper, his eyes blank and glassy with shock. “There’s no moon . . . ,” he muttered. “There has to be a moon . . .”

  The Wendigo choked out that same fleshy laugh I remembered from the forest. “I don’t need the moon,” it rasped, a voice like a cut throat emanating from somewhere deep in its chest. “Just hunger.”

  Lucas moved like air, the lines of his body blurring into smoke. “Crap,” I muttered. With Lucas changed into a six-and-a-half-foot-tall blood-drinking monster, I doubted human emotion had much of a place. But son of a bitch or not, Donal Macleod didn’t deserve to die just yet.

  I stepped forward. “I can’t let you do this.”

  Lucas rotated his head toward me, his neck twisting far more than was natural. I watched tendons and veins expand in his trunk, and his tongue flicked the air in front of my face. “Let him die.”

  “No,” I said, and my voice came out a squeak, high school scream-queen variety. Great. “Lucas, let’s just walk away. He can’t hurt you now.” I gestured at Donal, who was staring up at us from my feet, his breath shallow as he waited to see who would come out on top of our dance. “You made your point. He’s not going to hurt . . .”

  My speech got chopped off with a sweaty blood-stained hand over my mouth as Donal leapt to his feet and grabbed me in a bar hold across the throat. He pressed his free hand over my nose and mouth. “One step farther and I damage her beyond repair.”

  Lucas hissed and took a step toward us. “I’m quite serious!” Donal shouted, shaking me like a rag doll. Pretty pink-and-black tunnels of light kaleidoscoped in front of my eyes as he slowly pressed all the air out of me.

  “You picked the wrong damn day to take me as a hostage,” I muttered under his hand. I drew back my foot to drive the heel of my boot right into Donal’s undoubtedly inadequate balls. Before I could, though, Lucas flowed across the space between us.

  He was translucent, like smoke pushed before a hot wind, blurring limbs and features. Standing in stark relief were his hungry, gleaming teeth and eyes filled up with rage as he bore down on us.

  Claws latched on to the front of my shirt, ripping gashes through the fabric and digging into my skin, and the ground dropped away from me as Lucas tore me free from Donal’s grip. My neck snapped back painfully against Donal’s arm and then I was flying across open space, weightless for a few seconds.

  Pain went everywhere as I hit what I assumed was the opposite wall of the alley, ricocheted off it, and landed at the bottom of an empty Dumpster with a clang that would shake the teeth out of a dead man’s mouth. I thought I was deaf, and possibly dead until I heard screaming.

  Pulling myself to my feet with one shaking hand, I managed to hook an arm over the top of the Dumpster and peer out. Lucas had Donal backed up against a wall, advancing on him in the drop-shouldered pose that Priscilla had used to stalk me. Donal was shaking his head, graying copper hair wild, his eyes wide. “Leave . . . leave me alone . . . I order you . . . !”

  Lucas hissed. “You don’t order shit, mutt.” He stretched out one hand, tipped with talons nearly as long as his fingers, and plunged all five of them into Donal’s chest.

  Donal twitched as Lucas impaled him, still very much alive and screaming, hands scrabbling at the Wendigo’s grip.

  “You hurt me,” Lucas hissed. “You are filth. Die and be consumed.” There was no venom in his voice, just a chill that stippled as water droplets on my skin as the fog rolled around us.

  The mist that clung to Lucas took on a glow that expanded and darkened as his belly distended, the blood beating under his skin beginning to pick up speed as he drank Donal Macleod’s life away through those awful talons. It was what I had felt inside the charm that Laurel Hicks kept over her door—primal and blunt and so very strong that my knees gave out as my Path abilities frantically scrambled to translate the ambient magick into power and failed.

  Goonie broke the spell, smashing into Lucas with a snarl and taking him to ground. They rolled over and over and Lucas was on top, and his talons were in the were’s chest, and this time it happened so much faster.

  The Warwolf went still, pale as a vampire’s ghost. His cheeks were sunken and the veins in his neck stood out. Eyes open and looking ahead in the fear of his final seconds, he was dead as dead could be.

  I sagged as the magick lifted a fraction, weaving spindly webs through the air around me as Lucas’s chest heaved with the stolen life. I attempted to scramble out of the Dumpster and do something, stop him somehow, but Lucas flowed up and toward Donal again. The were had torn his shirt and was trying to stanch his wounds, but he was shaking and his eyes were black with shock.

  “Help me—” he cried, but Lucas sank his talons in deep again and fed.

  I hauled myself over the lip of the Dumpster, twisted my ankle, fell and got up again. I was limping but I had a clear goal in mind, the only thing that I thought might stop Lucas before he killed Donal.

  “Your soul tried to run from me,” Lucas hissed. “But you can’t escape my hunger, dog. You never can.” His words were barely more than high whines, and I felt like my ears were bleeding.

  Donal gurgled, his face going purple-tinged in the cheeks, trying to speak.

  “Lucas!” I shouted, scooping up my prize from where it lay in a puddle under an arthritic streetlight.

  His eyes met mine and he grinned. “Do you like this, Insoli? Do the screams excite you?”

  “Let him go,” I said. “This is over now. And no, the screams don’t excite me! What kind of gods-damn creepy thing is that to say? Hex me.”

  “No,” said Lucas, twisting his talons in Donal’s chest. The were screamed, a completely human sound of pain that sliced my ears. “No, I’m still hungry.”

  I got a look at his eyes, and my finger stiffened on the trigger. They were dead and silver, inhuman. Something Other stared out at me, like when the daemon overtook Dmitri, but this wasn’t an involuntary reaction. Lucas knew exactly what he was, and he was enjoying it. That galvanized me, got my legs back under me after the cold shock of staring at something so alien.

  “Have it your way,” I said, and pulled the Glock’s trigger twice. The bullets went into Lucas’s shoulder and passed through his upper arm. I cursed my shaky stance. I’d meant to go wide, but not that wide.

  Lucas jerked as the bullets hit him and then shuddered, his knees bowing and his limbs losing rigidity as he staggered back. His talons slid out of Donal’s chest with a sucking thock and Lucas went to ground, blackish silver blood running from his wounds.

  “You . . . shot me . . . ,” he said in shock, his already thin gray skin going translucent.

  “Don’t take it personally,” I said, stepping over him, one foot on either side of his neck. “Now change back or the next one goes into your brainpan.”

  “You . . . wouldn’t . . . ,” Lucas hissed. “You like Lucas . . . sweet Lucas . . .”

  I racked the slide on the Glock. Not necessary, but a hell of a dramatic effect. “I don’t like you that much. You wanna test the cranky, armed werewolf’s patience? Go ahead.”

  Lucas shuddered again and then sighed. “For now.” He closed his eyes and the Wendigo skin started to peel away, revealing his human shape. Naked and bruised, he curled and shivered as red blood from his wounds slowly emerged. I grabbed up his discarded shirt and shoved it into his hands.

  “Put pressure on the wound, and don’t you dare fucking go anywhere.” I turned and went to Donal, wheezing on his back, his pulse barely more than a flutter. I took Lucas’s jeans and pressed down on his richly bleeding chest wound. “Macleod. Can you hear me?”r />
  His eyeballs roamed under his lids like a dreamer in REM sleep, but he nodded weakly.

  “Okay,” I said. “Stay with me. Don’t fall asleep, or you’ll never get to see my gorgeous face again. You got that?”

  “Y . . . yes . . . ,” he managed. I could hear fluid in his chest every time he spoke or breathed. Still, I smiled at him. Never let victims know when it’s bad. Smile. Think of puppies and unicorns and double-decker bacon cheeseburgers served twenty-four hours. Don’t telegraph Hex it, you have a sucking chest wound with your face.

  “Good man.” I felt in my back pocket and came up with a crushed cluster of plastic and silicon chips, held to a dead LCD screen with wires. I have the worst luck with phones. “Crap,” I hissed. “Donal, where’s your cell?”

  His jaw tightened with the effort. “In my jacket . . . pocket . . .”

  I felt first in Donal’s left pocket and then his right, and came up with a wallet, a pack of cinnamon gum, and a butterfly knife. Finally, in the inside pocket I touched a BlackBerry covered in blood. I swiped it on my jeans and dialed the EMTs’ direct line. “This is Officer Wilder.” I rattled off my badge number. “Shots fired on Magnolia Boulevard. I need a bus for a gunshot wound and a stabbing outside the El Gato restaurant in the alley behind Uncle Jack’s liquor store.” I looked at Donal, whose breathing got shallower on each inhale and added, “H

  urry.”

  CHAPTER 18

  As sirens pricked my ears, still far enough away to be inaudible to anyone but a shapeshifter, I went back to Lucas and grabbed him by his free arm. “Get up.”

  “I still can’t believe you shot me,” Lucas groaned. “You’re crazier than those damn Warwolves.”

  “Oh, flex your muscles and man up,” I said. “It’s just a flesh wound. Someone who heals like you won’t even have a scar for more than a few days.”

  “Let me guess,” said Lucas. “You were aiming for my head?”

  “How I wish that were true,” I muttered, getting his good arm over my shoulder. My knees vibrated under his weight. Lucas was solid as he looked, every ounce of him sinew and bone. He was a good four inches shorter than Dmitri, but he staggered against me like a drunk twice his size.