“Call me crazy,” Lucas muttered as the sirens slipped into range, red lights tracing off the alley walls as they raced up Magnolia. Shots fired always gets their blood pumping. “But shouldn’t we wait for the EMTs?”
“Not if we want to stay out of trouble. And jail,” I said. Lucas and I were performing an odd and blood-soaked hop-skip away from the scene, his pain-weighted body pressing against mine like a punishing weight had been lashed across my shoulders. Behind us, an ambulance screeched to a stop at the mouth of the alley and I breathed a silent breath of relief. If Donal died, it wouldn’t be because of me.
“I’m with you on the staying-in-front-of-bars part,” said Lucas, “but in case you forgot, you shot me.”
“Lucas?” I snarled, tugging us down one of the throughways that spilled out onto Brewster Street, the smaller, dirtier back side of the Magnolia strip.
“Yeah?” he grunted, air huffing out of him as I dragged us faster now that we were out in the open.
“Quit your whining and just be glad I dragged you out of there, you son of a bitch!” I snapped.
A drag queen coming out of the twenty-four-hour convenience store on the corner made an ooo noise. “You tell him what it is, girl.”
Lucas made a defeated sound, his other hand going around my waist and snagging in my metal-studded belt. “Damn it, I’m going to pass out.”
“Not on this sidewalk, you’re not,” I told him. “Not unless you want to catch the kind of disease that makes parts fall off.” Brewster Street used to be called Pin Street, and in Jeremiah Chopin’s day was replete with seamstress shops fronting for brothels. Now it was replete with sex shops and plain old sex workers, strolling the sidewalks and the streets. There were fewer girls and boys than usual posing at the slowly cruising cars—the heat was getting to everyone.
“This way,” I said to Lucas, leading us toward a drugstore with soaped-over windows. “Not much farther.” The side door of the druggist’s was marked DELIVERIES, but I wasn’t fooled. Waterfront had hosted me for the five years I was a beat cop, and I remembered Officer Dixon pointing out Pop’s Drug Store and Soda Fountain. “For when some types don’t wanna bother with the hospital” was all he said as we cruised slowly past, keeping time with the john cars and dealers who passed back and forth along Brewster like shadows on the X-ray of an artery.
I kicked the door, rusty and stark under the old globe light, since I was holding on to Lucas with both of my hands to keep him standing. “Hello!” I bellowed. “Open up, Pops!”
After a time, I heard a chain slide back and the door cracked open, revealing a face haloed by hair that would have done any mad scientist proud. “Password?” Pop’s voice was far from tremulous, old and battered as his liver probably was, judging by the smell of bourbon that rolled through the crack. Thirty years of cigarettes carried on the phrase.
“Open this door or I’ll break your nose?” I guessed.
Pop’s eyes narrowed. “Who the hell are you? You ain’t one of my reg’lars.”
Lucas stumbled against me, leaning down to Pop’s level through the crack. “Let us in, old man.” His eyes flowed into silver and Pop yelped, springing back and taking the door with him.
“That’s my trick,” I muttered to Lucas.
The back room of the drugstore was a surgery, with the equipment straight out of a horror movie from another decade. Nothing was gleaming or even particularly sterile, but I dropped Lucas onto the white-sheeted operating table with a groan of relief. “Bright lady, you’re heavy.”
“Been meaning to lose weight . . .” Lucas murmured. “Eating my own cooking . . .”
“Look,” said Pops nervously. “I don’t truck with any non-humans in here. Gives the place a bad reputation, you understand? People get worried about contamination.”
“If you want to make us leave, you’re welcome to try.” I said, grabbing a handful of gauze and pressing it over Lucas’s bullet wound. Blood soaked through the white in a starburst and Lucas yelped.
“It’s not that I don’t appreciate you thinking of my establishment for your discreet medical needs,” said the old man, shifting from foot to foot nervously. He wore print pajamas and a raveling brown sweater. Glasses pushed up high on his head were streaked in grime. He reminded me of a gnome, and not one of the cute ones you stick in among your begonias. “But, nonhumans and all . . .”
“He’s a gunshot victim,” I said, pointing at Lucas. “Now, are you going to do your job or am I going to deck you and use the tools myself?”
Pop’s face twitched. “Can you pay?”
“Not at the moment,” I said. “Think of it as a public service.”
We stared at each other, Lucas’s soft moans the only sound except for car horns and the catcalls of street-walkers outside. “I need to get my surgical kit from the upstairs,” said Pops finally. “And morphine. Gunshots are tricky. If he wriggles all around while I’m hauling a bullet out of him . . . could be nerve damage.”
“Go,” I said. “And if you call the cops on us, just remember . . . nonhumans don’t need guns and blades to make your demise really fast and really, really painful.”
Pops let out a squeak and ducked into the front of the store through swinging doors. I sat down on the edge of Lucas’s bed. His hand slid over mine and I twitched involuntarily. The skin was cold like he’d been sitting in one of Bart’s freezers for a few days, and I tried to pull away, but Lucas held on. “What’s wrong?” he muttered thickly.
“You have some goddamn nerve asking me what’s wrong after you killed a man back there,” I hissed.
“No choice,” Lucas said, with a surprisingly nonchalant shrug for a guy who’d had two bullets pass through him in the previous hour. “Besides . . . you don’t seem like . . . you’d be bothered.”
“Of course I’m bothered!” I shouted, and then wondered why I was. Donal Macleod, in my situation, would probably be dancing the Highland Fling or chowing down on a haggis. He wouldn’t be weeping about the grisly death of one Insoli woman who had gotten in his way.
So why was I so bothered that Lucas had killed one Warwolf and almost Donal?
“Why?” he asked me, in echo.
“Because you didn’t have to,” I said. It came out soft and flat, the way the truth usually sounds—anticlimactic. “You had him, Lucas. You had him and we could have gotten away. But you were going to kill him.”
“Yes,” said Lucas. “I was.” He sat up on his elbows, a little color in his face. “It’s my nature. You thought you wouldn’t see my monster?” He reached across me and came back with a fresh handful of gauze, pressing it to his own shoulder. “You thought I was just like you?”
I looked at the discarded bandages on the dirty mustard-colored linoleum of the surgery, their blood so red and bright it appeared almost like a flower petal rather than something that had come from a wound. “I made a mistake,” I whispered. “I have to find out why the Wendigo are killing weres and I have to find out soon. Lucas, this is all going to come crashing down because I helped you.”
The detached expression chased away from his face, replaced by the warm, understated smile that was familiar. “But you did, and I’m grateful.”
“We’ll get you fixed up,” I said. “Then you can stay low at my house until the police are finished with Donal and that body.” The were’s screams were still with me, and I shivered, feeling the fog of magick on my exposed skin. Whatever his faults, I severely doubted anyone deserved death in the manner Goonie had met it.
“Then?” Lucas prompted as I went quiet again. I shoved all the fear and sickness that had rushed up at me when Lucas attacked Donal back where it belonged, down below the surface where all police and soldiers and trauma workers keep their natural, human reactions to horror.
“Then I’ll take you home,” I said. “And we should probably try to forget we ever met each other.”
Lucas squeezed my hand harder. “That’s going to be rough for me, Luna.”
I me
t his eyes, saw something there that was familiar, to a degree. It was the same lust tinged with fascination I saw when Dmitri looked at me, but there was a hesitant, shy cast to Lucas’s face.
And if I was any kind of woman, I would stand up, walk out of arm’s length, and never get this close to him again.
But he was making it pretty damn hard.
I detached my hand from his. “I’m with someone, Lucas.”
His gaze went blank. “The smoker’s a lucky bastard.”
My lips twitched. “Thanks for saying so.” Realizing I hadn’t heard any sound from the store for some time, I got up and poked my head through the door. “Hex it. Pops ran out on us.”
“I guess you’ll just have to do the job,” said Lucas. “Don’t worry,” he added when I let my horrified expression surface. “I have faith in you.”
“Great. That makes a whopping one of us.” I went behind the counter and found a banged-up medical box, which contained a tray of instruments and a few vials of morphine. I took it, plus a bottle of alcohol and more gauze, back to the surgery. “I don’t do this sort of thing a lot.”
Lucas filled an old-style syringe and held out a piece of rubber to me. “Tie my arm off.”
I did, and he slapped a vein and injected himself with morphine. “Do it fast enough and I’ll still be dreaming of pink bunnies and happy leprechauns,” he said.
“Bright lady,” I cursed. I poured alcohol over a likely pair of tweezers and took the gauze off Lucas’s wound. “Hold still. This is where the pain comes,” I warned, and doused the bullet hole with alcohol.
Lucas jerked, his hands clenching on the sides of the table, and I nearly lost my tenuous grip on the bullet. “Hold still!” I use hollow-point rounds, so it was still inside his shoulder, and I drew out the crumpled slug and dropped it into the wastebasket.
“You okay?” Lucas giggled. “You’re not okay. You’re gonna faint. Girly-girl.”
“You’re high,” I returned. “Lightweight.”
He just laughed. After I patched Lucas up and dressed the wound, we went out into the street and hailed a cab. The cabs in this part of town always smell like stale beer and exhaust and have drivers whose faces you can’t see in the glow of the dashboard light.
I gave the silent driver my cottage’s address and he grunted. “Driving there’s gonna be hard.”
“Oh no,” I assured him. “Grasp the wheel, apply your foot to the gas, and Newtonian physics will do the rest.”
“No.” He sighed. “Ain’t you been watching the television? Freeway’s closed. Overpass fell down. From the quake, and all.”
“Take the surface streets,” I said. “Charge me whatever. Just get us out of downtown.”
“This is exciting,” said Lucas as the taxi puttered away in a cloud of smoke. “Never been on the lam before.” He shifted so our shoulders, mine sore from tossing the thug and his swathed in bandages, touched. “How about you?”
“Once,” I murmured, watching light and shadow blur into one as the cab picked up speed down Watermark Street.
“What happened?” Lucas asked. Morphine made him positively chatty.
“People died,” I said, and shifted away from him on the plastic-covered cab seat, looking out my window for the rest of the ride. Self-storage units and off-track betting was the order of the day as the city devolved to urban sprawl and then faded away altogether closer to the coastline. Dilapidated houses, looking more like beached shipwrecks than dwellings, flashed in and out of the cab’s headlights. A skeletal rowboat marked the turnoff to my cottage.
“Nice place,” said Lucas, stepping out while I paid the cabdriver. “Looks cozy. Nice view. You ever decide to move, I’ll take it off your hands.”
“Wouldn’t your clan have something to say about that?” I asked. The cab briefly painted Lucas and me red with its taillights before it pulled away and turned the corner. I scented the breeze coming off the water, but there were no other weres in the vicinity, Dmitri or someone who might be even more unfriendly. Although if he saw Lucas leaning on me like he was now and hobbling toward the cottage, I didn’t know if that would be possible.
“Those people on the state land aren’t my clan,” Lucas said, with vehemence that surprised me, considering he’d been shot and drugged. “Just my family.”
“Same thing,” I said with a shrug, turning my key in the lock.
“It’s not the same thing at all,” Lucas said. “Blood means nothing. Strength is all. Weres aren’t capable of understanding that.”
“Gee,” I said, depositing him ungently on the sofa. “Thanks a bunch, Lucas.”
His mouth crimped. “I’m sorry. Shouldn’t have said that.” He grinned mischievously at me. “I’ve had a hard day, after all.”
“No, me too,” I said. “I have this habit of spewing out conversation with no regard for who’s hearing it. The doctors think that with a well-placed surgical zipper the problem should subside on its own.”
Lucas didn’t laugh, just grunted. He propped one foot up on the coffee table and rather than be irritated, as I was when Dmitri put his feet all over my things, I felt myself settle and stop shaking. Lucas seemed a right fit on my sofa.
This was bad.
“Thanks for everything you did today,” he said after a bit, when I got the nerve to sit down beside him. This close, I was reminded of what lived under his skin, but I didn’t want to move away.
Lucas’s monster didn’t frighten me. I wanted to be closer to it, to see what it would make him do if we touched.
“No one has ever gone out of their way for me before,” he elaborated when I was silent.
“I can’t imagine why,” I said, making myself move back to Just Friends distance. “It’s not like you’re that difficult to get along with, when you’re human.”
Lucas instantly sobered. “I’m not human, Luna. Why do you say these things?”
“I . . . ,” I started. Lucas sat up and faced me. His eyes were narrow and had deep lines at the corners I hadn’t noticed. They made him look older and rougher than he was.
“Are you so ashamed of being were that you have to try and convince yourself that when you wear human skin, you are human? Because that’s just plain fucked up, Luna.” He touched my cheek. “You’re so much more beautiful than any of them.”
“Stop it,” I warned, pushing his hand away. “I’m not ashamed of anything, Lucas, but in case you hadn’t noticed, parading around as a nonhuman doesn’t make you real popular in this city. I don’t have the luxury of hiding under a tree every time someone takes exception to the fact that three days out of the month, I’m fuzzy.”
Lucas dropped his gaze. “This has been the worst day of my life,” he said. “Seeing Jason dead . . . getting jumped. I apologize.”
“It’s fine.” I sighed. “I’m sorry I had to insinuate he might have helped to kill four people.”
“Weres,” said Lucas absently. “Not people.”
“Whatever,” I said. “I’m just glad we got to the fifth before they snatched her.”
“She’s under your protection?” Lucas drawled. “That’s sweet.”
“Not that she really wants to be,” I said. “She hates me. I’m unworthy, you know, plus I’m sort of the evil ex-girlfriend of the man who bit her.”
Lucas moved a ribbon of hair away from my eyes. “That I can see. I wouldn’t want to make you mad.”
“Lucas.” I sighed for the third time, grasping his wrist. He rotated it and squeezed my fingers between his.
“Can I just be close to you for a bit? I need it . . .”
“Technically, Bryson’s protecting Carla . . . ,” I babbled. “He’s this guy who wears stinky cologne and horrible polyblend suits and drives a . . .”
Lucas pressed his lips against mine, soft and fast as if he’d closed his hand over my mouth. “Shut up, Luna.”
I did. And he kissed me again.
To be fair, I only let it last for about ten seconds before I started trying
to push him away again, but that was enough. Lucas was very gentle, cool, and sweet, and he fired every one of the instincts that the were had, the ones that overrode my human sense a lot more often than I’d like.
“I can’t,” I whispered frantically against his mouth. “Please understand . . . I won’t do this to Dmitri . . .”
Lucas breathed out, his free hand on my neck. “You’re so goddamn good and pure, Luna. I’d think it was an act if you weren’t so earnest.” He closed his eyes for a second. “Still, all good things must come to an end.”
“What?” I said with a dumb-blonde blink. Lucas smiled, showing just the tips of his teeth.
“I’m still hungry.” His teeth struck at my neck, close to the spot where my scars rode, and I screamed, shoving him in earnest.
“Why fight?” Lucas said, pinning my arms to my sides. “You know that sooner or later someone is going to put it in you.”
“Get off me, you fucking psychopath!” I snarled, and twisted one hand free. I dug my thumb into his bullet wound, hard.
Lucas howled, the sound from the forest. Somewhere in the cottage, glass shattered and I went momentarily deaf.
We split apart, panting, me with a scraped neck and Lucas with a newly bleeding shoulder. “Luna?” he said in confusion, backing away from me. Understandable, because I was heading for my gun in the desk drawer by the entry. “Luna, what happened . . .” He looked at his shoulder in surprise. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry . . .”
I yanked open the drawer and got a clip, too angry to care.
“This is all wrong . . .” Lucas got his hand on the doorknob. “Luna, you have to believe me that I’m sorry. I’m leaving. I’ll . . . we’ll talk later.” He ran out of the cottage, the screen door flapping.
I was still sitting on the sofa with my gun when Sunny pulled up. She stopped in the doorway, eyebrow sliding up. “Is this a bad time?”
Second Skin Page 23
