Second Skin

by Caitlin Kittredge

  The fetish ate, jaws twitching like it was alive, and Lucas writhed. His screams turned into whimpers, and finally he could barely breathe. As Donal watched with a smug expression, I grabbed him by the throat and bent him over a gravestone.

  “Why? He did his job!” I tightened my grip. “You got him possessed by a fucking dead god! You made him take down all of the pack leaders—anyone who posed a fucking threat.” I warmed, seeing all the pieces of what Donal had done fall together in my mind. “You made yourself god. Wasn’t that enough?”

  Donal’s goons dragged me off, and I fought, kicking out at whatever I could hit. Macleod coughed and straightened his collar. “Except for you, and that’s a real shame, missy.” He walked up and slapped me, splitting my bottom lip. “For the choking. You need manners.” On the ground, Lucas moaned softly, his eyes rolled back in his head. He was human, blood streaming from a hundred shallow bite marks all over his body.

  “You can’t just cut out the opposition,” said Donal. “You’ve got to solidify your position. And there’s nothing like a little apocalypse to do that.” He took Lucas’s silver knife away from him and drove it through Lucas’s chest in an economical movement. Lucas twitched and went still. Donal wiped off the knife and gave it to the goon not holding me.

  “That’s the blood. Get me the sage and that printout I have to read from.” He checked his watch. “Our mutual friend will hold up his end. Before tonight is out, I’ll be the only pack were in Nocturne City worth considering.”

  Before I could articulate my thoughts, which right at that moment ran to Fuck, the ground began to vibrate ever-so-slightly, as if a train were about to pass us by.

  “You think the packs will just welcome you in? Alpha of alphas? Some kind of gods-damn kingdom?” I shouted at Donal. He lit the sage stick and began to smudge the air.

  “Yes, when I stop the Wiskachee from feeding on their spineless hides.”

  He held up his bloody hand, letting it drip over the patchy earth of the cemetery. “Wiskachee gen kah, muscun ne kah. Nis kee.” Translating ostensibly for my benefit, Donal said. “Wiskachee, I come to you now with the blood of the unwary. I kneel.”

  Donal knelt down and pressed his hands into the earth. “I come to you now with anger in my heart, and I kneel.”

  The shaking increased exponentially, rising and falling like something were breathing below us in a great chamber.

  Donal raised his palms upward and I felt something unpleasant wrap around us, heavier and hotter than the wet air from the bay. “I come to you now with hunger in my soul, Wiskachee, and I kneel,” Donal whispered. “Come to me, devourer.”

  As Donal touched his bloody palms to the earth once more, the third earthquake hit.

  The two weres looked alarmed, but Donal only laughed. “Good man, Danny. Right on time!”

  I thought of the three working circles behind the cabins, the ones that had absorbed my unwary blood. It wasn’t blood magick or caster magick, but they worked something all the same, and it was here.

  There was a roar like I was in the path of a semi truck and the ground rippled underneath me, throwing me onto my side and smacking me against a headstone. Donal grabbed on to a stone angel. The two thugs fell on their asses. I was free, if a bit concussed.

  All around the cemetery, graves began to uproot, stones flung into the air as the ground shook. Coffins rose through the shuddering, cracking ground, spilling their contents free. I clung to the headstone I’d hit, feeling a few fingernails snap off as the force of the quake yanked me back and forth.

  At the center of it all Donal watched calmly as a chasm opened at his feet and disgorged a host of old-style pine boxes, their nails shrieking as the dry wood shattered on impact.

  “Wiskachee!” his voice carried over the roaring and shaking, the sound of car alarms and falling brick from the street. “Wiskachee! Come!”

  Just as it had risen to a crescendo faster than I could react, the shaking stopped. A crack in the earth had opened in front of Donal and the still body of Lucas, mummified and embalmed bodies littered everywhere as if an enormous dog had dug them up. From the city beyond, I could see fire and imagined I could hear the screams that went with it.

  “Disappointed?” I called to Donal, forcing my vibrating hands to let go of the headstone. My speech was thick and I wiggled my jaw, feeling a fresh bruise from where I’d hit rock.

  “No,” said Donal, his eyes bright with reflected flames. “It worked out exactly.“

  From the turned earth near his foot, a hand emerged. It was gnarled and nut-brown, with long gray nails that looked sharp as butcher knives. Another hand followed it, arms, a head full of wild iron gray hair. The thing pulled itself out of the grave chasm hand-over-hand, sliding along until, grunting, it came upright.

  “Wiskachee,” Donal murmured. The thing scented the wind with thin, snake-like nostrils and then grinned, displaying teeth that would make any Wendigo weep in envy. They shouldn’t fit, teeth that big, I thought desperately, but Wiskachee’s fangs were blacker than an ink bottle spilled in the night, and razored at the tips like steak knives.

  Around his feet, a host of brakichaks spilled up from the chasam, giggling and chittering as they scrambled away into the night.

  “That’s it?” I said, trying to keep my mouth moving so my mind wouldn’t be able to fully process what was happening. If I let myself stop and think, I’d panic. “That’s your hunger god? He looks like a damn piece of lawn statuary. I could take him home and stick him in the rosebushes.”

  Donal laughed silently, his shoulders shaking. “Her,” he told Wiskachee. “You can have her.”

  Wiskachee, at his full height, came to maybe my collarbone, with his dirty gray hair making it to my nose. He was long-armed and potbellied and had bright pure black eyes, like the daemons I’d encountered. Wiskachee was no daemon, though. His little stooped shoulders and his skin like a wrinkled, rotted fruit contained power I could taste. When Donal told him to have at me, he smiled, child-like, and hissed something in the Wendigo language too fast for me to hear.

  “Take as much as you want,” Donal answered. “You have until I call you back to earth.”

  Wiskachee looked at me, smiled, and winked. Then his long arm lanced out and embedded claws in Donal’s chest. I realized the gray around him was spectral, and that he hadn’t sunk his claws into flesh but into the magick that made Donal a were. Black flowed in to cover the bright, misty green that hung around Donal’s spirit. I felt a sharp pull as he began to suck it all away, and I started to scream in concert with Macleod.

  Donal began to change, losing his skin and hair and becoming the construct of Wiskachee, like his niece. Wiskachee gloried in his death, and I buried my head on my knees, trying to keep the feedback of ambient magick away from me, because Pathing in such an atmosphere would probably kill me.

  As suddenly as they’d started, the sounds stopped. I opened my eyes and saw something wholly different than when I’d closed them. Wiskachee was no longer stooped and ancient, clothed in gray scraps of power. His corporeal figure remained, but behind it was a vast shadow that rose into the sky and expanded outward as the volume in my head increased. This was Wiskachee, this great towering hunger that blotted out everything else. His corporeal construct couldn’t hold the ancient, bottomless nothing that was at the center of his power.

  “Stop it,” I tried to say, but screaming seemed to be the only sound left to me. Wiskachee laughed, his shadow-face opening a mouth the size of my car to display serrated teeth.

  “He’ll taste them all,” Donal hissed from his new mouth. “Every last person in this city sucked dry.”

  I rose and ran at Donal. He turned and extended his taloned hands toward me, and I felt the pain from five yards away as he sank his claws into my aura.

  “Bad girl,” he rumbled thickly. “Trying that same old trick. I can drink your soul down now, little wolf. Any other brilliant plans?”

  The mocking tone in his voice did i
t. Even when I’m nearly dead and being psychically drained, being patronized by crazy people is not something that I’ll take smiling. Around my growing fangs, I snarled.

  “Just one.”

  “Fighting back.” Donal sighed. “How I’d hoped you wouldn’t. Cheapens the moment.” He closed the space between our physical bodies, drawing back his talons to sink into my heart. I stayed still.

  “Terror-stricken,” Donal said. “Delicious.”

  “Waiting for you to get close,” I corrected, and jammed the needle holding the tincture into his neck.

  Donal howled and windmilled away from me, the spell lighting up his veins as the magick of Wiskachee fought with Sunny’s working. He flickered back and forth, limbs and organs shifting and re-forming as blood sprayed from his mouth, leaked from his eyes, and he fell over, convulsing.

  With a great effort, I blocked out the screams and stared into Donal’s face, into those black, amused eyes that were like the button eyes on a particularly creepy child’s doll.

  “He’s a killer,” I told Wiskachee, pointing at Donal’s lashing body. I was very weak, held up largely by Donal’s claws, and my voice was too weary to come out anything but a whisper. “He killed your sacrifice. There was no willing blood spilled here today.”

  Wiskachee held my gaze for a moment. “Tauthka du dan?” he breathed.

  “No!” Donal moaned. “Why would you listen to a wolf instead of me? I brought you back. I believed.”

  “Try telling the truth a little more often, Donal,” I said. “You might die less.”

  Wiskachee hissed, his lips curling back over his teeth until all that showed in his face were razor edges.

  “No,” Donal bubbled, his lungs sucking with fluid.

  “No, nonono . . .”

  “I am free,” Wiskachee purred. “And hungry.” He made a move toward us, and Donal clawed at me, trying to shove me toward the hunger god.

  “Take her! Not me! I don’t deserve this!”

  Wiskachee swiped at us. I got the feeling he wasn’t very choosy. “Fuck off!” I screamed, kicking at him. The pain as our magicks brushed was extraordinary. I may have been outgunned, but I wasn’t going to let him feed on me, not without a fight . . .

  Something hit me from behind, shoving me out of Wiskachee’s reach. “You don’t touch her,” Lucas gasped.

  He was bleeding freely from his chest, staggering and blue around his lips and eyes from shock.

  Donal goggled at him from his prone position. “How . . .”

  “Hard to con,” said Lucas. “Even harder to mother-fucking kill.”

  Donal swiped at Lucas and I intercepted the swing, bending his wrist backward and snapping it in an easy motion. Lucas swayed on his feet, coughing, spitting black-red arterial blood from his lungs. “You think I didn’t know?” he snarled. “You think I hadn’t seen a fetish before? I wanted to kill them, all of them, and you let me.”

  I felt like I was going to be sick. “You let yourself be possessed?”

  “For the chance to kill those weres?” Lucas said, softly, fading out like a bad radio signal. “Absolutely.”

  “Lucas.” I started to shake. My own shock was catching up with me. “Lucas. Look at what you’ve done.”

  “I’m sorry, Luna,” he said. “But you wouldn’t understand.”

  Oh, Hex that. “I wouldn’t understand?” I screamed. “How dare you! How fucking dare you, Lucas? You put my city on the line and that’s all you have to say for yourself?”

  “My whole life was that treaty, poverty, and a father who beat me because of the rage inside him over what was done. The weres and the Wendigo ground under their heel. It’s not right and I’m going to burn it to the ground so that no one else goes through a life like mine. It’s a poison that needs to be expunged.”

  “The world is not black and white,” I whispered. “Weres and Wendigo . . . it doesn’t matter. You change it, you don’t burn it and start over. What was done to you was horrible, and wrong, but we get a life and we have to live it, Lucas.”

  Lucas went to his knees, tears streaming down his face. “I just wanted to make it better. Mend it, by smashing it. I had to try. I did what I had to do.”

  I looked back at Wiskachee, at that great shadow waiting to consume my city. “I am, too,” I told Lucas. Then I grabbed Donal and shoved him toward Wiskachee’s waiting arms.

  The claws went in, and Donal gave a scream. This time, it was entirely human and borne on pain. The blood drained from his face and the life light from his eyes, and I watched, transfixed for a moment as Wiskachee suspended Donal in his black shadow, draining him until he looked as if he’d been dead for a week.

  Wiskachee sighed, and again I felt the dead sensation in my head as he surveyed the city around him, head tilting as he listened to the screams. “So many to feed me. Your offering pleases me, wolf. I will be engorged.”

  “Hex that,” I said. “I was just distracting you with Macleod so I could get away.”

  I got to my feet and ran for all I was worth, flat-out toward the road. Behind me Wiskachee let out a howl and began to chase me, the ground shaking under his immens

  e power.

  CHAPTER 22

  I looked back only once while I ran, and saw Donal and Lucas still on the ground, Donal spent and Lucas corpse-still.

  Years later, it seemed, I fetched up against the Fairlane. Wiskachee’s magick made it hard to move, to think. Dimly, I knew he’d begun to feed on me, on everyone within reach. I was dizzy and my fingers shook so hard that for a long time I couldn’t turn the key in the ignition. I could hear whispers, screams, the sounds of a thousand souls that Wiskachee had already consumed.

  The Fairlane rumbled to life and I turned it up the hill, zigzagging between graves and heaves in the earth, accelerating until the cylinders screamed.

  Wiskachee was standing on the hill, and his shadow was visible now, growing with every mind that he touched and fed on. I aimed my grille for his physical body, the tiny potbellied target almost comical under the nightmare shadow form.

  I gunned it straight into him, and he hissed at me on the other side of my windshield, his mouth opening impossibly wide. His fingernails screeched along the hood as I put my foot to the floorboards, the Fairlane’s tachometer springing into the red zone.

  Carrying him forward, the car roared toward the lip of the chasm Wiskachee had crawled from, his screams reaching above the sound of the engine and his fists making hairline cracks across the windshield.

  I let go of the Fairlane’s wheel. “I’m sorry,” I told my car, and then I opened the door and dropped out, shoulder-first like the police academy taught us, tucking my legs up and tumbling and tumbling until I rolled to a stop against a grave.

  The Fairlane crested the edge of the chasm, suspended for a second, and then fell. The crash shook my teeth, and an orange fireball blossomed out of the crevasse with a whoosh as the gas tank caught.

  I got myself up and tottered over to the edge to look down, to be a witness so I could be sure, later, that Wiskachee was gone.

  He was still screaming, pinned under the burning wreck of the Fairlane, and I watched as bits and pieces of his shadow form began to ash and drift upward on the hot wind of the fire. The flames licked his skin, blackened it, turned it to fine powder and then to nothing at all.

  When Wiskachee stopped screaming, I turned and limped toward the cemetery entrance, weaving and dipping as if I were seventeen again and drunk on cheap wine coolers, trying to act natural on my way home so the cops wouldn’t pull me over.

  I screeched when something grabbed my ankle. “Wolf . . . die . . . ,” Donal Macleod moaned. He was desiccated, his eyes bulging from their taut sockets, but his grip was death.

  “Pack it in, you sorry son of a bitch,” I said, and shook him off. “Alpha of alphas, my ass.”

  “At least I strove for greatness!” he cried. “You’ll always be a gutterwolf!”

  “Mr. Macleod?” One of the thugs emerg
ed from behind a hillock, looking around at the wreckage. “Sir?”

  I pointed at the goon. “Go back to your pack house. Tell your leader what he’s been up to.”

  The two weres looked at each other, and then hauled ass out of the graveyard. I took my handcuffs off my belt with numb fingers and clapped one end around Donal’s wrist, the other to the handle of the mausoleum door. “They’ll kill me!” Donal cried. “The pack’s justice . . .”

  “Is nothing compared with mine,” I told him. “I’ll see you when I testify against you at your trial, you piece of shit.”

  Lucas had no pulse when I knelt next to him. After a few seconds his chest jerked and heaved, and then he went still again.

  I should hate the guy, but I couldn’t. I put my hand over his wounds instead, cold blood coating my palm. “Now we both know what it feels like,” I murmured. “If you die on me, I’m gonna be pretty fucking pissed off.”

  Lucas made no response, his face drawn and blood-spattered. I sat next to him, touching him, until I saw flashing lights and a SWAT van bumping over the road toward me.

  McAllister jumped out of the lead car and wrapped his arms around me.

  “Mac?” I goggled at him.

  “You were maybe expecting Lon Chaney?” he asked, holding me at arm’s length.

  “After the night I’ve had,” I told him, “don’t even joke about that.” I put a hand to my head, still finding fresh blood. “Oh, gods. Where’s Sunny?”

  Mac jerked his thumb at the passenger’s door, which erupted to reveal my cousin. “Riding shotgun. Flagged us down when we got here. She can be as stubborn and insistent as you, Wilder. Must be a genetic thing.”

  Sunny ran over and threw her arms around me, so hard that I stumbled and fell against the hood of Mac’s car. “You stopped it,” she whispered.

  “Stopped what?” Mac demanded. “What the Hex is going on here, Wilder? Is that fire I see up on the cemetery hill? And who the hell is the stiff?”