Skinwalker jy-1

by Faith Hunter

  Across from the fountain, sown with dozens of healthy plants, were three large boulders and half a dozen smaller ones brought in by the crane Troll had mentioned. Katie was right. The gardener had done a good job; the boulders looked like they had been here forever.

  I set the kickstand and walked the garden, looking for wires, scuffs on the brick, signs of work other than the gardener’s. I spotted them fast, a scuff near the left back corner, too high to be from a spade, and a well-concealed electrical line running from the security light down to the brick wall.

  I pulled off the straps that secured my shotgun and set it aside. The jacket followed, and, sitting down on a conveniently placed bench, I tugged off my boots. I gathered three loose cobblestones and dropped them into my T-shirt. They landed against my skin at my waist, held in place by my belt. Then I pulled the bench to the wall, spat on my hands for effect more than necessity, and leaped.

  The brick wall was irregular, with some bricks forming depressions and others sticking out just enough for a rock climber to know what to do with them. I hadn’t climbed Everest, but I’d lived in the Appalachians and had taken a few classes. I had taken at least a few classes in lots of things.

  I caught a slightly protuberant brick and swung out, catching another with my toes, pushing up for a second handhold, another toehold. I reached the top of the fence and studied it. There was no barbed wire, no broken glass embedded in concrete, no trip wires. Nothing. A half-assed job, security-wise.

  I pulled myself to the top and stood, surveying the yard next door. A small dog, more hair than meat, growled at me. Beast was rising in my mind as the moon rose and darkness fell, and she spat at it, not that the stupid little dog could tell. I reined her back and, because she understood that the safety of the den was paramount, she let me. I was better at human things, and she didn’t mind me taking over as long as it wasn’t dangerous. Then it got a bit harder to submerge her instincts.

  I walked along the wall, taking in the scents of the place, the brick warm beneath my bare feet as I scrutinized the garden with eyes and nose and considered the walls on the houses adjacent to my freebie-house wall. I came to the back corner where the scuff was and toed a tiny lump, brushing away dirt that had been carefully sprinkled there. I reached down and pulled the miniature security camera from the duct tape holding it in place. The tape made little snapping sounds as it broke.

  The electrical wires powering the camera came free as well, and I turned the camera lens to me, holding it level. I smiled at Katie, or maybe Troll. Or maybe a security firm. I shook my head. I held up the index finger of my free hand and shook it slowly side to side. Then I raised the camera and brought it down on the wall, lens first, and broke it into pieces. I did the same thing to the other two cameras.

  I wasn’t worried about ticking off Katie. My Web site was firm about my privacy requirement, and I insisted it be part of my contract. What could she say? “Oh, dearie me, I forgot they were there . . .”? Yeah, right.

  When I was sure I had all the ones within easy reach, I positioned myself and studied the camera mounted on the neighbor’s wall. I didn’t want to smash the window next to it. I pulled my T-shirt out and caught the three cobblestones. I hefted them, getting their balance and weight. I had never been as good at throwing as I was at other sports. I threw like a girl. It took all three stones but I smashed the last camera.

  Satisfied, I dropped from the wall, not bothering with the brick handholds. With the cameras gone I didn’t need them. I gathered up my belongings and, barefoot, unlocked the door with the smaller key on the big ring. I went through the house fast, locating cameras. I busted two hidden behind grilles, one in an air return, one in a fanlight in the twelve-foot-high ceiling, which I hit with a broom handle. Several others. Finding security devices in a house was a lot harder than in a garden. I’d have to go over it later in better detail, but for now, I had a lot to do. First things first—a call to Molly.

  Molly, a powerful earth witch and my very best friend, answered, children giggling and splashing water in the background. “Hey, witchy woman. I’m here. I got the gig,” I said. Molly gave an ululating yell, and I laughed with her.

  Vamps and witches came out of the closet in 1962, when Marilyn Monroe tried to turn the U.S. president in the Oval Office and was killed by the Secret Service. There was a witness, Beverly Stumpkin, a White House maid, who ran for her life. The Secret Service quickly set up a suicide scenario for the actress and staked her in her bedroom. Not that anyone believed she had offed herself with a wooden stake to the heart and a garroting wire that beheaded her. The government tried to track down the maid, but she got away clean. Sloppy work all the way around.

  Some gossip rag got wind of the real Monroe story and managed to do what the Secret Service couldn’t.They found the maid. Within weeks the lid was blown off the age-old myth. Vamps, and then witches, came out of the closet. If there had been other supernatural beings, it seemed like a good time for them to come out too, but so far no elves, pixies, wood nymphs, or merpeople had appeared. No weres or skinwalkers or shifters of any kind either. I was a singularity in a human world that wouldn’t like me if it knew about me, which meant I had to keep my secret close. And that meant that I had to live without true backup. Except for Molly.

  “I’m proud of you,” she said. “Here, talk to the dirtiest child in the world. Maybe she’ll let me finish her bath.” The phone made muted rubbing noises, as if she held it under her arm. I waited patiently.

  Molly Meagan Everhart Trueblood, the witch who had spelled my saddlebags, knew all about me. Mol came from a long line of witches. Not the kind in a pointy black hat with a cauldron in the front yard, and not the kind like the Bewitched television show. Witches aren’t human, though they can breed with humans, making little witches about fifty percent of the time, and normal humans the other fifty.

  Young witches have a poor survival rate, especially the males, most dying before they reach the age of twenty from various kinds of cancers. The ones who live through puberty, however, tend to live into their early hundreds. Mol was forty, looked thirty, and was fearless.

  I had wondered whether witches and skinwalkers had similar genetics.The witch trait is X linked, passed from generation to generation on the X chromosome. About ninety percent of the witches who live to maturity are female; only a few sorcerers, the term some call the male witch, survive in each generation. Nobody knows why witches have such a poor survival rate, but Molly was one of the lucky ones when it came to kids. So far. She had married a sorcerer, Evan, and they had a son, Little Evan, and a daughter, Angelina—Angie. Both have the witch X gene. The girl is a prodigy. And she is only six years old.

  Most witches come into their gift slowly, around puberty. Angie came into her gift at age five, and it was atomic bomb potent. Mol postulated that her daughter has a witch gene on both of her X chromosomes, one from her dad, one from her mom, which, if true, would make the girl one of the most powerful witches on the planet, and someone that everyone would want, from the U.S. government’s black ops programs, to the council of witches, to the Chinese, the Russians, you name it. And anyone who didn’t have her would want her dead. Molly kept Angie’s power level under wraps, a lot like I kept what I was under wraps. And she and Evan warded their children and their property with protection, healing, and lots of prayers.

  A delicate, sweet voice said, “Hi, Aunt Jane.” My heart started to melt. Beast stopped pushing and sat, panting, in my mind. Kits, she thought at me, happy.

  “Hi, Angie. Are you giving your mother a hard time in the bath?”

  “Yes. I’m being a bad girl.” She giggled again. “I played in the mud. I miss you. When you coming home?”

  “Soon. I hope. I’ll bring you a doll. What kind do you want?”

  “Long black hair and yellow eyes. Like you.”

  Cripes. My melting heart was a pile of goo. “I’ll see if I can find one,” I said past the lump in my throat. “For now, let your mama ge
t you clean, okay?” Molly had needed backup when Angie’s power erupted. I had been there for her and we had been friends ever since, back-to-back, including when I took down the rogue vamp’s blood-family last year in the Appalachian Mountains, rescuing her sister in the process.

  “Okay. Here, Mama. Aunt Jane wants you. And then she’s gonna go play.”

  Into the phone Molly said, “Play, huh?”

  “Yeah. You and Evan checked the wards around your house?”

  Molly made a sound, half pshaw, half grunt, and I heard water falling into water as she lifted Angelina out of the bath. “Twice tonight. You have fun. Call me.”

  “I will.” Feeling twenty pounds lighter, I left my belongings in the middle of the parlor floor and opened the fridge. Thirty pounds of fresh meat took up the center shelf. Beast hissed in anticipation, even though she hated to eat cold. I ripped the butcher paper off a five-pound stack, stuck it in the microwave for a bit, just enough to take the chill off, and, while it heated, gathered supplies. When the bell dinged, I carried the meat outside, a roll of paper towels under one arm, my travel pack and a zipper satchel under the other. Already it felt weird walking on two legs, as Beast moved up from the deeps into my thoughts.

  I set the stack of raw, bloody steaks on the ground and wiped my hands. Beast wanted to lick them, but I refrained. I had that much control left. I stripped off my clothes, leaving them in a pile. My stomach was rumbling. I was panting, salivating. Hungry, she thought at me.

  I am a skinwalker, and so far as I know, the last of my kind anywhere. If I have the right quantity of genetic material, I can take the shape of most any animal, though it’s easier if the species is the same mass as I am. Borrowing mass to fill out the genetic requirements of a larger animal is painful and dangerous, and I haven’t tried it often. It’s equally difficult to skinwalk in the body of a smaller animal, as I have to release mass, dump it somewhere, and that always means dumping some of what I am, some of my consciousness, and leaving it behind. The fear that it won’t be there when I return is enough to keep me my own size most of the time. Beast hissed at the thought; she didn’t like it when I shifted into the form of another animal.

  Beast. She is something outside my skinwalker nature—a whole other entity, sharing my body, and sometimes my mind. If I try to rein her in when she wants to come through, she sometimes forces her way in anyway; I don’t have complete control over her. And I know, in my bones, that if other skinwalkers exist, they don’t have a Beast soul living inside. I’m not sure how we ended up together, and thinking about it always leaves me feeling vaguely uneasy, though I have an inkling that Beast knows and is keeping it from me.

  I pulled the travel pack over my head and positioned the gold nugget I wear around my neck on a double gold chain, usually under my clothes, but now swinging free. Together, they looked like an expensive collar and tote, like a Saint Bernard rescue dog might have carried in the Swiss Alps. I bent over and scraped the gold nugget across the uppermost rock, depositing a thin streak of gold. It was like, well, like a homing beacon, among other things.

  Yesssss. Hunt, Beast thought at me. Big!

  Beast was ready to scope out this new territory, but she had an unfortunate aggressive tendency and had, upon occasion, taken on a pack of dogs, a wild boar, or some other animal it might have been smarter to leave alone. When I first shifted in a strange place, her aggressive tendencies always came to the fore and she demanded that I take on mass, adding to my natural one-hundred-twenty-plus pounds, drawing on the fetish of the African lion to skinwalk. “Big is dangerous,” I murmured to her. “We’re just looking around tonight. Big later.”

  She panted in derision. Big always better. Big now!

  But I could tell she wouldn’t push the issue. Beast, while always present in the depths of my consciousness, was talking to me as a separate entity now, as a self-aware creature with desires of her own. And for her, hunting was more important than winning an argument tonight.

  Going back to the steaks and the paper towels, I placed the three bloody vamp cloths on the ground, securing them with a pot of geraniums. I climbed the boulders and sat, the rock warm beneath me. Mosquitoes swarmed, biting. I had forgotten about them. Beast hissed.

  I opened the zipper bag and pulled out one of the bizarre necklaces inside, the one I used the most, like a totem or fetish, but so much more. The necklace of the mountain panther, commonly called the mountain lion. It was made of the claws, teeth, and small bones of the biggest female panther I had ever seen. The cat had been killed by a rancher in Montana during a legal hunt, the pelt and head mounted on his living room wall, the bones and teeth sold through a taxidermist. The mountain lion was hunted throughout the western United States but was extinct in the eastern states, or it had been. Some reports said panthers were making a comeback east of the Mississippi. One could hope. I didn’t have to use the necklace to shift into this creature—unlike other species, the memory of Beast’s form was always a part of me—but it was easier.

  I held the necklace and closed my eyes. Relaxed. Listened to the wind, the pull of the moon, still sickle shaped, hiding below the horizon. I listened to the beat of my own heart. Beast rose in me, silent, predatory.

  I slowed the functions of my body, slowed my heart rate, let my blood pressure drop, my muscles relax, as if I were going to sleep. I lay on the boulder, breasts and belly draping the cool stone in the humid air.

  Mind slowing, I sank deep inside, my consciousness falling away, all but the purpose of this hunt. That purpose I set into the lining of my skin, into the deepest parts of my brain, so I wouldn’t lose it when I shifted, when I changed. I dropped lower. Deeper. Into the darkness inside where ancient, nebulous memories swirled in a gray world of shadow, blood, uncertainty. I heard a distant drum, smelled herbed woodsmoke, and the night wind on my skin seemed to cool and freshen. As I dropped deeper, memories began to firm, memories that, at all other times, were half forgotten, both mine and Beast’s.

  As I had been taught so long ago—surely by a parent or perhaps a shaman?—I sought the inner snake lying inside the bones and teeth of the necklace, the coiled, curled snake, deep in the cells, in the remains of the marrow. Science had given it a name. RNA. DNA. Genetic sequences, specific to each species, each creature. For my people, for skinwalkers, it had always simply been “the inner snake,” the phrase one of very few things that was certain in my past.

  I took up the snake that rests in the depths of all beasts. And I dropped within. Like water flowing in a stream. Like snow falling, rolling down a mountainside. Grayness enveloped me, sparkling and cold as the world fell away. And I was in the gray place of the change.

  My breathing deepened. Heart rate sped up. And my bones . . . slid. Skin rippled. Fur, tawny and gray, brown and tipped with black, sprouted. Pain, like a knife, slid between muscle and bone. My nostrils widened, drawing deep.

  She fell away. Night came alive—wonderful, new scents, like mist on air, thick and dancing, like currents in stream, yet distinct. Salt. Humans. Alcohol. Fish. Mold. Human spices. Blood. I panted. Listened to sounds—cars, music from everywhere, voices talking over one another. Gathered limbs beneath, lithe and lissome—her words for me.

  Ugly man-made light, shadow-stung vision.Yet clear, sharp. She never saw like this. Scented like this. I stretched. Front legs and chest. Pulling back legs, spine, belly. Little clicks fell away. Things from her hair rolled off boulders. Delicately, with killing teeth, lifted necklace she dropped. Hopped from boulders. Landed, four-footed, balanced. Studied garden. No predators. No thieves-of-meat. Dropped necklace near food. Sniffed. Hack of disgust. Old meat. Dead prey. Long-cooled blood. Tip of tail twitched, wanting chase. To taste hot blood. But stomach rumbled. Always so, after change. Hunger. She left this, an offering.

  I ate. Long canines tearing into dead meat. Filled stomach. Cold food did not appease need to hunt. Afterward, licked blood from whiskers and face. Pack and collar in way, but . . . important. Her things.
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  Memory she buried under skin began to stir. Ahhh. Hunt. For one of them. Drew in night air. Delicate nostril membranes fluttering, expanding, relaxing. Many new smells, some with value, some without. Unimportant: close-by smell of flowers, fresh-turned earth, mouse cowering in boulders, small snake on brick. Important: fish, pungent, sour. Salt. Old, still water full of tiny living things. Houses, many, ancient wood and brick. Bike she rode. She—Jane.

  Strolled to it, muscles long and supple. Foul smells: gasoline, rubber, metal, wax, fainter smell of new paint. Magic tingle on whiskers. Good bike. Silent-not-dead now, roaring heart still. I approved of it and of her, sitting in wind, smelling world. Fast speed, too swift for hunters to follow. Her territory wherever she wished it to be. Jane hunted wide.

  Stepping with care, though new den was walled and safe from humans. Prowled garden and lower porch of house. Drank from water running over man-carved stone. A good place. I coughed softly, approving.

  Hunt, the command came again, from her. Long hairs along shoulders lifted in anticipation. Scented air. Food on breeze. Human food, dead, cooked. Human urine. Dog. Domesticated cat. Hacked in disapproval of being owned. Even she didn’t own me.

  Smells of den grounds settled in olfactory memory. Went to pot. Sniffed cloth trapped there. Drew in scent. Blood. Fear. Humans, three. Alive when blood spilled. One female, ovulating, ready to mate. One man, old, wizened. Likely stringy, tough. New smell to skin.

  Melanin, Jane whispered. He was a black man.

  Last one was male, no melanin, young, healthy. All smelled of fear.

  Beneath it all . . . was scent of rogue. Drew it in over tongue, over roof of mouth. Isolating. Parsing scent. Old. Very, very old. Anger. Madness. Many scents in layers, different parts of rogue.

  Complex scent, she thought. Like many scents overlapping, compounded. How strange. And what is that smell? Image of her wrinkling weak, useless human nose.