In My Skin

by Shannon McKenna

  An almost inaudible moaning sound stopped her. It didn’t seem faked. It sounded like someone in pain. An accident victim or …

  Dani listened for sirens. Nothing yet. Then she heard another low, grinding moan.

  She eased toward the back door and peeked through the pane of glass, looking down this time. The porch light revealed a bright red smear on the steps, and then a man’s sprawled legs.

  Holy shit. Someone was lying on her porch. Someone who was wounded.

  She threw the door open and crouched down. The guy was short, dark, extremely thin. He lay on his side, his hand against his shirt, which was torn wide open over his bleeding chest.

  He looked up into her face. She gasped in shock. “Naldo?”

  “Dani.” His voice was thick and slurred.

  “Oh my God. What happened to you?”

  He moaned, unable to speak. She forced herself to focus. “Don’t move, Naldo. Stay down.” She scrambled up, dropping her phone, and ran back into the kitchen for clean tea towels, pulling open drawers. Bang. Not in that drawer. Bang. That one. She grabbed several and dashed back to find Naldo somehow dragging himself over the threshold of the open door.

  “Whoa!” She seized him under the armpits and pulled him all the way inside, trying to be careful and gentle. “I got you. Let me do the work.” He was so thin and scrawny. Always had been, but he was almost skeletal now.

  They’d been troubled kids back in the day. Forever in the deepest of shit and never escaping the consequences. Best friends, come hell or high water, with a powerful bond.

  Then, about six years ago, Naldo had vanished. She’d looked everywhere for him, worried sick. No trace of him had ever turned up.

  Years had crawled by…and nothing.

  “Can you talk?” she asked.

  He gritted his teeth. “Y-yes.” A fading whisper. “Hurts, though.”

  “Stay with me,” she said, keeping her gaze on his unfocused eyes. Keeping him in this world. Naldo let out a cry as Dani pressed a folded tea towel against his chest wound.

  Her dropped phone rang. She glanced at the screen. The 911 operator came on, calling her back. Why? She realized that the faint sound of a siren had faded away.

  Fuck. The police had to be all over that arena for the big concert.

  Dani reached with her free hand, tapped the screen to connect the call and activated speakerphone. She explained and gave her address again when asked. “Send an ambulance,” she said. “Not for me. For a friend. He’s been stabbed. Hurry.” Her voice sounded tinny and small in her own ears. He might bleed out, she wanted to shriek.

  Naldo stared up at the ceiling. His eyes looked vague and blank.

  Do not die. Do not die.

  Her training kept right on mechanically doing what needed to be done.

  The operator said something she didn’t fully hear. “… will be there in mumblemumble minutes…” Something like that. Naldo lifted his hand but not for long. It fell onto her bare thigh, right below her frayed shorts and slid off again, leaving a bloody handprint above her knee.

  She circled her fingers around his wrist, feeling for a pulse. Irregular. Barely there. Naldo was in shock and going down fast.

  His dark eyes were sunk deep into their shadowy sockets, but they had a crazy glow, and his pupils looked strange, one larger than the other. The blood dripping onto the kitchen floor made her gently turn his head to see if—

  Yes. He was bleeding out of his ear. Brain trauma.

  Do not die.

  His face gleamed with sweat, though his skin was cool and clammy. “Dani,” he croaked. “Don’t have much time. Have to…tell you—”

  “Later. Don’t worry, I’m sticking to you like glue, buddy.”

  “Can’t wait,” he whispered feebly. “Almost gone.”

  “Help is on the way. I’m here. Look at me.”

  He did, raising his hand again like he wanted to touch her face. It spasmed into a claw that hooked his torn shirt, opening it more. Dani hissed between her teeth at the sight of the nasty slash dripping fresh blood. The tea towel she’d used was soaked. She tossed it aside and pressed a dry one against the wound.

  Then she saw the scars on his sunken chest. Someone had carved the living shit out of him. But it had happened long before whatever had happened tonight.

  Just looking at that ugly, snarled crosshatch of raised white marks made her sick at heart. She might never know who’d tortured him, but if she did and when she did …

  He reached up, shifting the tea towel so that his fingers pushed on the side of the wound, not over it. Blood welled out, gushing down his chest.

  “No!” She cried out in protest and tried to stop him, but he batted her hand away in a surge of strength.

  Then something caught the light. Even smeared with blood, it gleamed as it poked out of the edge of the wound. Bright and metallic.

  Naldo groped for it, gasping as the pressure of his fingers popped it out of his ravaged flesh, along with another rush of blood.

  It rolled over his chest and clinked on the floor tiles. A bloody metal capsule. A bullet? Didn’t look like one. Didn’t look like anything she’d ever seen, in fact.

  She covered the wound with the tea towel and pressed down, fighting panic. Where was the goddamn ambulance? She could answer that question. Picking up overgrown brats who’d overdosed on bad molly in the mosh pit at the arena. While her best friend in the world once upon a time lay here dying on her kitchen floor.

  His mouth quivered, trying to form words. “J-j-juvie,” he gasped out. “Listen, Dani. Juvie. It’ll show you the key.”

  “Show me what?” She was trying to calculate how much blood he might have lost before he got to her door, and he was raving now, irrational, his mind going back to their long-ago stint in juvenile detention. “I don’t want to remember that place.”

  “No. No. It’s in your skin now.” His voice had gained a little strength.

  “What about my skin? You’re the one who’s bleeding, Naldo.”

  “Juvie,” he panted out. “I’m sorry to put it on you. So sorry. No choice.”

  “It’s OK.” But she was totally bewildered.

  “You have to help her, Dani. I tried. Didn’t…couldn’t…”

  “Help who?”

  “Ivy. Please…help Ivy.”

  Dani shook her head, still lost. “Who is she? Someone we met in juvie? I don’t remember an Ivy.”

  He breathed in heavy wheezing gasps, white-rimmed eyes staring wildly. “Manticore. Watch out for them. They’ll…come after you now. I put you in danger.”

  “Naldo, enough. The ambulance will be here soon. Whatever happened, you’re safe now.”

  “No time left. You gotta stop them.” Fluid was bubbling in his throat. He stopped to cough, wincing. “You’re strong. Smart. You could try…to stop them.”

  His voice trailed off. His pulse fluttered. The tea towel was soggy with blood but the gaping wound wasn’t pumping it out. Maybe he would live.

  Of course. If her magic chant—do not die—actually worked. If only.

  Time was running out. Naldo had the look and vibe of someone sliding past the point of no return, probably because of what was going on inside his skull, about which she could do exactly nothing, and where was that fucking ambulance? A distant wail grew faintly louder.

  Dani grabbed a fresh tea towel with her red, sticky hand, folded it and pressed it to his chest. “Stop who? Stay with me, buddy. You’re gonna be OK.”

  “No. I’m done,” he whispered. “Too much stim. Coming apart. Sorry.”

  “Don’t say that!” There was a frantic edge to her voice that she couldn’t control. He was slipping away. She’d waited for Naldo to come back for years. Here he was at last, but mortally wounded.

  What a fucking cosmic joke.

 
She focused on his other hand for the first time, and saw a flash of steel. His fingers clutched a small but deadly looking knife, drenched in blood.

  A horrible thought came to her. “Naldo…did you cut yourself?”

  His eyes flickered open. Blood trickled from his nostrils. “Had to.” A faint puff of breath. “Juvie. Read it. Help Ivy. Stop them. You always wanted to stop people from…hurting. That’s…what you do.”

  “You have to help me,” she told him desperately. “Come on, Naldo! Don’t do this to me! It’s not fair! I just found you!”

  He could no longer hear her. He was unconscious, his heartbeat barely perceptible.

  All she could do was hold the towel to his chest, which no longer even seemed to rise and fall, and stare at the gray stillness stealing over his face.

  Like a shadow on a tomb.

  Chapter 2

  Blue flashing light sliced through the trees as an ambulance siren wailed. Luke faded back into the foliage after he finally got a good look at Daniela LaSalle. She’d appeared briefly at the front door to yank it open for the EMTs before running back into the kitchen at the back of the house.

  Until then he’d only caught brief glimpses of her. Even when he slunk through the bushes around to the back of the place to get a better look through the kitchen window. She’d been crouched down on the floor almost the whole time.

  She was tall, curvy. Golden skin. Her black curly hair bounced wildly. She moved quickly. Her voice was low and strong. Stressed, but under control.

  No way he could get the courier away from here now. He ignored the endless stream of increasingly violent battle plans he was getting via ASP.

  A Manticore courier showing up in an emergency room would be a complicated scenario whether or not the guy survived. Which would depend on the ER trauma team’s skill, and the courier’s injuries, whatever they were.

  He hung back in the shadows and watched the ambulance pull up, a cop car right behind it. EMTs hurried up the walk toward the front door, lugging heavy satchels.

  After a few minutes, an EMT came back out. He and a guy who’d been waiting in the back of the ambulance unloaded a gurney and hustled back into the house with it.

  Luke moved closer, careful to stay out of the cop’s line of sight, amping up his auditory implants to listen to the rapid-fire talk and crackling radios. Airway open. Single penetration wound. Possible hemorrhagic shock.

  Naldo, she’d called him. So LaSalle knew the guy. Had history with him. But was Naldo a first or last name? It wasn’t enough info to do a dive on him.

  Daniela LaSalle came out with the gurney crew, her anxious gaze focused on the man strapped to it as they lifted it into the ambulance. After a brief conversation with the driver, she jumped into a Mazda parked on the street in front of her house. Off they went, the Mazda following, as sirens started up again.

  Luke waited until the ambulance turned the corner to go to his car.

  No rush now. He knew exactly where it was going. Which left his attention free for a deep dive into LaSalle’s life as he drove. Beyond his sensory augmentation, muscle and bone reinforcements and combat stim, the Midlands researchers had trained him to use brain implants to interface with electronics way back in the day. When he was a kid trying to survive that place.

  Another year locked in another cage had honed that ability far beyond the Midlands researchers’ original intentions. He’d used those long, empty hours of captivity to practice total brain control. Particularly during the times that Mark or Braxton had stun-coded him into total immobility.

  When he couldn’t move his body, he’d focused on teaching himself to sucker-punch those bastards with his naked brain. Because fuck them all.

  Which meant that at this point, hands-free, device-free wireless hacking into databanks and rapid-scanning their contents was as easy for him as daydreaming. He barely had to think about it. He rode the data-stream wherever he needed to go.

  Her social media was first, just a quick overview, saving all her data and contacts in his mental archives for more careful analysis later on. She called herself Dani, and was a Sagittarius. He lingered on a Facebook photo from a holiday party at the hospital. She liked red velvet cupcakes. She wore a low-cut black sweater and had a half-eaten red and white cupcake in her hand. She had a gap between her two front teeth. He liked it.

  Two boneheaded bozos in the picture were gawking openly at her cleavage.

  The DMV was next. Their half-assed encryption had more holes than Swiss cheese. He checked out her driver’s license photo. The holographic overlay made her look slightly pissed off. She had a few speeding tickets on file, duly paid.

  He perused a newspaper article about a local free clinic serving the community in multiple ways. Great picture of her, arms flung around her fellow volunteers. Wide grin, sexy dimples. Add that to the sweet gap between those white teeth, the direct, striking green eyes, the defiant jut to her chin. She looked tough. Tough was good. Hot. Not that Daniela LaSalle’s hotness was relevant to his, uh, mission. Just to him personally.

  Things got tricky once he got to the ER. He left the Porsche in the hospital parking area and went inside. Dani and the courier had gone in the ambulance bay, but he had to slip in the front entrance, somehow avoiding notice. Not that easy for a guy of his size, but he got lucky, arriving at the same time as a grizzled old man who staggered and moaned, held up under his armpits by his adult sons. He followed them right in, like part of their family. Sat near them. Kidney stones, their anxious conversation revealed. Sounded bad.

  Luke gulped data while the triage nurse started the interview with the guy who had kidney stones, searching for the passcode signal to open the big doors that divided the intake area from the ER. Didn’t take long to find it.

  A crying woman burst in the doors screaming about her boy, who’d gotten himself fucked up at the rock concert still thumping its bass beat through the whole town. Everyone looked her way, including the triage nurse and the security guard. His cue to ping the hacked signal to the double doors and walk right on into the ER.

  The corridors inside were crowded with medical personnel, family members, staffers pushing high gurneys with patients strapped onto them, people slumped in wheelchairs. He spotted a cop leaning over a reception desk further down the hall, shooting the shit with a red-haired lady behind the desk who wore rose-print scrubs. The cop looked busy, but Luke made a quick turn off that corridor anyway.

  A peek through an open door revealed an empty exam room with a white lab coat flung over the back of a chair. Luke ducked inside and grabbed it. It stretched way too tight over his shoulders and back, but if he tried not to breathe the seams might not split for a while. More eyes might slide past him without stopping.

  He kept moving purposefully, reaching out with his auditory enhancements for the specific timbre of Dani LaSalle’s voice. Hoping he could identify it in the noisy place.

  He finally caught it and tracked the soft sound through the ER until he caught a glimpse of her sitting in a glassed-in nurse’s station.

  Her distress blared at him like red strobe lights. Multiple signals, small in themselves, summed up into a silent scream of grief and frustration.

  The courier was dying. And she knew the guy. Cared about him intensely.

  They’d taken Naldo away. Up to surgery, most likely. Nothing new in the hospital database yet about his condition. Luke double-checked to be sure.

  Dani LaSalle just waited, hunched over. The gold of her skin was washed out in the brutal white glare of the hospital lights. Blood was spattered all over her, drying to a dark red. Her dark ringlets seemed to have lost some of their bounce. The in-your-face set of her jaw that he’d admired in her photos was not in evidence now. She looked shattered.

  Another nurse in scrubs came into Luke’s field of vision and handed Dani a cup of coffee. The nurse murmured something, patting her
on the shoulder. Dani looked up at her and tried to smile. She failed. Her hands trembled as they held the paper cup.

  He could roughly estimate her body temperature from a distance with thermal imaging. Too low. She needed a sweater. A lab coat. Anything.

  Damn. She shouldn’t be here alone. Someone should be here with her, an arm around her shoulder. Not just a busy co-worker. Someone she knew personally. A mom, a sister, a brother, a friend.

  Several staffers brushed past him. The corridor was full of people. He had to keep moving.

  He pushed onward and dived for more info on her family as he did another full circuit. No father listed on her birth certificate. Mother, deceased seven years ago. No siblings or relatives. Huh. So much for that.

  For the next hour or so, he cycled slowly through the place like a restless shark, disappearing from time to time in bathrooms and empty examining rooms to break the rhythm but always circling back around to catch a fresh glimpse of Dani LaSalle, hunched in her chair over her untouched coffee, silently waiting. There was a bloody splotch on her bare leg, which looked shapely and strong even in the baggy sweat-pant shorts.

  But he shouldn’t be thinking about any of that. Not here, not now.

  Then again, any guy with a pulse would, if he got a good look at Dani LaSalle. And he was real conscious of his pulse right now. He willed it to slow. Keep focused.

  He concentrated on looking purposeful and busy as he walked, mentally sifting through the info that all the databases of the world had stored on Dani LaSalle.

  Interesting stuff. Checkered past. Troubled childhood. Her mom had died of cancer while incarcerated. Damn. Obsidian would have gone nuts for this girl if they had come across her. The combination of smart, angry and completely unprotected, oh fuck, yeah. They would have eaten her up with a spoon.

  He lingered over LaSalle’s childhood medical history. A broken arm, a sprained wrist, dislocated shoulders more than once, broken ribs, even a broken nose, all while she was a kid living with her mom and her mom’s worthless boyfriends.