SkinThief

by Sonnet O'Dell

“You and your escort best come in then, but I extend my invitation into my home only for this one night.”

  Aram placed his foot gingerly across the threshold.

  “Understood, Ms. Toogood.”

  “Just so it is. Come through to the kitchen.”

  Virginia led the way, and Aram, unfamiliar with her home, seemed to be looking around with wonder but kept close behind Virginia so it wouldn’t seem obvious. He put me down on the island counter in the middle of the smallish kitchen, and Virginia furnished me with a saucer of milk. If I hadn’t been so thirsty I might have ignored it because it was embarrassing, but my walking had really tired me. I lapped it up with great abandon. Virginia looked at the amulet I had wrapped around my neck with great interest. I was very careful to think only about the milk and not how nice it would be to be in a human body again, even one as old as Virginia’s.

  “This is a powerful amulet. How did you come across it?”

  Through work. It was being used to commit a crime. I was just going to hold on to it until morning, Truth was going to buy it off me after that.

  “That woman,” Virginia scoffed. She didn’t much care for Truth or her little side business tracking down and selling magical items that Virginia thought should be under lock and key at the council of magic’s main headquarters in London. They had a section in the tower for these things, right next to the crown jewels, I’d heard.

  The money was more appealing than the alternative. The council has done nothing for me; I don’t see why I should hand it over to them.

  Virginia poured herself a cup of tea and nodded solemnly like she understood my point, even if she didn’t quite agree with it. Virginia still had a healthy respect for the council, as she had worked for it for so many years.

  “Rethink upon that; I think it might be a good bargaining chip.”

  Bargaining for what?

  “Well it seems to me that the best course of action would be to call the Grand Magus and have him come remove his spell from you so that you can track and switch yourself back with Nancy.”

  Would he really go for that?

  “If I explain to him what happened clearly, promised to hand him both the necklace and Nancy to turn back into a cat afterwards, then it’s possible. He is a reasonable man after all. I’ll give him a call.”

  Virginia sat down in her rocking chair that was in the corner, folded an old worn patchwork blanket over her legs and held up a hand. A cordless phone floated through the door and into her hand. I watched, amazed at how modern it looked. Virginia dialed a number from memory and waited for it to connect. I turned to look at Aram, who was patiently leaning against the sink, staring out of the window into what amounted to Virginia’s back garden. I admired the sculptured line of his chest where it flashed through his partly open shirt.

  Cassandra! came Virginia’s chiding voice in my head.

  I’m a cat, Virginia, not dead.

  But he is, child, which is my point. I turned back to look at her, and she was giving me a very serious glare. I gave a catty little shrug. Aram had been nothing but polite and patient while we had first what seemed like a one-sided conversation and now a silent one.

  I wanted to argue that I was not a child, but the fact that Virginia had lived my meager life so far three times over kind of stopped me in my tracks. It’s hard to argue status with someone that much older than you, which is why I would never think of arguing something like that with a vampire.

  Aram never thought of me or called me a child, and he was considerably older than both of us, which probably made Virginia hate his pursuit of me even further. The big bad vampire trying to seduce the child; that had to be Virginia’s take on it. I doubt even if she lived to see me turn thirty that she would consider my any more grown-up. I sighed and let her make the phone call.

  I didn’t believe for a minute that Virginia was as tight with the Grand Magus as one of his golfing buddies, but she had been a good enforcer, a renowned one. Both she and her deceased husband had been, in fact, and the Grand Magus had respected them, even held a fondness of them. So whenever Virginia called him, he took the call. This occasion was no different, and she traded banter with him for a little while, softening him to the point where she could bring up the reason she’d called. At least that was what I had picked up from her side of the conversation. I couldn’t hear what the Magus was saying, but I noticed a shift in Aram’s body language that told me his vampire-sensitive ears were hearing all of it loud and clear. Virginia mentioned the amulet.

  “Yep, I’d heard of it too, thought it was picked up when Farnsworth died couple of months back. I know he claimed he’d found it to a lot of people,” Virginia said, enticing the Magus. “Well, the reason I’m calling is that I happen to know the amulet itself is in the possession of Miss Farbanks.”

  The Magus replied with something that made both Virginia and Aram wrinkle their noses with displeasure.

  “Now I’ll try not to take offense at that remark about someone dear to me,” she said curtly, “but more to the point is that she is willing to hand over the amulet if you can help her out. You remember Nancy Barone.”

  Judging from the fact that Virginia didn’t go into greater detail, the Magus remembered Nancy. She was kind of hard to forget, or at least the damage she had caused was.

  “Cassandra had been looking after her imprisoned body. Why? Because she’s a sweet-natured girl who doesn’t have a cruel bone in her body, that’s why.”

  That was technically true. I’d been pushed before and said and done things I had regretted, and I had a couple of ex-boyfriends who would attest to those facts. I was as human as everybody else.

  “The amulet proved too great an opportunity for Nancy to pass up, and it seems the two of them have been switched. She needs help in locating Nancy and her own body before any serious damage can be done. What we are requesting is that you remove your spell...”

  Virginia moved her head away from the phone, and Aram reacted like he’d been slapped across the face by someone of equal strength to his own. Virginia slowly moved her ear back to the receiver.

  “We’re not asking for the charges to be dropped, or for you to lose any political face. The spell can go right back on Nancy as soon as she is in the right body again and... Now sir, with all due respect, this is not Cassandra’s fault and has nothing to do with her mother in any way shape or form.”

  My ear pricked up. I had never heard Virginia talk about my mother, although I had suspected that she had maybe met her somewhere along the line. To know that the Magus had known her, and worse still, had disliked her to such a degree as to refuse to help me even a little, was disturbing. My mother had never specifically told me why she had left this world, just that it was not working out there and that our world would have been the safer place to raise her child in.

  I was beginning to wonder all over again if maybe that wasn’t the only reason, if my mother had fallen out with some great power and brought its wrath down upon her so vehemently that she could not have survived it, so she’d escaped to a whole other world. Then I was abruptly furious beyond all belief, for I was not my mother and had never done anything to cross the Magus personally. I’d made a bad choice, one bad choice when picking whom to be friends with, but since then I had kept my nose clean to a degree that would even have been called obsessive by those people who feared germs. When Virginia hung up the phone with an air of defeat about her, I was consumed by that rage. It wasn’t fair. The Magus had refused me so much—to be trained, to be accepted into the societal circle and now to reclaim my body, although it was no real fault of my own that I had lost it in the first place.

  “If only we’d gotten that hole closed in your aura, you might have been strong enough to just push the magic away from you. Nancy isn’t as strong as you and never will be.”

  Virginia’s brain was s
till on transmit, and I could hear loud and clear that she thought Nancy was jealous of me and had to use underhanded and surprise methods to even have a chance at besting me. She could never win a fair fight. I was something else compared to Nancy, something Nancy could never dwarf. I walked to the edge of the counter, elated to be getting some insight into what Virginia knew about my powers, and as if she could sense my interest in the topic she shoved a wall down fast, blocking me out.

  I went back to being angry; the momentary lapse of my concentration had almost made it fizzle right out. I gathered that emotion around me like a blanket—it was warm, and it fueled the power that was me till I was ready to explode in an inferno. Virginia stood gaping and I could tell from her stunned face that something was happening with all the power I felt coursing through me. Where Aram was I couldn’t see, because I was staring intently at a spot on the floor. I had very simple and clear thoughts. I did not want to be a cat. I was not going to stay stuck like this anymore. I wanted my body back, and damn it, I was going to have it back. Fuck the Magus. If he wouldn’t help me, I would just have to damn well help myself.

  I hit the floor with a noisy thud, and it rocked pain through my body that I did not believe. My knees ached, and a splinter of wood jabbed into the skin on my calf, making me bleed a little. I supported myself on my arms and, breathing hard, tried to rise back up to my feet, but I didn’t make it. I kept staring at the floor and trying to figure out what the hell had just happened when I realized three things: I had real hands, I was human again, and I was naked. I screamed. I screamed and shot back against the kitchen island counter, huddling all my limbs around my naked body to hide it from view. I caught sight of my reflection then in the brass kettle that was sitting just off of the fire flames and took in what there was to see. It was not my body, but Nancy’s. Her red hair was tattered and mangy. She was skinnier than she had been from the lack of a decent diet for a human, and her fingernails needed some serious clipping. I reached out, moving onto all fours to stroke the face in the copper kettle, and was relieved when Virginia threw the quilt she’d had over me. I wrapped it around the body and kept the cold out.

  “I wouldn’t have believed it, if I hadn’t seen it,” Virginia said while I sat back on my haunches, staring at the world that had returned to full living color around me. Aram came out from behind the island where he had been pressed against the sink.

  “I don’t understand. What has just happened here?”

  “Cassandra broke the Magus’s spell all on her own, just because she was angry with him for not helping. You have to understand there is a reason that man is Magus; he’s the most powerful Wizard in the local Wizarding fiefdom. He’s number three in the whole country. No one just no one breaks his spells, not like that, not like it was nothing at all.”

  I got to my feet. I was wobbly, and I felt extremely weak and tired, but most of all I felt dirty. There were calluses on Nancy’s hands from all the walking on four legs; they were rough, and the ones on her feet were sore, but she didn’t get to feel the first pain of them. I did. There was stuff in her hair that made it stick together in a way that wasn’t designed by some hair-care manufacturer, and other places that I daren’t mention just felt nasty beyond all belief. I wanted a shower badly. I could not embark on a campaign to get my own body back until I took care of this one.

  “I didn’t know Nancy had that kind of power in her.”

  “She doesn’t, but Cassandra does, which means...” And before she could say what it meant, I swayed, stumbling right into Aram, who had to catch me so that I didn’t hit the floor. I felt sick right in the pit of my stomach, and sweat beaded on my forehead. Virginia didn’t need to explain it for me to get it. I was beyond Nancy in the same way that a demon was beyond a human. If I didn’t get us back into the right bodies pretty damn sharpish, then I would burn right through Nancy, killing her dead. Right at that moment, it was the last thing I wanted to do.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The shower felt so good. Virginia had agreed with me that cleaning myself up would help—it would give her body some strength, and it would also make me feel less nasty. I used the shower that Virginia had to show me how to work, as it was an old one attached to her cast-iron tub thing that looked like it was right out of a Victorian period drama. The tub was all glossy white, with gold fixtures and a rail that went all the way around the top so a curtain could be drawn around to conceal you while you showered; it also kept the majority of the water from splashing onto the floor.

  I scrubbed and scrubbed until Nancy’s skin turned red and every last inch of dirt and dead skin was scraped away. Once all the dirt was gone and I had lathered, rinsed, and repeated shampooing her red hair several times, I pulled the curtain back, hit the switch over the big tap, and filled the tub with lavender-scented bubbles. Her muscles gave joyful little spasms that I couldn’t control as I lowered down to sit in the water, and I started working on clipping both her fingernails and toenails, which had grown exceptionally long over the last couple of years.

  While I did this, I thought about what Virginia had told me: she had said it was up to me to put Nancy back into her punishment. She had rooted around in books and shown me the spell; funnily enough, it was easy to remember. If I just let Nancy go, the council would be even more pissed at me.

  Once all my grooming was done, I settled back against the end of the tub and closed my eyes to relax. Of course, relaxing was the last thing the universe had in mind for me.

  Suddenly there was a golden light around my eyes and I could see myself, my true self. I was still dressed the way I had seen myself when Nancy had approached Aram. Tight leather trousers and that horrible vest thing that zipped up the middle, which Nancy had been keeping stored in my basement lock-up in the other world. It looked different on me because Nancy’s breasts were smaller than mine; in comparison, it looked like she’d had to stuff two melons down a Christmas stocking. Although I found the look distasteful, it did something for the man she was with. The man happened to be Magnus. They were on his couch, and things looked cozy. I make it sound like it came in to my mind like a big-screen production at a movie theater, but it wasn’t. It came in pieces—interrupted, interspaced pieces that were slowly beginning to fade away.

  I tried to stay with it. I bashed my fingers against my temples. It was like trying to watch an illegal cable hook-up. There was static interrupting the images. I couldn’t see what was going on or anything to give me a time frame, and it made my/her head ache. It was my power, this new power where I’d been seeing things that hadn’t happened or were just happening. It was weird and I didn’t understand it, but Nancy wasn’t wired to receive it in the way my body was. I couldn’t ride around in Nancy for long. It was like trying to play a DVD in a VCR; you’d simply end up breaking both.

  I floundered getting out of the tub and put on some clothes Virginia had laid out for me, clothes from her younger days when she’d been an enforcer. They wouldn’t have suited her now: dark chocolate trousers, low-heeled, sturdy boots, and a tank top. It was hard to imagine Virginia, who now wore mostly floral dresses and cardigans, in the outfit. Nancy’s boobs were also small enough that I didn’t have to worry about the fact I had to leave off a bra. Virginia, like me, was slightly more gifted in the boob department, and nothing she had would have fit Nancy. It didn’t matter; the tank top was tight, so I didn’t bounce around too much.

  Aram and Virginia were still in the kitchen when I came downstairs, and I instantly grabbed for Aram’s arm.

  “We’ve got to go,” I pleaded, “she’s up to something, and I’m sure it’s not going to lead to any good. I don’t know how much time I have to stop what I just saw, but I sure as hell know that I want to stop it.”

  “Stop what?” he asked.

  “She’s going after Magnus, the same way she went after you.”

  “Then that isn’t good, but surely he’ll k
now it’s not you.”

  As much as I wanted to believe Magnus would have the insight to see my behavior was off, I had seen differently in my head, and it didn’t give me the faith.

  “I can’t attest to that—it’s not what I saw. They were getting cozy, and I don’t want her getting cozy with my boyfriend, whether we yelled a lot the last time we spoke or not.”

  Aram nodded, and we prepared to leave when Virginia stepped in front of me.

  “I don’t understand. What’s going on? How do you know that Magnus and Nancy are together?”

  “I don’t know they are together, but I know they’re going to be. She might be arriving there right now and I have ten minutes, or she might not be there for half an hour, but she is going to be there. I can’t explain it. Since, well, since that night in the underground, since my near death...” I hated to say it because it made Aram wince behind me. “I’ve been seeing things, future things. Sometimes, if I’m awake, I see things a few seconds before they happen; other times, when I’m asleep, it can be an hour before it happens, or even a few days. I didn’t know what it was at first, but now more than ever I’m positive I’m seeing things ahead of time.”

  “Precognition?” Virginia said, and her expression was not pleased. She looked deeply shocked and worried.

  “If that’s what it’s called, then precognition. But I don’t have time to sit down and discuss in great detail with you all the weirdness that is now my day-to-day life. I’ve wanted to for some time, but whenever I broach the subject, you shut down on me like a clam protecting a pearl. It’s made me wary about coming to talk to you because I never get any real answers, and it always seems like you know more about what’s going on with me than you’re telling.”

  Virginia took a step back from me and held open the kitchen door. I looked at the open door and then at her.

  “Go. You don’t have much time. I would hate to see Nancy ruin what you’ve got started with that boy.” Although she was spurring me on, there was something about her expression that told me she was once again shutting down on me, clamming up. But this time she just happened to have a good excuse, an excuse I had provided. I had to prioritize. Stopping Nancy from putting the romantic moves on my boyfriend while wearing my skin was priority number one.