SkinThief

by Sonnet O'Dell

  I led Aram to the door, which I opened to find Lance standing there, his fist raised like he was about to knock. He staggered a step backwards when he saw me, or more likely saw a wild, skinny redheaded woman dashing out of the house. He was more himself when he saw that Aram was right behind me.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Aram, but Mr. Jareth called me. He says he needs you back at the club ASAP. He’s having some problems with the fire marshal who paid a surprise visit, and he needs you to keep everything running while he tries to smooth things over.”

  Aram cursed under his breath.

  “Lance, I’m going to give you a very important job to do, do you understand me?”

  Lance nodded with enthusiasm to do something that Aram considered important. He was probably hoping it meant he’d earned more trust and was working his way up the ladder to becoming a vampire of his very own someday.

  “You will take us somewhere to drop off my friend here, drive me to the club and then return to that same address to pick up my Cassandra.”

  I wanted to object to the term “my,” but I knew that now was no time to be quibbling over details. Lance beamed with pride at being entrusted with my care. It was the pinnacle of his day, which I found entirely ludicrous. I didn’t comment, I didn’t say a word; I just kept my mind wide open in case whatever power let me see things wanted to share any more about the immediate future. However, my mind was about the only part of me that was patient. I shifted about in the seat like my ass was on fire. I could not contain myself; I wanted to go faster because I was worried and scared.

  “Calm down, pet, we will get there in time. She may steal some of his kisses, but that will not be so bad.”

  “It’s not his kisses I’m worried about,” I said bluntly, and Aram seemed to understand my meaning. Lance drove to the letter of the law, and even though I started screaming at him to go faster, it was better that he didn’t. We passed at least two patrol cars on the way, and we might have been pulled over if he had dared to listen to me.

  Finally we pulled into the community and onto the street where Magnus’s one-story bungalow house sat. I was out of the car like a shot, barking at Lance that when he returned, he should wait right at this spot. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lance pull out again to take Aram back to the club. I ran for the house.

  Magnus kept a spare key under a flowerpot on the front step. It was dead when I reached it and snatched the key out from under it. Magnus’s car, I had noted, was in the driveway, so he was home from work. The next few minutes depended on whether he had arrived home to find me there, or to an empty house. If he was alone in there, I could thank the stars and lie in wait for Nancy. It would take some explaining to do it, but I had enough personal information about my boyfriend. I didn’t think it would take too long for him to get that although I didn’t look like me, I was me. I struggled with the key in the door and finally pushed the damn thing open.

  The house was lit sparsely; mood lighting I would call it, mostly candles lining counters and clear surfaces. There was a finished meal on the table and a half-empty bottle of wine on the coffee table next to the couch. Two glasses sat there, both empty, and one had a lipstick mark on the rim. She had beaten me here. A knot tied itself in the pit of my stomach as I looked toward the closed bedroom door. No, oh please, dear God no.

  I ran for the door and my hand froze on the handle. The sounds from inside made my eyes screw up, and I wanted to cry. The low moans and the groaning, the happy sound of his masculine voice. I hated Nancy for the first time in my life, really, truly hated her. I would never forgive her, never ever.

  I threw open the door, and neither of them turned to the sound. The covers were strewn around their naked, joined bodies. I could barely stand to see myself astride him, and the tears in my eyes came so thick and heavy that I could barely see straight. And then it was like a knife was driven through my heart: he reached up to touch her face and said words I had been waiting to hear for weeks.

  “I love you.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  I just about lost it. Nancy was the first to see me in the room, to see herself, and it scared her half to death. I grabbed her by my own hair and pulled her from the bed, tossing her onto the floor, which I could see genuinely hurt both of them. Magnus made a hurry to collect the sheet around his waist and get up to defend her from the crazy redheaded bitch who had just broken into his house and his bedroom. I held up my hand and yelled a simple spell of restraint; the covers wrapped around him and held him to the bed. Nancy crawled back from me, and it was disgusting to watch my own body cowering.

  “You stupid, backstabbing, low-rent bitch,” I said to her, using all the malice I could put into my voice. It made her wince because it was not my voice telling her this, but her own. It was her own visage looking down at her, and it seemed to scare her down to her bones.

  “How did you—?”

  “I have that kind of power, Nancy. You don’t.”

  She looked at me, frightened, and I reached for a football jersey of Magnus’s that was hanging in his closet. I threw it at her.

  “Put some clothes on, I don’t want to see myself like this.”

  “What is going on here?” Magnus shouted from the bed; I turned sideways so that I could look at both of them at the same time. Magnus was struggling with the restraint. I felt my anger flex, and it tightened around him. He squealed a little like it hurt, and right then, I didn’t care if it did.

  “I’ll tell you what’s going on. This bitch stole my body. Did I tell you the case I was working on involved a magic talisman that could switch the spirits of the two individuals? And guess who couldn’t resist the chance to get out of her cat-shaped prison? Nancy,” I said and pointed to myself. She was still sitting on the ground; she was stunned and frightened of me right now. I didn’t want to give her time to get around me or to teleport out of here.

  “Cassandra?” Magnus asked, confused. I turned to face him completely. I felt hurt and betrayed, and I was like hell going to take it out on both of them.

  “This time you would be correct.” I gave a mocking little bow. “You’ve never met Nancy—well, I guess that’s not technically true, but not in the flesh.”

  Magnus’s eyes widened with horror. He looked at me on the floor, and he looked at Nancy’s body. His face folded in on itself, and he hung his head.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know, I’m sorry,” he said, and for some reason his apologizing just seemed to piss me off even more. Nancy tried to crawl around me to the door where she could make an escape. I grabbed her by the hair again and pulled her back into the room; she hit the end of the bed next to his feet. She gasped as she hit it.

  “I don’t know where you think you’re going. I have so much planned for you.” I bent down in front of her and strapped the amulet around her neck; she looked at me with wide eyes as I gripped the gem in my hand.

  “My heart to yours, my soul in exchange.”

  I went from looking down at myself to looking up at her. I shoved her away from me and held on to my stomach as the pain roiled up through me. It was a sore, throbbing pain that hit me around my belly button, and I felt like I wanted to heave up whatever Nancy had eaten for dinner. Nancy sat flat on her butt; she examined her hands and wiggled her toes in the boots, ran her fingers back through her hair and even smiled a little. It was that smile that broke me. I launched myself at her, kneed her in the ribs and hauled us both to our feet.

  “You stupid bitch, how could you do this to me? After everything I did for you? I took care of you for two years despite your constant bitching and moods. I made sure you didn’t go hungry, I made sure you got to sleep in a nice, dry, warm place, and you betrayed me at the first chance.”

  Nancy struggled with my grip on her arms so I clutched her tighter. I shook her and made her look at my face. I couldn’t hide the pain in my f
ace, the tears in my eyes, and she looked back to Magnus. From what I could see, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, his face in his hands.

  “You’ve never slept together,” she said, astonished, and then she took a really good look at me. My legs were shaking from the pain inside me. “You’ve never slept with anyone!”

  Magnus looked up at us then, and the look in his eyes mirrored my own: horror and hatred for Nancy. I held her to the wall by her throat. I could feel the anger coursing through me as I began the incantation Virginia had told me. If I was strong enough to break the spell with my will, then I was strong enough to recast it on Nancy. Her eyes widened with fear—she knew the words, as she had been forced to listen to them spoken over her before. Her stubby fingers pawed futilely at my fingers and my wrist. I was strong, so much stronger than I had been before, both physically and mentally and especially magically.

  The anger made my power boil up in my veins so that flame rolled over my normally green eyes, and I saw them reflected in her dull brown ones. It was the reflection that caught me, made me gasp and quit chanting the spell. How utterly monstrous those flames were. I felt like a vengeful god looking down on Nancy, and I wasn’t. When she saw my resolve falter, tears brimmed over her lashes, and she rasped out a single word. “Please.” It was all she said.

  I released her neck, looking at the red imprint of my fingers on her flesh. I remembered the torture it had been to be trapped in that cat’s body, with no words, no power, no escape; humanly aware but fighting the basic, primordial feline urges. It had not been what I imagined Hell to be like but it had been unpleasant to a deep degree. I tried to push my anger aside. I’d never agreed with the punishment, and I would be racked by guilt if it was me who did such a thing to her, even after how she had betrayed me. I didn’t want to become that kind of person. I had my own body back, and that was what was most important, though it was slick with sweat and smelled like Magnus, like he was a scent I had marinated myself in. A scent I used to adore, but now it made me so sick I could barely stomach it. I saw him kneeling next to the bed, the sheet covering him as he reached out, trying to gather up his jeans, but keeping his eyes on me in case I should attack him. I turned my back on both of them, grabbing the pair of trousers Nancy had been wearing to put on under the lengthy jersey, but I didn’t get them on or more than a step away from Nancy before she found her voice again.

  “I knew you couldn’t do that to me—you just don’t have the stones.”

  I pivoted on my foot, drawing my arm back as I did, and swung, punching her in the jaw. My knuckle whined with the impact, but Nancy went down like a sack of bricks to the floor. Her mouth bled, and she spat onto the floor as she coughed in startled surprise. Nancy had expected me to slap her, maybe, but I had never fought like a girl. I punched her, and with the strange new strength that was coursing through my body, I hit hard. I was pretty sure that I had broken her jaw. I listened to her whimper on the carpet and was pleased that I found it would be no problem to live with that in my memory. I stalked out.

  I was out of the house and in the street before Magnus caught up with me. When he called my name, I stopped dead, and my body filled with ice.

  “Baby, wait, please talk to me.”

  “There is nothing for us to talk about,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest and staring defiantly at the pavement.

  “You’ve got to understand, I didn’t know...not now, not about...”

  I turned to him; I was abruptly and completely enraged again.

  “No, you’ve got to understand that what you just took to bed wasn’t really me, and you didn’t really seem to care. You ignored any weirdness, didn’t you, because it was finally getting you what you wanted?”

  “I didn’t just want to have sex with you, and I didn’t know you...that Benjamin made it sound like you and he...please, Cassandra.” I took a deep breath, trying to pull back the warm cloth of anger that felt so comforting and protective; I even started to reach for him.

  “I might have believed that until recently, but you were just so eager to overtake, to beat Aram to it, that you overlooked...”

  He looked down at the ground and gave a bitter bark of a laugh.

  “Will you go to him now? I’m not magically inclined; you couldn’t have expected me to see.” I had made the mistake of feeling sympathy for him. Nancy had used him as much as she had used me, but that one sentence erased any good feeling left in me.

  “I am so sick of that being your excuse.”

  He looked at me; his eyes were angry and hard. He was trying to use his anger to protect himself like I had, to keep the sadness back.

  “It wouldn’t have taken magic to see through her, just knowing me, knowing who I am. It’s not that you couldn’t see; it’s that you didn’t want to. Do you know how violated I feel?” He winced at the word, and I was glad; how dare he fling his hurt feelings at me. “It was my body, but not my consciousness; I can’t remember it because it wasn’t my experience. Every kiss, every touch on my skin she enjoyed, but I don’t know the feel of it. And on top of that, that you could look into my eyes, say that, and not even know it’s not me. I can’t stand it. I want to be sick because I can smell all the sweat and scent of what you did with her on me. It’s the feeling of catching you with another woman, but a lot more personal, twisted and vile.”

  I hugged myself, but it wasn’t the cold air that was bothering me. It was like the growing flame that had been my feelings for Magnus had been snuffed out, and my heart felt all the more cold for it. The dark blue sedan pulled up to the curb just down from me, and Lance gave me a hearty wave in the rearview mirror.

  “I never want to see you again.” I said and walked away. I climbed into the backseat of the sedan, and as we drove off, I didn’t even glance behind me.

  Chapter Thirty

  Lance drove me home without a word; I think he could tell I didn’t want to talk, which was very astute of him. He pulled up out front of my building, and I got out without even thanking him, something I would regret later, but not until much later. I took the elevator up, and by the time I got to my floor, I was barely keeping it all in; the water was pressing against the dam, and the kid with his finger in it was getting a cramp. I stood in front of my apartment door and was lucky to find my keys stuffed into the back pocket of the trousers with what remained of the money Nancy had stolen from me.

  But she had stolen so much more than that tonight.

  I crashed through the door in a hurry to be inside and in private. Finally the tears came, and I screamed, crashing to the floor as the door slammed shut behind me. I threw my head against my arms and, huddled in a little ball, I cried and let violent angry tremors rock through me. Time passed, and it was hours before the crying slowed to just trickles of tears down my face. I turned onto my side and curled up into a fetal ball. Unable to feel anymore, I let a cold numbness take me, and I was glad for the stop gap. When you’re crying, all you think you’ll do for the rest of your life is cry; the pain is just too much. I lay on the floor and just let all my cares run away from me till I felt nothing, not even my own body. I think I even slept a little.

  It was the phone ringing that woke me. I lay there listening to the ringing of it and even murmuring the sound to myself. I knew it was someone calling me, but I just had no desire to answer it. The answering machine clicked on, and the one voice I did not want to hear started to leave a message. I found that I could move after all as I grabbed at the cord and pulled the phone plug from the jack, and the message was cut short. I stood up, using the kitchen counter to get me to my feet, and tore the answering machine tape from the machine and threw it into the bin. I never wanted to hear from him again—that’s what I’d said—why couldn’t he get that? It was pretty damn clear.

  I dragged myself into the bedroom and slipped out of the clothes, heading straight for the shower. I turned the heat up t
ill it was nearly scalding me, and I started to cry again, the water from the showerhead washing the tears away from my face before they could get purchase. My body was sore, and there were small bruises from where Nancy and Magnus had gotten a little rough with each other. I grimaced that I would have to be the one to bear the badge of the betrayal. I cleaned a smear of blood from inside my knee, and though it was sore, I scrubbed myself with soap over and over again. I stepped out of the shower, and at least I felt clean if nothing else. I dried my hair with the hairdryer like I was on autopilot. I dressed for bed and sat on the floor at the end of it, curling my legs up under my t-shirt, stretching it and staring at the ceiling. Tears fell down my face again, slower this time, and I didn’t choke out a sob. It was a quiet sorrow that led me slowly to sleep.

  When I woke up, the sun was shining dully in through the curtains; it was four p.m. and I stretched, yawning. The tightness in the center of my body made me wince, and the tiny moment between sleep and waking where you don’t remember anything was over. The pain cut me in so many ways that I just wanted to go back to sleep again and forget everything in an endless world of dreams.

  I shook my head and stood up tall. I was not going to be defeated. I was going to get on and do what needed to be done. I walked into the kitchen, made coffee and plugged the phone back in. It didn’t ring, and I was thankful for that. I went and sat down on the couch. It took me awhile to get comfortable, and I sat there sipping the coffee slowly. What was I going to do now? Despite everything, the first thing I felt was hungry, so I ate. I threw into the bin the foods that I didn’t like that I had bought for Magnus, sealed the bag and dragged it down the stairs to the Dumpster in the alley outside. I threw it in. I didn’t notice I was still in my pajamas until someone on the street gave me a weird look.