Under His Skin

by Jennifer Blackstream

  “About your fur. Why didn’t you tell me what happened?”

  She shook her head and sighed. “It didn’t matter. You were mad about the other skins, about your skin. Telling you what happened to me wouldn’t have changed that.”

  “It would have made a difference.”

  “I couldn’t know that. The last man who saw my skin tried to burn it. You were so angry with me, I couldn’t take the chance.” She shrugged. “Besides, you said you couldn’t help me. You said burns were forever, that the skinwalker would be doomed to—”

  His arms tightened around her and she screeched as she shoved him back to keep him from crushing her skin. He jumped and swore.

  “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”

  Ana stroked her fur, ignoring the increasingly panicky tone in Brec’s voice.

  “It doesn’t matter now anyway. It was stupid to try for so long. Better to give up and be done with it.”

  Brec shot up in the bed and Ana frowned as his seal-skin was thrown back, releasing a burst of cold air against her skin. She thought about trying to pull the skin back over her, but she didn’t want to let go of her own fur. The cold isn’t so bad.

  “Ana, what do you mean give up?”

  She rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean.”

  “You’re going to kill yourself.”

  “Don’t sound so dramatic. I’ve been dying for two years now.” She closed her eyes. “Really, the hard part is over.”

  “Two years?”

  The horror is his hushed voice almost amused her. “Yes, two years. Now do you see why I can’t wait any longer? Would you really force me to keep going, knowing I’ll never get my skin back? That I’ll never be whole again?”

  “Ana, think about your family and friends,” Brec insisted, desperation straining his voice. “Think of how they’ll miss you.”

  “My parents died when I was a child and the servants who raised me are all gone. I don’t have any friends. All I have is money and it won’t miss me.”

  “Then think about me. Ana, I would miss you.”

  A tiny thread of annoyance began to pierce her pleasant fog of nothingness and she narrowed her eyes. “Why are you being so nice to me now? You didn’t give a shit about me before, what do you care if I die? Are you just being obstinate? Do you want me to live because I want to die?”

  She gasped as he rolled off the bed and came around the other side to kneel where she could see his eyes. He looked so serious, it scared her a little. He held out his hands.

  “Please let me set your skin on the floor.”

  Her eyes widened and she shook her head, panic seizing her heart. “No. No, you can’t have it, it’s mine.”

  “Ana, I need to talk to you and you’re not going to hear anything I have to say if you’re holding that fur. Ana, I swear to you, on my own skin, that I will lay it on the floor and I will walk away from it. I won’t damage it, I won’t hide it, and I won’t do anything to stop you if you want to pick it up again.”

  For a minute she thought about running. She could jump off the bed and be out the door and in the kitchen before he could scramble off his knees, couldn’t she? Maybe if she chewed the hemlock it would work really fast and she’d be dead before he could do anything about it.

  “Ana, when I first saw you in the shop, I thought you were the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen,” Brec whispered. “Even after I found out what you’d done, I still couldn’t get over your beauty.”

  “Beauty is skin deep. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “But strength does.” He gently place a hand over one of hers, not trying to take the fur, but just resting his fingers on the back of her hand. “Ana, I don’t know of a single person in this world who could have watched their skin . . . who could have survived what you went through. I went less than twenty-four hours without my skin and I nearly went mad. I can’t imagine how it would have felt if it wasn’t just missing, if I had seen it . . .”

  He can’t even say it. “Burned,” she whispered.

  He winced, his black eyes shining with pain. “Burned,” he whispered back. “Ana, you are too strong to give up now.”

  A fresh wave of tears welled up and spilled over her cheeks. By the time this day was done, she’d have creases in her face, carved out by all the crying. “I’m so tired. I’m tired of fighting. I’ve tried everything, Brec. I’ve tried herbs and ointments, I’ve tried incense and spells. I’ve prayed and I’ve begged—I’ve even stolen other furs.” A familiar weight settled on her chest. “Nothing works. You said yourself that you’re one of the greatest healers the selkies have ever seen, that you have a natural gift. Even you said there was no healing a burnt skin. It’s destroyed, gone forever.” She shook her head. “There is nothing left for me.”

  Chapter 22

  Brec shook his head over and over, staring at Ana’s face. The spark was gone, her blue eyes clouded by too many tears. It wasn’t even sadness that flattened her voice anymore—it was apathy.

  She was a lisitsa, a skinwalker who true form was a fox. He could scarcely believe it. He held his breath as he ever so gently placed his palms under her fox-skin. She watched him with glassy eyes, but she didn’t fight him when he began to ease the skin away from her chest. Part of him wished she’d fight, wished she yell at him to get away from her skin, but she didn’t. It was as if she’d used up all her protests and now she was just waiting for him to leave. Waiting for him to go away so she could die.

  He laid the fur on the floor with all the care that one would handle a newborn baby. Her eyes followed it, but she made no move to take it back. Some of the weight eased off his chest and he turned away from the hideously burned piece of fur. The very sight of it brought horrible images into his mind, images of burning fires and the sounds of agony that only came from someone watching their entire life burn away.

  When he turned back to Ana, she had turned her gaze to him. For a second, he didn’t know what to do. He’d been unsure that she’d let him take her skin out of her arms and nothing he could have said or done would have registered as long as she clutched the reminder of her old life to her chest. Now that she lie there, alone and waiting, he had to think of something to help her.

  His mind traveled back over the past couple of days, searching for a moment when she’d expressed an emotion other than sadness. There was anger. Images of how she’d ranted at the pixie filled his mind and he almost smiled. What he would give so see her eyes light up with anger again.

  “Nu!” he called. It was worth a try.

  The little pixie must not have been far because in a few seconds he was hovering in the air over Brec’s shoulder.

  “What is it, what’s happened?” the pixie demanded, peering over Brec at Ana.

  Brec turned to tell him what had happened, but the pixie spoke first.

  “What did you do? You were supposed to help her. She looks worse now than she did when you got here.” He scowled, crossing his arms over his chest. “This isn’t how it was supposed to go at all.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Brec stared at the pixie, dumbfounded. “How was it supposed to go?”

  “You were supposed to live up to your reputation,” the pixie snapped. He waved his hands around, twisting his face into an expression of mockery. “Oh, Brec is such an amazing healer, he has a gift from Alaunus himself.” He dropped his hands and glared at Brec. “What good are you if you can’t help her?”

  “What do you want me to do?” Brec shouted, his frustration boiling the blood in his veins. “Her skin’s been burned! There’s no way to heal that!”

  Ana sobbed and turned her face into the pillow. Helpless and fearing that he just kept making things worse, Brec let go of his anger and turned pleading eyes to the pixie. “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

  His panic rose as the pixie’s anger faded as well, replaced by a sadness that looked out of place on the annoying fey’s tiny face. Without speaking to Brec, he flew over and
landed on the bed just beside Ana’s head.

  “So you’ve given up then?”

  Ana nodded once before turning to face him. “It’s time.” She sighed, her breath hitching slightly from her most recent bout of tears. “I always planned to give them back. After I got my fur back, I was going to return them all.”

  “I know.” Nu turned and walked to the edge of the bed as if preparing to fly away.

  “Wait, where are you going?” Brec’s stomach ached as dread settled inside it like a lead weight. “You have to help her.”

  “You’re the healer,” Nu snapped, his tiny hands fisting at his sides. “You need to help her.”

  Panicked confusion squeezed his throat until he could hardly speak.

  “I don’t know how.”

  Nu glared at him for a long minute. Then the anger seemed to melt away and he sighed as if in resignation, running a hand through his tiny shock of blue hair. “You need to make her feel something, make her care again. If you can do that, then she’ll fight. She’ll fight to get her life back.”

  “I called you in here to make her angry,” Brec objected, desperation making his voice higher. He laughed, a short semi-hysterical sound. “You made her so angry before, you can do it again.”

  Nu shook his head, all traces of his light-hearted harping gone. “She’s beyond anger now, Brec. She doesn’t care.”

  He could see that. He could see in the limpness of her muscles, the glaze over her eyes, and the dull tone in her voice. Ana didn’t care. Helpless and scared, Brec stared at the little pixie. “How do I make her care?”

  Nu took to the air, giving Brec one last sympathetic look. “You care first.”

  Brec stared after the pixie as he flew out of the room. His hope seemed to trail out of the room with Nu, leaving him with only a dark suspicion that the gift of healing he’d fought to deny all this time had finally given him his wish. He couldn’t heal this. He had to fight.

  He crawled into the bed with Ana, his body feeling a lot heavier than it had a moment ago. He didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what to do. All he could do was cuddle into the bed behind her and hold her against his body. It was a child’s irrationality that said if he held onto her, he couldn’t lose her.

  “It’s very strange that you’re so upset by all this.”

  Ana’s voice startled him and for just a second his hopes shot up. Then the flat tone of her voice registered and he realized that she was likely only talking to fill the silence.

  “Of course I’m upset. You were doing just fine before I got here and now after less than forty-eight hours with me you want to kill yourself.”

  He’d meant it as a joke, but he couldn’t quite get his voice to carry the proper lilt. It was difficult to feel anything but the hopeless despair that seemed to infuse his soul the more he heard the defeat in her voice. He wrapped his arm around her waist and buried his head in her neck, concentrating on the sweet smell of her strawberry-scented shampoo. He had the strange random image spring into his head of waking up with Ana, the morning sunlight streaming through the window. He pictured a smile on her face as she rolled over to face him, planting a soft kiss on his lips. The image faded, leaving him disoriented and more confused than before. When had Ana weaseled her way into his dreams?

  “It has nothing to do with you, Brec,” she sighed, interrupting his thoughts. “I wasn’t fine before you came. As a matter of fact, I was only waiting for an ingredient to finish steeping for one more ointment and then I was going to end it all anyway.”

  “What ointment?”

  “I found an ointment in one of my books that says if you steep slippery elm in kukui nut oil for twenty-four hours and then clean the burned skin with witch-hazel before applying the ointment, then the burned flesh will heal under the coating of oil. I was going to use it on my skin as one last chance to save it.”

  Brec sighed. It wouldn’t have worked. Fire was the ultimate consumer of life. If it had been just one edge of the fur, the spells may have worked, but he’d seen the damage. All that remained of the fur was a small strip of pale white about the width of his hand. All around that patch, the edges were blackened and crisp. There was no way for it to close around Ana’s human form. It was nothing but a scrap of skin now. Dead for eternity.

  He snuggled back against her, shoving thoughts of her ruined fur from his mind. He had to stop thinking about it or he’d never manage to distract her from it. And as long as she obsessed over its loss, she would never pull herself out of the pit she’d fallen into.

  “What did you do before . . .” He groped for the words.

  “Before my skin was burned?”

  Stifling a wince, he nodded.

  She shrugged. “Not much of anything really. I spent most of my time in fox form. I just kept this house because it belonged to my parents and it was isolated enough that I didn’t have to worry about neighbors shooting me. I went into town when I needed supplies, that’s about it.” She paused. “You know though, if things had turned out differently and I’d been able to heal my skin, I think I would have liked to be a healer. All the books I’ve read and things I’ve tried . . . it’s all been really interesting.” She sighed. “And it would have been nice to do something for others to make up for all the suffering I caused.”

  The matter of fact way she talked about her life as if it were already a done deal that it was over sparked an anger inside him. He grabbed on to the anger, desperate to feel anything other than the drowning pain that was eating him alive. He fed the embers, fanned them until the flame grew and chased away the icy fear that held him hostage.

  “Well why don’t you try and make up for all that then?”

  She shook her head. “It’s too late. I—”

  “It is not too late!” Brec shoved his upper body off the bed and then reached down to Ana. Flipping her over onto her back, he glared into her wide surprised eyes. “Stealing other people’s skins was a selfish thing to do.”

  She stared at him, her jaw dropping with shock. “I—”

  “And killing yourself before you make amends because you’re just too tired to keep fighting is another selfish thing to do.”

  She opened her mouth again, but he shook his head.

  “No, don’t say anything. I can’t take it anymore.” He glared at her, his brain trying to sift through all the intense emotions that battered him around like a buoy on the waves. Fear and anger warred in his mind. He didn’t know why he cared about her so much. He didn’t know when it had happened or what it would mean in the long run, but dammit, he wanted the time to find out. And if she killed herself he would spend the rest of his life tortured by the fact that he’d helped drive her to it, always asking himself “What if?”

  “I don’t know how you survived so long without your fur, but you did,” he continued, not caring about the desperation that had soaked into his voice. “You isolated yourself and you did some lousy things to other people, but you survived and you kept trying. That kind of person doesn’t just give up all of a sudden.” He took a deep breath, trying to steady himself. “You can’t give up when I only just found you.”

  “For almost forty-eight hours you’ve kept me trapped in the same house with you and not once have you said or done anything to give me the slightest impression that you give a shit about me,” Ana said quietly.

  Brec’s spirits lifted as he thought he detected the beginnings of her own anger in her voice.

  “Why is it only now, now when I’ve finally accepted that my skin is gone and I’ve finally got the nerve to just end the whole thing, why is it only now that you care what happens to me?”

  “Why has it taken you this long to let me see the real you?”

  His words barely came out, so low even he wasn’t sure he’d said them. Ana stared at him, her lips parting in soft surprise. He pushed ahead before he could lose his nerve.

  “When I first found you, you’d just stolen my skin. I hated you. Then you were so angry and I just c
ouldn’t figure out how you could be so cruel as to steal skinwalkers’ skins and then refuse to hand them over when your crimes were discovered.” He shook his head. “All I saw were the results of your pain—a pain I never could have imagined and you didn’t tell me about.”

  Ana opened her mouth as if to argue, but he put a finger to her lips.

  “Then I saw all your herbs and your texts. You had an interest in healing, there were signs everywhere. Evil people do not study healing.” His heart softened. “And then you pulled your underwear drawer out and we had that one shared moment of laughter. You’re a completely different person when you laugh. The hard lines in your face vanished and I caught a glimpse of someone I wanted to know better.”

  His mind played over the images as he spoke of them and he found himself smiling again at the memory. “And when you made that comment about it being harder to heal a wound than inflict it, you spoke to a part of me that I’m ashamed to even admit existed.”