“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 get 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.
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.