Second Skin Part 31

"No, nonono . . ."

"I am free," Wiskachee purred. "And hungry. hungry." He made a move toward us, and Donal clawed at me, trying to shove me toward the hunger G.o.d.

"Take her! Not me! I don't deserve this!"

Wiskachee swiped at us. I got the feeling he wasn't very choosy. "f.u.c.k off!" I screamed, kicking at him. The pain as our magicks brushed was extraordinary. I may have been outgunned, but I wasn't going to let him feed on me, not without a fight . . .

Something hit me from behind, shoving me out of Wiskachee's reach. "You don't touch her," Lucas gasped.

He was bleeding freely from his chest, staggering and blue around his lips and eyes from shock.

Donal goggled at him from his p.r.o.ne position. "How . . ."

"Hard to con," said Lucas. "Even harder to mother-f.u.c.king kill."

Donal swiped at Lucas and I intercepted the swing, bending his wrist backward and snapping it in an easy motion. Lucas swayed on his feet, coughing, spitting black-red arterial blood from his lungs. "You think I didn't know?" he snarled. "You think I hadn't seen a fetish before? I wanted wanted to kill them, all of them, and you let me." to kill them, all of them, and you let me."

I felt like I was going to be sick. "You let let yourself be possessed?" yourself be possessed?"

"For the chance to kill those weres?" Lucas said, softly, fading out like a bad radio signal. "Absolutely."

"Lucas." I started to shake. My own shock was catching up with me. "Lucas. Look at what you've done."

"I'm sorry, Luna," he said. "But you wouldn't understand."

Oh, Hex Hex that. "I wouldn't understand?" I screamed. "How dare you! How f.u.c.king dare you, Lucas? You put my city on the line and that's all you have to say for yourself?" that. "I wouldn't understand?" I screamed. "How dare you! How f.u.c.king dare you, Lucas? You put my city on the line and that's all you have to say for yourself?"

"My whole life was that treaty, poverty, and a father who beat me because of the rage inside him over what was done. The weres and the Wendigo ground under their heel. It's not right right and I'm going to burn it to the ground so that no one else goes through a life like mine. It's a poison that needs to be expunged." and I'm going to burn it to the ground so that no one else goes through a life like mine. It's a poison that needs to be expunged."

"The world is not black and white," I whispered. "Weres and Wendigo . . . it doesn't matter matter. You change change it, you don't burn it and start over. What was done to you was horrible, and wrong, but we get a life and we have to it, you don't burn it and start over. What was done to you was horrible, and wrong, but we get a life and we have to live live it, Lucas." it, Lucas."

Lucas went to his knees, tears streaming down his face. "I just wanted to make it better. Mend it, by smas.h.i.+ng it. I had to try. I did what I had to do."

I looked back at Wiskachee, at that great shadow waiting to consume my city. "I am, too," I told Lucas. Then I grabbed Donal and shoved him toward Wiskachee's waiting arms.

The claws went in, and Donal gave a scream. This time, it was entirely human and borne on pain. The blood drained from his face and the life light from his eyes, and I watched, transfixed for a moment as Wiskachee suspended Donal in his black shadow, draining him until he looked as if he'd been dead for a week.

Wiskachee sighed, and again I felt the dead sensation in my head as he surveyed the city around him, head tilting as he listened to the screams. "So many to feed me. Your offering pleases me, wolf. I will be engorged."

"Hex that," I said. "I was just distracting you with Macleod so I could get away."

I got to my feet and ran for all I was worth, flat-out toward the road. Behind me Wiskachee let out a howl and began to chase me, the ground shaking under his immense power.

CHAPTER 22.

I looked back only once while I ran, and saw Donal and Lucas still on the ground, Donal spent and Lucas corpse-still.

Years later, it seemed, I fetched up against the Fairlane. Wiskachee's magick made it hard to move, to think. Dimly, I knew he'd begun to feed on me, on everyone within reach. I was dizzy and my fingers shook so hard that for a long time I couldn't turn the key in the ignition. I could hear whispers, screams, the sounds of a thousand souls that Wiskachee had already consumed.

The Fairlane rumbled to life and I turned it up the hill, zigzagging between graves and heaves in the earth, accelerating until the cylinders screamed.

Wiskachee was standing on the hill, and his shadow was visible now, growing with every mind that he touched and fed on. I aimed my grille for his physical body, the tiny potbellied target almost comical under the nightmare shadow form.

I gunned it straight into him, and he hissed at me on the other side of my winds.h.i.+eld, his mouth opening impossibly wide. His fingernails screeched along the hood as I put my foot to the floorboards, the Fairlane's tachometer springing into the red zone.

Carrying him forward, the car roared toward the lip of the chasm Wiskachee had crawled from, his screams reaching above the sound of the engine and his fists making hairline cracks across the winds.h.i.+eld.

I let go of the Fairlane's wheel. "I'm sorry," I told my car, and then I opened the door and dropped out, shoulder-first like the police academy taught us, tucking my legs up and tumbling and tumbling until I rolled to a stop against a grave.

The Fairlane crested the edge of the chasm, suspended for a second, and then fell. The crash shook my teeth, and an orange fireball blossomed out of the creva.s.se with a whoosh whoosh as the gas tank caught. as the gas tank caught.

I got myself up and tottered over to the edge to look down, to be a witness so I could be sure, later, that Wiskachee was gone.

He was still screaming, pinned under the burning wreck of the Fairlane, and I watched as bits and pieces of his shadow form began to ash and drift upward on the hot wind of the fire. The flames licked his skin, blackened it, turned it to fine powder and then to nothing at all.

When Wiskachee stopped screaming, I turned and limped toward the cemetery entrance, weaving and dipping as if I were seventeen again and drunk on cheap wine coolers, trying to act natural on my way home so the cops wouldn't pull me over.

I screeched when something grabbed my ankle. "Wolf . . . die . . . ," Donal Macleod moaned. He was desiccated, his eyes bulging from their taut sockets, but his grip was death.

"Pack it in, you sorry son of a b.i.t.c.h," I said, and shook him off. "Alpha of alphas, my a.s.s."

"At least I strove for greatness!" he cried. "You'll always be a gutterwolf!"

"Mr. Macleod?" One of the thugs emerged from behind a hillock, looking around at the wreckage. "Sir?"

I pointed at the goon. "Go back to your pack house. Tell your leader what he's been up to."

The two weres looked at each other, and then hauled a.s.s out of the graveyard. I took my handcuffs off my belt with numb fingers and clapped one end around Donal's wrist, the other to the handle of the mausoleum door. "They'll kill me!" Donal cried. "The pack's justice . . ."

"Is nothing compared with mine," I told him. "I'll see you when I testify against you at your trial, you piece of s.h.i.+t."

Lucas had no pulse when I knelt next to him. After a few seconds his chest jerked and heaved, and then he went still again.

I should hate the guy, but I couldn't. I put my hand over his wounds instead, cold blood coating my palm. "Now we both know what it feels like," I murmured. "If you die on me, I'm gonna be pretty f.u.c.king p.i.s.sed off."

Lucas made no response, his face drawn and blood-spattered. I sat next to him, touching him, until I saw flas.h.i.+ng lights and a SWAT van b.u.mping over the road toward me.

McAllister jumped out of the lead car and wrapped his arms around me.

"Mac?" I goggled at him.

"You were maybe expecting Lon Chaney?" he asked, holding me at arm's length.

"After the night I've had," I told him, "don't even joke about that." I put a hand to my head, still finding fresh blood. "Oh, G.o.ds. Where's Sunny?"

Mac jerked his thumb at the pa.s.senger's door, which erupted to reveal my cousin. "Riding shotgun. Flagged us down when we got here. She can be as stubborn and insistent as you, Wilder. Must be a genetic thing."

Sunny ran over and threw her arms around me, so hard that I stumbled and fell against the hood of Mac's car. "You stopped it," she whispered.

"Stopped what?" Mac demanded. "What the Hex is going on here, Wilder? Is that fire fire I see up on the cemetery hill? And who the h.e.l.l is the stiff?" I see up on the cemetery hill? And who the h.e.l.l is the stiff?"

I sighed. "Lucas Kennuka. Five homicides, a.s.sault on a police officer, and . . ." My legs wobbled as the night caught up with me like a tidal wave catches a beach bungalow. "Look, just go easy on him, all right, Mac?" I tilted my head toward the flames that were just visible over the ridge. "That fire . . . that, you wouldn't believe, even if I had the energy to explain it."

Mac looked at the fire, back at me. "There will be questions, either way."

Sunny supported me as I woozily rolled my eyes. "I think that's the least of our worries right now, Lieutenant," she said. "Could we maybe talk about getting an ambulance for my cousin before she bleeds to death in the street?"

"Yeah, yeah," said Mac, still gazing at the fire. "I called a bus."

We watched in silence as an ambulance worked its way among cars that the earthquake had flipped on their sides and wreckage thrown by the tenements that lined Garden Crest.

The EMTs came running, flas.h.i.+ng lights in my eyes and speaking their staccato code to one another. They tried to pull me away from Sunny but she wouldn't let go of my undamaged hand, and finally they let her sit next to me in the back of the ambulance while one EMT took my blood pressure and gave me painkillers and the other st.i.tched up my forehead.

"Ow! d.a.m.n it!" I growled at the EMT, who backed away with his hands raised.

Sunny coughed and brushed her lips with a finger. I clapped my free hand over my mouth and felt fangs still there. " wSorry," I told the EMT. "Just been a stressful night."

More police cars arrived while they worked on me, a cl.u.s.ter of officers around Mac, and eventually Captain Morgan pulled up, wearing sweats, her hair in a ponytail. She looked toward me and gave a great, long-suffering sigh.

"Officer Wilder?" she demanded, putting one foot on the b.u.mper of the ambulance.

"I know, I know," I said. "I'm off the force, effective immediately. Can you at least tell me it's without pay while the painkillers are still working? Takes the edge off."

"If that's what you really want to hear," said Morgan. "I was going to tell you that Detective Bryson is in stable condition at Sharps.h.i.+n, and I hope you follow suit. But really, I'll say the rest as well."

"That's fine," Sunny a.s.sured her when I started to open my mouth. Morgan gave us both a severe glance.

"Do not think for one second that we will not be talking about all of this later, Officer Wilder." She nodded curtly and stepped down as the EMT shut one of the ambulance doors.

"Captain?" I called. She turned her head back, a long-suffering look in place.

"Yes, Officer?"

"I'm sorry. About my insubordination. It won't happen again." Saying that out loud was, by my reckoning, by far the most painful thing I'd done tonight.

Morgan's lips twitched. "Apology accepted, Officer." I looked at Sunny. "See? I can not antagonize people. Sort of."

"I'm so very proud of you," she said.

The EMT put a gauze patch over my cut. "You riding with her to the hospital?" he asked Sunny.

"As long as I can," Sunny said.

Mac came jogging over before the other door shut. "I'll be there as soon as I can. You gonna be okay?"

I nodded, even though the movement caused lights to twinkle at the corners of my vision. "Yeah, I think so, Mac."

"Good." He started to walk back to the cl.u.s.ter of uniforms and SWAT, then turned around. "Hey, Wilder. Where's your car?"

The hospital emergency room was a riot of blood and crying and nurses running back and forth while constant codes blared over the PA, but Sunny got me to a quiet curtain and after a few hours an intern looked at my head and my side wound, rest.i.tched Sunny's work, and declared me fit to go home.

"Normally I'd tell you to stay overnight, but it's the ninth circle of h.e.l.l here and I'm up to my a.s.s in major injuries. Go home, Officer." He scribbled a prescription, gave it to Sunny, and rushed out of the curtain as a gurney rolled by surrounded by nurses shouting vitals.

"Male, approximately age thirty, unconscious and unresponsive, blood pressure one forty over sixty and falling, stab wound to the upper left chest . . ."

I watched Lucas's face, half hidden under an oxygen mask, roll by toward the trauma unit, his s.h.i.+rt cut open to reveal the thin deep wound over his heart.

"I'll be d.a.m.ned," I muttered as he pa.s.sed me by.

Sunny came out of the curtain.

"What?"

I looked back toward a pair of uniforms in the waiting area. Looked toward the doctors working over Lucas. One of them caught my eye. "Hey, you know this guy? He your John Doe? He has a custody tag on his chart."

Lucas choked, then, spitting a mouthful of blood against his mask, and a nurse shouted, "I've got a rhythm!"

The two uniforms got up and went down the hall toward the cafeteria.

"Nope," I said to the doctor. "I've never seen him before in my life."

"Hex me," the doctor cursed, and ripped the red tag off Lucas's gurney. "Get him prepped for surgery and call the ICU."

Sunny, standing a few feet behind me as Lucas rolled away, gave me a disapproving look. "We all have our reasons," I told her, and didn't elaborate. Lucas had done a terrible thing, but he'd saved my life. We were even, and if he was smart, he'd never show his face to me again.

Sunny rolled her eyes but didn't say anything more.

As we exited the hospital and its sounds, I heard the distinctive chug of a bike over the ambulances and traffic diverted from the quake-ridden freeways for the morning commute.

Dmitri was waiting for me as the traffic parted, and I nudged Sunny hard. "Did you call him?"

"No," she said, drawing the word out. "No, this one was all on his own." She moved away from us as Dmitri and I regarded each other. "I'll go get the car."

"You didn't come for me," Dmitri said when I was close enough to touch. He didn't try it. "When you figured out what the Wendigo had done, you didn't ask for my help."