Shade and the Skinwalkers

by Marilyn Peake

  I thought about how the newspaper club at my old school had saved me and how getting involved with something like that might help Kai, but she didn’t go to school. Then I had it. “Kai, I could use someone to help me with The Flying Saucer, the forum we started at school. It’s been working out really well. Kids have been chatting there, even sharing some deeply personal and troubling issues. Anyone who wants to protect their privacy can sign up with a fake username. Soon, I’m going to need someone to keep track of a thread posted by me about another girl who was kidnapped by the same people who kidnapped Annie.” I had a hard time talking about this whole situation, but Kai had seen her own share of horror and I thought it would help her recover if she kept busy trying to save someone else’s life. That had certainly helped me. I continued, “A number of girls from my old high school were kidnapped. You know the horrors Annie went through. There were others. Ursula Wooten died when the kidnappers tried to give her a C-section themselves. She ended up bleeding out and dying.”

  A look of shock on her face, Kai covered her mouth with her hand.

  Continuing, I said, “The last bit of information the police had for another girl, Misty Perkins, was in some ledgers we found. She was sold into slavery and the ledgers reported that she’d been taken to Romania. I’ve been desperate to find her. Now that Annie’s recovering, she’s working to help find her as well. She posted something in the forum back at my old school and I’ll be posting a thread in the forum here. The thing is, it’s hard to keep track of all the comments and posts when I’m away at school and I don’t want to miss anything. Could you help me when I’m away by keeping up with the forum?”

  Kai said, “Sure. I’d be happy to help.”

  We went out into the kitchen for blueberry muffins and milk. Then I showed Kai how both forums worked, the one at Central High and the one at my new school. Kai signed up for both—with the username redarrow at my old school and whitestar at my new one. I figured those were symbols for her aunt and her mom.

  That evening was pretty quiet. I started creating artwork for the October forum. I remembered how difficult it was to get Halloween art approved at my old school because of religious concerns. I realized it should be a lot easier here. It was practically Halloween all freaking year long with all the eerie UFO decorations and people dressing up in costumes every chance they got.

  I debated whether or not to add UFOs-and-aliens-from-outer-space to yet another forum design. I decided to stick it in there, but to make it minimal. Halloween was a lot more than that. There were a lot more things to be frightened of.

  As I contemplated what to add, images popped into my head. Bats. Werewolves. Black cats.

  I fought back tears as I remembered Kai’s aunt in her cat form. Black cat with the red arrow on her head. I didn’t want to burst into tears and make Kai feel bad. I was trying to cheer her up.

  I asked, “Hey, Kai, are werewolves real?”

  Kai looked up, surprised, from her laptop. “How would I know?”

  I cocked my head and gave her my most Seriously? look. She was born into a shapeshifter family, after all.

  She said, “What? What’s that look for?”

  I was about to say, Your mom and your aunt were shapeshifters, Kai, but the words stuck in my throat. Her mom and her aunt ... Part of me hadn’t accepted that they were gone. Part of me still thought of them as alive, as though I could talk about them with Kai and not cause her pain.

  I had to say something now. I ventured, “You know so many shapeshifters, Kai. Did you ever see any werewolves? Or hear about them?”

  She said, “I have heard of them. I’ve never met any, though, so I can’t swear they’re real. Our group tries to avoid them. If we hear they’re in a particular area, we stay away from there. From the stories I’ve heard, they’re totally unpredictable. Werewolves don’t usually shift by will. They tend to shift when rage sets off their human hormones, causing a whole cascade of animal hormones. Once that starts, it doesn’t typically end well.”

  Good Lord. There was a good chance they were real.

  Suddenly, my pretend-scary Halloween drawings seemed lame. I had to create something for the October forum, though. I created a Haunted House like the one I’d made for my old school, but added some changes. I placed a witch with a pointed black hat in a front window, looking out. Underneath the window where she couldn’t see it, I put a werewolf with sharp teeth. Coming around the corners of the house, I put werewolves traveling in packs. Knowing they were probably real scared the bejesus out of me. As I sketched, I thought about how terrified I’d be if I ever met one.

  I put flying saucer and green alien head decorations on the house windows, as though someone had put stickers there. Jack-o’-lanterns carved with the large eyes and slender nose and mouth of all the alien heads I’d seen in Roswell rested on the front step.

  On the top of the forum, I drew both UFOs and witches on broomsticks flying across a night sky lit by a full moon.

  I showed it to Kai. She liked it.

  I told her I’d be home late the next day because I had to get together with a group from the newspaper club to work on the forum and paper.

  We watched an episode of Teen Titans and called it a day.

  CHAPTER 15

  To work on the October newspaper and forum, anyone in the Newspaper Club who wanted to help out had been invited over to Luke’s house. Luke had always been super-mysterious and made me feel a bit uncomfortable. I have so much emotional baggage, I need people to be outwardly friendly when I first meet them in order for me to feel safe. Luke was standoffish and hardly ever smiled. I’m not exactly perky, but Luke rarely offered even the glimmer of a smile. Compared to him, I was a social butterfly. And trust me, I am not a social butterfly.

  Lin’s mom let her borrow their family’s van again. It was perfect for getting a lot of us where we needed to go in one vehicle.

  Lin plugged in her cell phone. She played a TED Talk by a SETI researcher, Seth Shostak, called: ET is (probably) out there—get ready. Lin said, “This is food for thought. Our article about the UFO Festival last month went really well. We need to decide today what we should write about for October.”

  She had a good point.

  October meant Halloween. I thought we should probably tie whatever subject we tackled into Halloween. We weren’t ready to write an open article about missing girls. Otherwise, I could write an article that began with Annie’s disappearance on Halloween and go from there, describing all the girls who were kidnapped, what had happened to them and how we’re still looking for Misty. That all needed to be handled a lot more quietly, though. A newspaper article would be too much. We wanted to keep discussion going in the forum without scaring off anyone who might have information.

  I thought about the new reality I’d witnessed. Shapeshifters and skinwalkers. There were a bunch of them around. They were perfect Halloween fodder; but they were also deadly serious and once you knew that, the whole subject no longer seemed appropriate for an entertaining article. Plus all the real information I had was secret between Kai and me.

  I decided that maybe we could write a research-type article on Halloween creatures: witches, werewolves, faeries, ghosts and so on. We could write about the history of these characters in mythology. And ... And ... My brain started clicking ... Maybe we could invite people to follow up reading the article by starting a discussion over on the forum. That way, someone might decide to come forward and leave information about the real shapeshifters and skinwalkers in the area. It seemed far-fetched, but someone deeply affected by them might decide to post something that could eventually lead to the capture of Kai’s mom’s boyfriend or some of the other skinwalkers. It seemed to me that if they were killing people, we ought to be able to stop them.

  Luke’s house was interesting. It was more like a set of rambling shacks connected to each other out in the desert. A pink water tank sat next to them. A windmill spun lazily around in the afternoon breeze. Everything was
coated with dirt: the peeling paint of the shack walls, rusted hunks of old cars without wheels, a couple newer trucks, even some chickens running around stirring up dust with their feet.

  Lin parked the van on a side of the front yard farthest away from the chickens. When we hopped out, a dog started barking so ferociously somewhere inside the buildings, I just wanted to hop back in and go home.

  We heard a woman’s voice: “Rocky, shut up!”

  Next, there was the sound of whimpering. Then, quiet.

  We looked at each other.

  Moonjava shrugged. He said, “C’mon, let’s go. It’s just a dog.”

  Just a dog? That did not help. I pictured a monstrous-sized dog with sharp teeth.

  We let Moonjava go first.

  He knocked on the splintery door of the middle shack. A woman opened it. Her skin was old and weathered, even though she didn’t actually seem old. It’s hard to explain. Her skin was kind of like leather. She had tried to pull her wiry blond hair back into a ponytail, but loose strands popped out everywhere. She said, “Hi, there! You must be Luke’s friends...” It was more like a question.

  Moonjava said, “We’re here to work on a school newspaper project.”

  The woman swung the door open and said, “He’s down the hall to the left.”

  The house felt cool inside. Fans circulated the air around. Native American rugs hung on the walls, along with a few animal heads which totally gave me the creeps. I swear the eyes of the coyote hanging above a table just inside the front doorway noticed something about me it didn’t like and glared at me all the way down the hall to Luke’s room. Every time I turned around: staring.

  Luke’s room was so large, I figured he must have an entire shack to himself. The floor was made of wooden planks. Rugs with Native American designs were thrown here and there. His walls were filled with Science posters: Periodic Table of the Elements, diagrams of NASA rockets, the solar system. He was hunched over a computer set up on a desk made from the same type of boards in the floor. His bed was a mattress thrown on the floor, but huge. King-sized, I guess. It only took up a small part of the room.

  Most of us sat on the floor, leaning against the mattress. When we needed to check out something on Luke’s computer, we got up and sat in a chair next to him. There were only two chairs in the room: Luke’s and the extra one.

  Jane was chewing gum and reading something on her cell phone. When she absentmindedly snapped a bubble, it looked like the snarly dragon tattooed across her cheek had done it. Belched bubbles with its flames.

  Gail Dickerson pointed at the computer, showing something to Luke. She came across as both spunky and intense. Red curly hair, intense green eyes, lots of freckles, she wore a hot pink dress with black tights. Hot pink on a redhead totally worked, but I’d never seen a redhead risk that before.

  While the rest of us waited for the meeting to start, a perfect storm started brewing.

  My cell phone pinged. It was Kai. She had texted: hey, need to tell u something might b impt 4 ur meeting.

  I texted back: what’s up?

  She answered: forum at ur old school, mysterious messages seem to be about misty. i’m an empath, pretty sure i’m right.

  My heart started beating way too fast. I messed up my reply, typing gibberish from hitting the wrong keys. I tried to calm down and keep my hands from shaking. I finally typed: are u sure? sure enough 4 me to mention it here at meeting?

  She typed back: yes look 4 patterns.

  I answered: K.

  I decided to broach the subject openly. I felt a level of trust with this group. I’d already mentioned Misty and the kidnapped girls when we’d met at Felix’s house and everyone seemed shocked but OK with discussing it. Plus we’d already published an article with information about Bobby Huffman’s death that was most likely a murder. Why couldn’t we continue to cover real news kinds of stories? I said, “I just got news about something happening on the forum at my old school and I think we should do something similar in The Flying Saucer.”

  The room got quiet. Everyone seemed interested.

  I explained all about the missing girls at my old school.

  Wolf Song said, “Shade knows what she’s talking about. But she’s leaving out the most important fact...” He grinned. “...that she’s a hero back in her old hometown. You can look it up on the Internet. Newspapers wrote articles about how she helped solve the case.”

  Somehow, I felt ready for this. I could finally deal with it. I said, “That’s hardly the most important fact. One of the girls died. Another girl—her name’s Misty—is still missing. The police think she’s probably in Romania, being held against her will ... as a sex slave.”

  Everyone stared at me. I realized that is not something you hear every day. They were trying to absorb it. I didn’t think they doubted me. I said, “I want to show you something.”

  I asked Luke if I could borrow his computer. Sitting down at his desk, I brought up the thread that Annie had started on The Tiger’s Den about her own kidnapping and Misty’s current status as a missing person.

  When everyone was done reading it, I said, “The forum’s being used to solve a crime and, hopefully, rescue Misty in the same way that Annie was rescued. I think we should try this in The Flying Saucer. We could start a thread about Misty as someone I knew at my old school and coordinate any information we receive with information coming into The Tiger’s Den about her. And we could start another thread about Bobby Huffman and see if we can help solve his murder.”

  I had other plans that I couldn’t share because they’d sound too crazy. I also hoped we’d get enough information to locate the skinwalkers and take them down. How we’d take them down, I had no idea. Reporting them to the police might not do any good, but maybe the shapeshifters who served as enforcers could do it.

  I realized we could start working on the problem of finding Misty right away. I mentioned that Kai had found some posts that might contain clues about Misty in Romania.

  Luke said, “Let’s do it. Let’s see the posts.”

  Luke and everyone who’d brought laptops with them went over to The Tiger’s Den. Everyone else checked it out on their cell phones or leaned over someone else’s shoulder to look at their screens.

  The tech kids seemed hardwired to recognize patterns. My mind’s not at all like that. Maybe that’s why I see ghosts. My mind wanders around so much, it often feels like it takes its own trips without my complete knowledge to the edge of the universe and beyond. It kind of meanders around and goes in loops, picking up information and eventually solving puzzles. But it never goes from Point A to Point B along some kind of logical graph that leads me directly to the solution. The tech kids, on the other hand, drew that kind of graph in no time flat.

  Mark Bahazhoni was Navajo. Tall and broad-shouldered with an aquiline nose, dark brown eyes and straight black hair that fell to his shoulders, he had a confidence about himself as he explained what he saw in the posts. He said, “OK, check the thread labeled Romanian Literature. The initial poster goes by the username mysticpoet. Sounds almost like Misty, but maybe that’s just a coincidence. He or she asks if anyone has read any Romanian Literature. Only three people reply, saying they’ve read a Romanian author. Then a fourth person, username williamblake, says they’ve read the Misty Poets of China and asks if anyone else has read them. Why not start a new thread about the Misty Poets or Chinese Literature, rather than mentioning it in a thread about Romanian Literature? William Blake was considered a mystic. So, over and over again, you see variations on the words Misty and mystic. My guess is: these are code words, trolling for someone who recognizes them as such. We should keep an eye on this thread for sure, see where it goes.” He continued to study the forum as he absentmindedly straightened his glasses and ran his hand through his hair, trying to brush it out of his eyes.

  Gail Dickerson had short black hair, ruddy skin and intense blue eyes. Looking up from her laptop, she said, “That makes sense. And here’s
something else. Look at the thread labeled Geography Lessons. Started by someone going by the username vampirekiss, the first post talks about plans to backpack from Italy to Ukraine. They ask if anyone’s done that, if they could offer any suggestions. There are a lot of potential clues in that post. First of all, the username, vampirekiss ... Vlad the Impaler, the real-life Dracula, was from Transylvania in modern-day Romania. Second of all, Romania’s in between Italy and Ukraine. Is it possible Misty was brought from the U.S. to Italy to Romania?”

  Everyone hunched over computers and cell phones, tapping on keys and scrolling through the forum post.

  Felix said, “Yeah, I think we’ve got a pattern here. Someone named bitdefender started a post about Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Bitdefender is an Internet security software company based in Romania. The post is talking about Internet hacking. If this post is code, it’s practically inviting someone to hack into it and figure out where it’s coming from. My guess is somewhere in Romania.”

  Luke didn’t smile or even turn around to look at us. He simply announced, “I’m on it. You guys do whatever else you need to do. I’m on this.”

  At that point, Luke withdrew completely into himself. He didn’t seem to hear anyone or anything else. A few times, someone yelled, “You got anything, Luke?” He didn’t flinch or answer or bat an eye. He stayed focused on whatever he was working on. I wished I could do that. I heard everything around me all the time and it was horribly distracting. I always thought that was a flaw, but I suddenly realized it did keep a channel open in my brain to hear ghosts crying, no matter what else I was doing.

  Luke’s dog started barking like he was about to rip someone’s throat out. I nearly jumped out of my seat on the edge of the mattress. Luke’s mom yelled, “Rocky, shut up!” The front door opened. She exchanged some words and said, “Thank you.” Then a truck engine started up. Probably a package delivery. I heard everything.

  Luke, however, continued to stare at his computer screen and tap keys as though virtual reality was all that existed. I envied his focus.