Skinwalker

by Faith Hunter

Page 7

 

  When the memory of Beast came back, other fractured, shattered memories came with it. I remembered her kits. I had memories of the hunger times, when Beast was alpha and I was beta. And before that, I remembered a few Cherokee words. Had memories of faces—elders, most of them. Memories that claimed I was a skinwalker. But that was all. I had no clear memories of time, or how or when I became what I—what we—were.

  Since then, I had collected skins, claws, bones, teeth, feathers, and even scales of other animals. I had taught myself to skinwalk into other forms. And it always hurt like blue blazes to shift back into being human. Like now.

  When I could breathe without pain, I unlatched the travel bag around my neck and rolled stiffly to my feet. I gathered my things and went into the house. Naked, I padded around my freebie-house kitchen, exploring. Like Beast, I was hungry after a shift, but unlike Beast, I wanted strong tea and cereal—caffeine, sugar, and carbs—to restore my sense of self. Comfort foods. I rinsed and filled a kettle and a pot with water, added salt to the pot. Opened a box of oatmeal from the supplies Troll had provided, and spotted the box I had shipped to Katie’s last week. I’d been pretty hopeful about getting the job. Inside were travel supplies, including ziplocked black foil bags of loose tea. I chose a good, strong, single-estate Kenyan-Millma Estate tea. Searching through the drawers and cabinets for a strainer or a tea filter, I found a nook off the kitchen where china, silver, stoneware, and serving dishes were stored in glass-fronted cabinets.

  There were a dozen teapots in one cabinet, some Chinese pots—a copper block Yixing teapot and a Summer Blossom Yixing pot, both with square shapes, and one tall Yixing with an elongated spout and top so the steam could cool and fall back into the tea as it steeped. There was one very old, classic Chinese clayware with a rotting bamboo handle. I was entranced. Gingerly, I moved the Chinese pots aside to find two Japanese pots—a Bodum Chambord teapot and an iron pot that looked positively ancient, the crosshatching on the sides almost worn away.

  There were English pots in various sizes; porcelain and cast-iron pots with iron handles that rotated across the tops. In the front corner near the door were a dozen tea filters in different shapes and sizes, including a woven bamboo filter that crumbled when I touched it. The cabinet smelled like Katie, though from long ago, the scent muted by time.

  I wasn’t sure what I felt about Katie loving tea as much as I did. It was the first time I thought about vamps liking anything besides the taste of blood or alcohol. Vamps went by lots of names, individually and collectively: vampire, vam pyre, sanguivore, damphyr, damphire, calmae, fledgling, elder, Mithran, childe, kindred, anarch, caitiff, and members of the camarilla, among others. I had studied what little reliable info was available about so-called sane vamps, and so far as I was concerned, they were all bloodsucking psychos. It wasn’t easy seeing them in another light, and Katie’s loss of control when she scented me hadn’t helped.

  I chose an English eight-cup pot and a filter to match and rinsed them both at the tap. While the water heated and my stomach growled, I found a bedroom suite on the ground floor at the front, showered and dried off, and slung a soft chenille robe, hanging on the bathroom door, around my shoulders. I brushed out my hair and tied it out of the way by flipping it into a knot. I could braid it later.

  After dumping my meager belongings on the bed in a heap, I stored my toiletries in the bathroom, my clothes on hangers and wire racks in the closet, and my special wooden box on the top shelf of the closet. The box was only four by four by two inches, give or take, composed of inlaid olive wood from a tree outside Jerusalem. It held charms that had cost me mucho buckos, and were my ace in the hole for killing rogues. The box itself was charmed with a spell to make it hard to see. Not an invisibility charm, but a disguise spell, what my witch-friend Molly called an obfuscation spell. Molly likes big words.

  I folded down the sheets and put two vamp-killers— specially designed knives with a line of silver near the edge—on the bedside table. Vamps couldn’t move around in the daytime, but that didn’t mean that their human servants couldn’t attack. If the rogue had one, or more, he might be sane enough to send them after me. A little silver poisoning if he drank after I cut one might make him easier to kill later.

  As satisfied with security as I could be without replacing the doors and windows, I took a tour of the house. It was beautiful, something out of a magazine. It had hardwood floors, the boards twelve inches wide, maybe local cypress; intricately carved, white-painted molding at ceiling and floor; wainscoting in one room, which might have been intended as a dining room; walls painted soft, muted colors—latte, off-white, taupe. Charming antique tables and hand-carved chairs mixed in with comfy modern furniture, and sofas and a leather recliner completed the eclectic look. The AC came on as I explored, blowing up the bed skirt, chilling my skin. Fans turned overhead in each of the twelve-foot-high-ceilinged rooms, redistributing the air. A lot nicer than my minuscule one-room apartment under the eaves of an old house near Asheville.

  Back in the kitchen, I turned off the fire under the singing kettle and poured the nearly boiling water over tea leaves in the filter in the porcelain pot. While it steeped, I made oatmeal the way my housemother at the children’s home had taught me. Bring slightly salted water to a boil, add whole grain rolled oats—never the instant or quick kind—in equal proportion, and stir until heated through. Maybe a minute. Maybe less depending on my hunger. Dump it in a bowl, add sugar and milk. Eat. With properly prepared tea.

  I’m a tea snob. My sensei had introduced me to teas and teaware when I was a teenager and I had made a study of tea after hours, after he had bruised and beaten me into a pulp and somehow along the way, taught me how to fight like a man.

  I’d been up twenty-six hours and was exhausted, but I was more hungry than tired, so I ate fast, putting away three bowls of oatmeal. My belly bulged, satisfied, though I got a sleepy wisp of Beast’s disgust and an image of a deer eating grass. Ignoring it, I carried the mug with me to the table and tightened the chenille robe. It was clean, and I figured whoever had prepared the house for me had left it. Or maybe the previous tenant had forgotten it when he moved out. He. Yeah. The house smelled of male most recently, over the other scents of the ages.

  I sipped and relaxed, my feet in the chair across the table, the robe closed chest to shins. The table was old, maybe an antique, though I hadn’t studied antiques. Maybe next year. Or maybe I’d start languages next year; I wanted to learn French, Spanish, and Cantonese—Cantonese because of tea, of course. When I finished the tea—eight cups, four mugs—I rinsed everything and placed pot, kettle, and stoneware on a drying cloth. I tossed the robe at the foot of the bed and crawled between the soft, lightly scented sheets.

  Before I slept I called Molly, holding the cell close to my ear.

  “Big Cat!” she answered.

  “Morning, Mol,” I mumbled, feeling sleep pull at me. “How’s the kits?”

  “Kits? You’re still talking like Beast. You hunted last night. ” When I mumbled a vague yes, she said, “Catch anything?”

  “The rogue smells weird. Beast thinks it’s dying. ”

  “Vamps don’t die. Don’t eat that, Evan,” she said to her son, without missing a beat. “Crayons look pretty but taste bad. Angie, take the crayons away from him. Thank you. Vamps don’t die,” she repeated to me.

  I closed my eyes, sleep so close it paralyzed my limbs, the world darkening. “I know. Weird, huh. You and your witch sisters figure out yet why Christian symbols kill vamps?”

  “Not a clue, but the whole family’s looking. Interesting research. ”

  “Night, Mol. ”

  “Night, Big Cat. ”

  I woke at two in the afternoon to the sound of someone knocking. I rolled out of bed, feeling stiff, and pulled the robe on. I was still holding the cell phone and tucked it in the robe pocket. Barefoot, I padded to the front door and looked out throug
h a clear pane in its stained-glass window. On the front stoop was the pretty boy, the Joe. Interesting.

  He was standing at an angle so he could view the street and keep the door in sight. The too-cool, all-black look was gone. He was wearing well-worn five-button jeans and a tee so white it had to be brand-new, with scuffed, worn, stained, once-brown leather sandals. The sunglasses were still wrapped around his face. His nose had been broken once. A small scar across his collarbone disappeared into the shirt. On one bicep, I saw the fringes of a tattoo. I couldn’t see much, but it was a good quality tat, something dark with globes of red, like drops of blood, the ink bright and rich. An Oriental job, maybe. He hadn’t shaved, but the gnarly look suited him. I’d known kayakers—paddlers, river rats—who sported the look almost as well.

  As if he sensed me, the Joe turned his head and removed his glasses. Black eyes looked at me through a tiny clear pane. The Joe didn’t appear to be armed. He had come to the front door in plain sight of anyone who happened by. I hadn’t heard the bike and smelled no fresh exhaust. He’d walked? He was alone. So I opened the door. Heat rolled in, sticky and heavy with moisture. “Morning,” I said.

  He smiled. It was a really good smile, full lips moving wider before parting, to show white teeth, not perfectly straight, but uneven on the bottom. Something about the canted teeth pressing against his lower lip was unexpectedly appealing. His eyes traveled from my face down my body and back up in leisurely appreciation. “Actually, it’s afternoon,” he said.

  I nodded and my hair fell forward, knotted in a half bun, bead free. I had forgotten to take the stone and plastic beads out before I shifted. Dang. Now I’d have to round them up out of the dirt. “So it is,” I said.

  “You weren’t here last night. ” When I didn’t answer, he said, “I knocked. Walked around. The bike was in the back, I could see it through the gate. But there were no lights on, no sound or indication of movement. You weren’t here. ”

  It wasn’t a question so I didn’t answer; it wasn’t quite an accusation, but it was close. This Joe was paying entirely too much attention to me and I had to wonder why. I was pretty sure he hadn’t fallen in love with me at first sight when I motored by him yesterday. I let a small smile start and he went on, a hint of amusement now in his eyes.