Close Enemies

by Marc Daniel

  Daka was the first to morph back into his human form. The transformation was instantaneous, one of the few advantages skinwalkers had over werebeings. It took Olivia about ten seconds to regain her human shape, covering her chest with her arms as she did. She still wasn’t used to being naked in front of others and felt awkward and vulnerable every time it happened. Daka, on the other hand, didn’t appear to mind in the slightest, but of course he’d been morphing his whole life while Olivia had been a werewolf for less than two years.

  “What happened to him?” she asked.

  “He was killed.”

  “I assumed as much. Do you know what killed him?”

  “That wasn’t a poacher. This much is clear,” replied Daka, scanning the area for clues. Suddenly he knelt near the carcass, staring intently at something on the ground. He then got up and started examining some of the bear’s wounds from up close. Olivia had no idea how he could stand the stench. She was ten feet away and could barely keep her lunch in her stomach.

  “I think a mountain lion got him,” concluded Daka. “That’s weird. Never heard of such a thing.”

  “Mountain lions don’t attack bears?”

  “Not unless they have a very good reason to do so. Such as protecting their cubs or defending a kill.”

  “That’s maybe what happened.”

  “Maybe, but I find it doubtful. Plus there’s no trace of a kill to protect anywhere around. Also, I’ve never heard of a mountain lion actually winning against a bear. Even a black bear. And this particular specimen easily weighs three hundred pounds, which is twice as much as the average lion in the park.”

  “That must have been a hell of a mountain lion.”

  “Yes… I think we should have Michael take a look at it. There’s something odd about this.”

  *****

  Michael’s cabin, located in the heart of the park near Canyon Village, actually belonged to the park services, but Michael was the sole user of the facility and everyone referred to it as his cabin.

  The dwelling was composed of a small kitchen, a microscopic living room, and a tiny bedroom with a sink and a shower.

  It was a cramped space that Olivia knew only too well, since she’d spent eight very long months as Michael’s roommate after she was turned: a period of her life she didn’t look fondly upon. While the ranger had successfully taught her to control her inner beast, the process had been anything but pain-free.

  She knocked on Michael’s door but obtained no answer, although his patrol SUV and personal pickup truck were parked at the side of the cabin. She checked her watch. Michael’s shift should have just ended; it was unlikely he’d gone on a hike.

  After a second unanswered knock on the door, she and Daka entered the cabin.

  They found Michael sitting on the couch, a blanket over his legs.

  “Why aren’t you answering the door? Are you alright?”

  “I’m not answering the door because I don’t want to deal with visitors. But that’s clearly not a good enough deterrent where you two are concerned.”

  “If you don’t want people to just walk in, you should lock your door,” said Olivia.

  “You still have my spare key so that wouldn’t do me much good.”

  “Hey, Michael,” said Daka, interrupting the exchange.

  “Hello, Daka. How’s Cameahwait?”

  “He’s doing well. I think he’ll bury us all.”

  “What’s going on, Michael? I’ve never seen you on this couch before,” said Olivia.

  “It would seem I have a bit of a problem,” replied Michael, removing the blanket that covered his legs.

  He was wearing only boxers underneath and his legs from the knee down resembled giant red prunes.

  “What the hell happened to you?” Olivia’s voice was full of concern.

  Michael related the events of the morning in a few words.

  “The guy got away?” asked Daka.

  Michael nodded.

  “Why aren’t you healing?” asked Olivia, unconcerned by the poacher’s fate.

  “I have no idea. This has never happened before. With the exception of the time I was injected with wolfsbane, the longest it ever took me to fully recover was maybe an hour, and that was with my body beaten to a pulp. On the other hand, this is the first time I’ve gone for a swim in a boiling bath of diluted sulfuric acid.”

  “Sulfuric acid?” asked Daka.

  “The hydrogen sulfide reacts with the water to form sulfuric acid,” offered Olivia. “Some of these springs have a pH as low as 2, which is about ten times more acidic than vinegar.”

  “This particular spring had a temperature of 200 degrees and a pH of 2.5. But that still doesn’t explain why my legs aren’t healing.”

  “Do they hurt?” asked Olivia.

  “Not too bad anymore.”

  This was an answer Olivia immediately interpreted as meaning he was in extreme pain. For Michael to even mention pain meant that the average person would likely require a morphine drip just to stop screaming in agony.

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I don’t know yet. Wear long pants for a start… No, what’s really worrying me is that my sense of smell has been affected as well. Probably due to the hot hydrogen sulfide fumes.”

  “How bad is it?” asked Daka.

  Michael looked at him bleakly. “Right now I couldn’t even tell the two of you were in the room if my eyes were closed.”

  This was bad! Michael’s sense of smell was that of a bear, the best in the animal kingdom, able to smell a carcass from twenty miles away. And at the moment, his sense of smell was gone.

  Chapter 3

  “You need to go to the hospital, Michael, and file for workers’ comp,” repeated Jason Parrish for the third time in five minutes. “Although I’m not sure that willingly jumping in a hot spring qualifies as a work accident…”

  “It doesn’t, which is why I won’t file workers’ comp. It barely hurts now, but if it makes you happy, I’ll go see my doctor first thing tomorrow morning,” lied Michael.

  Jason had showed up on his doorstep twenty minutes earlier, at dinner time, after spending the day dealing with the fallout of the morning’s incidents.

  The kid was in ICU, being maintained in a drug-induced coma until the doctors figured out what to do next. Whether she was going to make it or not was still unclear at this point.

  “How’s Helen doing?” asked Michael.

  “She’s still in the hospital, but she should be out by tomorrow morning. She’ll have a nasty burn all over her arm and hand for the rest of her life, though.”

  Michael still couldn’t wrap his head around the whole thing. How could things have gone so wrong so quickly? One second he was chasing a poacher, the next a kid was fighting for her life, Helen had a disfigured arm and his own legs looked like a dark pink version of cantaloupe skin.

  “What about the man?”

  “He seems to have vanished into thin air. We found the stolen car where he left it, so he must have left the park on foot or in a different vehicle.”

  “We gave his descriptions to all units and the parks gates are being monitored. But nobody had a good look at him so I’m not too hopeful we’ll get him.”

  “What about the stolen car? Can we have a forensic team go through it? The man’s wanted for attempted manslaughter, at the very least.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” said Jason, heading for the door. “Get some rest and let me know what your doctor says, Michael.”

  Jason opened the door to find an attractive brunette there, arm raised as if about to knock.

  “You have a visitor, Michael,” he said, squeezing past the woman. “Talk to you tomorrow.”

  Michael got up from the couch and walked to the kitchen where the front door was located.

  “Surprise!” said the woman.

  “Sheila! What are you doing here?”

  “I came to see how you were doing. I heard you’d been playi
ng hero again.”

  “Who called you? Olivia?”

  “Who else? She sounded worried enough that I got on the next plane,” replied Sheila, walking towards him. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the lips as he wrapped his arms around her in a soft embrace, her head nestled against his chest.

  Physically speaking, they were about as different as two people could be. Her petite 5’3” build and Chinese features were the yin to Michael’s 300 pounds of Viking-muscle yang.

  They stood there hugging in silence for a long moment, sometimes kissing but mostly just holding each other.

  Sheila tasted of fresh mint but had absolutely no odor. Her subtle fragrance that typically drove him wild was simply non-existent. This worried Michael more than anything else. What if he were never again able to breathe her delicate aroma, lose himself in her bewitching pheromones?

  Sheila had walked back into his life a few months earlier, and they’d picked up the relationship where they’d left it before the year-long intermission. The issue at the core of their break-up hadn’t been solved, though; Sheila still wanted kids and Michael still represented a serious liability in that department. But they’d tacitly agreed to ignore the issue for the time being and enjoy each other’s company without worrying about the future.

  “What happened, Michael?”

  “Olivia didn’t tell you?”

  “She did, but I’d like to hear the story from you.”

  He related the morning’s events for the third time in as many hours while brewing a pot of coffee.

  “And you’re not healing as you usually do?”

  “The pain is starting to get better, but my skin doesn’t appear to be regenerating, at least not at a noticeable rate. It’s been nearly ten hours since it happened. I should have absolutely no trace left by now.”

  “But you do… Can I see?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t, Sheila.”

  “Listen, Michael, if you never heal I’ll have to have a peek sooner or later. If I’m going to be dating Freddy Krueger’s legs, better I find out what they look like now rather than later on when things are getting hot and heavy.”

  “Who’s Freddy Krueger?”

  “For someone who’s been around since the beginning of times, your cinematographic knowledge is sometimes a bit thin.”

  “Watch out lady, I believe you’re mistaking me for Ez. I, for one, am barely old enough to remember the Crusades,” he replied with a wink.

  “OK, let’s see those legs, youngster.”

  He grabbed her hand and pulled her behind him to the living room. “Are you sure about this?”

  “Very sure. Stop stalling and drop your pants.”

  “If you put it that way… but you may want to sit first.”

  He unbuttoned and unzipped his dark green uniform pants and slowly started dropping them down to his ankles, repressing any facial expression that would give away the pain the simple touch of the fabric on his bare flesh was generating.

  Sheila’s face remained expressionless as she silently examined the damage caused by the scalding acidic water, but her eyes betrayed her true feelings: disgust and fear.

  Michael couldn’t blame her. These were his legs and their sight made him nauseous. For the most part, the skin that had sloughed off had already been replaced by new skin, but the flesh underneath was so damaged that the new skin didn’t seem to fit correctly over it.

  “Now you’ve seen. Can I pull my pants back up?”

  “Your skin looks perfectly normal from the knees up.”

  “That’s because that part was never dipped into the water.”

  “So… nothing above your knees hurt?”

  “No?” he said, not quite understanding Sheila’s question.

  “Then leave your pants down and take off the rest. You and I have some catching up to do,” she said, walking decidedly towards the bedroom as she slipped out of her blouse.

  Chapter 4

  Daka decelerated and took the 19th Street exit ramp. Sitting in the passenger seat, Olivia was preparing herself for what was to come.

  Daka had offered to drive and had picked her up at her dorm near Yellowstone’s North Entrance. The part of the park located between the North Entrance and Mammoth hot springs was open year-round and harbored the majority of buildings reserved for employee housing.

  Michael had helped Olivia obtain a summer internship position working in the park and she’d been given a room in one of the dormitories reserved for interns. The room wasn’t luxurious in any way, but it was free and therefore a lot cheaper than the Bozeman apartment she’d shared with her sister Lucy.

  The drive had taken a bit over an hour: an hour spent staring out the window for Olivia. But even the teeming wildlife grazing in the fields bordering the road hadn’t lifted her spirits.

  They made a turn into the hospital parking lot and found a spot near the main entrance.

  “Ready?” asked Daka.

  Olivia silently nodded to the young man and stepped out of the car. The two of them had become close over the past few months and Olivia thought of him as her best friend. This hadn’t always been the case. Their first few encounters hadn’t been pleasant for either one of them. Olivia had even nearly killed Dakayivani on one occasion. But that was before she’d learned who he truly was: a Shoshone skinwalker whose alter ego was a wolf. Skinwalkers weren’t werewolves and that’s what Olivia loved the most about Daka. He could teach her everything about being a wolf while not belonging to the species responsible for her parents’ murder.

  They checked in at the reception and headed towards the now familiar room.

  Olivia knocked on the door. She waited a moment for a reply she knew wouldn’t come and entered the room.

  “Good morning, Luce. How are you feeling today?”

  As usual, Lucy was sitting in an armchair facing the window, which offered a spectacular view of the mountains. Most of her pretty young face was covered by her long red hair.

  “Good morning, Lucy,” said Daka.

  “Morning…” she replied after a few seconds, catching both her visitors by surprise. Lucy almost never replied to their greetings. It looked as if the patient was having a good day.

  After her rescue from the vampires’ camp, Lucy’s mental state of mind had quickly degraded. Within a month, she’d fallen into a depression so deep that on some days she was borderline catatonic.

  Olivia dragged up one of the two visitors’ chairs and sat facing her sister in a way that didn’t obstruct Lucy's view of the mountains.

  “How are you doing today, Luce? You’re looking good,” she said, holding her sister’s hand.

  For a long moment, Lucy didn’t show any sign that she’d heard the question. But as Daka placed his hand on Olivia’s shoulder in a comforting gesture, Lucy’s slender neck turned towards them. Her face looked even thinner than it had the last time they’d visited a mere four days earlier. Lucy’s curves and cascading red hair had always turned heads among the opposite sex, but she’d lost over twenty-five pounds in the past few months and was only a shadow of her past beauty.

  “I want to leave, Olivia,” Lucy said finally.

  “You mean leave this room?”

  She nodded slowly. “Leave this hospital. I’m not crazy. I don’t belong here.”

  “Of course you’re not crazy, Luce. You’re just going through a rough time. Anyone who went through what you went through would react the same way. It’s perfectly normal. You were kidnapped and held captive by vampires.” Olivia had lowered her voice to pronounce the last word. “Most people would have gone completely insane, but not you. You just got a bit depressed, that’s all.”

  “Then help me get out of here.” Lucy was talking slowly, enunciating each syllable as if she were pronouncing them for the first time. “I want to go back to our apartment.”

  Olivia looked at Daka who’d retreated to a corner of the small hospital room. She simply wasn’t prepared to handle this discussion
; she hadn’t expected Lucy to pronounce more than four of five words. Her sister hadn’t spoken this much in months.

  “We no longer have the apartment, Luce, remember? I had to move out. I have a room in Yellowstone right now. I’m going to work there as an intern through the summer.”

  Olivia could see Lucy’s expression turning increasingly sullen as she spoke. “But listen, Luce. As soon as you’re healthy enough, I’ll get you out of here. We’ll find a place to live together again, promise.”

  “I’m not sick, Olivia.”

  “I know, Luce, and I think in no time you’ll be back to your old self, but you need to gain a little bit of weight before I can check you out. Say… ten pounds. Gain ten pounds and I’ll convince the doctors to let you out.”

  Lucy didn’t reply, but the tears that rolled down her cheeks spoke for her.

  *****

  “You did the right thing. She can’t check out in the state she’s in,” said Daka after they’d returned to the car.

  “It’s killing me to leave her in there, Daka. Killing me.”

  “I know. But there’s no other option. The psychologists they have here are much better equipped to help her than you are.”

  “I meant what I told her. As soon as she’s regained some weight, I’m getting her out of that dump.”

  “And I’ll help you. Believe it or not, I have some experience dealing with the mess left behind by vampires.”

  Olivia hadn’t considered this before, but it should have come as no surprise. Daka’s pack specialized in hunting vampires, and they were damn good at it too. So it was only natural that he’d had to deal with this type of situation in the past. People who lived in blissful ignorance seldom reacted stoically to the revelation that vampires, werewolves, witches and other faes weren’t only real but malevolent in many instances.

  Once again, Olivia was glad to have Daka at her side. He was a great friend and great support. So was Michael, of course, but it was often easier to talk to a wall than to talk to Michael. The man had spent so many centuries living by himself that his bear alter ego could teach some social skills to his human form.