I didn't need to splint Annie's foreleg. I'd just set to work when she started her Shift back, and I don't know what I expected--a screaming, tortured transformation, I guess--but instead she started to twitch and quiver and whimper, and Rafe told me to get back, then she was human again.
It only took a couple of minutes as she morphed in a process that looked more like something from a sci-fi movie than a horror flick. It took a lot out of her, though, and she lay there, curled up in a ball, gasping and panting, naked and covered with sweat.
Then she sat up, looked around, saw me, and crawled over. She curled up, half in my lap, like a scared child, shivering, her heart pounding, snuggling against me for warmth. After a moment's hesitation, I hugged her and told her it would be okay as Rafe draped his jacket over her. Within minutes, she was asleep.
"We need to"--I glanced at the dead guy--"move him."
My second body in as many days. I should be horrified. At least with Mina Lee, I'd felt a hint of grief. Even then, though, my response had felt wrong. Cold.
Now it was even worse. I felt nothing. This guy had come for Rafe, and he'd been willing to kill me to get him. He'd died by accident. If he'd had his way, he'd have done a lot worse to us. Still, to feel nothing didn't seem right. Too sensible, even for me.
"I know a place," I said after thinking for a moment. I carefully slid from under Annie, lowering her to the ground and adjusting the jacket over her. I stood and looked down at the body. "Is anyone going to come looking for him?"
Rafe shook his head. "The Jacksons must have put out a bounty on me. He wanted to collect it himself, which means he wouldn't risk telling anyone else where he was going." He stepped toward me, fingers closing around my arm. "I'm sorry, Maya. I never would have gotten you involved--"
I pulled from his grasp. "Don't lie to me. Not now. That's why you're here. To get me involved. Not in this"--I motioned to the dead guy--"but this." I tugged my shirt away from my jeans, showing off the top of my matching mark, and as I did, I watched his expression, praying for a look of surprise and knowing I wouldn't get one. I didn't.
That's what you wanted, isn't it? You said you were looking for something special in a girl, and that's what it was.
I didn't say the words. Even thinking them made my gut clench, made me want to run as far from him as I could get, but I couldn't do that. I needed answers.
"I can explain," he said.
"I expect you to," I said. "But first, we have to get rid of him."
We carried the body to a narrow cave farther down the ridge, where erosion had eaten away at the cliff side. We took his ID. He didn't have keys, so he must have hitched a ride. We put him in the cave, then stuffed the opening with rocks and branches, to keep scavengers away.
By the time we got back to Annie, she was awake again and ready to walk to the cabin. She was still exhausted, though, barely saying a word, leaning against her brother. When we got there, it was exactly as I remembered it--the kind of place so rundown that hikers would use it for shelter in bad weather, presuming no one lived there.
The cabin was barely larger than my bedroom and had an outhouse. A new generator supplied electricity and a propane stove provided heat for cooking. As rustic as you could get. Clean, though, I saw as I followed Rafe inside. Probably a lot cleaner than it had been when Ed Skylark lived here.
There were two beds, little more than bunks. One was original. The other was made of new wood, as was the table and two chairs. Add a tiny fridge, and that was it for furnishings. The bed linens and plates and other stuff all looked new but were discount store quality. Clearly Rafe was making the drug dealers' money last as long as he could.
Rafe helped Annie to the new bed, which was piled with colorful pillows and blankets. She snuggled in, saying something about being hungry, but she drifted off to sleep again before she could finish. Rafe got a health bar from a crate of groceries and a juice box from the fridge, and left them beside her bed. Then he motioned me outside.
He didn't say another word until we were standing beside the fire pit, and even then he only said, "So ..." before lapsing into silence. I lowered myself onto the log they'd been using for a fireside chair. He sat and tried sliding closer, but when I tensed, he stopped and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, staring into the forest.
"You said your mother was Hopi," I said, pointing to the tattoo on his forearm.
He rubbed it and nodded.
"They have the skin-walker stories, too, don't they?"
He looked over sharply, blinking.
"Yes, I know the legend," I said. "But I'm guessing it's more than a legend."
"It is." His hand came down right beside my leg, not touching. He looked down at his hand, like he was hoping I'd slide closer, give him some sign everything was okay. When I didn't, he said, "This isn't how I imagined it. Telling you."
"Did you imagine telling me at all?"
His gaze shot to mine. "Yes. That's why I asked you to come out here tonight. I knew I couldn't wait. Shouldn't wait. Things were happening, and you needed to know the truth, if you didn't already."
"Okay, so you were going to tell me tonight. Well, it's tonight. Go on."
He squirmed and I knew the timing didn't matter--he'd expected this to play out differently, probably on a cliff top after a climb, sitting together, his arm around me, as he casually said, "Hey, you know how those mountain lions have been hanging around you a lot lately? Well, there's a reason ..."
"Skin-walkers," I prompted.
"Right."
Silence.
"I've only read one reference to them turning into cougars," I said. "It's usually wolves, coyotes, even bears."
"It's there, if you dig deep enough. That's what my mom said, anyway." He cleared his throat and sat up straighter. "What you read--that was about witches, right? Cast curses? Wear animal skins and change form?"
"Right."
"Well, that's not us. Mom said we probably shouldn't even call ourselves skin-walkers, because of the confusion, but we had the name first. Real skin-walkers, like us, go back to before Columbus 'discovered' America. It's a kind of supernatural race. We're born into a family of skin-walkers. We can change into mountain lions. We get our energy from nature. We have healing powers and some control over animals." He met my gaze. "Sound familiar?"
He reached over to put a hand on my arm, and I realized I was covered in goose bumps.
I pulled away. "Go on."
He hesitated, then continued. "Mom was told the new kind of skin-walkers started out as assistants to the real ones, who were tribal healers and protectors. Our kind--Well, it's a long story and I'm sure you're not that interested yet. I can give the history lesson another time. Point is that we aren't the skin-walkers they believe in these days. Our kind went extinct."
"Annie doesn't look extinct to me."
"That's because--" He stopped, wincing, then stretched out his legs and rubbed his calves.
"You okay?"
"Muscle pains. I'm getting them a lot lately. I think it's close. The first Shift. Are you--?" He exhaled. "Later, right? Keep explaining. Okay. Skin-walker families lost their powers. Mom said it was a survival mechanism. They were being killed off by the new human kind of skin-walkers, and so all of a sudden, they started having kids without powers."
"Those kids weren't a threat, so the others left them alone."
"Right. But some families still passed along the old stories. Like Mom's. It was like telling your kids that your family used to be famous warriors. It didn't mean anything anymore, but it was cool. Then these people got in touch with her. People from other skin-walker families. They said scientists had figured out a way to reactivate the gene."
"Reactivate a skin-walker's powers?"
"Right."
"Why?"
He shrugged. "If we don't have them, we feel it. Mom said it's like being born a blind artist or a deaf musician. There's this ... drive. This itch you can't scratch. There were people in her family
who went crazy, and everyone said that was the reason. She worked her frustration out in art, but she said it was never enough. Something was always missing."
"So they reactivated the gene. For you and Annie."
"And others."
"Like me."
He nodded. "Annie was the first. When everything seemed to go fine with her, they did a full first wave of trials. They were in it together, our mothers. Of course, they worried about what might go wrong. Whether they'd done the right thing. They started getting paranoid. Then one of the mothers said she'd overheard the scientists talking about taking the babies away after they were born. So they ran."
"All of them?"
Another nod. "They split up because they thought that would make them harder to find. Later ... well, later, Mom started thinking they'd overreacted. The woman who said she overheard the scientists had already wanted to leave."
"So maybe she made the story up. If they all went together, any efforts to find them would be split. It made it easier for her to get away."
"Right. But when people talk about taking kids away from their parents ..." He shrugged. "It brings up bad memories."
Residential schools, he meant. I didn't know a lot about it in the United States, but I knew it was a big issue in Canada, where, for over a hundred years, Native kids were taken from their families to live in state-funded, church-run schools.
From inside the cabin, Annie yelled, "Rafe?"
"Right here!" he called back. He got to his feet, then turned to me. "Hold on. I'll be right back."
TWENTY-SEVEN
"THERE WASN'T AN ACCIDENT with Annie, was there?" I said when he came back. "It's not brain damage. Not really."
"No." He stared at the cabin, looking so sad that I had to resist the urge not to slide closer. "It started soon after she began Shifting. Just small things at first. Not interested in her art anymore, not interested in school, getting restless, wandering off and staying away until she was hungry. I figured it was just a combination of the Shifts and our mom's death."
"But it wasn't."
He shook his head. "It kept getting worse. She's not ... She's not Annie anymore. I mean, she is, in some ways, but she's ... simpler."
"More animal than human."
He nodded. "She still takes care of me, but in a different way, protecting me, like with that guy today. But now I'm the parent. I make sure we have clothes and food and a place to live. I'm not complaining--she did it for years, and it's time I took some responsibility. But ..."
"You want your sister back. You think she'd want to be back."
"I know she would. I mean, if that happened to me ... If it happened to you ..."
My heart started thudding so hard I struggled to breathe. Shifting into animal form, running and experiencing life as a cougar--that part sounded amazing. But truly becoming an animal, giving up all my dreams, my future? I felt sick just thinking about it.
"She's getting worse," he said in a low voice. "She Shifts more and more. One day, maybe she won't Shift back."
"But that's not normal, right? Obviously skin-walkers were still human. Something went wrong with the experiment. That's why you're here. You came looking for another subject, hoping to find leads to the group that did this, to see if they can fix her."
He nodded. "When Mom found out about the cancer, she started searching for the other subjects. She contacted someone who really didn't want to tell her anything but finally said he knew where one girl was. You. Here. When Mom was dying, she said if anything went wrong, to come here and look for you. She knew the name of the town and what your mom looked like, but that's all I had."
"Only my mom is my adopted mother. So you started going through all the girls, trying to find the one with the birthmark. If you were looking for a Native girl, though ... kind of obvious, wasn't it?"
"I wasn't. Your mom's white."
"W-what?"
"That's what my mom said. It's how your mom's family hid. Intermarriage. She had Native blood, but she looked Caucasian--hazel eyes and light hair."
"And my dad?"
"I don't know. It was all in vitro fertilization."
My guess was that the sperm donors carried the gene, too. That would make sense, if you were trying to resuscitate a genetic trait. My dad must have been full Native, then. Not that it mattered now. Well, it did matter. I was half white. Or close to it.
For genetic shocks, that didn't quite match finding out I could change into a cougar, but it was close. I felt a weird squeezing panic in my chest, like waking up one day and looking in the mirror to see a stranger.
"So you figured I wasn't the girl you were looking for. You gave it a shot, but halfhearted, just in case."
"It wasn't like--"
"You thought it was Hayley, didn't you? Hazel eyes, blond hair, right age."
"Kind of. But not really. I was--" He exhaled, gaze dropping to his hands, folded in front of him. "Hayley liked me. Enough to tell me anything I wanted without asking why I wanted to know it. She was on the swim team, and she'd have seen just about every girl here in a swimsuit ..."
"She could tell you if anyone had a birthmark. She's seen mine, but she didn't mention it."
"No, and I got the feeling she wouldn't even if you had one."
So he had to see for himself. That was why he'd wanted to go swimming yesterday. To confirm his suspicion.
He continued, "I thought maybe it was Sam. Hayley wouldn't have noticed if she had a birthmark. Mom wasn't completely sure that you'd be here with your mother. She knew she'd given up one of her twins."
"Twins?"
"A boy and a girl. Multiple births are common with skin ..." He trailed off. "You really didn't know, then."
"That I'm a skin-walker? That my mother is white? That I have a twin brother? No, apparently there's a lot about myself I didn't know."
"I'm not doing this right. I ..." He slid closer, arm going behind me, but I jumped away so fast I almost fell off the log.
"Just tell me the rest," I said.
"My mom knew that yours gave up one of her kids to make them both harder to find--the scientists would be looking for twins. When she heard that you surfaced up here, she presumed you were the one your mom ..." He looked over, like he'd just realized he was telling me that my mother chose to keep one of her children, and it wasn't me. "Maya ..."
"Go on."
He swore and shifted position, giving me a look like he wanted to make this easier.
"So you figured it was Sam," I said. "She came here alone, so that fit, too. Only she didn't want anything to do with you, meaning there was no way you were getting close enough to check for a birthmark."
"No way I wanted to either," he muttered. "I asked her out. She said no. When I tried taking the slow route, getting to know her, she told me to take a hike, and when I didn't, she went after Annie."
"What?"
"Annie came by to get a look at her. Like with you, because I thought she was the one. Sam wanted her to tell me to back off. Annie laughed. Sam was about to take a swing at her when I got there. She stopped and she said she wasn't going to hit Annie. Doesn't matter. It completely freaked Annie out. And completely pissed me off. She could tell Annie was slow. It was like kicking a puppy that wants to play."
Sure, Sam was quick with her fists, but she was never cruel. My guess was that she'd just raised her hand in anger. An instinctive reaction with Sam.
Yet she'd had a few run-ins with other girls at school. Was I defending her because she was nice enough to me?
I said, "And that's when the cougars started taking an interest in me and you realized you'd been chasing the wrong girl."
He nodded, calm, like he had no idea what he was admitting.
I continued. "But I'd already made it clear I wasn't impressed by the bad boy routine, so you had to figure out what would impress me. Honesty. Let me see past the bad boy front and make me feel special, as if you liked me so much you'd let down your guard for me."
&
nbsp; I wanted him to say no, I was wrong, that wasn't how it happened at all.
He didn't even try. I supposed, when this was over, I'd be grateful for that. But right now, it hurt. Hurt so bad. After everything I'd just found out, you'd think this wouldn't matter, but the rest of it was too hard to wrap my head around. I needed time for it to sink in. This sunk in. Like a dagger.
"So I guess you found what you were looking for," I said. "The girl you were looking for."
My words twisted with a bitterness I wished I could suck back in, and his lips parted in a curse, as if he'd just realized what he'd admitted.
"It isn't like that."
"Yes, it is. You chased me for the same reason you chased all the rest. You thought I was the one. You chased me harder because you were pretty sure I was. That's why you came to my party. That's why you took me up on the roof. It was you who dosed my drink, wasn't it? Hoping I might be willing to shed some clothing, so you could look for a birthmark."
"No! I did not drug you, Maya. Yes, that's why I hit on you. That's why I hit on every girl. But you were different."
Because I was the one. I got to my feet.
"I don't know anything about my mother or skin-walkers or scientists. But if everything else you said is true--and I have no reason to think it isn't--then I need to find these answers as much as you do. So I'll help you. Right now, though, I need to go home."
"Maya." He took my arm.
I shook him off. "I need to go home, okay? I have a lot to think about. We'll talk tomorrow."
I walked away. He didn't try to stop me.
My relationship with Rafe was a lie. He'd chased me for a reason. He'd kissed me for a reason. Even when I'd looked into his eyes and thought I'd seen something special, it was there for a reason.
He'd tricked me. Lied to me. And the worst of it? I'd seen it coming.
I'd watched him go after half the girls at school. I'd rolled my eyes and said I couldn't believe they fell for it. When he made a run at me, I shot him down and I was so pleased with myself. I could see through the guy when no one else could.
Yeah, right.
Sure, I'd fended off his interest easily ... because he wasn't all that interested at the time. Once he decided I might be who he was looking for, all he had to do was change tactics and I fell harder than any other girl.
Still, I'd suspected that he had a goal I couldn't see. But I didn't care. I didn't want it to be true, so I told myself it wasn't.