The Gathering
Page 23

Just before the cat leaped, the guy’s arms windmilled, legs buckling as he skidded to a stop right at the edge of the ridge we’d climbed the afternoon before. He turned, hands going up, and shouted “Okay! Okay!” as the cat crouched, tail flicking, amber eyes fixed on him.
“Call it off!” the guy yelled as Rafe raced toward them. “Call that thing off and I’ll go away, okay? I never found you, okay? Just call—”
The cat jumped. Rafe shouted and this time I heard exactly what he said.
“Annie!”
The cat hit the guy, and they flew over the cliff. Rafe kept shouting her name, running toward them so fast I thought he was going to fall, too, and I lunged, screaming, but he stopped right at the edge.
I raced up beside him. Below, the cat lay on the guy, who was sprawled on the grass, his eyes open. Open and unseeing. The cat lifted her head and whined. We started climbing down.
At first, the cat just lay there, whimpering. When she tried to rise, she stumbled onto three legs, her left front one dangling.
“Stay there,” Rafe yelled down. “Don’t move. Just stay there!”
The cat made a noise low in her throat and looked up at us. I looked into her eyes and I knew what I saw—who I saw.
“Annie,” I whispered.
Rafe looked over sharply. He tried to make eye contact, but I turned back to the ridge. Blood pounded through my veins so hard it hurt.
Annie. The cougar below was Annie.
As crazy as it sounded, I never once thought, “But that’s impossible!” Because I knew it was true.
I saw that dark patch on her haunch and I knew when she was human, there’d be a birthmark in the same place. I knew what it meant for her. And I knew what it meant for me.
Yee naaldlooshii.
Skin-walker.
TWENTY-SIX
WHEN I REACHED THE bottom, I knelt beside the fallen guy. I checked for a pulse, but his staring eyes told me he was dead.
I thought of Mina Lee. Eaten by a cougar. Possibly killed by a cougar. I glanced over at Annie, then tore my gaze away. I couldn’t think about that now. I couldn’t think about a lot of things now.
Rafe noticed the hole in my jeans and realized I’d been shot. It was only a graze. Slap on a bandage and I’d be fine.
He crouched beside the cat as he checked her injuries, and if there was any doubt that it was Annie, it disappeared as I watched her letting him touch her hurt foreleg, only whimpering when he brushed a sore spot. I crouched beside them, and she stretched her head back and nudged me, giving a chirp of greeting, eyes closing as she rubbed her head against me.
“Is it broken?” Rafe asked me.
I ran my fingers along her leg.
“It doesn’t seem to be,” I said. “I think it’s just a sprain. It should be wrapped, though. Can she …?” I swallowed. “Can she Shift back? To human?”
“She will, but it’s not really …” He paused. “It isn’t under her control. She just will.” He looked at me. “I know you have a lot of questions—”
“All of which can wait. Give me your jacket. I’ll wrap her leg and see if she can stand on it.”
He stripped out of his denim jacket. Underneath he was wearing the same sleeveless tank top he’d had on on Saturday. When he twisted, once again I saw the dark edge of what I’d presumed was another tattoo. I remembered yesterday, when he hadn’t wanted to take off his shirt to wrap the arm.
I caught the armhole of his shirt and pulled it away before he could stop me. There, below his shoulder, was a paw-print birthmark.
For a second, I couldn’t breathe. I just stared at that mark until he tugged the fabric from my fingers.
“Maya …”
I turned back to Annie. “Hold her still. This will hurt.”
He leaned down, trying to catch my gaze. “Maya …”
“Hold her,” I snapped. “We need to get her to safety and take care of—” I glanced at the dead guy and couldn’t bring myself to finish, so I just looked over at Rafe and said, “I’m guessing you don’t want to take this to Chief Carling?”
He shook his head. “I can’t.”
“Then we have work to do.”
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, na**d 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.”