Under My Skin

  Under My Skin

  Wildlings Book 1

  Charles de Lint

  Copyright 2012 by Charles de Lint

  This one's for my wife, MaryAnn,

  whose intelligence, love and support

  help me in all things.

  The ancients were people, yet also animals. In form, some looked human, while some walked on all fours like animals. Some could fly like birds; others could swim like fishes. All had the gift of speech, as well as greater powers and cunning than either animals or people.

  - Okanogan folklore

  Josh

  My mom's got a lot of good qualities, but picking boyfriends isn't one of them. More often than not, she's trying to save some loser from himself. Steve—the latest—is actually a step up from the usual lot because at least he has a job. He even owns a suit. But he has that same mean streak as the rest.

  Whenever I try to point this out to Mom, I get shut down for having a smart mouth. It's not until the relationship is over that it's all, why didn't I listen to you at the beginning?

  I don't get it. I mean, Mom's smart—she basically runs Dr. Esposito's office—and she's really together about pretty much everything in her life, except for these guys. Even my dad treated her badly, which is why, hello, he doesn't live with us.

  I've learned the hard way that this isn't anything I can fix. So mostly I just try to keep my head down and wait it out. Sooner or later, it all falls apart and then it's smooth sailing when it's only Mom and me. Until the next loser comes along.

  Today is a perfect example of trying to fly under the radar. It's a Tuesday afternoon and I've just come home from school. I see Steve's at the dining room table, frowning at his laptop, so I slip down the hall and go into my room. If I'd known he was here, I'd have taken Marina up on her offer to go to the skate park. But I have an essay due, so I quietly close my door and surf the Net before doing any actual homework.

  When Steve comes into my room, I'm streaming a demo cut from The Wild Surf's website while clicking through the photo gallery of their lead singer, Joanie Jones, who I've got a mad crush on. I mean, who wouldn't?

  I drop my headphones around my neck and turn to face him.

  "Have you been using my laptop?" he asks.

  Steve's got his macho on and my heart sinks. He doesn't have as much muscle as the last couple of boyfriends, but I'm not kidding myself. I could never take him. I'm seventeen, but small for my age—five-foot-five last time I measured and I measure often. When you're my size, people get a kick out of pushing you around.

  "I've got my own computer," I tell him.

  I point to the screen where Joanie Jones is wearing a perky top hat and a jean jacket over a black bikini. She's sitting on the shoulders of Chuy Martinez, the band's drummer.

  "You didn't answer the question," he says in a tight voice.

  "Actually, I pretty much did. Why would I use your machine, when I've got one of my own?"

  The corner of Steve's mouth twitches and his eyes narrow. Here we go.

  "That's what I want to know," he says.

  "Well, I didn't."

  "Then why does it have some freaking virus on it that shuts down the Internet every time I try to go online?"

  I shrug. "I don't know. Maybe you should stop hanging around in porn sites."

  I was anticipating something, but he moves so fast it still catches me off guard. It's only the flat of his hand, but it whacks me on the back of the head with enough force to knock me out of my chair. My head fills with white noise. I land on the floor and the headphones rip out of the computer. My chair goes wheeling off to hit my bed. He takes a step toward me, yelling something I can't hear because my ears are still ringing and something just snaps in me.

  I am so pissed off. This is my house. He has no right, no right to hit me.

  He aims a kick at me and I come up off the floor. I know he's going to beat the crap out of me, but I don't care.

  And that's when it gets weird.

  It's me wanting to take a swing at him, but by the time I'm off the floor, I'm something else. Some kind of huge animal. My hand's a paw that slashes the side of his head and sends him reeling back into the hall. Blood sprays from the wound. Onto the walls. Seeps through his fingers as he puts his hand to his head and tries to keep his balance. His eyes are huge. His mouth is open, but he's not threatening me anymore. I think he's screaming.

  He trips over his own feet, falling to the ground, and the whatever-I-am pounces on top of him. My paws hold him in place. I want to rip out his throat. The whatever-I-am could do it, no problem. I've got a serious mouthful of teeth.

  But in my peripheral vision I catch a glance at myself. Down the hall, Mom's bedroom door is open. In her mirror I can see a reflection of Steve lying on the carpet with this huge, pissed-off mountain lion standing over him.

  I realize it's me. The whatever-I-am is a mountain lion. A huge badass wildcat that's about to tear apart my mom's boyfriend.

  I freak.

  I jump off him and race down the hall, away from the mirror. The front door's closed, so I bolt for the kitchen. I skid on the tile, claws trying to find purchase, and bang up against the cabinet under the sink. The back door's closed, too, but it's just a screen. I leap through it like it's made of paper and land in the backyard.

  I stand there for a long moment. A thousand smells hit me. Then I bound over the backyard fence and flee down the alley as hard and fast as I can make this strange body go.

  I wanted so much for it to have been a bad dream. But when I wake up at dawn the next morning, I'm lying dirty and naked behind a dumpster. I remember running from home and Steve's bleeding body. I remember hiding between a hedge and a garage, crouching there until it finally gets dark. Then it was more running running running with the sound of barking dogs following me from yard to yard to yard.

  I don't know when I got to this alleyway.

  I don't know what happened to my clothes.

  I don't know what's happening to me.

  I sit there holding my head in my hands—a human head, thankfully, held with human hands—when I realize I'm not alone. I look up to see a boy sitting on his haunches a few yards away. He's around my age with dark skin and darker hair, dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, runners and a hoodie. When he sees I'm awake, he throws a bundle of something at me. I catch it without thinking.

  "First thing you learn," he says, "is to bring your clothes with you. It's not hard. You just have to remember what you're wearing and make sure you're still wearing it when you change back."

  "What?"

  "Get dressed. I don't get any thrill looking at your skinny black ass."

  I hold the bundle of clothes against my chest.

  "Who are you?" I ask.

  The boy grins.

  "You can call me Cory," he says.

  For a moment, there's a coyote head on his shoulders.

  I back up until I'm pressed tight against the dumpster, but then there's just the boy once more.

  "You—it looked like you had—it was like there was this coyote head ..."

  "Yeah, get used to it, 'cause you're one of us now."

  He sighs at my blank look.

  "What they're all calling Wildlings," Cory says. "Who came up with that name, anyway? Some smart-ass headline writer, I'll bet."

  So now I've got a word for what he is, pulled from a hundred news reports over the past six months. Wildlings.

  I shake my head. "No, I'm not like you."

  "That's right." Cory agrees. "I'm old school, kid. Been around forever."

  He sniffs at the air like a dog. "And I'm canid, not feline. Full-blooded coyote, but not Coyote—if you know what I mean. There's only one of him. I'm like his little cousin."

  He studies
me for a long moment. "You're cat clan. Big one, too. Mountain lion?"

  I have a flash of Steve, of what I did to him, of what I became. But I shake my head again.

  "I'm not a Wildling."

  Cory shrugs and shakes his head.

  "You look like you need to eat," he says. "We can talk about what you are or aren't over breakfast."

  "I need to go home."

  "Sure, whatever. But first you need to hear a few things. Get dressed, kid. I went Dumpster-diving especially for you to get those thrift store specials."

  When I refuse to put the clothes on, he tells me he got them from the donations box for the thrift store up at the mall. That's not as grotty as somebody's throwaways pulled out of the garbage. I get dressed without a lot of enthusiasm. The T-shirt's tight and the hoodie and sweatpants are too big, but the runners are actually my size. I roll up the pants until I'm not tripping over the hems. And I zip up the hoodie to hide the Hannah Montana logo on the T-shirt.

  I know I look like crap, but it beats being naked.

  Cory tosses me a black knit skullcap.

  "Here, put this on, too," he says. "It'll help hide those little dreads of yours and make you harder to recognize."

  "Why would that matter?" I ask.

  Except I have a flash of slashing Steve with a mountain lion's paw.

  "First things first," Cory says. "There's a diner around the corner. We can talk after we've ordered."

  I pull the skullcap over my dreads. And they're not that little. They come down to my shoulders now. My friend Marina says they're pretty cool and Marina would never lie to me. I wish Rachel Armstrong thought they were cool, too, but she's a senior and I'm a sophomore, so why would she even look at me? But a guy can hope.

  "Are you still with me?" Cory asks.

  "Yeah. I was just thinking."

  "How's that usually work out for you?"

  I figure he's only generalizing, but I know what he means. Think too much and you tend to worry about life instead of living it. Mom's got all kinds of good advice like that when she's single.

  I let him lead the way out of the alley and around the block to Pete's Diner. We're on the east end of 12th Street, up around the baseball field. Santa Feliz isn't big—the population's what? Twenty thousand?—but it's big enough that I don't go to this part of town much. Usually, I hang out in my own neighbourhood, closer to the ocean where Marina and Desmond also live. We hang at the beach a lot because Marina's a surfer and we all skate. After hours, when the tourists have gone home and the restaurant at the end of the pier is closed, we work on tricks in the parking lots. At least until the cops chase us off. Other than that, we go to school, the skate park, maybe hit the mall from time to time for a movie or just to goof around.

  We don't have much reason to go anywhere else, unless it's to the wildlife refuge near the old naval base, hunting frogs and that kind of thing. But we don't do that so much since we got into high school.

  Pete's Diner is filled with people who look like they're on their way to work and it smells better than any restaurant I can remember. Actually, everything smells more intense than normal.

  "I don't have any money," I tell Cory as we slide into a window booth at the far end of the diner.

  This section is pretty much empty and I guess that's why Cory led us here.

  "No kidding. And if you did, I wouldn't want to touch it, considering where it would've had to have been."

  "Gross."

  He laughs. "Order whatever you want. I'll cover it."

  "How come you're being so nice to me?"

  He opens his menu. "Order, then we'll talk."

  I realize how hungry I am as I start to read the menu. I can't remember the last time I ate, except then I get another one of my flashes. This time, I'm crouched in the branches of a black walnut, leaping down on a whitetail rabbit that goes down my throat in a few quick bites, blood and guts juicing out of my mouth and dribbling down my chin …

  I shake the image away. It leaves me feeling uncomfortable, but also hungrier than ever.

  When the waitress comes, Cory orders the Hungry Man's Breakfast deal: bacon and eggs, pancakes, sausages, home fries, coffee, O.J. and toast. When she turns to me, I tell her I'll have the same. Cory smiles.

  "You sure that'll be enough?" he asks.

  To be honest, I'm so ravenous that I'm not at all sure, but we're on his dime, so I nod.

  "How did you find me?" I ask. "How'd you know I'd need these clothes? Why are you buying me breakfast?"

  Instead of answering any of my questions, he says, "None of this is new, you know. Wildlings have been around since forever. What's new is all these kids in this one small town being changed."

  "I don't understand."

  "Me neither," he says. "Why here, why these kids, why one at a time instead of all at once? Why you?"

  "That's not what I meant. And I'm not a Wildling."

  "Pretending it's all some big mistake isn't an option. Or what do you call running around in the shape of a mountain lion all night?"

  "I—I ..."

  A cop comes in and Cory breaks off. His shoulders go stiff. The cop takes off his hat and stands in the doorway, giving the room a once-over before he takes a seat at the counter and orders a coffee. It's weird that I can hear him so clearly from way over here.

  "Are you in trouble with the cops?" I ask.

  He shakes his head. "If he's looking for one of us, it isn't me."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  He points to the TV. They're running that same old surveillance camera footage that they always do when anything involving Wildlings hits the news. I've seen it so many times that I have that stuff memorized by now—like everybody in town does.

  The first confirmed case was last November. Caught on a video surveillance camera, the grainy footage seems to run endlessly on CNN. A teenage boy crossing a parking lot is about to be swarmed by a half-dozen other kids. Halfway across the lot, he changes into a hawk—snap! Just like that. The footage ends with him flying out of camera range. All that's left on the ground is a heap of clothes and a pair of running shoes.

  It's been a little over six months now and still no one has any idea why some kids change, while most don't, or why it's only happening to kids in Santa Feliz. All anybody living here really knows is that every other week or so, some poor kid or another turns into a shape-changing freak. At least, that's what my buddy Dillon calls them.

  Then I see my high school picture on the TV and I realize this story's about me. About what happened yesterday after Steve hit me. I have to face the facts.

  I'm one of those shape-changing freaks now.

  I cast a quick glance in the cop's direction, then duck my head.

  "I am so screwed."

  It's not until Cory answers that I realize I spoke aloud.

  "It doesn't have to be the end of the world," he says.

  I look at him.

  "Name one good thing."

  "I can do better than that," he says and starts to count off on his fingers. "You're stronger and faster. You're going to live longer and you won't get sick as easily. All your senses are heightened—smell, hearing, vision. And that's just in your human form. You can also turn into a mountain lion—I mean, how cool is that?"

  "Very cool—if you want to live your life like a freak."

  He raises his eyebrows.

  "Uh—no offence."

  Humour tugs up a corner of his mouth. "None taken."

  I think about what he's just told me. I've already noticed how everything smells stronger, which is both good and bad because not only does the food in here smell like it's to die for, I also get a powerful reek of B.O. from the guy three booths down that makes me want to gag. And now I realize that it's not unusually loud in the restaurant. It's just that I can hear better.

  I glance over to the counter, where the cop's looking at a paper someone left behind. I can read not only the headlines of the page he has open, but also the tin
y print that makes up the stories.

  "Can I turn it down?" I ask.

  "Turn what down?"

  "The volume. All these intense smells and sounds."

  "You'll adjust. Quicker than you think, actually."

  I sigh.

  "So, why me?" I say.

  "Like I said, I don't know any more than anybody else. My guess is that kids like you—the ones that change—carry traces of the old animal blood. It's not something scientists can measure because it's not purely a physical thing. It's in your spirit. The real question is, how and why did someone or something jumpstart that old blood?"

  My head is spinning. I don't want to be having this conversation. I want to go back to my old life. But that option seems to drift farther and farther out of reach with each passing moment.

  Cory shrugs when I tell him I just want to go home.

  "I get that you want to go back to your old life, but this is permanent. You can stop yourself from shifting into your animal form, but you can't change the fact that you can do it."

  "A Wildling."

  He shrugs. "If that's the name you want to give it."

  "Well, what do you call yourselves?"

  "Cousins."

  "That doesn't make any sense."

  "It does when you consider how we're all connected by our animal blood." He laughs. "We're just one big dysfunctional family."

  We break off when the waitress approaches with our order. The food smells delicious and I'm so hungry I can actually feel myself salivating. It's all I can do not to just grab it off the plate and shove it in my mouth with my hands. I force myself to wait until she sets it down in front of me, and I use a fork and knife, but I'll tell you, I never tasted anything so good.

  The cop gets up while we're still eating. He glances in our direction and I feel myself go tense. I know I've got guilt written all over my face. But his gaze slides right by me. He puts on his hat and heads out the door.

  "Well, at least he didn't arrest me," I say.

  "Why would he?" Cory asks.

  "Because I killed Steve."

  "Who's Steve?"

  "My mom's latest loser boyfriend." I nod toward the TV. "That's why I'm on the TV, right? They're looking for me."