Chapter 10
Katie
My sense of smell came back first.
Pine trees, cold rock, and something musty that coated the inside of my throat. I could feel I was in motion, a rhythmic bouncing that sent dull shocks through my ribcage and stomach where I hung folded over something hard and warm.
A shoulder.
My wrists were bound behind my back with what felt like zip ties, the plastic biting into the skin each time the shoulder moved.
My head hung down against a broad back, and through the curtain of my own hair I could see the ground scrolling past below me.
We were climbing. The air was cold and thin and the light was a diffused gray.
The body carrying me smelled like Silas. Pine sap and woodsmoke and that warm musk underneath, all present and correctly assembled, as convincing as the face at the motel had been.
But I knew what had me even without the sulfur stench that now hit my nostrils.
Mainly because I wasn’t lucky enough to get darted in the neck like a dinopark animal out of its enclosure by the skinwalker and then somehow wake up to Silas rescuing me.
But also because the warmth of this thing felt surface-level, skin-deep, while Silas radiated heat from the inside out, the furnace of him burning through every point of contact.
And the rhythm was wrong. The thing moved with Silas’s stride length and Silas’s weight distribution, but each step landed with mechanical precision, like I was being carried through the mountains by a very bulky robot.
I kept my breathing slow and shallow and did not open my eyes wider than the slit I needed to watch the ground pass beneath me. The thing hadn’t noticed I was awake. Or maybe it had and didn’t care, because we were already deep in the mountains and I was bound and there was nowhere for me to go.
“You can stop pretending.”
The voice rumbled through the chest my stomach was pressed against. It was Silas’s voice, or at least way closer to Silas’ voice than the thing had gotten in its past impersonation attempts. This wasn’t a Silas-bot. This was the lead singer of a top tier Silas cover band.
I didn’t respond.
“Your heartbeat changed four minutes ago. I can feel it.”
I opened my eyes fully.
“Why did you copy Silas?”
The thing adjusted its grip on my thighs, hitching me higher on its shoulder. “It’s easier to carry you in this form.”
The trees had thinned to twisted, wind-bent things that clung to exposed rock faces, and the terrain was steep and broken.
We were somewhere deep in the Jemez range, in country I didn’t recognize, far from any trail or road.
The sky overhead was flat and gray and the wind carried the mineral bite of snowmelt.
I didn’t know how long I’d been unconscious. Hours at minimum, based on how far we’d climbed. “Where are you taking me?” My voice came out rough, scraped raw from the drugs.
“Home.”
The word, in Silas’s stolen voice, made my skin crawl.
The thing turned up a narrow path between two volcanic ridges, the rock walls closing in on either side.
The light dimmed as the walls rose higher, the sky narrowing to a strip of gray above us.
The air temperature dropped by several degrees.
The charred-sage smell intensified, mixing now with something older and fouler, like mineral deposits laced with decay.
We went deeper. The path twisted left, then right, then opened into a wider space that was less a cave than a wound in the mountain.
The ceiling was jagged and low, the floor smooth with centuries of water and wind.
Bones littered the place. I could easily pick out several skulls and ribcages of larger animals amid the scant remains of countless smaller creatures.
The skinwalker dumped me on the ground.
I hit the smooth rock hip-first and rolled, the impact jarring through the zip ties into my shoulders.
The cave, or lair, or whatever it was, stretched back into darkness beyond the gray light filtering in from the entrance.
The walls glistened with moisture. The air was cold and still and saturated with chemical reek.
The thing wearing Silas stood over me.
Then it changed.
Not the explosive, instant shift I’d seen at the motel, skin splitting and angles forcing through.
This was slower. The skinwalker peeled Silas’s form off itself in stages, like shedding a suit.
The jaw elongated first, the bones of the face stretching and narrowing, the skin going taut and then translucent.
The shoulders widened and then distorted, becoming pointier.
But it didn’t go all the way to the form I’d seen previously, the angular coyote shape from the ravine and the motel room.
It stopped partway, in a form I hadn’t seen before.
Something trying to be humanoid but failing too hard to get even partial credit for it, as if whatever evil animated this creature had tried harder this time but still fucked it up pretty badly.
It stood on two legs, both too long and bent backward at the knee, ending in feet that were more paw than foot and splayed flat for balance.
Its torso was elongated and gaunt, every rib visible beneath skin that looked less like skin and more like stretched membrane, dark and faintly iridescent, catching the gray light with an oily sheen.
Its arms hung past its bent knees, and there were too many fingers, six on each hand, each one tipped with a nail that was closer to a talon.
The head sat atop a neck that was too thin for the skull it supported, and the skull itself was an awful compromise between human and the angular coyote shape, a long, narrow face with a mouth that stretched too wide and contained teeth that hadn’t decided what species they belonged to.
The void eyes looked down at me. Up close, they weren’t empty. There was something behind them, a moving darkness. It was like looking into water too deep to see the bottom of but knowing something was down there, circling.
It made a sound. Not speech, not a growl, but something between the two, a vibration that I felt in my chest cavity before my ears processed it.
Then it spoke, using what must be its own voice now instead of Silas’.
“I’ve waited,” it said, raw and harsh, its malformed jowls seeming to scrape wetly against each other with every syllable. “Tracking your scent. Luring you toward my mountains.” Each word landed separately, like stones dropped one by one into still water. “Then the wolf interfered.”
It crouched in front of me, those inverted legs folding in a way that made my stomach heave.
The taloned hands rested on its knees. Its face was close enough that I could see the texture of its skin, pocked and uneven, pulled tight across cheekbones that looked like they’d been carved with a chisel.
“But here you are.”
I pulled against the zip ties. They didn’t give.
The skinwalker’s too-wide mouth opened further, showing rows of mismatched teeth.
It reached for me.
The taloned fingers hooked into the collar of my FBI-provided sweatshirt and tore downward.
The fabric split like tissue, and it pulled the pieces away from my body.
The sweatpants went next, the drawstring snapping under a single claw, the material pulled down my legs and discarded on the cave floor.
I screamed.
The sound bounced back from every surface, layered and multiplied and distorted by the acoustics of the cave. The skinwalker didn’t react to it. My screaming was irrelevant up here. We were miles from any trail, any road, any ear that would hear and care.
But something else was happening.
Beneath the screaming, beneath the terror, something was building inside me.
It started low, in my pelvis, a heat that wasn’t arousal and wasn’t pain.
My skin felt too tight. The fine hairs on my arms stood up and then lay flat and then stood up again, as if the follicles themselves couldn’t decide what they were supposed to be doing.
My bones ached, a deep, structural ache, as if every joint in my body was receiving instructions it didn’t yet know how to execute.
What is happening to me?
The skinwalker pushed my thighs apart.
The heat inside me surged. My vision flickered. My ears filled with a roaring that wasn’t sound but sensation, every frequency in the cave amplified and separated and laid out like a map.
I could smell everything. The skinwalker’s chemical reek, yes, but also the mineral composition of the rock beneath me, the age of the bones near the wall, the water seeping through the ceiling, and underneath all of it, faint but still detectable, Silas.
On me. On my skin, in my hair, even deep inside my body where his seed was taking root.
The skinwalker positioned itself over me, its hideous quasi-human form between my spread legs, and something thick and wrong and nothing like human flesh pressed against my inner thigh.
The heat detonated, and it felt like every cell in my body went white.
I couldn’t have described the shift if I’d been given a year and a thesaurus.
There was no sequential process, no stage-by-stage transformation.
One instant I was a naked woman on a cave floor, and the next my body was no longer a woman’s body, and the bindings on my wrists snapped like thread because the wrists were no longer wrists and the hands were no longer hands.
I was on four legs.
The cave that had been gray and dim was suddenly readable in ways my human eyes had never processed, every texture magnified. The charred-sage smell of the skinwalker was so intense to my far more sensitive nose that it burned, not just in my nostrils but across my entire being.
It took me a full second to realize I’d tossed the skinwalker off of me.