Second Skin (Skinned) (33 page)

“We have not,” another voice responded, exasperated. “You can’t change the boundaries just because you have some new cards from an illegal deck.”

“Your kind is not welcome here,” the deep voice continued, really overdoing it with the menacing tone, like a death-metal singer doing a commercial voice over. “Prepare to defend yourselves.”

I’d been trying to block out both the ever-increasing demands of my stomach and the nerdspeak coming from the far tables, when the sudden, harsh scrape of a chair against the library’s tiled floor assaulted my wolven hearing. I flinched and glanced up from the pages of
Withershire’s Dictionary of Superstitions
. I was researching anything to do with adverse affects of the moon, a crucial part of Kate’s plan to trap Blake and restore his ability to shift at will.

Farther down the long row of bookshelves sat members of the Boroughs Quest Club, a bunch of guys who played a fantasy- based card game in the library during lunch. You know the type. Smart. Insular. Strange. May or may not be bathing on a regular basis. Just my kind of people—well, except for the bathing thing. You wouldn’t think it to look at me. I was a girl, a rather freakishly tall, dark and deadly girl, with two appropriately tall, dark, and dangerous guys vying for her attention, but here I was hiding out in the library, doing research on the paranormal.

Me and the nerds were kin.

Yet something was off. The club had never been this rowdy before. They had heated debates, sure, that was their shtick. But calling attention to themselves, yelling and scraping chairs was out of their league – a real throw down. I slipped the heavy text into my book bag and approached their table.

A stocky guy, sporting thick black-framed glasses, had climbed onto the wooden table, holding some sort of stick. Or wand? He was spinning in a circle, snarling at the others, yelling, “Feel my wrath! Garwwwhhh!”

Yup. Way beyond the norm. For the nerds, I mean.

“Cut it out, Kyle.” One of the guys held out a hand to pull the him down.

Kyle sliced the air with his…wand. “I tell you what I will cut out, Christopher Pinche,” he said with a laugh, “I’ll cut out your heart!” Then, practically foaming at the mouth, he stomped on the table, sending black and gold playing cards flying.

In a movie, this would have made a great slow-mo pan. For the nerds it played out like that—a tragic event with time standing still.

They gave a horrified gasp and dove to the floor, scooping up the cards, careful not to bend the corners, and exchanged frustrated looks that told me this wasn’t the first time Kyle had gotten out of hand.

Chris stood firm and tried again, “I told you, if you keep freaking out like this, we’ll have to kick your ass out of the club.” “Raise your weapons, fools,” Kyle cried. “You are no longer in the Zone of Purity. You’re in my territory. Attacking you is my right. My duty. I have an arsenal at my disposal and I’m not afraid to use it.”

Oh boy, a real head case.
I sniffed the air, hoping for backup, but no one else was in the library, no token adult to wrangle the kid into line. Mrs. Larpane, the librarian, must have sneaked out to refill her coffee. Again. It was just me, the nerds, and freakout boy, Kyle.

I hooked my fingers into the shoulder strap of my book bag, resisting the urge to brandish my athame, a silver dagger, infused with powerful magic, and tucked ever so sneakily under my sweatshirt in its leather holster.

I wasn’t known for my subtlety when dealing with out-of- control situations.

“Um, Chris, the bell’s gonna ring, we should go,” a guy wearing a
Star Wars
T-shirt announced, twisting his wristwatch and shuffling his feet.

Chris spun to face the wall clock. His gaze skimmed over me, his eyes widening for a second—I was kind of used to that reaction, freakishly tall, remember?—and then he turned back to Kyle.

“There are innocent maidens in our presence.” Chris gestured to me lurking at the edge of the bookshelves. “Your duty is to keep the power hidden from the human realm. That is the most basic rule of Boroughs. You risk banishment. Is that what you want?”

I wasn’t thrilled at being drawn into their little drama. A surge of unease had the hairs on my neck standing on end. The words the guys were rattling off were totally melodramatic, but the themes behind them—power hidden from humans, territories, battles— described my entire life. My wolven, hunter of the paranormal, big-secret-from-the-real-world life.

Kyle swung to face me. His snarl faded. He studied my form with beady eyes, threw his head back, and laughed. The
mwah- hah-hah
kind of laugh you usually hear from B-grade horror-flick villains.

Like I said, these guys were into the melodrama.

“That one is not human.” Kyle pointed a stubby finger my way, causing me to nearly choke on my own saliva.

How did he know that?

“I risk nothing, but I see I gain another foe.” Kyle launched himself off the table crying, “Till we meet again,” and ran from the library.

The bell rang, punctuating his exit. The nerds filed out after

Kyle, talking in hushed tones.

Chris gave me an apologetic look. “He didn’t mean anything. He’s not himself.”

“Yeah, I figured,” I mumbled, still stewing over Kyle’s
that- one-is-not-human
remark.

“You’re Paige’s cousin, right? Eryn?”

A yearning tone coated his voice when Chris spoke Paige’s name. My blonde, blue-eyed cousin had that effect on guys. She just made me want to kill things. Definitely a no-no. For now.

My stomach growled. I pressed a hand to it, willing my hunger pangs away. Great, now thinking of killing things made me salivate. Forget ringing a freaking dinner bell. I took a deep breath and focused on Chris.

“So, what happened to Kyle?” I asked. “A little too much role-playing, not enough real-world time away from his bedroom in the basement?”

He laughed. “That, and…” Then he shrugged. “You’ll think I’m crazy.”

He really had no idea who he was talking to. Crazy made my world go around. I gave him an encouraging smile and soon Chris was spilling the beans. Maybe he was susceptible to my wolven charms. Or it might have been that when I smiled, my oversized canines glittered under the library’s fluorescent lights.

Yeah, that was probably it.

“Kyle was like the rest of us, a bit obsessive, sure, but an excellent strategist, you know?” Chris’s eyes pleaded for me to understand.

I didn’t but nodded anyway.

“Then he got this new pack of trading cards. See, they’re not BQLP approved. “BQLP?”

“Boroughs Quest League Players. They create the game and the playing cards. I don’t know where he got these cards, but the portents, spells, influence zones are like nothing I’ve seen before, and I’m at the beta-testing level.” Again, his look suggested I should be impressed. But I was lost. Nerdspeak.

I raised an eyebrow.

“Sorry.” Chris grimaced. “Of course you don’t get what I’m saying. Let me break it down into layman’s terms. Kyle bought new cards. They’re not part of the official game. I think they’ve… taken him over somehow.” Gathering up a few more playing cards from the floor, Chris avoided my gaze. “Never mind. It’s nothing. I gotta get to class.” He grabbed his backpack and bolted for the double-wide glass doors.

“Wait, Chris, give me a second to process…” But I was speaking to myself. Chris had fled down the hall.

Following Chris, I passed the nerd table. An unusual smell permeated the air. Amongst the strong body odor of nerd-gone- bad hung a dank, dead-worms-on-the-road-after-a-rainstorm odor.

Not good.

I glanced around to make sure I was still the only one in the library. Then I bent over and sniffed the spot where Kyle had stood on the table. Now you know why I looked around first. Nothing like being caught sniffing a freaking table to tumble down another rung of the Redgrave High social ladder. The worm smell grew to boa constrictor levels.
Ewww
. I straightened, and in a moment of colossal uncoordinated-person-ness, stumbled as one foot slipped out from under me. I grabbed the back of a chair to steady myself and scowled at my feet. I could count on one hand the times I’d fallen or tripped. Wolven were smooth like butta, never clumsy. Even being half-human, I’d always had excellent wolven reflexes. I shuffled my feet and sighed with relief. I wasn’t losing it, I’d just stepped on a playing card and the waxy surface had sent me slding.

I crouched and picked up the card.

A zing of power surged through my fingers. I flicked the card back to the floor with snap of my wrist. It landed face up.

We stared at each other, me and the Reaper on the card. I don’t know what he represented in the Boroughs Quest game—a dude in a long black cloak, holding a scythe, his face a black shadow with glowing red eyes—but I recognized a bad omen when I saw one.

I could taste the worm odor in my mouth. Trying not to gag, I carefully slid my fingers along the card’s smooth surface and flipped the card over, holding it by one corner. The Boroughs Quest logo was proudly stamped on the other side. It was eerily familiar, a tattoo style skull, its jaw open around the game title, about to bite down and crush the fancy gothic font.

Not another skull tattoo image giving me the heebie-jeebies. The last time skull images had turned up around school, kids from all over town were turned into werewolves—soulless beasts compelled to serve Redgrave’s chief of police. Police Chief Gervais was more than the usual serve and protector, he was also known as Logan, a master vampire working some serious evildoer mojo in our small, northern Alberta town.

A hollow feeling settled in my gut. Okay, it wasn’t exactly a hollow feeling. More like a carved-out sensation somewhere between my ravenous stomach and my uneasy heart. If Logan was connected to this illegal deck, trying to piggyback his evil agenda on the popularity of Boroughs Quest, a game played by nerds the world over—well, we had trouble. Of the paranormal end-of-life- as-we-knew-it kind.

Typical.

The skull’s empty eye sockets glittered with gold flecks, as if eagerly awaiting my next move. I swallowed my instinctive revulsion and stuffed the card into my back pocket. I’d ask my friend, Brit, a borderline nerdess and fellow hunter of the paranormal, what she knew about Boroughs rules and whatnot.

The worm stench faded, and my stomach growled again, rumbling so hard people could probably see it shifting under my figure-hugging black T-shirt. I was starving. The Brit brain- picking session would have to wait.

Looking back, I shouldn’t have stopped at the cafeteria for a few greasy burgers. I should have tracked Brit down right away, but I figured we had some time. Maybe I was over-reacting. After all, what was there to panic about? I’d stumbled upon a stupid card game with possible connections to the paranormal, and some gamer who smelled like worms and had gone over the edge.

Hardly go-straight-to-red-alert stuff. Right?

Nope, I’d taken down stuff that made Kyle’s freakout and odd body odor seem like a pillow fight at a kid’s slumber party. So no way was I scared of a skinny, if overzealous, kid like Kyle.

But what I should have been, was scared
for
him.

Full up on burgers, I tracked Brit down in the computer lab. I waved at her from the hall, and in seconds she’d given Mr. Johonish some excuse and joined me.

“Are you here about Kyle Beuford?” she asked, blinking at me under her veil of black bangs. “I just heard what happened.”

My eyes widened. “
Wow
. Remind me never to underestimate the rumor mill that is Redgrave High. Although I wouldn’t have thought it was urgent news.”

Brit snorted. “Are you kidding? Kind of hard to keep something like that from the masses. They’ve got grief counselors coming in tomorrow.” She glanced at computer lab door as if expecting Mr. Johonish to come looking for her. “I gotta get back in there. But I don’t think we have anything to worry about. Sounds like a textbook suicide.”

The burger bits in my gut lurched.
Suicide?
“Are we still talking about Kyle’s freakout in the library?”

It was Brit’s turn to frown. “No, we’re talking about how Kyle was found dead this morning. He hung himself in his parent’s garage.” Something in my expression must have worried her. “Aren’t we?”

I slowly and deliberately shook my head. “I saw Kyle a few minutes ago. In the library. With a wand.” Why did this feel like we were stuck in a murder mystery game?

Brit’s already pale face, blanched. “I’ll get my stuff. Stay right here.” She bolted back into the computer lab.

I stood alone in the hall with images of Kyle flashing through my mind. Kyle on the library table, waving his wand, alternated with visions of him dangling over a sawdust-covered concrete floor, his eyes popping out of their sockets. All while the Reaper card burned through my jeans like a smoking gun.