Under My Skin (Wildlings) (24 page)

After several minutes, Agent Solana and another man in a suit enter the room. They lean against the wall near the door. The new man's cold blue eyes give us a once-over before he turns his head toward Solana.

"What've we got here?" he says in a voice so low that I only hear it because I'm a Wildling.

I instantly dislike the newcomer. It's not just his creepy pale eyes. It's the way he carries himself. He's big and broad-shouldered with just a hint of swagger. And he clearly doesn't like us.

"Beats me," Solana replies, leaning over to speak in the other man's ear. "The Chief just said to bring them in and to be nice about it. Boy, did that ever put a bug up Reed's ass."

"Who gives a shit? The kid's an asshole. Using Wildlings to catch Wildlings was a lousy idea—I said it from the start."

"Apparently we're not catching them anymore," Solana says. "Lindel wants us to—"

He breaks off because the man at the desk shuts his laptop and looks across the desk at us.

"Again," he tells us, "I'm sorry for making you wait. But ever since that boy got abducted at the school, there's been hell to play. Parents and the media are going nuts and politicians are after our heads." His gaze drifts over us. "Some of you are his friends, correct?"

Desmond and I nod uncertainly. Elzie gives him a stone face. Auntie Min has taken out a bracelet of Hopi fetishes and is playing the carved animal figures through her fingers as though it's a rosary, except she's smiling, rather than looking serious the way Mamá does when she's saying her Hail Marys. Auntie Min doesn't seem to be paying attention to anything but her bracelet.

"My name's Jason Lindel," he goes on, "and I'm the Bureau Chief here in the Santa Feliz office. I'm hoping we can help each other."

"To do what?" I find myself asking.

"To get your friend back."

"Well you could just try releasing him," says Elzie, sarcasm dripping from her voice.

"What would make you think we have him?" asks Lindel.

"We were there," I say. "The FBI Tazed Josh and took him away."

     "That wasn't the FBI who abducted your friend. It was someone else."

Elzie gives a derisive snort, but he ignores her, his gaze on me.

"Anything you can tell us could help," he says. "Something he might have said, or that you might have noticed. Has he been in trouble lately? Have there been any suspicious strangers hanging around?"

"Oh, come on," Desmond says. "There's been nothing but suspicious strangers hanging around."

So much for the silent treatment. Des, I plead inwardly, please don't tell them too much.

Lindel nods. "Can you describe these strangers?"

Desmond hooks a thumb to where the two agents lean against the wall by the door.           

"Guys like that," he says.

"So these men who took your friend—you've seen them before."

"Dude," Desmond says, "your agents have been following him around for days now."

Lindel's gaze goes briefly to his two men before returning to Desmond.

"And you know this because …," Lindel checks a note on his desk, "… Joshua told you this?"

"I know it because I'm not blind. Your men have been hanging around the school for days now. They're in our neighbourhood, following us everywhere ..."

I think the Bureau Chief is being very patient, but I'm also proud of Desmond. He's keeping himself in check, but he's standing up to the cops who Tazed Josh and hauled him away. For my part, I just want to go hide somewhere—and I'm the Wildling.

"If our men have been watching you," Lindel says, "it's only for your protection. "

None of us believe him. Really, what else is he going to say?

"Let me get this straight," Elzie interrupts. "You're
seriously
pretending you had nothing to do with Josh getting grabbed?"

"I can assure you Ms. ...?" He lets the question hang until he realizes she's not going to answer and then goes on. "We had nothing to do with it his abduction. The Bureau doesn't operate like that."

"Oh sure," she says. "Just like you didn't pretend to snatch Danny."

Lindel pauses. "I see why you feel that way, but apparently, Reed asked us to. It was a bad judgment call—especially in light of what happened today."

"We didn't know those men at the school," I find myself saying. "But they identified themselves as FBI."

"Why are we here?" Elzie breaks in. "And don't give us that bull about trying to help each other. Twenty minutes ago, Danny Reed said he was arresting us."

Lindel glances at his agents. "Solana?"

"Reed did say that to them," Solana tells his chief. "He seemed to think he could get them to give up information. He also tried to recruit this young woman," Solana adds, motioning toward Elzie.

Lindel nods. "I'm going to want a full report on that."

"Screw you and your reports," Elzie says. "Either be straight with us and tell us what you've done with Josh, arrest us, or let us go."

Lindel rubs his face with his hands, then looks at us again.

"I think we need to start over," he says. "As I said, my name is Jason Lindel and I've been hired to lead the FBI's Santa Feliz field office. Either the brass think I'm good at what I do and can get things under control here, or I've pissed somebody off and this posting is my punishment. I've been here a week and I'm still playing catch-up. The men by the door are Special Agents Matteson and Solana.

"The Wildlings problem—" He holds up a hand, palm out, before Elzie can protest. "Okay,
issue
. Can we just accept for the sake of argument that there is one?

"The Wildlings issue has become a problem," he goes on, "because it's escalating out of control. We've got kids being shot, suicides, a population that's getting more antsy by the day, and pressure from various political and religious groups to put a fence around the whole place, lock it up tight, and throw away the key.

"And now we've got some unknown party abducting a kid from right in front of his school—which, I have to tell you, is probably just the start of a whole new mess of headaches."

"Josh isn't a Wildling," Elzie says.

"Fine," Lindel says. "To be honest, from the evidence I've seen so far, it could go either way. What hasn't changed is that he's been taken by persons unknown and we need to find him. I wanted to have this meeting with you to see if we can put our heads together and figure out what to do next."

I hear Matteson's small grunt of disapproval, but I like the way Lindel levels with us and doesn't talk down. Maybe he's telling the truth. The guys who Tazed Josh weren't wearing FBI vests. But for the moment, I'm reserving judgment. I don't know who to trust.

Lindel studies us for a moment before he says, "So now you know who we are …"

He lets his voice trail off. I wait a moment to see if anybody else is going to speak.

"My name's Marina," I say finally. "Desmond and I are in a band with Josh."

Desmond holds up a hand when I mention his name.

"Thank you," Lindel says.

His gaze turns to Elzie. She gives a theatrical sigh.

"I'm Valerie," she says.

Lindel waits a moment. He knows she's lying. We all do. But he doesn't call her on it. Instead, his gaze goes to Auntie Min.

"I'm no one," she says. "Just an old homeless woman who happened to be nearby when all this excitement began. But you may call me Señora Mariposa."

Just for a moment, I think I see something shimmer in the air behind her as she speaks. It's a ghostly image of a giant moth, its wings a mottled brown and black with startling bands of white, and tiny iridescent turquoise highlights appearing here and there like stars in the night sky. It's there and gone so quickly that I think I've imagined it.

Lindel is looking right at her, but he doesn't seem to have noticed. Neither did the others on the sofa beside me. But I hear Agent Solana shift his feet. I turn to see that he appears pale and uncomfortable, though Matteson has the same bland expression that Lindel wears.

Mariposa means butterfly, but the shape behind Auntie Min was a moth. I wonder if it's some kind of projected aura of her animal shape and why Solana could see it.

Señora Mariposa. Mrs. Butterfly.

I sort of remember a movie or something with that name.
Madame Butterfly
. But that's an opera, isn't it? Then something else comes to mind.

When I was really young, before Mamá tried to reshape us into brown-skinned gringas, she would tell Ampora and me stories that her own mother had told her. Old folktales from the desert peoples of Sonora, where Mamá's family originates. There was one about a butterfly. A scary one ...

And then I remember.
Mariposa de la Muerte
. The black witch moth. Depending on who was telling the story, they were either harbingers of death, or the souls of the dead. In Mamá's story, they were the familiars of a powerful
brujá
.

I look at Auntie Min, then glance over to Agent Solana again. Is that who she's saying she is? I have no idea why I've even thought of that old story of Mamá's, but I can tell that Solana saw what I did and he doesn't like it. Has he heard the same stories from his own mamá? He sees me staring at him, so I turn away.

"Chief?" Matteson says.

Lindel nods to him.

"Reed says the old lady's a Wildling—'old school,' he called her."

Lindel looks back at Auntie Min.

"I thought it was only teenagers who had been changed," he says.

It's hard to figure out who he's talking to. Matteson? Auntie Min? Himself?

"That's what we've been assuming," Matteson says. "There've been no been no reports of adults having changed."

Solana nods. "But there've always been stories about animal people—long before this Wildlings business came up. Werewolves, Navajo shape-shifters, Kikimi crow people."

"Right," says Matteson. "And Santa Claus lives at the North Pole and flies around the world delivering presents on Christmas Eve."

Lindel sighs. "But if kids can turn into animals, who knows what else is hiding out there?"

"Just because one impossible thing is true," Auntie Min says, "that doesn't mean everything is."

Lindel studies her for a long moment. Finally he nods.

"So why did you agree to come here?" he asks.

She smiles. "Because the nice Señor Solana asked me to."

Lindel's gaze goes to Solana, who can only shrug.

"She was there when Reed approached the others," Solana says. "You told us you wanted to question anyone who might know something. And as Matteson just said, according to Reed, she's one of them."

"This arrangement with Reed needs a serious revisit," Lindel says, before he returns his attention to us.

"So here's where I stand," he tells us. "I've got the media and my bosses on my case. Everybody's demanding answers when all I've got are questions, but the longer I don't come up with some results, the worse it's going to get.

"But that's not what's important at this moment. Right now, persons unknown have grabbed your friend Josh, and I don't care if he's a Wildling or not, we need to get him back. Safe and unharmed. So if there's anything you haven't told us,
anything
you can do to help, now would be the time to step up and be heard."

"You're seriously saying you want
our
help?" Desmond asks. "Dude, we're just a bunch of kids. What're we supposed to do?"

"Exactly my point," I hear Matteson mutter under his breath.

Lindel spreads his hands across the desk. "Yes, you're just a bunch of kids," he says. "But this is all about kids, isn't it? Adults aren't affected by whatever it is that remakes an ordinary teenager into a Wildling." He glances at Auntie Min before adding, "At least, so far as we know."

"Okay," Desmond says. "Just saying you guys aren't responsible for what happened to Josh—and to be honest, I still don't buy that—the question you've got to answer, dude, is this. Who's got the most to gain from you taking the rap for it?"

"I highly doubt that anyone's trying to frame the FBI," Lindel begins.

Desmond shakes his head. "Come on, dude. Seriously?"

I've never seen Desmond quite like this. Calm, sure of himself, disarming and just a little bit cocky. Usually he's the one who gets hot under the collar.

"Kid's got a point," Matteson says. "Why else would they pull a stunt like that in the middle of the day with all those school kids around? They had to know that someone was going to record it, throw it up on the Net and we'd take the heat."

"Okay," Lindel says. "So who could it be and why would they do it?"

Matteson shakes his head.

"The other thing we have to work out," Solana says, "is why they took that kid. It's one thing to bring in a tame Wildling like we did with Reed, but this is a whole other ball game. I've watched the footage. I don't think Josh is that good an actor. He looked scared. And those men were violent. You don't Taze someone who is compliant."

"And he's not a Wildling," Elzie puts in. "None of us are. Danny Reed is full of shit. He's just a loser who wants to act like he's some big important cop."

Matteson rolls his eyes, but Lindel nods.

"We're not here to debate who's what," Lindel says. "Our priority is to get Josh back and find the perpetrators so that this doesn't happen again.

"Now, if no one has anything to add, you can all go. But please, if something comes to mind, even the smallest detail, call us immediately. Agent Solana will give each of you his card."

"So we can go?" Elzie says. "Just like that?"

"You were never under arrest," Lindel says. "We're not your enemy."

Agent Solana hands each of us his card and escorts us down to the back door.

"I'll have someone drive you to wherever you need to go," he says.

Auntie Min pats his arm. "Oh, that won't be necessary. I'm not that feeble."

"Yeah," Elzie says. "We want to walk."

Solana nods. "Try to avoid the press out there. The guard will let you out the back gate. Think about what Chief Lindel told you. We want to get Josh back as much as you do."

"We will," I say.