Under My Skin (3 page)

Were they?

But if Alec really was a hunter, chances were he’d despise me once he found out I was part wolven. Hunters and paranorms didn’t mix. I was a rarity. So why was I even entertaining the notion of a hunter as a boyfriend?

No, he couldn’t be a hunter. It was a rumor. Small town gossip mill stuff.

But what if it wasn’t?

What if Alec had been out there in the woods because he’d been tracking the werewolf who’d wanted me for a bite-sized snack? My instinctive response was to charge back to the woods to help, but I was under strict orders by the Hunter Council to avoid all paranorm interactions.

To lay low.

To blend.

So, I had two options. I could:

*****

A.
Avoid contact with Alec and his possibly hunter family at all costs—a.k.a. bury head in sand and hope for best.

Or…

B.
Do some sniffing around, get to the bottom of the rumors about Alec’s werewolf-nabbing hobby, and perhaps engage in a battle to the death once the Hunter Council heard I had outed myself.

*****

Yup. Plan A it was. Boring and safe and totally against my instincts, so it must be what the Hunter Council would want me to do. Staying-out-of-it-girl I would be. For now.

Groans rang out across the field as Mr. Riggs lead the rest of our class to the finish line of pylons. Then he jogged over to where Brit and I awaited the okay to go back into the school and change.

“Nice work, McCain,” he said, using my last name in the usual manner of gym teachers and drill sergeants from every war film I’d ever seen. “You play basketball? Got the height.”

“Ah, no.”

“Volleyball?”

“No-o-o.” I wrinkled my nose. “I don’t do team sports.” I didn’t like any sport. Period. End of discussion. The running thing was a fluke.

Guys, still panting from the run, gave me The Look, checking out my long go-go-gadget legs. Like I cared. They were midgets-in-training anyway. I straightened from the slight stoop I usually adopted to mask an inch or two and stood proud of my five-feet-eleven inches. In this case, it served as an unspoken shutdown.

Defeated, they regrouped and sauntered over to a cluster of simpering girls to pursue more approachable fare. Their collective testosterone level proved overwhelming, and a girl squealed as a fight broke out between the beefier guys.

A smile tugged at my lips. My pulse raced, and I debated joining the scuffle. Or at least grabbing the guys and knocking their heads together. Wouldn’t that scare the crap out of everyone? I struggled to keep from laughing.

The smile slipped from my mouth. I was enjoying the fight a bit too much.
Like a wolven would
. I deliberately slowed my heart rate and distanced myself. Sometimes all the changes happening to me physically and to my soul were just plain scary.

“Thompson! Povich!” Mr. Riggs bellowed, charging at the brawling mass of elbows and fists. “Drop and give me twenty.”

With loud groans, the guys fell to the ground and assumed the position, but their arms shook by the tenth push-up. Ick, how painful and embarrassing.

I bet Alec wouldn’t have any trouble.

Must. Stop. Thinking. About. Hot.
Hunter.

The rest of the class ambled to the gym entrance, but I hung back. Over the field, the sun hung afternoon-low while the pale outline of the full moon crept higher in the sky. Whether in full daylight or in the dead of night, the full moon fascinated me. I could stare, fixated, at that glowing orb and lose all track of time. Though she called to me, the moon didn’t command me in any way.

Unlike werewolves, wolven—able to turn at will—weren’t ruled by lunar phases, but had an instinctive respect for the moon’s power. A crazy madness ran through all paranorms at the full moon. Even humans experienced stronger emotions during the full moon. They became quick to anger, to love, and to give into impulses—though at a much lower intensity than paranorms. Maybe that explained my connection with the guy in the forest.

I looked back at the woods.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was there.

Watching.

Chapter 2:
Har-de-freaking har

At the rusting metal doors, I balked. I hated locker rooms.

Brit gave me a shove, and we plunged into the ripe-smelling buffet of all things laid bare. I wove through girls in various stages of dress, opened my locker, and grabbed my backpack. A gossip session started in the far corner. Dark looks, sent my way, made the topic of conversation pretty obvious.

I ignored the muffled giggles and rifled through my stuff for my black socks. No way was I wearing glowing white anklets for the rest of the day—not with jeans I’d outgrown by half an inch.

Brit claimed a spot on the glossy wooden bench. Close, but not overstepping our tentative friendship boundaries.

I wondered if she was hanging around to see what I’d do next. New to town. Rambling about racing a guy with a pet wolf. Freakishly tall—a nice foil for her pocket Venus self. Yup, my entertainment value must be pretty high, although I could have saved her the trouble—I was nothing special. Not much, anyway.

So far, I’d exhibited few of my mother’s wolven traits except for being a bit stronger and faster than the average kid. I wasn’t sure how much Sebastian, my father’s ex-Hunter-Council boss, knew about my wolven side or that my father had been controlling it with drugs. But he must not have thought I was a threat to the general public, or he never would have sent me to Redgrave to live with my uncle after the funeral.

The funeral where we’d buried… No.
My parents were dead.
At least, that’s what I was supposed to tell everyone. Even my father’s brother who had taken me into his home and who had looked so lost when we lowered the coffins into the ground.

Not that I wasn’t lost too.

But Uncle Marcus wasn’t as good at hiding his emotions. He hadn’t grown up the way I had. Tracking the paranormal creatures that go bump in the night, wondering when it would be
my
turn to cling to the shadows. To be hunted.

I gave a disgusted snort and wiggled my feet free from my cross trainers so I could get changed. Was I the only one who thought the plan—sending me to live with my uncle in the middle of small-town northern Alberta—was stamped
certifiably insane
?

Getting cast off the island-that-was-my-life wasn’t my idea. I was merely following Sebastian’s “suggestion.” If I wanted to find out the truth about what had happened to my parents, I had to lay low, stay out of trouble—
my
kind of trouble—and wait. Well, fine. I’d do as my father’s ex-boss wanted for now. But it might get a whole lot of innocent humans killed.

So much for the Hunter Council’s code of conduct.
Humans first.
But then, I wasn’t really human, so maybe I, and the destruction I could cause, didn’t count.

How ironic that Marcus and his family thought my dad had owned a pharmaceutical company and dabbled in chemicals all day. If they only knew what kind of chemicals he’d mucked around with. I’d been weaned on every batch of anti-paranorm juice my dad created, and one of them must have done the job. I hadn’t shown many signs of being like my mother. Thanks to good ol’ dad, I was a chemically induced anomaly, a half wolven who couldn’t turn. No one knew what would happen if my wolvenness decided to kick in despite Dad’s manipulations.

I could be lethal. Stronger than any other of my kind. Or…I could be a drooling idiot with excessive back hair and a hankering for raw meat. Oh, the horror! But if I did start to turn, I’d be feared by hunter and wolven alike. So Sebastian decided I’d be safer living in an area with limited paranorm activity.

Apparently he had Redgrave all wrong.

After less than a week in town, I’d encountered a rogue werewolf/hot hunter combo. I was back among the paranorms whether he wanted it or not.

A locker door slammed shut like a gunshot. I jumped, putting a hand to my chest, my heart pounding. I’d been so skittish lately—nightmares, lack of sleep, the moon’s pull—the fates were against me.

Brit raised an eyebrow at my performance, so I shrugged. “Haven’t had my coffee yet today. I’m a bit jumpy.”

“I thought
having
coffee was supposed to give you the jumpies,” Brit said, “not
not
having any.”

I smiled weakly as I fished through my backpack. Luckily, I found my socks before the cursed extra pocket in my backpack, the one that ate every cool pair of sunglasses I owned, could suck them into oblivion. While gathering up my clothes, I spotted a girl sitting on the other side of the locker room, crying. She had bloodred hair and the saddest face I’d ever seen.

“What’s up with her?” I asked Brit, who glanced over at the girl and grimaced.

“Olivia used to be the most popular girl at Redgrave High. But her boyfriend split town, and she’s been a train wreck ever since. She keeps telling everyone Travis wouldn’t have left without her, but…” Brit grabbed a crayon-sized coal black eyeliner pencil out of her backpack and rimmed her eyes without a mirror. “The guy had a track record, if you know what I mean. A textbook case of relationship A.D.D. But Olivia’s in denial.”

I avoided looking at the girl again to give her some privacy—not that she seemed to care. Everyone’s attention was divided between the pitiful spectacle she made and my shiny newness, but she seemed oblivious.

“I guess you’re wondering why I didn’t join in the class sweatfest?” Brit said out of nowhere, although I hadn’t been wondering at all.

I’d been obsessing over my own weirdness—skipping out of a gym class run didn’t seem so interesting in comparison to missing parents, werewolf attacks, and increasing superhuman strength.

“It’s a medical-type deal. Want me to read you the doctor’s note?”

I didn’t, especially if she had something contagious, but Brit was the first student to acknowledge my existence since I’d started at Redgrave High. I owed her mild interest at least. I shrugged, which was all the invitation she needed. She launched into a complex review of her medical history, a rare condition wherein physical exhaustion caused seizures.

I tuned out the boring bits.

Comments from the opposite bench shifted from new-girl-mocking snorts to new-girl-and-school-hypochondriac-unite shrieks of laughter.

Har-de-freaking har.

Brit continued. “I have to show up for gym class to get the credits, but I don’t actually do anything. Well, sometimes Mr. Riggs has me keep score, which I like. I’m good with numbers…”

I tried to keep up, but my attention wasn’t the greatest. I bided my time. After quick glances at the exposed few inches at the bottoms of the bathroom stalls, my heart sank. They were all taken, and the doors stayed firmly shut.

I’d have to change in front of everyone.

Brit rambled on, unfazed when I spun, faced the lockers, and quickly stripped off my gym clothes. I worked into my resisting jeans and slid the denim up my legs. A cross-hatching of scars, some red and swollen, others faded to fine white lines, marred the smooth skin at the tops of my thighs. I yanked the jeans over my hips before the other girls noticed.

Self-mutilation, survivor’s guilt—whatever the shrinks labeled it—I didn’t cut myself.

Anymore.

I was better now.

But my skin bore evidence that I hadn’t always been level-headed.

“…we can go to the mall, well, it barely gets mall status, there’s like ten shops. Or we could go for coffee. I know this great coffee house,” Brit said. “Hello, Eryn? You listening?”

“Of course, coffee, sure thing. I like coffee.” I gave an amiable nod, but all I could think about was the werewolf, the hunter Alec.

And my voice echoing through the woods…
I know you are, but what am I?

Chapter 3:
Gothic Pixie on a Mission

What am I doing?
I asked myself for the gajilianth time as I eased my bedroom window open and crept onto the second story roof at precisely one o’clock in the morning. High in the overcast night sky, the moon glowed through heavy clouds.

From my perch on the shingled roof, I stared down at the neighbor’s dog, Cujo, a female yellow Labrador, chained to a tree. Day and night she barked, keeping up a steady drone, driving me crazy. Why did people get pets if they were going to cast them out of the house? Didn’t they know dogs were pack animals? All she wanted was to be with her people. I debated on busting out poor Cujo, but I had to avoid trouble, and I couldn’t get close to her without sending her into a barking frenzy. Dogs went nuts around me. They sensed I wasn’t quite human.

“Maybe another time,” I murmured as I scanned the street.

A ghostly fog had settled on the quiet town, muting the streetlights. Row upon row of the same model houses, each with identical stone siding, eerily perfect manicured lawns, and curving slate walkways. My uncle, real estate lawyer extraordinaire, had chosen to settle in Cowley Heights, the most affluent, if tragically carbon-copied neighborhood in Redgrave. In fact, the whole town suffered from a serious lack of
oomph
. Hard to believe a werewolf was roaming these freshly mowed, about-to-be-seriously-snowed-on lawns.