Under His Skin (5 page)

They shouldn’t have left their skins so vulnerable,
she told herself fiercely.
If they’d truly treasured them then they would never have lost them.
Her stomach tightened as pain gripped her heart. If she’d only protected it better, she never would have lost hers.

The guilt crawled up her spine, bowing her back. She would return the skins soon. As soon as she tried this last spell on them. She just couldn’t return them until she’d exhausted every possibility. What if the next spell would only work on bear skin? Or a wolf pelt? She shook her head over and over, trying to breathe past the guilt. No, she couldn’t return them yet.
Soon
, she promised herself.

Unable to bear the site of the skins, she turned to the right. A painting leaning against the earthen wall caught her eye. Unlike the artwork that graced the walls and surfaces of her cabin upstairs, this painting was not done by a well-established artist. She’d found it one day while walking down the street, the work of an artist who had only just begun his craft. Yet despite its humble beginnings, this painting was Ana’s favorite.

It was
a gorgeous
oil on canvas of a cold winter’s night. The sky was a velvet midnight blue, littered with sparkling silver stars and a full moon that made the thick blanket of fresh snow glow so bright it nearly blinded her. The dark wood of small trees broke up the blinding white, drawing her eye to what lay hidden just under its branches.

She shook her head and strode forward to tilt the painting down before the image could become too clear. That wasn’t her life anymore. Looking at it would only make her loss all the more painful.

The lowered painting revealed the floor behind it. Ana’s breath hitched in her throat as she looked upon the source of all her pain.
A fox skin.
Her skin.
A fresh wave of tears fled down her cheeks as she picked up the haggard pelt with all the tender care of a mother cuddling her child.

The feel of the burnt edges ripped a whimper from her throat and she clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from erupting into hysterical sobs. The fox pelt lie in her arms like an injured loved one. The beauty of its pure white fur couldn’t keep her eyes away from the ugliness of its singed edges. The blackened sides sent her mind reeling into the past and she fell to her knees.

She could hear the crackling of his fire now. The snaps and sizzles of the sap inside the pine mixing with the hiss of something
else being
incinerated. He’d moved slightly when she entered his cabin, his head turning to see who was there. It was then that she’d seen what was in the fire.

Her face tightened and heated as if she was still in that cabin. She remembered how her screams had echoed in the room, how his eyes had widened with shock to find her standing behind him. A feeling of loss so strong it crashed over her in a wave of nausea, pain, and despair ripped ragged shriek after ragged shriek from her throat. He’d tried to keep her from diving into the flames, but nothing could stop her. Nothing could keep her from trying to rescue her life from those horrible hungry flames.

Agony enveloped her arms as the flames ate at her flesh, stubbornly trying to keep their prize, but still she kept going until her hands closed around her fur. Her fingers tips cried out in pain as they dipped into the burning embers in their mad scramble to recapture her skin. The large size of her pelt had muffled the fire in the modest fireplace, but it didn’t matter. Every second had felt like an eternity, as if no matter how fast she moved the fire had all the time in the world to consume that which she couldn’t live without.

She’d ripped it from the embers as quickly as she could, but in her heart she’d known it was too late. She’d beat out the flames, extinguishing some with her own tears as she sobbed and begged it not to be true. The fur in her lap would never set her free again.

“Don’t go, please, don’t go!”

Ana stroked her damaged skin, her eyes locked on an invisible spot on the floor. She could hear his voice now.
The man who had taken her fur.
It wasn’t the smooth seductive tones he’d used with her when they first met. No, his voice was ragged, hoarse. It was the voice of someone trying to speak through too much emotion. Too much fear.

“Don’t go, please, don’t go! Ana, I love you!”

His voice had abraded her skin even more than the burns. She’d held her smoking skin in her lap and turned eyes blinded by tears to the man responsible. The man who’d claimed to love her, but who had destroyed everything that meant anything to her. He hadn’t loved her. He’d wanted to possess her, to trap her by taking away the aspect of her life that he couldn’t be a part of. She’d stared at him as if her rage and despair could set fire to him as surely as he had set fire to her very existence.

For several long minutes he’d stared at her face, still begging as he searched for some sign of forgiveness. It had taken a ridiculously long time for his gaze to fall to her hands. She remembered the horror that had blossomed on his face as he finally registered her burned and bloody fingertips, the red scratchy skin that crawled up her wrists. The smell of burning hair had filled the space between them. His eyes had grown wide as saucers, his mouth continuing to open and close with no sound coming out. That was the moment he’d truly realized exactly what he’d done. And in that moment, he must have realized why none of the stories about
skinwalkers
and their skins ever mentioned someone burning the pelt in front of their victim.

Ana drew in a deep steady breath. She didn’t remember his death with nearly the vivid detail she remembered watching her skin burn. In her memory, she could see every hair whose tip burned a bright fiery orange, could smell the acrid scent of burning fur. She remembered how every fold had felt against her hands as she’d sobbed and smacked the pelt, trying to put out the flames in time. The entire nightmare was etched on her brain forever.

All she remembered of his death was the silence that followed it. She was vaguely aware that she’d killed him, but how she’d done it seemed inconsequential. He didn’t matter.

She rocked back and forth with her skin, knowing it was pointless to fight the tears. With every day that passed, every fur that failed her, every healing spell that didn’t work, she grew a little sadder. She had no skin. She had no family. She had no friends. She had nothing. The healing spell upstairs was her last chance, the final healing spell in her arsenal. If that failed, all hope would be gone. And when that hope was finally gone, maybe then she could use the hemlock in her cupboard to escape this miserable fleshy prison once and for all.

Brec couldn’t breathe. It was as if the air around him had grown too dense, breathing was like trying to inhale sand. Even the sea air rolling off the water of
Chilkoot
Inlet couldn’t ease the tightening in his chest. His skin was gone and without it he couldn’t return to the sea. His home, his family, everything he cared about was under the waves and the human body he had now could never survive those icy waters.

He looked at the surface of the water, anxiously waiting for his brother’s head to break the surface and tell him he’d found his skin. Every passing second was agony, winding his nerves tighter and tighter until he thought he’d collapse under the pressure. When he saw the smooth lines of his brother’s head break the grayish-blue waves only to stare at him with a sad almost human expression on his seal countenance, his heart nearly stopped beating. He pointed to himself and then up toward the shops and the seal vanished under the waves again.

“Think, Brec, think,” Brec said out loud, the panic in his voice making the adrenaline spill even faster into his veins. He trudged through the snow, up the path toward the main street. “Where is it?”

“If you’ve been around here long at all, you’ve heard the stories. Devastatingly handsome men coming out of the water, shedding their seal furs so that they can take a human lover?”

He stopped so suddenly it was a miracle he didn’t fall over. Ana’s face hovered in his mind, her words echoing in his ears. At the time, he’d thought she was just
flirting,
using what she thought was a myth to flatter him. In light of his missing skin, her words didn’t sound so innocent anymore. Anger burned up his spine like the fuse of a stick of dynamite. As a matter of fact, her abrupt departure seemed more sinister now too.

The handshake.
Brec cursed himself and stared down at the webbing between his fingers. He never thought about it, never even really noticed it. He spent most of his time with other selkies and to them it was just skin, nothing to draw the eye. Clearly, it had drawn Ana’s. And it had told her everything she needed to know about him.

His anger sped his pace as he trudged through the snow back to Mrs. Downing’s shop. The way Ana talked about her, it seemed she’d been there more than once, maybe the nosey herbalist would know where she lived.

As he trekked through the snow in the human body that
was seeming
more and more clumsy now that it was his only option, Brec tried figure out exactly why Ana had stolen his skin. Could she possibly believe the old stories? Did she think that stealing his skin would make him stay and be her husband?

Part of his body perked up at the idea of taking Ana as his wife, but it had no
effect
whatsoever on the heat of his anger. If anything his physical attraction to her only pissed him off more. Beautiful or not, taking his skin had been a mistake. He would not end up like the selkies in the old tales, settling down and having children with the human who stole his skin—spending every day of his life searching for the fur that would let him return to the sea. He clenched his teeth. He may only have a human male’s strength, but she was a human female. He’d make her give him his skin back.

The bells over the door of Mrs. Downing’s shop clanged in his ears, their noise only agitating him even further. He took a breath to yell for Mrs. Downing, but she appeared before a word could leave his lips. Her eyebrows rose and he wondered how much of his fury was showing on his face. Choking back his anger, he twisted his lips into what he hoped was a smile.

“Mrs. Downing, I need your help.”

All traces of suspicion vanished from her face.
“My help?
Why certainly.
Anything for my best customer.”

“It’s about Ana, the woman I was talking with here earlier.”

“Ah, yes, she is a beauty, isn’t she? And a nice girl too, comes in here at least once a week for her herbs. She must be a healer like you, as varied as her stock is.” She paused. “You two have a lot in common.”

The knowing look on the old woman’s face set Brec’s blood to boiling. If only the herbalist knew what his true intentions were for Ana, she’d run screaming in the other direction.

“Yes, we do.” His voice sounded strained even to his own ears. He cleared his throat. “I’d like to,” he groped for the words, “call on her. Do you happen to know where she lives?”

“‘Call on her?’
Such a gentlemanly way of speaking.”

She fairly giggled and Brec clenched his hands into fists, trying to keep his temper long enough to get the information he needed. If there was one thing he should know after all these years, it was that you could not rush Mrs. Downing.

“I don’t recall Ana ever saying specifically where she lives. However, one day Mr. Downing caught twice the amount of fish he usually does and I offered to sell some of the best specimens to Ana. At a fraction of what they were worth,” she added. “Anyway, Ana said she didn’t need any fish. She said she lived right near the shore with no neighbors within a mile on either side.
Said she caught plenty of fish on her own ‘private stretch of water.’”

“An isolated cabin by the shore?”
Three-fourths of the damn state is “by the shore.”
He tried not to let his frustration leak into his voice. “Can you be any more specific?”

“Well, she likely has a wreath on her door that I made her. She’s always purchasing healing supplies, so out of the kindness of my heart I made her a wreath out of figwort and marsh mallow root to hang on her door. It’ll bring healing energies to her entire home, I told her.” She paused to think. “She rides her snowmobile here. I wouldn’t think she lives that far or she’d hire old Mike to fly her.” She rolled her eyes. “Lord knows the man doesn’t charge nearly—”

“Thank you, Mrs. Downing, you’ve been very helpful!”

He spun around before Mrs. Downing could think of a way to make him stay longer and bolted out the door. Hope took the edge off his anger and his mind spun with the new information as he ran to the shore. She lived by the water, close enough to ride her snowmobile here. The wreath on her door would make things easier, but even if it wasn’t there it shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Micah should easily be able to organize a search party to swim along the shore and search for her house. Seals were a common sight along the shore, no one would think twice about a seal popping its head out of the water, or even flopping around in the snow should it become necessary to get a closer look.