Under My Skin (Wildlings) (8 page)

But this is different. He only just met Elzie and it's already like he's all connected with her, standing up for her and everything.

I feel a bit guilty for not having more sympathy that her parents threw her out. That does suck big-time, but why does it have to be Josh that she turns to? Elzie's gorgeous. She could have her pick of any guy she wanted.

And then there's Chaingang getting all friendly with Josh. I didn't expect them to get buddy-buddy. I know they weren't really talking about the band. Josh only said that for our sake. Chaingang gave me the same pep talk on being a Wildling after I changed.

He wasn't the first to give me advice, though. A guy named Jez showed up the first time I changed and told me the basics. I'm glad it wasn't Chaingang who did that, because I was buck naked. I've learned to change back wearing my clothes since then.

But when Chaingang did approach me, he was really sweet. Before I actually met him, I was scared to death of the guy. When he called me over at the beach that day, I thought I may as well drown myself right then and there. Instead, he told me that he knew what I was and warned me to be careful and all. He said he'd protect me if I got into trouble.

I kind of enjoyed the fact that he was, I don't know, softer around me than he'd ever acted before. I guess I felt as though he'd specifically chosen me to be close to. Now I realize I misread him. I know he won't out me to Josh, but somehow it hurts that they're all pals now.

Josh is free to like whoever he wants and so is Chaingang, but it's just hard to feel less and less special to either one of them.

Tomorrow morning I'm going to catch the biggest swells I can find and ride them like there's nothing on the planet except for me and a few tons of crazy water.

Josh

My phone vibrates under my pillow that night at around two in the morning. I'd turned it on with the ringer off. Let's face it, I was curious if Elzie would call. I look at the call display and my pulse does a little jump.

"Josh?" her voice says in my ear as soon as I press talk.

"Hi," I say. "Are you okay?"

"Oh sure."

"How'd you get away?"

"I'm good at that kind of thing."

"I guess you are."

"Did they stop you at all?" she asks.

"Just to ask a couple of questions."

"What did they want to know?"     

"Mostly how I knew you."

"What did you say?"

"That I didn't. I told them that you just came up to me and started trying to sell me on getting proactive about the environment and I was only listening because you're cute."

I want to call the word back as soon as it comes out of my mouth, but it's too late.

"You think I'm cute?"

"Well … um …"

She responds with a throaty laugh and I feel something stirring under the sheets. I never really got the concept of phone sex before, but I think I do now.

"That's sweet," she says. "Living like I do, I kind of forget that there are nice guys like you out there."

Nice. Man. Do I want to be the nice guy? The nice guy never gets the girl.

"So where are you now?" I ask.

"Safe. But maybe not for long."

"Why not? Are they still after you?"

"I don't know if they're exactly
after
me. I think I'm just a 'person of interest' because they've seen me hanging around with Danny."

"So why aren't you safe?"

"I'm going after Danny."

"Really? But the FBI has him."

"And that's so not right. I've tried to get some of the others to help me, but everybody thinks Danny's a flake and that we should just cut him loose."

"But you can't."

"I know he's a flake," she says, "but he's still one of us. They shouldn't be allowed to take him away like that. He never did anything to anyone. And he helped me sometimes."

"So what are you going to do?"

She doesn't answer right away, but then she says, "I was hoping you might help me."

I remember what Marina said about her being a taker, but I think of how I'd feel if I was the one that the FBI shot full of tranqs and then locked away in some secret place. I'd sure want someone to help me.

"What do you want me to do?" I ask.

Fifteen minutes later, I'm standing in the shadows by the Evoras' garage. I've done what Elzie asked. I'm waiting for her here, dressed in black jeans and runners with a dark hoodie over my T-shirt. I shift my weight from foot to foot, trying to use the mountain lion to sense what's out there in the night. I guess I'm not very good at it yet, because suddenly Elzie's standing right beside me. I never saw or heard her approach.

She puts a hand on my upper arm and gives it a squeeze as we start walking.

"Thanks for coming," she says. "It means a lot."

"If it was me instead of him, I'd like to think people were trying to get me out, so it was hard to say no."

"Yeah, but you still could have."

I shrug, trying to be cool.

"Do you know where he is?" I ask.

"It has to be the old naval base. That's where everyone says the government's keeping the Wildlings they take off the street."

"Won't they have guards all over that place? We used to goof around in the wildlife refuge near there, but you can't get in at all anymore. I'm not so sure anyone can get by their security."

"I've got to try," she says.

Oh boy. What have I gotten myself into?

A couple of blocks from my street, she stops at a car and goes around to the driver's side.

"Is this your car?" I say. "I thought you were homeless."

It's not fancy, just a 2001
Ford Taurus wagon, but a car costs money—not only for the initial outlay, but for gas and upkeep, too. You don't see homeless people driving around. You see them on traffic islands, trying to cadge change from the drivers stopped at the lights.

"It's borrowed," she says.

"Borrowed?"

"Relax. It's Danny's. I don't think he's going to mind if we use it to rescue him."

A sour smell hits me when I open the door. I see that the back seats are down and there's a rough bed taking up the length of the rear compartment, along with piles of clothing and a collection of fast food wrappers and empty pop cans.

"Yeah," Elzie says as she slides in behind the wheel. "He's not exactly the world's best housekeeper."

"This is where he
lives
?"

"Beats couch surfing or sleeping on the beach. At least he's got a place."

"I guess."

There's a bunch of junk on the passenger's seat and on the floor. A damp towel that I wish I hadn't touched, old newspapers, a pizza box, a screwdriver, some paperbacks with the covers torn off. I toss it all into the back and get in.

She takes us out the Pacific Coast Highway heading south. With the windows all open, front and back, the stench isn't as pervasive. Eventually it pretty much goes away. It's that or I'm just getting used to it.

I expect her to be a reckless driver—everything about her seems a little wild and reckless—but she sticks to just a few miles over the speed limit. Fifteen minutes later, she pulls into a parking lot overlooking the ocean. There are over a dozen cars and vans in the lot and I can see a fire down on the beach. Surfer party. It makes me think of Marina. I should go out with her tomorrow morning if the waves are good. I'll make a fool of myself—I don't know why I can ride my wheels like they're a pair of shoes, yet I keep falling off a surfboard—but we always have a good time.

Elzie pulls the Taurus into a spot between a classic Woody, oak panels gleaming in our headlights, and a powder-blue T-Bird convertible with the top down. Killing the engine, she reaches under the seat and pulls out a pair of
luchador
head masks and hands me one. Mine's shiny gold with red flames around the eye and mouth holes. Hers is a deep blue with yellow highlights.

"You've got to be kidding me," I say. "What's going out like Mexican wrestlers going to prove?"

"It'll keep your secret identity secret."

"Come on, seriously?"

She puts hers on. All I can see is her green eyes, nose and lips. The long dreads are bunched at the back of her neck and make a weird bump under the mask.

"There are cameras everywhere now," she says. "Weather cameras, traffic cameras and at the base, there are sure to be security cameras."

I sigh and put on the mask she gave me. I feel like an idiot.

"Stick some of these in your pockets," she says, passing me a handful of energy bars. "It's in case we have to change," she adds. "You know how to focus on keeping your clothes when you change so that you've got them when you've come back out of your animal shape?"

I nod. "That's what Cory told me, but I haven't tried it. How does that even work, anyway?"

"Don't know, don't care," she says. "Just so long as it works. The food's for if we have to take our animal shapes. Whatever makes it work uses up a lot of energy. You'll be starving."

I remember how hungry I was the morning Cory found me in the alley. It didn't happen the second time in my bathroom, but I'd only been in the mountain lion shape for a moment before switching back.

"You ready?" she asks.

"Yeah."

I join her on the pavement. We wait for a car to go by, then cross the highway and duck into the scrub along the verge. Moments later we come to the chain-link fence that protects the wild bird sanctuary from intruders. I can smell the salt marsh, rich and heady.

"We need to keep low," she says. "They've got cameras in there for monthly night surveys of mammals passing through. I don't know what night they do the survey, but I'm guessing they actually leave them running all the time."

"How do you know that?"

"I Googled the refuge. It's got its own website."

"Of course it does."

We follow the fence along the highway, turning when it leads us inland. Elzie starts out at a fast walk, but as soon as we make the turn, she breaks into a jog. I want to tell her that I'm not really in shape for a long run, but I don't think she's going to listen, so I just try to keep up for as long as I can. Five minutes into our run, when I should be calling for a time-out, I'm not even out of breath.

Stronger and faster. No kidding.

"I feel like I could run like this forever," I say.

Elzie laughs. "You could make even better time in your animal shape, but even as humans we've got serious chops. Why do you think everybody wants a piece of what we are?"

"I thought they couldn't figure out what causes the whole Wildlings thing."

"Maybe not yet. Which is why they're after us. They can't duplicate what we are, so they want us to work for them."

It isn't fair. This should be like Desmond thinks it is—totally cool. We shouldn't have to live in the shadows, hiding from our own government.

It makes me think a little more about Elzie's agenda. Getting rid of everybody human isn't the answer, but there must be something we can do. Not just to save the natural world the way she wants to, but to save all of us.

It should have taken us around forty-five minutes to get to the old naval base. We make it in twenty. Elzie stops us at an embankment shored up with boulders. When we peer over it, we see a long stretch of flat land on the other side of the chain-link fence, acres of pavement beyond it, flat warehouse-type buildings past that.

"It's a big place," I say.

She nods.

"Do you have any idea where they keep their prisoners?"

"No. I'm going to scout around a bit. You wait here for me."

"I don't think that's such a good idea."

"You should listen to him, cousin," a new voice says.

We turn to find Cory sitting on his haunches looking at us. He's in human form but he still gives off a doggish vibe.

How did he get so close without either of us noticing?

Well, with me it's not such a big surprise, I guess, but Elzie's been at this a lot longer than I have. You'd think she would have twigged to his presence.

"And why the hell are you wearing those goofy masks?" he asks.

I want to tell him that the surf band Los Straitjackets wears them for gigs and they're a pretty cool band, but Elzie's already talking.

"You know they've got cameras in the wildlife refuge?" she says. "Without these, they'd have our pictures on file. Maybe they could use them to track us down."

"So go in your real shapes."

"Yeah, like a mountain lion trotting through their property's not going to send up any warning flares."

"Point taken. But you look like a couple of kids playing Halloween."

"If you're not here to help," Elzie tells him, "you should just go away."

He shrugs and turns his attention to me. "Do you remember what I told you about keeping a low profile? And alliances? Are you sure this is the choice you want to make?"

"This isn't about politics," I say. "It's about stepping up when someone's in a jam."

He looks from her to me. "So which one of you's in a jam?"

Elzie mutters, "Loser," and turns her attention back to our target.

"I'm serious," he says, "because Danny Reed doesn't need rescuing."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Elzie says.

I can hear an angry growl in her voice.

"Well," Cory drawls. "Right now he's sitting in his brand new apartment waiting to start his brand new government job in the morning."

"Bullshit."

"I have it on good authority."

"Yeah? And whose would that be?"

"Auntie Min's."

"You know I can check that out."

"Be my guest. She says the whole charade of him getting taken down was so that nobody would start sniffing around asking questions. I guess they didn't figure on you going all hero to bust him out."

"Who's Auntie Min?" I ask.

"Queen of the street cousins," Cory says. "She's over in the cardboard city under the Santa Feliz Boulevard overpass."

"How does she know?" Elzie asks.

"She said she's seen it coming for awhile."

"Why wouldn't she have told me?"

Cory shrugs. "You know how it is. That's a pretty serious accusation. Nobody's going to come right out and say it, based only on a feeling."