I set my gun on the ground anyway, not wanting to get shot by an overzealous or scared officer. It wasn’t like it was going to be much of a defense against a creature that I could shoot ten times with a .40-caliber weapon and not do much more than surprise it.
“What was that thing?” asked the police officer who’d been first on scene.
“We don’t know,” growled George. “But that’s what turned the semi to cement.”
“Concrete,” said one of the police officers in a small voice. “Cement is what you mix with water to get concrete.”
George ignored him, instead stalking over to the body still curled up against the old building just beneath a wannabe gang tag. He knelt without touching.
“She’s about sixteen,” he told … me, I thought. “Her scent is all over that tractor. Freaking driver is forty if he’s a day.”
“Forty-two,” said someone. “We can get him for statutory.”
I left my empty gun on the ground and walked over to the body. I couldn’t smell anything out of the ordinary. I dropped to one knee beside George and said, “I have to touch her to be sure.”
“Do it,” he said.
I put a finger on her neck—and realized that she was wearing the same clothing the creature … beast had been. Before I could process it, the smell of magic flooded over me. It was as if, I thought, sitting all the way on the ground, the magic had been entirely encased in the body until I touched it and released it.
“That sucks,” said a voice just behind me.
I turned my head and started, bumping into George pretty hard. As he put a hand out to steady himself, he turned to look where I was looking, his body tight and ready to move.
The beast had seemed old, even in the shape of a young woman. This girl looking over my shoulder at the body, at her body, was very young. It was the same face and body the beast had worn—but whatever animated this one, it was not our monster.
She met my eyes, her arms wrapped around her rib cage.
“Damn,” she said. “Guess Mama was right. She told me that someday I’d regret jumping in a car with any stranger willing to pick me up.” Her voice was similar to the smoke beast’s, but her English was unaccented and the rhythm of her words was smoother.
She might not have ID on her, I thought reluctantly. She might have information we needed. I decided to risk strengthening her, though condemning anyone to haunt this sad little space didn’t seem kind. Maybe she could make it to the cheerful bakery down the street.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Liv—like that actress, the one on the white horse in the movie with the monsters,” she said. “Liv Mendoza.”
“Can you tell me what happened?” I asked.
The ghost shivered. “I was out behind the gas station—” She gave me a guilty look. “Never mind what I was doing. Not your business. Anyway this rabbit just came out and bit me—right here.” She stretched out her arm—and two crusted wounds appeared. “And then something sat in my head and ran the show. It just took over.” A tear appeared and she wiped it off with the back of her wrist. “I couldn’t even make a phone call. And when it was done with me, it discarded my body like a, like a snake sheds its skin.” She looked away from me. “I wish,” she said, “I had died on a beach somewhere. Or in one of those meadows you see in movies, the ones with flowers. I like flowers.”
“Who are you talking to, Mercy?” asked George.
I held up a hand—but she was gone, leaving me with most of the Pasco PD staring at me. Hopefully she was gone for good.
I shrugged, sighed, and told them, “I see dead people.”
MY PHONE RANG AS I WAS CRAWLING BACK OVER THE Blue Bridge toward the garage with the parts in the trunk of my car. I took a chance and glanced at the screen. It was Adam. It took me another five or six minutes to get across the bridge and on a street where I could pull over to call him back. I had six missed phone calls from Adam.
“Hey,” I said.
“I have a headache,” Adam said without preamble. “What happened?”
I did, too, now that the adrenaline from the confrontation with the smoke beast was starting to die down. I prodded our bond. The weird bleeding sensation was gone, though the bond was definitely the cause of my headache. My fooling around with it made me wince.
“Quit that,” Adam said. “Tell me what happened.”
So I did.
I HAD TO REPEAT THE WHOLE STORY TO TAD AND ZEE when I got to the shop, parts in hand. I restarted the story from my first sighting of Anna’s ghost up through today’s confrontation, adding in the pieces that I’d left off or glossed over when I’d talked to them earlier.
“Is it a skinwalker?” asked Tad when I was done.
Zee just grunted and continued to loosen bolts with his ratchet, which had chattered at us most of the time I’d been talking. Tad had stopped working about halfway through the story, but Zee, although his expression had been getting grimmer and grimmer, had continued to work.
My phone chimed with a text—and with the way things were, I couldn’t ignore it.
“I don’t think so,” I said, getting out my phone. “There are vampires in Underhill, but I don’t know that I’d believe in skin-walkers there.” I’d never run into one of those, and I didn’t care to do so, either.
The text was from Aiden, sent to both Adam and me.
Tilly confirms smoke beast. Says no other escapees. She is sad she cannot help hunt him. Knows from me that you are good at killing monsters. Wishes you good luck. This is my fault, I am VERY sorry.
I read Aiden’s text to them out loud—everything except for the last sentence, which was nonsense.
“No,” said Zee. “It is not a skinwalker. Skinwalkers are native to this land. This is something from the Old Country.”
“You know what it is?” I asked.
“Nein,” he said. “A creature who transforms one thing into another. Who can infest someone with magic that appears as smoke. Using that magic, it turns its victims into puppets to kill for it, in order to gain power from those deaths. And then can mimic the forms of those it has used as puppets.” He frowned. “Magic has rules, Mercy. Especially for the fae. Transformation magic—that is rare and belongs to only a few types of fae—but, with the exception of several of the Gray Lords, generally those are not powerful creatures.”
I thought about what it had done and not done. “It didn’t turn George or me into concrete,” I told him. “Though maybe it can only do that with nonliving things?”
“Generally living or nonliving doesn’t matter to that kind of magic,” Zee said. “But that it didn’t transform you suggests that it had used up all of its magic.”
“Okay,” I said.
“So,” he agreed. “But this other magic that it has—this is oddly complicated for fae magic.”
He shook his head. “Bite and infest a living being with magic that manifests as smoke that allows it to take over the body. Then it has to use that body to kill in order to gain enough power to assume the shape of the person it has killed.”
“It sounds so weird when you put it like that,” Tad said.