SkinThief Read online

  The infirmary was through a double set of security doors. It was tightly secured—no prisoners could get into any drugs they kept on the premises, and if they thought getting themselves into the infirmary would make for an easy escape later, they would find it harder than they imagined. The white walls were cleaner than clean, and the tiled floor smelled like it had been washed recently with bleach. It made my nose burn and twitch. Two uniformed men stood guard outside a door into a room coming off the corridor; I could hear the beeping of monitors from inside. We turned into this room.

  The man in the hospital bed did not look the same as the photograph of Petrovich. His elderly face was puffy, the left side covered in deep purple bruises around the jaw and eyes. His nose had been broken and reset. The bruises on his jaw continued down his neck, spotting his skin along what looked like a fractured clavicle. I had a feeling that under the blankets his injuries got worse. The IV plugged into his hand was barely visible under the bandages that wrapped around his damaged fingers. His one eye that was only slightly bruised flickered between opening and closing; his breathing was labored and helped by the oxygen machine at his back. I watched the lines on the monitor roll sluggishly across the screen.

  “He’s in bad shape.”

  Governor Bird kept step behind me as I walked over to the end of the bed. The closer I got the more I could feel something, like a residue that clung to the man’s aura. There was something off about him. I pulled over a chair, putting my things down on it, and dug out a bottle of salve.

  “Excuse me,” the doctor asked, approaching me from the far end of the room, “what is that?” I could understand that he would want some involvement in this, or at least knowledge of whether the stuff I held in my hand would affect his patient’s health. I didn’t like doctors much, but I tried to smile politely at him as I explained.

  “It’s an herbal salve. I’m going to place it on his chakra points and take a little look at the man’s psychic body.”

  “Psychic body?”

  I carefully unscrewed the top on the jar of salve, gave a quick sniff to check it was still fresh enough to use, and smeared some on the tip of my finger.

  “We all have a physical body and a psychic one, our individual energy, our spirit. Our bodies are connected to that spirit, designed to hold precisely that amount of energy inside us.”

  “Are you talking of our souls?” Governor Bird asked.

  “Sort of.” I didn’t explain any further than that because it just got too complicated. We could end up in a debate about the soul and the meaning of life for hours.

  I walked around the bed and slowly wiped the salve onto the man’s chakra points, starting with his third eye. His skin felt a bit like sandpaper under my fingertips. I wiped some of the salve on the ridge between my own eyebrows, my own third eye.

  “Sort of? What does sort of mean? What are you going to do?”

  I sighed. Doctors and their need to scientifically understand every little thing and action.

  “Let me put it in a way you might understand. I am a mechanic, he’s a car, and I’m going to check his engine to see if he’s running with all the right pieces in place.”

  The doctor and Governor Bird took a step back from me, watching as my focus began to show in a warm wind around my body. Sometimes people see lights too, but usually only if they’re particularly sensitive. I closed my eyes till I felt my energy peak and then slowly let them roll open. The man I saw lying in the bed looked at me, confused. He was a younger man, maybe in his thirties, and he had been pushed into place like Play-Doh© into a mold that just didn’t fit. His eyes pleaded with me to do something to help him. I closed my eyes and rubbed the salve from between my eyes, letting my energy slowly flow away. I shook my head, dropping into the seat on top of my things. I took a deep breath.

  “Are you all right, Miss Farbanks?” Governor Bird asked, placing his hand down on my shoulder. I turned to look up at him and nodded my head.

  “He’s been telling you the truth. The man in that body is not the man who should be there.” The governor’s eyes widened as he looked down at me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The man I saw was maybe thirty, shaved brown hair, blue eyes and looked really confused to be where he is.”

  Governor Bird nodded his head, and I guessed the description matched Merrick Stone, who had been put on suspension. I rubbed my temples and pulled myself to my feet.

  “I need to see his cell now.”

  “I’ll have Pert-Smith take you through. Please try to ignore the inmates—they can be crude.”

  Governor Bird hadn’t been joking. The catcalls and offers I received following along behind Pert-Smith made my face flush crimson. I stuck close to his back until we reached the cell, which had some tape across it. I may not have been afraid of these men but neither did I desire to make their acquaintance.

  Pert-Smith held the tape up so that I could climb through. He stood next to the bars watching me as I walked around the bloodstains on the floor. It was a single-bed cell with a desk against the wall. I had always imagined prisons to be hellholes—sharing with other people, having to pee in a bucket, grimy walls, bland and impersonal. His cell seemed kind of coy, more like a back-street bed-and-breakfast than a correctional institution. The toilet and sink were hidden in the back corner of the room, discreet so there was some illusion of privacy.

  There were patches of tape on the wall near the bed, four of them, as if something had been stuck there.

  “What was here?” I asked as I searched under his pillow and the edges of his mattress. What was I looking for? Something, anything that would point to this Petrovitch being a wizard.

  “Photo of his kid and his granddaughter, I think.”

  I nodded and started looking through the desk; he had a couple of books from the prison library, but they weren’t anything that pointed to an interest in magic. Unless you counted the adventures of Harry Potter. There was nothing to indicate he himself knew magic in any detail that would allow him to cast a spell over the guard. There were some envelopes on the desk, from what looked like outside mail. This surprised me.

  “The prisoners get packages from outside?”

  “All the mail is screened and recorded,” Pert-Smith informed me.

  “I’ll need to see everything he received in the last few months.”

  “I’ll have to get that cleared, but it shouldn’t be a problem.”

  I looked at my watch and stepped out through the tape again.

  “Have it sent to my office and I’ll review it when I get it. I also suggest that you track down that suspended guard, Merrick Stone, and have him brought in as soon as you possibly can. I have to go now or I’ll miss the train home.”

  Chapter Two

  “There’s something about a city that changes when it snows.”

  “Yeah, it’s colder,” I grumbled back at Magnus.

  I stood in the bedroom wrapping a towel around my hair. Magnus was sitting on the couch in the living room, comfy as usual, his arm stretched across the back leaving a gap I would normally fit myself into. He was watching the local weather reports; it had been snowing over Worcester since about four p.m. It looked like it was going to continue to be a cold January.

  “Cassandra, it’s about to start.”

  I walked out of the bedroom, securing the towel around my body as tightly as I could. I was quite comfortable showering while Magnus was in my apartment doing other things, although I never left my mobile near him anymore; he had a habit of reassigning my ringtones. The television was all set for the seven p.m. special broadcast. I perched on the arm of the armchair instead of joining him on the couch, watching from the corner of my eye the long line of Magnus’s throat as he swallowed. His gaze took in the few beads of water that were still working their way along my body, slither
ing down my calves.

  Across from the reporter in the news studio sat two vampires, a girl who looked all of seventeen and a middle-aged man. They both wore modern clothes, dressed to look completely unthreatening as the women from Channel Five interviewed them. They very calmly talked about vampire rights. It was the latest buzz topic in the other world. Vampires wanted to be treated more like humans. America had already granted a bill of rights for vampiric citizens allowing them things like the right to a trial; they couldn’t be discriminated against by employers or official bodies. American vampires could now vote, and British vampires were lobbying to follow the Americans’ lead; as if we didn’t do enough of that already.

  “Some of us,” said the small seventeen-year-old girl, brushing a lock of her red curls back from her face, “did not choose to become vampires but have done what we can, as humans do, to make the best of our situation. We are acknowledged as existing but we have not been acknowledged as equals; we are segregated just like the black communities of the early nineteen hundreds.”

  I looked at the girl and realized she was the older of the two. Although the man was physically in his forties and looked like he could be the girl’s father, he was a fairly new vampire. He had probably been dead less than fifty years, whereas the girl with her cherubic face and sweet ringlet curls could be as old as two or three hundred. The camera spun around to flash on the opposition to their point, a group of right-wing middle-aged men in suits and some members of extremist Catholic groups.

  “They are dead,” one of the men argued. “We do not give special rights to those corpses who are smart enough to stay in the ground where they belong. You would use this to hide among us, laws designed to protect you while you commit your crimes.”

  The camera swung back in time to catch the young-looking vampiress wrinkling her nose in disgust. The younger male vampire took the lead.

  “We would expect any new rights to come with stipulations—we would have IDs like everyone else, registering our made date; we would require passports to travel and licenses to drive; all we ask is the opportunity and the right to pursue these things.”

  A long time ago, I might have agreed with the conservative group who believed vampires were dangerous monsters. In the past, I was ready to believe the worst, but that was because I made the mistake of thinking all vampires were the same.

  The middle-aged vampire placed his hand on the girl’s shoulder and took over the speaking role. “We have for many years policed our own kind so as not to bring suffering upon you. We abide by the few laws the human world has given us, but we require, as in all things, that something be given in return. We would like to be given the rights of any human.”

  “You’re not human,” bellowed the opposition. “You are unnatural.”

  The man didn’t bat an eyelid, but the little girl flinched. Her eyes watered, and the light pink tears on her pretty face garnered her only sympathy from the reporter.

  “You have accepted many others into the mainstream without so much hesitation—the elves, the dwarves, and even the werewolf populace fare better than us. Just because we are not warm, that does not make us any less as living, sentient beings.”

  “I...I...,” the vampire girl tried to speak between sobs, “I am stuck forever as a child. You don’t know how envious I am that others can grow old, have children, and even die. I just want to be the best I can be with what I am. Is that so wrong?”

  The reporter started to comfort the young vampire, offering her a tissue to remove the pink lines from her face. Magnus hit the mute button.

  “You think that’s an act?” He turned to look at me as I adjusted the towel on my hair, trying carefully to dry it without dislodging the one wrapped around my body.

  “Definitely. She’s the oldest of the pair, I’d say nearing two, maybe three hundred years old. She can control her emotions, but she’s playing the little-girl angle for all it’s worth.”

  Magnus stared at the TV and blinked at the image on the screen.

  “How can you tell?”

  “The style of her hair, the way she holds herself, the placement of her hands all speaks of a time when women were brought up differently. She is also very pale even for a vampire, meaning that tanning was not a popular activity when she was alive.”

  He turned to look at my legs, which were a nice light shade of brown by nature. I tanned really well in the summer, when I got the chance to lie on a sun lounger and enjoy it. It was nothing, though, compared to Magnus’s permanent bronzed skin, part of his heritage of being half dark elf. I didn’t judge him by that heritage, but it did mean he looked fabulous with his shirt off all year round.

  The buzzer rang next to the door. I rolled my neck to look at it as it buzzed again.

  “That will be dinner. You’ll have to go down and get it; the guy won’t come up in the elevator.”

  He pulled himself off the couch with what appeared to be reluctance and headed out the door. I’d ordered in Chinese food so that neither of us had to cook after the long day we’d both undoubtedly had. I got up, going back into my bedroom to put on something other than a towel. The cool wind blew around my ankles before I could realize what was happening. I gasped as the breath was knocked from me and my back pinned to the column at the end of my bed. My wrists were pulled behind it, and the towel was held in place only by Aram’s body pressed against mine. Aram is a vampire, one I happened to have the misfortune of being semi-involved with; my involvement was “semi” because it was reluctant. I’d tried for months to cut him out of my life but like a boomerang, he just kept coming back.

  “You have not been to see me this week,” Aram growled at me. I looked up at him and rolled my eyes. “You are not keeping up your end of this agreement.”

  “I said I would come by once a week unless I was working on a case, and I am working on a case.” Aram held both my wrists with just one hand, and the other came up to stroke my wet hair back from my face. He turned his head and took in a deep breath through his nose.

  “You have the elf boy here—you are not working.”

  I looked into Aram’s handsome face, his flawless pale skin, the deep mahogany curls that fell around his face, the deep hazel of his eyes and the pearly shine of his fangs. Aram was five hundred twenty-six years old. He had told me more than once that he was in love with me, and I had more than once turned him down. The truth was that I now had no idea how I felt about the vampire. Before Christmas I’d had the option of getting him out of my life for good. He could have been banished from the city or he could have been executed, and although I had been sure his brother, Jareth, the leader of their group, would have never let it come to death, I hadn’t been able to allow things to go on. Not when it had been within my power to put a stop to it.

  “He’s my boyfriend,” I reminded him a little snippily.

  “And you are my bride; I demand equal time.” He pressed his chest tighter to mine, and I could feel the towel loosening. I swallowed hard and tried to control my heartbeat.

  “You have no right to demand anything. I promised to the pretense, but I have no intention of becoming your bride and...”

  Before I could find another objection, his cool lips were pressed against mine. I have to admit that kissing Aram felt like a guilty pleasure. It was something I shouldn’t enjoy, but when a man has had over five hundred years of practice at kissing, boy can he kiss. I couldn’t help myself; my heart pounded against my chest, my fingers twitched behind me and my eyes fluttered closed. Aram pressed closer to me, purring triumphantly into my mouth, trying to part my lips.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Magnus’s voice was deep with anger, and I struggled against his grip. Aram disengaged his lips from mine, and we both turned to look at Magnus.

  “Magnus, it’s not...”

  Magnus wasn’t looking at me; he was starin
g hot, hate-filled arrows at Aram, who grinned like a naughty schoolboy caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

  “Get your un-dead hands off my girlfriend.”

  “I will release my bride when I am good and ready,” Aram said smugly. Magnus’s jaw went slack and his eyes bulged.

  “Your what?” He dropped the bag of Chinese food he was holding to the floor. “Move away from her.” Magnus growled possessively. It was one of Magnus’s flaws. He was terribly possessive. I always used to think that a man being possessive of you meant that he must really love you. Most possessiveness, however, comes from two places: insecurity—they don’t think they deserve you, so they cling on to you for dear life—or mistrust—they don’t trust that, given the opportunity to jump into bed with another handsome man, you’d resist. Neither of which, it turns out, is particularly flattering. I didn’t know which place Magnus’s came from, but when his possessiveness was aroused he became very pigheaded. Magnus took a step toward us; his fingers were curling into fists.

  “I said move away from my girlfriend, coffin boy,” Magnus continued to growl out his words. Aram started to move away from me, and I felt the towel slide as he did.

  “No, don’t move.” Aram froze, but Magnus turned his angry eyes to me. I glared him down. “If he moves before he lets go of my hands, I am going to lose my towel.” I turned my eyes to Aram. “Let go of my hands and only move when I tell you.”

  Aram, with a smile that showed his disappointment, released his grip on my wrists. I snatched the edges of the towel into place and slid away from him, rounding behind Magnus to grab my nightshirt from my dressing table. I slipped it on over the towel and yanked a pair of tartan sleep shorts up underneath, then let the towel drop out.

  Finally, I slipped myself into Magnus’s side and started rubbing his shoulder, trying to soothe him. His hand gripped my thigh almost painfully, but it made a point to Aram, who rolled his eyes. I wanted to roll my eyes too, but that wouldn’t have helped matters.