Lunar Marked (Sky Brooks Series Book 4) (24 page)

“Where’s Trent?” Ethan asked.

Even David looked surprised by the question, probably because Ethan had never met him.

“I had to give him something. When the guy started growing hair he freaked out. He’s sleeping right now.”

“I need to take off the rest of your clothes, okay?” I said to the injured man. I used my knife to remove the rest of his clothes and then placed my hand on his sweaty warm skin trying to force a change. I wasn’t sure what he was going to change to. My experience with helping someone change was novice at best, but since I’d helped Ethan, I felt confident I could do it. Closing my eyes, I felt the tingles of the change that happened in my body, the prickle of my skin as the hairs prepared to force their way through. The tension on my joints as they prepared to be stretched and contorted to accommodate a new form. My heart slowed and I could feel my vital organs starting to perform at accelerated levels, preparing for what my body would endure.

The man squirmed under my touch, but eventually he relaxed against the floor. His eyes widened, and a frown made its way across his face distorting his appearance. Sweat started to pool and roll down his face. He appeared to be waiting for me to make the pain disappear—something I wasn’t sure I could do. Time stretched, and nothing happen. The same obscure hairs remained, and his eyes had the odd appearance of an animal’s stuck in a human’s body. In the background I could hear Ethan on the phone with Dr. Jeremy and Josh. Once he hung up with them he took up a position next to me. Moving my hand, he continued trying to force a change. The man’s back rounded, the crunching of his bones breaking and reassembling filling the air. David looked like he was about to lose whatever he had eaten in the past week as he retched behind us. It would have been rude to suggest that he take whatever he had given Trent, but he needed something.

I went to the kitchen to get him something. At first I considered ginger ale, but hell, he was about to see a man transition to an animal and our transition wasn’t pretty and fluid. It was going to be ugly and gross. Instead, I brought back vodka, but I didn’t bother with a mixer or a glass that I knew wouldn’t be used. As soon as I handed it to him, he threw back the bottle, and gulped down most of it before he stopped and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. This disheveled, flustered mess wasn’t David, and I felt like crap that he was going through this.

I guided him to the sofa, and he took another look at the corner to get a view of the man that was a wolf from the waist down. The cracking continued, along with the screech-like sound of ligaments being stretched beyond their physiological tensile ability. The panic of knowing the heart was about to stop for a few moments sent Strange Eyes into a panic.

“You didn’t look like that when you changed.”

I didn’t want to lie to David, our friendship was better than that. “It gets better each time. He’s different and I don’t know what his deal is, but when I know something I’ll tell you, okay?”

He nodded. And then he frowned. “Oh kitten, I hate that my cupcake has to go through that every month.”

Look at that a twofer, feline and a pastry in one sentence.

Another look at Strange Eyes and then David took another hard hit from the bottle. By the time the man had fully transitioned David had excused himself to the bathroom, bottle of liquid courage in hand. His tenuous grip on bravery had snapped, and I would have followed him, but I had a feeling he really wanted to be alone.

D
r. Jeremy
, Josh, Sebastian, and Winter had filed into the room when David returned, having somehow gathered his composure. A smile eased across his lips as he greeted everyone as though an exhausted Ethan wasn’t propped against the wall with a fully formed wolf that was barely breathing lying next to him. But he was so obviously drunk off his ass, something like that just wouldn’t seem so bothersome. He nearly ignored everyone and went to Winter, whom he had seen numerous time at my house but had never been officially introduced to.

“The dark swan, how beautiful you truly are in person.” Sober David was going to regret that statement. I needed to get him out of here before he started espousing all his little nicknames he had for people. Winter’s didn’t make a lot of sense, either. He said it was because she was beautiful, graceful, and pleasing to look at, but her resting bitch face made her seem dark and menacing.

The glare she gave him only served to prove my point. Her eye thing freaked him the hell out—amber slits flashing in her dark pupils. It freaked me out the first time I saw it and pretty much every other time she did it. But not David. It seemed to add to her mystique and he appeared to be even more intrigued by her. I could imagine him doing something totally inappropriate with her, like treating her face like putty and trying to push a smile on it.

I formed a tight gird around his arm and guided him to the kitchen to get water and whatever I could to help get him sober—or the nicknames he thought were clever and cute weren’t going to make him a friend of the pack.

From his kitchen I could see everything while I kept handing him water, and he sat on a stool. After a few minutes he seemed better and chomped down the sandwich I quickly assembled. I didn’t blame him—this was a lot to handle, and since I’d only changed once with him and most of it happened with me behind a tree, this was the first time he’d actually seen a change, and it was a horribly grotesque one. I made a promise to allow him to see someone else change, preferably Gavin. His change was absolutely striking, pure fluidity and as graceful as the panther he became.

“Is he okay to question?” Sebastian asked, entering the kitchen.

David, who had lowered his face onto the counter resting it on his hands, rose up and immediately started to stare at Sebastian. It was the same look that most people had when they first met him: diametrical chaos. He was the living embodiment of a beautiful monster. An alluring predator that incited the desire to have him and the need to run and cower. Just forty-eight hours after nearly dying he still possessed it like a second layer of skin.

David straightened. “I’m fine.” His self-assurance was fake, and if I could see it, I know Sebastian could as well.

His deep baritone voice was genteel as he addressed David. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“I was getting ready for work.” David worked in public relations. Most of the time he worked from home but went to the office once a week. He was always so stylishly dressed I never knew if it was the day he went to the office or not.

He looked around the kitchen; I was sure he was ready to take another drink of liquid courage. I slid a cup of water over to him. He took a sip and continued. “I heard a light knocking. He looked injured so I opened the door. I was about to call the police when I got a look at his legs, that’s when I called Skylar.”

Sebastian shot a glance in my direction and then back at David. “Did he say anything?”

“Just partial words, ‘kil'l’... kela’ maybe. I couldn’t make out any of it.”

“Could it have been Kelly?” Sebastian asked.

“Maybe.”

Sebastian thanked him and quickly made his way back to the living room. Reluctantly, I left David and followed Sebastian, who was going through the man’s discarded clothing searching through the pockets of his pants where he found a license. Kelly’s license.

“She didn’t leave, she was taken,” he said and then swore under his breath. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for Sebastian. At every given moment he was playing three-dimensional chess with the otherworld, and just when he was about to call “checkmate” everything gets knocked over and he has to start over and he’s given a hell of a hand to play with: Your Beta is a dark elf. Kelly, your employee, becomes injured by a creature from the dark forest. You fix her, and now she is missing. You have to placate a psychotic and troublesome Seethe’s Mistress to prevent a war with the vampires. Someone calls you to tell you they are about to kill a child because of an antiquated belief and you have to fly across the world and decimate a pack to save her. I couldn’t believe he would challenge anyone to keep his position. I’d offer pie to anyone who would take it.

Sebastian was about to speak when Dr. Jeremy started yelling for assistance. Strange Eyes was convulsing on the ground. The short spastic movements came to an abrupt stop, and Dr. Jeremy checked him and immediately started CPR. Winter took over while he searched through his bag and gave him a shot directly to the heart. Things had to be bad—my mother was a pathologist and I’d seen this done so many times on television shows that I thought it was a viable option, and she’d simply rolled her eyes and said, “Now if only they would show the doctor going through his malpractice case, this story would be more realistic.” It was a procedure done in emergencies only. Like now, when a recently changed were-animal, and I’m not sure if we could categorize him as that, went into cardiac arrest.

He didn’t move. We waited. Nothing. Dr. Jeremy’s hands ran through his hair, ruffling the silver mass that already looked like he had just gotten out of his bed to get here. I could tell Dr. Jeremy didn’t lose patients often. His typically relaxed demeanor was constricted, and the gentle lines that gave his regal features character made him look weathered and aged. “I want to take him back to the retreat to study him,” he said.

Sebastian turned to David, who had made his way out of the kitchen with the horrible timing of seeing the were-animal die. He blanched and looked like he was going to be sick. They took the wolf to the car through the garage; since it had been hours, we were well into the day and I was sure the neighbors were out.

After Dr. Jeremy left with the body, I was nervous when Sebastian came back in to talk to David. “He won’t say anything,” I assured him.

“I know. But I still need to talk to him.”

“About what?”

His eyes narrowed to small slits. Sebastian hated to be questioned, and his firm handling of his job confirmed he wasn’t very often.

“He’s scared and you’re kind of ”—
Raging box of scary
—“intense and I think he’s been through enough.”

Sebastian considered it for a few minutes and then me for even longer. “Give him my number and have him call me. He needs to call me, Skylar, okay?” As he walked away, he shot back over his shoulder, “I will see you tomorrow at five for training.”

No you won’t.
“P.M., right?”

He simply laughed.

D
avid was better
when I went back to see him a couple hours later to the point that he made a joke about Sebastian wanting him to have his number. Trent was a different situation all together. His flair for the dramatic made things worse, and when I changed into my wolf form, he started day drinking—hard. A bottle of wine later he wasn’t any better, just drunk and very inquisitive.

“You all turn into animals?” he drawled out as he took another long gulp from his fourth or fifth drink. It might have been ten since he kept filling up the oversized glass that looked like a bowl with a stem.

I nodded. “Except for Quell.”

His mouth twisted as he tried to remember which one was Quell.

“The broody one,” I offered.

“What is he?”

“Vampire.”

He was alcohol-numb enough to just laugh. “Eh, why not.”

“Josh is a witch.” Trent was calm and relaxed at this point. I could have told him I was Spider-Man on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and moonlighted as Wonder Woman the other days and he would have been okay with it. But that intrigued him.

“He can do magic?”

I nodded.

“Your life is so freaking interesting.”

I laughed but it wasn’t jovial, lacking any humor at all. It was a manic chortle. My life wasn’t interesting; it was fucking scary. David and Trent stared at me wide-eyed and concerned. Day drinking didn’t seem like such a bad idea, and when I asked for a glass of wine, David brought me one and sat the bottle down next to me. I told them everything: my strange birth, the real reason for the fight with Michaela, Ethos and his goal to control the otherworld and use me to do it. They got the rundown on Maya and how I felt like she was taking over, and even the assassination attempt.

At some point I just started rambling, and they didn’t seem to mind but struggled to keep up with all the information.

“Do most were-animals die?” David asked as troubled eyes stared back at me. He was handling things remarkably well, but I suspected he was wondering if I ran the chance of dying each time I changed.

“I don’t know many changed were-animals, most of us are born were-animals. I’m not sure what that thing was. He was different.”

David looked down at his hand. The extended silence was welcomed although uncomfortable. I had just bombarded them with a lot of information and was starting to feel a little guilty for making them my therapist and sounding board, and irreparably changing their world. “Could Ethos have made that thing? If he’s able to shift into a jackal could he make someone else change into something else?”

That was the question. If Ethos was Ethosial or a descendant, then there wasn’t any telling what he could do. Last year he used
genums,
small shapeshifting animals that everyone thought was extinct
,
and forced them to shift into massive creatures strong enough to attack and kill vampires and were-animals. At this point, I couldn’t put anything past his capabilities.

“What about those books, do you think they help you figure out the animal or at least stop Ethos?” David asked.

I shrugged. Since we hadn’t translated all of them I didn’t know, but it would definitely explain why he wanted them. But everyone wanted them. Samuel wanted them to rid the world of magic; I had no idea why Ethos wanted them. Was it leverage over the vampires and the were-animals to force them into subjugation for fear of being killed or losing their ability to shift?

I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. I wanted to day drink and slip into a nice alcohol-induced calm or nap, I didn’t really care which one. David had eased over to the chair I was sitting in and had placed his hand on my back. I didn’t need sympathy, I just needed to vent. I felt like everyone in this world was just fine with the violence, the constant discoveries of new and horrible things that occupied it, and had become immune to how petrifying and exhausting it could be. It was my life now, I got it. But every once in a while I wanted that “it’s not fair” moment and sulk over the brevity of my somewhat, kind of, normal life. I was going to take that moment.