Skin (22 page)

“
Well,
you’ve got Erik now. You can mould him into your new puppet. And
let’s not forget Darius. I know you certainly haven’t. You know
he’s a Mech right?”

“
You’re
ridiculous. First you accuse him of taking steroids, now he’s a
Mech. Darius isn’t a Mech.”

“
Why
don’t you ask him then? I’ve seen him bleed Mech fluid. That’s why
he forfeited that fight. He was cut and about to blow his
secret.”

“
Darius
isn’t a Mech, Rev.”

“
Fine,
you believe that all you like. I can see I’m the only one to see
any kind of truth around here. Go back to Darius, Sveta, you
deserve each other. I’m leaving.”

“
You’ve
got no choice but to leave, Rev. I have no more to offer you. I’m
casting you out of Sanctuary.”

“
You
can’t cast me out, I just said I was leaving.”

Neither of us
said goodbye.

I headed
to the wharves without even being aware I was going there. I moved
through the Downtown strip, still wearing nothing by my fight
shorts. People stared. Some of them pointed. Let them stare, I was
something to behold. I didn
’t need to be a legend on
the cross. People would talk about me everywhere. I would be a
legend in all of Guessing and further. The world would know my
name.

I
wasn
’t specifically looking for werewolves, but knew
they would be the easiest to find. And the wolf had been somewhat
thematic for me lately, it seemed fitting.

I found a
small pack lumbering through the shipping yards near where I had
been beaten to near death. I came up behind them, four, and
whistled.

“
Want a
piece?” I snarled.

The dogs did
not attack like I had expected them too. They bristled, bent low
and growled. I stepped towards the largest of the four, beckoning
it to move forward. I was practically on top of it before it
slashed out to attack. I grabbed its paw before it would connect,
twisting its arm until I felt it pop. I pulled again, hard, and the
limb tore free like well cooked chicken sliding off the bone. The
beast howled and fell, the other three edged warily away, backing
up against a shipping container.

“
Fight
me, damn it,” I yelled. Not one of them moved. The first writhed on
the ground, bleeding out. I grabbed for the next one, gripping it
by the throat. It was soft as butter and I squeezed, my fingers
popping skin and hair. I closed my fist into blood and gore as the
thing gurgled to a bloody, pathetic death while the other two fled,
scuttling away like frightened puppies.

“
Fight
me!” I screamed after them.

“
I’ll
fight you,” came a familiar voice from behind.

“
You’re
following me now? I guess that’s only fair.”

Darius
stepped into the pool of light. For the first time since
I
’d met him, he didn’t look so big.

“
It
looks really cool,” he said, looking my scales up and down. “I
mean, if you like that sorta shit. It looks good.”

“
What do
you want Darius? Come to get your ass kicked?”

Darius stepped
over the now still body of the first werewolf.

“
I’ve
come to tell you you’re the dumbest fucking idiot I’ve ever
met.”

“
So you
have come to get your ass kicked then.”

“
She
loves you. She really loves you. I know, I’ve seen love on her
before but that time it wasn’t nearly as deep as what she’s got
going on for you and it was me that stuffed it up.”

“
She
used me, the same she uses everyone and now she just can’t handle
the fact I’m so powerful. She can’t control me like her little
puppet anymore.”

“
Nah,
she loves you. She gave you the world and would’ve given you a
whole lot more. She would have given you everything you asked for.
You think she does that for every hot jock that passes through the
cross?”

“
She’s
slept with most of the members you know, Animus and
Natural.”

“
So
what? She hasn’t loved them. You’re the love of her life in a life
that doesn’t love easily. And you’ve tossed it all up, for what?
Because she stopped paying attention to you for a while, while she
dealt with her illness.”

I heard the
growling before I saw the pack. They approached from behind where
Darius stood looking down on me, his hands on his hips like a
scolding parent. The runaway wolves had returned with
reinforcements. Darius cricked his neck, readying for the
fight.

“
She
kept secrets from me. What kind of love is that?” I said, eyes
still on the approaching pack.

“
A love
that wants to protect you from the bad stuff,” he said.

The pack
stopped as a single unit. There were eleven of them, far too many
for two ordinary guys, even with one of them being Darius to take
down. I was not a normal guy.

Darius
turned so that we were both facing them. I wasn
’t
scared, not even nervous. I didn’t need to be. Darius was breathing
heavy, his eyes flashing, sizing up the pack one by one, his throat
bobbing as he swallowed hard. I could let them have him.

“
Speaking of secrets, how is it you’ve convinced everyone
you’re not a Mech?”

The pack
moved, flanking the two of us and stopping us from backing
completely against the crate. It was a haze of dark, stinking hair,
and slathering teeth.

“
Because
I’m not,” Darius said, laying his fist into the belly of a wolf.
The beast faltered, just briefly to suck in a gasp of air and kept
on coming. I had two against my back, flitting about like pesky
insects. A light brush of my arm sent them both crashing down into
the container wall, giving me time to get to Darius’ side before
the next stupid dog came to taken me on.

“
Why are
you still lying?” I pulled the dog back by the scruff of the neck
and held it, it’s paws scrabbling for purchase on the concrete
ground.

Another took
the opening for him and Darius moved with a swiftness I’d never
seen in him. He locked the beast around the neck and snapped its
head clean off between his bicep and forearm, like a pair of
pruning shears snapping at a twig. He was a different fighter than
the one I had seen so many times on the cross, the one I had fought
myself. I realised then all those times he had been holding back,
moving slowly, performing a role as the dumb hulking giant. Even
when we had fought in his apartment, he had been saving me. He
downed another dog, kicking it in the back and delivering a single
hit on the back of its skull as it fell, dead before it even hit
the ground.

“
It’s
the tablets, that’s another thing I came to tell you about,” he
panted. “I only just discovered what they’re actually doing, how
they actually work. Nanobots, or some shit. They get in there and
fuse into your muscles, turn them to steel.”

My grip
on the dog
’s neck loosened and I almost didn’t see
another come at me from the side. The held beast tried to twist
free and almost made it. I lifted it, swinging it like a flail and
sent it flying into his brother. I’d taken dozens of those pills
since my first surgery. They were helping my recovery. That’s not
where my strength was coming from. That was dragon. Not steel. It
was natural.

“
If
you’re still popping them, then you’d better stop.” Darius grunted.
He grabbed another dog and swung it into the container wall, using
the force of its own momentum. “But I guess you’re not holding so
tightly onto being a Natural anymore. You’ve got skin made of
dragon steel so what’s a bit of robot titanium in the
muscles?”

The dog turned
on him again, not taking any time to collect itself before
launching another attack. Darius delivered a smooth uppercut into
its sternum and I heard the crunch of snapping bone. I stepped in
and finish the job with a sharp chop to the neck.

My head was
swimming. The adrenaline of the fight, the news that Darius had
told me about the pills. It was impossible of course. Wouldn’t a
man know when his muscles are being replaced by steel, when he had
a foreign substance growing on the inside, mutating him like a
cancer? My mother hadn’t felt her cancer growing. No one ever did,
not until it was too late.

My vision
blurred.

I
couldn
’t tell how many dogs were left alive. I saw
six, I saw dozens more, hundreds. I saw nothing but a black haze.
My stomach heaved and I doubled over with a crushing cramp as if I
had been slashed through the middle. A hot torrent of sour vomit
erupted.

“
Beside
you!” Darius yelled.

I was pulled,
the dog’s paws held firmly around my chest, its claws buried deep
into my abs where I had told Ricard I didn’t want any armour just
so I could keep my hard earned six pack. I spewed again as the
animal threw me, winding me around like an Olympic hammer toss and
sending me crashing into what I thought was a wall. As I slid to
the ground, a crumpling mess, I realised it was Darius I had come
up against. He lowered me to the ground, gently, carefully and I
lay curled, my body wracked with violent spasms and shivers. Pain
seeped through every cell. A dog screeched and another. Howling,
growling, Darius grunting with the effort of the fight, taking on
the rest of them alone as I lay on the ground, helpless and weak
and nothing.

The last
dog yelled as Darius put it down. Its hulking form fell beside me,
its blood curdling with my vomit on the concrete, just in front of
my face. I felt Darius
’ hands on my shoulders, turning
me, lifting me. He propped me up sitting against the shipping
container smeared with werewolf blood.

“
Thanks
for that,” he said. “Taking on a pack of werewolves solo was just
the thing I needed to end my night.”

His face was
close, I could smell the sweat and feel the heat radiating off him,
but I could only make out a dark shape. The lights of the harbour
shone and blurred behind him.

“
What’s
happening?” I whispered. My mind swirled and it felt as though all
of my insides were moving while the outside parts of me stayed
still. My head throbbed with my racing pulse. My legs were
numb.

“
I’d say
you’re rejecting the transplant,” Darius said.

He slid his
hands under my arms and lifted me as if I was a toddler. I slumped
over his shoulder and I fell into the heavy lull of his
footsteps.

I heard
birdsong. I reached out to touch Sveta, sleeping beside me and felt
only the cold touch of steel. I dragged my eyes open. The birdsong
was a beeping machine, the cold steel was a rail in the side of the
narrow bed where I lay, bandaged and strung out with tubes and
wires. The lights were too bright. The air was frigid.

“
Sveta?”
I called out, my throat burning and sore.

“
Try not
to talk, love,” came a woman’s voice that was not Sveta’s. An
unsmiling old nurse in drab grey scrubs leaned over my bed to
adjust some dials and buttons on the machine I was hooked up to.
“Do you hurt?”

I nodded,
barely able to move my head thanks to the crushing pain. She
pressed a button on a tube leading into my arm and I felt a warm
rush of relief, like I was being wrapped in a blanket and laid down
to sleep in a bed made of clouds.

“
I’m in
Omega?” I whispered.

“
You’re
in Guessing General, love. What did I just say about
talking?”

Oblivion took
me like an ebbing tide, pulling me back into the depths of the dark
sea of nothing. The beeping machines, the sounds of loud voices,
the bright lights, they all faded as I did, sinking peacefully,
gratefully into a soft void.

When I woke
again, it was to the feeling of warmth sliding into my cold hand. I
gripped tight, I knew that feeling as well as I knew my own
heartbeat.

“
Sveta,”
I said.

“
Quiet,
my love,” she hushed. “Don’t try to move.”

I lifted my
eyes and she fell into focus, leaning over my bed, her face like a
seraph come to deliver me to heaven.

“
What…”
I tried to ask her what had happened, but could manage only the
single word.

“
Your
body has rejected the dragon skin,” she said softly. The doctors
have removed it and had to take the modalities from your legs too.
There was also steel. Darius told me about— ”

“
No,” I
gasped through a choked sob. “No they can’t. Get it
back.”

She held
tighter onto my hand.
“It’s over, Rev."

I lifted
my head, just a fraction, to look at my body. I was covered in a
light sheet, but still felt the bandages, tight from ankles to my
chest. I couldn
’t move my legs.

“
They
told me you will have full normal function once the swellings and
infections pass,” she said, her voice never rising above a whisper.
“They’ve rebuilt your legs. You’re Natural again. With medical
implants.”

Normal
function. That
’s all I was left with? Natural? After
everything that I had achieved? It had all come to this, come to
nothing.