“Sometimes,” Cole said with a smirk. “Never a Full Blood, though. I’m not good enough for that.” Before Jessup had a chance to speak for himself, he added, “Neither of us is. Besides, do you really think we want to kill you?”
“I guess not.”
“So tell me how you got pulled into all of this.”
Cecile’s eyes glazed over as if she was looking at something else instead of the tall grass and water cooler in front of her. “I changed for the first time …I don’t even know how long ago. He was there when I did.”
“Who was?”
“He told me his name was Randolph Standing Bear.” Cecile wrapped her arms even tighter around her legs and started rocking. “One night I was sleeping in my room. My brother was in the other bed. Dad was in his room. I woke up screaming. My whole body hurt. Then …I changed. I thought it was a nightmare, but he told me it wasn’t.”
“Randolph told you that?” Cole asked.
“Yeah. He was there. Watching me. He said I had to leave my home and go with him. He changed too and I went with him.” Lowering her head while steeling herself, she added, “I guess I still thought it was a dream.”
“What did he want from you?”
“He said he had to take me away before the others found me. Said I needed to figure out what I was before the others tried to teach me the wrong way. Said I needed to learn how to change, how to hunt, how to kill, how to do everything my instincts told me to do.” Looking up at Cole with eyes that had become multifaceted jewels, she told him, “When I changed for the first time on my own, I was hungry. I chased down whatever I could find and ripped it apart.” The jewels embedded in her eye sockets lost some of their luster, until they were merely the soft, wet orbs through which every human saw their world. “Or maybe that was a dream too.”
“What about your family?” Cole asked. “Do you want to get back to them?”
Her eyes narrowed, and although she didn’t change form, the beast rose close enough to the surface for aspects of it to be seen around the edges of her face and in subtle changes of musculature. “They’re dead. Randolph told me and I believe him. Even if they weren’t dead before, they wouldn’t have lasted long once the others came.”
Cecile pulled in a breath, placed her chin flat against the tops of her knees and stared straight ahead. Blinking once, she said, “When we killed those men in Billings, Randolph broke my arm and put something inside.” Looking up at the men as if she could sense the reflexive anger that had come over them, she added, “Not like that. He never touched me that way. I mean inside as in …inside the wounds. Inside my bones.”
“Inside your bones?” Cole asked.
“What men in Billings?” Jessup snarled.
Cecile stretched out her left arm and twisted it to display the veins running along the inside of her wrist. “He broke my arm there. Pulled it apart and …” She paused as if to consider if that was another of her dreams, but gave up on that right away. “It healed up right away. After I changed back again, there wasn’t even a scar.”
Jessup grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her to face him. “What men in Billings?” he demanded.
“They were in the back of some bar,” she said. “They tried to kill us, but we tore them apart.”
“What did they look like?” Jessup asked.
“They weren’t like me or Randolph, but they had fangs,” she said. “They fought back more than the first ones we killed.”
“They had fangs? What else?”
“Fangs and …I don’t know. It all seems so hazy.” One blink was all it took for her focus to go away from him and to something else. She still faced the Skinners, but wasn’t seeing him when she said, “Randolph told me I needed to hunt and I wanted to hunt. Wanted to kill. I …think I ate them, and I don’t even know if they were animals or …” She pulled in a deep breath, gripped her arms and said, “I don’t know what I’ve become, but Randolph keeps telling me it’s important.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Cole cut in. He looked at Jessup and asked, “Isn’t that right?”
Reluctantly, Jessup nodded. Despite the bravado he’d shown earlier, it seemed the older Skinner was just as tired and ragged as Cole when he said, “Randolph told us to hide you from the other Full Bloods. You remember that part?”
“Yes,” she replied.
Walking over to the duffel bags, he rooted through them and started pulling out spare pieces of clothes. He tossed a few shirts and a pair of faded cargo pants over to Cole. “Why haven’t you talked about all of this until now?”
“Because Randolph said you might try to kill me,” she explained. “Guess you would have tried to by now.”
Cole held the clothes in his arms and asked, “What’s this?”
“Might as well strap on a set of reflectors if you wanna wear that bright blue Broncos shirt.”
“Got any more in there?”
“For that skinny friend of yers? He’ll be swimming in them, but yeah.”
Cole walked around to stand in the grass a few paces behind Cecile so he could change clothes.
Sitting down so he could stretch out his legs with a labored grunt, Jessup said, “Why don’t you get us some food, Cecile?”
“You’re sending me away?”
“No. I’m hungry. You and Cole probably are too. There’s some PBJ, chips, and some old candy bars inside.”
Cecile rolled her eyes, turned her back on the men and walked to the camper.
“All right, then,” Jessup said in a low voice that made it clear he knew all too well that a Full Blood could still hear him if he wasn’t careful. “What do you think of this?”
Cole’s eyes were continually drawn to the other man’s vest, partly because of the rattle that accompanied almost every one of his movements. The teeth braided into the fringe looked like melted wax and were sharp enough to double as bullets, which meant they’d been pulled from the mouth of a shapeshifter. “Seems like we should help her. If she’s tricking us to get information about the rest of the Skinners, she won’t find anything that the Full Bloods must not already know.”
Jessup walked back to the bed of his truck and returned with a large overstuffed backpack. While talking to Cole, he removed several see-through bags stuffed with cash consisting of wadded bills and copious amounts of change. “Did you catch what she said about the thing stuffed into her arm?”
“Yeah. What was that?”
“I don’t know,” Cecile replied while coming out of the camper. She carried two plastic grocery bags to the clearing and set them down. “If I did, I would have told you. I could hear everything you said, by the way.”
Cole and Jessup looked at each other, shrugged and sifted through the grocery bags. “Guess you’re not as much of a pup as I thought,” the older Skinner said.
“I would think the ears start working as soon as they grow in,” Cole said as he picked a sandwich, tore open the Baggie and sniffed the crust. The bread was soggy after being in the bottom of that bag for too long, but the jelly was grape, just as God intended.
“You hungry?” Jessup asked Cecile.
“Yes.”
He tossed her a sandwich, which she held up to her nose and sniffed. Not interested in whether she liked peanut butter and jelly or not, he asked, “So you don’t know what that thing is in yer arm?”
“Nope. Randolph acted like it was special, though. I think it’s something he just found.”
“Does he ever mention something called a Jekhibar?” Cole asked.
She squinted while gnawing on the Snickers bar she’d found and replied, “I think so. It was while we were changed. so …” Rather than say the words, she waved her hand around her head as if she was scrambling her brain.
“Jekhibar?” Jessup asked. “That’s an Amriany word.”
“Are you sure about that?”
He nodded. “Hell yes. Ever since the Blood Blades came over, I thought it best to read up on the other stuff they’ve got. The Jekhibar is a Unity Stone.”