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