The Hidden Blade by J. Manoa

Author:J. Manoa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABDO
Published: 2017-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

POLICE BARRICADES SEPARATED THE ROAD FROM the murder scene. It took a second for that term to kick in. Murder scene. Someone had died here. Someone around Nate’s age, who’d attended Nate’s school, who’d walked into and out of the same classes. Someone who’d taken the climb just as often as he did. The idea only became concrete once they arrived, as the blood stung the deep channels of his snout. Traces of sweat mixed with iron from both the tracks and the blood spilled on them.

The blood was expected, as was the dirt and steel, trees, grass, moss, and the musk of the others with him. The largest of them, Zarker, had a particularly powerful odor, as though years of grease and dead skin had been smeared into the fur covering his body, creating a heavy yellow-orange hue that permeated the air around him. Shayera and Clarkson were a less-intense yellow, the hot color of animal life, but a calmer color than the blazing red of danger. Seeing the world in this way reminded him of infrared sequences in movies, or how the Predator looked at Arnold during their own encounter in the forest. Except, for Nate, it indicated density instead of heat, a difference which seemed to give Zarker a dotted outline, as the dirt and oils came into clumps which built into points in his hair. He was a constellation stalking with sudden movements across the tracks and toward the trees.

Of course, Nate had yet to see what he looked like in this new, altered form, whether through scent or by sight in a mirror or photograph, as Ulrich had advised him to do. It was important to understand how the world would see him, Ulrich claimed, to feel the shock others would. Nate had practiced changing, familiarizing himself with the searing pains that came with stretching bones, hardening skin, and sprouting coarse hairs over his entire body, but he had yet to see himself. He had an expectation of how he looked. To see something else would be a shock. It would be too much. Luckily, the only ones who would see him that way were those like him. That was the fourth rule. Still, it was little wonder those who weren’t like him would be frightened. If he couldn’t handle looking at himself, then how could anyone else?

Dirt and steel. Trees, grass, and moss. Blood and the musk of the others. Not much else was left on the scene once Nate and Shayera arrived. More than a day later, in the open, on a rail line which still ran a few times per month and cut an alley into the woods where wind howled through. It would have been a miracle if any scent remained in those circumstances. Still, there they were, four hulking beasts, sniffing around as though one of them would suddenly find something no one else could.

Nate took a moment to listen to the leaves shaking, the branches creaking, the wind passing through the hair along the tips of his pointed ears.

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