Skin Deep Read Online Free

Weird and mean and real nasty. Knocked me out a couple of times too."
    I waited for him to continue. These were the most words the boy had strung together since we met.
    "He...he became something else." Todd looked at the remains of the Wraith and shook his head. " That is not my father."
    "So what do you figure he became?" I tread carefully.
    "Dunno. Maybe he went a little crazy? Multiple personality or something like that?" He didn't believe those words. Not for a minute. Mere psychological justifications for what he knew to be something far stranger. His face darkened. "To be honest it was more like he was possessed by something. Something evil. And strong."
    He brushed his hair away from his face. I caught sight of a huge purple bruise on his forearm. Grabbing his arm in a light hold, I looked straight at him, eye to eye. "Did he do this to you?"
    "Yeah. He hurt me all the time. Broke my hands and legs all the time." He stopped talking and sat there, watching me, mulling over something. His arms were streaked a violent purple with yellow highlights. He'd admitted to having had his limbs broken recently. But no physical signs indicated he was hurt apart from the shocking bruise.
    "You heal?" My matter-of-fact acceptance of the ability to heal gave the poor fellow some confidence to own up.
    He nodded and the look of relief flooding his eyes brought tears to my own. I understood what he felt. "What's wrong with me?"
    I shook my head. "There's nothing wrong with you, Todd. You're just a special kid." I ruffled his hair and he didn't resist.
    "But why am I this way?" I understood his need to know. At least I came from a family of Walkers. No matter how dysfunctional, I'd at least known what made me different from the start.
    "I don't know." I kept an eye on the body. On the door. We had to get moving.
    "You can see them, can't you?" Todd seemed to accept the possibility that something evil had possessed his father's body.
    I struggled with a response to his question.
    "It's a little more complicated than that. I can see their residue. They leave it on whatever they touch. I saw it on you."
    Todd rose to his feet and approached the corpse that was once his father.
    "What happens when they take you, like they took my dad?"
    "They're a parasitic entity. They kill their host, slowly enough for them to fill the place left by the soul of the mortal. You father would’ve died a few days after being possessed by the Wraith. And it’s why we can't detect them on their host. I can only track them through the people they hurt along the way."
    Todd nodded in silent understanding. "This thing was walking around in my father's dead flesh. Nobody would ever have been able to give my dad the peace he deserved. Thank you." He looked at me, an earnest honesty on his face. "My father was a good man. Not a great man. But a good man—in his heart." The boy tapped his chest.
    "Do you have somewhere to go? Somewhere safe?"
    "I can stay here." He refused to meet my eyes, clearly not wanting me to see his need.
    "It's better you don't. In case his friends come looking for him."
    "Do they have like...social networks or something?" Todd scrunched up his forehead in distaste, obviously disliking the thought the soul-sucking killers who had taken his father from him would dare to be social creatures with friends and families like normal people.
    "I don't really know. I've only ever seen one of them at a time. And I never stopped to chat about the sociology of Wraiths." I failed to educate him on the fact my association with Wraiths was wholly based on method of dispatch. "I think it would be safer for you to be far away from this place for a while."
    "Wraiths?" Todd let the word tumble over his tongue, testing it as he would the taste of a chocolate. "What are they?"
    "They are the darker branch of the Ethereals." My response was automatic, as if it was expected he'd know what an Ethereal was. In a split second I realized how vastly different our