Marcus Vesper's Arc

Chapter 2 of 7

By midday the woman could sit up. Marcus left her wrapped on the porch with water and walked to find shelter for the night. Clouds stacked black in the west. He had no roof past the toll house, and open ground meant strangers might pass and see him shift. The letter rode in his pocket beside the gecko. He needed walls before dark. He found a dead traveler first. The body lay in a shallow ditch, half under a fallen branch. Rain had come and gone; the man had not moved in a long time. Marcus knelt and made himself look. He needed what the dead no longer used. Under the branch he found a rain mantle, thin and clear, striped with faded orange. It draped wide, with a deep hood and loose sleeves that could hide arms twice their size. Marcus lifted it and understood. If he shifted on the road, this could cover the plates and the tail. He would not have to hide behind walls at all. He could keep walking. The body's hand still gripped something. Marcus pried the fingers open. A small rust-colored scorpion sat dead in the palm, dried by the sun, tail curled over its back. The man had been holding it when he died. Marcus stared at the thing. It looked like the shape he became. Someone had carried it close, the way he carried the gecko. He did not know why the stranger kept it. He knew only that it made his chest tight. Thunder cracked. Marcus pulled the mantle over his head. It settled around him, loose and dry. He tested it, hunching, letting his shoulders swell the way they did when he changed. The cloth held. The hood swallowed his face. From the road he would look like any hooded walker in the rain. Rain began. Marcus walked back to the porch. The woman watched him come, wrapped in her blanket, and saw the new mantle. "You found a roof," she said. "Better," Marcus said. "I found a way to walk in the open." She nodded, slow. "Then you can carry it faster." Her hand touched her coat where the letter had been. "He's waited long enough." Marcus felt the fear then, small and cold. Not of the shift. Of the man up the road. Of handing him the sealed letter and watching a stranger read the words of the one person who had not run from Marcus. His skin prickled. A plate rose along his wrist. He pulled the hood lower and breathed until it sank back. "I'll go at first light," he said. The rain sheeted down. Marcus sat under the mantle, dry, hidden, no longer trapped by walls. He could travel now in any weather, in any shape. But every step forward carried him toward the man who owned the heart he wanted for himself.