7am

I woke up with a pounding headache, a cold, clammy feeling settling on me as I sat up. I’d had a string of vivid nightmares, not least being what had happened with Lisa. Reaching up to scratch my hair, I almost put my eye out with the spines now sticking out of my fingertips.

My eyes went wide, horror and anxiety settling in as the reality of the situation hit me like a brick. Spines emerging from my fingertips. I looked to my side and could see Lisa’s discarded skin, still partially dressed, thrown to the floor and abandoned. I stood as fast as I could, swaying and panicked, before a mix of emotions over took me and I fell to the ground again. My legs were like jelly! Feeling them with the back of my hand so as not to impale myself, they felt squishier or something. It was kind of unpleasant.

I could feel a weight of new feelings and thoughts coming to me, including memories that I didn’t recognize. Me as a little girl, accepting my best of class award for a science project. Homecoming dance, in a lilac dress, dancing with a guy from the football team. Losing my virginity to my high school sweetheart, awkward missionary, but the love was there. The sting of my first heartbreak before college. None of these memories has been mine before… so that meant the skinwalker must have given me Lisa’s soul along with everything else!

An avalanche of other thoughts and feelings came to me as well, but these ones were more indistinct and messy, I couldn’t quite make them out, or get the details. Rather than a conventional memory, this was more like the pure physical sensations of an experience, muscle memory maybe. I reached out for one of these memories, and went with the feeling. At that moment, the spines coming from my fingertips retracted, a visceral feeling which seemed to sting a little bit, but in a pleasurable way. Some light steam flowed as the flesh knitted back together in my fingertips.

For a few moments I just stared, wide eyed. Then I reached for another sensation in my mind and felt the opposite happen, a moment of pain that felt much more pleasurable than it should, as the spines re-erupted from my fingertips and hung free. More was starting to come to me, very quickly, as these remembered sensations settled into my mind, sorting themselves into an almost neat order. I knew how to bring forth the healing liquid, the one to turn a person into a skinsuit, and the one to restore someone.

Seeing Lisa’s skin lying there, a powerful and deeply perverted urge to put her on overcame me. I thought about slipping into that skin, wearing her face to match her memories and moaning in her voice as I explored the reaches of her body. Putting on her dresses, trying her make-up, deceiving her friends. All of it was mine now. Before I knew it, I was holding her skin up, ready to tear my clothes off and get inside.

What was I doing?? A firm, clear thought ran through my mind. This was wrong! Lisa was a sweet, kind girl who had already been reduced to a disguise and paraded around by a monster, she didn’t deserve this again. I looked at my hands, appalled by how strong that urge had been, and stabbed the skin with the spines. I felt a release of pressure I didn’t know I’d been holding as her memories I’d so recently been given seemed to pour out of my fingertips into her. I held it until I felt the last vestiges of her leave me, and as I did I saw her body had nearly totally reformed. As my fingers left her back a light steam rose up and the flesh sealed together, leaving no trace of what she’d been through. I stepped back, overwhelmed with relief it had worked and she was okay. She seemed to be sleeping peacefully now, thank Goodness.

I had to get out of here. Checking my watch, I saw it was 7:00am, way too early for students to be about, which gave me the perfect excuse to escape to my dorm room. The walk there was cold, freezing even, despite it not looking cold at all and there being no frost or even dew about the grass. I got back to my dorm without having the say a word to anyone and hopefully, going unseen as well. Getting into my dark bedroom I rested my head and found myself drifting off to sleep again, exhausted by everything that had happened and just wanting to avoid having to think for a little while.