"The Skin Walker"

Sasha Black walked home alone, and something walked behind her.

She'd always been good at reading situations at knowing when a room had turned against her, when a conversation had shifted from friendly to predatory. It was a skill she'd developed in boarding schools and corporate boardrooms, a survival instinct honed by years of being the outsider who had to become an insider to survive.

But this was different. This wasn't social danger. This was something else.

Every time she turned around, the street behind her was empty. Every time she stopped walking, the footsteps behind her stopped too perfectly synchronized, as if the sound was coming from her own shadow.

She reached her rental house. Locked the door. Leaned against it, heart pounding.

And then she saw herself standing in the corner of the room.

The other Sasha smiled with her face, moved with her body, spoke with her voice. But the eyes were wrong hollow, hungry, ancient.

"Don't worry,"

her own voice said to her.

"This will only hurt for a moment."

Sasha screamed. And then there was darkness.

The next morning, Sasha Black walked into the Nakamura restaurant and ordered her usual coffee. She smiled at Keiko. She complimented Satoshi's cooking. She asked how Willow was doing in school.

She'd never asked about Willow before.

Asher noticed. Asher noticed everything it was what he was paid to do. But he said nothing, just watched his partner with the careful attention of someone waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Abigail noticed too. When she brushed against Sasha's arm, a vision hit her like a slap fragmented images, stolen faces, identities worn and discarded like costumes. And beneath them all, something that had never been human, wearing humanity like a mask it didn't quite understand.

But the vision was brief, confusing. She couldn't be sure what she'd seen.

Around town, the strangeness spread. A husband who didn't recognize his wife's favorite song. A daughter who called her mother by the wrong name. Friends meeting for coffee who seemed to have forgotten the inside jokes that defined their relationship.

The fabric of Nowhere was unraveling, one identity at a time.

Benji found the pattern in his folklore archives. He spread papers across his video store counter and explained the Skinwalker a Navajo legend about a witch who can take the form of any person they've studied closely. They steal identities, memories, relationships.

Abigail asked how you fight something that can be anyone. Traditionally, Benji told her grimly, you don't. You just hope it gets bored and moves on. But there was something else: Skinwalkers aren't just shapeshifters. They feed on distrust. The more paranoid a community becomes, the stronger the creature gets.

And Nowhere was already a town built on secrets. A town where everyone was hiding something. The perfect hunting ground.

Asher found Abigail at the Big Ear, watching the sunset paint the massive dish in shades of rust and gold. He told her he needed to tell her something about Sasha, about them, about why they were really there.

He told her everything. The organization he worked for an unnamed group that monitored supernatural phenomena worldwide. The assignment that had brought them to Nowhere. The cover identities they'd constructed the tech entrepreneur and his girlfriend, just passing through, nothing to see here.

Abigail stated flatly that he'd been lying since he arrived. Asher confirmed it. When she asked why she should trust him now, his voice came out tired, stripped of its usual polish. She shouldn't trust him. But right now, he was the only person who knew Sasha well enough to recognize what was wearing her face. And he needed her help to save her.

Something in his expression cracked. For the first time, Abigail saw the man beneath the infiltrator. He was scared not of the creature, but of what it meant that Sasha was gone.

Abigail realized he actually cared about her. Asher laughed bitterly and admitted it was supposed to be a cover, a fake relationship for the mission. But Sasha had made it real. For her, it was never fake. And he had let her believe he felt the same way because it was useful. Now there was something ancient wearing her face, and he realized he had never told her the truth about anything. He asked Abigail to help him save her. Then Sasha could hate him for the right reasons.

The Skinwalker-as-Sasha was getting sloppy.

Or maybe not sloppy. Maybe something else was happening. The longer it wore Sasha's face, the more of Sasha's memories it absorbed. And Sasha's memories were complicated tangled with emotions the creature had never felt, connections it had never experienced.

It found itself feeling things it didn't understand. Loneliness that predated Sasha's existence. A hunger for connection that went beyond the need to feed. And, most confusingly, genuine affection for Asher a man who had lied to the woman whose face it wore, but whose lies somehow made the love more real.

Humans were strange creatures. They loved people who hurt them. They trusted people who betrayed them. They built identities from the very wounds that should have destroyed them.

The Skinwalker had stolen thousands of faces over thousands of years. But it had never understood what it meant to be any of them.

Until now.

Abigail found the creature in Sasha's rental house, staring at photographs of a life it had stolen. She told it quietly that she knew it wasn't Sasha.

The thing wearing Sasha's face didn't turn around. It observed that everyone in this town was pretending to be someone they're not. It just did it more literally. Abigail countered that it wasn't the same thing. The Skinwalker finally faced her, ancient weariness visible behind Sasha's eyes, and asked how it was different. The man Sasha loved didn't love her back. He was using her, wearing a mask of affection to complete a mission.

Abigail explained the difference: Sasha chose to love him. The Skinwalker chose to steal her face. The creature's voice cracked, something vulnerable showing beneath the stolen features as it admitted it didn't remember choosing anything. It just was. It had always been wearing faces, stealing lives, moving on. An eternity of being everyone except itself.

Abigail took a step closer and asked what the creature feared. The question seemed to hit the Skinwalker like a physical blow. It flinched, its form flickering for just a moment between Sasha and something else something thin and wrong and impossibly old. It whispered that it feared being alone, really and truly alone, not wearing someone else's life, just itself, whatever that was.

Abigail asked if that was why it took faces because it didn't know who it was without them. The creature looked at its stolen hands, turning them over as if seeing them for the first time. It admitted it didn't remember what it looked like before it started taking others. It had been so long. It didn't know if it ever had a face of its own.

Asher burst through the door, ready for a fight, but Abigail held up her hand to stop him. She told him she knew the creature had Sasha, but violence wasn't how they would get her back.

Abigail turned to the Skinwalker and observed that it had been absorbing Sasha's memories, her feelings. It knew now that the relationship was a lie on Asher's side. The creature nodded slowly. But it wasn't a lie on Sasha's side, Abigail continued. Sasha had loved him, really loved him. And now the creature was feeling that love and didn't know what to do with it.

The Skinwalker admitted it hurt. It asked why love hurt so much. Abigail explained that's what love does. It makes you vulnerable. It opens you up to being hurt. But the creature had a choice now. It could keep wearing Sasha's face, feeling her pain, pretending to be her. Or it could let her go and face being itself for the first time in however long it had existed.

The creature asked what if there was nothing there. What if it was just empty. Abigail told it then it would be empty, but at least it would be real.

The Skinwalker looked at Asher with Sasha's eyes one last time. Then it reached up and began to pull the stolen face away.

They found the real Sasha in the basement, unconscious but alive. She woke confused, disoriented, with memories that weren't hers tangled into her own.

She remembered everything the creature had experienced while wearing her face. Every conversation it had had. Every secret it had learned. Every moment of Asher's confession to Abigail.

Her voice flat, she told Asher he had been using her. He confirmed it. The relationship was fake for him. He confirmed that too. But she had loved him, for real. Asher couldn't meet her eyes as he acknowledged that he knew, and apologized.

Sasha stood, unsteady on legs that hadn't moved in days. She told them she remembered what the Skinwalker learned from everyone it impersonated while wearing her face. She knew everyone's secrets now.

She looked at her reflection in the basement's dusty mirror. Her eyes met their own reflection.

For just a moment, her eyes seemed wrong.

And then the moment passed, and she was just Sasha again. Mostly.