(continued from part one)

A Gift From: frea_o
Type Of Gift: Fic
Title: Second Skin 2/2
A Gift For: hufflepuffsneak
Rating: PG-13/T
Warnings: Violence, blood, swearing, mentions of violence toward women
Summary/Prompt Used: Clint as a country sheriff dealing with mysterious murders on his home turf, Natasha as an FBI bigshot (or someone impersonating an FBI bigshot) +1 for Kate Bishop as a deputy or as a nosy teenage detective.



Awareness was something that trickled in slowly, like molasses dripping from the jar, one sticky droplet at a time. He had some feeling—he knew he existed, which was usually a good sign—but the rest, reminders that he had hands and feet and a nose and...other things, came more slowly. After some time, he realized that his alarm wasn’t going off. And even more time passed before he figured out this was because he wasn’t in his own bed. He was in the station. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. There was a gorgeous woman sitting on the floor, her legs pulled up to her chest and her arms hugging her knees.

That last fact made the world settle into place faster. Clint moved to sit up, but Natasha put a hand on his shoulder. “Easy there, Sheriff.”

“What the—where am I? I mean, wait, I know where I am, but what’s going on? Why don’t I...” Clint looked down and realized something: his chest had had several gaping holes in it the last time he’d seen it. Now there were several faint lines across his flesh, like long-faded scars. The full force of the encounter hit him: they had faced some sort of beast-man, Natasha had lit up like Three Mile Island, and he’d gotten some pretty big scratches for his trouble. “Huh.”

“You’re okay. No lasting damage,” Natasha said, and he couldn’t detect any sign of emotion in her voice. She’d been warming up to him during their dinner. He could hear it in the amusement her voice carried, and her eyes had twinkled—not glowed, just twinkled. But now, she was completely impassive, her eyes and her expression giving nothing away. “How do you feel?”

“This isn’t purgatory or heaven or anything, right?” At least, he was fairly sure heaven wouldn’t involve the conference room in his office.

From the brief glint of amusement in her eyes, she seemed to be thinking along the same lines. She’d lost the leather jacket and the giant knife and seemed to be wearing one of his spare undershirts that he kept stashed in his desk. He could see that the tattoo he’d notice earlier did indeed extend all the way down the arm. “No, this is Stewart’s Point.”

“You’re no longer glowing. And I’m no longer leaking. I’m guessing the two are related.”

“Is that your subtle way of asking what I am?” Natasha asked.

Clint looked around. He could see streaks of blood on the floor, dried now, and the empty water bottles, but no Kate. “That and where my deputy is.”

“She’s asleep in the other room. It’s five in the morning, for the record. I finally convinced her that I wasn’t going to mutilate you in your sleep or make off with your soul.” Natasha’s eyes betrayed no amusement. The soberness was remarkably clear, so that he could make out the dark circles under her eyes, which were once again back to a shade of hazel-green that seemed remarkably human.

He had a feeling that part was a lie.

“I’m a rusalka, for the record,” she said.

“A what now?”

“Rusalka. Do—do you think I could sit up there?” She looked at the bed and he realized that she’d probably been sitting on the floor for a while. So, gingerly, he sat up (he was a little sore, but it sure beat bleeding to death) and scooted over. She gratefully sat down next to him, close but not touching. She smelled like sweat and the perfume he’d noted earlier.

For a moment, she was quiet, just staring forward. Clint looked at her hard, trying to see if there was any catch, any sign that she wasn’t human.

He saw nothing but a tired woman.

“Rusalki are...well, they’re not commonly known in your American mythology.”

“Mythology?”

“Come now, do you really believe anything is a myth anymore?” Her lips twisted, wryly.

She had a point, but he was still playing catch-up with all of this. And part of him wondered if he was just hallucinating. “Sasquatch better be a myth—or wait, was that what that thing was? Did we fight Sasquatch?”

“Sasquatch lives in Ontario, so no.”

“I can’t tell if you’re joking.”

Natasha’s lips curved even more.

“So rusalka...does that just mean a woman who turns green, drinks a lot of water, and can, you know, heal people at the drop of a hat? Like a witch?”

“Think more of a demon.” Natasha no longer smiled. “My kind, we were notorious in Russia. Women that were killed too young or by violence or by themselves. We lived by water. It gave us our power as the scorned women. We’re known for luring men into the water and drowning them.”

It took every inch of Clint’s willpower not to lean away. Granted, the only source of water in the room was in a bunch of Great Value water bottles on the floor, but after seeing the woman next to him light up like a torch, taking precautions suddenly seemed very, very prudent.

She caught his unease, as much as he tried to mask it. “Don’t worry. I’m reformed. And I really am an FBI agent. I work for the Suspicious Happenings Investigations and Extranatural Lore Department.”

Clint blinked. “Like aliens and stuff?”

“Yes.” She seemed to brace.

“So you’re a literal Agent Scully?”

Her sigh told him that she’d heard that one before a million times. “Scully was the skeptic.”

“But you’re a redheaded FBI agent who investigates weird stuff.”

“As I’ve been reminded.”

Clint frowned. The fact that she knew X-Files actually served to reassure him somewhat, though his brain kept getting caught up in the idea that she’d been something that lured men to their deaths. And he couldn’t forget that he was a man, even though it was five in the morning and they were in various states of dishabille, sitting together on a cot in the back of a sheriff’s office.

“Except,” he said slowly, “Scully wasn’t a Russian mermaid.”

Her eyes lit up with annoyance, and thankfully that was only a metaphor. “I am not a Russian mermaid! God.”

“You just said you live in water and lure people to their deaths. I know not all mermaids are like the Disney kind,” Clint said before he realized that maybe taunting the woman who could literally lure him to his death was a bad idea. “Okay, never mind, you’re not a Russian mermaid. You’re a Russian Lite-Brite.”

“A what?”

“How does a rusalka go from, um, killing men to working for the FBI? I thought Quantico was hard but I didn’t realize it was...” Clint trailed off as he realized he couldn’t exactly think of a term. Given that he’d had the crap clawed out of him and had discovered that the myths weren’t exactly mythical, he figured it was okay. But he still needed a word, so he settled on, “Supernatural.”

“I was recruited by a man named Nick Fury.” Natasha face closed up a little. “He came to Russia looking for a rusalka to join his team. He bested me in battle. He was the first one to do so in centuries, though at great personal cost to himself.”

“A couple of centuries. So...thirty-four is...”

“I age like a human now,” Natasha said, “if that makes you feel better. But maybe I added a couple of years to my physiological age.”

Clint goggled. “You think a couple of years makes up for centuries?”

The smoldering look she shot him made his tongue wither in his mouth a little. “Okay, okay,” he said, holding up his hands. “So you’re human now?”

“Mostly. SHIELD—my department, in case you’re not good with acronyms—has ways of keeping the supernatural population under control. And helping them blend in, or break their bonds. I retain the rusalka abilities through a way I’m not going to tell you about.”

“The tattoo,” Clint said, nodding.

Natasha gave him an annoyed look.

“Look, don’t blame me for pointing out the obvious. It got bigger, so it’s not just some regular ink. And I saw it when you were...glowing.” God, that felt weird to say. It felt weird to experience, too, but honestly, growing up in the circus had taught him that there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot of black and white to the world. Everything came in shades of gray. Or, in Natasha’s case, green. And he’d always had amazing eyesight, so it wasn’t as though he’d just start disbelieving what had happened before his very eyes. “So the abilities. I’m guessing speed, probably strength, stamina, healing. Connected to water?”

“You really are taking this well. Your deputy...”

“Not so well?”

“There was yelling.” Natasha shrugged. “A lot of yelling.”

“Sounds like Kate.” He didn’t bother to keep the pride out of his voice. “So if you’re a Russian—not a Russian mermaid. That answers that. What I want to know is what was that thing that clawed the shit out of us?”

“My guess? Skin-walker.”

“A who-what now?”

“Think werewolf, but not quite. They’re people with the ability to transform into animals, but it’s not constrained to the full moon.” Natasha frowned. “And usually they’re peaceful. They don’t kill, which was why I was so hesitant to link all of the crimes to one. But this one was...”

“A skin-walker,” Clint said, repeating the word blankly. “What the hell?”

“They’re people who put on animal pelts to become the animal in question. There’s a long tradition of them, going back to the Navajo people.”

Clint froze. Kate was half-Navajo.

“But this one’s odd. Usually they take the form of a single animal, and this one was multiple animals—bear, wolf, I think cougar—at once like some kind of abomination.” Natasha wrinkled her nose again, and Clint thought she just might hate that word. He didn’t blame her. If he’d been a reformed water demon, he’d probably hate it, too. “And like I said, they don’t usually kill. Sometimes they do, if they’re created out of what the Navajo consider perversions, but mostly you get teenagers joy-riding.”

“Joy-riding as wolves?” Clint scratched his head.

“Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it, I guess.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“I think this one may be trapped permanently as a skin-walker. I’ve met a few, but something about this one feels different,” Natasha said.

Clint rested his head against the cinderblock wall and thought about it, replaying the fight in his mind. “Bullets and arrows didn’t seem to bother it much, but somehow it got hurt when it clawed me. Why?”

“This.” Natasha dug in the pocket of her jeans and held something up: his medal. It was blood-stained, which would make it a pain in the ass to clean, but the Cooper’s Hawk stamped on the pendant sneered at him, ever the same. She handed it back to him. “Touching it was worse than trying to get through the line of salt. I don’t know why. As far as I can tell, it’s not charmed.”

“You can see magic?”

“Russian water demon,” Natasha said.

“And here I am, still just trying to accept that magic exists. So...salt kept it from getting in here.”

“Yes, which is why I’m surprised you listened to me,” Natasha said. “Most men don’t. Sometimes, if I know they’re going to die without protection, I can compel them. But you listened to me.”

Clint scratched the back of his neck, wishing abruptly that he had a shirt on. It was an odd thing to think in that moment, as he’d been fine without the shirt up until now. But rusalka and possibly-able-to-drown-him-with-magic or not, he couldn’t deny that from the very first minute, there’d been attraction, the sort that would make him ask where to land if Natasha said jump. Discovering she was an ex-demon, that magic was real, that the monsters were real, that didn’t seem to have changed much about that feeling.

“Maybe I’m not as much of a non-believer as I say,” he said. “What was it trying to get, anyway? It wanted in here pretty badly.”

“If I had to guess? Something about that talisman Dr. Monroe had.”

“Is it going to attack anybody else? Should I call for reinforcements?”

“The sun will be up soon, and skin-walkers hate sunlight, so as long as it’s only after the talisman and nobody stumbles across it in the woods, your people should be safe.” Natasha’s cell phone buzzed, making both of them look over at the interrogation table, where it was sitting next to an unopened file. “That’ll be Fury. You should get more sleep. I’ll brief you more on the case when you wake up.”

But before she could hurry out of the room, Clint reached out and grabbed her wrist. She went still, her eyes cutting to his hand and to his face. He realized that not many must reach out and touch her willingly, but he didn’t care. “What?” she asked.

“Whatever let you become human again...did it take away your desire to kill?”

He saw actual emotion flicker across her eyes: surprise, distrust, confusion. “Don’t worry, Sheriff. I’m not any danger to your citizens. The only one I’m after is our rogue skin-walker.”

Firmly, she pulled her arm free and strode out. “That wasn’t what I asked,” Clint said, but she was already gone.

Now that he was alone, he reached out and ran his hands over the very faint scars where the skin-walker had gashed him. He still wasn’t sure he entirely believed what exactly had happened, but there was undeniable evidence right there. A closer inspection made him frown: just under the largest of the scars, there was some kind of faint symbol on his skin, as though the rest of him had tanned and this area had been missed by the sun. It looked fluid and a little like a bow and arrow.

Had he been marked by a rusalka? What did that mean, anyway?

The gashes ended abruptly just above his sternum, where his pendant had hung. Clint lifted it to the light and studied it, scratching at the dried blood with his thumbnail to get some of it off. Natasha had said it wasn’t charmed, and it didn’t seem like old Mr. Sliney, who’d left it to Clint in his will, would have been the type to use actual magic. But then, a day ago, Clint hadn’t even believed in magic. So what the hell did he know? So what made this pendant so special that it hurt the skin-walker when bullets and arrows had done nothing?

Exhausted, Clint drifted off to sleep again, the mystery still in his thoughts.

* * *

“Magic,” Kate said to him later that morning when she stormed into the interrogation room with a tray of coffees.

Clint lunged for the tray. “Gimme.”

“Magic. Magic is real.”

“Coffee,” Clint said, as that was as high as his cognitive function went.

“The FBI employs Russian mermaids and has a whole department to deal with supernatural shit.”

“Coffee,” Clint said again, slurping. “Glorious coffee.”

Kate rolled her eyes at him. “We just had our entire worlds rocked last night, and all you can focus on is caffeine. Aren’t you at least a little bit shocked?”

Clint took another long drink, feeling the coffee warm him to his bones. He could have gone out to his trailer to get a shirt, but instead he’d fallen asleep in just his battered and still bloody jeans. He ran a hand over his hair and winced. Of course it was a mess. “She doesn’t like being called a Russian mermaid. Just saying.”

“You’re no help,” Kate said, and stomped back into the other room.

When he strolled out a few minutes later, some brain function restored, he found Kate and Natasha perched together on one of the desks, going over files. His deputy looked up when he came in. “Hey, Sheriff Shirtless.”

“Cute,” Clint said, and Natasha looked up and met his eye. He had a flashback of the ferocity on her face, the way she’d faced down the skin-walker with those glowing veins on her hands and neck, but now, she looked tidy and neat and like an FBI agent once more. The little silver chain was back on her wrist. “What’cha up to?”

“I’m educating Kate about what we know about skin-walkers. There’s nothing in our files about why your pendant would hurt it.”

“Great. I’m gonna...” Clint gestured vaguely toward the back of the office, in the direction of his trailer. “Shower. Change. Do regular stuff. Did you get breakfast?”

“It’s after noon,” Kate said, giving him an amused look. It only deepened when he panicked. “And no, there weren’t any calls. I don’t think our skin-walker struck again. There was a car accident down on Main Street, but it was just Allen Landry again. I handled it.”

“Oh. Good, then. That’s good.”

He took his time showering and changing into a shirt he was less fond of than the one that the skin-walker and Kate had destroyed the night before since this problem didn’t look like it was going away any time soon. After that, he dug out some old silver polish Kate had probably nagged him into buying, and cleaned off the pendant. He felt a sense of relief when he finally put it back on.

When he came back to the station, feeling almost new, he found Kate and Natasha in deep discussion again. They had sandwiches from JJ’s Diner half-finished in front of them, and they’d picked him up his typical ham on rye.

He dug in with gusto. “Find anything?”

“Just that everything I’ve ever believed in is wrong,” Kate said, frowning.

To his surprise, Natasha laughed and patted her on the shoulder, and his deputy didn’t flinch. Whatever Natasha had told her while he’d been out seemed to have cured a lot of the problems between them. “For most, beliefs are fluid. You’re young. You’ll recover.”

Kate scowled. “Great, another person who tells me that.”

“To be fair,” Clint said around a mouthful of sandwich, “she’s got a couple of centuries on me, so she probably has more authority to say that.”

Natasha shook her head at him, but he noticed her lips were curved upwards a little bit. It felt like a victory.

“Anything about the pendant?” Clint asked.

“Do you know if it’s pure silver?”

“Yeah,” Clint said. When both women gave him questioning looks, he shrugged. “Look, life wasn’t easy when I left the circus, so I may have gotten it appraised at a pawn shop to see what it was worth. Are you thinking it can’t touch silver?”

“Were-creatures can’t,” Natasha said, and Clint had a moment where he readjusted his reality to realize that those things were probably real. “But skin-walkers are a different sort of creature entirely. There aren’t any files of them reacting to silver, pure or not. And my kindjal is only a silver alloy.”

“Your what?” Clint and Kate asked.

“My knife.”

“Oh, right, your skin-walker skewer,” Clint said, frowning. He’d seen her holding it during the fight, but afterward, he couldn’t remember seeing it anywhere. “Where did that go, anyway?”

Natasha held up her hand. It took him a moment to realize that she was indicating the silver chain on her wrist. “Whoa, are you kidding?” Kate asked. “Is that more magic?”

“Just one of the perks of being a special agent for SHIELD.”

“How does it work?”

“Of course it would be the weaponry that gets the both of you interested,” Natasha said, but she rose to her feet, brushing crumbs off of her fingers. She moved around the desk so that both Clint and Kate could get a clear view of her arm and wrist. “Pay close attention. I will not be doing this again.”

When she flicked her wrist, the silver on her wrist seemed to flow down her hand like mercury, dripping toward the ground. No, it wasn’t dripping. It merely gathered below her hand to form a fourteen-inch blade, the black and green studded hilt gripped in Natasha’s right hand. Clint blinked and the silver hardened into a darker blade, etched with wavy patterns.

“Whoa,” Kate said. “Can I see?”

Natasha held out the blade, hilt first. “It’s Russian,” she said, unnecessarily. “I carry a sidearm, but the blade is better for fighting unfriendlies, the skin-walker aside.”

“And bullets didn’t work,” Kate said, frowning at the blade. She gripped it in one hand and swung it about (cutting it very close to the office plant Clint was struggling to keep alive, which he certainly did not appreciate). “And neither did the blade?”

“No, just Barton’s pendant.”

“Hm.”

“I know that look,” Clint said, and it was his turn to frown. He’d known Kate Bishop for the better part of a decade. She’d picked up some of his better qualities—a good eye with a bow, a love of the law—but more importantly, she’d picked up his lesser qualities, too. Like impulsiveness. “What are you thinking, Katie-Kate?”

“I’m not sure.” She handed the kindjal back to Natasha. The redhead flicked her wrist and the blade vanished. “I think I’ve got an idea about how we can hurt this thing if it comes back.”

* * *

Kate left without explaining her plan. Clint could tell that Natasha didn’t like that, but he didn’t mind so much. He was used to Kate. She usually had good ideas that she didn’t always want to share until she was absolutely certain. So he handled a couple of tasks that the office needed to see to, which felt strange and mundane in the face of magic being real. He let Natasha use the office as her base and headed into town, where he had to endure Miss Patty’s admonishing look for keeping the pretty FBI agent out all night.

Clint was almost tempted to tell her that the FBI agent was not what she seemed.

When he returned to the station, Kate still hadn’t returned. Natasha looked even more frustrated. “I’m missing something,” she said. “Every creature has a weakness, and we’ve discovered what this one’s is, but I don’t know how to replicate it.”

“We could throw this at it?” Clint said, using his thumb to hold the chain to his pendant up.

“Not big enough. That would only injure it rather than incapacitate it, I think. And trapping it won’t work. It would eventually break out of any cage.”

“What about that salt thing? Seemed to stop it last night.”

“Salt can only do so much. It’s there to guard buildings and homesteads, not imprison unfriendlies.” Natasha sighed and sank back into her chair. “And I have no idea what your deputy is doing.”

“There’s a strong chance she’s goofing off. No, wait, that’s me. The kid’s smart. If she has an idea, you can bet your ass it’s a good one.” Clint sat down at his desk. When he looked over, he was surprised to see Natasha frowning at him, like she couldn’t figure him out. “What?”

“I wasn’t kidding earlier when I said you’re taking this well. And you’ve barely had any questions. It’s like you’ve been associated with magic-users and unfriendlies for a long time. Or you’re the most pragmatic person on the face of the planet.”

“I had myself a good cry in the shower,” Clint said.

Natasha scowled. “And of course it’s a joke.”

“It’s not a joke. Something out there killed a tourist on my turf and it beat the shit out of both of us. I can waste time having a freak-out or I can go find the son of a bitch and figure out some way to lock him up.”

“And you don’t find working with an ex-demon disgusting.”

“You glow in the dark, but you saved my life.” Plus, Clint added in his mind, you’re really hot. “So as far as I see it, we’re square. Did you contact, uh, SHIELD and see if anybody in the area was willing to help us out?”

“Director Fury didn’t see the point in sending out more ‛cannon fodder,’” Natasha said. “This is one of the most powerful unfriendlies I’ve ever seen. Your rifle didn’t even slow it down, and it nearly defeated a full-blood rusalka.”

“So we’re screwed?”

“Not yet. Our benefit is that whatever that talisman is, the skin-walker wants it, and badly. So maybe it will keep its attention away from killing like it did with the other cases. Hopefully we can come up with a solution before then.”

“And if we can’t?”

“Burn the forest down? I don’t know yet. But we’ve got to do something.”

In the meantime, Clint read about skin-walkers and Natasha studied first Monroe Miller’s talisman and then Clint’s. She refused to call it anything but a talisman, and once she fully explained what that meant, Clint could kind of see that that was what the pendant had become to him. It signified his lean days, his hungry days, the long days of studying at the Academy, the long nights on patrol. His time in Stewart’s Point. For every piece of his life save the earliest days, that pendant and that Cooper’s Hawk had come along with him, guiding him.

And now magic and demons were real, real enough that there was an entire FBI task force dedicated to hunting them.

In between files, he asked about various things, and Natasha gave him vague answers that made him wonder if she was bullshitting him or not. Vampires didn’t sparkle and usually didn’t bother with killing, Sasquatch really did live in Canada, the Loch Ness Monster was pretty friendly, and Natasha’s best friends were a naiad and a fury that had been dating seriously for quite some time. He wasn’t sure if he was more surprised that the Greek furies existed or that his joke about Sasquatch had been so on the nose.

Finally, dusk settled over the town. Clint watched Main Street with a growing sense of unease. He knew exactly how many people there were in town, and how many lived on the outskirts. His jurisdiction wasn’t a large one, but he had a duty to protect these people, and there was a creature that could kill all of them at large.

When the idea hit, he knew it was a bad one.

Silently, he crossed to the back of the office and opened the gear cabinet. He donned his hunting camouflage jacket, not bothering with the bright orange vest he usually wore with it, and toed out of his sneakers so he could pull his boots on.

“What are you doing?”

“I need to keep the skin-walker away from the citizens of this town.” He slung his hunting quiver onto his back. “So all I do is take the talisman and go deep into the woods.”

“That’s suicide, just so you know.”

“I figured as much. Nobody knows these woods the way I do, though.” Clint knelt next to the giant bag of rock salt and scooped some into a plastic baggie, which he slipped into one of his many pockets. Maybe he could wet down one of his arrowheads and coat it in salt. Might cause some pain. “And who knows? Maybe it’s injured and I can just lead it on a merry chase all night. Gonna try and talk me out of it?”

“Actually, I was going to see if you had extra gear.”

Kate was half a foot taller than the diminutive rusalka, but they were both slimly-built, so her back-up hunting jacket sufficed. In addition to her kindjal, Natasha carried her sidearm and another baggie of rock salt, as well as her rings—whose purpose she wouldn’t share with Clint. She shook her head when he offered her Kate’s back-up bow.

They were packing away some granola bars and water to take with them when the door opened and Kate strolled in with a bundle under her arm. “It worked!” she said.

“What did? You didn’t try to go after this thing yourself, did you?”

“Of course not. I’m not an idi—oh, you’re planning to do just that, aren’t you? Well, these will help.” Kate set the bundle on the desk and unwrapped it. The bright purple fletching in the arrows he recognized as those belonging to her, but the arrowheads were crude and homemade, composed of what looked like silver. “Just in case pure silver does harm this thing. My aunt left me some supremely ugly candlesticks when she died. Hideous. They’re much better this way.”

“When did you become a silversmith?” Clint asked.

“There was a YouTube video. I figured it out. Where are we going?”

Clint added Monroe Miller’s talisman to the chain on his neck. “If it wants this as bad as I think it does, it shouldn’t take long to start chasing us. We’d better be ready.”

* * *

Six hours later, he was seriously rethinking that statement.

“Maybe it’s moved on?” Kate, who’d taken a perch on a low branch, asked.

“Apparently.”

“Also, you’re really bad at plans.”

Natasha, crouched by a creek a few feet away, looked up to give him a slightly crooked grin. “So far I can’t disagree with her, Sheriff.”

“Everyone’s a critic,” Clint said. They’d hiked, walking steadily through the area for a few hours. Clint hadn’t heard any sign that they were being followed, but he also usually didn’t wander around with the express purpose of getting tracked by not-so-mythical animal-men. So tonight was a bundle of firsts, really.

Natasha’s grin only intensified. She held her hands out over the water, fingers spread like she was holding her hands over a campfire. Clint knew from Wikipedia that rusalki haunted streams and lakes and ponds, so he had to figure this was probably some way of recharging her batteries or something. Either way, he wasn’t going to comment.

“I’m not ready to throw in the towel just yet,” he said. “Maybe it’s taking a nap.”

“It’s a nocturnal creature.”

“That’s why I said a nap, not ‛sleeping,’ duh.” But he was starting to doubt. What if the beast didn’t want the talisman at all, but something else? Would the salt still work while they were away? Natasha hadn’t said anything about it, but Clint realized he had a whole bunch to learn about this new world he’d been exposed to. “Either way, we should keep mov—do you hear that?”

“Showtime,” Kate said, standing. She moved to jump down, but Clint motioned for her to stay put. He wasn’t sure which direction the growling had come from, and if the skin-walker attacked, Kate had a better vantage point.

“Where’s it coming from?” Clint asked Natasha in an undertone, since she was only a few feet away. He pulled an arrow from his quiver and nocked it.

Instead of rising, she stuck her hand in the water. “That way,” she said, and her eyes took on a distinctly yellow tint. “It’s getting nearer.”

“Time to run,” Clint decided, and was about to jerk his head at Kate, to tell her to get the hell out of there when something streaked through the darkness, straight for him. He lifted the bow and fired, cursing when the skin-walker dodged at the last second. Kate’s silver-smithing needed some work, apparently.

In startlingly clear detail, he saw the snarl on the skin-walker’s face as it leapt toward him, claws extended.

Figures, Clint thought, and the skin-walker slammed into a wall.

“What the—” There was a wall in the middle of the clearing where there hadn’t been one an instant before, and even stranger than that, it was made of water. It was slightly opaque, but Clint could see the water streaming along the edges like a living, breathing entity. He gaped for a second.

“Run, idiot,” Natasha said, sounding strained. She was still crouched by the creek, one hand in the water and the other hand extended, directing her—oh, god, she’d built that wall using water and magic. On the other side, he could see the skin-walker, blurry from the water, shake off the hit in a daze. “Run! Now! I’ll catch up, I’m faster.”

“Weirdest day of my life,” Clint said, and took off. He heard Kate drop to the forest floor and streak after him, hot on his heels. He’d taken her hunting so many times that she knew these woods as well as he did, so he wasn’t worried about her getting lost, but he was grateful that she stayed with him. None of them needed to die by skin-walker tonight.

A minute later, he heard Natasha’s footsteps right behind him. “For the record,” she said, “skin-walkers appear not to be too fond of water.”

“That would explain the smell!” Kate called back.

“Giving it a shower would only piss it off more, so I can’t do anything about that,” Natasha said. “Maybe next time.”

“More running, less talking,” Clint said.

Apparently, his plan needed work, as the skin-walker was faster than he anticipated. But if the skin-walker was tracking them, there were two options: either they’d really pissed it off the night before or it did want the talisman. Or both. Clint figured it was both.

He led the way, cutting east. There was an area with bluffs overseeing a small gorge. It was dangerous at night, but Kate was as sure-footed as he was, and Natasha seemed even more so. With those bear-like claws, the skin-walker wasn’t going to have as easy of a time over the rocky bluffs. Or so he hoped. Plus, maybe they could trick it into falling off of a cliff. It might not kill the thing, but it would at least get them a chance to slip away and elude it for a couple more hours.

He heard Kate’s muttered curse when she figured out his plan.

“What?” Natasha asked.

“Hawkeye here is trying to get us to the high ground because he’s nuts,” Kate said.

“Hawkeye?” Natasha asked.

“I’m from Iowa. She thinks she’s being cute.” He cut left behind a copse of trees and heard the others follow. The enraged roar behind them told him that the skin-walker had missed the turn and had had to double-back. Under his feet, the terrain changed from the carpet of fallen leaves to a rocky, barren type of soil. He saw another turn up ahead. “Kate.”

Immediately, she understood what he wanted to do. “On it,” she said, and sped up, reaching behind her to grab Natasha by the arm to haul her along. Clint broke off and ran straight at the boulder, making a leap that made his thighs burn. He wobbled a little when he reached the top. As he swiveled, he snatched one of Kate’s silver arrows from his quiver and nocked it in one smooth motion.

He counted his breaths, thumb on his neck pulse, as he heard the skin-walker racing toward him. For a creature infused with the spirit of animals, it certainly didn’t have that animalistic grace he’d seen in wolves and coyotes and even in Natasha.

And then it crashed into sight. Clint waited for the pause between heartbeats and, praying Kate was right, loosed the bowstring. This time, the arrow flew true. It cut through the air and hit the skin-walker straight in the chest. Clint waited for a scream of pain, a burst of light, any sign that it had worked.

Instead, the skin-walker ripped the arrow out of its chest.

“Shit!” Clint dove off of the boulder and rolled, landing hard so that his quiver bruised his back. Cursing further took too much energy, so he shoved himself to his feet and ran for it, sprinting in the direction he’d seen Kate and Natasha disappear.

They’d apparently stopped running, though, for Natasha had found some kind of stream and had her hand buried in the water, skin glowing faintly. Kate had an arrow nocked but not drawn back. “It doesn’t work!” Clint said, waving at them to keep running. “I’m going to see if I can lure it over the edge.”

“Won’t work,” Natasha said.

Kate pointed. “Stand there.”

“And do what?”

“Be bait,” she said. She’d taken up another perch on a tree branch, crouching with her eyes sharply focused on the trees behind Clint. He’d lost the skin-walker for a moment, but he had no doubt that the creature would soon catch his trail. “Natasha’s got an idea. I think I can do it.”

“You sure about this, kid?”

“Nope, but we’re gonna do it anyway.”

“Okay,” Clint said, standing where bid and drawing one of his regular arrows. “But if this gets me killed, remember you have to be the one to escort Allen Landry to court over those unpaid parking tickets. Because you’ll be the new sheriff.”

“Ugh, don’t remind me. It’s coming, hold still.”

Both of the archers drew back and aimed. Natasha plunged her arm deeper into the stream. Clint didn’t know if she was planning to throw another wall between him and the skin-walker, but he sincerely hoped so. He’d already been clawed to pieces once during this ridiculous juncture. He didn’t relish repeating the experience.

Clint sent a short prayer up to some gods he wasn’t sure he believed in, even though magic and monsters were real, and waited.

The skin-walker burst through the trees, stumbled over itself as it studied the area. When it spotted Clint, it leapt at him a third time. Time began to stumble. Clint was able to study each of the seriously gnarly yellow teeth in perfect detail for one terrifying second. And then he heard the twang of Kate’s bowstring, distorted because everything was happening so slowly.

Like him, she aimed for the heart, and like him, she hit the creature. But instead of simply ripping the arrow out and storming forward in a rage, the skin-walker let out an unreal scream that made the hair on Clint’s arms stand at attention. He watched, dumbfounded, as it collapsed to the ground in a fetal position, curled around the arrow. The horrifying wail continued to fill the air, making Kate clap her hands over her ears. Clint just grimaced.

“Please don’t be playing possum,” he said under his breath, and wandered closer as the wail turned to whimpers. If he’d found the noise disturbing, though, what he saw as he crept up to the beast was even worse: it was melting. Full Wicked Witch of the West melting, its flesh and bones turning to liquid in front of him.

“Don’t touch it,” Natasha said.

“What the hell is it doing?”

“Leaving this realm.” She wiped her hand dry on her jeans as she rose, heading for the body. Her eyes as she studied it were grim. “Sometimes they explode. Sometimes they melt. I prefer the melters.”

“Why?”

“Less likely to get on your clothes.”

“Gross.” Kate hopped down from the branch.

For a moment, all three of them stood over the melting skin-walker, breathing hard from the chase. When the whimpers silenced, Clint knelt and grabbed the arrow shaft that had been embedded in the creature. He held up the bloody silver tip. “How come it worked for you and not me?”

“Natasha figured out the key.” Kate took the arrow back and wiped most of the blood off on the grass. “It’s not silver. It’s inherited silver, like your talisman. The arrows wouldn’t have worked for you because you weren’t the one who got Aunt Clarice’s ass-ugly candlesticks during the Great Bishop War of 2012.”

“Thank god,” Clint said. He stared at the sizzling, mostly melted pile of skin-walker on the ground. “Now what?”

“Now I call SHIELD,” Natasha said. “And they send a clean-up crew.”

* * *

The clean-up crew consisted of a genial man in a suit that introduced himself as Coulson, and a couple of geeks. Or at least Clint assumed they were geeks. They’d introduced themselves as Fitz-Elementals-and-Simmons-Blood-Magic, and that seemed pretty geeky to him, like they’d normally be biology or chemistry nerds or something. They wore hipster clothing that you didn’t see out of the city much and he still wasn’t sure which one was Fitz and which one was Simmons. But it didn’t seem to matter, for they were happy to babble at each other without pause—the lady geek really liked his arms, the boy geek didn’t like this so much—until Coulson sent them to go collect the skin-walker remains and then stepped outside to take a call himself.

Clint turned to his deputy. “I would not have expected magic-users to include bureaucrats.”

“Do you think they use parchment for their paperwork?” She looked intrigued by the idea, and Clint again felt guilty that he hadn’t read those Harry Potter books she’d been obsessed with years before. Either way, he’d seen a couple of the movies, so he spent the next couple of minutes speculating with Kate. It made things seem a little less weird.

“I’m afraid,” Coulson said, stepping back into the office, “most of our files are digital.”

Clint and Kate exchanged guilty looks at being caught gossiping.

“But we have quite a few scrolls and other parchment-related items. Deputy Bishop, might I have a word in private?”

“Am I in trouble?” Kate asked, glancing from Coulson to Clint.

The bureaucrat smiled. “Quite the opposite. Is there someplace we can talk in private?”

Kate shot Clint a baffled look as she led Coulson to the interrogation room. Because he had a feeling Coulson would instinctually know if Clint turned on the intercom, he chose to focus instead on finishing out the paperwork on Declan “Monroe” Miller, though he had to leave quite a bit of it blank. Bobbi wouldn’t release the body until she had paperwork and after everything he’d seen, he didn’t really want to cause any trouble for the SHIELD division of the FBI.

Something about the whole thing turned his stomach, but he wasn’t entirely sure what, yet. After melting the skin-walker, they had returned to the office. Natasha had gone back to her hotel room to sleep it off. Coulson and the geeks had pulled up not too long after Clint had arrived at work that morning, exhausted from their late night activities. Though he’d given Natasha completely blasé responses to the existence of mythical creatures, in the open light of day, he wasn’t entirely sure what to believe anymore.

And the regular sheriff duties seemed even duller than they ever had.

Natasha pushed open the door to the office, holding two coffees. One, she set down in front of Clint.

“I thought you went with the nerds to go pick up the remains.”

“No, Sam did that. I needed coffee.”

He blinked. He’d only met Coulson and the nerds. “There are more SHIELD agents here?”

“The entire town is crawling with them, Sheriff. Standard protocol. We have to see if any normals were affected—besides you and your deputy, that is. Luckily, we weren’t dealing with a creature capable of infecting others, but somebody might have seen something they weren’t supposed to.”

“And what happens to them if they did?” Clint asked, wariness rising up in his gut.

“Then our techs will very carefully remove those memories. They’ll just think they drank something or ate bad seafood. It’s perfectly safe.” She obviously caught his skeptical look, for she leaned forward and put her hand on his wrist. She didn’t feel like anything other than human. Her hand was a little warm from holding the coffee cup, but her skin felt smooth. “SHIELD interferes as little as it can. Those people will be fine. We just need to make sure it’s not known to the greater part of the world that magic is real.”

“And what about Kate and me?” Clint asked. He realized that was what had been bothering him; he might not read too much science-fiction, not like Kate did with her vampire novels or whatever, but he knew that when you stumbled across a conspiracy or a monster, you were basically SOL. “What happens to us? Do our memories get erased?”

He really hoped not. He might not entirely understand what she was yet, but he really, really wanted to keep his memories of the woman sitting next to him.

“Well, you had a little too much exposure to erase comfortably, so don’t worry about that.” Natasha took another long sip. “As far as I can tell, SHIELD has two choices. They can buy you off into signing an NDA, or they can hire you.”

“What?”

“You and Baby Hawkeye, you do good work.” Natasha’s shrug was light and bouncy. “Especially together. She put you straight in harm’s way last night and you trusted her. If I’m not mistaken, Coulson’s in there offering her a job.”

“What? She’s my deputy, she doesn’t belong to the FBI.”

“Oh, c’mon, Clint,” Natasha said, and since she actually used his name, Clint paid attention. “Don’t be boorish. You know working for the FBI is a great opportunity for her.”

It really was. She’d talked a time or two about getting on a bigger force, working her way up to detective. Hell, he’d pushed for that, but Kate had wanted to come back to Stewart’s Point and back to him, working as his deputy. And he’d fought tooth and nail to get her into the budget. The county would certainly be relieved if she accepted a transfer.

“Yeah,” he said, finally. “It’s a great opportunity. Still, it’s a bit weird, knowing that instead of terrorists or white collar criminals, she’ll be facing zombies and undead creatures.”

“You get used to it surprisingly fast.”

“Just like you get used to being an ex-water demon?”

Natasha paused, tilting her head as she considered her words. “That took a little more time.”

“So what’s that like?”

“Hmm?”

“Being human again after years of drowning guys in a pond.”

“A stream,” Natasha said. “And it...I’ve done a lot of things. I don’t foresee myself ever paying off those blood debts, but working for SHIELD, I can at least make a small dent in the red in my ledger. I have more clarity around water, and my hearing is enhanced, but I am like any other human.”

“Give or take a couple of centuries,” Clint said.

“You’ll be bored,” Natasha said abruptly, evidently growing tired of the subject.

He blinked. “What?”

“If you don’t take Coulson up on the offer he’ll make you when he’s done talking to Kate. You’ll be bored if you stay in Stewart’s Point, and even more, you’ll always wonder.”

“Wonder what?”

Natasha’s lips curved up. “Well, for one, what sort of creatures are out there. If they’re out there now, what they’re doing. If you could help. You’ve seen the supernatural, and it’s not the type of thing that will leave you alone after you’ve been exposed to it. But most importantly of all, you’ll always wonder about one thing, Sheriff Barton.”

He caught himself looking at her lips and very pointedly met her eyes. “And what’s that, Agent Romanoff?”

“If I look as good naked as I do glowing. Oh, look, there’s Coulson. It looks like he’s done talking to Kate. And now it’s your turn.”

Clint made a strangled noise, especially when Natasha gave him that slow, smirky smile as she walked away toward the back to talk to Kate. He couldn’t be sure, but it seemed like she might have put a tiny bit more sway in her hips as she strolled away.

Coulson crossed the room and surveyed him from the other side of the desk. The grin he shot at Clint was knowing and too polite to be lewd. “Need a moment?”

Clint never took his eyes off of Natasha’s back. “If you’re here to offer me a job, Agent Coulson, I’ll save you some time. I accept.”

“I thought you might.” Coulson held out a hand and Clint shook it. “Welcome to SHIELD, Agent Barton.”