Skyler applied her makeup with shaking hands. She was nervous. It was an
unfamiliar feeling for her, and she had decided she didn't enjoy it. Of
course, that fact didn't change that she was still feeling it.

This would be her first mission since Ransom 3 months ago. She could no
longer think of any excuse to keep her from working. Moving to New York had
taken all of a week with her working around the clock. Working on anything,
day and night, helped her. It froze her emotions to some distant place were
nothing could touch them.

Her hand slid wildly, leaving a streak of thick black eye shadow down her
pale cheek. "Damn." Skyler muttered as she threw down the pencil and wiped
at it with a kleenex.

As she went back to her eye makeup, she thought of the night ahead. Her new
mission was called Dominic Wolff, a shapeshifter. She had all the
information she could ever need on him, and his picture, and she was still
nervous.

She wandered into her bedroom, briefly mourning the loss of her books, which
she had left with various Daybreakers, not finding logic in carting them
across the country. Everything looked too... new, unlived in still, after
all the months since she had moved in.

Moving to one of the tables in the room, she moved the small hidden panel
out, and took another look at the Dominic Wolff file. She read it
absentmindedly, and grimaced as she realized she had been biting her nails
while doing so. It was an old habit, and she had just recently taken it up
again for the first time since her mother had died five years before. She
had also been dreaming about her mother, something she hadn't done since
joing Circle Daybreak four years before.

She threw down the file back into the compartment, and shoved it closed with
her hip as she walked past.

The whole apartment still did not feel like her own. It was too modern, too
brightly lit with garish fluorescent lighting that she could remember all
too well from high school. Her furniture did not fit, looking old-fashioned
and out-of-date against the high gloss whiteness of the entire apartment.
She hated it.

She also hated New York. It was cold, and there was no beach to escape to,
and she missed her few friends. Especially her Daybreak friends, and
training with Jez and Morgead, who had become her closest friends from the
moment she had joined. She missed the conversations about everything she had
with Jez, and the way Morgead made her laugh and forget the world.

They had both called her almost every night since she had arrived in New
York, but it wasn't the same. She missed her old life, and she missed
Ransom. She missed him in a way that confused her, and she hated thinking
about it, but she still ended up doing so.

She sighed and shrugged on a winter coat, the first thing she had bought
upon arrival to the city. It was time to go.

****************************

"This way, my dear. I have a surprise..." Ransom heard Dominic's faint
voice, and frowned moodily as the door to the darkened room he stood in
slowly opened.

She looked amazing, if a little more slender and tired-looking. Her skin
shone in the dim light, and her eyes flashed as she tried to get her
bearings in the unfamiliar room.

Skyler looked around curiously, not really caring what she saw, not caring
what Dominic's big surprise was. She moved inside, and whirled around as the
door clicked shut behind her, leaving her alone.

"Dominic? Where are you going?" She called out. All she could hear was his
laughter fading away, and then she was alone. She felt her hand along the
side of the door, trying to find a light switch she knew had to be there.

"Don't." A soft voice said with power behind that one word. She whirled back
in disbelief. "Ransom?"