“That’s exactly what I mean. Kind of like when hunters take out too many of the coyotes in a certain area or bobcats in another. That’s when all the other things poke their noses out and spread all over the place.”
“But the big wolves are back,” Cole pointed out. “Now more than ever.”
“Which don’t bode well for us. These little peckers have been out long enough to find better food and bigger dens and warmer beds and greener pastures and . . . you get the point.”
“Got it about five minutes ago,” Cecile grumbled.
“What about the Nymar?” Cole asked. “Have you found a lot of Shadow Spore?”
“Hell no,” he spat while tearing open a candy bar as though he was ripping off a small animal’s head. “Why would they be out where we’d just pick ’em off? The whole point of burning out as many of us as they could was so they could set up shop all over the place. The cops are either on their side or believe them bloodsuckers are victims being stalked by folks like us.”
Cecile didn’t even look up from her sandwich when she asked, “Well, aren’t you? Stalking them, I mean.”
“Think I liked it better when she was givin’ me the silent treatment,” Jessup grumbled.
“So we don’t have to worry about Nymar,” Cole stated.
Jessup was quick to reply, “I wouldn’t go that far. Just because they’re not out skulking in the alleys everywhere don’t mean they’re not a threat. Fact is, they’re a bigger threat than they realize. And you should pay close attention to this too, young lady. Those Nymar used to spread rumors and outright lies about how they ruled the cities to keep your kind out. That’s no lie anymore.”
“Trust me,” she said. “Randolph is a lot more pissed off about that than you are.”
“This is his territory,” Cole explained. He stood up and turned his back to both Jessup and the girl. “And this shit is really getting hard to choke down.”
“It’s all I got,” Jessup said. “There’s tuna salad somewhere, but it might clean yer plumbing out more that you’d like.”
“Not the sandwich,” Cole said. “Why the hell do we care what a murdering animal like Randolph has to say? Why should we care what he wants? Have things slid too far down the crapper for us to even try to be Skinners anymore?” Shifting his eyes to Cecile, he asked, “Do you even know how many of our friends that goddamn beast has killed?”
“You think the Full Bloods are setting you up?” she asked. “Then you guys really must not know a lot about them. They don’t need to set up anyone but themselves. Everyone else is just tall grass to them. When it gets in their way, they mow it down. And when it’s time to mow, there’s nothing that can stop them. I’ve only been one of them for a little while, but I can see that much already. How long have you guys been fighting them?”
Cole was still fired up. He looked to Jessup to see whether he stood alone against the wolf in a teenage girl’s clothing.
“Look,” she continued, “I know people are dying. I saw it on the news and on the Internet. Randolph told me about what’s out there. You kill them, they kill you.” Quickly raising her hands, she added, “And yes, I know it’s not a game. Skinners have died, but you’ve got to see this from my side here. You don’t just kill werewolves. You peel them and drain them and I don’t even know what else. I may have eaten a human being, but you guys even give me the creeps.”
It gave Cole the creeps to hear her talk about things so candidly. Then again, he knew from experience that it didn’t help anyone’s sanity to tiptoe around the truth. Sometimes it felt good to just embrace the madness and move on.
“Obviously you and Randolph aren’t friends,” Cecile continued. “But if the Full Bloods wanted to find you, they could. I barely know how to move around in my other body, but I feel like I can smell and hear everything there is. I think Randolph’s older than all of us combined. When he talked about Skinners, he told me to see if I could trust you and then tell you the whole story about what’s going on with the Breaking Moon. He said you needed to know because if anyone had a prayer of hiding me away from the others, if only for a while, it was a Skinner.”
“And what can you tell us?” Cole asked.
“The Breaking Moon,” she replied, as if reciting something she vaguely remembered from a dream, “is why the others are here.”
Farther down the road a few cars rolled by. They were too far away for the Skinners to worry about and might as well have been in another universe than Cecile.
“There’s some kind of heat inside of us,” she said. “Full Bloods, I mean. Those big dogs too. Are they Half Breeds?”
“Yes.”
“I remember Randolph mentioning that now.” According to the look on her face, Cecile was hearing plenty of things in her mind at that moment. She winced at the screams the same way Cole had when he’d been awakened to his new world. “The heat is real. I can feel it all the time. It’s some sort of power,” she continued. “Randolph described it as the fuel that allows them—I guess us—to do what we do. I thought it sounded crazy, but I can feel it working when I change. It’s like a match is always on inside me. Kind of like, you know, inside a furnace?”
“A pilot light?”
She nodded and then smiled wistfully. “I used to like watching my dad light the pilot light at the old house back in West Virginia. Sometimes I snuck down there and left the little door on the side of the furnace open so that little flame would go out. Dad would go down there with a coat hanger he’d twisted up to hold a match and I’d follow him to watch.”
A semi pulling a trailer rumbled down the interstate. After it passed, a stray breeze swept across the camp. Her hair fluttered like streamers against her unmoving face. Crossing her arms and standing against the wind, she looked less like she was bracing herself against the elements and more like she was giving them silent commands to function around her.
“When my dad would light the match and stick it into the end of that bent metal hanger,” she said, “he told me to stay back. Then he stuck the match into the furnace and . . . whoosh!” Even as she said that word, her eyes sparkled as if she was looking at the little spectacle that had captivated her all those years ago. “The flames just exploded in every direction. They filled the whole furnace and all these streams of fire came out of all those metal pipes or whatever was in there. You know the ones I mean?”
“Yeah,” Jessup replied. “I do.”
She nodded, acknowledging him, but just barely. “That’s what it feels like when I change. Inside, there’s this little flame in me. Always burning. When I change, though . . . whoosh. It fills me up. Kind of like sex, but more.” She glanced over at him with the sly expression of a girl who’d done the deed, but not enough times for it to have lost its shock value. When Cole failed to react in kind, she rolled her eyes and nodded. “I’ve had sex, don’t you worry about it.”
She was just learning to use her sexuality as a tool. If he’d been about fifteen years younger, it would have had a lot more of an effect. Instead, he was able to see her as the young pup that she was. “So what’s this got to do with the Breaking Moon?” he asked.
“All the Full Bloods—and I don’t think there are a lot of them—we’re like the flames shooting out of those pipes. We each have some of that fire in us and we can use it however we like. Randolph says that part just goes into living, but we get to live for a real long time.”
Cole felt like a spy who’d found himself sitting at the dinner table inside an enemy’s camp when he asked, “How long?”
She glanced over at him, smirking like an officer who’d just found a spy sitting at her dinner table. “A long time. That is, unless we’re hunted down and murdered by some psycho with a Blood Blade. Oh yeah. He told me all about that too.”
“Sounds like you werewolves do a lot of talking.”
“I haven’t slept since that first change. That leaves a lot more time for talking.” After that, Cecile became more focused. “So anyway, we all
get our share of the fire and the whole world is the furnace. Like, the ground. The earth. That sort of thing. We pull it up and draw it in to . . .”
“Recharge your batteries?” Cole asked.
Cecile snapped her fingers. “Exactly! Wherever it comes from, it’s tied into the moon cycles. He told me I wouldn’t be able to become all of what I can be until I pass some sort of Blood Moon trial.”
“You mean a lunar eclipse?” Recognizing the puzzled and vaguely annoyed look on her face after seeing it so many times when trying to bring various girlfriends in on the whole Star Trek vs. Star Wars debate, he said, “When the moon passes between the earth and the sun, it’s a lunar eclipse.”
“No,” she said after an impatient click of her tongue. “That’s a solar eclipse. A lunar eclipse is when the earth is directly between the sun and the moon.”
Before fighting back with a scathing commentary on the modern school system, Cole paused and said, “Oh. You’re right. Yeah, I was thinking of the other one. But they’re called Blood Moons because when there’s a lunar eclipse, the moon looks all . . . you know . . . bloody.”
“Done?” she asked.
Suddenly, Cole didn’t miss Paige so much. If Cecile had a stick in her hand and was about to crack him upside his head, she might even make him homesick for his days at Rasa Hill. “I’m done,” he said.
“The Blood Moon is different. That’s something each of us needs to go through. With the Breaking Moon, we all get our fires stoked. It’s supposed to come up through the earth to keep us going for the next however many years it’ll be before the next one.”
“You don’t know how many years that is?”
“Nah,” she replied with a shrug. “But I know it’s a lot.”
A lot of years in Full Blood terms could very well mean several of his own lifetimes, Cole thought. Rather than break her conversational stride, he let it pass.
“Whatever the fire is, it’s drawn to us,” she continued. “Like in physics, how air will move from one spot to another to fill a vacuum. Know what I mean?”
“Uh-huh,” he said in a way he hoped was convincing.
“All the Full Bloods draw more of this fire than anything else, so they all picked their own territories and patrol them. This is Randolph’s territory. I think it goes up through Canada and covers most of the States as well. That system got messed up when that friend of his came over to rip up Kansas City.”
“Liam,” Cole said. Finally, it seemed all the crap he’d gone through since becoming a Skinner was coalescing into something greater than chasing monsters through back alleys.
“He was here for too long,” she continued. “Randolph said that two Full Bloods in the same territory will threaten the Balance.”
“What balance?”
“The Balance.” Since her stressing that word didn’t have much of an effect on her audience, she shrugged and added, “That’s what he told me. You’ve never heard of it?”
“No.”
“I guess another Full Blood in someone else’s territory can draw some of the fire away from where it was supposed to go,” she said. “This whole system has been going for a while, and all that stuff in Kansas City ruined it. The other Full Bloods know Liam is here, drawing more energy or whatever for himself and Randolph.”
“So, if more Full Bloods are in one spot, more energy is drawn to that spot?” Cole asked.
“I think so.”
“Like the girl said,” Jessup muttered. “Physics.”
He thought for a moment until a picture formed in his head. Imagining the world as a source of energy and the Full Bloods as points scattered across its surface, he was able to make a good guess as to what that Balance was all about. If the Full Bloods positioned themselves just right, they could draw from the energy equally. Once the collection points clustered too close together, more energy would flow in that direction and get siphoned away from the others.
“That’s why they’re here,” he said. “Those other Full Bloods can’t let Randolph and Liam get stronger because it would put the rest of them at the bottom of the pile. But if they all came here, they’d draw even more of the energy, right?”
“Maybe all of it,” Jessup offered.
Cecile nodded. “There will always be this wildness in us, but the Balance is supposed to help ease it.”
“From what I’ve been hearing, you Full Bloods are a long way from being balanced,” Cole said. “One of them attacked Randolph and damn near leveled that prison. Others are tearing apart some town in Oklahoma as we speak.”
“Atoka?” she asked.
Jessup stepped forward. However she reacted, he wanted to see it first. “That’s the place. From what I’ve heard, things are pretty bad there right now.”
“Is Randolph a part of it?”
Unable to answer that, Jessup looked over to Cole. All Cole could say was, “I don’t think so. Randolph genuinely seemed to want to do something to fix whatever’s going on. Since he was attacked by another Full Blood, he may be on the outside of this whole thing. Maybe the others are looking for you.”
Cecile shook her head. “No. They’re going to stay there until the Breaking Moon rises. I was born there. That means it’s a spot where the energy collects. That’s how I was turned into . . . this.”
“From what I’ve heard, it’s a war zone and getting worse.” Abruptly, Cole stopped and straightened up as if smacked in the face. “Is that why Randolph wants you hidden from them? Because you’d be drawing some of this fire or energy as well. And if you have a share of it, then that means there’s less for everybody else.”
When he looked at Cecile, he stared into her eyes intently. Even if she’d shifted into her full, raging form, he wouldn’t have backed down, because his next questions were too important. “What happens if one of them gets it all?”
“Then however bad the Full Bloods are now,” she said, “they’ll get a whole lot worse.”
Silence fell upon the camp.
A gentle wind drifted by, fanning the flames of the campfire and sending a much-needed chill down Cole’s back.
“What about that thing in your arm?” Cole asked. She looked at him intently, but he merely waited patiently. That was enough to give her the strength to continue.
“I think it draws even more of the power to it,” she explained while rubbing a spot on her arm. “It’s hard to explain, but it feels like it’s getting hotter. I don’t think any of the power is going into me, though. It’s just getting hotter like it’s collecting something.”
“Randolph wanted you to come to us to hide you,” Cole said, more as a way to let that idea roll around inside him. “There’s another one of those things somewhere. He was looking for it at the place where I was being held. Can you find it?”
“I don’t even know what to look for!” she cried. “Randolph protected me, but he wants me to give in to this monster inside of me. You guys haven’t tried to kill me yet, even though you probably had a chance. I don’t want to be a part of any of this.”
Jessup crossed his arms and studied her carefully. “So Randolph is after both of these stones to collect this energy or just to keep it away from the other Full Bloods?”
“All he told me was that the others can’t be allowed to get more powerful than they already are. Once things got past a certain point, he said all of it would be wiped away.”
“All of what?”
Glancing back and forth between the two Skinners, she said, “All of everything.”
Chapter Eighteen
Atoka, Oklahoma
The basement beneath the autobody shop was well-insulated against the outside world. While down there, Paige felt removed from everything that had brought her to that spot. The only things left were the starkly lit room next to the storage space, a few cots, and a couple of dirt walls. The Mongrels had dispersed to scout for reinforcements and not yet returned, leaving Paige and Nadya with Milosh. Treatments from the medical kit meant none of the wounde
d were going to change into Half Breeds, but Milosh was still missing an arm. The remains of that appendage had been cleaned, wrapped, and tied off to stop the bleeding long enough for the Amriany healing serum to be administered. After that, he passed out. In fact, all three of them had passed out for a few hours of some of the worst sleep Paige ever experienced.
At various times throughout the night Nadya spoke to some of her people on a cell phone. Even though Paige couldn’t understand the Amriany language, Nadya’s tone of voice bounced between angry and desperate.
The Mongrels came and went, and the Full Bloods seemed to be doing the same. Rather than run after every shapeshifter that made a sound, Paige tended to her own business. The kit she had with her was about the size of a small cosmetics bag. It was a length of leather wide enough to carry a few simple tools, some tubes of premixed necessities, and some ingredients to mix up emergency doses of healing serum. When rolled up tightly, it fit perfectly beneath a loop that had been stitched into her belt just behind her left hip.
At the moment she was only concerned with a thin plastic tube of a pungent substance with the color and consistency of maple syrup. Holding the tube up to a light, she shook it to watch the piece of Kawosa’s earlobe move around within the liquid. She’d been carrying the little bundle with her since Toronto. The little chunk of skin had been soft and moist when she cut it from Kawosa’s ear, but when she fished it from the tube it felt more like a glob of coagulated tomato sauce. She squashed the earlobe into the tube and then shook it some more. It didn’t take much Nymar or werewolf blood to create a good batch of varnish, but this was something different. She wasn’t even sure if Kawosa’s sample would have an effect when added to the varnish. No matter what had happened the last time she tested her own innovation, the potential benefits were too great to pass up.
After adding a few drops and some water, the stuff was smeared onto a rag and applied to her weapons to strengthen the coat of varnish that allowed them to bond with her and change shape. This wasn’t the first time she’d whipped up something in the field or modified a weapon. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it backfired. Sometimes nothing happened at all. She considered all of those options while looking at the little chunks of earlobe swirling around in the tube. The safe thing to do would be to add a little bit of the varnish to her weapon and see what happened. Maybe later she could add more. If she didn’t run out of the sample she’d gotten, she could keep trying until she got it right.
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