Cole jabbed at him using the forked end of his spear and managed to land several stabs before the old man could retaliate. Lancroft’s muscles had become an unknown factor, making each of his punches brutish and overextended. He could no longer get his fingers to close around his weapon, so he balled up both fists and let them fly. Even going by the hazy outline of the scent trails, Cole had no difficulty in allowing each incoming swing to sail past him and answering with a shot of his own.
Paige came at him with another kick that was blocked by the arm that had taken the brunt of punishment from the electric needle. As soon as her shin thumped against the hardened mass of muscle beneath Lancroft’s skin, she knew exactly what Cole had done. She tossed a slower kick into Lancroft’s chest just to gauge his reaction time, and when the old man tried to block it, she followed up with a quick snapping roundhouse to his face.
In one last burst of strength, Lancroft threw Cole to the floor so he could drop his fist onto him like a sledgehammer. Cole hit the concrete with a thump that knocked the wind from his lungs, and he was barely fast enough to roll away from the fist that sent a tremor through the hallway.
Paige slid into a side kick that caught Lancroft squarely in the chest. The old man planted his feet, absorbed the kick, and dropped his arm to grab her leg. He was too slow, however, to prevent her from burying the curved blade of her sickle into the side of his neck.
Lancroft stood and stared at her for a second, shocked by the blow and weakening from the blood that poured out of him. He reached up with a hand that seemed almost too heavy to lift, pulled the sickle from where it had been lodged and crushed it as if it had been whittled out of balsa wood. Blood sprayed from his severed artery, but was quickly stanched by the healing serum flowing through his body. “You’ll never be true Skinners,” he croaked as he tore his jacket open to fumble for a pendant that hung around his neck and under his shirt, “but perhaps you’ll be remembered as such when you’re found here with me.”
The little box in Lancroft’s hand looked like a remote car door lock. Cole felt the bottom fall out of his stomach as he thought about the collapsed pile of rubble that had once been Lancroft Reformatory. Before this place might be buried in a similar manner, Cole drove his spear straight through the old man’s wrist and into his chest. Between the debilitating effects of the ink, the loss of blood, and two such grievous wounds, Lancroft crumpled. His hand was pinned and not functioning well enough to push either of the buttons on the black box. Cole leaned on the spear, twisted it, and pulled it out. With his last spark of life, Lancroft reached for the remote hanging around his neck.
Paige bent down and calmly took it from him.
“Uh…guys?” Daniels called from the top of the stairs. “Are you all right?”
When she saw Cole looking at her with that same question written across his dirty face, she rushed to press her body and lips against his. He was surprised at first, but quickly wrapped his arms around her and lifted her off her feet.
“My friend,” she whispered, “you won’t be able to walk straight for a month after I get through with you.”
“Yeah, Daniels!” Cole shouted. “We’re fine. Just give us a minute!”
“You don’t have a minute,” the Nymar replied. “Cops are pulling up to the house, but there’s a bridge ready for us.”
Paige tensed and bumped her forehead against Cole’s chest. “Shit.” After taking a moment, she marched down the hall, up the stairs, and straight through the examination room. “How’s Rico?”
“Already through. He didn’t want to leave you, but I pushed him.”
“Damn,” Cole chuckled. “I wish I could’ve seen that.”
The beaded curtain was alive with crackling energy. “You guys go ahead,” Paige told them. “I’ll be right there.”
Instead of heroically refusing the offer to leave her behind, Daniels scurried past them both and disappeared through the beads. Cole didn’t go anywhere.
Paige jogged through the workshop and ran up to the first floor, and her partner followed. Even before they got to the upper door, he could hear sirens outside the house. “We’re not gonna make it,” he warned.
“Doesn’t matter if we do or don’t.” Upon stepping through the doorway, Paige jabbed a finger at him and said, “Stay right here and don’t make a sound.” She then went to a cluster of runes on the wall near the stairway and moved her hand slowly over the blocky symbols.
The street outside was illuminated by headlights and filled with dozens of dirty, confused people. From what he could see, the former Mud People were barely aware of where they were. “Might want to hurry it up,” he urged.
Once she picked out the symbols Rico had toiled over upon their arrival, Paige traced some of them with her fingertips. Cole could see through the little house to the front window, which was enough to spot a pair of police officers approaching the front door. The cops looked through the window and knocked as if they meant to shake the entire house. Paige stepped through the doorway where Cole waited at the top of the stairs. When he tried to shut the door, she whispered, “Don’t move. Don’t make a sound.”
The cops entered the house with their hands on the holsters at their hips and swept flashlight beams back and forth along the walls. “Hello?” one of them said. “Anyone here?”
Even as the cops looked directly at the door, Cole could tell they weren’t really seeing it. Their eyes continued to wander along the walls, not even following the lines of symbols etched there.
Slowly, he and Paige went down the stairs as the cops stomped around, and they eventually found their way outside again.
“Next time Rico says I never pay attention to his precious teachings, he can stuff it,” Paige said proudly after reaching the temple.
“What just happened?”
“I restored the runes intended to hide that doorway and everything else in the house. All those cops or anyone else will see is what we saw when we first got here, which is a fat load of nothin’.”
After the night he’d had, that was all the explanation Cole needed. Before taking the last step that would carry him through the beads, he stopped and nodded toward the lab. “What about this place?” he asked. “The stuff in there? The things down in that hallway?”
Paige took the remote that had been hanging from Lancroft’s neck and let her thumb glide over the cover. “I still don’t know if I believe he was hundreds of years old, but he came up with some stuff I’ve never seen before.” The remote disappeared in her fist and then into her pocket. “He wanted it destroyed, so I want to keep it around for a while. Hopefully he knows we’re sifting through all of his crap. If he’s anything like Daniels, that’d be his own personal hell.”
“I’m definitely coming back,” Cole vowed as he looked toward the stark light cast from the examination room. “I’ve still got some things to do here.”
The front door was pushed open, but the footsteps only stomped around for a minute or two before going back outside, which meant Lancroft’s defenses had held up against another set of unknowing eyes. They could hold out a little longer.
Cole stepped through the curtain and emerged in a smaller temple, where he was greeted by an excessively attractive, scantly clad woman with curly pink hair. After a sharp crack of her gum the pink-haired Dryad said, “Hiya. I’m Annie. There’s food in the main room.”
Paige emerged next and kept walking as if crossing hundreds of miles in a flicker of light had already become second nature. She and Cole followed Annie into a cavernous room filled with five large stages. Reading the confusion on Paige’s face, he told her, “This isn’t The Emerald. It’s Steve’s.”
“Do you know all of these places by heart?”
“No,” he replied as he pointed behind the largest stage to where STEVE’S was written in glowing neon.
Turning to Annie, Paige sighed, “Okay. Where’s Steve’s?”
“Dallas. Tristan didn’t have the juice to bring anyone else into St. Lo
uis. We’re running two-for-the-price-of-one lap dances and have enough juice to power the state, so,” she added while holding her arms up and out as if posing for the first step in the YMCA dance, “here you are!”
“Are Rico and Daniels here?” Paige asked.
Annie shook her head in a way that made her pink curls wiggle. “They made it to St. Lou.”
“Both alive?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Perfect. Point me to the buffet.”
Epilogue
St. Louis Two days later
The cute news anchor with the short brown hair and pretty round face smiled comfortingly at the camera and announced, “Medical teams across the country have reported success in their most recent efforts to combat the Mud Flu. All symptoms ranging from cough and disorientation to the viscous discharge that gave the sickness its name are being cleared up thanks to a treatment developed by Dr. Angela Oehler. One of our correspondents is with Dr. Oehler now at the Pathology Department of Barnes-Jewish Hospital.”
A blond woman dressed in a white coat shifted nervously in front of all the cameras and said, “After recently isolating the cause of the flu, we’ve formulated a treatment that clears up every symptom in all but the most extreme cases. If anyone else is currently affected by the Mud Flu, please contact your physician or anyone here at Barnes to schedule an appointment.”
“Dr. Oehler claims similar results have been reported at many other hospitals across the country,” the brunette reporter said once she was back on screen. “According to the Centers for Disease Control, the Mud Flu stemmed from an exotic malaria strain brought to the U.S. from a remote region in Ecuador. Hopefully, this marks the end of an epidemic that has claimed a total of sixty-eight lives since the first reported case less than a month ago.”
“You hear that, Rico?” Cole asked as he flipped through the channels of Ned’s TV using a remote that was heavier than most people’s DVD players. “The CDC figured out the Mud Flu!”
“Great,” Rico grunted from the broken couch nearby. All that remained of the wound Lancroft had given him was a deep cut that had required just under a dozen stitches to close. “We do the legwork, our friend at the hospital puts it to use, and the feds take the credit. How much you wanna bet the insurance companies and doctors found a way to charge for immunizations of a plague that’s been wiped out already?”
“Speaking of medications, how was that Memory Water stuff?”
“Made me remember what it’s like to not have a hole punched through my chest. I only took half of what she gave me, though. Gave the rest to Paige so she could try and fix up her arm. Don’t know if she took it, though.”
“Why don’t you take some of those pain pills we found in Ned’s collection?”
“I can handle the pain just fine.”
“Actually,” Cole said, “I was hoping they’d put you to sleep for a while.”
“If I’m sleeping, I can’t work on your little present.”
The big man lay with one leg dangling off the slope-backed couch, and a pile of throw pillows under his back and neck. Rico’s grin was wide enough to display a full set of blocky teeth, and it made Cole more uncomfortable than all three sets of a Nymar’s fangs. “What present?” he asked hesitantly.
“Don’t you remember that case you threw at Daniels while we were leaving Philly?” Rico asked. When Cole furrowed his brow and started to shake his head, Rico propped himself up. Stress lines formed at the corners of his eyes, but he stubbornly refused to ease back down. “If you don’t remember, then I might as well keep it for myself!”
“I remember, I remember,” Cole said as a way to get Rico to stop straining the bandages wrapped around his torso. “Wait. I really do remember now.”
“You know what was inside?”
“No.”
Shifting within the groove he’d worn into the couch, Rico grunted, “Henry’s inside, that’s what. Pieces of him anyway.”
“Oh, hell. I don’t even know why I grabbed it, I just did.”
“Then I want you pullin’ numbers at the next bingo night, because you grabbed enough leather to make one hell of a nice piece of armor. And not just leather,” Rico added. “Full Blood hide. Do you have any idea how hard that is to come by?”
“Yeah,” Cole said while thinking back to those long strips that had been removed from Henry’s back. “I think I do.”
“Lancroft must’ve been tanning it for himself because there ain’t no way a Skinner in his right mind would part with something like that.”
Crossing the living room to the small desk where Ned’s computer was set up, Cole said, “So much for my present, huh?”
“You forgot,” the big man said with a waggle of his eyebrows. “I ain’t anywhere near my right mind. Plus, you earned it more’n I did. Give me a few weeks, maybe a month, and I’ll stitch that leather into something that’ll protect your worthless ass better than anything I ever made for anyone.”
Ned’s Internet connection was passable, so Cole was online and running various key words and phrases through his favorite search engines in no time. “Looks like Lancroft wasn’t lying about Pestilence killing off Half Breeds. The only report of any sighting in this part of the country is from some Bigfoot blog in Colorado, and the description isn’t anything like a shapeshifter I’ve ever heard about.”
“I was on earlier and saw a few pictures of a big rat thing a few miles away from the KC International Airport.”
“Was it digging?” Cole asked.
“Yeah! Only had three legs too. Weird.”
“That’s Ben. He’s supposed to be there. What about dead Nymar? I’d think those would be easy to spot.”
Rico propped his foot onto the coffee table and scratched at his bandages. “Nope. They may get hungry, but they’re not stupid. One of the bloodsuckers down in New Mexico found a way to sniff out that Pestilence shit and word’s spreading. You ask me, they’ll be our biggest helpers in making sure us humans gets nice an’ healthy in time for supper.”
While Rico talked about the coat he was making, Cole continued to search the Web. Other than a bunch of doctors congratulating themselves about wiping out the Mud Flu, the only other hit was from a fresh batch of pictures from Kansas City and Janesville. He was about to pass over one entry on HomeBrewTV.com when he realized it wasn’t more wild dog footage from KC, but from Alcova, Wyoming. It was a shaky video file filmed by the passenger of a moving car. About five seconds in, the driver hit the brakes and pointed, screaming for the cameraman to look in the opposite direction. When the camera swung that way, three large figures were crossing the highway. They ran on four legs and resembled small bears. Two of the smaller ones looked like Mongrels and bolted out of frame in a blur. The third was a larger creature with coal black fur that either had trouble walking or wanted to make sure the camera had plenty of time to get a good shot. While the people in the car chattered back and forth, the camera zoomed in close enough to the creature’s face for Cole to verify it was missing an eye.
It was definitely a Full Blood. More important, it was the Full Blood that had torn up Kansas City. Cole could almost feel the burning under his scars just by looking at Liam’s image on Ned’s screen. After a few more seconds the ebon werewolf hung its head and took a few slow steps toward the car. Tires screeched. The driver panicked and nearly ran into a tree. The video ended with a screen swearing the footage was real. Several hundred HomeBrewTV viewers posted their opinions on whether the video was real or one of the many fakes doctored by Cole himself. The prevailing opinion on the site was that the Wyoming video was “fake as hell.”
Rico sat up and grabbed his bandaged midsection. “What’s that?”
Not wanting to give him a reason to jump off the couch, Cole e-mailed the video to himself and said, “Just another Mongrel.”
The new home page for Digital Dreamers, Inc. had some flashy animations advertising new projects that Cole hadn’t even heard about yet. The only mention of the game he�
�d been consulting on was that it was “alive, but indefinitely postponed.”
“Yeah,” he grumbled to himself. “I know how that feels.”
“Did you hear me before?” Rico growled. “What’re your damn measurements?”
“I don’t know,” he said as he closed his browser and pushed his chair away from the desk. “Take your best guess.”
“At least tell me yer coat size.”
Standing up, Cole caught himself looking at every one of the room’s cluttered shelves and dusty surfaces. If he stared long enough, he could find clean spots that had been left behind by the fingers of its former owner.
“Get me a tape measure,” Rico said. “I think Ned kept one in the top drawer of that desk.”
Cole opened the top drawer, found the tape measure amid some old lottery tickets and brought it to Rico.
Holding both arms straight out and to the sides, Cole asked, “Where’s Paige?”
“Dogtown.”
“Is that still in St. Louis?”
After jotting down one set of measurements into his little spiral notebook, Rico grumbled, “Yeah. Just south of Forest Park, right around Clayton Avenue.”
“Can you be more specific than that?”
“Sure I can. First let’s discuss lining and pockets.”
Less than an hour after his session with the ugliest seam-stress in history, Cole parked in front of St. James the Greater Catholic Church. He double-checked the address scribbled on the piece of paper torn from Rico’s notebook as well as the screen of his GPS. Not even the Cav parked nearby with smashed windows, dented doors, missing bumper, and multiple coats of rust was enough to fully convince him he was in the right place.
St. James was beautiful in the same way that most churches were beautiful. Stained glass caught the sunlight and scattered it throughout a large room filled with rows of pews and well-cared-for statuary. There wasn’t a mass being performed, so most of the seats were empty. A small line formed near a confessional, and a priest in his late fifties or early sixties acknowledged Cole’s arrival with a curt nod. He returned the nod and spotted Paige sitting just right of center of the sixth pew from the front. As he scooted over to her, he couldn’t decide if she was praying, studying one of the leaflets stuck in the hymnal rack in front of her, or sleeping.
Teeth of Beasts s-3 Page 39
