“Always did like to set your sights high,” Abel mused.
The basement echoed with sounds of battle filtering down from the upper level. Jory scrambled to collect weapons while piling on as many layers of armor as he could. “Shit,” he grunted as Liam’s bellowing roar shook the entire house over his head. When that was followed by the heavy impacts of bodies hitting the floor, he snarled, “Shit, shit, shit! You two get up there!”
Paul and Tru were in the workshop as well. He carried a shotgun and she had a varnished sword that had runes etched into one side of the blade.
“Is that thing loaded with them new rounds Paige brought from Chicago?” Jory asked.
“They’re special rounds,” Paul replied, “but not that special. They’ll probably just piss a Full Blood off.”
“Too late for that. Take this, get the hell up there and help.”
Although Paul caught the wooden weapon that was tossed to him, he didn’t seem anxious to use it. “What the hell is this? A pool cue?”
“It’s all that’s left. It’s been treated, so it’ll damage that thing.”
“Damage it like all the others are damaging it?” Tru asked.
Even for a Nymar, Paul looked pale. “Yeah. Screw that. We’re supposed to stay down here and protect this stuff, so that’s what we’re doing.”
Jory drew a long cleaver from a scabbard hanging from his belt. As soon as the thorns in the handle cut into his palms, a spike protruded from the handle to curve into a thick hook. “Suit yourself. If that thing gets down here, you two are the only ones left. You guys are braver than I thought.”
“Wait,” Tru said. “There’s something under us.”
“Yeah!” Paul replied hopefully. “The other basement! We can get down there!”
Jory held his ground as a rumble passed by the wall at the base of the stairs and crackled through the floor. “Was that a tremor?”
Pointing toward the Skipping Temple, Paul said, “It’s moving that way.” Even as he raced in that direction, the tremor died down.
“It’s still moving,” Jory said. “It must have started in the yard and is going deeper. Aw shit! The subbasement! You two, come with me!”
There was no allowance in Jory’s tone for back talk. It was a command that the two Nymar obeyed immediately. Also, with gunshots blasting through the upper portion of the house amid Liam’s roar, any reason to get farther away from the stairs leading to the kitchen was a good one.
As they went through the temple, Jordan slipped between the beads and asked, “What’s going on? Why all the shooting?”
Jory turned as if he was going to shoot the nymph where she stood. “Never mind about the shooting,” he told her. “Just warm that curtain up or start singing or do whatever the hell you need to do because we’re gonna have to get out of here quick.”
“Why? What’s wrong? Tell me!”
“The big bad wolf’s blowing our house down, that’s what. Now figure a way out of here before we’re all dead!”
Jory and the two Nymar ran into the dissection room, through the secret door, and down the stairs that led to the subbasement.
Jordan started to hum.
As the Skinners hurried down into the brick hallway at the lowest level of the house, Jory, Tru, and Paul were surrounded by the scraping of claws against the other side of the subterranean walls. It veered away from them and traveled in another direction, but the Skinners didn’t have the means to follow it. There was only one way down the hall, so that’s where they went. Before long the scraping returned.
“Sounds like it’s all around us,” Tru said.
Jory’s eyes were almost shut in concentration. “No,” he breathed. “It’s coming from there.” He used the cleaver to point at one of the cells about a quarter of the way down on the left side of the hall, where a gritty cloud of dirt rolled out from between the bars like smoke.
All three of them broke into a run so they could get to the cell before something had the chance to dig its way out. It wasn’t until they were within ten feet of the smoke that they realized it had been loosened from the ground beneath the bars as well as the wall around them. Suddenly, the wolf-digger hybrid Mongrel darted from the hole it had created in an awkward, waddling run. Its thick bony paws were capped with wide claws. Pure black eyes glared out from beneath heavily ridged brows that shifted into a more canine alignment before its rear end had emerged from the broken floor. The Mongrel charged directly at the Skinners, unmindful or simply unconcerned with the weapons they bore.
Jory, Tru, and Paul squared off against it as the fight two floors above them raged on. With all that noise filling the house and basement, the rumble of continued digging was easy to miss.
At the farthest end of the brick hallway, something else churned beneath the floor. Unlike the wild scraping that had announced the hybrid’s entrance, this was quicker and more systematic as it buckled the floor beneath the last darkened cell. After several attempts to dislodge the bricks, the digging moved one cell over, where the bricks were pushed aside by a set of strong, flat hands emerging from the dirt. Max poked his narrow snout up from the shadows, blinked a set of vertical eyelids and wriggled out of the hole he’d dug. Randolph emerged soon after, pulling himself out with powerful if drastically constricted paws. He couldn’t get out of the hole fast enough before shaking the pebbles and grit from his coat like a dog sloughing off the rain.
The cell was the size of a closet and reeked of excrement from more than one species. Iron bars were fitted into a frame with a door so narrow that a normal man would have to turn sideways in order to pass. Randolph shifted into a form that was compact and upright. His fur became a thick mat over flesh that looked dense as tire rubber, his movements stiff and his features becoming blocky and indistinct. The only thing that remained of the man known as Mr. Burkis were the crystalline gray-blue eyes staring out from the primitive face.
His compact form moved easily through the narrow opening. In the darkness his thick, dark brown fur made it easy for him to remain unseen by the Skinners who were already distracted at the other end of the hall. He approached the neighboring cell, placed one hand upon the bars and immediately pulled it back with a pained hiss. One quick glance at the rusted iron allowed him to pick out the Skinner runes etched into the iron that had scorched his fingers.
“Are you Kawosa?” Randolph asked in a voice that sounded as if it had been strained and compacted along with the rest of his body’s mass.
The creature in the cell kept its back pressed against a wall. At first its large unblinking eyes were simple reflective surfaces in the shadows. Then they became darker, redder, and finally took the same blue gray color as Randolph’s. “You are Full Blood,” the creature said in a voice that was smooth as milky honey.
“When did the Skinner capture you?”
“Since I cannot see the moon or sun, I do not know how many days have passed.”
“Answer me. Are you Kawosa?”
The creature took no notice of the battle raging in the hall. He was too enthralled with the sight in front of him to care about rumblings in the distance. “There have been a people who called me by that name,” it replied.
“How did the Skinners catch one like you? If you are Kawosa, such a thing shouldn’t be possible.”
“Do you think I am a god?”
Randolph had to think about that. He blinked heavily, as if the weight of his answer pressed upon his brow. He considered lying to the creature but gave up on that almost immediately. “I have heard stories. Legends. Some say you are a god or maybe a demon. But some say the same about our kind. All I know is that we need something to tip the scales back in our favor.”
“Or,” Kawosa mused while narrowing keen eyes, which had now become violet, and slinking forward upon bony legs, “do you just want to keep me away from the Skinners? It simply wouldn’t do for them to sink their hooks and knives into me, now would it? That is, after they found a way to kill me or simply wai
ted long enough for me to die. Just like they did with poor Henry. Do you even know what horrors Lancroft had to inflict to kill him?”
With every word, Kawosa’s voice took a new tone; a concoction that changed as new ingredients were sprinkled into the mix.
“Can you break these bars, Full Blood?” For the first time since he’d stepped forward, Kawosa’s eyes disappeared as he closed them and drew a long breath. They snapped open, green and vibrant, as an incomplete set of crooked fangs were displayed beneath raised lips. “You’re the one they called Standing Bear. Could it be you’re working for the Skinners now too?”
“You know better than that. I’ve been trying to find you for years, and all I discovered was that your trail ended when it crossed with Jonah Lancroft’s. Only recently has he been found and dealt with.”
“Yes,” the creature sighed. “I nearly got a taste of the woman who did the dealing. So sweet.”
“If we stay here much longer, we will be forced to fight these Skinners as well as any more that come to help them. And then there are the humans.”
“You fear them?”
Randolph took a moment to gauge his response. “They have numbers and technology at their advantage. I don’t know how much of that you know about.”
“They’ve always had their toys. How do you plan on getting me past these bars?” Kawosa asked.
“Tell me you want to leave and we should be able to clear a path.”
“I want to leave.”
“Then stand back.”
Shifting into his four-legged form, Randolph swatted at the floor with a massive paw. A few seconds later the rumbling beneath him commenced. Bricks trembled as Max passed under them, but the ones anchoring the bars hardly moved. At the other end of the hall the hybrid Mongrel yelped as both Nymar descended upon him. Jory waited for the other two to clear a path before delivering a finishing blow that sent a wet crunch down the hall.
Kawosa backed into the darkness from which he’d come. He shifted his blank reflective eyes toward the floor as the bricks started to buckle and split. Dirt and subterranean filth spewed up like pus from an old wound once Max concentrated his efforts on the section of floor beneath the bars. Those bricks, either strengthened by the warding runes or powered by some other force, held firm. They did, however, need a solid foundation. Once that was removed, they shifted and slid within the churning ground until the bars were the only thing holding them in place.
Randolph looked at Kawosa again, finding the creature’s eyes closer to the top of the cell and encased in a lean shape that bristled with coarse fur.
“Can you break the plane of the bars?” Kawosa asked.
“With the bricks of your cell disrupted, the runes should be weakened enough for you to—”
“That’s not what I asked. Can you break the plane of the bars?”
Hunkering down on all fours, Randolph leaned so his snout was almost touching the old iron. “We don’t have time for this.”
“All this world has for me are its curiosities. Meeting you this way is a surprise. I like surprises. I want more of them.”
“If I were to start performing tricks for your amusement, then that would be a very big surprise indeed. You can stay here until the Skinners figure out a way to cut you apart, but if you want to leave, let’s bloody well leave.”
The smile Kawosa showed was crooked and verging on childish, which made it a disturbing addition to a face such as his. Rather than test his luck with the bars, he sank his claws into the earth beneath the broken floor and pulled himself under the upturned dirt. It was a short crawl through decades-old filth before his lean frame emerged inside the cell next to his old residence. By the time he pulled himself completely out of the hole, Kawosa was a wiry man with skin the color of scorched desert rock. He wore a tattered leather loincloth and a collar around his neck that might have once been attached to a shirt or some sort of tunic. Long stringy hair hung in front of his face but wasn’t enough to obscure his rich, chocolate-brown eyes.
“The tunnel continues from there,” Randolph said as he eased back into his dense, shaggy human form. “Once we’re outside we run. Can you run?”
“We’ll soon see.”
“Yes we will. Max, lead the way.”
The tunneling Mongrel had watched silently for this long, and was more than happy to dive back into the earth to leave the brick prison behind.
Randolph stared down the hall and locked eyes with the Skinners who were recovering from their fight with the canine hybrid. When one of them sounded the charge, the Full Blood followed in Kawosa’s wake.
“Come on!” Paul said. The few stray drops of shapeshifter blood that he hadn’t drank were quickly lapped up by a wildly flopping tongue. He’d never tasted the blood of a Mongrel and it flowed through him like raw volcanic energy.
Tru had drunk from the Mongrel as well and was so affected by it that she couldn’t form words. All she did was race to join her partner, since he was running to what might be another of the newly discovered delicacies.
Jory wasn’t so eager. He took a moment to fish a small syringe from a compartment stitched into the side of his weapon’s scabbard and injected a dose of serum into his arm. Even as the healing began, he jogged while the other two threw themselves into a dead run. “Hold up!” he shouted. “Did anything get loose down there?”
The chaos upstairs subsided so quickly that the ensuing silence seemed more shocking than an explosion.
“We don’t know yet,” Tru replied. “What the hell was just standing there?”
“I thought it was a Full Blood,” Paul said. “Looked like one, but then it changed into something different.”
Jory’s fingers curled in to brush against the scars on his palm. “That was a Full Blood. Just never seen it in that form before. It’s gone now. Let’s get out of here.” He led the way back upstairs and through the dissection room. Even before he made it out of the Skipping Temple, he could tell there was more trouble on its way. Without looking back, he grunted, “Cops.”
“I think those lights are just from the walls,” Tru said.
“Yeah, the green ones. Not those,” Jory replied as he pointed to one of the small windows along the top of the workshop wall. The windows were rectangular and barely large enough for a child to fit through, but the metal basins outside them caught more than dead leaves and small animals. It also reflected some of the red and blue lights from the street.
“Tell the nymph to be ready,” Jory shouted while running up the stairs that led to the kitchen.
“The nymph can hear you,” Jordan shouted back. “And it’s ready. The only bridge I could get right now was to … are you listening to me?”
“Just keep it open,” Paul said. “So long as it leads away from this place we should be fine.”
Before either of the Nymar got concerned enough to venture into the part of the house that had become a war zone, Skinners began filing into the basement. Bobby was first down the stairs, helping someone who was too wounded to move on his own. The rest came down in a stream of bloody bodies and a few limp corpses. Abel was last to step upon the top stair, and quickly traced some of the runes near the door.
“Is that going to keep the cops from seeing what’s up there?” Jessup asked from the landing at the bottom of the steps.
“Doesn’t even matter,” Abel replied in a haggard wheeze. “Half the neighborhood must’ve heard the shots, and Lord only knows what anyone saw if they looked over the back fence. Just get the hell out of here before we’re all dragged away.”
By then the first Skinners were marching through the curtain. Jessup went into the dissection room and picked up the thing that had literally been pried from Jonah Lancroft’s dying hand. It was a small box with a simple control on it that was linked to explosives set up throughout the basement.
“Everyone’s out,” he said to Jordan. “Your turn.”
“What about the Full Blood? Are you going to let the cops find it?”<
br />
“It took off and so did the Mongrel. Just move.”
She didn’t need to hear any more than that before approaching the curtain and placing one foot through. “Are you coming?”
“Hell yes,” Jessup said as he pressed the button that triggered the first muffled thump of C4 from the bottom of the stairs. “Ain’t nowhere else for me to go now.”
Chapter Eleven
Chicago, Illinois
After all that had happened, Cole was amazed to find Raza Hill so quiet. The building was a blackened husk spattered by foam and water that glistened with reflected streetlights and the glare from passing cars. The parking lot was empty, but there was plenty of evidence that it had been full not too long ago. Everything from fresh tire marks to candy wrappers marked the most activity at the old restaurant since its final dinner rush. Sections of the perimeter were cordoned off by police tape, but nobody was around to enforce the stern words written in large, blocky font upon a yellow background.
“What did you expect?” Prophet asked as he stuck his hands in his pockets and shifted on his feet to get a look down the alley. “An armed guard posted at some run-down, burned-up hole in the ground?”
“Considering all that happened? I thought we might have more trouble than this getting so close,” Cole replied. “Just keep your eyes open and let me know if anyone’s coming.”
“Sure. After the fire, the shooting, the stabbing, the dead vampires, and everything else, I’m sure folks’ll be flocking to this place.”
“Are the Nymar bodies still out there?”
“Just the clothes. I think one of the fire trucks ran them over. Looks like some poor bastard who got crushed by a steamroller in one of them cartoons. How come it’s so hard to find those good cartoons anymore?”
“Too violent,” Cole said as he fished the hard drive from the wreckage of his old computer. From there he went to the restaurant’s side entrance and pulled it open with an expectant wince. When no alarms sounded and nobody shouted through a bullhorn for him to freeze, he opened the door the rest of the way and went inside.
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