Even though she knew there was no chance of breaking the weapon, Paige struggled against it. Her feet skidded against the floor as she tried to push herself upright while also impeding her forward momentum. But she was caught within the snare and, even worse, weaponless.
Lancroft shoved her toward one of the empty cells farther down the brick passage. “While we were fighting, something occurred to me. Skinner blood combined with that of a shapeshifter might take our healing serum in a whole new direction. A Skinner infected by a Half Breed—under properly supervised conditions, of course—would ultimately yield a new base for the serum that could be passed on through the same methods as the current recipe. Tissue samples taken from your arm before and after the change may unlock some doors I hadn’t even contemplated.”
Directly across from her was a square cell only slightly larger than a walk-in closet. The Half Breed imprisoned there swiped at her while shoving its face against rune-encrusted bars to drool on the dusty floor. Its body was a withered mass of knotted muscle, and covered with skin that hung loosely on a frame of broken bones. Jagged gouges in the walls, floor, and ceiling told of a tedious, constant effort to escape over the course of what must have been several years.
“Think of this as a learning experience,” Lancroft said while straining to shove her closer to the beast. “When the change comes and your bones begin to snap, you’ll finally know just how complex your enemy is. I imagine the pain couldn’t possibly last throughout the entire process. Or perhaps it does. I’ll be sure to chronicle my observations once you take your place upon my examination table.”
Daniels trembled and backed away from Henry.
“The leeches were inside me once,” Henry said in both his physical and mental voices. Stretching out a filthy little hand, he reached for Daniels’s chest and flashed a sludge-stained smile. “I haven’t tasted them for a long time.”
Cole reached for the kid, but Daniels clamped a firm grip around the boy’s wrist. After forcing his grubby fingers away from his chest, Daniels shoved them into the wiry fur of the dead Full Blood splayed out on the examination table. “This is you, Henry!” he said. “Remember the scars you had. Remember the color of your fur, the bumps on your skin, the curve of your nails, just remember anything and see for yourself!”
A rippling disturbance filled the air surrounding the kid’s body. But instead of becoming the orbs Cole had seen before, the essence of Henry Bartlett was drawn to the body on the table.
Taking Henry’s other hand and pushing it against the Full Blood’s exposed rib, Cole felt the kid jerk away from the table as if he’d been electrocuted. “Hold him there, Daniels!” he shouted while Henry’s arms flailed and his little feet pushed against the floor.
With Daniels’s squat body acting as a barrier, Henry didn’t have anywhere else to go. No matter whose spirit was fueling the kid’s efforts, his muscles simply weren’t up to the task of fighting off two grown men. The wriggling kid swore in ways that were as heartfelt as they were disturbing while he pulled against the thin smear of energy connecting him to the corpse. Cole and Daniels held the boy against the table for a few more seconds before the essence rushed completely out of one shell and into the other. One of the overhead fluorescent tubes flickered and the others died out completely. Cole prayed his e-mail transfer had run its course, because the energy from Henry’s reunion with his body fried the terminal along with the earpiece he was still wearing.
Once the transfer was complete, the Full Blood’s decimated corpse sat up. Testing the limits of the pegs tacking its skin to the table, it let out a howl that was garbled beyond recognition due to the absence of its lower jaw. The sound it made thundered through the entire house, despite the fact that it emerged from a throat that was not only cut open in several places, but also filled with fluids and loose meat.
The boy fell back, so Cole handed him over to Daniels and said, “Get him out of here.”
“Don’t you need any help with…with that?”
Every move the carcass made introduced it to a new level of pain. Blood trickled from a hundred places despite the lack of a heart to pump it.
“You’ve already done your part,” Cole said. “If there’s any Full Blood I should be able to put down, it’s this one.”
Henry’s garbled howl echoed through the brick hallway like a tidal wave, sending the imprisoned Half Breed scuttling to the back of its cage, where it jammed its rear haunches against the wall and scraped nervously at the floor.
When Lancroft glanced back at the stairs, Paige grabbed the weapon encircling her neck as close to its handle as her arms would allow. Feeling the sting of thorns tearing into her palms, she channeled all of her physical and mental strength into one concerted effort to free herself from the snare. Lancroft was distracted. The Half Breed was gathering its courage, and she only had another second before that slight advantage would be gone. She needed to loosen the snare as quickly as possible.
Loosen the snare.
Loosen it!
Howls continued to roll down from the laboratory, and it wasn’t long before the sound of creaking wood mingled with them. As soon as Paige felt the snare loosen, she pushed it up while pulling her head down. Lancroft was quick to reassert his own will and the weapon responded by snapping shut less than an inch over her head, trapping a portion of her hair between its two halves.
“Die as a Half Breed or die as a human,” Lancroft snarled while rolling the staff as if he was twirling spaghetti on the end of a giant fork. “Either way, you sure as hell won’t die as a Skinner!”
Paige took her knife from her pocket, snapped it open and gave herself the quickest, sloppiest haircut in history. The instant she was free, she rolled past Lancroft and picked her weapons up off the floor. Within moments after the thorns sank into her hands, the sickle shortened to form smaller curved blades at each end. The machete widened into something resembling a butcher’s cleaver. Her head was fuzzy from the spill down the stairs, but all she needed was instinct to put her weapons to use.
You did this to me, Skinner!
Henry struggled to sit up, but as he tried to pull himself off the table, he was restrained by the pegs holding the flaps of his open chest cavity to the polished surface. When the Full Blood turned in the other direction, Cole could see that several long strips of flesh starting at Henry’s shoulder blade and running to the small of his back had been neatly cut away.
In a matter of seconds the carcass had found the limits of its motion. Whatever pain it experienced before had either subsided or become so overwhelming that it no longer had an effect. Its hands were restrained. Both eyes floated in separate jars. Most of its tongue lay diced in a pan, but its nose was still attached to the end of its snout, and Henry used it to sniff the air frantically.
“You see?” Cole said as he held his spear at the ready. “Lancroft put you here. He locked you away in this room just like he locked you away at the reformatory!”
Either those words got to Henry or the Full Blood had simply run out of steam, because the massive body thumped back down and its limbs hung loosely off the sides. “I…eehhhhh…err.” One more breath shook the carcass and was followed by a surprisingly calm voice in Cole’s head.
I remember.
“Remember what?”
Dr. Lancroft told me there was work that needed doing. Said I had to look inside folks and find what he put in ’em. I found it and stoked it like a fire. When I did, they all was different.
“They became Mud People?”
The carcass shifted so its hollowed-out eye sockets were pointed at Cole.
They weren’t people no more. Not while that fire was in ’em.
“What about after? Can they be cured?”
They ain’t sick. They’s changed. Lancroft changed ’em. Everyone I see’s been changed. Everyone but Skinners, leeches, and the like.
“So everyone will turn into these Mud People?”
Not unless I’m here to stoke the fire,
but I don’t plan on bein’ here no more. See, I hear the stars now. I feel this wide open space an’ all I gotta do is go there. I meant to go there before, but Dr. Lancroft told me not to.
Daniels rushed into the room amid the thump of clumsy footsteps and the clatter of everything shifting within the metal case he carried. Cole waved furiously for him to be quiet, but the noise didn’t seem to bother Henry. The carcass was motionless and the pathetic excuse of a face was still aimed at the Skinner.
I won’t stoke no more fires. I promise. IpromiseIpromise.
The upper portion of the carcass twitched, and Cole instinctively reached out to hold it down.
You broke me outta one hellhole, Skinner, an’ now you busted me outta another. Suppose I should thank you.
“Just tell me how to put an end to Pestilence, Henry. Then we’re even.”
Daniels stopped trying to get Cole’s attention and tried to make sense of the fact that he was having a conversation with a very quiet and very dead werewolf.
Unconcerned with whether the Nymar could hear Henry’s voice, Cole said, “Tell me how to get rid of Pestilence!”
Without me, there ain’t no Pestilence. Folks’ll get sick, but they’ll get better so long as I’m gone. They only listened to me. But you gotta swear somethin’ to me.
With that, the peeled, brutalized head of the Full Blood slid toward Cole, freezing him in his place and sending Daniels skidding backward into a set of cabinets.
There’s somethin’ I want you to take so’s you can use it to do the Lord’s work. I can feel it nearby.
“Take what?” As soon as he asked the question, Cole found the answer tucked neatly into the back of his head.
Talk to yer friend on the floor. He’ll tell ya what to do with it, but the rest of me gets buried. You’re a good man, but the resta you Skinners is a buncha ghouls. Bury me proper and there ain’t no more Pestilence. That’s the deal. Break it and I’ll know.
“All right. You got a deal.”
The Full Blood’s snout thumped against the table as if the string holding it up had been cut.
Daniels stood with his arms wrapped around the case that hung open like a street vendor’s display of knockoff watches. “Are you still hearing voices?” he asked Cole.
“No. Where are the Mud People?”
“Heading to their homes.”
“Are they all right?”
“Well enough to call the cops,” Daniels replied. “Can we go now?”
“How’s Rico?”
“I went to inject him with some healing serum, but he didn’t really need it. He’s unconscious and the wound on his chest is…fading.”
“Fading?” When Daniels nodded, Cole asked, “Is he all right?”
“Sure he is. I wish I had a woman like that stroking my hair and holding me right against her—”
“Okay, then. Get him ready to move and call Tristan. See if there’s a way for her to zap you out of here. I’m going after Paige.”
Not only was the Nymar sweating profusely, but he shook badly enough to dump half of his supplies onto the floor. “Take some serum in case she’s hurt.”
Cole gathered up as many of the little syringes as he could find and was about to run through the narrow door beside the computer desk when he spotted another vial. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Leave that,” Daniels snapped when Cole took the vial. “It needs to be disposed of properly!”
Despite Daniels’s protests, Cole took the vial along with another piece of equipment from that same case. His eyes were then drawn to a rack of long, skinny drawers set against the wall on the other side of the table. There were over a dozen of them, but Cole went immediately to the eighth shelf from the top and pulled it open. The entire tray was covered by a thin metal lid, so he pulled it out and tossed it to Daniels.
“Take that and get the hell out of here!”
The confused Nymar barely managed to catch the tray before Cole hurried down the stairs.
The hallway seemed to stretch for miles, and the farther Paige was forced back, the more the floor sloped beneath her. Lancroft didn’t show the first indication of tiring as the battle escalated to a personal war. When his opponent countered his tactics, he simply shifted his weapon along with his fighting style. The rooms appeared at regular intervals on either side of the hall. Some were filled with old crates and others were fashioned into cells. Only a few cells contained living specimens, none of which had any place among civilized man.
“There are others who know about your transgressions,” Lancroft said as he swung his weapon at Paige. The staff had become a small halberd to accommodate faster swings in a confined space. “When Kansas City almost fell, there was talk of removing you before any more damage was done.”
“Talk is all you do, old man.” Paige used the double-bladed sickle to slash at his face, and the cleaver for more solid strikes to his arms and legs. Apart from a number of shallow cuts and a few bleeders, most of her attacks were blocked or dodged. Lancroft was just too quick, too practiced in his style, and too accustomed to his home turf.
When Paige hopped back to avoid being gutted by a vicious swing, she was able to see what was in the alcoves in that section of the hall. The one to her left was filled with clutter, but the one to her right had a metal box attached to the wall. She hit the box with a solid blow from her machete, removing some of Lancroft’s advantage along with the overhead lights amid a shower of sparks.
“Stupid,” Lancroft snarled. He walked forward slowly and carefully, shifting his weapon into a thin pole with curved blades on each end. The blades were angled forward so when the staff was spun in front of him, it became a meat grinder filling the hallway from floor to ceiling. Anyone close enough to hear the subtle hiss of the blades whipping through the air would quickly feel them chop through flesh and bone.
But Paige didn’t need to guess where Lancroft was. She didn’t need to listen for his movement or try to get past him. The drops in her eyes allowed her to make out vague shapes in the dark as well as the dim, luminescent scent waves drifting off him. His scent was all over the bricks and bars and floor, lighting up the place for her enhanced eyes like a layer of glowing fungus. Scents from the other creatures floated through the air as well, only to be mixed up by the spinning staff as he cautiously inched down the hall. She knew better than to get overly confident. The old man’s guard would be up more now than ever, and if there was a switch to activate any backup lights, Lancroft would know where to find it.
Paige shifted into a sideways stance before extending the cleaver so it cracked against Lancroft’s weapon. He responded with a flurry of blows that barely interrupted the circular motion of the staff. Both blades came at her, one after another, end over end. Even though she easily deflected most of the attacks and backed away from the rest, she was about to run out of hallway. Something snarled in one of the cages at the far end of the subbasement to let her know the spinning wooden blades wouldn’t be the only threat she would have to face. She couldn’t make out much within that cell even with her drops, but the bulky shape was unlike anything she’d ever seen.
“Lancroft!” Cole shouted while racing down the stairs.
In the smeared colors of scent that Paige could see, the old man’s head turned to glance back. The trickle of light coming from the examination room was too far away for Cole to get to Paige before she hit the end of her line. Just to be certain, Lancroft pressed forward and willed the blades to extend even farther. Sparks flew as one of them knocked Paige’s cleaver from her hand. The thorns in the grip shredded her palm and one even snapped off to become lodged in her flesh.
Suddenly, another scent trail cut through the shadows as Cole rushed down the hall with a last burst of speed from his tattoo. His unnaturally fast footsteps were accompanied by the grating sound of a dentist’s drill. Before the old man could angle his weapon to cover his flank, Cole dug the tattoo machine into Lancroft’s shoulder. One end of the staff sparke
d against the ceiling, causing the other to crack against a wall. Now that the whirling barrier was down, Paige took a swing at Lancroft’s chest, but was stopped by a thickly callused palm.
The old man grabbed her weapon in one fist. Before he could drive the other into her face, his arm was ensnared from behind and an electric needle was raked across it. As much as Cole would have liked to carve an obscene message into Lancroft’s skin, he settled for injecting him with the entire vial of the same defective ink Paige had used in Kansas City.
After slamming Cole into a wall, Lancroft stooped to pick up his weapon. “By opposing Pestilence, you’re not just going after me,” he said as he grabbed Paige’s ankle and flipped her onto her rear. Cole tossed the empty tattoo machine and tried restraining Lancroft by gripping his spear in both hands and dropping his arms down around Lancroft’s torso. Before Paige could take a free shot at him, the old man snapped his head back in a clubbing blow to Cole’s face and then flipped him over his shoulder. “You’re opposing every other Skinner who’s helped me throughout the years. I’m doing them a favor by making sure you won’t be around to sully our names any longer!” He swung his weapon in an arc angled to separate both of his opponents from their heads. All of those sparring sessions paid off when Cole dropped at the same time as Paige so the halberd could pass over them.
Unlike the previous swings, this one was too powerful to be controlled, and Lancroft wound up driving several inches of his blade into the brick wall. Since he’d easily received four times the amount of ink that had messed up Paige’s arm, he went through the change that much quicker. Even with his features crudely outlined in scent trails, Paige could see the confusion on Lancroft’s face when she dropped him to one knee with two snapping kicks to the nerve that ran down his leg.
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