Howling Legion (Skinners, Book 2)

by Marcus Pelegrimas

  “It was enough that you got us out of there,” she said. “Right now, we’ve got other stuff to do. Make that call and get to skinning.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Cole phoned Daniels to let him know they were on their way and then climbed into the backseat to take his first crack at cutting apart a dead monster. Normally, something like that wouldn’t have set too well with him. The smell alone was enough to bring the bottom layer of his stomach contents up to the back of his throat. At that moment, however, with the campsite behind them and getting farther away with every second, he didn’t mind a little dirty work. It meant he was still alive.

  A few hours later Cole was still in the car staring out the front passenger side window. Daniels was packed into the backseat, along with most of his and Paige’s gear. The Nymar had one shoulder wedged against the window behind the driver’s seat, due to the fact that his left leg was draped over a flat case. His feet were resting on top of more cases, which practically forced him to eat his own knees. Judging by the expression on Daniels’s face, he wasn’t at all happy with the arrangement.

  “Why don’t you just throw me in the trunk?” he griped. “I’d be able to stretch out more.”

  “Do you mind sharing space with a pile of dead Half Breeds?”

  Daniels winced. “You Skinners truly are disgusting ghouls.”

  “Hey, for a guy who stank up his motel room as badly as you did, I’m surprised to hear any complaints.”

  “For your information, I had a breakthrough in my research.”

  “Yeah?” Cole asked. “It smelled like burnt hair. Didn’t I see a cleaning lady leaving your room right when we got there?”

  “She took an unfortunate fall and lost some blood,” Daniels muttered. “As for the smell, I needed to use the heating element in order to—”

  “You knocked out the cleaning lady so you could feed?” he interrupted.

  Daniels pondered that for a second and then flashed him a smug grin via the rearview mirror. “Oh, no. That would be wrong.”

  Since the cleaning woman had been able to walk and wasn’t screaming at the time, Cole let it slide. The wound running along the side of his leg was still tender. Paige had helped him wrap it up as Daniels was collecting his things. She’d patched her own wounds as well, but in a way that seemed like the medical equivalent of fixing an oil leak by slapping some tape onto the wet spots.

  “You both look pretty torn up,” Daniels said. “Shouldn’t you go to a doctor or something?”

  “We’ll rest up as soon as we’re done making these rounds.”

  “What rounds might those be?”

  They were parked along Cliff Drive, which bordered North Terrace Park. It was late, which meant the street was relatively quiet and the nearby University of Medicine was mostly dark. This was the fourth stop they’d made since racing back into Kansas City, and Cole was beginning to feel as though he’d made the entire trip on foot. “We found a bunch of Half Breed dens scattered around the city,” he explained. “She’s checking them now to see if we cleaned them out or not.”

  “What if the things are out hunting?” Daniels asked. “It’s that time of night.”

  Absently brushing his palm with his fingertips, Cole felt nothing more than the rawness that came from having the thorns rip through his skin and the minor irritation caused by Daniels. “They’re not around the city. At least, there’s not as many as there were before.”

  “The moon’s out. They run real fast.”

  “Yeah, Dan. I know.”

  “It’s not Dan.”

  “What?”

  Leaning forward from the backseat caused a shift in the delicate balance of all the crap piled around the Nymar passenger. “My name is Daniels.”

  “Oh, and I suppose that big bald spot is just a temporary hair migration?”

  Daniels leaned over and looked in the mirror. He started to run his hand over the top of his head but stopped as if his skull was an eggshell that had already been cracked. “That was mean.”

  “Sorry.”

  The driver’s door was pulled open then and Paige dropped in behind the wheel. She landed with a strained huff, which became a wince when she turned the key in the ignition. “What are you sorry for this time, Cole?”

  “Nothing. You find anything?”

  “There was one Half Breed way in the back,” she replied. “Just a day or two old by the looks of it. I put it down and knocked in enough dirt to bury it. Considering that’s the only Half Breed we found in any of those dens, this was a pretty good night.”

  “I’ll say it was!” Daniels chimed in as he grabbed the backs of both seats and pulled himself forward.

  “Watch it!” Paige snapped. She started to turn around but flinched and settled back into her seat. “Just don’t knock those cases around so much, okay?” She put the car in gear and drove away. “I want to stay somewhere outside the city. If any authorities saw anything, they’ll be looking for those werewolves, but I don’t want them to get lucky and stumble upon us.”

  Daniels slumped back and allowed the piles of cases and other supplies to slide over him like a slow motion avalanche. “We were set up just fine before.”

  “And if anyone was following us before, they’d head straight for that place,” Paige said. “I’ll bet there’s at least one cleaning lady at that hotel that’s got some interesting stories to tell.” Taking a deep, obviously strained breath, she headed for I-35.

  “Tell us about the breakthrough,” Cole said.

  For a few seconds Daniels sulked by pushing around as many of the cases as he could reach. When he was done with that, he leaned forward again. “This,” he announced while extending his hand to display a heavy square attachment that had been soldered onto the tattooing machine, “is one of them.”

  Paige looked at the machine and then shifted her attention back to the road. “Isn’t that the same thing I unwrapped at your apartment?”

  “Yes, but the device you ordered requires a separate power supply. This battery pack not only allows you to use the machine wherever you like, but it even makes the necessary adjustments in speed and has a life of several hours.”

  “So that’s what you were burning in your room?” Cole asked.

  Daniels slumped back and grumbled, “I also needed to use my heating element to melt down shavings from the Blood Blade. After that, I was able to further isolate the medium that bonded the shapeshifter blood to the specially forged metal. That is, of course, after I separated the shapeshifter proteins and such from the plasma.”

  “Is it ready for use?” Paige asked.

  Reluctantly, Daniels scooted away from her side of the car and replied, “Not yet. We should be able to start our first trials after I iron out a few more wrinkles.”

  “What sort of wrinkles?”

  “The sort that transfers properties of the metal to the recipient along with the shapeshifter properties you so desperately want, no matter how many times I tell you the entire process is too dangerous to be considered.”

  “Gotchya,” Paige said as she reached for the radio dial.

  They drove north on I-435 until it changed into I-29 about halfway to St. Joseph. Cole savored the fresh air that blew in through the window to wash away the lingering stenches of Half Breed and the gunk that attracted them. Before long Paige pulled to a stop outside a quiet, three-story hotel advertising satellite TV and an indoor swimming pool.

  “I see you guys spring for the nice places when you have to stay there,” Daniels grunted on the way up to the second floor.

  “Yeah,” Paige sighed. “It’s a huge conspiracy. I’ll check on you in a while.”

  Cole followed her with cases hanging from both shoulders, under his arms, and in both hands. Like any good pack mule, he kept his head down and his feet shuffling until he was told to stop. When he looked up again, he was in a room that smelled like air-conditioning and deodorizer. Compared to how he’d spent the earlier part of his night, it w
as a little whiff of heaven. On that same train of thought, he noticed something else about the room. “There’s only one bed.”

  “Yeah. It’s all they had. Find my medical kit and pile the rest wherever you want.”

  The medical kit was a large tackle box that had been modified to hold all manner of goodies in little compartments divided among the main container and two upper trays. By the time Cole had set everything else down, Paige already had the kit open and was selecting several different items from her collection.

  “Take your pants off,” she said.

  Cole stopped right where he was. “No dinner first?”

  “If you want to bleed some more, crack a few jokes while I patch myself up. That scratch on your leg looked pretty bad, so I thought I’d start there.”

  The scratch she’d mentioned had gotten bad enough to cause most of that leg to go numb below the knee. The feeling returned quickly enough when she started poking him. “Why don’t I just go clean it up first while you—”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Paige grumbled. “You must be the only man to think twice after a woman tells him to strip. I must really look like shit.”

  “No,” Cole said as he watched her peel off the cotton button-down shirt she’d thrown on in order to look a bit more presentable to the front desk clerk. “It’s not that.”

  Technically speaking, Paige should have looked a lot worse than she did. Her clothes were stuck to her skin thanks to all the dirt, sweat, and blood they had absorbed at the campground, and her face was tired and dirty. But somehow she managed to make him forget about all of that just by dropping her voice a little and raising an eyebrow. “All right, then. You want me to go first?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Go right ahead.”

  She lifted one leg and crossed it over her knee. From there, she eased the boot from that foot and daintily lowered it to the floor. “You next.”

  Sighing, Cole unbuckled his belt, pulled open his jeans and shimmied out of them.

  Within seconds after Paige’s eyes dropped down below his waist, she started laughing. “Are those rabbits?”

  It was useless for Cole to try and hide them from her, but he couldn’t bring himself to look at the cartoon bunnies plastered all over his boxers. “They were on sale.”

  “Oh no they weren’t! The ugly stripes and polka dots go on sale. The solid colors go on sale. Those cute ones are always more. You paid extra for those!”

  “I’m bleeding, you know. Weren’t you going to help me?”

  Tugging at the leg of his boxers, she giggled, “And it looks like there’s a whole little garden on there too. Is that a carrot?”

  “Yowza! Watch where you’re reaching, woman!”

  Paige’s hands may have drifted a bit too close to the carrot printed over the fly of his boxers, but she wasn’t so quick to move it. “What other critters have you got hiding in there?”

  “You’re about to find out if you’re not careful.”

  Leaning in close only caused her hand to drift a bit higher up. “I haven’t been careful all night. Why start now?”

  Cole was wounded, bleeding, and more tired than he thought he could be without passing out. He was also close enough to smell the natural scent of Paige’s skin and feel her hair brush against the side of his face. Pulling in half a breath of her was more than enough to push his mouth against her lips and for him to grab hold of her with both arms.

  Paige let out a soft, sighing groan as she pushed him onto the bed and took the kiss to a whole other level. Her lips parted and she teased him with her tongue as she swung her leg over and straddled him. The instant that leg fell into place, it brushed against the wound that ran down the length of his calf.

  “Oh my God,” Cole gasped. “You’re gonna have to get off of me.”

  Tracing her fingers down his chest, she was about to say something when she snapped her attention to his leg. “Oh no! I’m sorry,” she said as she climbed off. “Does that hurt?”

  Every part of his body wanted to tell her he was fine and that she should hop aboard to pick up right where they’d left off. Well, some parts more than others. As he tried to move his leg, he grunted, “Yes. It does.”

  “Let me just fix you up and we can get back to business.”

  “That would be…that sounds…I mean…yes. That sounds good.”

  Paige had already gotten up to head for the bathroom. When she came out, she tossed a few towels to him and said, “Clean off that wound first.”

  He pressed the towel against his leg, but found that most of the blood had already hardened into a sticky crust. Rather than tear the coating off and create a gruesome mess, he wiped away as much as he could from around the wound. When he looked up again, he was just in time to watch Paige trade her filthy T-shirt for a fresher sleeveless version.

  Noticing he was watching, she walked over to him and said, “Good enough. Now hand me that turkey baster.”

  In one of the top trays of the kit, he saw several long plastic tubes filled with clear liquid, sealed with plastic caps at one end and rubber bulbs at the other. “Which one?” he asked.

  “The one with the stuff to keep you from turning into a Half Breed.” Since Cole hadn’t reached for any of the tubes, she added, “One of the ones marked HB. It doesn’t look like you got hurt bad enough to have a serious problem, but better safe than sorry.”

  He grabbed one of those tubes and handed it to her. She popped off the cap and squirted some of the clear blue fluid onto his wound. The stuff might have looked like windshield wiper solution, but soaked in with a cool touch. Paige emptied the rest of the large baster on every open wound both she and Cole had. The treatment left them looking like they’d been in a wet T-shirt contest, which Cole didn’t mind one bit. It all soaked in or evaporated within a couple minutes.

  “Now hand me the epidermic paste.”

  “What?”

  “The tube near the bottom of the kit.”

  Cole found the tube and handed it over. He wasn’t quite sure what the stuff was and didn’t think to ask her about it, since Paige was slowly lowering herself onto her knees in front of him. She took the tube from him, popped it open, and looked up with a sly grin on her face.

  “Are you ready for this?” she whispered.

  “Oh God, yes.”

  Reaching out with one hand to brush her fingers and thumb along the side of his wound, she asked, “Are you sure?”

  Feeling a rise in the carrot patch, Cole leaned back and told her, “Go for it.”

  Thanks to the numbness spreading once more through his leg, he didn’t feel it when Paige pressed her hands against the skin alongside his wound. His calm frame of mind was shot to hell when she pinched the torn skin together and covered it with the stuff from the tube. His hands dug into the mattress and his butt lifted an inch or so up to send the rabbit right back into hiding.

  “What the fu—” was all he could get out before the next wave hit him. Paige slid her hand all the way down the length of the wound, pinching it shut and sealing it with the clear, quick-drying glue. She set the tube aside a few seconds later, but the pain in his leg was a gift that kept right on giving.

  She leaned forward, brushing against him while reaching for one of the syringes she’d taken from her kit. “Hold still, Cole.”

  “Hold still? I can’t believe you tricked me like that!”

  “Did that hurt?”

  “Fuck, yes it did!”

  “What about this?” she purred as she leaned forward again so her breasts rubbed against his other leg. “Is that better?”

  Even though it was all he could do to pull in a breath, he replied, “A little.”

  “Just think about how nice that feels.” As soon as she saw the first trace of a contented smirk drift across Cole’s face, Paige buried the syringe’s needle into a spot at the top of his wound. With a swift, crisp motion, she turned the needle under his skin so it was pointed downward and then pressed the plunger.

&nbs
p; The healing serum flooded through Cole’s leg like ice water, to banish the numbness below his knee and replace it with a whole new kind of pain. While smaller wounds and infections were treated with thinner needles attached to smaller syringes, this one felt like a marker being shoved into his aching shin. “Damn, you’d make a good vet.”

  “What made you think of that?”

  “The way you distract me right before the hammer drops makes me feel like a dog getting his vaccinations.”

  “Just wait until I fish out my rubber gloves.”

  “Don’t even joke about that,” he warned.

  “Were you hurt anywhere else?” she asked.

  “Feels like I was hurt everywhere else, but it’s not too bad.” That was a lie, but he could see the wound on his leg was bleeding less than a few seconds ago.

  “Normally, that’d be a bit too much serum for such a short amount of time, but you were hurt enough to burn most of it off. If you have trouble sleeping, take this,” she said while handing him one of the smaller syringes. “Now, do me.”

  “I thought I’d ease back into it a bit more, but…” Paige turned her back to Cole and held out the tube of skin sealant she’d just used on him. He took it and sat on the bed behind her.

  Peeling her shirt off and holding it against her front, she said, “There’s a few cuts on my back I couldn’t reach. Pinch them shut and cover them with that stuff. Then give me an injection from that small syringe. I don’t need much.”

  Cole took his time working on her. There were plenty of scratches, bumps, and bruises, but nothing half as bad as the set of three slashes that ran all the way across her ribs and wrapped around to stop abruptly near her spine. “Looks like something got to you,” he told her. “Your vest caught some of it, though. You ready?”

  “Just do what I told you.”

  There was a little bit of stuff in the turkey baster, so he added that to what she’d already drizzled over the cut. The process of sealing the wound wasn’t much different than using a glue stick to put a few pieces of leather together. Since Paige didn’t even squirm, he got it done with a minimum of fuss. Placing his hand on the darkened yet smooth skin of her ribs, he asked, “Doesn’t that hurt?”