Liam roared and ran straight down one lane of the interstate. Several cars skidded to avoid him, but the Full Blood leaned into them and used his shoulder to knock them aside. Then, like a bear using the trunk of a tree to scratch an itch, he angled his back toward the cars to try and rid himself of his unwanted rider.
Paige kept her hands wrapped around the weapon grips but couldn’t use them as anything but handles to keep from dropping onto the road. When Liam lowered his shoulder to slam that half of his body into a bus, she barely managed to pull her lower body up and tuck it in so her legs wouldn’t be mashed against steel. Once she’d adjusted her weight on that side, Liam lowered his head and kicked his back legs up in an attempt to fling her toward an oncoming truck. Her left hand slipped from the handle of her sickle, but her right fist remained locked so tightly that she wondered if she would ever be able to open her fist again.
Then Liam did the one thing she’d been praying he wouldn’t do. He stopped in the middle of the road and rolled onto his back.
Paige reacted without thinking, bringing her knees up to her chest, placing her feet against the Full Blood and pushing herself away. Liam hit the cement and rolled back and forth as if putting out a fire. Headlights from cars that had stopped or were wrecked around and behind them bathed the two combatants in illumination from several angles. The moment Paige whipped around to get a look at the Full Blood, she was forced to dodge a set of claws that were longer than short swords. She raised her right arm, but her weapon only blocked a fraction of the blow. Claws raked through her hardened flesh as though scraping against brick, the impact of the swing knocking her flat against the pavement.
More cars honked and crashed into each other, but Paige couldn’t see any of it. Her face rested against the concrete and she was too tired to lift it. The Full Blood snapped at a pair of cars that honked wildly as they drove by, straightening his upper body and shifting effortlessly to stand upon two legs.
Reaching over his shoulder, Liam grabbed at what seemed a large thorn protruding from his back. His thick fingers brushed against the sickle, which brought something resembling a smile to his face. When he got ahold of the weapon and pulled it out, he released a breath that might have been lodged in his throat since the blade first hit home. He was about to toss it away when Paige threw the machete in her right hand with enough inhuman force to plant it solidly within the gray spot on Liam’s side.
He reacted to the blow as if she’d stabbed a raw nerve. Craning his head all the way back, he roared and allowed the sickle to slip from his hand. Paige, certain that he was about to flee, scooped up the weapon and got to Liam before the pained howl had completely left his throat. When he lowered his head to run along the shoulder of the interstate, she’d already grabbed a handful of fur in her powerful right fist and used the machete to pull herself up and back onto him. The Full Blood was no longer interested in flipping cars. He ran along the highway for the quickest couple of miles Paige had ever experienced before launching himself up and over the guardrail.
They sailed over a canopy of branches and leaves, but Paige could tell they weren’t anywhere near a park. The air smelled of smoke and rusted steel. The ground beneath Liam’s feet crunched with loose gravel or broken cement as he brushed against a few large things to try and knock her off. Failing that, he came to a stop. His chest heaved like a powerful engine on the verge of overheating. Just as Paige recognized one of the nearby things as a boxcar, Liam threw himself against it. She was barely able to dismount with her weapons in hand before being squashed.
“You’re accomplishing nothing, Skinner,” Liam said while shifting into his upright form. “If I don’t kill you now, I’ll only kill you later.”
They were in a train yard. Several darkened warehouses were lined up just beyond a couple sets of tracks. Behind them Paige saw smaller sheds and rows of empty boxcars, all a stone’s throw from the Missouri River. She didn’t know exactly how far Liam had taken her, but could no longer hear police sirens.
Liam squatted down with his knees bent and his elbows resting on them. He eyed her with a little bit of everything showing upon his face: exhilaration, lust, hunger, even a good deal of curiosity. “If the Mongrels are here, that means this city is way out of your control. Or did you have something to do with that?”
She didn’t answer his question. Instead, she tried not to think about the pain flooding her body while she opened and closed her right fist to get some blood pumping through it.
Liam wrinkled his nose and said, “I already know you deal with the leeches, so I’m surprised you didn’t recruit them to help you. But the Nymar don’t fight for their territory any longer, do they? They hide inside their noisy taverns and frilly clothes, whining endlessly about how hard they’ve got it. Maybe I’ll show them what to do with their power. Wouldn’t that be funny?”
“You know what I think is funny?” Paige sneered. “A big bad wolf like you doing so much talking when there’s a fight to finish.”
“Just picking your brain,” Liam mused as he casually waggled his long, clawed fingers. “I suppose I can do that just as well when the wretches tear your head open.”
Before Paige could charge the Full Blood head-on, Liam leapt up and back. His hands touched the side of a crane used for loading oversized cargo containers, then he grabbed onto the steel beams and climbed toward the top of the crane. It began to groan and shift under his weight, so he stopped halfway up and raised his face to the black sky.
Paige recognized the howl from when she and Cole had been driving downtown. Being so close to its source was another experience altogether. The sound shook her on a primordial level. Instincts came to the surface that made her want to run until her legs would no longer carry her.
But she wasn’t the only one to feel that urge. Half Breeds emerged from the nearby warehouses and from beneath the dirty sheds bordering some of the older sets of tracks. There were at least ten of them scraping up from their pits, hungry and eager to stretch their newly formed muscles. Just when things looked like they couldn’t get any worse, stragglers from downtown howled from other parts of the city. The first of those creatures to arrive showed plenty of wear and tear from tangling with cops, Mongrels, and Skinners, but didn’t show any signs of slowing down.
Not only could Paige feel those demonic snarls grating inside her ears, but she felt a rumble beneath her feet. She tried to loosen up her right arm in preparation for a fight, but the limb felt too thick and heavy to be of much use. Standing alone in that train yard, she swallowed the regrets that rose to the back of her throat and got comfortable with what remained.
She’d had a good run.
As the Half Breeds circled, their crazed, once-human eyes focused upon her. Then every set of thin, pointed ears perked up as another voice demanded to be heard.
It was a howl, but compared to those she’d heard earlier, this was musical. The new voice didn’t need to compete with Liam’s. It was a pure, single note that wove through everything else in the simple, unstoppable way a river might cut through a mountain. Liam took notice and shifted on his perch to look toward the row of low buildings along the river to the north.
A second Full Blood stood on top of a warehouse at the far edge of the train yard. Its head was pointed straight up and both of its massive arms were stretched out, with fingers splayed as if it was preparing to battle anything the gods dared to send his way.
For a few moments the Half Breeds seemed confused. Then one of them started running toward the other Full Blood. Before it had gone more than twenty yards, the rest of the wretches followed suit. They bolted straight past the crane where Liam snarled down at them and raced for the opposite end of the yard. Once all of the Half Breeds had gathered at the foot of their new master, that Full Blood unleashed the full fury of its teeth and claws upon them.
What followed was an ugly display of nature’s most unsympathetic rule. The newly arrived Full Blood ripped the first Half Breed apart and sent both pie
ces flying against the side of the building behind him. The rest of the leaner werewolves attacked in a frenzied battle for survival, simply because they knew it was too late to try and escape.
“To hell with you, Randolph!” Liam shouted from on high. “I don’t need them!” Shifting his eyes to Paige, he dropped from the crane and scrambled toward her. His eyes were unnaturally clear. Every one of his features had become angular and rougher around the edges, as if the last drop of humanity inside of him had dried up.
The rumbling beneath Paige’s feet grew stronger, but she was too tired to run from it. Instead, she tightened her fists around her weapons and waited for Liam to come to her. As the rumbling passed directly under her and moved on ahead, she realized that something else was going to get to the Full Blood first.
Four lanky arms exploded from the dirt to grab Liam’s feet, the earth rising in large chunks that sent Paige tumbling to one side. The Full Blood shook one leg free, but lost his momentum and came tumbling down. Another pair of burrowers grabbed Liam’s hands and yanked them down, and when he pulled them from the dirt, they sank their short, wide teeth into him.
In the distance, Half Breeds yelped and snarled, ripping at Randolph’s hide before he tore them to shreds.
Directly in front of Paige, Liam struggled to climb to his feet as Mongrels swarmed at him from the ground. Most of the burrowers attempted to pull him down just to keep him from moving, but one had climbed up and onto the Full Blood’s powerful frame to gnaw on the side of his neck.
Wincing as dozens of teeth and claws tried to get through his thick layers of fur, Liam looked at Paige and growled, “Do your new allies know you’ll be hunting them next?”
Paige got to her feet and searched the writhing contingent of Mongrels for an opening to strike.
“Humans who survive a wound from our kind become wretches,” Liam said as he grabbed one of the burrowers by the neck. “Mongrels surviving the same wound become Full Blood. Did you think about that when you sought their help?”
The moment Liam tossed the Mongrel he’d grabbed, Paige ran toward him. She used every bit of anger, frustration, even desperation she felt to try and regain a connection that she seemed to have lost. The thorns in the handle of her right-handed weapon had practically been swallowed up when the thing shifted into its crude, vaguely machetelike shape. The remaining nubs were sharp, but barely sharp enough to puncture the hardening skin of her damaged hand. Once her grip tightened enough to do the job, all the emotional fire she’d ignited allowed her to will the handle of her machete to peel back and expose the tooth she’d attached to it when it had been her more familiar sickle. The tooth emerged like a Nymar’s fang, and carried the same message: blood was going to be spilled.
The sickle blade snagged in Liam’s fur, where it became tangled amid a thick layer of spent bullets. Paige pulled herself forward to add even more power when she drove the modified end of her other weapon straight into the tuft of gray fur on Liam’s side. As soon as the blow landed, she could feel the tooth on her weapon scrape against the one that had snapped off of Cole’s spear. Liam batted one Mongrel away as if flicking an insect, bellowing a roar that quickly deteriorated to a pained wheeze. When he tried to jump away, he was held in place by the Mongrels that had remained in the dirt.
He bent down to swipe at the Mongrels holding his feet, but was dropped to his knees when Paige pushed her weapon in even farther. The more she strained her right arm, the more the dark shading beneath her skin faded away. Before the ink could fully burn off, she twisted and pulled to do as much damage as possible.
The Full Blood lashed out with one hand, but Paige tucked her head down as the set of deadly claws sliced over her. His follow-up strike was a wild slap, but it connected and sent her straight to the ground. She tightened her fists and was relieved to find both weapons still in her possession.
Liam pulled loose, climbed back to his feet, and raised both fists over his head. Before he could drop those fists onto Paige, Kayla flew at him like a battering ram. The feline Mongrel didn’t have the strength of the Half Breeds or the coiling serpentine bodies of the burrowers, but her claws raked at Liam’s chest and face in a flurry that was impossible for human eyes to follow. While the werewolf’s fur absorbed most of the strikes, Liam’s blood soon sprayed through the air. He wrapped both hands around Kayla’s torso and slammed her to the ground. When Liam hunched over to finish her off, he saw Paige trying to approach him from another angle and knocked her aside.
Paige landed flat upon her back and curled up to keep her head from knocking against the packed dirt. Her right arm, once the best weapon in her arsenal, flopped uselessly, like a log that had been stitched to her sleeve.
Suddenly, Liam realized he was being pulled deeper into the ground. His claws turned one burrower into mulch, but he was too focused on the next figure writhing in the dirt to spot a third Mongrel scampering across the open train yard. It was Ben, and the Mongrel’s momentum allowed him to knock Liam off balance so only one hastily placed leg kept the Full Blood from falling over. Liam recovered from the impact and viciously slashed at Ben’s face, but was then knocked flat by the Cavalier, with Cole behind the wheel.
Liam rolled for a few yards, and when he came to a stop, three sets of clawed hands reached up to hold him there. The Full Blood struggled and nearly broke free until Kayla leapt onto his chest and sank her teeth into his neck. The pain from that lit a fire under Liam, allowing him to pull one hand free from the burrower that had been holding it in place. Ben flattened himself against the ground and was scrambling away when Liam’s jaws snapped shut around his leg. Letting out a high-pitched screech, Ben rolled onto his back and thrashed against the ground. Blood sprayed from his left leg in a torrent, but everything below his knee remained in Liam’s mouth. The Full Blood would have been able to finish his meal if Paige hadn’t rushed over to stop him. Her right arm still dangled uselessly, but her left was strong enough to drive the sharpened handle of her sickle down into Liam’s right eye.
The only sound Liam could make was a strained wheeze. Kayla lay across his arm to prevent him from decapitating Paige. Just as he was about to pry his other arm free from several sets of hands emerging from the ground, Liam’s wrist was pinned down by the forked end of a battered spear.
Cole’s face was now illuminated by the headlights of the nearby Cav. Leaning down to keep the Full Blood’s arm trapped beneath his weapon, he grunted, “What does it take to kill this thing?”
“It takes a Blood Blade,” Paige snarled while rolling onto her back. She grasped her tattooed arm, only to feel it tightening up like a husk under a desert sun. “Be sure to thank Daniels for all that extra work he did!”
The Full Blood’s muscles twitched and writhed as he arched his back and attempted to change shape. Every little move he made only intensified the agony in his voice, anchoring him to his current form.
Ben lay on his side after shifting into a form that was somewhat smaller but still nowhere near human. Since the remains of his leg had closed to a gnarled stump, the change had apparently served its purpose.
Kayla had enlisted the help of the remaining burrowers to hold Liam down. He twisted his entire body around to shake the Mongrels loose, but the attempt to transform had sapped his strength. The Full Blood opened his eyes and looked toward the buildings along the water’s edge.
Randolph sat atop a pile of Half Breed carcasses and stared back at him before launching himself toward the horizon with a powerful leap.
Forsaking whatever healing he could get from climbing into his human skin, Liam fought to climb back to his feet. When another set of burrower’s arms emerged to wrap around him, the Full Blood was unable to keep himself from being dragged underground.
Paige struggled to her feet and stood near the freshly turned soil. “Where is he?” Looking at Kayla, she demanded, “Bring him back! We need to finish this.”
Kayla and a few of the other burrowers gathered around the spot where
Liam had just been. A few Mongrels tended to Ben. Another peeked up from the ground.
“Well?” Kayla asked.
The partially submerged burrower said, “Max took him deep. I can’t even hear them anymore.”
“That doesn’t mean much,” Cole said. “I was carried underground so deep I couldn’t even see, but I could still get enough air to stay alive.”
Ben pulled in a breath and raised his narrow head. “I kept you within a foot of the surface. When you got too fidgety, I dragged you beneath a few flower gardens where the ground was loose enough to let some air through.”
“Full Bloods aren’t built the same as Cole,” Paige said impatiently.
Kayla was studying the way she cradled her right arm tightly against her chest. “They still need to breathe,” she told Paige. “We all heard as much.”
“So what do we do now?” Cole asked.
“You go home and we take care of this,” Kayla announced. “This is our city now. Or are you planning on going back on our deal?”
Paige held her bloody face up to glare directly into Kayla’s eyes. Although she couldn’t see all the Mongrels, she could feel them sizing her up as she spoke. “I’m not going back on any deal, but I’m not going anywhere until that Full Blood is dead.”
“Max is taking him as far down as he can go,” Ben said. “If that Full Blood could survive in the ground indefinitely, he’d be one of us. Even if he can hold his breath, he won’t be able to do any damage stuck a hundred feet below ground level. There are measures we can take to be sure he stays put.”
“What measures?” Paige asked.
Kayla reached out and placed a thinner, clawless version of her hand upon Paige’s shoulder. “That Full Blood killed more Mongrels than it did Skinners tonight. If we are to live here, we have more reason than you to put an end to the beast. Wouldn’t you have felt it if he was still close enough to be a threat?”
Howling Legion (Skinners, Book 2) Page 36