Extinction Agenda (22 page)

The gargoyle’s body hit him with a wet slap, wrapping his arms and torso within a layer of writhing skin. Talons dug into his chest, piercing his jacket and jabbing into his flesh to give the gargoyle a firm grip. He dropped to his knees and yelped in pain, but his attempt to break loose only caused the talons to rip him open even more.

Cole knew better that to simply cut the gargoyle apart. When it was wrapped around its prey, the creature’s sole purpose was to administer a fluid from glands on its tongue and beneath its wings and smear it over its prey using the flat surface of its body. After a few seconds the fluid would begin to harden into a stony crust so the victim could be immobilized, preserved, and eaten slowly over an undetermined period of time. The statues left behind had historically been mistaken as gargoyles, while the real things were free to tuck themselves away in corners of buildings or hide in trees where they were again mistaken as hanging moss or large bats.

“Keep still,” Cole grunted as he wrapped his arms around Waggoner and the gargoyle encapsulating him. “Struggling only makes it worse.”

“Worse?” Waggoner asked. “How the hell could this get worse? It’s stabbing me!”

The gargoyle’s black eyes gazed up at Cole without a hint of consciousness. Either they were incapable of expressing anything close to emotion or the creature was focused intently on what its other eyes were seeing. The creature’s second face was similar to a crude black chalk drawing on its belly. When Cole saw it the first time, he was reminded of a stingray. He couldn’t see it now, but could imagine all too well how its narrow mouth was silently opening and closing to administer the hardening fluid.

As if to confirm those suspicions, Waggoner said, “Holy shit, it
is
worse! I think it’s biting me!”

“Stay still!”

Waggoner closed his eyes and clenched every muscle in his body like a robot that had blown a gasket and seized up. Hearing the shrieking overhead from another gargoyle, Cole swung his spear with one hand toward the sound and cut the incoming flier in half. Its fluids spattered in a wider, less concentrated arc, which formed a thin, brittle crust where it landed. The sounds of battle were slackening in the distance, but Cole only paid partial attention. Even an army of Full Bloods was headed his way, he needed to drop his weapon and grab both talons that were digging into Waggoner’s upper chest.

“This is gonna sting,” he said. Without any more warning than that, he pulled the curved talons as straight as possible from the holes they’d dug in the other man’s flesh. They were long and sharp, but also thin and didn’t do any significant damage. He pulled the gargoyle back and cracked its frame in half with a quick twist.

Extending his arms and then reaching back to pull the smaller set of talons from his lower back, Waggoner said, “That did the trick. Nice one.”

“Actually I didn’t mean to do that, but you’re welcome anyway.”

The lower set of talons were connected to the closest thing a gargoyle had to feet. The long toenails had barely punctured Waggoner’s clothing before digging into him. Once they were pulled away, the entire creature fell off him like a second skin that had been shed.

Before Waggoner could stomp on the gargoyle, Cole said, “Wait! Grab it by the head.”

“Grab what?”

“You heard me,” Cole snapped in a sharp tone that left no room for misinterpretation. “Grab it by the head, reach into its mouth and pull out its tongue.”

Confused disgust flashed across Waggoner’s face, but he’d been training with Skinners long enough to have heard stranger requests from his superiors. He looked around for a good excuse to ignore the order, but the fighting had tapered off to a few random yelps as some Half Breeds were put down for good. The rush of retreating footsteps flowed away from the road like a wind rustling through tall weeds. Grudgingly, he grabbed the gargoyle by the head and did as he was told. The tongue and bladder to which it was connected came out after no small amount of work.

“Tie a knot in those tubes and keep that sac safe,” Cole said.

“You plan on using some of that stuff to turn something into stone?”

“If we have to. Otherwise, we’ll keep it for later.”

When he was through, Waggoner offered it to Cole.

“No,” Cole told him. “Keep hold of it and make sure it doesn’t leak.”

“But it stinks like hell.”

“Yes it does, but you already got that crap all over you. Holding onto a little more won’t make things any worse.”

Waggoner looked down at the front of his jacket where portions of the rocky crust still clung to him. The rest had left behind a mess of gray, dusty globs that stuck to him like dried glue. Already he smelled as if he’d been doused in rotten eggs and vinegar before being rolled on the floor of an old movie theater.

“Sucks to be the new guy,” Cole told him.

“Cole!” Paige shouted from the spot where the SUVs had been parked. “Stop messing around. You and John get to the club and bring all of our stuff over here.”

Cole sighed and looked around for any trace of gargoyles or Half Breeds. There was nothing else in the vicinity, which left him no reason to ignore the orders he’d been given. Turning toward the club, he jabbed a finger at Waggoner and said, “Not a word.”

Chapter Twenty-One

“H
ow is it that the nymphs usher you around, but not us?” asked a slim black man wearing a dark gray hooded sweatshirt and frayed jeans. He was behind the wheel of the SUV Cole, Paige, and Waggoner had been piled into, and when he looked at them in the rearview mirror, a sour expression twisted the goatee that covered the lower portion of his face. Sharp features made him look even more severe when he said, “We’re supposed to be working together, so I think they should put in a good word for us with those ladies.”

“You are Russian,” Milosh said from the passenger seat. “So nobody cares what you think.” He was a stocky man with a full beard that would have spread like a bandito mask across the bottom of his face if not for the two scars running along his cheeks to part the whiskers like smoke.

The driver shot Milosh a piercing glare, which became friendlier when he shifted his eyes toward the Skinners. “Since he is a Czech pig with no manners, I will introduce myself. I am George.”

“And that,” Milosh cut in, “is Paige and Cole. The other one, I do not know.” Settling back into his seat, he grunted, “Pig, indeed.”

“So what happened back there?” Paige asked.

George and Milosh both looked into the closest mirror they could find as it they thought there might be werewolves nipping at the SUV’s bumper. “Ever since the Breaking Moon,” Milosh explained, “the Vitsaruuv have all been crazy.”

“Like they were ever sane,” George grunted.

“They are changed now. The ones with the tusks. They showed up in America first, but now they are here. Even the Kushtime are changed.”

George glanced back at the Skinners. “He means Mongrels.”

Milosh nodded and carried on. “At first we thought the Weshruuv all move over to America.”

“And you didn’t mind that, huh?” Paige asked. “As long as the Full Bloods are gathered on our turf, you guys just don’t care?”

“Maybe you forget that I was
there
during the Breaking Moon!” Milosh roared. “Drina and Gunari were killed when that insane Weshruuv brought our plane down. Tobar is still behind bars in your country! He may be dead for all we know.” Milosh shifted in his seat. The left sleeve of his jacket had been cut off and stapled shut because there was no arm inside it. He’d lost it to Minh when they fought in Atoka, but the Amriany seemed less concerned about that than he did about his next question. “Is he dead?”

Paige looked over to Cole, deferring to him since he’d taken it upon himself to keep up on the research. As much as he wanted to say otherwise, Cole replied, “I don’t know. The prisons were hit hard when the Half Breeds showed up. There just wasn’t enough time to move everyone and—”

“And a foreigner being held captive doesn’t matter to your police,” Milosh said.

“Lots of men and women were killed when those things started to swarm everywhere,” Cole replied tersely. “The Half Breeds were hungry, and prisons were just big buildings full of meat to them. Hospitals got hit just as badly. Lots of lives were lost, just like they’re being lost everywhere else. You want to focus on what we’re doing here or would you rather spout off some more?”

“You must excuse him,” George said. “He makes everything so political. All Czechs are like that.”

“You want to know what all Russians are like?” Milosh asked.

And, as further proof that the world was indeed going crazy, Paige took the role of peacemaker. “So you and your men were attacked outside of that club. I take it that wasn’t random?”

Drawing a knife from a shoulder holster that had been modified to carry it instead of a gun, Milosh said, “No. Not random. Someone knows our networks. Our codes. Everything they might need to guess where we might be and what we might be doing.”

Cole winced and pushed himself as far back into his seat as the cushions would allow before saying, “I hate to ask this, but is there any chance that one of your people is leaking the information? Like . . . maybe someone who was captured and questioned?”

Judging by the wariness in his voice and the lack of a knife shoved in his general direction, Cole suspected that Milosh had considered the possibility as well. “Tobar doesn’t know enough to have caused this kind of damage. And even if he did, he wouldn’t have lived long enough to have gotten it to the right people.”

“Who the hell are the right people?” George snapped. “The Full Bloods? They’re not people. They’re animals!”

“You’ve only dealt with one of them,” Milosh scolded. “Esteban isn’t like the others.”

Paige and Cole both sprung to attention. “What do you know about Esteban?” she asked.

“My country’s in his territory. Has been for over a century. He’s an animal that prefers to walk on all fours and would rather eat five children before bothering to bring down a grown man.”

“I don’t care which Full Blood it is,” Cole said. “They’re not the kind to take prisoners and they sure aren’t the kind to question anyone about anything. They don’t have to. That sounds more like a Nymar tactic.”

Milosh grimaced as if he’d suddenly gotten a taste of sour milk. “Old tactics don’t mean shit anymore. All of the animals have started playing by different rules.”

“No,” Cole said sternly. “They’ve just upped their game. The Full Bloods have their own thing going and it’s on a much bigger scale than sniffing out each specific thorn in their side. They’ve started engaging the military and winning. If you haven’t had that sort of thing over here yet, it’s only a matter of time.”

“Cole’s right,” Paige added. “You have to see what’s going on back home to get just how little the Full Bloods need subtlety right now.”

The Amriany in the front seats shared a few quick but loaded glances before Milosh nodded and began using the tip of his blade to pick something out from beneath a fingernail.

“Maybe it has been happening here,” George said while looking at them in the rearview mirror.

“Jesus Christ almighty,” Milosh growled. “It
has
been happening. No maybes about it.” When he wheeled around, he used his knife as the world’s most dangerous pointer. “You Skinners don’t give a damn about the rest of us. That’s the problem.”

“We’ve been kind of busy!” Paige said.

“You’re goddamn right you have. Unleashing God knows what!”

“Since when did you become so religious?” Cole asked.

The question was so simple and spoken so calmly that it threw the volatile hunter for a loop. Having reset his temperament, Milosh placed his knife flat on his knee so he could steady himself using the back of George’s seat as the SUV rattled over a stretch of rough road. “I know what happened during the Breaking Moon. I’m not talking about that. By then it was too late to do much more than contain the storm. I’m talking about all the years before when you Skinners insisted on doing things your own way by tearing apart the monsters and making them a part of you. Then you made them a part of your cities! Then your whole damn country!”

“What in the hell is he talking about?” Cole asked.

“He’s talking about the reason Skinners and Amriany have been working separately for so long,” George said. When all he got was silence from the backseat, he asked, “Don’t you know your own history?”

“Spare me the old-school feuding bullshit,” Paige grunted with a wave of her hand. “This isn’t the time for it.”

“No,” Milosh told her. “Now is definitely the time because those differences from the past still hold up today. If you bothered reading anything from your own Jonah Lancroft or anyone else’s journals from centuries past, you’d know that we warned you something like this would happen.”

“I read a lot of Lancroft’s journals,” Cole said. “And he didn’t mention specifics about any feud between Skinners and Amriany.”

Milosh grumbled something in his own language as he flopped back around to sit in his seat without contorting to look at the people behind him. Finally, he said, “The Amriany have been warning since the first settlers went to hunt Full Bloods in the New World that using vampire blood and werewolf skin was a mistake. It’s unnatural and it’s disgraceful.”

“He’s right,” George said as he nodded. “Taking the blood of a monster, wearing their flesh, adorning yourselves with their teeth and claws, is savage.”

“Disgraceful?” Paige sneered. “People are dying, those things are running around
eating
them, and you’re calling
us
savages?”

“See, my friend?” Milosh said to the driver. “Skinners didn’t listen to us then and they don’t listen now.”

Paige grabbed the back of both front seats and pulled herself forward as if she intended to crawl all the way up to the windshield. “I know some of our history. For example, you guys wouldn’t part with your precious secrets, so we had to make do on our own. And if you’re worried about us being disgraceful savages, maybe you should talk to some of the people who died because you were too busy sitting over here hoarding weapons that could have saved them!”

“You want more Blood Blades?” Milosh asked. “Then why don’t you tell us how you bond your weapons to your hands?”

“Why bother?” Paige snapped. “You’ll just stick whatever we give you into a storehouse somewhere and use it when you decide someone is
worth
saving.”

“It is not nature’s way for everything to live!”

Cole leaned back in his seat. “I’m beginning to get an idea of why we haven’t formed a monster hunting supergroup in all these years.”

Milosh went back to picking at his nails with the knife, and Paige slumped back into her cushions with an exasperated sigh.

T
hey drove for another hour, only slowing down to traverse an exceptionally bumpy road or skirt an area that seemed quieter than anything Cole had ever experienced. When he looked out the windows on Paige’s side, he could see a few lights shining down from posts or inside small buildings. There were open fields of tall, frosted grass and the rare movement of other automobiles. The view on his side was another story entirely.

That side of the road had a rugged shoulder and a short stretch of field leading directly into an ominous forest pulled directly from every Grimm’s fairy tale he had ever been told. Trees stripped all but bare by the harsh winter reached up to a clear sky as if to rake bony fingers across a gleaming black slate. Although Cole couldn’t make out a lot of details due to the speed of the SUV and the dense shadows, he saw no hint of the forest opening up past the first layer of trees. The more he looked at it, the more he felt it was looking back.

He, Waggoner, and Paige shared some coffee that was strong enough to melt through cast iron. It was kept hot in a thermos that, like the SUVs in their caravan and the Amriany driving them, was dented, battered, and hardened. Nobody felt much like talking, so Cole used his phone to check on some Internet news sites to see how things were back home. No big surprise there. Things were bad.

He was jostled from his own little world when the SUV’s tires rattled over a bridge and across a cobblestone street. They’d entered a small town that was a distinctly European mix of old and new. Small cottages and pubs lined the narrow streets alongside a few gas stations and convenience stores that would have been at home on any modern street corner. For some reason he couldn’t quite pinpoint, Cole felt a distinct calmness here. The signs weren’t quite as bright. The windows weren’t filled with as many advertisements. The few people who were out and about kept to themselves while projecting a friendly aura.

Before much longer the SUVs pulled to a stop outside a narrow two-story brick building with shuttered windows and a steeply angled roof. The Amriany piled out of their vehicles and didn’t make the first effort to conceal the weapons they carried inside. They also didn’t make an effort to help the Skinners carry their belongings into the building.

Unlike most of the Skinner safe houses Cole had seen, this one wasn’t a hollowed-out structure refurbished to meet their needs. It looked and felt like a home, complete with old, comfortable furniture, quiet conversation, and the smell of freshly baked bread. In that regard, it was more like his grandma’s home.

The woman who’d ridden in one of the other vehicles walked down a short hall to confer with the squat man cradling an automatic shotgun who was watching the back door. After she said something to him and patted his shoulder, he lowered the shotgun. She was thin and looked to be somewhere in her late fifties. Her long brown hair was loosely braided and held in place by a small, oval piece of leather with what looked like a wooden knitting needle stuck straight through it as well as the hair beneath it. The vaguely fashionable ’do, combined with the dark green sweater and combat harness underneath a leather coat that stopped just short of her knees, was a strange combination of earthy and military sensibilities. When she removed her coat and hung it on one of the hooks near the door, he saw that the harness held more than the pair of Glocks holstered under her arms. There was a sword too, strapped to her back and almost as long as her torso. The handle was straight and bound in leather straps, the blade was slightly angled as it moved away from the guard, but then took a sharp curve back, down, and around to form a single barb at the end of a large hook. In the short glimpse he had before she turned around again, Cole could see that the blade was dark brown and might have been copper. Also, there were symbols etched into the metal that had more than a passing resemblance to those found on a Blood Blade.

“So,” she said in a polite, conversational tone, “did Milosh tell you what happened while we were waiting for you to arrive?”

Cole stepped up and spoke before Paige had a chance to voice her opinion of their guide. “We didn’t get around to that.”

Her eyes narrowed as she fixed them on Milosh. He winced and veered off to go into another room. When she looked back to Cole, her expression was cordial if not overly friendly. “Some of the Half Breeds were circling that village when we got there. They showed up on infrared cameras but weren’t making a move toward any of the buildings on the outskirts. They perked up once we showed up and came running. It leads us to believe they were being guided somehow.”