Howling Legion (Skinners, Book 2) (12 page)

More fear than blood pumped through Cole’s veins, but it was instinct that got him clamoring over the boxes to where Sid had landed. No innards could be seen within any of Sid’s gaping wounds. There was just a writhing black mass that stretched little tendrils to the edges of each fissure to pull them shut. Cole drove the spear straight down toward the spore attached to the Nymar’s heart, but Sid batted it away.

Allowing his weapon to flip around, Cole brought the forked end down and swung it like a broom. It caught Sid’s forearm and scraped toward his hand until the Nymar’s wrist was wedged in the crook of the weapon. Cole leaned behind his spear and pinned Sid’s arm.

“What now, Skinner?” Sid rasped. “You wanna take a swing at me like a man or stand there and watch me heal?”

Cole’s eyes dropped to what had been a series of messy open wounds in Sid’s belly and ribs. Now, there were only a few cuts and a mess of oily, polluted blood soaked into tattered clothes. Sid lashed out with one foot to take Cole’s legs out from under him. When Cole staggered back, the Nymar pulled his arm free and jumped to his feet. From there he slammed a powerful fist against Cole’s ribs and followed up with a punch to his chest. Having absorbed plenty of punches over the last few months, Cole took those and swung his spear.

Sid was fast enough to clamp his hand around the sharpened end, and he used it to pull Cole into a straight, gut-level kick. Wrenching the spear out of Cole’s grasp, he warned, “You’d better have a lot more than that, asshole.”

“I do,” Cole said as he drew the .44 from where it had been tucked under his belt. The pistol bucked in his hand and drilled a lopsided hole through Sid’s body. The Nymar’s innards met the antidote that was mixed into the lead of the bullet with an acidic hiss.

Sid dropped Cole’s spear to claw desperately at the gunshot wound.

Cole didn’t have time to fish out the syringe Paige had given him. The Nymar’s wounds were already closing and there wasn’t enough antidote on that single bullet to do the job. “Damn it,” he grunted as he jammed the barrel of the .44 into the wound and fired several muffled shots up toward the Nymar’s heart. Every pull of the trigger caused Sid to flail and kick like he was being electrocuted. Cole recovered his spear and drove it into the smoking mess that was Sid’s chest.

As soon as Sid stopped twitching, Cole raced out of the apartment to check on Paige. She exploded from the neighboring doorway and skidded to a halt with five or six inches to spare before running into the business end of Cole’s weapon. When she saw the oily black and red Nymar blood dripping from the tip of the spear, she smiled.

“You got the other one?” she asked breathlessly.

“Pretty sure, yeah.”

“Is Daniels upstairs?”

“One way to find out.”

Cole bounded up the stairs and rounded the corner on the second floor to get to the next flight of stairs. Several other apartment doors opened to let a few curious faces peek out, but none of them were showing any fang. “Looks like we woke the neighbors,” he pointed out.

Paige was right behind him. “Yeah. The cops will probably be here before too long. We need to make this quick.”

The door to 303 was ajar but hadn’t been kicked down,
which was a good sign. Cole and Paige entered the apartment to find Daniels backed against a wall with Burkis looming over him. That wasn’t so good.

Cole’s scars sent a deep burn through the tendons of his hands. Something about Burkis seemed familiar, yet different. If he was Nymar, he was unlike any of the others he’d encountered so far. He hadn’t encountered many shapeshifters since getting bonded to his weapon, but Burkis wasn’t quite like them either.

Not one for introspection, Paige snapped, “Just who the hell are you?”

Burkis stood next to the couch while Daniels pressed against the back wall of the living room. He carried himself like a man who was too powerful to be decked out in such a cheap suit. His thick mane of dark brown hair hung just a bit too low to be conservative and was shot through with several strands of gray.

“I was just about to complete a transaction with Mr. Daniels,” Burkis said.

Scraping his hands along the wall behind him, Daniels looked ready to climb all the way up to the ceiling. “He wants the Blood Blade.”

“Why do you want that?” Paige demanded.

Burkis merely glanced toward the front door, as if Paige and Cole were just a couple of strays who’d wandered in by mistake. “My business isn’t with you.”

“What about those other two?”

One of Burkis’s eyebrows rose for a second as he subtly shifted his feet so his back wasn’t exposed to anyone in the room. “It’s very difficult to find one particular leech in a town that’s crawling with them. Having never met Mr. Daniels before, a proper introduction was needed. Now that we’ve met face-to-face, I won’t have that problem again. Unfortunately, the whore who contacted me insisted that those other two come along.”

“That’d be Stephanie,” Paige muttered. “I knew she’d screw us over.”

“I suppose that was the intention,” Burkis continued, “which is why I pointed them in your direction.”

Cole’s hands reflexively tightened around his weapon. “You knew we were here?”

Burkis looked from Paige to Cole and said, “Your scent has been masked but is hard to miss at this range.” Then he shifted his focus back to Daniels. “We’ve talked long enough. Give me the Blood Blade.”

“It’s…not for sale,” Daniels squeaked.

“It never belonged to you.”

“It belonged to a friend of mine,” Cole said. “And I say it’s not for sale. Your Nymar bodyguards are dead and someone had to have called the cops, so just get out of here while you still can.”

The side of Burkis’s face twitched. He turned to look at the sliding patio doors a few seconds before Cole heard the wail of distant sirens.

“Give me the Blood Blade, Mr. Daniels,” Burkis said dryly. “I know it’s here. Hand it over and I may only kill the Skinners.”

Paige took a step forward and held both weapons at the ready. “Come on, Daniels. You’re coming with us.”

“What about Sally?” Daniels asked while easing away from the wall.

Cole was getting more impatient with every word. “Who?”

“My girlfriend. She lives in 102.”

“She’s fine,” Paige said. “A little shaken up, but fine.”

“I need to make sure.”

“Daniels!” Paige snapped. “We’re leaving!”

Burkis didn’t make a move to stop any of them from clustering together and heading for the door. He simply said, “I was hoping for this to be easier than Canada, but you Skinners should know you can’t possibly move fast enough to get away from me.” With that, he pulled in a breath that caused his chest to swell beneath the layers of his cheap suit. His torso kept expanding until the material strained and ripped. When his head drooped and his lips curled back, the man’s skull crunched as if it had been trapped in a vise before swelling out to form a thicker brow and a long, squared snout.

Cole felt as if he’d suddenly pressed his hands flat against the engine block of a running car.

“Jesus,” Paige gasped. “We need that Blood Blade.” Grabbing Daniels by the arm and pulling him away from the sight that had stopped the Nymar in his tracks, she screamed, “Grab everything you need for our project and get to my car.
Move!”

Cole inched toward the door one tentative step at a time. Fear and panic soaked into his body like weights tethering him to the carpet.

Burkis’s muscles had exploded under his skin, reducing his cheap suit to shredded rags hanging from his shoulders and waist. His mass had become great enough to force him down onto all fours. Once there, he twisted his head back and forth as long ears stretched out from the sides of his face and teeth sprang from his jaws to scrape against each other and rip through his cheeks. As the snout took shape, Burkis lifted his head and cried out in a voice that shifted from smooth, deep tones into an even deeper roar.

Cole wanted to run, but he couldn’t. He was scared, but that wasn’t what kept him in the apartment. At that moment not even Paige’s iron grip on his wrist could pull him away.

“We need to get to that Blood Blade!” she shouted over the creature’s roar and scraping of claws against the floor. “He’ll kill you!”

Burkis’s legs shot out from the remains of his trousers, snapped in half to bend against the knees, and grew to nearly twice their original length. Every move he made brought up sections of the carpet along with a few pieces of the floor itself. The man from New York arched his back as his spine rippled in a shockwave that started at the base of his neck and rolled all the way down to his newly formed tail.

“We can kill him,” Cole said.

“That’s a Full Blood! We need the—”

“I know what it is,” Cole snapped. “He’s still changing. We can kill him before he grows to full strength. Like those Half Breeds we found in that den in Wisconsin, remember? We got to them before they changed all the way and we can do the same with him but we need to hurry!”

Paige thought it over for less than a second before she nodded. When she lifted her hands, they were each wrapped
around shorter versions of her sickles, which allowed for stronger blades. “You ready for this?”

“No, but let’s do it anyway.”

Burkis was now somewhere between human and animal. It wouldn’t be much longer before he was one of the most dangerous creatures in the world. Cole just hoped there would be one less in the world before the night was over.

Paige got to Burkis first and sank both curved blades into his back. Since Burkis’s muscles were still expanding, she was able to pull the right one out, but was having trouble getting the left one free.

Cole wasn’t able to build up much steam, but what he didn’t gain from momentum he more than made up for in adrenaline by driving his spear into the shifting meat of the werewolf’s side like a soldier delivering a killing blow with a bayonet. Judging by the howl that exploded from him as he shook his head and arched his back, Burkis felt the weapon hit home. A second later fur flowed out of every one of his pores as if to entangle the weapon before it was reclaimed.

With one sweep of a massive arm, Burkis knocked Paige off her feet. When the creature stood upright, Cole was almost hoisted off the floor. He pulled his spear free, dropped to his feet and was immediately knocked toward the sliding glass door when the creature pivoted toward him.

Burkis’s face was now completely changed. A low, ridged brow had settled in above a pair of crystalline, gray-blue eyes. Fur flowed from him like water trickling over his skin after a hard rain. As the creature’s frame settled into its final shape, he hacked up a bellowing roar, kicked aside the couch and lashed out with both hands.

Cole was just quick enough to drop and roll away from the window before those claws shattered the thick glass of the sliding door. When the creature turned, it howled and staggered to knock away a sizable portion of the door frame. Only then did Cole see Paige hanging from the sickle that was still lodged in its back.

Seeing her hang on with every bit of strength she had, Cole thought back to the isolated cabin in Canada where the first two Skinners he’d ever known were killed. They were
good men who’d put up a hell of a fight before being torn apart by the same Full Blood that was seconds away from ending Paige’s life. It had been the better part of a year since that happened, but Cole still smelled that blood and heard those screams in the back of his head as he threw himself into a fight that no reasonable human being could ever hope to win.

Every swing of his weapon drove the thorns farther into his own flesh. One of those hits must have landed in a soft spot, because the creature dropped to all fours and shook Paige off. She pulled her weapon free but landed awkwardly and was about to hit the floor on her back when Cole caught her.

“We’re not doing anything but pissing it off,” she said. “We need to get downstairs.”

“That’s the Full Blood,” Cole wheezed.

“I know. That’s why we need the Blood Blade!” She grabbed Cole by the back of his collar as if dragging an uncooperative mutt by the scruff of its neck.

Resisting Paige’s efforts to get him moving, Cole held his weapon in front of him and watched the thing that scrambled to get disentangled from the broken patio door frame. Outside, the sound of police sirens drifted from the direction of the main parking lot. “No. That’s the Full Blood from Canada. The one that killed Gerald and Brad.”

Paige took a moment to look the creature over, recognizing the color of its fur as well as the patches of gray on its chest, thanks to Cole’s past descriptions. Burkis even had some familiar scars that could now be seen through spots where its coat had thinned out a bit. “Run,” she said.

“We need to kill it.”

“We’re chipping the surface but not doing enough damage. We need something other than what we’ve got.”

If Burkis had been hurt in the slightest by their attack, it was recovered now. Baring its teeth, it glared at the Skinners and unleashed a demonic howl wrapped around the vestiges of a human scream.

“Run!”
Paige shouted.

Paige jumped through the hole in the floor that led to apartment 203 and shouted for Daniels. The Nymar was gathering things from a pile of overturned boxes and shoving them into a large gym bag he’d strapped over his shoulder. Seconds later Cole dropped through and knocked the ladder down behind him. The Full Blood quickly appeared to stick its gnarled face through the opening and snap its jaws at him.

“The cops are here!” Cole shouted as he hopped away from the closet.

“Hopefully they’ll just find a big dead body,” Paige replied in a rush. “Where’s that package, Daniels?”

“Already packed it,” the Nymar replied. “Along with the mixtures of ink, my burner, and my notes, so I can—”

“Get the Blood Blade and bring it to me. You never told me the combination to that damn safe!”

Gripping the edges of the opening that had been burned between the second and third floor apartments, Burkis tore away chunks of the floor and ceiling like he was digging a hole in the ground. Wood, plaster, and metal formed a heap in the closet as the werewolf forced its way down.

Daniels collected a few plastic containers and stuffed them along with some other knickknacks into his bag. After that he raced down the hall and disappeared through the next hole.

Standing beside Paige, Cole asked, “Have you ever killed one of these things?”

“I don’t know if anyone’s really killed one. There’s been stories, but nothing solid.”

“Can we kill it?”

“We can try.”

Burkis hit the floor and exploded from the little room that had contained the ladder. As soon as he saw Paige and Cole, he roared and batted aside the piles of heavy boxes as though they were all empty.

Paige distracted the werewolf with a few swings of her weapons as Cole backed toward the hall where the water heater should have been. Racing down the ladder without being fully aware of what his arms and legs were doing, he felt the touch of panic lapping at the edges of his mind. He managed to keep moving and was soon joined by Paige in apartment 103.

The flashing lights and sirens of the police cars were getting closer. Cole only cast a quick look toward the approaching commotion when he felt Paige shove him into the living room. Burkis didn’t do any digging this time. Instead he shoved his face through the opening to rip directly into the first floor apartment. His thickly muscled frame was solid enough to crack the ceiling and send chunks of plaster to the floor. He hit the ground and immediately lunged forward to clamp Paige’s arm between his teeth.

She let out a short, piercing cry that contained as much surprise as pain.

Although Cole made some sort of noise as he rushed toward the werewolf, he couldn’t hear it over the drumming of his heartbeat and the dull impact of his spear being driven over and over into the tough meat along the side of Burkis’s neck.

The werewolf’s jaws hadn’t quite closed, but its face showed the strain of working to that end. Even in the dark hallway its eyes caught the stray bits of light being cast from outside to reflect it inward through a blue-gray prism. Tendons along the side of its mouth drew taut. Muscles sprouted where they were needed and its jaws strained a bit closer toward closing time.

Cole shifted his aim to keep from hitting the creature anywhere that might force it to bite down harder. He landed plenty of blows along Burkis’s shoulder and side, but didn’t have the power to push the spearhead in more than an inch or so. Suddenly, Burkis’s eyes snapped open and he let out a choked snarl. As the creature swung its head back, Paige pulled her arm free. Instead of the bloody stump Cole had been expecting, she dragged out a double-ended stake that had kept the werewolf’s jaws from closing while also digging into the top and bottom of its mouth. When it came out, the weapon brought a few of Burkis’s fangs along with it.

The werewolf howled and lashed out with a paw powerful enough to collapse a section of the hall. Dropping the moment she’d broken loose, Paige barely managed to dodge the swing. When Burkis jerked his head to one side, Cole saw Daniels hanging from something he’d stuck into the Full Blood’s cheek just below its right eye. The Nymar was flung into the closest wall, where he bounced and then dropped into a heap on the floor.

Since Paige was closer, Cole grabbed her by the left arm and tried to pull her away. “Wait, wait!” she said while tearing her arm from him. Swiping her hands along the floor as if looking for a contact lens, she picked up the broken werewolf teeth, showed them to Cole, and triumphantly announced, “Dibs!”

Although Burkis started to stand up, he staggered before making it all the way to his feet. Cole took the strongest stance he could and stuck the werewolf in the chest. It would have been a devastating blow on most anything else, but Burkis’s torso might as well have been rock covered in several inches of leather. The creature ignored him completely and gingerly touched the jagged piece of gleaming metal from which Daniels had been hanging a few seconds ago.

Since Paige couldn’t have trained him for this exact moment, Cole fell back on what little knowledge he had on the subject. In any video game, when the big strong thing was hurt, you needed to hit a spot that had already been damaged. Normally, Cole and every other game designer
was kind enough to mark that soft spot by a patch of glowing red or some sort of blinking light. In the real world, however, his only beacon was a charmed blade protruding from a monster’s face.

Peeling his hands from the grip of his spear, Cole held the weapon more like a sword and swung it at Burkis’s wounded cheek. The hit landed with all the impact of a whiffle bat on the creature’s fur, angering it even more. But when Cole swung again, the forked end of the spear scraped against the end of the Blood Blade and drove it deeper into the meat of Burkis’s cheek.

The roar that followed was something civilized man might have never heard before. It shook all there was and sent a dizzying fear through Cole that hit him like a battering ram. It might have actually been the Full Blood’s paw that knocked him to the floor, but something else dragged him toward the front door. He was still dizzy when he somehow got to his feet and raced from the apartment building.

“Cole! You with us?”

It was Paige’s voice. She was running at full speed and pulling him along with her. He snapped his head back and forth to find Daniels outpacing them by several yards. Considering all the crap the Nymar was carrying, that was a pretty impressive feat. Lights from the cop cars filled the air of the adjacent parking area.

“Where’d it go?” Cole asked. “Where’s the Full Blood?”

Paige had been breathing heavily, but her next few gasps were relieved sighs. “Daniels hurt it and then you hurt it more. It knocked you down and was gonna take your head off, but I pulled you out of the way. I think you hit your head on the wall because you were out of it for a little bit.”

“Where’s the Full Blood, Paige?”

They’d cut across a courtyard to arrive at the lot where the Cav was parked. Daniels was hopping around it like a six-year-old waiting for the bathroom door to open.

“After he took you out, Burkis jumped through the patio door,” she said as she unlocked the car and pulled open her door. “You two must have done a real job on him because he sure as hell didn’t want to fight anymore.”

Daniels dove into the backseat and Cole climbed in to sit up front next to Paige.

“Is he still here?” Cole asked.

Paige got the car running in a matter of seconds. Just after that, she pulled out of her space and threw it into gear. “The cops were shooting at him, but he’s got to be gone by now.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because the cops are still making a lot of noise. Dead men are a little quieter than that. Well, mostly.”

Now that he was sitting down and able to catch his breath, Cole could see more than just a few steps in front of him. The apartment complex had several little parking lots, and one of them swarmed with curious residents and some very anxious police officers. More sirens blared from the distance, which meant reinforcements were winding their way through the crooked streets of the subdivision.

Being careful not to get too close to the police, Paige circled around just enough to get a look at where the first two patrol cars had pulled in. Neither vehicle was in one piece. The front end of the car closest to Daniels’s building was flattened, and lights flashed at odd angles due to structural damage to the frame. The second car’s roof was sloped in a way that clearly marked where Burkis had stepped down onto the pavement. Remains from both windshields lay scattered on the surrounding pavement. Four uniformed officers stood near their cars. One motioned for the encroaching residents to stay back, while another spoke into her radio. The other two were still standing with their guns drawn, feet planted in a firing stance and gawking in the direction that Burkis must have gone.

Cole’s entire body felt fractured. Dull, throbbing pain swelled up from his right side and quickly bled into the rest of him. As if she’d read his aching thoughts, Paige asked, “Are you hurt?”

“Just banged up.”

“You’re bleeding. Reach under the seat for that kit. Take a dose of what’s in there just to be safe.”

Cole was just about to point out some of Paige’s injuries but she was already looking a little better. He reached under
his seat, found the small leather pouch and unzipped it. The pouch had probably been a travel kit for nail files and that sort of thing, but now held several small syringes. Since the labels marked with an N were Nymar antidote, he took one of the others, which contained the special concoction Skinners used for healing.

Perhaps it was the kit or the syringes, but he couldn’t help feeling like a junkie. “You sure I need this? I’m feeling okay.”

“You need to let it absorb into your system. Once you start producing it on your own, you won’t need half as many injections.”

Pausing with the needle poised over his arm, Cole asked, “Can’t I get addicted to this stuff?”

“Only if you take too much when you’re not hurt. Just do it.”

The syringe was half the size of a pencil and not even half full. The needle was about as thin as a hair. He didn’t feel so much as a sting, but could definitely tell the solution was doing its job after the injection. The breaths that followed were easier to pull in. The sore spots where all those punches had landed weren’t aching so badly, but his headache stayed put. Nothing was perfect.

Once she’d put the apartment complex behind her and pulled onto I-90, Paige floored the gas pedal.

“Shouldn’t we look for that thing?” Cole asked.

Daniels leaned forward and grabbed the backs of both seats. “The hell we will! We’re going back for Sally and then getting the hell away from here!”

Paige turned around to look directly into Daniels’s face when she said, “Both of you, shut up! Burkis got what he wanted and left, just like Canada. He’s long gone by now.”

Cole was still anxious. He looked in the mirror a few times, but there was nothing bounding down the street behind them, and the burning reaction from his scars had completely cooled off. Finally, he let out a sigh and slumped into his seat. “Right. Just like Canada. He was after the Blood Blade.”

“And Daniels gave it to him,” Paige said.

“No I didn’t.”

Ignoring the squeak from the backseat, Paige continued, “Cole, you happened to be in the spot where Gerald and Brad were picking up two of those blades and the Full Blood came to get them. You brought one back, so he tracked you here and came to get the second one.”

“If Blood Blades can kill those things, why would Burkis follow it around?”

“Probably so nobody else can have it.”

“But,” Daniels mumbled, “he doesn’t—”

“It’s not your fault,” Paige said as she tossed a wave over her shoulder. “We’re not angry. You did the best you could.”

The Nymar’s meek voice gained an edge when he said, “I saved your lives.”

Cole took a quick look back to find Daniels sitting with his arms crossed. “He’s right, Paige. Burkis was there for the Blood Blade and he got it, right in the damn face. Maybe the cops haven’t found him yet because he changed back after he lost too much blood. He may even be dead.”

“He’s not dead,” Paige said.

“How do you know?”

“Because,” she replied as she steered toward an interchange that led to I-80, “that would make things too easy.”

“I want to go back,” Daniels announced. “It’s the least you can do for me.”

Paige lifted her chin to look at him through the rearview mirror. “Your girlfriend is fine. I made sure of that myself, and Burkis has no reason to go back there. If you want to call her, go ahead, but we’re not going back there either.”

“Where are we going?” Cole asked. “Back to Raza Hill?”

Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, Paige dug out her phone with the other. “Nope.” Before Cole could ask another question, the call she’d made had already been answered. “Hey, Steph! How’s it going?…Yeah?…Well I just thought I’d give you a quick call to let you know we got the gift you sent…Oh, come on. You know the gift I mean. That guy from New York with the matching set of assholes
from your own personal collection…Don’t give me any of that. I know you sent them…Uh-huh.” When she paused this time, Paige looked over to Cole and made the yapping gesture with her free hand.

Cole chuckled uncomfortably and looked out the window. The weight of everything he’d done started to mash him into his seat like a bag of rocks the size of Minnesota being slowly lowered onto the back of his neck. He had some trouble drawing his next breath, so he rolled down the window.

“Why would they come on their own, Steph? Tell me that,” Paige said. “Can’t think of a reason why they’d do that? That’s because they
wouldn’t
come on their own. They’re your buddies, and you’re the one who knew about the man from New York.” Paige listened for a few seconds and nearly clipped a minivan as she swerved into the next lane. “That’s better. It feels good to ’fess up, doesn’t it? Hey, speaking of confessions…”

The bag of rocks pushed down on Cole a bit more. Conversely, Paige was doing her best not to keep her smirk from bleeding into her voice when she said, “You know those two Nymar I was talking about? They’re dead…Yeah, we’re sure. Dead as Abe Lincoln. And that guy from New York? He’s a Full Blood. Send anyone you like down to Schaumburg or you could just flip on the news. You’ll hear all about it. What’s that?…”