Howling Legion (Skinners, Book 2) (35 page)

“Let’s just try an experiment,” Cole said as he clicked to an online search and typed in the words,
Kansas City riot monsters.

Within .28 seconds, several pages of results came up. Some were in the vein of, “Hundreds claim to see monsters in streets of KC” and “rottweilers or werewolves?” while others had labels such as, “Monster pictures proven to be fake” and “Werewolf hoax turns into riot.”

When Paige looked over at him, Cole was beaming and nodding as if he’d just cured a disease. “Nice job,” she said.

“Nice? Just
nice?”

“KC has been quiet and the press won’t stop talking about sick dogs, but you did a very nice job with adding to the confusion.” She got up and patted him on the head. “Now if you’ll get out of my room, I need to pack.”

“Pack for what?”

“A trip to Kansas City. I want to check in on those Mongrels.”

Cole logged out of his e-mail account and walked toward
her door. “You’re going to see Officer Stanze, aren’t you?”

“He was a big help,” she said with a shrug. “And a pretty nice guy.”

“Staying in the good graces of the authorities for a change, huh?”

Flicking her eyebrows up and putting on a dirty little smile, she said, “I guess you could call it that.”

“Wait. What?”

She had more than enough strength in her left hand to shove him out of her room and shut the door behind him. “You stood toe-to-toe with a Full Blood, so you can handle Chicago for a few days,” she shouted through the door. “Check on Stephanie tomorrow. I don’t like the…”

Although Paige continued to issue orders, Cole turned away from her room and walked back through the kitchen. After having been gone for a while, the door to his freezer took some coaxing before it swung open. Once he was inside his metallic, somewhat cool living space, he sat on the edge of his cot and sighed, “Just because I sleep in a freezer doesn’t mean I’m stuck here like some piece of meat.”

He picked up his phone from a stack of plastic crates that served as a table and pressed one of the speed dial buttons.

After two rings the connection was made and a voice said, “MEG Branch 40, what can I do for y—Cole! Sorry about that. Just looked at the caller ID. What’s up?”

“Hey, Stu. Is Abby around?”

“She’s listening to some EVPs.”

“Can I talk to her?”

“Sure. Hold on.”

A few minutes of static was finally interrupted by a click and a tired, vaguely interested, “Hello?”

“Hi, Abby. This is Cole Warnecki. Remember me?”

“Yes.”

“I was wondering if you were free some night. Maybe for dinner or something? I’d like to hear some of your ghost stories. Heh.”

“Like…a date?” Abby asked in a more interested voice.

“Sure. Yeah. That’s what I had in mind. How about it?”

“Welllll…”

Cole pulled in a breath, during which he reminded himself that he wasn’t some nervous kid wringing his hands. All right, so maybe he was a little nervous, but his hands were steady. “Look, I’m not a stalker or anything but you sound really nice and I’d like to treat you to a meal. We can swap weird work anecdotes. It’ll be fun.”

After a pause that stopped just short of unbearable, Abby said, “I’d like to hear more about Digital Dreamers.”

Cole smiled in a way that used muscles he’d all but forgotten about.

“There’s just one thing,” she added.

Bracing for the worst, he asked, “Yeah?”

“Do you even know where Branch 40 is?”

“If you’d like to meet, just tell me when and where. I’ll be there.”

“Really? Wow. How about the diner across the street from me in fifteen minutes?”

“You might have to work with me a bit more than that,” Cole said.

“I know. I’m just messin’ with ya. Got a pen?”

Cole wrote down the where and discussed the when. They talked for about two more hours and then met online in one of the roughest games of
Sniper Ranger 3
he’d ever played. After signing off, he downloaded a few maps and plotted a course that allowed him to sample some of Abby’s favorite chop suey on his way to the Digital Dreamers offices in Seattle. It had the makings of a very interesting road trip.

The chamber was so hot and cramped that it might as well have been carved from a living thing. Mud was caked onto the rounded cement walls over layers of mold and multicolored, multilingual profanities. Daylight poured into one end of the tunnel, along with sounds of passing cars and the rumble of planes from the nearby Kansas City International Airport.

A few people in dirty clothes kept even dirtier faces turned away from the trio huddled just beyond the reach of the sun. Every so often the vagrants would sneak a quick glance into the tunnel to find lean figures in the darkness looking back at them with wide, inhuman eyes. When the things in the tunnel spoke, the vagrants hurried off to find their shade elsewhere.

“Do you think Ben will be all right?”

Kayla glared toward the tunnel’s opening for a few more seconds until it became clear the human inhabitants wouldn’t be coming back. She and her companion remained in their true shapes so their senses would be at their peak. Her squat, oval head turned toward the shadows and she narrowed her round, multilayered eyes to study a figure that lay on its side. Her small, triangle-shaped ears perked at the sound of the figure’s shallow yet persistent breaths. “He should be fine, Max,” Kayla whispered. “Ben could burrow faster than any of you with one arm tied behind
his back. He will become even better when he learns to compensate for his loss.”

“But he doesn’t belong at the front of the tunnels any longer. I do!”

Kayla’s lips curled as a hiss passed between her rounded, knitting needle teeth. “This is not the time for campaigning. You did well and the others will take that into consideration. If Ben hears you saying these things while his wounds are still fresh, you’ll have to do a lot more than talk to prove your worth.”

Like the other burrowers, Max had a long, lean body, short arms, and stout legs. His narrow head seemed to be whittled down to a curved beak. Fidgeting nervously, his leathery eyelids flicked open and shut like vertical flaps over solid black orbs. When his brow furrowed, he narrowed his eyes down to a pair of dark creases. It was tough even for other Mongrels to tell if the expression was of shame, deference, or frustration.

Claws scraped against concrete as the wounded shapeshifter stirred on the floor. He curled his damaged body in the muck and then fell back into a pattern of shallow panting, accented by the occasional grunt.

In a low whisper, Max asked, “Do you think it’s true?”

Kayla continued to watch the prone shape.

“What the Full Blood said,” Max pressed. “About humans beings turned into Half Breeds, while we can become like them. Stronger. Immortal. Do you think it’s true?”

“I honestly don’t know,” Kayla replied. “We can ask this one when he wakes up.”

Max stretched his neck toward the prone figure and slunk forward until he could see Liam’s partially changed form. The chunks of fur that still sprouted from his chest were graying and crusted with blood. An ugly puncture wound marred his ribs, and the right side of his face was all but obliterated. “It was my idea to take him. I want to be the one to—”

Snapping her head to stare directly into Max’s eyes, Kayla hissed, “You’ll be the one to take him somewhere he can’t do any more damage. Dig down as far as you can go, make a
chamber and plant him there. If there was truth in his words, we’ll find it before the Full Blood regains his strength. If not, we drink the marrow in his bones and bury the remaining pieces in a hundred different holes across ten different states.” She slowly turned to study Liam’s twitching body some more. “Now take this murderer away from our city. If you are to have a place at the front of our tunnels, you’ll find a spot that Ben cannot reach.”

Although he seemed reluctant at first, Max opened his beak and twisted it into the closest semblance of a smile he could manage. “I know just the place.”