Howling Legion (Skinners, Book 2) (20 page)

The Full Blood leapt back, but wasn’t able to get far enough away before the Half Breeds clamped onto his legs.
One of the wretches bit down on the bear trap and was tossed through the air when the Full Blood finally shook loose of the metal jaws.

As much as he would have liked to watch the bigger werewolf wrestle with those things for a while, Cole had already spent too much time separated from Paige. She was still tangling with one Half Breed, but a straight, solid jab from Cole’s spear was enough to back it off. When that werewolf turned to face him, it caught a sickle blade straight across its jugular.

Paige grabbed the Half Breed’s ear, pulled its head back and nearly sawed it from its shoulders. Recognizing the glassy look in her eyes, Cole pulled her away and said, “Come on! We need to get out of here.”

She blinked a few times as if looking at the campgrounds for the first time. “How’d you get those Half Breeds off of me?”

“I sicced them on the big guy.”

Paige had no trouble spotting the Full Blood. It contended with the Half Breeds by wildly swinging his arms to toss the smaller werewolves into the air or ripping them to shreds. When one refused to be shaken loose, the Full Blood gripped the gnarled creature by the head and slammed it down while letting out a bellowing howl. As he ground that creature’s skull into paste, the Full Blood cast his eyes at all the other Half Breeds and roared in a way that forced them to scamper back while twisting their heads aside to bare their throats to him. The minute he ran out of breath, the Half Breeds again caught the scent of the bait mixture that was on him and renewed their attack.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Cole said.

Paige dusted herself off and discovered several gaping wounds in the process. Grabbing a plastic syringe from her belt, she injected the healing serum and growled, “We’re not leaving.” She waited for a Half Breed to get ripped apart and ran in to attack the spot on the Full Blood that the gangly werewolf had been chewing.

The huge, ebon creature started to climb onto its hind legs, but was dragged down by the weight of the Half Breeds. He
howled a command for the Half Breeds to back off, which gave Paige a chance to drive her modified weapon in again. This time Cole lent his spear to the cause. Twisting around to bat away the two humans, the black beast left himself open to the persistent Half Breeds. When one of the wiry animals sank its teeth into the spot where the Skinners’ modified weapons had hit, the Full Blood lifted his head to the moon and screamed. Every Half Breed tried to join in with howls of their own, which turned into frenzied yelps as the Full Blood launched itself into the air.

By the time its paws hit the ground, the Full Blood had already shifted to its more compact form. It disappeared in a thick blur of motion, taking the last of the Half Breeds with him.

“God
damn
it!” Paige shouted. “Grab one of these bodies and take it to the car. Bring back that lighter fluid from the trunk.”

Cole surveyed the area, now a bloodied landscape of gnarled bodies and sprung bear traps. The soil had been churned up by so many different sets of claws that the ground itself looked completely different from when they’d arrived. Even the campfire was a sputtering relic of what it had been an hour ago. “How the hell do we explain this?” he asked. “What do we say to the cops? They’ll be here after all that shooting!
Some
one had to see what happened!”

Stepping up to glare directly into Cole’s eyes, Paige told him, “We didn’t come here to explain anything to anyone. If someone saw what happened, they can explain however the hell they want. If the cops get here quick enough to stop us, we tell them we were attacked by wild animals. There’s no law against that.”

“How do we answer all of their questions?”

“We won’t have to if you get that lighter fluid and help me torch the rest of these things!” Paige snapped. “Now pick up a damn body and drag it to the car!”

Cole didn’t have much to say to her after that. After pulling in a few deep breaths and wiping the sweat from his eyes, he picked up a damn body and dragged it to the car.

The closest thing to a cop that Paige and Cole passed on their way out of the nature preserve was a terrified park ranger sitting in a state-owned SUV. The ranger flashed his lights, hopped out of his vehicle, and waved his arms like he was cleared for takeoff. “You headed into the campgrounds?” he asked after Paige rolled down her window.

After all that had happened, she did an admirable job of looking like she was out for a drive and not hauling a dead werewolf. “No,” she said. “I heard shooting coming from back there, so I just wanted to leave.”

“There’s a hell of a lot more than shooting. Some pack of animals tore through here and overturned a Winnebago. If you see anything along the roads, don’t stop. Just keep moving and get to the highway. The police are on their way. Jesus, are you two hurt?”

“I think there’s a fire back there,” Paige told him. “You might want to take a look at that.” Even though the ranger had something else to say to her, he let it go when he caught sight of the flickering glow coming from the nearby campsite. When he looked back at her, Paige had already rolled up her window and was driving away.

Cole twisted around to look behind the Cavalier at the park ranger gawking at the fires they’d set and fumbling with his radio. There weren’t many carcasses in one piece, but they were all ablaze thanks to the lighter fluid that had
sprayed on them. “He might have taken down our license plate.”

“Let him. We’ll change them when we pick up Daniels. Give him a call to let him know we’re coming. Also, tell him to have everything ready to go. We need to find somewhere else to stay.”

“You think the fire will get too bad?” Cole asked.

“That ranger will get to it before any of it spreads too far. Werewolves are too damn greasy to burn for very long.”

“So that’s it, huh? I guess we just wait a few days and bait the rest of those things to some other field? Do we at least get a few days off?”

She glanced over at him and grumbled, “Sometimes I don’t know when you’re kidding.”

“What if I’m not kidding?”

“Then you’re just an idiot. Here, take this and get to work.”

Cole nearly cleared his seat when he felt the knife fall onto his lap.

“Now let’s see how well you skin that Half Breed,” she said. “Get at least two good-sized pieces of hide from its body and pull as many teeth as you can. I’ll take all the claws too.” She grinned and looked over at him. “Dumping that bait on them was a hell of an idea.”

“It didn’t work as well as I thought it would. I was kind of hoping for a lot more ripping and tearing and not so much bowing and whining from those Half Breeds.”

“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 was 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.”