Teeth of Beasts (Skinners) (22 page)

“Crazy bastards!” Cole yelled. Turning to Paige he added, “
All
of you!”

“Just buckle up and keep your eyes on Burkis.”

Although Paige was driving without any regard for traffic laws or human life, she wasn’t doing much to stand out from the rest of the pack vying for lane space. Even the cars that ambled along at a leisurely pace sped up when they were about to be passed. Once she managed to get by them, they slowed as if grudgingly admitting to a loss. Looking for a werewolf amid all of that was a welcome distraction.

They’d just crossed Baptist Church Road when Cole’s scars alerted him to the Full Blood’s proximity. Straining to see through the stark contrast of lights and shadow on both sides of the street, he caught occasional glimpses of the creature bounding from a rooftop or disappearing behind a billboard. Just when he’d lost sight of the beast, they drove past a large theater illuminated by several sets of colored lights. A glowing white sign close to the street spelled out movie names and times in short black letters. A familiar shape perched upon that sign, dressed in the tattered remnants of a white shirt and dark sweatpants.

“There he is!” Cole said.

Burkis’s leaner upright form was better suited for scaling surfaces or balancing on narrow ledges. His limbs were extended past the point where he could pass for some lunatic who’d climbed up onto the marquee, and if there still was any doubt as to what he was, his coat of long, dark brown fur was an even bigger giveaway. When the Cavalier closed in on him, Burkis sniffed the air and jumped off the sign as if he’d been launched by a catapult.

“He’s leading us down the street,” Cole said while reaching under his seat to grab the little black case containing his GPS. After switching it on, he waited for it to receive a signal from the satellites.

“What the hell are you doing?” Paige asked. “You think you can look up ‘werewolf’ under Points of Interest?”

“I was just gonna pull up the map and see where this street goes.”

“I
know
where it goes,” she barked. “I used to live here, remember?”

“Then maybe I can see if there’s any traffic or construction up ahead. Does your inborn city-sense get minute-to-minute updates?”

“You can see traffic updates on that thing?”

Cole nodded and rubbed the top of the GPS without smearing the touch screen. “Romana’s got the deluxe package. Ah. See? Looks like there’s some construction a little further up.”

“There’s always construction,” she snapped. “What about traffic?”

“On the right.”

“How bad is it? Should I detour?”

“No!” Cole said as he pointed at his side window as though there was still glass in the frame. “On the right. There he is!”

Paige leaned over the top of the steering wheel and spotted Burkis leaping down from atop a gas station sign to land in the parking lot and shift into his barrel-chested, four-legged form. His ribs were hidden beneath a thick layer of fur and his chest nearly scraped against the cement as he
darted across the busy street. Whether out of reflex or as a warning, Burkis snapped at a few cars that honked at him while driving by. To those drivers’ credit, they seemed just as annoyed to let him get ahead of them as they’d been when anyone else tried to pass.

Since it was obvious that Burkis wasn’t trying to lose them, Paige drove the rest of the way without risking life, limb, or any more police involvement. She remained with the rest of the cars, which put her well above the posted speed limit. The werewolf attracted plenty of attention, but moved too quickly for anyone to get more than a fleeting glimpse. After crossing Watson Road and passing under I-44, they headed north. The large, bounding creature darted from one side of the street to another, sought periodic refuge in the shadows, and finally hunkered down to leap effortlessly into the inky sky. This time, however, Cole couldn’t see where Burkis landed.

“Shit,” he said as he reflexively looked down at the GPS screen. He looked up twice as fast, hoping he wouldn’t catch any more grief from Paige for trying to use the device to spot a landmark that obviously wasn’t in the system. “I think he’s gone.”

Paige settled into her seat. “I don’t think so. He could have left us behind at any time, but made sure we were headed this way.”

They kept driving, but the heat in Cole’s scars cooled at an alarming rate. As they continued north, traffic snarled up thanks to construction that blocked off two of the lanes. Just when he thought he might hop out of the car and try running ahead a few blocks, he felt a jolt of unnatural fire.

“I see him,” Paige said as she flicked on her turn signal and veered to the right.

Burkis was in his human form, but his clothes were ripped and barely hanging on his sinewy frame. There were a few other people near him on the sidewalk, but they were too wrapped up in yelling at each other or into their phones to notice the man who watched the street with icy, predator’s eyes. Once the car had pulled to a stop along the curb between two others, Cole climbed out and slipped his harness
over both shoulders. Thanks to the smaller size of the spear, it didn’t make much of a bump under the baggy flannel shirt he tossed on over it.

There was a set of railroad tracks nearby, complete with a station that looked like something from a quaint little toy train set. Most of the other buildings were cast from a similar mold. Cozy houses had been turned into homey shops, giving the area a cute, almost delicate feel. “What should we do if he tries to kill us?” Cole asked.

Paige walked alongside him and flexed her right hand to somewhere near its normal range of motion. “Kill him back.”

After crossing the street, they still needed to walk for another half block before finally catching up with Burkis. “All right,” she snapped. “Why drag us all the way to Kirkwood?”

Burkis turned away from the train tracks to go down a narrow side street. All of the friendly looking shops were closed for the night, but Cole could hear music and raucous voices coming from what he guessed were a few local bars. Uninterested in two-for-one drafts or Jell-O shots, Burkis headed straight to a gazebo built next to a garden supply store on East Argonne Drive. Between the store and the gazebo were bags of soil stacked near a selection of cement lawn statues that were either not valuable enough to be locked up or too heavy to steal. Behind those things were the bodies of three of the Mongrels that had welcomed Cole and Paige to town outside of Dressel’s pub. A fourth lay buried at the bottom of the pile. Unlike the felines that Cole had seen before, the bottom Mongrel had a ratlike tail, two sets of wings evenly spaced along its back, and was covered in a slick layer of mud.

Burkis crouched to grab the base of the Mongrel’s right forewing and flipped it over to reveal yet another carcass. This one was a Half Breed. Its lean body and gnarled snout were almost as distinctive as the knotted muscle holding together the skewed, broken bones beneath its pasty flesh.

“This wretch had just fed,” Burkis said as he gazed down at the Half Breed. “It’s one of the few to make it out of Kansas City, and I’ve been tracking it to see if it might lead
me to any more. Once I was certain there were no dens in this city, I was going to put it down myself. That’s when these three descended upon it.”

“Didn’t anyone else see all of this?” Cole asked as he looked around. Cars drove along the street, but were more concerned with finding a parking space than what was going on behind a garden supply store. Pedestrians stayed on the main walkways and were barely paying enough attention to keep from tripping over cracks in the sidewalk.

“There wasn’t much to see,” Burkis replied. “The wretch was barely able to keep its head up, and the Mongrels fell over the moment they drew its blood.”

“So the Half Breed was dying and the others followed soon after,” Paige said. “Sounds like they could have been poisoned.”

“Spoken by someone who knows such cowardly tactics all too well,” Burkis sneered. “Now look closer.” He grabbed the Half Breed’s throat with a hand that had suddenly sprouted thick, talonlike claws. Hooking a couple of the claws into a flap of skin on the Half Breed’s neck, he pulled it aside to reveal the underlying muscle.

Half Breeds always stank, but the inside of a dead one redefined the term. While Cole turned his head and willed himself not to puke, Paige used a baton to hold its neck open. The specially treated wood creaked in her right hand to form a flat-bladed machete that was a distinct improvement over her last few attempts.

“This looks like wet tree bark,” she said as she scraped the tip of the blade against the hardened, leathery surface. “Feels like it too. And there’s hardly any blood.”

The Half Breed had the mass of a small man, but Burkis lifted it as if it was just another sack of manure from a nearby pile. “Its blood is there.”

Cole took his spear from its harness and used it to scrape the muddy sludge caked upon the ground. “This is the same kind of gunk that came out of Peter Walsh,” he said. “There were some men in jail across the river who were leaking it from their eyes. So was Henry.”

“I doubt that,” Burkis huffed. “Henry is a Full Blood, and
we are not affected by Pestilence…or War or Famine or even Death. You’re too ignorant to have caused such a plague, but there’s one Skinner whose hands are particularly muddy.”

Gritting her teeth, she said, “Let me guess. Jonah Lancroft?”

“I’ve heard that name whispered by Mongrels and Henry alike, but neither of those are very reliable sources. Lancroft was a brilliant man, and my guess is that some of his journals have been discovered by an element that would be considered undesirable even by Skinner standards.” Dropping the Half Breed onto the pile, he nudged the Mongrels with his toe. “These came from Malia’s pack. With Pestilence known to be linked to a Skinner, these deaths may just convince her to even the score at your expense.”

“And why would you be so kind as to warn us about that?” Cole asked.

“Because now that Henry has been made aware of his full capabilities, it won’t be long before humans, Nymar, and shapeshifters alike will experience death on an epic scale.”

Paige lowered her weapons an inch or so but remained on her guard. “So this stuff is activated by Henry?”

“Or any Mind Singer, I would assume. Since there has only been three in the past two hundred and sixty years, Henry should be the only one you need to worry about. But that brings me back to the problem at hand. I have heard the Mind Singer repeatedly since I have come to this city. His voice is strongest here, but his scent is not.”

“Maybe he’s somewhere else,” Cole offered. “What’s the range on psychic transmissions anyway?”

“Henry’s talent is unfocused,” Burkis continued. “He reaches out to all of us with thoughts that are nothing but wild screams. Now, he whispers to unleash this poison among our kind while turning yours into plague-infested rats.”

“Full Bloods don’t give a shit about Half Breeds,” Paige said, “and I seriously doubt you’ve made a truce with Mongrels. Pestilence has changed from the Mud Flu into Half Breed poison, so you’re just worried that you’ll be the next one to feel the sting.”

Burkis lowered himself to one knee as his entire body shifted into a taller, bulkier form. His face stretched into a long, tapered snout filled with teeth that were angled back like barbs on an arrow. By the time he’d backed into the shadows beneath the gazebo, he was something close to the beast that had almost separated Cole from his head on more than one occasion. He pulled in a deep breath and rolled it around the back of his throat. “The plague is changing. Once it becomes deadly to us, we will have no choice but to kill every carrier we can find. The Mind Singer is the spark, the deliverer and the answer. Since Liam is missing, the responsibility of maintaining this territory falls solely to me.”

“Awww,” Cole chided. “Poor little werewolf is all alone. Cursed to live through the ages with nobody to play with.”

“Wait a second,” Paige snapped. “You said Liam, as in the Full Blood from KC?”

Burkis’s intense glare was more than enough to confirm that.

“So he’s missing. Not dead.”

A barely perceptible nod came from the Full Blood.

“I saw him die in Kansas City,” Paige insisted. “I punched holes in him myself. Cole knocked him out with a car and the Mongrels ripped him to shreds while they…” Her eyes narrowed and she wheeled around to swing her machete straight through one of the support beams of the gazebo. “Son of a bitch!” she shouted, drawing more attention from the pedestrians on the street than the werewolf standing a few paces away. “Why the hell wouldn’t those Mongrels finish him off?”

“Perhaps they have taken him somewhere else to feast on him slowly, just as you Skinners would have loved to tear him apart and use the pieces for yourselves.” When he said that, Burkis displayed fangs that had thickened into ivory stalagmites. The ones that Paige had knocked out before heading to KC were only slightly shorter than the rest.

“They said they would bury him,” Cole reminded them. “They were supposed to suffocate him in the ground or stuff him somewhere he couldn’t be found. Is that why you can’t find him?”

In a flat tone, Burkis said, “I will find him and that’s all any Skinner needs to know. The only reason I’m speaking to you now instead of pulling your bones out through your mouths is because, without your Blood Blade, you are no threat to me. Maintain your territory on your own or I’ll be forced to do it for you.” The more he spoke, the larger Burkis became. While other animals might raise their hackles or puff their chests to assert their dominance, a Full Blood simply became larger than their opponent like a wall of heavy clouds filling a darkened sky.

Paige stepped forward to declare, “We don’t do chores for Full Bloods. You want Henry so bad? You find him. Why would we give a shit if this disease grows strong enough to kill you?”

“Henry’s Pestilence has only started taking root,” Burkis said. “His voice needs to be silenced before this entire continent is infected. I have already been to both coasts and can tell you the stench of this plague has spread well beyond the cities you protect.”