Vampire Uprising (16 page)

A gunshot blasted through the kitchen, sending a bullet past Abel’s ear and thumping into Lyssa’s chin. Her teeth had come so close to their target that Abel felt them take a chunk away from the tip of his nose. As soon as the Mongrel flopped onto her side, she shifted into her human form and crawled away.

More gunshots followed as the West Coast Skinners took aim at the biggest clay pigeon in the room.

“No!” Jessup shouted. “You’ll just—”

“Yes!” Liam growled as he rose up to his full height and bumped the back of his head against the ceiling. “Yes, yes,
yes!”

The bullets pounded against his chest, only to become entangled within his fur and glance off the near impenetrable hull of his flesh. Rage burned in his eye and thick ropes of saliva hung from his chin when he stretched out both arms as if to embrace his attackers. The wounded patch on his arm was still messy, but the flap of skin was held in place by a thick paste of blood. When one bullet dug into that wound, it caused Liam’s eye to glaze over and his claws to move in a series of horrific, blindingly fast swings.

Jessup and most of the Skinners that had rushed up the stairs in the first wave did their best to slash at the Full Blood while keeping their heads and limbs connected to their torsos. Abel, Selina, and Maddy dealt with the Mongrel that struck in hit-and-run attacks that brought her from one end of the house to the other.

“This is our chance!” Jessup shouted over the chaos that had become his entire world. “All of us together can take this Full Blood down!”

“That’s the spirit!” Liam roared as he sent one of the West Coast Skinners into the ceiling with a powerful upward swipe of his arm.

The next wave to surge up from the basement were clad
in leather armor from Lancroft’s personal collection and brought extra pieces of armor ranging from vests to cloaks along with them. Whenever they had a chance, the more vulnerable Skinners took turns falling back to pull on the first bit of protection they could find. Some of them were saved by Lancroft’s handiwork and others were quickly ripped into pieces and thrown against several walls.

“Ready?” Jessup shouted as he prodded Liam with the twin points of his V-shaped weapon.

A few of the Skinners moved with him, but the rest were too busy just trying to stay alive. After deflecting a few incoming swipes and ducking under a snapping set of hellish jaws, Jessup again shouted, “Ready?” The other Skinners near Liam backed up while taking a few swings to provide some cover, so Jessup shouted,
“Go!”

Everyone in the kitchen closed in around Liam, gripping their weapons in bloody fists. They screamed like barbarians storming a castle gate, and Liam responded in kind. Instead of trying to defend against all of the incoming attackers, he grabbed the closest one’s head in his hands, crushed his skull with enough force to drive his claws into her brain, and swung the twitching body at the others. Having cleared a partial path, Liam moved toward the front half of the house.

In the front bedroom, Abel and Selina traded blows with Lyssa. The feline Mongrel kept her center of gravity low and gripped the floor with talonlike claws. Her wide, triangular head bobbed and snapped from side to side to avoid Abel’s blades and Selina’s wooden pike. As soon as Maddy entered the room, the Mongrel put her down with a savage blow that severed the hamstring in her right leg. Between that and the pain of the wound, Maddy was out cold when she hit the floor. When both remaining Skinners came at her at once, Lyssa jumped to the side, grabbed onto the wall and sprung at them from another angle. Her claws ripped through half of Selina’s face and her body knocked Abel to the floor.

“Down,” Abel said calmly as he took a blind horizontal swing.

Ignoring the pain from the shallow tears running all the way down her cheek, Selina pressed herself to the cheap tan carpet as her partner’s knife whistled through the air above her. Although the blade didn’t hit anything, the one in Abel’s other hand raked across Lyssa’s side and sent the Mongrel scampering into the farthest corner.

Abel sidled along his wall, keeping the Mongrel in front of him and his partner to his right. He eased a hand to his belt, touched the hilt of the third knife sheathed there, drew it and tossed it in a snapping motion. The blade turned once in the air and stuck into the wall after missing the Mongrel by less than an inch.

“We gotta keep this thing in here with us,” Selina said. “It sounds like everyone else has enough on their plate without something else to worry about.”

“Always did like to set your sights high,” Abel mused.

The basement echoed with sounds of battle filtering down from the upper level. Jory scrambled to collect weapons while piling on as many layers of armor as he could. “Shit,” he grunted as Liam’s bellowing roar shook the entire house over his head. When that was followed by the heavy impacts of bodies hitting the floor, he snarled, “Shit, shit, shit! You two get up there!”

Paul and Tru were in the workshop as well. He carried a shotgun and she had a varnished sword that had runes etched into one side of the blade.

“Is that thing loaded with them new rounds Paige brought from Chicago?” Jory asked.

“They’re special rounds,” Paul replied, “but not that special. They’ll probably just piss a Full Blood off.”

“Too late for that. Take this, get the hell up there and help.”

Although Paul caught the wooden weapon that was tossed to him, he didn’t seem anxious to use it. “What the hell is this? A pool cue?”

“It’s all that’s left. It’s been treated, so it’ll damage that thing.”

“Damage it like all the others are damaging it?” Tru asked.

Even for a Nymar, Paul looked pale. “Yeah. Screw that. We’re supposed to stay down here and protect this stuff, so that’s what we’re doing.”

Jory drew a long cleaver from a scabbard hanging from his belt. As soon as the thorns in the handle cut into his palms, a spike protruded from the handle to curve into a thick hook. “Suit yourself. If that thing gets down here, you two are the only ones left. You guys are braver than I thought.”

“Wait,” Tru said. “There’s something under us.”

“Yeah!” Paul replied hopefully. “The other basement! We can get down there!”

Jory held his ground as a rumble passed by the wall at the base of the stairs and crackled through the floor. “Was that a tremor?”

Pointing toward the Skipping Temple, Paul said, “It’s moving that way.” Even as he raced in that direction, the tremor died down.

“It’s still moving,” Jory said. “It must have started in the yard and is going deeper. Aw shit! The subbasement! You two, come with me!”

There was no allowance in Jory’s tone for back talk. It was a command that the two Nymar obeyed immediately. Also, with gunshots blasting through the upper portion of the house amid Liam’s roar, any reason to get farther away from the stairs leading to the kitchen was a good one.

As they went through the temple, Jordan slipped between the beads and asked, “What’s going on? Why all the shooting?”

Jory turned as if he was going to shoot the nymph where she stood. “Never mind about the shooting,” he told her. “Just warm that curtain up or start singing or do whatever the hell you need to do because we’re gonna have to get out of here quick.”

“Why? What’s wrong? Tell me!”

“The big bad wolf’s blowing our house down, that’s what. Now figure a way out of here before we’re all dead!”

Jory and the two Nymar ran into the dissection room, through the secret door, and down the stairs that led to the subbasement.

Jordan started to hum.

As the Skinners hurried down into the brick hallway at the lowest level of the house, Jory, Tru, and Paul were surrounded by the scraping of claws against the other side of the subterranean walls. It veered away from them and traveled in another direction, but the Skinners didn’t have the means to follow it. There was only one way down the hall, so that’s where they went. Before long the scraping returned.

“Sounds like it’s all around us,” Tru said.

Jory’s eyes were almost shut in concentration. “No,” he breathed. “It’s coming from there.” He used the cleaver to point at one of the cells about a quarter of the way down on the left side of the hall, where a gritty cloud of dirt rolled out from between the bars like smoke.

All three of them broke into a run so they could get to the cell before something had the chance to dig its way out. It wasn’t until they were within ten feet of the smoke that they realized it had been loosened from the ground beneath the bars as well as the wall around them. Suddenly, the wolf-digger hybrid Mongrel darted from the hole it had created in an awkward, waddling run. Its thick bony paws were capped with wide claws. Pure black eyes glared out from beneath heavily ridged brows that shifted into a more canine alignment before its rear end had emerged from the broken floor. The Mongrel charged directly at the Skinners, unmindful or simply unconcerned with the weapons they bore.

Jory, Tru, and Paul squared off against it as the fight two floors above them raged on. With all that noise filling the house and basement, the rumble of continued digging was easy to miss.

At the farthest end of the brick hallway, something else churned beneath the floor. Unlike the wild scraping that had announced the hybrid’s entrance, this was quicker and more systematic as it buckled the floor beneath the last darkened cell. After several attempts to dislodge the bricks, the digging moved one cell over, where the bricks were pushed aside by a set of strong, flat hands emerging from the dirt. Max poked his narrow snout up from the shadows, blinked
a set of vertical eyelids and wriggled out of the hole he’d dug. Randolph emerged soon after, pulling himself out with powerful if drastically constricted paws. He couldn’t get out of the hole fast enough before shaking the pebbles and grit from his coat like a dog sloughing off the rain.

The cell was the size of a closet and reeked of excrement from more than one species. Iron bars were fitted into a frame with a door so narrow that a normal man would have to turn sideways in order to pass. Randolph shifted into a form that was compact and upright. His fur became a thick mat over flesh that looked dense as tire rubber, his movements stiff and his features becoming blocky and indistinct. The only thing that remained of the man known as Mr. Burkis were the crystalline gray-blue eyes staring out from the primitive face.

His compact form moved easily through the narrow opening. In the darkness his thick, dark brown fur made it easy for him to remain unseen by the Skinners who were already distracted at the other end of the hall. He approached the neighboring cell, placed one hand upon the bars and immediately pulled it back with a pained hiss. One quick glance at the rusted iron allowed him to pick out the Skinner runes etched into the iron that had scorched his fingers.

“Are you Kawosa?” Randolph asked in a voice that sounded as if it had been strained and compacted along with the rest of his body’s mass.

The creature in the cell kept its back pressed against a wall. At first its large unblinking eyes were simple reflective surfaces in the shadows. Then they became darker, redder, and finally took the same blue gray color as Randolph’s. “You are Full Blood,” the creature said in a voice that was smooth as milky honey.

“When did the Skinner capture you?”

“Since I cannot see the moon or sun, I do not know how many days have passed.”

“Answer me. Are you Kawosa?”

The creature took no notice of the battle raging in the hall. He was too enthralled with the sight in front of him to care
about rumblings in the distance. “There have been a people who called me by that name,” it replied.

“How did the Skinners catch one like you? If you are Kawosa, such a thing shouldn’t be possible.”

“Do you think I am a god?”

Randolph had to think about that. He blinked heavily, as if the weight of his answer pressed upon his brow. He considered lying to the creature but gave up on that almost immediately. “I have heard stories. Legends. Some say you are a god or maybe a demon. But some say the same about our kind. All I know is that we need something to tip the scales back in our favor.”

“Or,” Kawosa mused while narrowing keen eyes, which had now become violet, and slinking forward upon bony legs, “do you just want to keep me away from the Skinners? It simply wouldn’t do for them to sink their hooks and knives into me, now would it? That is, after they found a way to kill me or simply waited long enough for me to die. Just like they did with poor Henry. Do you even know what horrors Lancroft had to inflict to kill him?”

With every word, Kawosa’s voice took a new tone; a concoction that changed as new ingredients were sprinkled into the mix.

“Can you break these bars, Full Blood?” For the first time since he’d stepped forward, Kawosa’s eyes disappeared as he closed them and drew a long breath. They snapped open, green and vibrant, as an incomplete set of crooked fangs were displayed beneath raised lips. “You’re the one they called Standing Bear. Could it be you’re working for the Skinners now too?”

“You know better than that. I’ve been trying to find you for years, and all I discovered was that your trail ended when it crossed with Jonah Lancroft’s. Only recently has he been found and dealt with.”

“Yes,” the creature sighed. “I nearly got a taste of the woman who did the dealing. So sweet.”

“If we stay here much longer, we will be forced to fight these Skinners as well as any more that come to help them. And then there are the humans.”

“You fear them?”

Randolph took a moment to gauge his response. “They have numbers and technology at their advantage. I don’t know how much of that you know about.”

“They’ve always had their toys. How do you plan on getting me past these bars?” Kawosa asked.

“Tell me you want to leave and we should be able to clear a path.”

“I want to leave.”

“Then stand back.”

Shifting into his four-legged form, Randolph swatted at the floor with a massive paw. A few seconds later the rumbling beneath him commenced. Bricks trembled as Max passed under them, but the ones anchoring the bars hardly moved. At the other end of the hall the hybrid Mongrel yelped as both Nymar descended upon him. Jory waited for the other two to clear a path before delivering a finishing blow that sent a wet crunch down the hall.