“Between sparring and sleeping, when the hell am I supposed to read or watch anything?” Cole snapped.
“Bring it in a notch, killer. I thought you might have seen it online. Four people were killed in Kansas City and plenty more have gone missing.”
“Wouldn’t that be the cops’ problem?”
“They were torn apart. The news started off by saying there was a pack of pit bulls running lose, but that was before the pictures started coming in.”
“What pictures?”
“You really have been out of touch,” Stu grumbled. “We’ve been putting them up on our site. Lately, the news and police statements have latched onto the idea of some sort of rottweiler-bullmastiff mix, but we’ve got eyewitness accounts and some cell phone pics that point to a bunch of those skinny werewolves you guys like so much.”
“Half Breeds,” Cole muttered, as if afraid of saying the words too loudly.
“Right. There’s also a few blurry shots of the other kind. One of those big ones.”
That didn’t set well. “Can you send those pics to me?”
“Not on that fossil of a phone you’re using.”
“That one’s history,” Cole beamed. “I’ve got one of the new touch screen models.”
“The new ones from four months ago or the new ones from last month?”
“The
“Man, you’re lucky,” Stu gasped. “I waited in line for hours and still didn’t land one. Tell me how these pics look.”
Within seconds an icon started flashing on Cole’s phone. He tapped it and brought up a set of three pictures sent by Stu. The quality was okay, but the lighting was terrible. Even so, he could make out the hulking form of a full-blooded werewolf with black fur stalking through a park. The other two pictures were of leaner creatures racing along nearly deserted streets. They’d been moving so fast when the pictures were taken that they weren’t much more than blurs. Even so, he would have bet they were Half Breeds.
“How do those look?” Stu asked.
“Not good,” Cole sighed. “Not good at all.”
“Well, they were probably taken on one of those—”
“Keep looking into that Burkis guy,” Cole interrupted. “And e-mail me whatever you’ve got on what’s going on in Kansas City.”
“Yeah. Okay. Is everything all right over there?”
“As good as it ever is.”
“Oh,” Stu said gravely. “I’ll let you get back to it, then.”
Cole ended the call and tapped his phone to enlarge the picture Stu had sent him. A few seconds later Paige snapped her phone shut and said, “Daniels is home, but he’s hiding. He says some Nymar are waiting for him outside his place.”
“We need to get to KC,” Cole told her.
“I’m not about to run away just because Ace and Stephanie got their prissy little noses out of joint.”
“Not that.” Showing her the picture on his phone, Cole said, “Because of this.”
Paige studied the blurred picture for about a second before nodding and shifting her attention to the interstate. “Looks like a Full Blood. Could be the one that found us in Wisconsin, but I’m not certain.”
Cole turned his phone around and studied it so closely that he nearly pressed his face against the smooth touch screen. “What if it’s Henry?”
“Even if Henry is recovered from all the crap he was put through, he was too crazy to hit and run like that. When he resurfaces, there won’t be any doubt it’s him. And look at the color of the fur. Full Bloods change shape, but they can’t change their fur. If anything, that’s the one that came to take Henry away from us. Yep,” she added after another quick glance at the picture. “See the white patch on the nose?”
“You can’t possibly see all that from this picture!”
Nodding as if she was accepting an award, Paige said, “It’s a gift. Once you see a few more of these bad boys, you’ll pick up on the details too.”
“So what if these other things are Half Breeds?”
“Oh, those are Half Breeds,” Paige replied.
“How could this get by us?”
“I’ve seen some stuff on the news about dog attacks in KC, but that was a few days ago. Since then all the attention was shifted over to the people who went missing.”
Already sifting through different screens on his phone, Cole shook his head and said, “I’m looking at news reports online right now. This isn’t good at all. Two cars were found alongside a highway last week. One of the drivers was busted up beyond recognition and the other was never found. More people have turned up dead or gone missing. Some college girl was dragged away by…well, this says it was a rottweiler, but come on! Aren’t we supposed to be on top of this crap?”
“We’ll look into it.”
“It’s all right here, Paige! I did a search for Kansas City dog attacks and ten pages came up.”
“Those are Internet search pages,” she reminded him. “How much of that is porn?”
Since the answer to that wouldn’t have helped his cause, Cole settled for a stern glare in her direction.
“There are real dog attacks and plenty of missing people,” she said. “We can’t investigate every last one on the off chance of a Half Breed turning up. Now that we know there’s a problem in KC, we’ll go there. If a Full Blood is still there, we’ll need what Daniels is working on anyway. Read off some more of those search results.”
“I can’t,” Cole snarled. “My battery just died.”
“How long did you wait in line for that new phone?” Paige chided.
“Shut it.”
Chapter 9
It was a long drive to Schaumburg, but thanks to an overpriced car charger for his phone, Cole had plenty to keep him busy along the way. As Paige drove to the Chicago suburb with her arm propped on the window and the night breeze shaking her hair back into its normal shape, he sifted through dozens of online news sources. The reports ranged all the way from syndicated articles about the supposed rottweiler-bullmastiff mixed breeds roaming Kansas City to conspiracy blogs that compared the attacks to the incident in Wisconsin commonly known as the Janesville Massacre. Cole and Paige had been in Janesville to see the massacre firsthand, and there were more Nymar there than werewolves, but the blogged reports were a little too close for comfort.
Then Cole spotted something to perk him up. “Hey! I think I found someone in KC who might help us.”
“Don’t trust anything you might hear about Skinners or their locations. I plant all sorts of lies on the Internet to cover us. If another Skinner was nearby, I’d already know.”
“This isn’t a Skinner. It’s a cop. The story is only two days old and says he hit one of those mixed breed dogs with his car. Apparently he still has the body and is trying to sell it on—”
“We’re here,” Paige announced as she nodded toward a cluster of buildings on the right side of the road. “The rest will have to wait for later. If there are Nymar watching this place, I don’t want to miss them.”
Cole tucked away his phone and took the revolver from the glove compartment. They’d left the interstate and were cruising through a quiet apartment complex that looked as if it had fallen out of an expensive mold. The buildings weren’t quite fancy enough to have an electric gate around them, but were clean, well lit, and inhabited by people who had impressive taste in cars.
“This is where a Nymar lives?” Cole grumbled.
“Sure beats your freezer, huh?”
“It beats the place I used to live back when I was pulling in a real salary.”
Paige drove along a road that led into the middle of the apartment complex where a clubhouse glowed with blue, wavy light reflected from the nearby pool. Pointing to the third of five identical buildings, she said, “Daniels
