Paige ripped open the chips she’d found and perched upon a stool near the counter. “No time for all of that.”
“Oh,” Daniels sighed. “Then let me just amend my previous statement by saying I like
“Good,” she grunted through a mouthful of half-chewed snack food. “Introductions made. We’re all friends. You two got beat up a lot in high school. Now that all that’s established, let’s get to the reason we’re here. How’s our project coming?”
Daniels straightened up and clapped his hands together. When he grinned, the fangs that had been hanging lazily from his gums snapped up to disappear completely. “It’s been coming along great! I think I’ve actually come up with a way to get your idea to work. At first I thought it was impossible, but now it looks like we’re close to really pulling it off!”
Cole tried to mimic the other two’s excitement. “What project?”
“Remember the Blood Blade?” Paige asked.
Cole nodded warily. “That’s the magic knife I brought to you from Canada. The one that can cut a werewolf.”
“Not just a werewolf,” Paige reminded him. “A Full Blood. And it cuts through them because they’re charmed, not magic. The question is, charmed with what? Why does the Blood Blade hurt a Full Blood when everything else from fire to automatic weapons leaves nary a scratch? As far as we know, those creatures may be immortal.”
“Full Bloods,” Daniels said, “like all supernatural creatures, can be harmed by other supernatural creatures. That’s why those weapons you carry work after that varnish mixture is soaked all the way through the wood. The shapeshifter and Nymar blood—”
“You can skip that,” Paige told him. “Get to the good part.”
Daniels gritted his teeth and shook his head as if he was physically grinding through his gears to skip to the next section of what he wanted to say. “I took samples from the Blood Blade to try and find out how it was forged.”
“That way,” Paige interjected, “we could make our own instead of trying to buy or steal them from the Gypsies that make the damn things.”
“Is that slang or a racial slur?” Cole asked.
Paige squinted and let out a short, snorting laugh. “Gypsies? They’re people. Just relax.”
Anxious to dive back into his lecture, Daniels paced and twiddled his fingers as if operating a very intricate, very invisible, piece of machinery. “A Blood Blade is made from metal that’s bonded to shapeshifter blood so precisely that it becomes more effective than your wooden weapons. While most Skinners already knew this, they don’t know
Cole looked over to Paige, only to find her nodding and clapping the dust from the chips she’d just eaten off her hands.
“I could, however, figure out how the metal was bonded to a peculiar element,” Daniels explained. “In that aspect, the Blood Blade isn’t much different than your sticks. It’s just a matter of binding the sample to metal instead of soaking it into wood. Obviously, that varnish mixture you use won’t work on metal, although I could try if I had a sample to analyze for myself.”
Paige shook her head at Daniels and said, “Not gonna happen. We gotta keep some things secret for the ones who signed on for the full membership package.”
Being one of those members, Cole actually felt kind of proud. The feeling was boosted when Daniels looked over at him with genuine envy. That’ll teach him for not sharing his toys, Cole thought.
“Anyway,” Daniels sighed, “I’ve recently been able to come up with a way to bond a small sample of the blade with a viscous substance that can be thinned down to a more manageable liquid. More shapeshifter blood is required, but that’s a lot easier to come by. At least…it is for you two.”
“You mean this stuff you made is like the varnish for our weapons?” Cole asked.
“Almost,” Paige told him, “but not quite. Our stuff is more of a concoction, and this is a…dispersed…how did you describe it?”
“It’s along the lines of a colloidal dispersion.” Not at all surprised by the dumbfounded expression on Cole’s face, Daniels went on to say, “Although I don’t know the specifics, I gather the mixture you use for your Skinner weapons must be replenished or at least added in so many layers before its effect becomes permanent.”
Cole knew that well enough. Since the night he first whittled his spear down from a freshly cut sapling, he’d lost count of how many fresh coats of the rancid varnish he’d applied.
“This particular colloidal dispersion,” Daniels explained, “is a substance that can be directly applied to other mediums. The substance becomes so potent that its qualities are transmitted to its new medium in a ratio somewhere in the vicinity of six to one.”
Rolling her hand as if she was guiding a car into its parking spot, Paige said, “Which means?”
“Which means, in the case of the substance I devised using the Blood Blade, traits of the biological element will be directly passed on to a biological recipient in a manner similar to when those traits are passed on to the mediums of metal or wood.”
Paige hopped off her stool and started pacing. “Blood Blades are forged using some special Gypsy metal and shapeshifter blood just to give the metal a supernatural charge.”
“Charge isn’t the best term,” Daniels muttered.
Continuing as if Daniels hadn’t even spoken, Paige said, “Our weapons can change shape because they’re alive, or they used to be. They’re not as strong as the Blood Blade because we have to use wood instead of metal.”
“Metal with the special mystery element,” Cole added sarcastically.
Paige snapped her fingers and pointed at him. “Exactly! When raw, pure shapeshifter blood bonds to living things, it allows them to do things like grow fangs and claws, run from one end of a state to the other, throw big stuff…you know.”
“I think so,” Cole said as some of the fog in his head started to clear.
As she went on, Paige reminded him of a professor feeding a slow student his lines and hoping he caught on. “But if the shapeshifter blood bonds directly with the blood of a
“They become a Half Breed,” Cole said.
“Yes.”
“Either give me a sticker or get to the point,” he grumbled.
Daniels stepped in. “The natural bonding process has bad side effects, as you mentioned. The bonding process used for your weapons requires so many treatments that the same side effects would be passed on to any living thing that’s more complicated than a stick. The process used on the Blood Blade, however, is different because it uses another element as a buffer. I don’t know exactly what the element is, but I did manage to separate it from the samples I’ve been given.”
Cole’s hopes for a simple explanation were dashed, so he looked back to Paige.
Leaning on the edge of her stool with elbows planted on her knees and the jersey hanging down low enough to show the top of her leather corset, she looked like she was calling for a very interesting huddle. “The stuff we use on our weapons is basically varnish. It would kill you if you tried to mix it with your blood. Whatever is used on the Blood Blade acts like a gateway between the shapeshifter blood and whatever it’s bonding to.”
“How did you come up with all of this?” Cole asked.
“I’ve been kicking it around for a few years. The details don’t matter,” Paige said dismissively. “The tricky part has been getting a Blood Blade to someone with more chemistry know-how than me to work on it. Now, after a few tests, we’ll be able to use this stuff to safely bond shapeshifter blood directly with our blood and use their power against them.”
Cole froze for a second and leaned forward, as if being closer to Paige and Daniels would help their words sink in. “Wait. You mean you could get the powers of a shapeshifter without becoming one?”
“Bingo!”
Daniels was quick to step in before either Cole or Paige could get worked up. “No. Not bingo. Not yet. I said certain traits could be passed along, not all of them. It’s got to be tested, but with all that’s involved in the distillation process, I can guarantee it won’t be a perfect conversion. I believe my ratio was in the vicinity of six to
