“It belonged to a friend of mine,” Cole said. “And I say it’s not for sale. Your Nymar bodyguards are dead and someone had to have called the cops, so just get out of here while you still can.”
The side of Burkis’s face twitched. He turned to look at the sliding patio doors a few seconds before Cole heard the wail of distant sirens.
“Give me the Blood Blade, Mr. Daniels,” Burkis said dryly. “I know it’s here. Hand it over and I may only kill the Skinners.”
Paige took a step forward and held both weapons at the ready. “Come on, Daniels. You’re coming with us.”
“What about Sally?” Daniels asked while easing away from the wall.
Cole was getting more impatient with every word. “Who?”
“My girlfriend. She lives in 102.”
“She’s fine,” Paige said. “A little shaken up, but fine.”
“I need to make sure.”
“Daniels!” Paige snapped. “We’re leaving!”
Burkis didn’t make a move to stop any of them from clustering together and heading for the door. He simply said, “I was hoping for this to be easier than Canada, but you Skinners should know you can’t possibly move fast enough to get away from me.” With that, he pulled in a breath that caused his chest to swell beneath the layers of his cheap suit. His torso kept expanding until the material strained and ripped. When his head drooped and his lips curled back, the man’s skull crunched as if it had been trapped in a vise before swelling out to form a thicker brow and a long, squared snout.
Cole felt as if he’d suddenly pressed his hands flat against the engine block of a running car.
“Jesus,” Paige gasped. “We need that Blood Blade.” Grabbing Daniels by the arm and pulling him away from the sight that had stopped the Nymar in his tracks, she screamed, “Grab everything you need for our project and get to my car.
Cole inched toward the door one tentative step at a time. Fear and panic soaked into his body like weights tethering him to the carpet.
Burkis’s muscles had exploded under his skin, reducing his cheap suit to shredded rags hanging from his shoulders and waist. His mass had become great enough to force him down onto all fours. Once there, he twisted his head back and forth as long ears stretched out from the sides of his face and teeth sprang from his jaws to scrape against each other and rip through his cheeks. As the snout took shape, Burkis lifted his head and cried out in a voice that shifted from smooth, deep tones into an even deeper roar.
Cole wanted to run, but he couldn’t. He was scared, but that wasn’t what kept him in the apartment. At that moment not even Paige’s iron grip on his wrist could pull him away.
“We need to get to that Blood Blade!” she shouted over the creature’s roar and scraping of claws against the floor. “He’ll kill you!”
Burkis’s legs shot out from the remains of his trousers, snapped in half to bend against the knees, and grew to nearly twice their original length. Every move he made brought up sections of the carpet along with a few pieces of the floor itself. The man from New York arched his back as his spine rippled in a shockwave that started at the base of his neck and rolled all the way down to his newly formed tail.
“We can kill him,” Cole said.
“That’s a Full Blood! We need the—”
“I know what it is,” Cole snapped. “He’s still changing. We can kill him before he grows to full strength. Like those Half Breeds we found in that den in Wisconsin, remember? We got to them before they changed all the way and we can do the same with him but we need to hurry!”
Paige thought it over for less than a second before she nodded. When she lifted her hands, they were each wrapped around shorter versions of her sickles, which allowed for stronger blades. “You ready for this?”
“No, but let’s do it anyway.”
Burkis was now somewhere between human and animal. It wouldn’t be much longer before he was one of the most dangerous creatures in the world. Cole just hoped there would be one less in the world before the night was over.
Paige got to Burkis first and sank both curved blades into his back. Since Burkis’s muscles were still expanding, she was able to pull the right one out, but was having trouble getting the left one free.
Cole wasn’t able to build up much steam, but what he didn’t gain from momentum he more than made up for in adrenaline by driving his spear into the shifting meat of the werewolf’s side like a soldier delivering a killing blow with a bayonet. Judging by the howl that exploded from him as he shook his head and arched his back, Burkis felt the weapon hit home. A second later fur flowed out of every one of his pores as if to entangle the weapon before it was reclaimed.
With one sweep of a massive arm, Burkis knocked Paige off her feet. When the creature stood upright, Cole was almost hoisted off the floor. He pulled his spear free, dropped to his feet and was immediately knocked toward the sliding glass door when the creature pivoted toward him.
Burkis’s face was now completely changed. A low, ridged brow had settled in above a pair of crystalline, gray- blue eyes. Fur flowed from him like water trickling over his skin after a hard rain. As the creature’s frame settled into its final shape, he hacked up a bellowing roar, kicked aside the couch and lashed out with both hands.
Cole was just quick enough to drop and roll away from the window before those claws shattered the thick glass of the sliding door. When the creature turned, it howled and staggered to knock away a sizable portion of the door frame. Only then did Cole see Paige hanging from the sickle that was still lodged in its back.
Seeing her hang on with every bit of strength she had, Cole thought back to the isolated cabin in Canada where the first two Skinners he’d ever known were killed. They were good men who’d put up a hell of a fight before being torn apart by the same Full Blood that was seconds away from ending Paige’s life. It had been the better part of a year since that happened, but Cole still smelled that blood and heard those screams in the back of his head as he threw himself into a fight that no reasonable human being could ever hope to win.
Every swing of his weapon drove the thorns farther into his own flesh. One of those hits must have landed in a soft spot, because the creature dropped to all fours and shook Paige off. She pulled her weapon free but landed awkwardly and was about to hit the floor on her back when Cole caught her.
“We’re not doing anything but pissing it off,” she said. “We need to get downstairs.”
“That’s the Full Blood,” Cole wheezed.
“I know. That’s why we need the Blood Blade!” She grabbed Cole by the back of his collar as if dragging an uncooperative mutt by the scruff of its neck.
Resisting Paige’s efforts to get him moving, Cole held his weapon in front of him and watched the thing that scrambled to get disentangled from the broken patio door frame. Outside, the sound of police sirens drifted from the direction of the main parking lot. “No. That’s the Full Blood from Canada. The one that killed Gerald and Brad.”
Paige took a moment to look the creature over, recognizing the color of its fur as well as the patches of gray on its chest, thanks to Cole’s past descriptions. Burkis even had some familiar scars that could now be seen through spots where its coat had thinned out a bit. “Run,” she said.
“We need to kill it.”
“We’re chipping the surface but not doing enough damage. We need something other than what we’ve got.”
If Burkis had been hurt in the slightest by their attack, it was recovered now. Baring its teeth, it glared at the Skinners and unleashed a demonic howl wrapped around the vestiges of a human scream.
Chapter 11
Paige jumped through the hole in the floor that led to apartment 203 and shouted for Daniels. The Nymar was gathering things from a pile of overturned boxes and shoving them into a large gym bag he’d strapped over his shoulder. Seconds later Cole dropped through and knocked the ladder down behind him. The Full Blood quickly
