Paige used the tip of her finger to push aside some of the fur to reveal the green smudge on its belly. “Oh shit,” Cole grunted. “Not another werewolf infected by Nymar. Are these things gonna start popping up all over the place now?”
“That isn’t Nymar. Stanze gave me a press release with descriptions of all the missing people. Under tattoos and distinguishing features, Lisa Wilson is listed as having a shamrock tattoo on her belly. This thing’s skin is a bit stretched to see details, but check it out.” Placing her fingers around the smudge as she had at the station, she bunched the creature’s skin together so the symbol came together again. “See?”
Cole leaned in to get a better look. Fortunately, he didn’t have to get much closer before he asked, “That’s her shamrock tattoo?”
“Yep. Not so lucky for her, but it gives us a bit of a timeline. If this is Lisa Wilson, the first batch has hit the streets. She’s got enough muscle to have fed, so that means there’ll be more resting up somewhere.”
“Wow,” Cole said. “I’m impressed.”
“Skinners have been watching these damned things for a long time. It’s been a while since there have been this many in one place, and I’ve never even heard of dens being planted like this.”
“Planted?”
Even though people were coming and going from the barbecue restaurant without casting more than a glance at them, Paige became uncomfortable. Cars flowed back and forth along the nearby street just as casually, but she didn’t seem to like the looks of them either. “Let’s get moving,” she said as she slammed the trunk shut. “I’ll talk and you drive.”
It wasn’t until they were pointed south and merging with the rest of the late afternoon traffic that she said, “Some of those pictures we saw before coming here, the ones from MEG, were of the Full Blood that came to drag Henry out of Wisconsin before we could finish him off.”
“You think Mr. Burkis is here too?”
“The Full Bloods aren’t known for traveling in packs. They’re territorial, but I’ve only heard of them crossing paths every once in a rare while. If Burkis was the one you saw in Canada—”
“He was,” Cole snapped. “There’s no doubt about it. Maybe this is just like a meeting or some time of the moon cycle when the Full Bloods gather and…I don’t know…howl.”
Paige shook her head while checking the gun in the glove compartment. “You don’t get it, Cole. Full Bloods don’t stake out patches of woods or stretches of mountain ranges. One Full Blood has been seen at different ends of this country and up into Canada only days apart. When they hit their stride, they move so fast that you can barely even see them. You can just feel it as they go by. Each one could stake a claim that’s a couple thousand miles wide.”
“Sounds like tall tales to me,” Cole grumbled. “All hunters get that way after a while. I had uncles that used to hunt bears, and the tougher one was, the more they exaggerated when they told the stories. They really believed what they were saying, though. Same thing with fishermen. The easy ones to catch are just little fish. The ones that put up a fight are monsters.”
Rather than try to argue, Paige simply emptied the rounds from the pistol into her hand. “We’ll need to reload this with the heavier ammo. These Nymar rounds are just greasy lead to a shapeshifter.”
“What did you mean when you said those dens were planted?” Cole asked.
Paige snapped her eyes to the road and pointed to the upcoming corner. “Turn right there and take another at Rockhill.” After the first turn was completed, she went back to digging through the glove compartment. “Half Breeds make their dens wherever they can. They sniff out a hole, a basement, anyplace they can sleep while the sun’s out. When there are too many Half Breeds to fit in one den, they either fight with each other or find a new one. They don’t divvy up a city like this.”
“Maybe they’re not part of the same pack,” Cole offered. “One got loose, tore up some people, and moved on. Then the new ones made a den of their own.”
“If they’re spreading naturally like that, why aren’t they clumped closer together?” Paige asked. “Half Breeds are stupid and hungry. They don’t strategically pick a different feeding ground each night. Not many animals do. When they find good pickings somewhere, they stay there until the food’s gone or until it’s too dangerous to go back.” After she’d finished reloading the pistol, she said, “Pull over.”
“Where?”
“Just stop. I need to show you something.”
Cole pulled into a gas station and parked next to an overpriced, motorized air pump that was missing its hose.
Twisting around to the backseat, Paige removed a road atlas from the previous year. “Look here,” she said while flipping to the map for Kansas City. “Here’s Penn Valley Park. Here’s North Terrace Park. This is Blue Valley Park, one of the spots that Rob showed me where there were a few supposed pit bull attacks.”
“Rob?” Cole muttered.
“Officer Stanze.”
“First name basis, huh?”
Shaking her head and waving at Cole the way she would shoo a fly, Paige pointed to another spot on the map. “This is where we’re going now. Forest Hill Cemetery. What do you notice about all these spots?”
Cole squinted down at the map and watched Paige use the tip of her finger to connect all the dots scattered throughout the city. “Kind of looks like a rectangle,” he said.
She nodded. “There are other spots as well, but none of them are as close as they should be to another one. Just the fact that so many popped up so close to all these people is strange. Usually, when Half Breeds get together and hunt, they’re spotted and are either killed by us or taken down by regular people.”
“People who take down Half Breeds don’t sound too regular to me.”
“Half Breeds are fast and mean, but they can be shot. It takes a whole mess of bullets or possibly getting run down by a car, but it can be done. Full Bloods…not so much. Since the cops don’t know they’re dealing with a fast moving creature that likes to burrow and hide underground, there’s probably other dens that nobody’s even found yet.”
“Maybe the Half Breeds want to hit a spot with the most people.”
Paige studied the map carefully. “All Half Breeds do is eat and run. Full Bloods are the ones who think and plan.”
“And they can create Half Breeds whenever they want. This reminds me of a game that my boss was working on a couple years ago.”
“Everything reminds you of some game,” Paige snapped as she closed up the atlas. “Get moving.”
Cole pulled back into the stream of traffic and resumed his course. “It was an RTS. That’s real-time strategy, for those who don’t know.”
“I know what it is. I played
“Really? That’s kind of sexy. I just picture you in a school uniform allocating resources, managing an army, and sending out attack forces—”
“Was there a point to this?” Paige asked.
It took a second for Cole to shake the imagery from his head, and it would have been a lot easier to do if a bit more time had passed since he’d actually seen Paige in pigtails. Finally, he said, “If you want to take over a fortified spot on the map, you set up your units wherever you can all around that spot. If you can sneak some bombs into the middle of enemy territory, that’s even better. Could this be something like that? I mean, planting a Half Breed den in the middle of so many people could cause more deaths than a bomb. And considering a portion of the victims will turn into more Half Breeds…”
“That could make things a lot worse for a long time,” Paige said with a nod. “Take Rockhill to Sixty-eighth Street and go left. So if that Full Blood from the pictures wanted to do a whole lot of damage, planting Half Breeds is a hell of a way to do it. If we don’t clean out every last den, Half Breeds will roll through this city like an army.”
Cole raised his eyebrows and said, “The last time we saw that Full Blood in Wisconsin, it said it was going to reclaim its territory. Maybe it meant KC.”
“Or maybe this is just the first spot it’s marking as its own.” Shaking her head, she added, “It won’t do us any good to try and think the way those things do. You’d have better luck figuring out what motivates a tornado. Let’s just stick to what we know. The parks seem like a natural choice for dens, but Rob told me this cemetery is where
