and the fact that her fingers felt like iron bars wrapped in a thin glove, Paige’s touch felt soothing as she slid her hand along his chest and to his side. Once there, she turned him a bit in one direction and said, “There. Just listen.”
The sappy, expectant grin that he couldn’t hold back froze in place when he heard a rush of movement beneath the malodorous breeze of the incoming campfire smoke. The sound churned with a power of its own. It wasn’t thunder, but more of a current being pumped through a nearby pipe.
After another second or two he could hear panting snarls being forced from several sets of unnaturally powerful lungs.
A few cars honked in the distance as tires screeched against pavement.
Something heavy was knocked over.
By the time he picked up on the snapping of twigs and low hanging branches, a dry creaking came from Paige’s batons as they stretched into curved sickle blades. Cole’s hands wrapped around the thorny grip of his spear and tightened until the sharp little spikes punched through his palms.
“How many do you think there are?” Cole whispered.
After a pause that was just a little too long, Paige replied, “More than I expected.”
“Should we still do this?”
She stood beside him so the side of her foot brushed against his shoe. “Just tear them up as much as you can and don’t ever let go of your weapon.”
The snarling breaths and scrambling paws drew closer. Cole blinked away a bead of sweat, which allowed him to make out the shapes of lean animals racing at him from the surrounding dark. Wide eyes glinted in the moonlight, and the panting became intermixed with a series of frenzied barks.
“Paige, I—”
“Save it, Cole. Here they come.”
Chapter 18
The first two Half Breeds exploded from the shadows amid a flurry of claws and teeth. Their long legs and lean bodies gave them such a gangly appearance, it seemed a wonder they could move at all. As soon as they spotted Cole and Paige, the creatures adjusted their course and charged at them even faster.
A few more werewolves followed the first two and three more came after them. There were more on their way, but Cole was too rattled to take a head count. He guessed the closest ones were about a hundred yards from where he and Paige stood. Before he could finish choking on the breath that had lodged in his throat, the first wave was nearly upon him.
A few feet away, Paige gripped her batons and said something that was lost in the chorus of raspy barks. The Half Breeds racing toward her weren’t like the ones that had been curled up in their dens. At rest, those creatures were gnarled tangles of limbs and broken bones held together by knots of muscle. These Half Breeds were in their element. Long, lanky bodies were covered in tangled, sweaty fur. Powerful limbs were in constant motion, and claws curled out from the tips of stubby fingers. They kept their ridged chests close to the ground as their vaguely canine heads pumped back and forth like pistons in an unstoppable engine. With most of their body mass clumped toward their shoulders, the creatures’ hind ends were narrow and bony, with short, ratlike tails dragging on the ground.
Ducking down over one knee, Paige snapped her right arm straight out to drive the pointed end of her weapon directly into the eye of the first Half Breed that reached her. The tooth fixed to that end of her weapon drilled straight through, hit home with a wet thud and dropped the creature to the dirt. Cole could only see that much from the corner of his eye as he braced himself for his first customer of the night.
The Half Breed that got to him before any of the rest looked about five and a half feet long. Extending both sets of legs all the way out, however, nearly doubled that length. It came at him with its teeth bared and a hungry snarl erupting from deep within its throat. Cole reflexively raised his weapon to protect himself as the werewolf leapt with enough force to knock him onto his back.
His blood burned with the proximity of so many of the creatures. The pain of getting those thorns driven so deeply into his hands caused him to grit his teeth and push the Half Breed away before it could tear off a piece of his face. Powerful jaws snapped shut less than an inch from his cheek. When the thing reared its head back to take another bite, Cole shoved it to one side and rolled to the other. The Half Breed compensated by twisting its neck at the impossible angle required to hit its mark. Jagged teeth tore through Cole’s upper arm and sent a spray of blood into the Half Breed’s mouth. Seeing the hunger that had grown to overtake the creature was enough to get Cole on his feet to defend himself.
He swung the forked end of his weapon at the Half Breed. One of the sharpened ends dug into the creature’s back, so he drove it in deeper to hold it against the ground. The Half Breed yelped and tried to get free. Its claws kicked and dug little trenches into the dirt but remained pinned. Before Cole could decide what to do from there, Paige buried one of her curved sickle blades into the Half Breed’s forehead.
“Don’t wrestle with them,” she snapped. “Kill it and move on.” Then she knocked away a snapping bite from another creature, tore the weapon free from where it had been lodged, and cracked the side of that blade against another Half Breed’s skull.
Cole heard paws thumping against the ground, whipped around and saw a werewolf racing toward him. It would have pounced if its rear leg hadn’t been caught between a set of iron jaws that popped up through a thin layer of dirt. Letting out a high-pitched yelp, the Half Breed fixed its gaze intently upon him. When the chain connecting the bear trap to the ground reached its limit, the creature’s front end flopped down and its chin smacked against the earth.
Raising his spear, Cole drove the single pointed end into the Half Breed’s side. Thanks to the tooth attached to the spearhead, it drilled all the way through the creature’s torso and sent another yelp ripping through the air. He turned toward the sound of more scampering steps to find a trio of Half Breeds running at him from another angle. He ducked down and allowed the group to leap through the empty air over his head. Using a scooping motion to reclaim his weapon from the trapped werewolf’s torso, he opened a wound wide enough to put the creature down for good. As an afterthought, he glanced down at the arm that had been bitten only a few seconds ago. The wound was there but had already stopped bleeding. When he flexed those muscles, he felt a coolness flow through him that normally only came after he’d been given a dose of Paige’s healing serum. Apparently, he’d taken enough injections for the stuff to be in his system. Even so, he hoped the pain and adrenaline wouldn’t stop. They were all that kept him moving.
“Paige, behind you!” he shouted.
Having taken a low, wide stance, Paige held her arms out so both weapons were well in front of her. Another one of the traps had caught a Half Breed’s front paw, forcing it to scramble and contort any way it could just to get to her. One of her blades punched a neat hole through the base of its neck, which killed the thing instantly.
She whirled around to meet one of the three Half Breeds circling around to rush at her from behind. The blunt end of her weapon knocked against the first one’s chin, temporarily stunning it. When that Half Breed flopped onto its side, it cleared a path for another to spring forward. Paige swung at its neck, but the Half Breed twisted its head away at an angle that made it look like a broken movie prop. After the sickle passed by the creature, it snapped its head back around to try and sink its teeth into Paige’s ribs.
The teeth sliced through the outer shell of her body armor and were snagged in the underlying layer of werewolf flesh. The Half Breed’s weight pulled her to one side, as if she’d caught a bullet. Hanging from her vest as its limbs swatted at the ground, the Half Breed desperately tried to regain some balance.
Seeing that Paige had been bitten, Cole took a swing at the creature that was still gnawing on her. His spear caught the werewolf in the neck, glanced off bone and ripped open a gash from its shoulder blades down to its tail. Hanging limply from teeth that were still snagged in her vest, the creature somehow managed to twist its head upside down, tear free of Paige’s armor and drop onto its side.
Cole buried the modified spearhead into its chest, but didn’t feel much resistance. The weapon seemed to drive through leathery skin while everything inside shifted to avoid being damaged. At the same time, the Half Breed
