stretched to the point of dislocating at the wrists and shoulders. The thorns in his weapon tore his palms apart. Every gulping breath was accompanied by a rush of dirt.
“I can sit down here all night, Skinner,” the voice whispered almost directly into his ear. “We spared the one that came before you, but we won’t allow our home to be destroyed. Speak to me or I’ll bury you deep enough for the worms to steal your last breath.”
As it became impossible for Cole to breathe, an eerie calmness settled upon him. He felt the rest of the world turn while he remained perfectly suspended in the middle of it. Not only did his heartbeat thump through his ears, but the pattering of the heart within the other creature could be heard as well. Thickly muscled limbs clutched his torso and sharp talons dug into his legs. Even if he could crawl up, he’d have to pull through those claws to get there.
Muffled yet familiar voices drifted overhead. Footsteps thumped against the ground and the MEG team’s equipment gave off its high-pitched shriek. All of those things had to be relatively close, but might as well have come from another planet.
Suddenly, the thing wrapped around Cole started to shake him. “Don’t drift off, Skinner,” the voice rasped. “You probably won’t wake up.”
If he kept perfectly still and focused on what little air he could get, he was able to push the panic down a few levels. “Came to…talk.”
“So talk.”
“We need help.”
The voice became quicker and more excited as the muscled limbs cinched around him like a tightening fist. “That why you came poking around? That why you brought your weapons and your traps? To draw us here?”
“Just wanna talk.” Cole was fading. His lungs were so emptied that the little gulps of gritty air just weren’t cutting it anymore. “Have…deal…”
Talons clamped down upon his shoulders.
Voices around and above drew closer.
Something coiled around his body and tugged until his hands felt ready to snap off.
“Let go of your weapon,” the voice insisted, “or you’ll suffocate.”
Cole tried to pull his weapon in but couldn’t get it to budge. He didn’t have the strength to pull himself up, and when he tried to get a better grip, he was torn away and dragged farther underground.
Dirt, rocks, and pockets of dampness slid past his face or scraped against his arms. The body coiled around him was in constant motion, and the talons gripping his shoulders dug into his clothes to drag him deeper through what felt like a vat full of sludge. He couldn’t see anything but a field of glowing dots that pulsed in time to his frantic heartbeat. His lungs burned with the effort of trying breathe and his throat ached as more grit was pulled in.
He couldn’t last much longer.
Hopefully, Paige would find his body.
Air hit Cole’s face like a bucket of cold water. He reflexively tried to suck in a breath, but his mouth was filled with soil and small rocks. His stomach heaved and he hacked up a good portion of the filth he’d taken in. Although he still couldn’t move anything from his neck down, he at least caught a hint of light when he opened his eyes. As his body worked to pull in as much air as it could, he realized he was being held a foot or two over a bare, water- stained floor. Then he realized only his face was sticking out from a spot on the wall about that high up.
Something rustled directly beside him and a trickle of dirt hit the floor. When the voice came again, he could feel the leathery face moving against his cheek. “Say your piece, Skinner.”
Cole’s eyes rattled in their sockets, but apart from a cracked cement floor illuminated by a distant light, there wasn’t much to see. “Where am I?”
“Not far from where you started.”
The walls were broken and unfinished. There were no furnishings or shelves in the little room, but the rust stains and squared-off shapes in the dust told him that hadn’t always been the case. He heard footsteps above him. “We’re not here to hurt anyone,” he said. “We need your help. You’re a Mongrel, right?”
The rustling against Cole’s cheek grew louder and something appeared in the corner of his eye. He could turn just enough to see part of a black eye covered in a leathery flap that opened into a narrow slit.
“Don’t worry about me,” the dirt encrusted thing told him. “Just take the air I give you and convince me not to plant you half a mile beneath the foundation of this house.”
Having had enough time to figure out where he was, Cole pulled in a breath and shouted,
That didn’t go over well.
The thing let out an angry hiss and tightened its grip around Cole’s torso. In a series of wriggling motions, it pulled itself and him back into the wall. Before his head was enveloped again, he heard the familiar voice of the lady who owned the house where MEG was conducting their investigation. She’d been waiting at the neighbor’s place, which meant he had only been dragged one basement over from where he’d started.
With most of his senses either shut down or overloaded, Cole could only tell he was moving through the dirt a hell of a lot faster than before. The earth sped past him on all sides, and he held his breath to keep from being filled up by it. Just when he felt his lights start to dim again, the movement stopped.
The Mongrel’s limbs tightened around him like a colony of thick snakes. The clawed hand eased past his head, brushed against his chin and shoved his face to one side. When the dirt parted in front of his eyes, Cole was shoved into an open space like a giant rock being squeezed from a dirty tube. He emerged from the soil, fell onto an earthen floor and was held in place by clawed hands that reached out from the wall to wrap around his neck and chest. Despite the circumstances, being able to draw a full breath was better than any sex he’d ever had.
“Feel better?” the kidnapper asked from over his shoulder.
Cole nodded and replied, “Yeah. Much better.”
“You want to talk? Talk.”
After wiping some more crap from his eyes, Cole saw he was in a space about the size of a walk-in closet. The walls, floor, and ceiling were dirt and stone supported by a few wooden beams. A single electric lantern was the room’s only illumination, but that was enough for him to spot another Mongrel, a female sitting directly in front of him. Tight, sinewy legs were folded under a lithe frame, and her hands were placed daintily upon her knees. Firm, rounded breasts swelled beneath a layer of fur that covered her entire body.
Using the only card in his deck, Cole sputtered, “I know a Mongrel named Jackie. She was in Canada a few months ago and followed me to Chicago. She…looks like a cat and could become invisible. Do you know who I’m talking about?”
The card was far from an ace, but it caused the figure in front of him to tilt her head to one side. “No,” she said, “but this person sounds very interesting. I suppose you killed her for the fading properties of her fur?”
“Killed her? No!”
Leaning forward, the figure stretched out her arms and slipped her legs back so she could crawl toward him. Her face had the narrow bone structure of a bird, but the rounded brow and jawline of a cat. Her short nose tapered to a point and turned upward at the tip. When she spoke, she displayed a set of short, spiky teeth that retracted into her gums so only a few rows of white nubs could be seen. “Why do you sound so surprised?” she asked in a smoothly textured voice. “Isn’t that what Skinners do? Kill people like us so you can tear what you want from our corpses?”
“Uhhhh…technically yes,” Cole sighed. “But only with werewolves.”
“What of this Jackie? If I ask my scouts to find her, will they only find a grave?”
“No!”
“No grave?” snarled the harsh voice of the thing that had him in its grasp. “Just a pile of discarded bones and pulp?” The limbs wrapped around Cole’s body tightened and the claws sunk a little deeper into his shoulder.
“The last time I saw her, she was alive,” he insisted. “She ran away and we wiped up some of the invisible stuff. That’s all. We found a way to make our own!”
When the thing behind him moved its eye, it sounded like a rusty ball bearing scraping against sandstone.
The figure in front of Cole shifted into a more human form. She still had a thin layer of fur, but the soft flesh and rounded curves of a human woman. Talonlike claws sprouted from the fingertips she placed beneath his chin. “What of the ones in the house nearby? You’re telling me they’re not here to hunt us?”
“We came to find you. I already told snake boy here that we wanted to talk.”
