Full Blood yet. The closest we got was watching one get dragged underground by Mongrels in Kansas City, and if you knew where they took him, are you telling me you wouldn’t like to dig him up and see how many different uses you could think of for all those teeth and bones?”
“I’ve never seen anything like what’s in that room.”
“Yeah? Well I might have believed you were all broken up about it if I hadn’t seen you gut a Half Breed in the backseat of your car.”
“Half Breeds are different. They’re mobile wood chippers with a taste for our blood. Toss in a risk of becoming a wood chipper yourself and I don’t see a downside to killing them.”
“Killing them is one thing. That,” Cole added while waving toward the room with the table, “is something else. I don’t even know what that is.”
“Hunters hunt,” Paige stated. “Werewolves hunt us, and our choices are to hide, die, or hunt them. The Native Americans were Skinners long before us, and I mean that literally. They skinned werewolves the way they skinned buffalo and it worked out pretty well.” In a softer tone, she added, “This is the first time we may have spoken to something after it’s been laid out, pulled into a thousand separate pieces, and put into jars. Personally, that’s freaking me out too.”
“He’s trying to get here again,” Jordan said from the doorway to the temple. “We can delay him long enough for you to leave, but it won’t be long before he forces one of our sisters to get here without our help.”
“Let him come,” Cole said.
Jordan blinked and was moved aside when Elsie poked her head into the workshop. “We haven’t heard the Mind Singer for a while, but there can’t be much time for us to get away.”
“Let him come,” he repeated with more conviction. “We came here to get Lancroft, and we’re as ready now as we’re going to be, right?”
Paige drew her left baton and formed it into a sickle. “If he wants to save us the trouble of tracking him down, I’m all for it. Where’s Rico?”
“He’s still in the…the green room,” Jordan replied, obviously making an effort to mention the examination area without actually thinking about what it contained.
Cole walked past the two women, but Paige gathered them under her arms like a mother hen with two nervous hatch-lings. “Do both of you need to be here for this temple to work?” she asked.
“No,” Elsie replied. “He kept two of us so he always had at least one in case the other passed out or couldn’t form the bridge.”
“All right, then. I want one of you to get out of here.” Both of the Dryads started to protest, but Paige had no trouble in overriding them. “We came here to help as many of you as possible, and we won’t risk you both getting hurt now. One goes back now and the other will leave as soon as you can after Lancroft gets here.”
“No,” Jordan said sternly. “We’ll stay to help and that’s final.”
“You two may fluster the guys, but I’m not as easily swayed as the ones in the next room. Do what I say and don’t make me say it again. I need you to tell your sisters what happened here. More importantly, once you’re gone, he’ll be stuck here. Am I right?”
Both of them nodded. “If he has no sisters here and no sway over the others,” Jordan said, “then the temples are useless to him. But you’ll all be stuck here. Elsie can leave now, I’ll stay to help.”
“Fine. Just get moving.”
The Dryads huddled together and spoke in a series of words that were either too quick to understand or in some language that Paige had never encountered before. Rather than try to figure it out, she headed for the examination room where Rico was busy pulling open the last set of cabinets and Cole tapped furiously at the computer.
“Hurry up,” she warned. “One of our girls is going to leave and then the other will bring Lancroft here. After that, hopefully the word will be spread and there’ll be no more magic beads for Jonah Lancroft.” There was a crackle of static followed by a flash from the temple behind her, prompting Paige to say, “Did I mention
Rico dumped the contents of the cabinet onto the floor. “I’m just tryin’ to get a handle on what we may be up against. Like if this guy was building weapons or if he might have worked something out to—”
“To what?” she snapped. “Live for three hundred years?”
“Yeah, or drop a Full Blood. Tricks like that would be good to know.”
“What have you found?”
Reluctantly, Rico let a metal tray fall from his grasp and said, “A whole lotta nothin’.”
“What about you, Cole?”
“I’m trying to get a copy of everything on this computer and send it to my laptop.”
“How long will that take?”
“Too damn long,” he replied. “I’ll get as much as I can, but he may be able to trace it to where I mailed it, so we need to let it run as long as possible and then destroy this computer. I mean really destroy it. No pieces intact.”
“That’s some tech talk I can get behind,” Rico said through a wide grin.
“I just found the Pestilence files!” Cole said. “At least it sure looks like them.”
“Can you send ’em somewhere else besides your own e-mail?” Rico asked. “Just in case somethin’ happens to us?”
Trying not to think about what that implied, Cole nodded. “Yeah. Like where?”
“One of Ned’s hospital contacts back in St. Louis, Dr. Oehler.”
Once he’d been given the doctor’s e-mail address, Cole made the necessary adjustments and paused before making them final. “You sure about this? There’s a lot of stuff in here that we wouldn’t want in the wrong hands.”
“We can trust the doc,” Rico said. “She’s one of ours.”
After a few more frenzied taps on the keyboard, Cole switched the monitor off and backed away from the computer. The processor was still blinking and whirring, but at least the terminal looked idle from a distance. He then skirted the table without touching the limbs hanging off its edge and dug into his pocket for his cell phone.
“What are you doing?” Paige asked as she checked the temple. Jordan swayed to a song only she could hear, and Elsie locked eyes with her sister as she stepped back through the glowing beads.
Having already speed-dialed, Cole put the phone to his ear and said, “I’m calling MEG.”
“Hang that damn thing up and get ready for whatever comes through this freaking curtain!” Paige said with a fury that was equal parts impatience and frustration.
“Henry’s body may be dead on that table, but he’s still out there!” Cole said over the growing thrum filling the next room. “That means he’s a ghost, and ghosts are MEG’s territory.”
“How much time until our guest arrives, Jordan?”
When the Dryad stopped singing so she could respond, all of the glowing symbols dimmed. “He’s trying right now, and if I hold off much longer, he’ll know something is wrong.”
“Hang up the phone,” Paige ordered.
Cole slid his thumb along the side of his phone’s case to pop the earpiece from its resting place. “Am I the only Skinner who uses technology from this century?” he grumbled while putting the headset in his ear and the phone into his pocket. The next dial tone was washed out by a rush of sound that originated from one side of the basement, charged through the room, and rumbled several yards beyond the opposite wall. The beads were left crackling and swaying, but Elsie was gone.
“—ranch 40, can anyone hear me?” someone shouted through Cole’s earpiece.
“Yeah, is Stu there?”
“I can help you. Do you have a disturbance to report?”
“I don’t have time for this. Put Stu on the phone. Tell him it’s Cole.”
“Cole? Damn it, I told you—” Although Paige stopped scolding him when Cole waved at her to shut up, she most definitely wasn’t happy about it.
“Oh,” the person answering MEG’s phones said. “I’ve heard him mention you before. Don’t you have a verification number or something?”
Cole recited the number from memory while Paige and Rico took defensive positions in front of the beaded
