them. The same sort of modification will draw the Nymar to their deaths.”
“You mean like rat poison stuck inside a piece of candy?” Cole asked.
“Precisely,” Lancroft declared. “That way, the Half Breeds are killed as quickly and efficiently as possible. Your generation of Skinners have stopped learning and become nothing but soldiers. Have you even pieced together how the Half Breeds spread their curse?”
“I’ve seen it happen,” Cole said. “Anyone hurt by one of those things will become one.”
“Yes, but why do some of the wounded become Half Breeds while others can be healed as if they’d only been attacked by a dog?” Looking back and forth between Cole and Paige, he said, “How are we supposed to do any good if we don’t know the root of the problem?”
When he leaned in close to Paige, she lashed out with both weapons rather than listen to whatever he was going to say. Cole wanted to help her, but she’d sparked another blistering series of attacks that turned the space around them into a hissing tornado of wooden blades. Trying to inject himself into that was like deciding how to stick his hand into a rattling garbage disposal, so Cole positioned himself in front of the workshop where several Mud People stood watching. Henry stood there as well. The boy he’d possessed still seemed to have his head connected to his neck.
“It’s the marrow,” Lancroft snarled. Having reshaped his staff into the oval-shaped weapon he’d used to cut Ned down, he switched his entire stance and fighting style to accommodate the new weapon. “Half Breeds carry their sickness in their saliva, but it needs to make contact with bone marrow for it to take root. Just knowing one simple bit of information like that should make Half Breeds less of a problem. Just as knowing that Pestilence is an exotic virus and not the fabled creeping death of Incan and Mayan mythology.”
Panting after the relentless attack, Paige said, “I’ll be sure to put that tidbit in my journal and credit it to the fucking asshole who killed Ned Post.” She went on the offensive using both of her weapons like a pair of scissors. Her sickle was blocked before cutting Lancroft’s throat, but the machete came in to shave large portions of flesh from both of his arms. Even with his advanced healing, a healthy dose of pain flashed across his face.
When Henry saw Lancroft recoil, the boy anxiously bared crooked teeth that were covered in a slick coat of the substance kicked up from the back of his throat.
Desperate to keep the Mud People from charging, Cole decided to give Henry something more pertinent to listen to. “Is this the same offer you gave to Misonyk when you let him infect Henry?”
For the first time since the conversation started, Lancroft appeared shaken. He glanced at Henry, but the strain of the fight made it tougher for him to put on a convincing poker face. “Misonyk was more demon than Nymar. It’s because of him that I needed to dispose of my cherished reformatory. I poured my heart and soul into every stone of that institution. There is no way you could possibly know how much good I did there.”
Moving so Lancroft was forced to edge away from her and Cole, Paige imagined Rico’s line of fire and inched the old man toward it. She kept him talking in the hopes that he might forget Rico was even there. “I’ve been to the reformatory,” she said. “It’s a pit. A den for Half Breeds.”
Strangely enough, Lancroft smiled. With Paige standing between him and Henry, he was forced to move away from the door while defending against her incoming blades. Their weapons clacked together in a quick rattle of impacts, each one coming faster than its predecessor. “It was necessary to destroy the entire facility. Such a horrible loss. To be honest, I thought I’d lost the drive to continue my work. And then Henry found me.”
The little boy rubbed the door frame and leaned toward the temple, but stopped before crossing the threshold.
Curling his fingers around to brush the scars on his palms, Lancroft glared at Paige and asked, “Where is the Nymar you brought with you?”
Henry’s young face twisted around before Daniels separated from the pack of Mud People behind him. When the Nymar grabbed the boy by the shoulders to yank him into the workshop, both Skinners took that as a cue to lunge at Lancroft. Cole almost got close enough to hit the old man before he spotted the bladed oval lashing in a tight arc aimed at his hamstrings. Pure instinct brought his spear down to smack aside the blade that would have crippled him.
“Bring him in here, Daniels!” Paige shouted as she tore after Lancroft.
The Nymar could be seen through the doorway, struggling with the much smaller boy. Even though Daniels outweighed his opponent by a hefty margin, the kid was lean, agile, and powered by something more than the Pestilence running through his veins. “Now you’ve done it!” the boy screamed in a pitch of the same frequency as an iron glove on a chalk-board. When he shrieked again, his voice ripped through the basement and through all of the minds within it.
Daniels and Henry both fell into the temple as Cole raced after Lancroft. The older man may have slipped past him, but he wasn’t fast enough to avoid getting tackled by Paige. When Lancroft was slammed face-first into the wall beside the door, Cole intended on nailing him there with his spear. The sharpened point caught Lancroft in the ribs and tore through the protective jacket to reveal metal plates attached by a series of latches spaced every eight to ten inches vertically along his back. Lancroft quickly twisted around so the spearhead skidded off his back and into the wall. As Paige tried to hit him again, he sent her into the same wall.
Cole swept low, but only scraped Lancroft’s ankle before the old man hopped up to avoid the follow-through from the spear’s forked end. When Lancroft’s foot came down again, it pinned the spear to the floor so his other foot could slam down on Cole’s hand. With Cole pinned, Paige kicked straight over his head to pound her heel against Lancroft’s hip. Not only did the kick move him away from Cole, but it set him up for a quick attack from both her weapons. The sickle ripped diagonally along Lancroft’s chest, while the machete came down toward the base of his neck. He blocked the machete and willed his weapon to close around it so he could ease it safely away as his wound was healed.
“Slower with your right arm, I see,” Lancroft said. “That’s what happens when you muck about with things you don’t understand.”
Her right arm was also stronger, and she reclaimed her machete with a quick tug before slashing again and again at Lancroft’s face and chest. “Get to Henry!” she said to Cole. “You know what to do!”
The old man defended against the blows and backed toward the examination room. Unable to do more than get in Paige’s way, Cole hurried to the workshop to help Daniels.
Henry struggled with the Nymar, but the boy was too small to break free. When Daniels locked him up in a bear hug, Henry exploded from his shell in a burst of energy that smeared through the stagnant air of the basement and was absorbed by one of the closest Mud People. After taking residence in the body of a large man dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, Henry jumped at Daniels and then abandoned ship so the lumpy body hit Daniels like a couple hundred pounds of dead weight. As soon as the Nymar hit the floor, a blond woman raced over to him and opened her mouth to let more of the mud drip from her mouth onto his face.
The instant Cole arrived, he was assaulted by the Mud People. A short woman wearing butterfly pajamas tried to sink her teeth into his face. He shoved her back and took a few more steps into the workshop before filthy hands grabbed at him and his weapon from all directions. All Cole could do was shift the weapon into its blunted longbow form and push forward. When the Mud People all tried to push him back at once, Cole shifted his balance and twisted his entire body around in a tight circle that sent several of them to the floor.
Mud People stumbled down the stairs into the basement and flopped in through the windows. Although Henry seemed to be spreading himself thin by controlling so many of them, they were effective as a wave of solid bodies and grasping fingers. Two Mud People hung from Cole’s back, so he slammed backward against a wall and shook them off. A few older neighbors were easily pushed aside, but a pair of teenage boys had enough strength to pose a threat. One of them cocked his head to the side and loped at Cole in a distinctive way. As soon as the teen pushed off with both feet into a wild jump, Henry ditched that body in favor of another teen dressed in a wife beater and cutoff sweatpants. The human projectile knocked Cole against a bench less than a second before Henry was attacking him in his new body, using flailing arms and snapping teeth.
Daniels wrestled with several Mud People himself, baring his fangs to compliment the savage, hungry look on his face.
“Hey!” Cole shouted. “Don’t bite any of them!”
The warning sank in, but not before Daniels was swallowed up by another wave of Mud People. He clamped his mouth shut and rolled onto his belly so he could cover his head with both hands.
Even before the supernatural intervention, the teen in the beater may have been able to wrestle Cole to the
