Teeth of Beasts

A rippling disturbance filled the air surrounding the kid’s body. But instead of becoming the orbs Cole had seen before, the essence of Henry Bartlett was drawn to the body on the table.

Taking Henry’s other hand and pushing it against the Full Blood’s exposed rib, Cole felt the kid jerk away from the table as if he’d been electrocuted. “Hold him there, Daniels!” he shouted while Henry’s arms flailed and his little feet pushed against the floor.

With Daniels’s squat body acting as a barrier, Henry didn’t have anywhere else to go. No matter whose spirit was fueling the kid’s efforts, his muscles simply weren’t up to the task of fighting off two grown men. The wriggling kid swore in ways that were as heartfelt as they were disturbing while he pulled against the thin smear of energy connecting him to the corpse. Cole and Daniels held the boy against the table for a few more seconds before the essence rushed completely out of one shell and into the other. One of the overhead fluorescent tubes flickered and the others died out completely. Cole prayed his e-mail transfer had run its course, because the energy from Henry’s reunion with his body fried the terminal along with the earpiece he was still wearing.

Once the transfer was complete, the Full Blood’s decimated corpse sat up. Testing the limits of the pegs tacking its skin to the table, it let out a howl that was garbled beyond recognition due to the absence of its lower jaw. The sound it made thundered through the entire house, despite the fact that it emerged from a throat that was not only cut open in several places, but also filled with fluids and loose meat.

The boy fell back, so Cole handed him over to Daniels and said, “Get him out of here.”

“Don’t you need any help with…with that?”

Every move the carcass made introduced it to a new level of pain. Blood trickled from a hundred places despite the lack of a heart to pump it.

“You’ve already done your part,” Cole said. “If there’s any Full Blood I should be able to put down, it’s this one.”

Henry’s garbled howl echoed through the brick hallway like a tidal wave, sending the imprisoned Half Breed scuttling to the back of its cage, where it jammed its rear haunches against the wall and scraped nervously at the floor.

When Lancroft glanced back at the stairs, Paige grabbed the weapon encircling her neck as close to its handle as her arms would allow. Feeling the sting of thorns tearing into her palms, she channeled all of her physical and mental strength into one concerted effort to free herself from the snare. Lancroft was distracted. The Half Breed was gathering its courage, and she only had another second before that slight advantage would be gone. She needed to loosen the snare as quickly as possible.

Loosen the snare.

Loosen it!

Howls continued to roll down from the laboratory, and it wasn’t long before the sound of creaking wood mingled with them. As soon as Paige felt the snare loosen, she pushed it up while pulling her head down. Lancroft was quick to reassert his own will and the weapon responded by snapping shut less than an inch over her head, trapping a portion of her hair between its two halves.

“Die as a Half Breed or die as a human,” Lancroft snarled while rolling the staff as if he was twirling spaghetti on the end of a giant fork. “Either way, you sure as hell won’t die as a Skinner!”

Paige took her knife from her pocket, snapped it open and gave herself the quickest, sloppiest haircut in history. The instant she was free, she rolled past Lancroft and picked her weapons up off the floor. Within moments after the thorns sank into her hands, the sickle shortened to form smaller curved blades at each end. The machete widened into something resembling a butcher’s cleaver. Her head was fuzzy from the spill down the stairs, but all she needed was instinct to put her weapons to use.

You did this to me, Skinner!

Henry struggled to sit up, but as he tried to pull himself off the table, he was restrained by the pegs holding the flaps of his open chest cavity to the polished surface. When the Full Blood turned in the other direction, Cole could see that several long strips of flesh starting at Henry’s shoulder blade and running to the small of his back had been neatly cut away.

In a matter of seconds the carcass had found the limits of its motion. Whatever pain it experienced before had either subsided or become so overwhelming that it no longer had an effect. Its hands were restrained. Both eyes floated in separate jars. Most of its tongue lay diced in a pan, but its nose was still attached to the end of its snout, and Henry used it to sniff the air frantically.

“You see?” Cole said as he held his spear at the ready. “Lancroft put you here. He locked you away in this room just like he locked you away at the reformatory!”

Either those words got to Henry or the Full Blood had simply run out of steam, because the massive body thumped back down and its limbs hung loosely off the sides. “I…eehhhhh…err.” One more breath shook the carcass and was followed by a surprisingly calm voice in Cole’s head.

I remember.

“Remember what?”

Dr. Lancroft told me there was work that needed doing. Said I had to look inside folks and find what he put in ’em. I found it and stoked it like a fire. When I did, they all was different.

“They became Mud People?”

The carcass shifted so its hollowed-out eye sockets were pointed at Cole.

They weren’t people no more. Not while that fire was in ’em.

“What about after? Can they be cured?”

They ain’t sick. They’s changed. Lancroft changed ’em. Everyone I see’s been changed. Everyone but Skinners, leeches, and the like.

“So everyone will turn into these Mud People?”

Not unless I’m here to stoke the fire, but I don’t plan on bein’ here no more. See, I hear the stars now. I feel this wide open space an’ all I gotta do is go there. I meant to go there before, but Dr. Lancroft told me not to.

Daniels rushed into the room amid the thump of clumsy footsteps and the clatter of everything shifting within the metal case he carried. Cole waved furiously for him to be quiet, but the noise didn’t seem to bother Henry. The carcass was motionless and the pathetic excuse of a face was still aimed at the Skinner.

I won’t stoke no more fires. I promise. IpromiseIpromise.

The upper portion of the carcass twitched, and Cole instinctively reached out to hold it down.

You broke me outta one hellhole, Skinner, an’ now you busted me outta another. Suppose I should thank you.

“Just tell me how to put an end to Pestilence, Henry. Then we’re even.”

Daniels stopped trying to get Cole’s attention and tried to make sense of the fact that he was having a conversation with a very quiet and very dead werewolf.

Unconcerned with whether the Nymar could hear Henry’s voice, Cole said, “Tell me how to get rid of Pestilence!”

Without me, there ain’t no Pestilence. Folks’ll get sick, but they’ll get better so long as I’m gone. They only listened to me. But you gotta swear somethin’ to me.

With that, the peeled, brutalized head of the Full Blood slid toward Cole, freezing him in his place and sending Daniels skidding backward into a set of cabinets.

There’s somethin’ I want you to take so’s you can use it to do the Lord’s work. I can feel it nearby.

“Take what?” As soon as he asked the question, Cole found the answer tucked neatly into the back of his head.

Talk to yer friend on the floor. He’ll tell ya what to do with it, but the rest of me gets buried. You’re a good man, but the resta you Skinners is a buncha ghouls. Bury me proper and there ain’t no more Pestilence. That’s the deal. Break it and I’ll know.

“All right. You got a deal.”

The Full Blood’s snout thumped against the table as if the string holding it up had been cut.

Daniels stood with his arms wrapped around the case that hung open like a street vendor’s display of knockoff watches. “Are you still hearing voices?” he asked Cole.

“No. Where are the Mud People?”