than half a second.
A cold sweat broke upon his brow.
He started to lose his balance and would have fallen if not for the young men that swarmed out from the building to catch him.
As he was being carried in through the window, Kilmer’s head lolled to one side and the edges of his vision started to blur. The body that had broken the glass belonged to a young man somewhere in his late twenties. He convulsed with haggard breaths that were forced out in spastic coughs before sitting up and letting out a pained groan as the sharpened stake in his chest shifted. When he grabbed the stake to pull it from his chest, he was attacked by others dressed in ragged clothes that emerged from the shadows on all sides. Locking eyes with Kilmer while swinging the stake to defend himself, the man said, “You … can’t be here.”
Hands grasped at Kilmer. Some of them dragged him farther into the building while others tore at his flesh. Wet things slapped against him, most of which were tongues protruding from parched lips. He tried pushing the licking horde away, but that only angered the ones closest to him and caused even more fangs to sprout from slits in their gums.
“Put him down!” the man near the window said. “He’s not part of this!”
More figures entered the room. There was no furniture to get in their way so they flowed in like a tidal wave. Trained to figure his odds upon entering any hostile environment, Kilmer counted ten of them before the assholes shoved him against a wall and went to work. Their knuckles cracked against his jaw like frozen iron and thumped into his gut. He struggled, but was weakened by the blood that had sprayed out from his torn wrists and continued to leak down his hands and drip off the ends of his fingers.
The woman who’d brought him inside was crouching down over another prone body that looked to be a male of average height with a slender build. As she loomed over him, the fallen man stretched out one arm to grab some kind of sword that was made of wood. He would have gotten to it if the woman didn’t sink her fangs into his throat.
Everything Kilmer saw was blurred and only got worse as the blows hailed down relentlessly upon him. Years of training and experience on the streets of three different cities helped him slam his knee into the groin of one of his attackers and grab the face of another. If he’d had any strength at all, he would have gouged out the bastard’s eyes. Instead, he could only watch as the son of a bitch pulled his head away from Kilmer’s fingers and snarled to show a set of curved teeth that slid down along the inner edge of fangs that were already sticking out of his upper jaw. After those curved fangs were sunken into his shoulder, something was pumped into Kilmer’s system that sapped the rest of his will and caused his mind to wander in several directions.
The man who’d been impaled in the window straightened up as best he could and raised the stake over his head. All of the figures around him retreated, allowing the woman to dash over to him and use the wooden sword to chop off his arm and kick him into the crowd lurking within the nearby shadows. Meeting Kilmer’s clouded eyes as the amputated limb hit the floor, she asked, “Is this one a cop?”
Larsen told her he was.
“Bring that one with us so we can keep an eye on him,” she said while nodding toward the sword’s former owner. “We’re almost done here.”
Kilmer had never thought he’d consider begging for his life until he felt the points of both the sword and the stake against his midsection. By the time the woman pushed the weapons into his stomach, it was too late to do anything at all.
Chapter One
The wounds given to him by the man who called himself Jonah Lancroft were still wreaking havoc throughout Cole’s body as the same man’s words echoed through his brain. All the reporters, headlines, and websites lamenting the damage caused by the Mud Flu weren’t nearly as interested in its cure. In the weeks following the epidemic, the number of cases had dwindled. Hospitals shifted their focus to more common tragedies and the story was eventually dropped.
Cole scooped some dirt from the pile beside him and tossed it into the hole he’d helped dig. He and Paige had been two of many who spent the last several weeks sifting through the remains of what was left behind. Whether Lancroft was truly as old as he’d claimed was no longer an issue. The man knew his stuff. He’d been a Skinner through and through, which meant he had taken meticulous notes about everything he’d ever done.
Cole felt guilty for keeping all those scribbled pages to himself so he could be the first to read them. But with the last panicky echoes of Mud Flu fervor sulking in the lower portions of news websites, and werewolf photos still coming out of Kansas City, it was Lancroft’s thoughts on dealing with public scrutiny that remained at the front of his mind like the chorus of a bad song that had snuck in through a set of unwary ears and refused to leave.
Lancroft had written:
Ours is not a world of subtlety. The common man will see what we fight just as they will undoubtedly bear witness to the war we wage. Skinners are human, which means we cannot control all that is seen or whispered about while we go about our tasks. We are mortal, which means we have no time to waste in educating the masses on what it is that stalks them.The uninitiated, either through choice or necessity, are ignorant.Too sheltered to know.Too stubborn to learn.That is how they must remain. According to the journal, those words had been written in 1851. Cole didn’t know whether he should be amazed or disappointed with how well that sentiment held up.
“Not a world of subtlety, huh?” he grumbled as he scooped the last of the dirt onto the pile and slapped the ground with the blade of his shovel.
“What was that?”
He’d been so wrapped up in his thoughts and his shoveling that he had all but forgotten he wasn’t alone. “Nothing,” he said. “Just thinking about something I read.”
Walter Nash pressed one of his steel-toed boots down onto the pile of freshly turned earth and stuck his own shovel’s blade into it. “You talking about Lancroft’s journals?”
Furrowing his brow, Cole looked at the other man carefully. Although Walter’s wide face was friendly enough, Cole wasn’t quick to return his smile. “What makes you think that, Prophet? Another dream?”
While there was definitely an edge to Cole’s voice, the reference made perfect sense when directed at a man who frequently saw the future in his sleep. At least, that was his claim. In the time that Cole had been among the Skinners’ ranks, Prophet’s occasional warnings were hit and miss, and his lottery picks hadn’t panned out well enough for early retirement. For anyone who hadn’t gotten used to chasing down shapeshifters or holding conversations with nymphs, that might have been impressive. In the mind of a Skinner, there was always room for improvement.
“Don’t need dreams to figure that out,” Prophet said. It was a cool night, but the sweat he’d worked up while digging and subsequently filling the hole added a sheen to his coffee-colored skin. Wiping away some of the perspiration trickling into his eye, he explained, “The only thing any of you Skinners have been talking about since you put the old man out of business is those journals.” He picked up his shovel to smooth over some of the rougher spots on the dirt pile and nodded solemnly. “Too late to deny it now.”
Cole sighed. Even though Paige wasn’t with him, he half expected to feel the swat of her hand against the back of his head. He hadn’t forgotten the other man was a professional bounty hunter, but he did allow Prophet’s more unusual talent to overshadow ones that had been honed through years of tracking people down the old-fashioned way.
They stood in a field ten miles south of Salem, New Jersey, and about an hour’s drive from Philadelphia. It was a calm stretch of flat land that was close enough to the Delaware River for them to catch a whiff of briny mist if the wind blew just right. Cole had picked the spot after riding in the passenger seat of a pickup truck that bottomed out with every bump it hit along County Highway 624. Since they’d stopped digging, the only sounds were the two men’s voices, the rustle of wind against tall grass, and the occasional rumble of engines from the highway. Despite their relative solitude, Cole lowered his voice when he said, “The journals are supposed to be a secret.”
“Then why mention them?” Prophet asked in a matching whisper. Straightening up, he motioned toward the
