Just like they did with poor Henry. Do you even know what horrors Lancroft had to inflict to kill him?”
With every word, Kawosa’s voice took a new tone; a concoction that changed as new ingredients were sprinkled into the mix.
“Can you break these bars, Full Blood?” For the first time since he’d stepped forward, Kawosa’s eyes disappeared as he closed them and drew a long breath. They snapped open, green and vibrant, as an incomplete set of crooked fangs were displayed beneath raised lips. “You’re the one they called Standing Bear. Could it be you’re working for the Skinners now too?”
“You know better than that. I’ve been trying to find you for years, and all I discovered was that your trail ended when it crossed with Jonah Lancroft’s. Only recently has he been found and dealt with.”
“Yes,” the creature sighed. “I nearly got a taste of the woman who did the dealing. So sweet.”
“If we stay here much longer, we will be forced to fight these Skinners as well as any more that come to help them. And then there are the humans.”
“You fear them?”
Randolph took a moment to gauge his response. “They have numbers and technology at their advantage. I don’t know how much of that you know about.”
“They’ve always had their toys. How do you plan on getting me past these bars?” Kawosa asked.
“Tell me you want to leave and we should be able to clear a path.”
“I want to leave.”
“Then stand back.”
Shifting into his four-legged form, Randolph swatted at the floor with a massive paw. A few seconds later the rumbling beneath him commenced. Bricks trembled as Max passed under them, but the ones anchoring the bars hardly moved. At the other end of the hall the hybrid Mongrel yelped as both Nymar descended upon him. Jory waited for the other two to clear a path before delivering a finishing blow that sent a wet crunch down the hall.
Kawosa backed into the darkness from which he’d come. He shifted his blank reflective eyes toward the floor as the bricks started to buckle and split. Dirt and subterranean filth spewed up like pus from an old wound once Max concentrated his efforts on the section of floor beneath the bars. Those bricks, either strengthened by the warding runes or powered by some other force, held firm. They did, however, need a solid foundation. Once that was removed, they shifted and slid within the churning ground until the bars were the only thing holding them in place.
Randolph looked at Kawosa again, finding the creature’s eyes closer to the top of the cell and encased in a lean shape that bristled with coarse fur.
“Can you break the plane of the bars?” Kawosa asked.
“With the bricks of your cell disrupted, the runes should be weakened enough for you to—”
“That’s not what I asked. Can you break the plane of the bars?”
Hunkering down on all fours, Randolph leaned so his snout was almost touching the old iron. “We don’t have time for this.”
“All this world has for me are its curiosities. Meeting you this way is a surprise. I like surprises. I want more of them.”
“If I were to start performing tricks for your amusement, then that would be a very big surprise indeed. You can stay here until the Skinners figure out a way to cut you apart, but if you want to leave, let’s bloody well leave.”
The smile Kawosa showed was crooked and verging on childish, which made it a disturbing addition to a face such as his. Rather than test his luck with the bars, he sank his claws into the earth beneath the broken floor and pulled himself under the upturned dirt. It was a short crawl through decades-old filth before his lean frame emerged inside the cell next to his old residence. By the time he pulled himself completely out of the hole, Kawosa was a wiry man with skin the color of scorched desert rock. He wore a tattered leather loincloth and a collar around his neck that might have once been attached to a shirt or some sort of tunic. Long stringy hair hung in front of his face but wasn’t enough to obscure his rich, chocolate-brown eyes.
“The tunnel continues from there,” Randolph said as he eased back into his dense, shaggy human form. “Once we’re outside we run. Can you run?”
“We’ll soon see.”
“Yes we will. Max, lead the way.”
The tunneling Mongrel had watched silently for this long, and was more than happy to dive back into the earth to leave the brick prison behind.
Randolph stared down the hall and locked eyes with the Skinners who were recovering from their fight with the canine hybrid. When one of them sounded the charge, the Full Blood followed in Kawosa’s wake.
“Come on!” Paul said. The few stray drops of shapeshifter blood that he hadn’t drank were quickly lapped up by a wildly flopping tongue. He’d never tasted the blood of a Mongrel and it flowed through him like raw volcanic energy.
Tru had drunk from the Mongrel as well and was so affected by it that she couldn’t form words. All she did was race to join her partner, since he was running to what might be another of the newly discovered delicacies.
Jory wasn’t so eager. He took a moment to fish a small syringe from a compartment stitched into the side of his weapon’s scabbard and injected a dose of serum into his arm. Even as the healing began, he jogged while the other two threw themselves into a dead run. “Hold up!” he shouted. “Did anything get loose down there?”
The chaos upstairs subsided so quickly that the ensuing silence seemed more shocking than an explosion.
“We don’t know yet,” Tru replied. “What the hell was just standing there?”
“I thought it was a Full Blood,” Paul said. “Looked like one, but then it changed into something different.”
Jory’s fingers curled in to brush against the scars on his palm. “That was a Full Blood. Just never seen it in that form before. It’s gone now. Let’s get out of here.” He led the way back upstairs and through the dissection room. Even before he made it out of the Skipping Temple, he could tell there was more trouble on its way. Without looking back, he grunted, “Cops.”
“I think those lights are just from the walls,” Tru said.
“Yeah, the green ones. Not those,” Jory replied as he pointed to one of the small windows along the top of the workshop wall. The windows were rectangular and barely large enough for a child to fit through, but the metal basins outside them caught more than dead leaves and small animals. It also reflected some of the red and blue lights from the street.
“Tell the nymph to be ready,” Jory shouted while running up the stairs that led to the kitchen.
“The nymph can hear you,” Jordan shouted back. “And it’s ready. The only bridge I could get right now was to … are you listening to me?”
“Just keep it open,” Paul said. “So long as it leads away from this place we should be fine.”
Before either of the Nymar got concerned enough to venture into the part of the house that had become a war zone, Skinners began filing into the basement. Bobby was first down the stairs, helping someone who was too wounded to move on his own. The rest came down in a stream of bloody bodies and a few limp corpses. Abel was last to step upon the top stair, and quickly traced some of the runes near the door.
“Is that going to keep the cops from seeing what’s up there?” Jessup asked from the landing at the bottom of the steps.
“Doesn’t even matter,” Abel replied in a haggard wheeze. “Half the neighborhood must’ve heard the shots, and Lord only knows what anyone saw if they looked over the back fence. Just get the hell out of here before we’re all dragged away.”
By then the first Skinners were marching through the curtain. Jessup went into the dissection room and picked up the thing that had literally been pried from Jonah Lancroft’s dying hand. It was a small box with a simple control on it that was linked to explosives set up throughout the basement.
“Everyone’s out,” he said to Jordan. “Your turn.”
“What about the Full Blood? Are you going to let the cops find it?”
“It took off and so did the Mongrel. Just move.”
She didn’t need to hear any more than that before approaching the curtain and placing one foot through. “Are you coming?”
“Hell yes,” Jessup said as he pressed the button that triggered the first muffled thump of C4 from the bottom of the stairs. “Ain’t nowhere else for me to go now.”
