The expressway was slick beneath her boots, but not slippery. That worked in her favor by getting the cars to slow down as they rounded the bend to avoid the same sort of crash that she had purposely endured. By the time she neared the guardrail on the opposite side of the road from the wrecked rental car, she heard a bellowing voice roll toward her from the other side of the expressway.
“Where do you think yer goin’, Bloodhound?”
She might have to kill him, she realized. It was simple survival now.
Paige hobbled backward until she felt her legs bump against the rail. A glance behind her showed how long a drop awaited if she decided to jump, and even if she did make it, Rico wouldn’t need many guesses to figure out where she’d gone. Ignoring the horns and engines of the cars that passed between them, she focused on the heap of wreckage. Some voices came from a few passing cars, but the angry and concerned ones alike were silenced when she raised her Beretta to sight along the top of its barrel.
She fired the moment she spotted Rico, but there was too much twisted metal in front of him for a bullet to find a clean path. He seemed to be as dazed as she was. Although he didn’t have a petrified arm to protect him, the jacket stitched together from Half Breed skins had done a fine job of seeing him through the crash. Judging by the awkward way he dropped and shuffled behind the car, however, his legs weren’t in very good shape.
“This ain’t how I wanted it to go!” he shouted.
She replied by squeezing off one more careful shot that sparked against the side of the rental car.
Rico’s voice was calmer when he said, “I’ll chalk it up to nerves if you cut this shit out right now. Don’t make me hunt you!”
She fired again, punching another few holes into the wrecked car. Her grouping was solid, and it wouldn’t be long before she hit pay dirt. All she knew was that she couldn’t let him get away. She just couldn’t. There was no other reason than that. Once she peeled away her logic to that point, Paige realized it was shallower than the puddles on the expressway. Turning her head to give herself a moment to think, she found herself looking into a narrow, angular face that still dripped with the water kicked up during his escape from the rental car.
“You have to kill him,” Kawosa said in a voice that had somehow been wiped away before. “You’re all alone and can only worry about surviving now.”
Even as she looked at the creature that had spoken those words, the sight of him began to fade. He wasn’t disappearing, she reminded herself. He’d told her she was alone and she believed him, just like he must have when she first started shooting. Something about his words was impossible to dispute. Instead of trying to figure out why that was, she pointed her gun at him.
“No,” he said. “You can’t shoot me.”
Realizing it was true, she lowered her Beretta. Kawosa started to say something else, but she drew the machete from her boot and swung at him before he could get his words out. The edge that had been treated with the metallic varnish infused with fragments from the Blood Blade would have sliced through Kawosa’s skinny neck like butter if he hadn’t been so quick to lean away. Instead, it grazed the side of his head and cut a straight line up toward one eye. The blade didn’t come anywhere close to blinding him, but it did send a quick spray of blood to the ground. By the time the drops hit her boot, Kawosa had shifted into his animal form and bounded away. Since she’d acted quickly enough to sidestep his lies, she figured he wouldn’t be returning to try again anytime soon.
Suddenly, Rico stood up from behind his cover. He’d ditched the shotgun in favor of the Sig Sauer that had been his trusted companion for the last several years. There was no more talking to be done. The instant he caught sight of her, he squeezed his trigger to unleash a steady current of lead that ripped across the expressway, chipped at a few passing cars, and hissed progressively closer to the spot where Paige was standing.
She waited until he ran along the shoulder to try and get a better angle on her, then fired until her rounds finally punched through the layers of steel protecting the rental car’s gas tank. It caused a spark that ignited the fuel and set off an explosion that shoved the car sideways several feet against the glistening pavement. It wasn’t the grand finale sort of explosion she’d been promised by all those movies and cop shows, but it was good enough to force Rico to dive for cover before he was blown over the guardrail behind him.
Paige knew he wasn’t down for the count. She also knew she couldn’t move at more than half speed as she turned and hobbled along the side of the road. More cars were either gawking at the flaming wreck or slowing to ease past it. Drivers shouted at each other, her, and possibly Rico, but she couldn’t bother with any of that. It took all of her focus to block them out while tearing off a piece of her shirt and crouching down to dab at the blood on the pavement. Praying she wasn’t just cleaning up her own mess, she let out a relieved breath when she found something that was even better than what she’d hoped to collect. She couldn’t be absolutely certain, but the little piece of rounded flesh looked like an earlobe. It was still warm after being cut from Kawosa’s head, so she wrapped it up and tucked it safely into a pocket. From there, she resumed moving along the shoulder of the expressway toward a spot where the slope of the ground rose up to meet the guardrail. Her arm hung at her side, throbbing with more pain than she’d felt since it was first poisoned. She needed to get more healing serum. She needed to get somewhere safe enough to make a phone call. But more than either of those things, she just needed to get the hell away from Rico.
“Screw it,” she grunted as she grabbed onto the rail and swung her legs over.
Motorists shouted for her to stop. They told her help was on the way.
Paige couldn’t stop.
There was no help on its way.
Chapter Three
Nine cops were dead, and those were only the ones that had been killed in Denver on the night that Cole, Rico, Prophet, and the Amriany shot their way through a warehouse being used by the Nymar. Across the country, more cops had died in similar raids or were murdered in silence and left with Skinner weapons in their bodies. It didn’t take long for those crimes to be tied together and pinned onto what was quickly labeled a cell of home-grown terrorists. Thanks to the news coverage focused on the blood-soaked Denver warehouse, Cole’s capture was heralded as the death of that cell.
Riding away from the warehouse that night in a SWAT van had been one of the most terrifying moments of his thirty-four years on this planet. That was no small thing, considering all the horrific things he’d seen in those years. First there was the speedy ascension of dancing reality shows to the top of the ratings, followed by the slow death of old fashioned rock ’n’ roll. Once he got his first look at a real werewolf, his world had gotten even worse.
Training to be a Skinner was a painful process where he was ground into someone cold enough to drive a sharpened piece of wood into another living thing, occasionally interrupted by those very same living things trying to rip his head off. After that he’d seen shapeshifters of all flavors, as well as vampires, nymphs, and even a Chupacabra. Somehow, those creatures had been easier to handle than the scalding glares of the cops who rode with him in the van that night.
They all wanted to kill him.
If the stories were to be believed—and there was no good reason for the cops not to believe them—they had every right to kill him in the most gruesome way possible.
But by some miracle, he had been shackled to his seat and driven straight to the nearest jail cell. Apart from several choice words snarled at him through many sets of gritted teeth, he arrived without incident.
He was processed and thrown into a cage.
After standing in front of a judge barely long enough to feel the courtroom beneath his state-issued canvas shoes, he was given a jumpsuit and thrown into a smaller cell.
There were no visits from lawyers, no questions from the authorities. Just hours upon hours of solitude, within three stark gray walls and a set of iron bars, during which he was made aware of one simple fact: cop killers lived on borrowed time. But he was no cop killer. He’d been smacked around by Full Bloods, shot, hit with blunt sticks, cut with all manner of blades, and bitten by vampires.
That last part was what stuck with him the most.
Cole’s time as a Skinner had been extensive enough for his body to produce the healing serum on its own. That
