The big man did and asked, “Who are you calling?”
“Information. Just give me a second.” Cole lifted the phone to his ear before pressing the button to make his call. The clearing in front of him was a mess of broken vehicles, smoking metal, dead werewolves, and mangled soldiers. The ground glistened like mud after a long rain, due to moonlight reflecting off so many shredded gargoyles. He’d barely noticed them during the fight because their fragile bones and paper-thin bodies had been trampled into paste.
Although Lambert was happy to be out of his chains so he could rub the raw spots on his ankles and wrists, Cole didn’t have more than a few seconds of quiet time before Jessup walked around the overturned truck and asked, “What are you dicking around with this time?”
“Making a call. Have the Mongrels showed up yet?”
“One’s right here. Says he needs to talk to you.”
Cole spotted Ben’s head and shoulders emerging from the dirt. It was in a clearing well away from where Rico now tended to a few of the fallen soldiers. Injuries there ranged from serious bite wounds to a woman in bloodied fatigues with a leg that was half encrusted by stone. He left the other Skinner to his task and approached the Mongrel to ask, “Is Cecile down there with you?”
“We pulled her under just long enough to get her to stop attacking soldiers, but then she got away. Sorry.”
“Got away? That’s it?”
Ben crawled out from the dirt to show his hands were empty. “If we could get rid of Full Bloods that easily, we wouldn’t have to worry so much when they got too close to our homes. In Kansas City, you and Paige wore Liam down after how much fighting and running all over the place?”
“Where did she go?”
Since Ben’s face was dominated by a large, hooked beak, and the lids of his black eyes were vertical instead of horizontal, it was tough to read his expression. The movement of his bony shoulders, however, was most definitely a shrug.
“Thanks for getting her away from here,” Cole said. “Do you think you can find out where she went?”
“We do our best to track the Full Bloods. We’ll let you know what we find.”
“Bring her back here,” he ordered. “Just find a way.”
Ben disappeared beneath the dirt like a Whack-A-Mole barely escaping a giant padded mallet. Cole allowed himself a few tired laughs while tapping the touch screen of his phone. Since he wasn’t getting a good enough connection to log on to the Internet via Rico’s device, he did things the old-fashioned way. “Madison, Wisconsin,” he said to the operator after dialing 411. “Shimmy’s.”
“What did you say?” Jessup asked as he walked over to him.
Cole twisted his wrist so the phone receiver wasn’t directly in front of his mouth. “I’m calling information. Shimmy’s is a strip bar in Wisconsin.”
“People are dead here and dying somewhere else and you’re calling tittie bars?”
“Not just a tittie bar. It’s one of the Dryad temples. You used the damn portals to get to the Lancroft house in Philly, remember?”
“Yeah.”
“We need to separate those Full Bloods from whatever it is they found in Oklahoma,” Cole said. “From what Cecile was telling us about the pilot light and that energy those things are after, the worst thing going right now is that so many Full Bloods are in one place.”
“You think the nymphs can zap them back to their territories if we could lure them to one of them bars?” After thinking it over, Jessup cringed. “Even if we could get them there, I doubt the girls would go for that. They don’t want much to do with Skinners, with all the police looking for us.” He stared at the statue of Esteban and scratched his cheek. “I just wish I knew what the hell he found beneath that prison of yours.”
“What about the gargoyles? Are they still here?”
“Circling,” the older Skinner replied. “With this much blood bein’ spilled and plenty of their own kind gettin’ shredded by werewolves, they won’t be goin’ anywhere anytime soon.”
“Tell me if you can— Yeah, connect me …Yes, I’ll pay the extra fee …Sorry, that was Information again. If you can get those gargoyles to— Yeah, is Tristan there?”
Wiping his hands on the front of his jeans, Rico approached the other two Skinners. “Need something better than dirty rags to patch these guys up.”
Jessup shoved past the big man and grumbled, “Headin’ back to the truck. Gotta get my medical kit to treat these wounded soldiers proper.”
“Somehow,” Cole said to Rico, “the Breaking Moon is allowing Full Bloods to turn people into Half Breeds without biting them.”
“Kinda found that out the hard way, didn’t we?” the big man scoffed.
“Yes, but if that gets any worse, it could be what Paige heard Liam talking about in Oklahoma. He said something about taking our guns and machines out of the picture. It they’re able to turn anyone just by— Yes I’m a friend of Tristan’s! Just tell her Cole Warnecki is calling. She’ll know who I am!”
“Get back into the truck, guy,” Rico said to the skinny fellow who tried to sneak past him.
Lambert stared intently at the Skinners, bouncing his eyes back and forth between them fast enough to make it look like a facial tic. “He’s right about what the Full Bloods can do,” he said to Rico while jabbing a finger at Cole. “I heard its thoughts. I’m psychic.”
“So you’ve been saying ever since we picked you up.”
“Why doesn’t anyone believe me?”
“Because,” Rico snapped, “you talk like a nut job and you’re givin’ me a headache. You got something to say, just say it and stop with the crazy eyes.”
“Crazy eyes?”
“Yeah. Was that something you did in prison or did you freak out yer mama with them things too?”
When Lambert tried to screw his expression into something he felt was more normal, he only succeeded in creeping Rico out even more. Finally, he let his squint and twitch return as he told the Skinner, “I was kept in that place to spy on people’s thoughts, and the ones who used me for that were like you. Skinners. They believed me and they were pricks. You and Cole aren’t pricks, so why the hell can’t you just listen to me?”
“I’m listening,” Cole said.
Letting out a relieved sigh, Lambert said, “I heard the Full Blood’s thoughts. It was something I ain’t never heard before. It wasn’t even words. It was just some kind of wild …static. It’s the same thing I heard in all of those Half Breeds tonight, but it wasn’t inside the ones back in Colorado.”
“These Half Breeds are different,” Rico said. “Normally, they got to ferment before they’re ready to run. These just popped and were good to go.”
“It’s the Breaking Moon,” Lambert insisted. “It’s all the Full Bloods have been thinking about since we left G7. The gray one, the brown one, even the girl. Tonight, everything for them is sped up. They’re getting stronger every second. Even that one.”
Cole followed Lambert’s trembling finger and was directed to the statue of Esteban. “He’s still alive in there?” he asked.
Lambert nodded. “And he’s pissed.”
Cole was about to shove the phone back into his pocket when a voice came through that was almost sweet enough to make him forget about everything else. “Cole?” she said. “Is that you?”
“Yeah, Tristan. It’s me.”
“I was so worried.” She sighed in a way that Cole savored like a guilty pleasure. “You were all over the news when you were brought in for those murders and now there’s nothing anywhere. No pictures, no reports. Just nothing. Where are you?”
“New Mexico. Is there any way for you to get out here?”
“There are clubs in New Mexico, but that depends on where you are.”
“What I really need to know is—”
“Are you in Raton?” she asked.
Cole did a mental checklist of all the powers he knew the nymphs possessed. They could appeal to senses most humans didn’t even know they had. Dryads were powerful enough to channel the energies given off by human lust
