bar on the adjacent corner.
“What were you expecting for a meeting place used by a militant splinter group of Skinners?” Paige asked. “A fort?”
“No, but maybe something more strategic.”
“Bars are perfect cover,” she explained. “Noisy at night and plenty of places to post lookouts posing as regular customers. The liquor store is a good addition too. Especially if it gets robbed a lot. At the very least, there’s enough foot traffic to keep any more from being noticed. You pay the owners of either place enough and they’ll keep an eye on your front yard along with theirs.”
“You seem to know a lot for a woman who lived in an abandoned restaurant.”
“It took a lot of work to scope that place out. Now come on. Let’s meet us some heavily armed nut jobs.”
As they approached the building on the corner, Cole wasn’t exactly sure who would greet them. The fact that they weren’t welcomed with open arms, however, was no surprise. The two who showed up first looked to be no more than twenty years old. Skinning werewolves didn’t have an age restriction, but even the newest recruits usually had a little more hair on their faces than the two young men who rushed outside carrying shotguns.
“That’s close enough,” one of them said.
Paige raised her arms, so Cole followed her lead. “We’re not going to hurt anyone,” she said.
“And you’re not about to take any of our supplies neither. What the hell do you want?”
The one who’d done the talking so far was a burly kid who looked like he’d spent his time playing football and partying before the world went to hell. He looked back at his partner, a taller kid with long hair and baggy jeans riding low on bony hips. Both wore matching sweatshirts that had probably been taken from a rack at the same Salvation Army store. Either that or the randomly raggedy look had become fashionable.
“Tell Jessup we’re here,” Paige replied. “It’s not safe to stand out in the open for this long.”
The guy spoke into a radio that was slightly bigger than a cell phone. “These two say . . . yeah. Okay.” Grudgingly, he looked at them and waved them through. As he moved past them, Cole noticed that neither of the younger men had any scars on their hands that would mark them as having been trained with a Skinner’s shifting weaponry.
The main room of the largest building reeked of kerosene, burnt gunpowder, and charred wood. Although Cole couldn’t spot whatever traps had been set to turn the entrance into a kill zone, he was fairly sure they’d already been sprung several times. Although his knowledge of Skinner runes was still far from complete, he had no problem picking out the ones etched into the splintered door frame. The room was barely the size of a walk-in closet and was sealed off by a thick wall supported by steel posts. The clatter of teeth braided into leather cords announced Jessup’s arrival through a narrow gap between two of the posts on the far side of the room. He was an older man with a grizzled beard and scarred skin. Even without the tanned werewolf hide vest decorated with teeth and claws, he looked like someone who was never meant to leave a desert. He nodded toward the two shotgun-wielding Junior Varsity athletes who’d answered the door and said, “You boys can go check the perimeter. These two are all right.”
The ferocity on the younger men’s faces was obviously a tired facade, and they didn’t do much to keep it up as they turned their backs on the Skinners and headed outside.
Jessup studied Paige with a gaze that had been hardened by more than his share of nightmares. Although most of the people in the country were building a gaze like that, Skinners had been working on theirs for a whole lot longer. “We’ve tried contacting you two for some time. What brings you here?”
“We came for the Jekhibar,” she told him.
“Then you might as well turn right back and go. We went through too much to get our hands on that thing.”
“I know,” Cole said. “I was right there in New Mexico with you. In fact, I don’t think you would’ve made it out of there if I hadn’t been watching your back.”
“It’s too late in the game to start asking for credit on the battlefield.” Jessup sighed. “Too much fighting, too many losses. There ain’t hardly anything worth owning up to anymore.”
“You told me to contact you if I wanted to learn more about the Jekhibar,” Cole said. “Here we are.”
“It’s been months since I made that offer. You lookin’ to join us?” Jessup asked.
“No.”
“Then why the hell should I show you a damned thing?”
“Because as long as we’re not sprouting fur or fangs, we’re on the same team. If you didn’t have any intention of doing that much, you never would have made contact with me after New Mexico.”
“True enough,” Jessup admitted. “You guys hungry?”
Cole and Paige followed him back through the narrow doorway and farther into the building. There were several sticks of dynamite and metal containers that reeked of flammable liquids fastened to the other side of that wall. Wires running from the homemade explosives ran to a set of switches farther inside a round room that had been gutted to make space for several shelves, storage lockers, and chairs. As he surveyed the rest of the area, Cole picked out at least a dozen lines of blocky runic symbols etched into the floor, walls, and ceiling.
Motioning toward a series of scorch marks, bullet holes, and claw marks adorning the floor and walls, Jessup said, “As you can tell, you ain’t the first ones to pay us a visit.” His long gray hair looked as if it had been scraped up from the ash coating much of the room’s surface area. It was held back by a thin leather cord. “We gotta be careful lately,” he explained. “If the Full Bloods ain’t tryin’ to sniff us out, the bloodsuckers are sending in spies to get as deep into this place as they can to plant bugs or any other kind of electronic bullshit.”
Without being told, one of the three others in the room stood up and opened a door leading deeper into the building. Until now Cole had barely noticed the other tired faces staring at him from their posts within the foyer. And, thanks to the explosives, he’d all but written off that second door as a possibility of leading anywhere but to the next life. It swung open after a few conventional locks were undone and was held open by a man with an M-16 in his hands and a wooden weapon hanging from one shoulder. The deep patchwork of scars on his hands told Cole that he knew how to put each of those weapons to use.
“So the Nymar know you’re here?” Paige asked as she followed Jessup into the next room.
“They’ve been after us ever since all that business with the dead cops,” Jessup explained. “It ain’t like they can really back down after something like that, right?”
“We’ve been stepping up our work against them,” Cole said as he stepped through the hidden opening and looked around. “Any Nymar Blood Parlor we’ve been able to find has been burnt to the ground.”
“Just so another can spring up somewhere else. Nope,” Jessup grunted definitively. “We’re well past the point of keepin’ the peace. It’s ‘us or them’ time.”
The next room was part living quarters and part bunker. Several walls had been knocked down to open what had to be most of the first floor. Men and women in layers of tattered clothing walked quietly between televisions and computer terminals, sifted through racks of guns and wooden weapons, or rested on cots or chairs situated near the back of the room. Some ate from cans or drank from plastic bottles, obviously more concerned with fueling their muscles instead of enjoying a meal. Every last one of them took notice of Cole and Paige. He recognized some of them as Skinners who had come to Philadelphia to scavenge from Lancroft’s old house, but others were strangers with tired, suspicious eyes.
“By the way,” Jessup added, “you’d better not be trying to communicate with those friends of yours from the military. If any of them IRD choppers or trucks come along, we’ll know it was you that brought ’em here.”
“What have you got against them anyway?” Cole asked. “We’re all trying to kill the same Half Breeds.”
“Sure, but what happens once the fight’s over? We know what should be done with those monsters. We know what Lancroft would have done with them. We know what any other Skinners would do. Can you tell me you know exactly what the Army or Marines would do? They might as well be a bunch of excited kids playin’ around with the shotgun they just found in their daddy’s closet.” Rather than show them to any of the other doors near the back of the room or any of the steel lockers guarded by armed men as well as several layers of iron bars, Jessup dropped to one knee and pulled up a thin section of floor to reveal a solid block of runes that fit together into a clump at least twelve inches square. He touched several of the runes with such quick, fleeting motions that Cole didn’t have a chance to memorize the sequence. A second later the square shifted and Jessup was able to open a hole that contained a dented metal box. He opened it so Paige and Cole could see inside.
Cole hunkered down to examine a thin wedge of silvery metal that looked like it had been blasted by fire and painted with thin streaks of blood. “That’s the Jekhibar?” he asked.
