space. All he needed to do was keep his prey in sight while gauging where Kawosa would land.
And then the trickster disappeared like a mirage that had been made of cloud vapor and drifting smoke.
Randolph slowed his steps while searching the blue Canadian sky. There was nothing to mask the sight of an airborne shapeshifter. In the distance he heard the impact of something landing in the snow, followed by the scraping of claws against hard, frozen earth. Panting with renewed vigor, Randolph raced in that direction.
“You know nothing of what I can do,” Kawosa said while pacing less than fifty yards in front of the Full Blood.
Randolph rushed at him, eyes narrowing to keep out as much of the icy wind as possible. When Kawosa sprang from his hind legs, Randolph jumped to meet him at the top of an arch formed by their two trajectories. Instead of colliding the way two physical bodies should, however, Randolph slashed apart the vision of Kawosa that faded without so much as a hint of anything solid that had been there. Before Randolph could touch the ground again, something slammed against his ribs. It was Kawosa, clinging to him, biting and clawing in a frenzy of sharp edges and insatiable hunger. Peeling him off and casting him away this time was even more painful for Randolph than the last.
“I’ll give you one chance to think, pup,” Kawosa said upon landing. “Think about what you’re doing and maybe you’ll come to your senses.”
But Randolph wasn’t going to be swayed. Although there were no energies trying to assert themselves on his mind, he recognized the feral gleam in the shapeshifter’s pale gold eyes. There was too much blood dripping from his tapered snout, too much torn flesh dangling from between his teeth, for him to simply give up now. Any werewolf knew the hunger that came after tasting the tender perfection of freshly shredded meat. Rather than put his insight to the test, Randolph allowed his muscles to relax and his head to hang to one side as if he was truly considering the offer.
Sure enough, Kawosa charged. Although the trickster was the one snapping at the bait dangling in front of him, he didn’t go about it recklessly. He covered the small patch of ground between them in a series of darting steps, each one sending him forward at a slightly different angle than the last. Even his head sent mixed signals as it bobbed in the wrong way from the rest of his body. Rather than try to compensate for all of those factors, Randolph stood up and swept both arms out. If another creature had been standing directly in front of him, it would have been ripped in half by both sets of claws that raked out in opposite directions to cover as much area as possible.
The swings were wild enough to clip Kawosa in several places. Having underestimated his quarry, Kawosa now found himself in the midst of an onslaught akin to several sets of propeller blades converging on him at once. He snapped at Randolph’s legs and brought the Full Blood down. He then kicked his lower body to an awkward angle so another powerful swing could pass him by, and scrambled away.
Like any predator, Randolph’s killer instinct swelled at the sight of his prey trying to flee. His howl was a terrible sound that sent smaller animals fleeing for miles in every direction. After all that had happened, even the humans in nearby towns knew to shut their doors and seek shelter instead of poking their noses out to investigate the unearthly riot.
Kawosa kept his steps swift and glanced over one shoulder to find the other shapeshifter bearing down on him. Shifting into a lean, scraggly canine built for running, he bolted toward the north. But Randolph knew better than to chase after him right away. Instead, he slowed down and strained for his other senses to detect any hint as to something else that might be moving around him.
Kawosa didn’t exactly disappear from where he’d been, but he did show up in a spot that Randolph hadn’t been expecting. When Randolph tried to follow his prey, he found himself simply looking in the wrong direction. Now that the trickster had built up a head of steam, he had enough speed to put a simple ruse like that to good use. Keeping that in mind, Randolph charged over snowdrifts, leapt over fallen logs, and stormed through forests. Kawosa’s ruse bought him enough time to veer away to the south, but the Full Blood surged onward with enough force to catch up to him. Randolph’s claws snagged the trickster’s tail, but Kawosa ripped himself loose at the expense of his own body and ran away again.
After tossing aside the tail he’d ripped from Kawosa’s body, the pursuit began in earnest.
Chapter Eight
When the sun went down on a war-torn country, nearly every city felt the same. After the Breaking Moon, dusk became a universal warning for all living things without claws to seek shelter before the monsters emerged from their holes. There was no shame in running anymore. No pride to be lost at jumping when an unexpected noise rang out. People still conducted their lives, trying not to think about the horrors that had engulfed their former lives. A trickle of humanity went out to eat or worked at jobs they could ill afford to quit. Some children went to school where drills were conducted to teach them where to run if Half Breeds charged toward the playground. The rest sat behind bolted doors, praying.
Rico had given up on anything as comforting as prayer. He sat inside the sloped building on the corner of Spring and Payne, hunched over the keyboard of one of many Vigilant computers, angling his head so the other nearby Skinners couldn’t easily hear him as he spoke into a hands-free phone receiver. Since the windows were all blacked out and barred, he watched the outside world through a small bank of monitors displaying feeds from cameras set up on posts, rooftops, and windowsills within three square blocks of his location. Every so often he would check the faces of the Skinners watching him, and then look back down to the work he was doing. “All right,” he whispered. “What do you want me to do?”
“Are you at the computer?” Cole asked through the headset.
“Yeah, but I ain’t no hacker. If anyone’s tryin’ to hide something about that prison in Colorado, I sure as hell won’t be able to find it.”
“Just type what I tell you and let me know what you find. Look for Hal Waylon. He was the guy who ran the place where I was locked up.”
Rico did as Cole instructed, but Hal Waylon’s name wasn’t easy to find. A little digging into e-mail histories, downloads, and user interface registrations was enough to pull up the name four times. Denver, Colorado, was mentioned, but mostly in connection to the two Full Bloods who’d leveled a supposedly abandoned packaging facility. It was the same bullshit that had been handed to the press, and mentioned nothing of Cole’s escape. The fragments he’d found where Hal Waylon was mentioned were too small to count for anything.
“We need more than that,” Rico grunted.
“Hal Waylon was a Skinner,” Cole insisted. “He mentioned the Vigilant by name and acted like someone who took his sensitivity training from a douche bag like Jonah Lancroft.”
“There are other Vigilant branches out there. I only got a few minutes before I’m noticed here, so make it snappy.”
The two closest to him were from the younger batch who’d been called in to help with Cecile. They were twitchy due to frayed nerves, pale after being out of the sunlight for the better part of a month, and never far away from a shotgun or assault rifle. A few more Skinners walked back and forth between other rooms. Most of the activity was centered on the basement now that there was a live Full Blood to cut and prod as they pleased. Rico didn’t even want to think about what sorts of experiments were being run on Cecile or what samples were being taken.
“Okay,” Cole sighed. “Let’s try a few other keywords. What about ‘tendrils, infected’ or ‘spore’?” He then told Rico how to run the search to look for instances where those words showed up in conjunction with his own name.
Leaning back in the squeaky old office chair he’d been given, Rico said, “Nada.”
“Hey,” one of the younger Skinners said. “You find anything yet?” She usually sat in the spot Rico was using, but wasn’t high enough on the totem pole to do much of anything when he waved her off.
He searched for
