Sophie and Milosh approached the shack so she could knock on the door while he scanned the edge of the crater with wary eyes. Paige walked with Cole, while Waggoner stayed behind. Taking a new Skinner under their wing was one thing. Trusting a former Vigilant member with something like this was another. After a few knocks, the door was opened by a tall man who filled the opening almost as much as his solid, muscular body filled the dirty layers of clothing wrapped around him beneath a filthy apron. “Come in,” he said with a thick accent. “I trust these are Skinners?”
“Yes,” Milosh replied. “And they’ve done well enough to chase Vasily’s dogs back into Prague. Ira, this is Cole and Paige.”
“Well then,” the large man said. “Not only will I speak English, but they can help themselves to the stew I just made.”
Cole and Paige followed the Amriany inside. The shack was at least three times longer than it was wide. The front portion was dominated by a rectangular table cluttered with dirty soup bowls, papers, a checkerboard, some battered paperback books, and a phone that was five generations behind the one in Cole’s pocket. At the back of the cabin a stone fireplace crackled, with flames that shed a flickering light on blades hanging from three of the four walls. “Looks like that’s not all you’ve been making,” Paige said.
Weapons sat on pegs that had been knocked into the walls or hung from hooks dangling from crude racks. They ran the spectrum from simple daggers and wedge-shaped blades to curving designs even more complex than the sword strapped to Sophie’s back. Sizes ranged from a few inches all the way to broadswords almost as tall as Cole. Each of the weapons were encrusted with the same runes as the Blood Blade, but all had the rough, ashen look of metal pulled from a fire and left to gather dust. Once he got over the spectacle of being in a room that stank of burnt metal and being surrounded by so many exotic weapons, he noticed that none of the weapons were complete.
“I was hoping you’d make it out here,” Ira said while waddling over to the fireplace. His awkward movements weren’t caused by a problem with weight or coordination, but from joints that were even less pliable than the iron he forged. “Those bastard Nymar swarmed into my summer home and destroyed it!”
“Was that the same place we were at before?” Cole asked. “The place where those Half Breeds attacked?”
“Yes,” Milosh said.
“That was a summer home?”
“It is warmer there than here. Can’t you tell?”
Ira waved at both of them before reaching into the fireplace that still burned with a large flame. He grabbed a black pot by a curved handle, a whispering hiss coming from his hands. He brought the pot to the table with the heated handle still burning his palms, then set it down so he could blow on his hands as if he’d accidentally touched a hot coffee mug. “I would have fought them myself if you would have left at least one strong arm to help me.”
“We don’t have anyone to spare,” Sophie told him. “Besides, I can’t remember the last time you needed someone to protect you.”
Holding up a thick, callused finger, Ira said, “I just needed someone to hold a few of them back so I could swing. Not protect me. Is big difference.”
“Of course.”
Having made her way to one of the walls, Paige reached out to run her fingertips along some of the blades. When she touched one of the shorter swords hard enough to set it swinging into its neighbor, she looked over to the Chokesari as if expecting a reaction. Ira merely looked back at her while spooning some stew into one of the bowls. “Are all of these Blood Blades?” she asked.
“Not yet. Stew?”
“We didn’t come all the way out here to—”
Cole interrupted her with, “I’ll have some stew.”
Nodding with approval, Ira handed over a bowl and stooped down to pull out a bench that had been hiding beneath the long table. “They would be Blood Blades if there were any more Jekhibar around that were . . .” He rubbed his fingertips together as if something vital was slipping through them. After a few seconds he snapped them and said, “Charged. Is that the word?”
Milosh nodded. “Yes it is. All of the Jekhibar we have are drier than my first wife’s . . . what are you looking at?”
Ira’s face had taken on an expression that made him look almost childish. “What happened to your arm? The last time I saw you, there were two of them.”
“Lost to a Weshruuv,” Milosh grunted while rubbing the stump that had been wrapped in several layers of torn scarves.
Turning on the balls of his feet, Ira shoved aside a pile of scrap metal with the same ease someone else might push a chair aside. He reached down and retrieved a bottle, then filled several glasses scattered atop the table. There was no label on the bottle, but a tentative sniff told Cole it was probably whiskey. Either very cheap stuff or home brewed.
Ira raised his glass and looked at each of the others as if daring them to do anything but follow his lead. Not surprisingly, they each took a glass and lifted it to the crooked rafters over their heads. “To the flesh we’ve lost,” Ira bellowed, “and the steel to pay it back!”
No matter how bad the whiskey was, Cole drank it all down.
Letting out a hard breath while slamming his empty glass onto the table, Ira moved to the back of the room in his uneven, waddling stride. “I sifted through this soil for days the last time I was here. The only Jekhibar I found were lumps of worthless stone.”
“One was found in America,” Milosh said. “A Weshruuv collected it and hid it away from the others.”
Ira spun around and raised his bushy eyebrows. “Is it humming?”
“I don’t know. Ask them.”
Although every Amriany eye was pointed at him, Cole looked over to Paige and waited for a nod. When he got it, he dug into his coat pocket and closed his hand around the Jekhibar. Even a direct shotgun blast to the tanned Full Blood leather wouldn’t have been enough to tear through that coat, and yet Cole felt vulnerable just thinking about handing the Jekhibar over. “What do you mean by humming?” he asked.
“The Jekhibar is nothing more than a special kind of rock,” Ira explained. “And all that’s special about it is that the Torva’ox collects inside of it. Soaks it up like a damn . . .” He winced before brightening again as he found the word he was after. “Sponge! Soaks it up like a sponge. Takes a man like me to get it out, though. There may not be a lot of us left, but we can put the Torva’ox into the steel. Turns ’em into Blood Blades. Only other thing that soaks that juice up more than Jekhibar is Weshruuv.”
“That’s why the Blood Blades can hurt them so badly,” Cole said. “They’re connected.”
Ira nodded and approached the Skinners. “Used to be legend that it took someone close to a Weshruuv to kill them. Since I’ve never seen one of those animals hold anyone close enough to care about them, I think this legend is about the Torva’ox. Perhaps something is lost in translation and it is talking about something that is a part of them. Other shapeshifters are part of them and they can hurt each other, but the Torva’ox is part of them, just like she,” he said, pointing to Paige, “is part of you.”
Cole wasn’t about to deny the claim, especially since he and Paige hadn’t stopped watching the other’s back since they made it to the Hub. He hadn’t been aware it was that obvious, though.
“Amriany have always been craftsmen,” Ira continued. “So we forge steel into blades. We hammer iron into tools or weapons and charm it with energies stolen from nymphs or other creatures.”
Sophie made both of the Skinners jump when she snapped at the blacksmith in a string of barbed words in her native tongue. Ira’s face twisted into a tired grimace as he waved her off with his charred hand. “It is true. We can call it whatever we want, but we steal from the monsters so we can do what we do best. Amriany make blades, and Skinners carve wood. Amriany write curses, and Skinners scribble their runes.”
Even as Sophie continued to scold Ira, Cole stepped up to him and asked, “What about the runes?”
The burly blacksmith shook his head as Sophie continued to snarl his name as if it was the harshest curse she knew. “Torva’ox is what powers the runes,” he said. Once that was out, Sophie threw up her hands and stormed to the back of the room to inspect what Ira had been working on prior to their arrival. “I don’t know how they work, because that is savage workmanship. All I know is what I see, and when I see those runes, I know they pulse with
