Blood Blade

Chapter 23

The phone in Cole’s pocket chirped in its familiar way. Despite the squealing of the tires against the pavement and the dangerous pull of the steering wheel in his hands, he reflexively dug the phone from his pocket and flipped it open. Angrier at himself for answering the damn thing than he was at the actual ringing, he snarled, “Yeah. What is it?”

“You guys doubted me, but I found the place,” Walter said from the other end of the line.

“What?”

“I’m in Janesville. I’ve been scouting all the parks all day long and I finally found one that fits my vision!”

Turning his head away from the phone, Cole announced, “Walter found his park.”

Paige was in the backseat with the dead Half Breed across her lap. Although the werewolf had shrunken a bit since it was killed, it didn’t shift all the way back to the putrid, gnarled thing it had been while it was asleep, and it was still a long ways from anything human.

“Great,” Paige said as she pulled up a handful of the werewolf’s fur and started cutting it away with her hunting knife. “That just gives us a fat load of nothing, since we’ve already found our own way to get to Misonyk.”

Cole looked out the window at the stretch of I–39 he was currently using as his own personal autobahn. With the sun long gone and the full moon hanging overhead, the road was only illuminated by an occasional streetlight and the rare billboard. The pale light coming from the moon was enough to put a nice glow on Henry’s back as he launched himself into the air to cover the ground at anywhere from ten to twenty yards per jump.

“Yeah,” Cole said. “Paige says great job.”

Walter dropped his voice until he was almost drowned out by the roar of the Cavalier’s motor. “A bunch of Nymar are gathering, and it looks like one’s in charge. He could be Misonyk. From what I can see, it looks like a lot of these guys are freshly turned.”

Suddenly, another shape bolted from the side of the road and flashed into Cole’s side mirror. The Half Breed was one of two others that had showed up to howl at the moon near the ruins of Lancroft’s East Wing and had yet to stray too far from Henry. When the werewolves originally bolted from the mansion, they headed south. Although Henry stuck fairly close to I–39, the Half Breeds came and went like flickers of shadow across the surface of a choppy lake.

“We should be there pretty soon,” Cole said. “Which park is it?”

“Palmer Park near I–39. You can’t miss it. Just turn off at—”

Suddenly, one of the Half Breeds dashed across the interstate in front of the car. Cole had to pull the wheel hard to the right to avoid hitting the werewolf, which caused him to swerve almost directly into a roadblock of twisted muscle. Henry sat in the middle of Cole’s lane. At the last second, Henry hopped back and swatted at the Cavalier as if the car was a pesky insect.

“What the hell are you doing?” Paige shouted. “I’m working with sharp objects back here!”

Cole gritted his teeth and swerved back onto the road. Henry leapt over the Cavalier to land a few yards ahead of it. The moment his feet hit the ground, he was running again. “Gotta call you back,” Cole said into the phone before he flipped it shut and tossed it onto the passenger seat. Squinting into the rearview mirror, he made sure Paige hadn’t cut anything that wasn’t supposed to remain attached.

The backseat was all but filled with dead werewolf. The Half Breed’s front two legs were wedged between Cole’s seat and his door, the curved claws scraping against his left leg. Its hind legs were wedged in a similar fashion between the passenger seat and that door. Paige sat with her legs tucked beneath the carcass so her hands were free to work. The details of that work became a little clearer when Cole heard something that sounded like thick, wet canvas being ripped apart.

“You might want to crack the window,” she said.

Before Cole could take a closer look, a smell hit him that made him regret that he had to breathe at all. “Good Lord!” he groaned as he lowered the window. “Are you cutting that thing open?”

“Just taking some of the fur,” Paige said. “Skinner isn’t just a clever name, you know.”

“Jesus. I think I’m gonna puke.”

“It’s not as bad as all that. If you’d like a lesson in what makes a Half Breed tick, I could point a few things out for you.”

“No thanks,” Cole said as he twisted the wheel once again to avoid another of the Half Breeds. “I’m getting a good enough look for myself.”

Paige glanced through the side window and then twisted around to look out the back. She cursed loudly and shook her head. “The rest of them are splitting off on their own,” she said.

“Good! Maybe they’ll stop trying to run me off the road!”

“Not good. Not good, at all. If they split off, they’ll just go hunt somewhere else. We’ll have to come back later to track them down.”

Before Cole could think too much about that, he caught sight of Henry landing a ways ahead of him on the side of the road. Henry turned and hunkered down a bit, his eyes glittering in the glare of headlights before he sprung toward the car with his arms held wide open.

“Oh shit,” Cole grunted. “Hang on!”

Fortunately, Paige didn’t have much room to move. She stretched her arms out and braced herself as Cole slammed his foot against the brake pedal to throw the Cavalier into a fishtail. He struggled to straighten the vehicle’s course, but that didn’t seem like such a great idea either.

Henry waited for him in the middle of the interstate. Swelling up to somewhere over seven feet tall, he lowered his shoulder and ran toward the car like a linebacker that had been deprived of red meat a month before Sunday’s game. Focusing so much upon Henry and his fight with the steering wheel, Cole almost didn’t notice that he was about to cross lanes and swerve into the path of an oncoming semi.

Spouting a blasphemous mixture of profanity and biblical references, he hit the gas, turned into his skid and steered across the other lane. He headed straight for the opposite shoulder and somehow managed to correct himself before going any farther. The semi rumbled past him while blaring its horn. Cole built up speed along the shoulder and looked for a chance to swerve back onto his own side of the road. There was another car behind the semi, which flipped on its blue and red lights as the entire car spun around to come after him.

“Of course it’s a cop!” Cole shouted. “What the hell else would it be?”

Twisting to look out the back window again, Paige said, “I don’t see a cop.”

“He’s making a U-turn and coming after me.”

“Then just gun it and get back over. You’ve got plenty of time to lose him.” With that, she sliced off another layer of fur and held it up so she could set it on top of the rest she’d collected.

For the first time, Cole got a clear look at what she was cutting. Although most of it was thick, wiry fur, it was attached to a thin layer of skin. Most likely, that explained the smell now filling the car. The actual werewolf carcass wasn’t as butchered as he had expected. The spots where Paige had been cutting were marked by skin that looked more like bare, leathery parchment. “I thought you were skinning that thing,” he said.

“The fur is what stops most of the bullets,” Paige said. “Deeper layers of skin are too tough to cut. How about you watch what you’re doing and let me handle this?”

Cole swerved into the right lane and looked around for Henry. Between the werewolf being skinned in the backseat and the creature that was out to tackle his car, he found it somewhat difficult to focus on something as normal as steering. Seeing police lights flashing in his rearview mirror, he said, “That cop’s catching up to us.”

“It might be better if he did,” Paige replied. “Half Breeds do enjoy their bright, shiny things.”

Still watching the road behind him, Cole winced as he saw Henry veer off to rush the police car. Henry’s shoulder slammed against the cruiser and knocked it several feet to one side. “Dammit!” Cole snarled as he slammed on his brakes.

“What the hell?” Paige shouted from the backseat.

Ignoring her, Cole put the Cavalier into reverse and got it rolling backward down the interstate. Paige kept cutting while leaning over to clear his line of sight. Pushing the reverse gear to its limit, Cole backed toward the damaged police car as fast as he could.

Henry had brought the cop to a halt and was slamming his fists against the officer’s hood while bellowing wildly. When the cop fired a few shots at him, however, things took a turn for the worse. Henry screamed loud enough to be heard over the whine of the Cavalier’s reverse gear and stampeded the police car to push it off the road completely.

Paige straightened up to look out the rear window, giving Cole another good view of the dead werewolf. Now that it was missing a good portion of its fur on one side, he could see the line of the creature’s rib cage. Instead of the smooth ridges of bone, the Half Breed’s ribs were dotted with bundles of ropy material at several places. Even with such a quick look, he didn’t have trouble envisioning muscle or sinew bunched at those spots to hold the Half Breed’s skeleton together.

Henry and the Cavalier’s rear bumper collided with a jarring crunch, stopping the Cavalier in its tracks and nudging Henry a step or two away from the police car. Just as he thought Henry was about to fall over, Cole saw the hulking figure stagger off the shoulder of the road and then jump straight up. A dent almost as big as the Cavalier’s hood buckled over Cole’s head as Henry landed on top of the car. After that, Henry’s gnarled, twisted hands began pounding against the windshield.

“All right!” Cole said as he put the car back into Drive. “Hang on!”

Paige lowered her head and braced herself as Cole hit the gas and got the car rolling forward.

“I’ve always wanted to shoot up through a car roof,” Cole said. “Now’s my big chance! Hand me a gun.”

Shaking her head, Paige said, “If we could just shoot him, this wouldn’t be such a—Look out!”

A muscular arm reached down to try and grab Cole through the driver’s side window. Leaning in the opposite direction, Cole twisted the steering wheel back and forth to shake Henry loose. After a few attempts, Henry dropped down from the roof, hitting the pavement in an awkward heap.

The moment he found Henry in his rearview mirror, Cole watched him pull himself up and leap into the air. The twisted figure landed in front of the Cavalier with a heavy thump and then jumped farther down the road.

“He’s headed south again,” Cole said.

“Good. What about the Half Breeds?”

Cole looked around, but could only see a few scattered streetlights and a whole lot of inky blackness on either side of the road. “They’re gone. Should I go check on that cop?”

“If they were close enough to hurt him, we would’ve seen them by now. Just keep following Henry.”

“He’s getting too far ahead!”

“Then just go to Janesville,” Paige replied. “Looks like whatever is about to happen will be happening there. After all the grief I gave Walter about the massacre, I’ll never hear the end of it if he’s right.”

Checking his rearview mirror as he stomped on the gas pedal, Cole asked, “You think there’s gonna be a massacre?”

“Hopefully we’ll be able to prevent it,” she said. “Now that I got my hands on this little beauty here, we should stand a pretty good chance against Henry, Misonyk, and however many local Nymar he managed to scrounge up. After what he pulled at that diner, there’s just as good a chance that those locals will be out to kill Misonyk too. If it’s true that the lie’s been shot down like your Mongrel girlfriend said, Misonyk and all the other Nymar must be getting ready for a fight.”

“So what’s the big lie?” Cole asked as he fixed his attention to the road and enjoyed the rush of fresh, cold air against his face. “Professional wrestling is really fake?”

“You know how the Nymar talk about their covens or clans or sects?” Paige asked. “They claim to rule Chicago and just about every other city worth ruling. They’re supposed to patrol the streets and know about everything that happens while they live forever and rule from their skyscrapers.”

“Yeah,” Cole replied. “None of those guys can say two words without throwing that crap at you.”

“That’s the thing. It’s crap. Every last word of it. The Nymar can barely hold together loose associations with each other. They might be able to manage a gang here and there, but that’s about it. As far as holding a city…that’s just a joke.”

Cole waited a few seconds, glanced out the windows to see if they were being followed, then looked into the rearview mirror again. “That’s it? That’s the big lie?”

Paige chuckled as she took a folded bundle of black plastic from her bag. “That’s all they need to keep anyone who finds out about them quiet. Some poor fool who got bitten starts to panic but shuts up if he thinks he’s got to worry about some bunch of undead crime lords. Most humans are too frightened to go against one Nymar, but the thought of a whole society of them carries a lot of weight even with some very influential people.”

“But from what I’ve seen, there are a whole lot of them,” Cole pointed out.

“Sure, but they’re not organized,” Paige replied. “There are a whole lot of drug addicts too, but they’re not about to get together and rule a city from the shadows. What it all comes down to is that Nymar are junkies. They’re dangerous and more powerful than some poor schmuck who’s hooked on crack, but they’re still junkies. A few of them are craftier than the rest and some of them kill rather than just feed. Those are the ones we’re after. I would’ve told you sooner, but I had to wait until I knew you were coming along for the whole ride.”

Laughing as he passed a green mileage sign, he said, “That ride’s almost over. Only about five more miles until we hit Janesville.”

“You’ve got to realize how important it is that you don’t talk about this where anyone else can hear,” Paige said as if she was alone in a quiet room with Cole instead of talking from the back of a speeding car with a dead werewolf across her lap. “The Nymar’s supposed infestation of the cities is what keeps the Full Bloods from making a move of their own.”

“I’ve seen one of those things,” Cole shot back. “You can’t tell me they’re afraid of Nymar.”

“Maybe not afraid, but a whole swarm of Nymar can bring a Full Blood down if they do it just right. It’s not pretty, but Nymar and werewolves are both supernatural and they can most definitely spill each other’s blood,” Paige said as she pulled a few of the Half Breed’s teeth. “The Full Bloods stay in the woods because it’s easier than trying to invade a city held by both humans and Nymar. Full Bloods may be damn near bullet-, fire-, and everything-else-proof, but Skinners and the Nymar are their only real threats. We figured out the Nymar’s bluff some time ago, but if the Full Bloods bothered to do the same thing, they might just decide to take a run at the more populated parts of the world.”

“I don’t know,” Cole said. “Sounds like a stretch to me.”

“All right. What do you think would happen if all of America’s enemies found out we’d made up three of the four branches of our military?”

Wincing, he muttered, “Point taken.”

“The Nymar also think their bullshit has been keeping Skinners in line. For years they’ve thought that the only reason we haven’t stormed in to clean them out is because we’re afraid of going against the big, dark overlords.” Paige spoke those last words with no small amount of sarcasm. “As long as they think they’ve got us snowed, they won’t look hard enough at us to know they outnumber us by at least twenty to one.”

“Same lie, different liars, huh?” Cole asked.

“It’s not a great system, but it’s been holding things together for a long time. If the Full Bloods and other shapeshifters aren’t buying it anymore, it may just explain why they’re getting so restless. Mongrels usually stick to their own packs, but now are prowling into your hotel room. Half Breeds don’t obey any rules, but Full Bloods sure never bothered sneaking as far into civilization as the one I saw outside of Shimmy’s.”

“You’re sure that was a Full Blood?”

“Yeah.”

“And what are we going to do about Henry? You plan on gagging him with all that fur you collected?”

Paige let out a breath and began stuffing the werewolf fur into a casing that resembled two plastic trays held together by nylon straps. Considering the weight on her lap at the moment, the simple movements weren’t easy. “I’ve got some ideas about him. Did you see any black markings on him anywhere?”

Even though it was difficult to focus, Cole had seen Henry enough times to have his face imprinted on his nightmares for a good long while. “Actually, no. Henry’s pretty messed up, but not like the Nymar.”

“And if there are a bunch of spores in him like you saw in that vision you snagged from Misonyk, then that would explain why Henry feeds off of other Nymar the way he does. If his own spores aren’t attached to his heart, they can’t feed on his blood. They must be leeching off of him for whatever food they can get.”

“And so,” Cole added as he swerved around a slow moving SUV with Iowa plates, “he’s got to eat healthy Nymar spores that are filled with all the stuff they’d get if he fed the way Nymar are supposed to?”

“Exactly! Kind of like when you crave peas even though you hate peas and it turns out your body just needs whatever is in peas. Does that make sense?”

“It actually does,” he replied. “And that scares me. Also, I’d really like some peas. But I don’t know if you should take what I saw in that vision too seriously. For all I know, I could’ve been seeing whatever crap Misonyk was thinking at the time.”

“Henry’s a mix of Nymar and shapeshifter, all right. I was close enough that I could feel it.” Paige had pulled apart the plastic plates and placed the Half Breed fur between them. Now that she was fastening the plates together, the whole thing looked like some sort of vest.

“Is that what I think it is?” Cole asked.

She grinned and nodded. Holding up the harness to show him, she said, “Standard level two body armor on either side, with a bit of goodness on the inside. Together, it’ll stop a few bullets, uncharmed blades, and even withstand a hell of a lot of punishment from claws and teeth of the supernatural variety. There’s a better way to put one of these together, but we don’t have time. This should hold up well enough to get me through the night. Since Henry is probably on his way to Misonyk, and Misonyk is probably trying to take over this area, it’s a safe bet that I’ll be wading into a whole lot of trouble.”

“I thought you said Nymar couldn’t take anyplace over,” Cole pointed out.

Paige shrugged and pulled the black plastic vest over her head. The two sets of black plates on front and back were sealed by a zipper, making it look like something worn by members of a SWAT team. She looked up and smiled at Cole in the rearview mirror. Even with all the layers of blood, sweat, and dirt coating her face, she still managed to look cute. “There’s always some crazy bastard who wants to make a play for the big time. It doesn’t mean they can actually pull it off. Chicago’s got a knack for attracting men like that.”

“Massacres and all,” Cole replied as he steered for the oncoming exit. “Why don’t the Nymar just take over the cities for real?” he asked. “I mean, they’re fast and strong.”

“Not fast and strong enough to go against the butt-load of guns that would be pointed at them by cops or the military if they made a move like that. Besides, there’s just not enough of them. If there’s one thing the Nymar know, it’s math. They need human blood to replace the blood their own spores burn up, so they need to keep humans around. They’re no better at internal power struggles than humans are, so the best solution is to keep their numbers limited.”

“Did you say ‘butt load’?” Cole asked

Paige shrugged and shared a laugh with him. “Technical term. You’d better get Walter on the phone.”

He slowed down while reaching over for the phone. After Walter picked up, Cole hit the button for the phone’s speaker and held it near the rearview mirror so everyone could have a nice little chat.

“Where the hell are you guys?” Walter asked.

“Almost there,” Cole replied.

“Has Henry showed up yet?” Paige asked.

Even though they were at opposite ends of the digital connection, Cole swore he could picture the expression on Walter’s face. “He’s supposed to be here and you’re not?” Walter snarled. “I’m not a fucking Skinner, remember? I’m doing this as a favor. I’m not about to hold off an army of vampires along with some freak job that rips through bodies like toilet paper! Have you checked your laptop lately? That diner’s on the news! There’s pictures on the Internet! They’re saying there was a grease fire, but I know dead Nymar when I see them. I should’ve known better than to put my ass on the line like this. Skinners attract this kind of gruesome crap like—”

“Take a breath,” Paige said. “We’re not going to leave you there on your own. In fact, we’re almost there! Will you at least be able to cover us from a distance? You still have that rifle, don’t you?”

After a pause, Walter said, “Yeah, but who’s gonna cover me?”

“I will,” Cole said. Noticing how Paige looked right back at him with genuine surprise on her face, he said to her, “Thought I’d save you the hassle of volunteering me.”

She smiled and rubbed his shoulder. “We won’t forget this, Prophet,” she said to the phone.

“Just don’t forget about my cut of that bounty money. In fact, I should get a bigger cut! And you’ll still owe me for this no matter how much cash you throw my way.”

“You got it,” Paige replied without hesitation. “What’s the situation there right now?”

For a moment, Cole thought Walter might have hung up. Then a heavy sigh crackled over the speaker and Walter said, “The pale kids are still drifting in to some sort of meeting. You should have a little time before anything happens, but that might all change once Henry gets here. I’ll show you where to make your entrance and then hang back to cover you. If things get too hot, I’m out of there. You two can have your blaze of glory.”

After Walter rattled off a quick set of directions, the connection was cut and Cole snapped the phone shut. Now he just needed to refrain from thinking about what was left to be done, and he might just make it to Janesville without getting sick.