Extinction Agenda

Prologue

There is no record of the village referenced in this entry.

In the months following the Breaking Moon, a cold descended upon the world as if to numb it for the carnage of a burgeoning war. That night’s victories prevented the Full Bloods from spreading the Half Breed plague across an entire continent in a matter of hours. Only as autumn sank into winter did the Skinners realize how close humanity had been to the brink of its destruction. Although the Full Bloods had been stopped before, using the earth’s own energies to spread the Breaking, the Half Breeds had still been unleashed, and their bite was still just as deadly. Angry breaths spewed from the mouths of shapeshifters as they roamed city streets in packs. Humans shivered in their homes, their tired eyes watchful over the barrels of hunting rifles or shotguns. Such weaponry had been bought up rapidly once the werewolves spread throughout the country, despite the fact that normal ammunition was somehow becoming increasingly useless against the creatures that seemed to have grown thicker coats for the winter. When a shot was fired, the noise drew sharp, black eyes toward its source. Even if that bullet had somehow dropped one of the Half Breeds, others would stampede the would-be hunter and decorate the stark white ground in a spattering of dark red.

As the months wore on, local police departments were tasked with keeping order in panicked jurisdictions. Large cities and small towns alike were dragged into what many thought was the end of the world. Monsters charged in from the hills, howled at the moon, tore through families. Overconfident at first, police forces, local militia, and even the military either fed the ranks of the dead or were turned into members of a pack. Whether those people were to be called victims, heroes, or martyrs ceased to matter. Dead was dead, and in this uncompromising winter people wanted to live. Fear led to panic, which settled into the desire to fight. No human emotion mattered to the wolves, however, as they kept running and feeding and killing and maiming. Their numbers grew exponentially, and when some packs were cleaned out, it wasn’t until after dozens of locals had been added to their ranks. Just a few stray Half Breeds meant more deaths and casualties. More casualties meant more Half Breeds, and the howling never waned.

The military had been called to action as a way to maintain order in the streets, divvy out the emergency food, and escort medical supplies to where they were needed. When the Full Bloods showed themselves, battles raged. Unfortunately for the cold, frightened world, the Full Bloods showed themselves often.

While the United States suffered the worst of the initial turmoil, the nightmare was not contained by any political border. It swept out from the siege of Atoka, Oklahoma, and the occupation of Raton, New Mexico. Before the media could debate whether the creatures were truly werewolves or just “diseased canines” from previous sightings in Wisconsin and Kansas City, the Half Breeds had made their presence all too clear. As bodies piled up, explanations became scarcer. Before long, nobody seemed to care what the creatures were or where they came from. They just wanted them to go away.

But the beasts weren’t going anywhere.

It was going to be a long, brutal winter.

“The Skinners know we’re here, Tara. This isn’t smart.”

Pacing across the front window of a town house on Battery Avenue, a skinny woman with stringy blond hair pulled aside a filmy curtain to get a look at a quiet section of Baltimore. Tara’s round face would have been pretty if not for the black tendrils creeping beneath her skin along both cheeks. Although the pattern was more or less random, one half of the markings reacted in perfect synchronicity with the other. They shifted beneath her flesh, sometimes twitching out of hunger. Where one tendril stretched out, another on that side pulled back so neither of her two spores could claim a lion’s share of the host. She paused when headlights splashed across the pavement as a car sped past the town house at highway speed. Like the rest of the country, most of Maryland’s authorities were too busy elsewhere to worry about traffic violations. “The Skinners already had their shot at you, Cobb,” she said. “They came up empty.”

The other man in the room stood at average height, his muscular build wrapped in a sweater frayed along the bottom. A thick turtleneck was stretched out enough to display a ring of black wavy markings around his entire neck. Some of them met the narrow goatee that had been shaved to a point above his Adam’s apple. The ones at the back of his neck reached all the way up into a thick crop of light brown hair that would have perfectly suited an edgy businessman from the mid-1990s. Even so, he cared for himself well enough to make the look seem timeless. When he didn’t say anything, he ground his teeth and allowed his lids to droop down over crisp green eyes ringed almost imperceptibly with quivering black filaments.

“They did come up empty, right?” Tara asked.

“I was told about those two Skinners in Toronto less than an hour before they kicked in my door.”

Tara placed a hand against the window as black claws snaked out from beneath her fingertips. “What did they get?”

“One of my personal PCs. It functioned as a small backup server and was used to post updates through ChatterPages.com.”

Tara’s claws scraped against the glass as she slowly balled her hand into a fist. “So they know how we’ve been passing our communications? They might even know everything we’ve been setting up ever since we took control?”

“The ChatterPages stuff has already been changed,” Cobb said. “If they have been listening in, they would have put their information to use by now.”

Moving in a flicker from the window to where Cobb stood, Tara clamped a hand around his throat and applied just enough pressure to raise him onto the balls of his feet. “That information should have been destroyed,” she hissed. “That was the order.”

“Right,” Cobb said as his two upper sets of fangs eased out from where they were sheathed in his gums. “An order given by Hope. Not you.”

“Hope put me in charge of making sure the order was carried out.”

“She may have given you some duties during the uprising, but that doesn’t mean anything now that she’s dead. The others are entrenched within their own cities watching the wretches tear the world apart. Why would they feel the need to obey orders given by a wild-eyed Double Seed?”

Even as Tara tightened her grip on his throat, the tendrils on either side of her face twitched in a way that was just frantic enough to prove his point. While most Nymar were created by a vampire spore attaching to their heart, only a select few could survive the process of having more than one introduced to their system. That feat won no respect with other Nymar, however, who saw only a raging temper brought about by the disproportionate hunger of two separate spores living in the same body.

“I am more than just a Double Seed,” she warned. With a thought in the right direction, Tara was able to widen her tendrils into thin stripes that could paint her entire body in a black cloak. “Because of what Hope and I did, all of our kind will soon become Shadow Spore.”

“I know that. But without me, the uprising never would have happened.”

“If you’re talking about a bunch of backstabbing pricks who don’t know who to thank for having entire cities to run, I already know about them. Just because the Nymar who followed Hope don’t respect me doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t.”

“What I said before is just the consensus,” Cobb told her. “That’s how they see you. If I saw you that way, I never would have told you where to find me.”

“What makes you think I couldn’t have tracked you down myself?”

“The Skinners haven’t been able to pull off that trick, and that’s one of the few things they’re good at anymore.”

She released him and walked back to the window. Holding her fingers to her lips, she licked the longest of her nails before they retracted. “The plan was to wait until the smoke cleared after the uprising before we started looking for the nymphs. Things may have gotten more out of hand than we thought, but it’s still just as good a time as any to hunt those sweet little dancing girls down.”

“You got that right. The Skinners that were protecting them before have a lot more to keep them busy now. But,” Cobb added, “there are more than Skinners to worry about. Those things that run loose on every street in this country are after us as well. The Full Bloods have something to prove after being kept at bay by our lies for so many years.”

“Which is why we need to find the other Shadow Spore.”

Cobb shook his head. “That was never the plan. Whatever you and Hope had going, it no longer applies. Hope’s gone and I only came out from behind my main terminal to put the Skinners out of the picture for a while. All we need to do is ride out this storm and gain control of whoever’s left.”

“And what if it’s the shapeshifters?” Tara asked. “Only a Nymar seeded with both of the original Shadow Spore can ever defeat a Full Blood.”

“We have strength in numbers. That’s how it’s always been. We turn as many as we need to throw at our enemies so that established Nymar take the least amount of casualties. This may not be the fight we were after, but it’s only a matter of scale. When it’s time for our kind to step up against the Skinners, the humans, or even the shapeshifters, we’ll be ready. I’ve started recruiting through the Internet and already the Nymar in most major cities have come close to tripling in number.”

Lowering her voice as if there were sharper, unseen ears to intrude on her conversation, Tara said, “The Full Bloods won’t stop after riling everyone up like this. There’s no reason to think they’ll even stop after overrunning this country. Even with superior numbers, we can barely hope to withstand the wretches they’ve been sending after us. We need the other Shadow Spore!”

“How do you even know there is another Shadow Spore?” Cobb asked. “We were lucky to find the one in Lancroft’s basement.”

“I’ve seen records from the decades when the Lancroft Reformatory was fully functioning. There were two Shadow Spore, just like we’ve always been told. And—”

“ ‘And when the two can become one, even the Full Bloods shall quake,’ ” he recited. “I’ve heard the stories too. Every species has its stories. You know why? Because none of them wants to admit it’s dominated by another. Stories tell us there’s always hope, always something to tip the scales. Well you know what, Tara? Sometimes you’re just outclassed.”

Her features were gaunt, no matter how much blood she might have drunk in the last hour or two. Although the two spores attached to her heart shared a space, there was rarely enough food to go around. She turned toward the window as a distant howl drifted through the air. “You heard about the assassin I sent to find Cole Warnecki after he was dragged to prison?”

“That was right after the uprising,” Cobb said. “There was a lot of posturing and plenty of big promises made regarding payback and whatnot. I was the one passing all of that garbage along, remember?”

“It wasn’t garbage,” she told him. “It took a while, but he found where Cole was being held.”

“I could have told you that much. It was the prison in Colorado that was all over the freaking news!”

“And then you never heard about him again,” she continued. “He was supposed to be waiting for a trial or being questioned, but that was a load of shit!” The more she spoke, the angrier Tara became. “Why is it that we’re always supposed to be the liars, when we’re the only ones telling the humans exactly what we want? They line up at our Blood Parlors to be bitten. They know what they’re getting, but the Skinners decide to burn us down. The Full Bloods act like they’re so high and mighty, when they’re the ones that have been sneaking among us for centuries like snakes.”

Knowing better than to try and calm her down, Cobb held up his hands and walked back to a computer desk set up in what was meant to be the town house’s dining room. “No need to tell me about it. I’ve been spreading that word for years.”

“Well it’s time to finish what we’ve started with the Skinners as well as the Full Bloods. There’s supposed to be some group that splintered off from the rest.”

“You mean the Vigilant?”

She nodded. “I want to hunt down as many as it takes to get to the heart of their operation. Surely they’re doing something against these goddamned shapeshifters. We need to get whatever weapons they’ve got.”

“And then what?” Cobb asked as he settled into a creaking office chair. “Stand toe-to-toe with Full Bloods? Leave the insanity to the crazy people. How many times do I have to tell you to just . . . be . . . patient?”

“You can stop telling me right now,” she snapped. “Because I’m sick of hearing it. What kind of message does it send if we stay hidden while the Skinners do the fighting? Even if we mop up what’s left, nobody will respect someone who leads a battle fought in the dark just to claim the scraps.”

Cobb tapped his keyboard and shrugged. Although he knew it wouldn’t go over well, he couldn’t let his other matter drop. “And what about the killer you hired to take out Cole? I assume he found something, even if he didn’t get his job done.”

“What makes you think he failed?”

“Because,” he replied simply, “you would have reminded me several times by now if that wasn’t the case.”

Her smile was more like an image from an old reel of moving picture film—unsteady and twitchy. “I guess you’re right about that. He did find Cole. And when he checked in before making the kill, he told me that Cole wasn’t being held in a prison at all. It may have been one at some other time, but there were only a couple Skinners and a few very special prisoners there.”

Cobb thought about that for all of two seconds before shrugging it off and shifting his attention back to the monitor. “It’s a crazy time. Just about everything is getting torn down. Wasn’t that part of the beauty of our uprising? The Skinners aren’t the same since we set their houses on fire and pitted the humans against them.”

“There’s more to it than that,” she said while tapping the glass. When the claw sprouting from her index finger raked against it, she eased it back as if using the window to shove it under her flesh.

“What did your assassin tell you when he returned?”

“He didn’t return.”

Cobb chuckled under his breath and typed furiously at his keyboard. “Then it seems like the Skinners are pretty much the same as when we left ’em.”

But Tara wasn’t convinced. She watched as the people in the town house across the street poked their noses out like a couple of frightened rabbits. They were so timid that she almost hoped to see a wretch scamper across their lawn to tear their wide, doe eyes from their sockets. Since there were no Half Breeds to be found, she got a better idea. “I’m hungry. Be back in a minute.”

This wasn’t the first time Kansas City had fallen beneath the cruel whims of a monster. Unlike the days when Liam had climbed its towers to claim the city, there was no denying what was happening, and nobody was trying to paint a prettier face upon a siege. As in the rest of the country, the first packs had claimed their victims within two days after the incident in Atoka, Oklahoma. Those wretches were born hungry and they fed to create more. Unlike many cities in America, this one had its protectors.

I-29 was covered with snow. Although it had been plowed well enough to reveal the surface of the concrete, there were drifts on the side of the road where empty cars and pickups were embedded like peanuts wedged into a candy bar. Most of the wrecks were tagged and all of them were empty. A few still blinked their hazard lights onto the pristine surface of the white layers that had collected on the vehicles. In the morning, patrols would come along to check the freshest of the accidents to see if someone either needed to be brought to a shelter or shot before they turned. Those unlucky enough to have crashed without being spotted by the irregular patrols would have to stay inside their cars for the night, lock their doors and pray the only thing to gnaw at their faces was the cold.

As if responding to the panicked thoughts of those stranded motorists, three Half Breeds trotted along the side of the interstate, sniffing wildly at each car. Their gnarled faces twitched with every flake of snow that came to rest upon their snouts or ears. Half Breeds didn’t need a reason to flinch, because they were always in pain. Having been born to the sounds of the breaking of their bones before their muscles could stretch out to hold them together, the werewolves were in a constant state of wincing, whining, or snarling. The cold, it seemed, only made them worse.

A man and woman sat huddled inside a blue Dodge, its two right tires buried hopelessly in the slush. Their faces were pressed together and their eyes widened when frightened breaths drifted from their lips to smear against the glass. That hint of movement was enough to catch one Half Breed’s eye a second before its companions caught the humans’ scent. The trio of werewolves lowered their chests to the snowy ground and stalked toward the car.

Both of the people inside wore glasses. Their lenses were fogged, but not enough to keep them from seeing what was coming. As the unexplainable terrors spread across the country, people had no choice but to either hide or carry on as best they could. Judging by the tears streaming down both sets of reddened cheeks, these two were reconsidering their choice.

As the Half Breeds approached the car, they bared their teeth along with two sets of tusks curving down from one row of teeth and up from another. The tusks were thicker than the rest of their teeth, but thin enough to scrape against each other like scissor blades as the werewolves opened and closed their mouths to sample the frigid, late night air. Once they spread out to form a semicircle around the vehicle, the creatures planted their feet and fixed their eyes upon the trembling humans. After hunkering down for a moment, the Half Breed in the middle of the group lunged forward to ram its head against the car door. It made a dent, but it could tell it wasn’t going to get inside like that, so it reared up and began scraping at the window.

From within the car, muffled voices wrapped around each other in much the same way the people’s bodies clung together for warmth. When something moved beneath the car and scraped directly below the passenger compartment, the couple began to scream.

By now all three of the Half Breeds were doing their best to find a way inside the car. Thick paws slapped against the frame. Twisted faces pushed against the doors and windows before the weight of a heavy body caused the entire vehicle to groan. The thing that scraped against the bottom of the car quickened its pace toward the side being attacked by the Half Breeds. As soon as it reached the driver’s door, the scraping against the window stopped. Soon, the other two Half Breeds were pulled away from the car as well.

When the man inside wiped the frost off the window to get a look outside, he found several shaggy bodies wrestling in the snow. Blood sprayed through the air in a fine mist cast from fangs and claws. It was impossible to tell which creatures were winning or even where one ended and another began, so the man eased away from the window before he was noticed.

“I think we should make a run for it,” he told the trembling woman.

“Where are we going to go?”

“I don’t know. Just away from here!”

And, as suddenly as the creatures had appeared, the fight was over.

The wind scraped against the car’s exterior, its slow rustle the loudest thing in the world at that given moment. Glass creaked and bits of ice rapped against the side of the car as if the winter itself had sprouted claws.

“Should . . . we still run?” the woman asked.

Two sets of claws wedged into the driver’s side door, one at the base of the window and another near the handle. With a minimum of effort, the door was separated from its frame and tossed aside. Outside, a tall creature stood wearing a thick coat of light blond fur peppered with streaks of darker brown and encrusted with chunks of snow. Blood was already frozen where it had been spilled. Kayla had presided over Kansas City since her pack had taken part in ending Liam’s siege. Although the Mongrels under her command had been thinned out due to treachery within her ranks or combat with the encroaching werewolves, she wasn’t about to step aside so any invader could have their way with her territory.

“Yes,” she snarled through a snout that seemed just a bit too long for her feline facial structure. “You should run.”

The couple within the car pressed themselves against the opposite window and nearly jumped from their sweat-stained coats when another Mongrel appeared outside the passenger window. Ben’s appearance was even more disturbing than Kayla’s. Being a digger who could practically swim underground, he was accustomed to remaining out of sight. Gill flaps along his neck stretched out and immediately snapped shut after drawing in too much freezing air instead of the soil they were meant to process. Blood and ice stuck to the beak that dominated his face, and his black eyes remained calm beneath their vertical lids as they studied the people within the vehicle. His fingers slipped beneath the door’s handle and were strong enough to force it open despite the ice that had sealed it shut. “There is another car further up the road,” he said. “White four-door just past a minivan facing the wrong way.”

Dazed by the words that came from the Mongrel’s beak, the woman stammered, “We can’t just . . . steal a car.”

“Get away from us!” the man snapped as he tried his best to squirm in the cramped confines in order to put himself between her and the Mongrel.

Ben merely stepped back, allowing the man to play his role as protector without reacting to the threatening tone in his voice or the way he grabbed a long flashlight and wielded it like a club. “It’s not stealing,” he told them both. “The owners of that car were killed by the same creatures we just chased away. My advice is to take that car and get somewhere safer. Also,” he added, while dropping to all fours and scraping away the top layers of snowy earth using long, curved claws, “don’t look too hard at the mess in the ditch.”

When the man turned to where Kayla had been standing, he found only the bloody remains of two Half Breeds. The third had already bounded down the interstate, chasing after a lean figure that slid gracefully into another lane.

“I think we should go,” the woman said.

Taking his eyes from the sight of the chase toward the row of lonely abandoned vehicles on the side of the road, the man swallowed hard and zipped up his coat. “Right. Do you have our suitcase?”

“Just move!”

He followed her order and bolted from the car. Along the way he thought about the fire that had all but consumed Topeka after the werewolves sprung up in the autumn. Only during the drive to KC had he asked his fiancée why they might have been spared. The conversation had lasted until they pulled over to fill the gas tank and their stomachs at a place that had a Subway sandwich shop and Pizza Hut tacked onto it. Every seat was filled, with people of all ages, genders, and nationalities. Each stunned face was focused intently on their meals. The terror implied within their features was all too familiar to the man from Topeka. He’d been wearing it ever since he abandoned his hometown.

It hadn’t been an easy decision. When the first werewolves showed up, everyone he knew wanted to fight them. A call to arms swept throughout the entire country at about that same time, encouraging everyone to buy a gun and defend their homes from the animals that meant to do them harm. Explanations would wait for later. Now was the time to fight.

That lasted for a few weeks.

When the angry voices died down, it wasn’t because of victory or fatigue. The people who’d bought their guns and started firing at the wild animals in their yards had been torn to shreds. It wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t spectacular. Even the few who’d rigged explosives with some degree of success barely managed to do any damage. After that, the wolves had swept in to kill them all.

The police were just more men with guns.

The military was taking a stand, but not in Topeka.

Soon, like most other cities, Topeka burned. Whether the fires had been started by accident or as a last ditch effort to kill the werewolves didn’t matter. The flames rose and the people who tried to put them out were set upon by another pack of ravenous beasts. The firefighters that lived to crawl away only howled in pain as their bodies were twisted into one of those things that set out to hunt for food. Like the rest of his family, the man who now clung to his fiancée to keep from slipping on a patch of ice on I-29 hadn’t wanted to leave Topeka.

His natural instinct was to stay. For the first several weeks of the crisis, people barricaded themselves indoors to fight for survival. They watched their televisions for news about how far the insanity had spread and what was being done to stop it. Before long, people stopped watching the news and just focused on living for another day. Then, as things got worse, the highways became crowded with cars on their way to someplace better. The people behind the wheels might or might not have known where they were headed, but it was time to go.

The man from Topeka stayed until his friends and family were consumed. That’s what people started calling it, since there often wasn’t a way to know if they were truly dead. At least that word was better than the thought of seeing a parent, child, or neighbor broken down into a screaming heap to be reforged into something with fangs and wild, pain-filled eyes. The last possible good he could do was take his fiancée away before her pretty face was twisted into something cruel and hungry. They’d made it as far as KC, and he was determined to keep going. When she slipped, he was there to pull her to her feet and urge her onward. They’d passed the minivan which had spun 180 degrees before plowing into a drift. The four-door was directly ahead of them, cleared off and waiting for them like a freshly unwrapped present.

“Stay here and I’ll check it out,” he said.

The door was unlocked and the keys were on the dash. After fidgeting with fingers that were almost too numb to feel the keys, he slipped the right one into the ignition and started the car. “Come on, honey!”

The woman cautiously stuck her feet into the snow. Tracks that were too large and spaced too far apart to be set down by humans surrounded the car. They converged a bit farther away from the road near a pile of crimson pulp that had been covered by a fine layer of snow. Heeding Ben’s advice, she turned her eyes away from the mess and fumbled with the handle of the passenger side door. After she got in, but before she had a chance to pull the door shut, the car lurched forward.

“Where are we going?” she asked while frantically tugging at her safety belt.

“I’ve got some old friends in St. Louis. We’ll go there.”

“Can we make it all that way? How far is it?”

Blinking furiously as a Half Breed leapt out from a hole on the side of the road, only to be overtaken by a beaked Mongrel, he sputtered, “I don’t know, but we’re going. We came this far, we won’t stop now.” He looked over to her and saw nothing but determination on her trembling features. She swiped some tears from her eyes, nodded, and placed her hand in his.

Smoke rose into the sky. Shapeshifters roamed freely. Corpses lay scattered beneath a stark winter sun. Randolph Standing Bear could smell all of those things as he pulled long, deep breaths into his lungs. The air also carried more familiar fragrances like pine trees and the crisp, simple purity of snow that lay piled hip deep across most of the Canadian wilderness. The Full Blood cherished winter more than any other time, simply because it was the quietest of the seasons. Considering all that had transpired over the last few months, silence had become the rarest of commodities. Launching off two powerful hind legs, Randolph closed his eyes and lifted his nose toward a sky that seemed to have been painted above him in thick, chalky gray.

His front paws stretched out as his stocky body cleared the highest point of his jump. In his four-legged form he could run fast enough to cross several miles of ground within the space of a minute. Powerful muscles propelled him forward after being tensed during all the time spent on the boat that had brought him from European shores. The soil felt familiar when his paws touched it again. Almost every stone was right where he’d left it. Despite everything that was happening to this continent, it was still his territory. And throughout the trials that lay ahead, he would reclaim it once again.

That had always been his intention. The move to his homeland had been necessary to create enough wretches to keep the humans huddled within their homes and firing their precious guns in every direction. Now he would take steps to reclaim the territory he’d fought so hard to claim all those years ago. And thanks to the chaos cinching around the world like a noose, other territories would change hands as well.

This was a new world, and a new breed was required to live in it. If Liam had been right about anything, it was that Full Bloods were through with hiding. With little or no effort, Randolph could hear the other Full Blood’s voice in his mind.

You can take them all, my friend.

Sometimes Liam’s voice was hard to block out. It was strange to miss the other werewolf, considering all the times he’d been ready to kill Liam himself. In the end, Liam’s death was just another responsibility that Randolph had allowed to slip from his grasp. But those irresponsible days were over. The Breaking Moon had risen, imbuing all of the Full Bloods gathered at the source of the Torva’ox with more power than they’d ever tasted. Those primal energies now flowed freer than ever, and it was Randolph’s intention to find out who among his brethren would put them to use. Then, the Skinners would be dealt with.

For too long he had tried to keep everyone in check. When the Skinners were poised to claim weaponry that would tip the balance in their favor, he was there to take it away from them. When Liam threatened to draw too much ire or shed too much blood, he was there to see it didn’t go too far. But no matter how much he tried to rein things in, they spiraled even further out of control.

Not everything’s s’posed to be controlled, Liam reminded him, either from memory or beyond the grave.

Perhaps that was true, but he had already given up trying to control things. Ever since he caught the scent of the First Deceiver, Randolph had known there was one last opportunity to set his new homeland back onto its proper course. Kawosa roamed free, opening geysers of the Torva’ox in his wake and imbuing his precious Half Breeds with new strengths, like a craftsman tinkering with a favorite line of toys. Kawosa had one more purpose to serve, and when that was done, there would finally be quiet.

No more humans with their arrogant voices and filthy machines.

No more wretches with their wild, pained cries.

No more Mongrels tunneling and sneaking in the dark.

No more leeches strutting and preening like spoiled children.

Just pure, natural, blissful quiet.

A quiet the world hadn’t known for over a thousand years.