Teeth of Beasts

Chapter 28

The instant Lancroft ducked into his lab, Cole fired another shot at him. The Snapper round missed its target but dug deep enough into the stone to break apart some of the runes Lancroft had been tracing. Since Henry was having an easier time clawing his way into the house, Cole guessed those shattered runes were another part of the house’s defenses.

Paige knelt at Rico’s side. “Here,” she whispered as she handed Tristan’s flask to him. “Drink this.”

“Just send that Nymar down here with some fucking serum,” he growled.

“You were hurt too bad for serum. Plus the wound was made by a Skinner weapon. You know those don’t heal like regular ones.”

Rico grit his teeth and looked down at his bloodied shirt. Allowing his head to fall back and knock against the floor, he spat, “Damn it.”

After pulling the stopper from the flask, she jammed it into Rico’s mouth almost hard enough to chip some teeth. When she told him what he was drinking. Rico almost spat it out.

Pausing at the door to the examination room, Cole shifted his grip on his spear so he could swing it with his left hand while maintaining his hold on the .45. He fired once into the room, stepped through the doorway, and fired again when he caught sight of Lancroft standing with his back pressed against the wall directly beside the door. He didn’t have time to fire another shot before Lancroft dropped straight down and snapped his pike up with a flick of both wrists. The end of the weapon shifted to become as long and thin as a whip, and it cinched tightly around Cole’s wrist like piano wire.

“You did a good job, Henry,” Lancroft said as he pulled his weapon sharply to send Cole’s .45 sailing over the Full Blood carcass. “But you know you shouldn’t be down here.”

Cole’s arm was snapped so violently that losing the .45 seemed more like a favorable alternative to losing his hand. He hopped to one side and swung his arm down to wedge the cord beneath the top of the examination table. “Why don’t you come take a look in here, Henry?” he shouted while unwinding himself from the whipcord. “There’s a whole secret room you need to see.”

From the workshop as well as the back of Cole’s mind, the little boy shouted, “I’m not allowed in there.”

As soon as the cord came loose, Cole bolted from the examination room so he could check on his partners. Rico was scooting into the corner farthest from the lab, where a dainty hand appeared from over his shoulder to pull him into the wall itself. Cole could only guess that Jordan was behind the cloak in the corner and helping the bigger man into her shelter.

“You three did a very good job finding me,” Lancroft said while walking out of the examination room. “I’m actually quite proud of you.” His weapon reformed into the single-bladed staff.

“High praise coming from a murdering asshole,” Paige snarled as she drew her gun and fired two shots at him. Spending so much time with a gamer had rubbed off on her. Rather than aim for his center of mass, she tried for a headshot, which sailed past Lancroft when the older man quickly hunched over and twisted around. Her next shots were lower and hit him in the upper back, turning bits of his tweed jacket into lint and exposing patches of leather reinforced with a wire mesh.

“That’s a new form of ammunition,” he said as if admiring a neighbor’s riding mower. “Nearly made it through the upper layers of my jacket.”

As Lancroft turned around, Cole saw the flaps of leather exposed in the damaged sections of the old man’s jacket. It reminded him of the material in Rico’s body armor, but was layered like sections in a compressed phone book. However Lancroft had managed that bit of craftsmanship, it might be enough to withstand all the bullets the Skinners had brought.

Cole threw himself at Paige as the whipcord extended from Lancroft’s pike. Since he wouldn’t get to her in time, he deflected the incoming snare with an upward swing of his spear. Paige dropped to a crouch, tucked the gun away and drew her other baton while running at Lancroft. She feinted with the sickle before swinging the machete, but was blocked by a move that sent a burst of sparks to the floor. Lancroft slashed her elbow, but she twisted all the way around and followed through with a swing from her machete that would have left most other opponents without a head.

Even though Lancroft seemed genuinely surprised by her last attempt, he still managed to duck under it and step away. “It’s too late to stop Pestilence,” he said while knocking Paige down with a clubbing blow from the shaft of the pike. “I’ve been infecting Nymar across the country with their portion of the disease since the early 1970s. The component festering in the leeches is derived from pollen. Very sweet, but very toxic. It’s only one of several lifetimes of work I’ve done. Work any Skinner should damn well appreciate!”

Paige rolled to get her feet under her while swinging at Lancroft’s legs. When the old man hopped over both weapons, Cole rushed straight at him. Lancroft deflected Cole’s spear and then willed his pike to curl around it so he could twist the weapon from Cole’s grasp. The thorns in the handle kept the spear in place, but also threatened to pull the skin from Cole’s hands in the process.

Paige swung at Lancroft’s neck, only to have him skillfully lean away from the sickle. After Cole forced the old man to twist away from a lunging stab with the spear, she hit Lancroft squarely in the back with her machete. It cut through several layers of Lancroft’s jacket, exposing the fresh bullet holes. Focusing on one ragged bull’s-eye, she sank the pointed end of her sickle into a bullet hole and drove all the way through the protective garment. Beneath that were thin metal plates, layered to protect the old man’s back while allowing for complete freedom of movement.

“I want to help, Dr. Lancroft,” the little boy said from the doorway connecting the temple to the workshop.

The old man edged along the opposite wall while spinning his weapon in a flow of constant motion to keep Cole and Paige at bay. Rico fired a shot from his corner, which didn’t do anything more than turn a few beads into powder and obliterate some more etchings. After that he made certain to keep at least one of the other Skinners between him and Rico’s corner. “Of course you want to help,” Lancroft said as he poked a shallow hole into Cole’s chest with a quick jab from his pike. “Be a good boy, Henry, and bring the others down here. Remember, though, you’re not allowed in my lab.” While blocking attacks from Cole and Paige, he still had enough speed to take a few swings of his own.

Paige used her machete for defense. Although that arm was getting hit, the hardened limb prevented Lancroft’s weapon from cutting too deeply. The pike was a blur and the rest of him moved in a fluid series of unpredictable bobs and weaves.

Fixing an intent scowl on Paige, he said, “Say what you want about my methods, but I never would have considered handing over human territory to Nymar vermin or abominations like that pack of Mongrels running wild through Kansas City.”

“So instead, you come up with Pestilence,” Paige replied. “Real noble.”

Lancroft backed toward the examination room. “After spending decades in laboratories without sticking my nose into the sun and hunting creatures that now are only footnotes in the most obscure legends, I would think you’d want to learn from me.”

Gunshots sounded from upstairs as hurried footsteps rushed the door and began stomping down into the workshop. The other garden-level windows were knocked in, allowing the smaller of the reawakened Mud People to squirm their way into the basement. Their strained wheezes were a foul wind that rolled out of the workshop to sully the Dryad’s makeshift temple.

Cole and Paige circled Lancroft so they could catch their breath and try to give Rico a clean shot. While they had used the respite to collect themselves and heal, Lancroft had done the same. All of his wounds were closed, including the ones that would have taken Paige a few days to shake off. As the Mud People started pushing into the temple, Lancroft said, “Wait a second, Henry.”

Stop.

All the Mud People obeyed the order.

“Maybe you just aren’t aware of what I’ve created,” Lancroft said to the other Skinners. “If you were able to study the bodies of the most recent Half Breed victims, you would have seen the nymph pheromones used to attract them. The same sort of modification will draw the Nymar to their deaths.”

“You mean like rat poison stuck inside a piece of candy?” Cole asked.

“Precisely,” Lancroft declared. “That way, the Half Breeds are killed as quickly and efficiently as possible. Your generation of Skinners have stopped learning and become nothing but soldiers. Have you even pieced together how the Half Breeds spread their curse?”

“I’ve seen it happen,” Cole said. “Anyone hurt by one of those things will become one.”

“Yes, but why do some of the wounded become Half Breeds while others can be healed as if they’d only been attacked by a dog?” Looking back and forth between Cole and Paige, he said, “How are we supposed to do any good if we don’t know the root of the problem?”

When he leaned in close to Paige, she lashed out with both weapons rather than listen to whatever he was going to say. Cole wanted to help her, but she’d sparked another blistering series of attacks that turned the space around them into a hissing tornado of wooden blades. Trying to inject himself into that was like deciding how to stick his hand into a rattling garbage disposal, so Cole positioned himself in front of the workshop where several Mud People stood watching. Henry stood there as well. The boy he’d possessed still seemed to have his head connected to his neck.

“It’s the marrow,” Lancroft snarled. Having reshaped his staff into the oval-shaped weapon he’d used to cut Ned down, he switched his entire stance and fighting style to accommodate the new weapon. “Half Breeds carry their sickness in their saliva, but it needs to make contact with bone marrow for it to take root. Just knowing one simple bit of information like that should make Half Breeds less of a problem. Just as knowing that Pestilence is an exotic virus and not the fabled creeping death of Incan and Mayan mythology.”

Panting after the relentless attack, Paige said, “I’ll be sure to put that tidbit in my journal and credit it to the fucking asshole who killed Ned Post.” She went on the offensive using both of her weapons like a pair of scissors. Her sickle was blocked before cutting Lancroft’s throat, but the machete came in to shave large portions of flesh from both of his arms. Even with his advanced healing, a healthy dose of pain flashed across his face.

When Henry saw Lancroft recoil, the boy anxiously bared crooked teeth that were covered in a slick coat of the substance kicked up from the back of his throat.

Desperate to keep the Mud People from charging, Cole decided to give Henry something more pertinent to listen to. “Is this the same offer you gave to Misonyk when you let him infect Henry?”

For the first time since the conversation started, Lancroft appeared shaken. He glanced at Henry, but the strain of the fight made it tougher for him to put on a convincing poker face. “Misonyk was more demon than Nymar. It’s because of him that I needed to dispose of my cherished reformatory. I poured my heart and soul into every stone of that institution. There is no way you could possibly know how much good I did there.”

Moving so Lancroft was forced to edge away from her and Cole, Paige imagined Rico’s line of fire and inched the old man toward it. She kept him talking in the hopes that he might forget Rico was even there. “I’ve been to the reformatory,” she said. “It’s a pit. A den for Half Breeds.”

Strangely enough, Lancroft smiled. With Paige standing between him and Henry, he was forced to move away from the door while defending against her incoming blades. Their weapons clacked together in a quick rattle of impacts, each one coming faster than its predecessor. “It was necessary to destroy the entire facility. Such a horrible loss. To be honest, I thought I’d lost the drive to continue my work. And then Henry found me.”

The little boy rubbed the door frame and leaned toward the temple, but stopped before crossing the threshold.

Curling his fingers around to brush the scars on his palms, Lancroft glared at Paige and asked, “Where is the Nymar you brought with you?”

Henry’s young face twisted around before Daniels separated from the pack of Mud People behind him. When the Nymar grabbed the boy by the shoulders to yank him into the workshop, both Skinners took that as a cue to lunge at Lancroft. Cole almost got close enough to hit the old man before he spotted the bladed oval lashing in a tight arc aimed at his hamstrings. Pure instinct brought his spear down to smack aside the blade that would have crippled him.

“Bring him in here, Daniels!” Paige shouted as she tore after Lancroft.

The Nymar could be seen through the doorway, struggling with the much smaller boy. Even though Daniels outweighed his opponent by a hefty margin, the kid was lean, agile, and powered by something more than the Pestilence running through his veins. “Now you’ve done it!” the boy screamed in a pitch of the same frequency as an iron glove on a chalk-board. When he shrieked again, his voice ripped through the basement and through all of the minds within it.

I’m not supposed to be here! AND NEITHER ARE YOU!

Daniels and Henry both fell into the temple as Cole raced after Lancroft. The older man may have slipped past him, but he wasn’t fast enough to avoid getting tackled by Paige. When Lancroft was slammed face-first into the wall beside the door, Cole intended on nailing him there with his spear. The sharpened point caught Lancroft in the ribs and tore through the protective jacket to reveal metal plates attached by a series of latches spaced every eight to ten inches vertically along his back. Lancroft quickly twisted around so the spearhead skidded off his back and into the wall. As Paige tried to hit him again, he sent her into the same wall.

Cole swept low, but only scraped Lancroft’s ankle before the old man hopped up to avoid the follow-through from the spear’s forked end. When Lancroft’s foot came down again, it pinned the spear to the floor so his other foot could slam down on Cole’s hand. With Cole pinned, Paige kicked straight over his head to pound her heel against Lancroft’s hip. Not only did the kick move him away from Cole, but it set him up for a quick attack from both her weapons. The sickle ripped diagonally along Lancroft’s chest, while the machete came down toward the base of his neck. He blocked the machete and willed his weapon to close around it so he could ease it safely away as his wound was healed.

“Slower with your right arm, I see,” Lancroft said. “That’s what happens when you muck about with things you don’t understand.”

Her right arm was also stronger, and she reclaimed her machete with a quick tug before slashing again and again at Lancroft’s face and chest. “Get to Henry!” she said to Cole. “You know what to do!”

The old man defended against the blows and backed toward the examination room. Unable to do more than get in Paige’s way, Cole hurried to the workshop to help Daniels.

Henry struggled with the Nymar, but the boy was too small to break free. When Daniels locked him up in a bear hug, Henry exploded from his shell in a burst of energy that smeared through the stagnant air of the basement and was absorbed by one of the closest Mud People. After taking residence in the body of a large man dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, Henry jumped at Daniels and then abandoned ship so the lumpy body hit Daniels like a couple hundred pounds of dead weight. As soon as the Nymar hit the floor, a blond woman raced over to him and opened her mouth to let more of the mud drip from her mouth onto his face.

The instant Cole arrived, he was assaulted by the Mud People. A short woman wearing butterfly pajamas tried to sink her teeth into his face. He shoved her back and took a few more steps into the workshop before filthy hands grabbed at him and his weapon from all directions. All Cole could do was shift the weapon into its blunted longbow form and push forward. When the Mud People all tried to push him back at once, Cole shifted his balance and twisted his entire body around in a tight circle that sent several of them to the floor.

Mud People stumbled down the stairs into the basement and flopped in through the windows. Although Henry seemed to be spreading himself thin by controlling so many of them, they were effective as a wave of solid bodies and grasping fingers. Two Mud People hung from Cole’s back, so he slammed backward against a wall and shook them off. A few older neighbors were easily pushed aside, but a pair of teenage boys had enough strength to pose a threat. One of them cocked his head to the side and loped at Cole in a distinctive way. As soon as the teen pushed off with both feet into a wild jump, Henry ditched that body in favor of another teen dressed in a wife beater and cutoff sweatpants. The human projectile knocked Cole against a bench less than a second before Henry was attacking him in his new body, using flailing arms and snapping teeth.

Daniels wrestled with several Mud People himself, baring his fangs to compliment the savage, hungry look on his face.

“Hey!” Cole shouted. “Don’t bite any of them!”

The warning sank in, but not before Daniels was swallowed up by another wave of Mud People. He clamped his mouth shut and rolled onto his belly so he could cover his head with both hands.

Even before the supernatural intervention, the teen in the beater may have been able to wrestle Cole to the ground. When he strained his muscles to the limit, the Skinner felt a surge through his upper body that allowed him to haul the bigger guy up and over his hip. Henry’s back thumped against the concrete floor, where he swelled up to the largest size his human body would allow and lunged at Cole with the ferocity of a true Full Blood.

Cole drove his shoulder into Henry’s gut and then shoved the teenage body down. Not only did the air leave the teen’s lungs, but Henry flew out of him as well. The Mud People closed in around Cole as Henry raked the painted nails of an elderly woman across the Skinner’s face. When Cole twisted around to face the old woman, Henry had vacated her for yet another body.

A large woman with curly hair jumped onto Cole’s back and screamed in his ear. Before he could force her off, he was being punched by three other sets of fists. He shook free just long enough to dodge a punch from a man with a face that had been completely caked in the crust of Pestilence. The orbs flew from him, leaping from one neighbor to another. Within seconds after sending two bodies flying at Cole, Henry used another as a battering ram. Cole ducked behind a workbench, waiting for the sickening crash of the clueless body against his makeshift shelter.

This time, however, Henry stayed put for the collision. “Why don’t you cut me, Skinner?” he snarled. “Cut me open and see what’s inside.”

The orbs flowed out and behind Cole. When he turned around, he found the same boy that had crawled through the window. Although his head was cocked at an angle, it wasn’t dangling from a broken neck. “You don’t want to hurt that kid, Henry,” Cole said.

The boy lunged at Cole so quickly that the wood chisel in his hand was nearly buried into Cole’s stomach. Half a second before the narrow strip of metal sank home, Daniels grabbed the kid’s arm, bared his set of curved snakelike fangs and spat a wad of venom into his eyes.

Henry jerked away from the Nymar and pressed his hands against his face as all of the Mud People screamed. When Henry ran out of breath, he sucked in another one and shrieked into his dirty palms.

Ican’tsee!Whathaveyoudonetome?Can’tseecan’tseecan’t see! Stop it! I know you’re in my head! Knowyou’reinmyhead! StopitstopitstopitSTOPIT!

For once Cole knew exactly what Henry was going through. Misonyk had been the first one to teach him about Nymar venom. Although intended to be injected through a bite, it could also be collected in the Nymar’s mouth and spat. The first method caused sluggishness, dizziness, or even paralysis in the victim. The second allowed Nymar to blind the recipient. If the poison got into someone’s eyes, it left them very susceptible to suggestion.

“Don’t hurt this boy, Henry,” Daniels said.

When Henry frowned and cocked his head in another direction, all the Mud People followed suit. “I got locked up for hurting kids,” he said through the boy’s mouth only. “I learned my lesson.”

In a sterner voice, Daniels commanded, “Let go of them, Henry. Let all of these people go.”

Henry tried to wipe the venom from his face, but Daniels held onto both of the kid’s hands.

Looming over the kid like a troll from a cautionary fairy tale, Daniels said, “Whatever you’re doing to these people, stop it! Let them go.”

Lancroft forced Paige toward the lab with a flowing series of attacks that made his staff look more like a crooked windmill. Her sickle rapped against the elongated weapon and the machete raked across his stomach. Paige tried to deliver a stronger swing aimed at the bloody gash she’d just opened, but she was held in place by a muddy hand.

One filthy man in a bathrobe held onto her arm, and when she kicked him away, he fell and grasped her ankle. The foul smell of copper and dirt filled her nose as an entire room full of Henry’s playthings screamed and dropped to the floor. Something was happening to them that weakened Henry’s control.

She kicked free of the muddy hands and raised her defenses just in time to prevent Lancroft’s weapon from taking her head off. The impact rattled through her entire body and sent her stumbling through the door to the examination room. Before she could get her bearings, Lancroft knocked her in the jaw with the middle section of his staff. She staggered back, ducked under another powerful swing and found herself in the middle of the starkly lit examination room.

“You’re an interesting case, Paige,” Lancroft said. “With a little study, I should be able to iron out the kinks of your botched experiment and solve your mobility problem.”

She used the blunt end of her sickle to flip one of the metal trays into the air and bat it at Lancroft with the machete. “What mobility problem?” she replied before bringing both weapons down in a double chop.

Lancroft held his staff across his chest to block her assault and shifted it so the blades on each end curled into sharp hooks. With a quick scooping motion, he snagged her leg and ripped through a small section of flesh. The hook went in just far enough to get her blood flowing. The following attacks came in short, chopping blows using the middle section of his weapon or quick slices that scraped across the hardened flesh of Paige’s wounded arm.

She recoiled from the gouging hooks and bounced off the edge of the large silver table into a row of metal cabinets. For every attack she blocked, another drew her blood. The only lull in the fight was when Lancroft knocked one end of his weapon into a recessed latch on the wall.

Something moved behind her, but Paige wasn’t about to turn her back on the old man. Lancroft put all of his weight behind a charge that sent her backpedaling through an opening that had previously been hidden by a tall cabinet. Her foot reached the top of a flight of stairs and the rest of her fell back into empty air.