Teeth of Beasts

Chapter 29

The Mud People dropped to their hands and knees, scraping at the ground as if it was their new enemy. Those who tried too hard to talk were quickly reduced to a heaving pile of muscles that strained to vomit up the substance that had seeped into their throats.

“Good boy,” Daniels said.

Henry watched, his eyes wide and mouth agape. The faraway expression and gentle nod made it unclear if his agreement was due to the venom that had been sprayed into his host’s eyes or from some other pleasant diversion drifting through his addled brain.

“Are they all free?” Cole asked.

“Yes,” Henry replied. “Dr. Lancroft don’t need them no more anyhow.”

Cole did a quick survey of the people in the basement. Several of them were climbing to their feet and wiping the gunk from their eyes. Others were nursing wounds where their flesh had been cut or scraped away to reveal the hardened, vaguely wooden texture of the underlying muscle. Once Cole told the most alert of the group how to get out, a slow exodus toward the stairs began.

“Shit,” he said as the workshop emptied. “I don’t hear Paige anymore. They didn’t go past us, so there’s only one other place down here they could be. Bring Henry.”

Daniels held onto the slick little hand and said, “Come with us, Henry.”

The boy nodded and held onto him like a well-behaved youngster crossing the street.

“How long will you be able to hold him?” Cole asked as he led the way through the temple and to the examination room.

Daniels replied in a terse whisper, “I don’t know. I’ve never done this on someone like him.”

“Just try to hang on.”

Walking slowly and staring straight ahead, Daniels obviously wasn’t seeing much more than a few steps in front of him. He stepped over a few cowering Mud People only when his foot bumped into them. At times along the way he pulled in a sharp breath and muttered to himself. When the Nymar’s lips moved, Henry nodded.

The lab was a mess. Dented cabinets, broken shelves, and spilled jars marked the path to a section in the corner that opened to reveal a flight of stairs. Cole had to choke down the instinct to run toward the sounds of activity that drifted up from the subbasement.

Entering the starkly lit room without truly seeing where he was going, Daniels asked, “What do you want—Good God!”

Cole stood next to the table and patted the massive set of ribs held apart by a set of spanners clamped directly onto the bones. “Henry, look at this.”

The boy squirmed and shook his head. “I’m not supposed to be here. Notsupposed to be here. Notsupposedtobe here.”

“You need to see this.”

“Henry,” Daniels snapped. “Look.”

Henry looked. The features on his little face twisted nervously before moisture glistened at the corners of his eyes. Mud-stained tears trickled down his face, cutting a path through the caked-on grime.

Meeting the boy’s fearful stare, Cole said, “This is your body, Henry. Whatever Lancroft told you, I’m sure he didn’t tell you about this.”

“You’re lying,” Henry said. “Dr. Lancroft wants to help me. He saved me from gettin’ hung.”

Cole shook his head. “Look for yourself. Look what he’s done to you.”

Daniels moved around behind the boy and nudged him toward the table. “Go on. Do what he says.” When the boy resisted, the Nymar shook his head. “I don’t know if I’ve still got him.”

The boy’s eyes, murkier than the bottom of a lake, flicked open to take in every detail with a hatred that was too vast to reside in such a small body. “Dr. Lancroft will kill you for coming in here,” he swore.

If he don’t, I will. IwillIwillIwillIwill.

“Lancroft was always hiding things from you,” Cole said in a voice that had to be pushed through the oppressive weight in the air. “He’s the one who locked you up and made you sit in that corner.”

The anger that had filled every inch of the boy’s frame shifted into melancholy. “I liked my corner.”

“I know you did, but he trapped you in that room.”

“I deserved to be there.”

Before Cole could respond to that, images flickered through his mind: men in tattered clothes screamed as they were cut down by a Full Blood’s claws. Women cowered in root cellars, wrapping their arms around crying children, praying to be pulled apart first so their young ones might have a chance to get away.

Instead of looking at the table, Henry studied the etchings on the walls. His mouth hung open in the same expression the boy might wear at a museum filled with towering displays of dinosaur bones and flying machines. “These are like the scripture written in my old room. They’re the words of the Lord.”

“No, Henry. They’re meant to trick you.”

Daniels put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and said, “You should listen to him. He’s telling you the truth.”

Suddenly, Henry spun around to snarl up at the Nymar. “Leeches are vermin! They all need to be ripped apart and flushed away! That’s what Liam thinks! That’s what Randolph thinks! That’s what all Full Bloods think!”

Hearing the Full Blood that had been responsible for bringing Kansas City to its knees mentioned by name was jarring enough. Hearing that name attached to a promise to exterminate his entire species was almost too much for Daniels to handle. Jumping at the first sign of weakness, Henry pulled away from the Nymar and bolted for the door.

Leeches do nothing but LIE! That ain’t me. It can’t be!

The stairway leading down to the subbasement was short and wide enough for Paige to tuck her head and roll down to the bottom without breaking anything vital. The hallway at the bottom of the stairs was made of solid brick walls and a floor of rough stone. Her blood was already chilled due to all of the serum it was producing, but her wounds were piling up. She needed another injection and doubted Lancroft would be so accommodating as to let her take one.

Using the back of her hand to wipe some blood from her face, she glanced toward the sound of the boy’s screams and said, “Your pet Henry is closer than he should be. Think he’ll be upset when he finds out you were using him for spare parts?”

“Go back, Henry!” Lancroft shouted. Sweeping his weapon in a motion that scraped the hooks against the floor and wall, he forced Paige a few more steps down the hall and bellowed, “Do what I say and go back!”

Paige brought the machete up to pin one of the hooks against the wall, giving her an open shot at Lancroft’s side. The sickle blade cut through his shirt, sliced along the top of a rib, and dug several inches into his torso before coming out.

The old man snarled with a mix of pain and rage. His foot swept Paige’s ankles, dropping her to one knee while also forcing her to release the hook she’d trapped. After sucking in a breath, he sent her rolling down the hall with a kick delivered straight to her chest.

Small cells were sectioned off by iron bars at regular intervals along the length of the hall. One contained a Mongrel that was too mangy and sick to do more than acknowledge the combatants with a snuffing breath. Another contained the body of a woman that had decayed to the point where her yellowed parchment skin looked one size too small.

“Do you know how much you can learn from a corpse?” Lancroft asked from directly above and behind Paige. When the hand gripped her hair, she could barely get her legs set as she was pulled to her feet. “Yours probably won’t hold up too long, but I’m sure it’ll yield some interesting results.”

As Paige was dragged down the hall, she swung her machete around to try and strike the man behind her. Lancroft shoved her toward the wall so her weapon scraped against solid brick. A moment later her head was knocked against the same wall with enough force to leave her dangling from Lancroft’s fist.

“There is so much you don’t know,” he mused while continuing to drag her along. “I owe my longevity to a simple discovery made while experimenting in directions that are closed off to minds such as yours. Skinners no longer contemplate the entire spectrum of beasts that live beneath what we know. Even if most people are too blind to recognize Nymar or shapeshifters, Skinners must see more than that. Otherwise,” he added while smacking the weapons from her hands, “they don’t deserve to survive what’s coming.”

Lancroft tightened his grip on her hair and tossed her down the hall. As soon as she landed, something that felt like a leather strap cinched around her neck. The strap was an end of Lancroft’s staff that had shifted into something more pliable than the petrified wood common to all Skinner weapons. He held it in both hands, shoving her in front of him the way animal handlers forced a wildcat into its cage. “I could have taught you the method of refining my original formula for the healing serum into the one that has sustained me for so long, but there’s no need to waste such effort on a simple foot soldier.”

Even though she knew there was no chance of breaking the weapon, Paige struggled against it. Her feet skidded against the floor as she tried to push herself upright while also impeding her forward momentum. But she was caught within the snare and, even worse, weaponless.

Lancroft shoved her toward one of the empty cells farther down the brick passage. “While we were fighting, something occurred to me. Skinner blood combined with that of a shapeshifter might take our healing serum in a whole new direction. A Skinner infected by a Half Breed—under properly supervised conditions, of course—would ultimately yield a new base for the serum that could be passed on through the same methods as the current recipe. Tissue samples taken from your arm before and after the change may unlock some doors I hadn’t even contemplated.”

Directly across from her was a square cell only slightly larger than a walk-in closet. The Half Breed imprisoned there swiped at her while shoving its face against rune-encrusted bars to drool on the dusty floor. Its body was a withered mass of knotted muscle, and covered with skin that hung loosely on a frame of broken bones. Jagged gouges in the walls, floor, and ceiling told of a tedious, constant effort to escape over the course of what must have been several years.

“Think of this as a learning experience,” Lancroft said while straining to shove her closer to the beast. “When the change comes and your bones begin to snap, you’ll finally know just how complex your enemy is. I imagine the pain couldn’t possibly last throughout the entire process. Or perhaps it does. I’ll be sure to chronicle my observations once you take your place upon my examination table.”

Daniels trembled and backed away from Henry.

“The leeches were inside me once,” Henry said in both his physical and mental voices. Stretching out a filthy little hand, he reached for Daniels’s chest and flashed a sludge-stained smile. “I haven’t tasted them for a long time.”

Cole reached for the kid, but Daniels clamped a firm grip around the boy’s wrist. After forcing his grubby fingers away from his chest, Daniels shoved them into the wiry fur of the dead Full Blood splayed out on the examination table. “This is you, Henry!” he said. “Remember the scars you had. Remember the color of your fur, the bumps on your skin, the curve of your nails, just remember anything and see for yourself!”

A rippling disturbance filled the air surrounding the kid’s body. But instead of becoming the orbs Cole had seen before, the essence of Henry Bartlett was drawn to the body on the table.

Taking Henry’s other hand and pushing it against the Full Blood’s exposed rib, Cole felt the kid jerk away from the table as if he’d been electrocuted. “Hold him there, Daniels!” he shouted while Henry’s arms flailed and his little feet pushed against the floor.

With Daniels’s squat body acting as a barrier, Henry didn’t have anywhere else to go. No matter whose spirit was fueling the kid’s efforts, his muscles simply weren’t up to the task of fighting off two grown men. The wriggling kid swore in ways that were as heartfelt as they were disturbing while he pulled against the thin smear of energy connecting him to the corpse. Cole and Daniels held the boy against the table for a few more seconds before the essence rushed completely out of one shell and into the other. One of the overhead fluorescent tubes flickered and the others died out completely. Cole prayed his e-mail transfer had run its course, because the energy from Henry’s reunion with his body fried the terminal along with the earpiece he was still wearing.

Once the transfer was complete, the Full Blood’s decimated corpse sat up. Testing the limits of the pegs tacking its skin to the table, it let out a howl that was garbled beyond recognition due to the absence of its lower jaw. The sound it made thundered through the entire house, despite the fact that it emerged from a throat that was not only cut open in several places, but also filled with fluids and loose meat.

The boy fell back, so Cole handed him over to Daniels and said, “Get him out of here.”

“Don’t you need any help with…with that?”

Every move the carcass made introduced it to a new level of pain. Blood trickled from a hundred places despite the lack of a heart to pump it.

“You’ve already done your part,” Cole said. “If there’s any Full Blood I should be able to put down, it’s this one.”

Henry’s garbled howl echoed through the brick hallway like a tidal wave, sending the imprisoned Half Breed scuttling to the back of its cage, where it jammed its rear haunches against the wall and scraped nervously at the floor.

When Lancroft glanced back at the stairs, Paige grabbed the weapon encircling her neck as close to its handle as her arms would allow. Feeling the sting of thorns tearing into her palms, she channeled all of her physical and mental strength into one concerted effort to free herself from the snare. Lancroft was distracted. The Half Breed was gathering its courage, and she only had another second before that slight advantage would be gone. She needed to loosen the snare as quickly as possible.

Loosen the snare.

Loosen it!

Howls continued to roll down from the laboratory, and it wasn’t long before the sound of creaking wood mingled with them. As soon as Paige felt the snare loosen, she pushed it up while pulling her head down. Lancroft was quick to reassert his own will and the weapon responded by snapping shut less than an inch over her head, trapping a portion of her hair between its two halves.

“Die as a Half Breed or die as a human,” Lancroft snarled while rolling the staff as if he was twirling spaghetti on the end of a giant fork. “Either way, you sure as hell won’t die as a Skinner!”

Paige took her knife from her pocket, snapped it open and gave herself the quickest, sloppiest haircut in history. The instant she was free, she rolled past Lancroft and picked her weapons up off the floor. Within moments after the thorns sank into her hands, the sickle shortened to form smaller curved blades at each end. The machete widened into something resembling a butcher’s cleaver. Her head was fuzzy from the spill down the stairs, but all she needed was instinct to put her weapons to use.

You did this to me, Skinner!

Henry struggled to sit up, but as he tried to pull himself off the table, he was restrained by the pegs holding the flaps of his open chest cavity to the polished surface. When the Full Blood turned in the other direction, Cole could see that several long strips of flesh starting at Henry’s shoulder blade and running to the small of his back had been neatly cut away.

In a matter of seconds the carcass had found the limits of its motion. Whatever pain it experienced before had either subsided or become so overwhelming that it no longer had an effect. Its hands were restrained. Both eyes floated in separate jars. Most of its tongue lay diced in a pan, but its nose was still attached to the end of its snout, and Henry used it to sniff the air frantically.

“You see?” Cole said as he held his spear at the ready. “Lancroft put you here. He locked you away in this room just like he locked you away at the reformatory!”

Either those words got to Henry or the Full Blood had simply run out of steam, because the massive body thumped back down and its limbs hung loosely off the sides. “I…eehhhhh…err.” One more breath shook the carcass and was followed by a surprisingly calm voice in Cole’s head.

I remember.

“Remember what?”

Dr. Lancroft told me there was work that needed doing. Said I had to look inside folks and find what he put in ’em. I found it and stoked it like a fire. When I did, they all was different.

“They became Mud People?”

The carcass shifted so its hollowed-out eye sockets were pointed at Cole.

They weren’t people no more. Not while that fire was in ’em.

“What about after? Can they be cured?”

They ain’t sick. They’s changed. Lancroft changed ’em. Everyone I see’s been changed. Everyone but Skinners, leeches, and the like.

“So everyone will turn into these Mud People?”

Not unless I’m here to stoke the fire, but I don’t plan on bein’ here no more. See, I hear the stars now. I feel this wide open space an’ all I gotta do is go there. I meant to go there before, but Dr. Lancroft told me not to.

Daniels rushed into the room amid the thump of clumsy footsteps and the clatter of everything shifting within the metal case he carried. Cole waved furiously for him to be quiet, but the noise didn’t seem to bother Henry. The carcass was motionless and the pathetic excuse of a face was still aimed at the Skinner.

I won’t stoke no more fires. I promise. IpromiseIpromise.

The upper portion of the carcass twitched, and Cole instinctively reached out to hold it down.

You broke me outta one hellhole, Skinner, an’ now you busted me outta another. Suppose I should thank you.

“Just tell me how to put an end to Pestilence, Henry. Then we’re even.”

Daniels stopped trying to get Cole’s attention and tried to make sense of the fact that he was having a conversation with a very quiet and very dead werewolf.

Unconcerned with whether the Nymar could hear Henry’s voice, Cole said, “Tell me how to get rid of Pestilence!”

Without me, there ain’t no Pestilence. Folks’ll get sick, but they’ll get better so long as I’m gone. They only listened to me. But you gotta swear somethin’ to me.

With that, the peeled, brutalized head of the Full Blood slid toward Cole, freezing him in his place and sending Daniels skidding backward into a set of cabinets.

There’s somethin’ I want you to take so’s you can use it to do the Lord’s work. I can feel it nearby.

“Take what?” As soon as he asked the question, Cole found the answer tucked neatly into the back of his head.

Talk to yer friend on the floor. He’ll tell ya what to do with it, but the rest of me gets buried. You’re a good man, but the resta you Skinners is a buncha ghouls. Bury me proper and there ain’t no more Pestilence. That’s the deal. Break it and I’ll know.

“All right. You got a deal.”

The Full Blood’s snout thumped against the table as if the string holding it up had been cut.

Daniels stood with his arms wrapped around the case that hung open like a street vendor’s display of knockoff watches. “Are you still hearing voices?” he asked Cole.

“No. Where are the Mud People?”

“Heading to their homes.”

“Are they all right?”

“Well enough to call the cops,” Daniels replied. “Can we go now?”

“How’s Rico?”

“I went to inject him with some healing serum, but he didn’t really need it. He’s unconscious and the wound on his chest is…fading.”

“Fading?” When Daniels nodded, Cole asked, “Is he all right?”

“Sure he is. I wish I had a woman like that stroking my hair and holding me right against her—”

“Okay, then. Get him ready to move and call Tristan. See if there’s a way for her to zap you out of here. I’m going after Paige.”

Not only was the Nymar sweating profusely, but he shook badly enough to dump half of his supplies onto the floor. “Take some serum in case she’s hurt.”

Cole gathered up as many of the little syringes as he could find and was about to run through the narrow door beside the computer desk when he spotted another vial. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Leave that,” Daniels snapped when Cole took the vial. “It needs to be disposed of properly!”

Despite Daniels’s protests, Cole took the vial along with another piece of equipment from that same case. His eyes were then drawn to a rack of long, skinny drawers set against the wall on the other side of the table. There were over a dozen of them, but Cole went immediately to the eighth shelf from the top and pulled it open. The entire tray was covered by a thin metal lid, so he pulled it out and tossed it to Daniels.

“Take that and get the hell out of here!”

The confused Nymar barely managed to catch the tray before Cole hurried down the stairs.

The hallway seemed to stretch for miles, and the farther Paige was forced back, the more the floor sloped beneath her. Lancroft didn’t show the first indication of tiring as the battle escalated to a personal war. When his opponent countered his tactics, he simply shifted his weapon along with his fighting style. The rooms appeared at regular intervals on either side of the hall. Some were filled with old crates and others were fashioned into cells. Only a few cells contained living specimens, none of which had any place among civilized man.

“There are others who know about your transgressions,” Lancroft said as he swung his weapon at Paige. The staff had become a small halberd to accommodate faster swings in a confined space. “When Kansas City almost fell, there was talk of removing you before any more damage was done.”

“Talk is all you do, old man.” Paige used the double-bladed sickle to slash at his face, and the cleaver for more solid strikes to his arms and legs. Apart from a number of shallow cuts and a few bleeders, most of her attacks were blocked or dodged. Lancroft was just too quick, too practiced in his style, and too accustomed to his home turf.

When Paige hopped back to avoid being gutted by a vicious swing, she was able to see what was in the alcoves in that section of the hall. The one to her left was filled with clutter, but the one to her right had a metal box attached to the wall. She hit the box with a solid blow from her machete, removing some of Lancroft’s advantage along with the overhead lights amid a shower of sparks.

“Stupid,” Lancroft snarled. He walked forward slowly and carefully, shifting his weapon into a thin pole with curved blades on each end. The blades were angled forward so when the staff was spun in front of him, it became a meat grinder filling the hallway from floor to ceiling. Anyone close enough to hear the subtle hiss of the blades whipping through the air would quickly feel them chop through flesh and bone.

But Paige didn’t need to guess where Lancroft was. She didn’t need to listen for his movement or try to get past him. The drops in her eyes allowed her to make out vague shapes in the dark as well as the dim, luminescent scent waves drifting off him. His scent was all over the bricks and bars and floor, lighting up the place for her enhanced eyes like a layer of glowing fungus. Scents from the other creatures floated through the air as well, only to be mixed up by the spinning staff as he cautiously inched down the hall. She knew better than to get overly confident. The old man’s guard would be up more now than ever, and if there was a switch to activate any backup lights, Lancroft would know where to find it.

Paige shifted into a sideways stance before extending the cleaver so it cracked against Lancroft’s weapon. He responded with a flurry of blows that barely interrupted the circular motion of the staff. Both blades came at her, one after another, end over end. Even though she easily deflected most of the attacks and backed away from the rest, she was about to run out of hallway. Something snarled in one of the cages at the far end of the subbasement to let her know the spinning wooden blades wouldn’t be the only threat she would have to face. She couldn’t make out much within that cell even with her drops, but the bulky shape was unlike anything she’d ever seen.

“Lancroft!” Cole shouted while racing down the stairs.

In the smeared colors of scent that Paige could see, the old man’s head turned to glance back. The trickle of light coming from the examination room was too far away for Cole to get to Paige before she hit the end of her line. Just to be certain, Lancroft pressed forward and willed the blades to extend even farther. Sparks flew as one of them knocked Paige’s cleaver from her hand. The thorns in the grip shredded her palm and one even snapped off to become lodged in her flesh.

Suddenly, another scent trail cut through the shadows as Cole rushed down the hall with a last burst of speed from his tattoo. His unnaturally fast footsteps were accompanied by the grating sound of a dentist’s drill. Before the old man could angle his weapon to cover his flank, Cole dug the tattoo machine into Lancroft’s shoulder. One end of the staff sparked against the ceiling, causing the other to crack against a wall. Now that the whirling barrier was down, Paige took a swing at Lancroft’s chest, but was stopped by a thickly callused palm.

The old man grabbed her weapon in one fist. Before he could drive the other into her face, his arm was ensnared from behind and an electric needle was raked across it. As much as Cole would have liked to carve an obscene message into Lancroft’s skin, he settled for injecting him with the entire vial of the same defective ink Paige had used in Kansas City.

After slamming Cole into a wall, Lancroft stooped to pick up his weapon. “By opposing Pestilence, you’re not just going after me,” he said as he grabbed Paige’s ankle and flipped her onto her rear. Cole tossed the empty tattoo machine and tried restraining Lancroft by gripping his spear in both hands and dropping his arms down around Lancroft’s torso. Before Paige could take a free shot at him, the old man snapped his head back in a clubbing blow to Cole’s face and then flipped him over his shoulder. “You’re opposing every other Skinner who’s helped me throughout the years. I’m doing them a favor by making sure you won’t be around to sully our names any longer!” He swung his weapon in an arc angled to separate both of his opponents from their heads. All of those sparring sessions paid off when Cole dropped at the same time as Paige so the halberd could pass over them.

Unlike the previous swings, this one was too powerful to be controlled, and Lancroft wound up driving several inches of his blade into the brick wall. Since he’d easily received four times the amount of ink that had messed up Paige’s arm, he went through the change that much quicker. Even with his features crudely outlined in scent trails, Paige could see the confusion on Lancroft’s face when she dropped him to one knee with two snapping kicks to the nerve that ran down his leg.

Cole jabbed at him using the forked end of his spear and managed to land several stabs before the old man could retaliate. Lancroft’s muscles had become an unknown factor, making each of his punches brutish and overextended. He could no longer get his fingers to close around his weapon, so he balled up both fists and let them fly. Even going by the hazy outline of the scent trails, Cole had no difficulty in allowing each incoming swing to sail past him and answering with a shot of his own.

Paige came at him with another kick that was blocked by the arm that had taken the brunt of punishment from the electric needle. As soon as her shin thumped against the hardened mass of muscle beneath Lancroft’s skin, she knew exactly what Cole had done. She tossed a slower kick into Lancroft’s chest just to gauge his reaction time, and when the old man tried to block it, she followed up with a quick snapping roundhouse to his face.

In one last burst of strength, Lancroft threw Cole to the floor so he could drop his fist onto him like a sledgehammer. Cole hit the concrete with a thump that knocked the wind from his lungs, and he was barely fast enough to roll away from the fist that sent a tremor through the hallway.

Paige slid into a side kick that caught Lancroft squarely in the chest. The old man planted his feet, absorbed the kick, and dropped his arm to grab her leg. He was too slow, however, to prevent her from burying the curved blade of her sickle into the side of his neck.

Lancroft stood and stared at her for a second, shocked by the blow and weakening from the blood that poured out of him. He reached up with a hand that seemed almost too heavy to lift, pulled the sickle from where it had been lodged and crushed it as if it had been whittled out of balsa wood. Blood sprayed from his severed artery, but was quickly stanched by the healing serum flowing through his body. “You’ll never be true Skinners,” he croaked as he tore his jacket open to fumble for a pendant that hung around his neck and under his shirt, “but perhaps you’ll be remembered as such when you’re found here with me.”

The little box in Lancroft’s hand looked like a remote car door lock. Cole felt the bottom fall out of his stomach as he thought about the collapsed pile of rubble that had once been Lancroft Reformatory. Before this place might be buried in a similar manner, Cole drove his spear straight through the old man’s wrist and into his chest. Between the debilitating effects of the ink, the loss of blood, and two such grievous wounds, Lancroft crumpled. His hand was pinned and not functioning well enough to push either of the buttons on the black box. Cole leaned on the spear, twisted it, and pulled it out. With his last spark of life, Lancroft reached for the remote hanging around his neck.

Paige bent down and calmly took it from him.

“Uh…guys?” Daniels called from the top of the stairs. “Are you all right?”

When she saw Cole looking at her with that same question written across his dirty face, she rushed to press her body and lips against his. He was surprised at first, but quickly wrapped his arms around her and lifted her off her feet.

“My friend,” she whispered, “you won’t be able to walk straight for a month after I get through with you.”

“Yeah, Daniels!” Cole shouted. “We’re fine. Just give us a minute!”

“You don’t have a minute,” the Nymar replied. “Cops are pulling up to the house, but there’s a bridge ready for us.”

Paige tensed and bumped her forehead against Cole’s chest. “Shit.” After taking a moment, she marched down the hall, up the stairs, and straight through the examination room. “How’s Rico?”

“Already through. He didn’t want to leave you, but I pushed him.”

“Damn,” Cole chuckled. “I wish I could’ve seen that.”

The beaded curtain was alive with crackling energy. “You guys go ahead,” Paige told them. “I’ll be right there.”

Instead of heroically refusing the offer to leave her behind, Daniels scurried past them both and disappeared through the beads. Cole didn’t go anywhere.

Paige jogged through the workshop and ran up to the first floor, and her partner followed. Even before they got to the upper door, he could hear sirens outside the house. “We’re not gonna make it,” he warned.

“Doesn’t matter if we do or don’t.” Upon stepping through the doorway, Paige jabbed a finger at him and said, “Stay right here and don’t make a sound.” She then went to a cluster of runes on the wall near the stairway and moved her hand slowly over the blocky symbols.

The street outside was illuminated by headlights and filled with dozens of dirty, confused people. From what he could see, the former Mud People were barely aware of where they were. “Might want to hurry it up,” he urged.

Once she picked out the symbols Rico had toiled over upon their arrival, Paige traced some of them with her fingertips. Cole could see through the little house to the front window, which was enough to spot a pair of police officers approaching the front door. The cops looked through the window and knocked as if they meant to shake the entire house. Paige stepped through the doorway where Cole waited at the top of the stairs. When he tried to shut the door, she whispered, “Don’t move. Don’t make a sound.”

The cops entered the house with their hands on the holsters at their hips and swept flashlight beams back and forth along the walls. “Hello?” one of them said. “Anyone here?”

Even as the cops looked directly at the door, Cole could tell they weren’t really seeing it. Their eyes continued to wander along the walls, not even following the lines of symbols etched there.

Slowly, he and Paige went down the stairs as the cops stomped around, and they eventually found their way outside again.

“Next time Rico says I never pay attention to his precious teachings, he can stuff it,” Paige said proudly after reaching the temple.

“What just happened?”

“I restored the runes intended to hide that doorway and everything else in the house. All those cops or anyone else will see is what we saw when we first got here, which is a fat load of nothin’.”

After the night he’d had, that was all the explanation Cole needed. Before taking the last step that would carry him through the beads, he stopped and nodded toward the lab. “What about this place?” he asked. “The stuff in there? The things down in that hallway?”

Paige took the remote that had been hanging from Lancroft’s neck and let her thumb glide over the cover. “I still don’t know if I believe he was hundreds of years old, but he came up with some stuff I’ve never seen before.” The remote disappeared in her fist and then into her pocket. “He wanted it destroyed, so I want to keep it around for a while. Hopefully he knows we’re sifting through all of his crap. If he’s anything like Daniels, that’d be his own personal hell.”

“I’m definitely coming back,” Cole vowed as he looked toward the stark light cast from the examination room. “I’ve still got some things to do here.”

The front door was pushed open, but the footsteps only stomped around for a minute or two before going back outside, which meant Lancroft’s defenses had held up against another set of unknowing eyes. They could hold out a little longer.

Cole stepped through the curtain and emerged in a smaller temple, where he was greeted by an excessively attractive, scantly clad woman with curly pink hair. After a sharp crack of her gum the pink-haired Dryad said, “Hiya. I’m Annie. There’s food in the main room.”

Paige emerged next and kept walking as if crossing hundreds of miles in a flicker of light had already become second nature. She and Cole followed Annie into a cavernous room filled with five large stages. Reading the confusion on Paige’s face, he told her, “This isn’t The Emerald. It’s Steve’s.”

“Do you know all of these places by heart?”

“No,” he replied as he pointed behind the largest stage to where STEVE’S was written in glowing neon.

Turning to Annie, Paige sighed, “Okay. Where’s Steve’s?”

“Dallas. Tristan didn’t have the juice to bring anyone else into St. Louis. We’re running two-for-the-price-of-one lap dances and have enough juice to power the state, so,” she added while holding her arms up and out as if posing for the first step in the YMCA dance, “here you are!”

“Are Rico and Daniels here?” Paige asked.

Annie shook her head in a way that made her pink curls wiggle. “They made it to St. Lou.”

“Both alive?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Perfect. Point me to the buffet.”