Marcus Pelegrimas - The Breaking

The gargoyles clawed Liam’s arms, their excretion making it harder for him to move. In his haste to peel the creatures from his shoulder and back, he left the spear where it was. Cole seized the opportunity to grab the spear again and grind it within Liam’s torso until he could feel it slide against the Full Blood’s rib cage. After ripping one gargoyle away and cracking the stony crust that had begun to form on his upper arm, Liam clapped a hand over Cole’s face.

“All I gotta do is think it and I can put a human through the Breaking,” Liam snarled. “You can’t take that away from me or any of the others. The power we’ve soaked up tonight is part of us now. You may have stopped the flow, but you won’t be able to stop what we started.”

It took all of Cole’s strength along with some supernatural reserves, but he managed to grab Liam’s hand and pull it away from his face. But no matter how good it felt to gain less than an inch of breathing room, he knew he was only getting what the Full Blood gave to him.

“You …can’t break me,” he said. “I know you’ve tried but you just …can’t do it.”

“You’re going to tell me what I can do? You think you even know what I can’t do?”

Liam’s hand shifted within Cole’s grasp. The muscles beneath his skin swelled and expanded like boiling paste. Bones creaked and stretched until his fingers were things that could wrap around Cole’s head and grip it even tighter. Watching a shapeshifter’s body reform was one thing, but feeling the grisly mechanics at work was something that brought the Skinner closer to his prey than he’d thought possible. By the time calcified claws scraped behind Cole’s ears, he couldn’t decide whether to feel panic or awe.

“I don’t know where you dug up these bats,” Liam said in his guttural cockney brogue while slapping down the last gargoyle that had followed them through the bridge, “but they won’t be enough. And even if you kill me, the gears are already turnin’. The humans that don’t feel the Breaking will watch as the rest of the world is pulled over to our side of the fence …just the way it should be.” Pulling Cole closer, he moved his hand so he could see more of his reaction when he added, “God created his finest creatures in his image. Who’s to say the man upstairs don’t ’ave claws and a snout?”

Cole pulled in a breath while he had a chance. The coppery scent of blood filled his nose, but it wasn’t his. When Liam had grabbed the spear to remove it from his chest, the thorns must have ripped the Full Blood’s palm. Blood trickled from the werewolf’s hand thanks to a wound he probably didn’t notice. Cole took notice, however, as did the tendrils wrapped around his innards. Rather than fight the impulse that came next, he grabbed Liam’s wrist and sank his teeth into the minor wounds.

If he’d had fangs, he would have gotten much more than a trickle of Liam’s blood. He turned his head and wedged his canine teeth into the Full Blood’s palm as the wounds tried to close around him. The thirst wasn’t something his entire body craved, but the part that felt it most was determined to make the rest pay for being denied.

“Ain’t this a sight?” Liam mused while waving his free hand to keep the gargoyles at bay. His movements had become sluggish and were now accompanied by the dry crunch of stone being chipped or cracked. “I could smell the leech in you, but thought it was just from that shit you Skinners pump into yourselves. Gonna try to bite me now? That’s just precious.”

Cole had tasted more blood than he cared to admit. He’d tasted his own during fights both practiced and genuine. He’d tasted splashes of Nymar blood in Denver and even human blood in G7. Now he tasted the blood of a werewolf. It was sweet and alive, shifting into something that stung and burned as it went down.

“You’re feeding?” Liam gasped, finally noticing.

Although Cole could only feel the occasional drop on his lips, the tendrils were more than eager for more. He didn’t know how they were getting the blood, didn’t want to think about how they could be slicing into his digestive tract or poking into his throat so they could absorb what he drank. All he knew was that the pain of their clenching grasp was a constant thing, and when it faded, the absence was pure bliss.

Liam grabbed the back of Cole’s head with his other hand, the gargoyles still attached to him, sinking their talons in deeper and drawing tight against his body and limbs. “What is that? What are you doing?”

The same question had flashed through Cole’s mind when he felt the tickle deep in his throat as wet tendrils reached up like hungry, eager hands. When Liam pulled back, it was a cautious, tentative movement that drew the tendrils out far enough to make it feel like his intestines were being drawn out by a string. A crystalline eye shifted within the Full Blood’s skull as he tossed Cole aside, forcing the tendrils to snap back into him like juicy rubber bands.

“So Kawosa was right,” Liam growled as more gargoyles settled on his back. “The leeches truly have gotten a foothold into the Skinners. Perhaps we should have just left you to them.”

“You’re an arrogant bastard who doesn’t know when to run away.”

Struggling to stand up proudly while purposely leaving the gargoyles in place, Liam raised his chin and howled to the fading moon. That bellowing roar was still drifting across the Finnish landscape when he proclaimed, “Humans may have weathered the Black Plague, but that was nothing compared to what I’ve started! Even if you unleash your best weapons and set your finest machines upon us, you will only succeed in killing yourselves. Even these bats you’ve dredged up are useless!”

In the light of dawn, Cole could see the rocky shell forming around Liam’s body. Every move he made caused pieces of it to shatter and fall away. The gargoyles, either too focused or too ignorant to stop, quietly gnawed on him while continuing their attempts to grind him to a halt.

Before Liam grew tired of reveling in his dominion over lesser things, Cole dove for his spear and then stuck it into his abdomen after piercing the gargoyle that had attached itself there. Light blazed from over the Full Blood’s shoulders, illuminating Cole’s features. Wincing as the spearhead was driven deeper, Liam reached down to remove it. Unlike a few moments ago, he couldn’t take the weapon out so easily. Cole held on to the thorny grip with every ounce of strength at his disposal, and now that the tendrils had fed, he was stronger. He leaned against the weapon to push it between Liam’s grasping fingers.

The Full Blood tightened his grip until Cole’s hand felt like it was trapped within a vise. “You didn’t bring enough bats,” Liam said.

Gargoyles lay scattered on the ground like skins shed by a truckload of giant snakes.

“Don’t need them,” Cole said through gritted teeth.

Liam’s eyes widened, absorbing the sight of the Skinner before him as though witnessing the birth of a new species. The glow behind him shifted from brilliant white to green. “I can feel the humans nearby,” he wheezed. “Now …one of them feels me.”

The Breaking.

Even as Cole tried not to think about it, he swore he could hear the shocked cries of whatever random person was unlucky enough to receive the gift of Liam’s mental touch. Bones would snap, muscles would unravel, a Half Breed would be born. After that, a spot on the globe chosen for its relative calm would be dragged into the war.

Liam suddenly grunted and dropped to one knee. Cole could see the top of Paige’s head behind him. She swung her sickle again to cut the tendons behind Liam’s other knee with the same stroke she’d just used to sever the others. Knowing it wouldn’t take long for a Full Blood to recover, Cole pulled his spear back and drove it into Liam’s chest. Once again the fragment of the Blood Blade that had been melted into the spearhead’s metallic coating allowed it to puncture the werewolf’s hide, though it didn’t have the power inherent to the genuine Amriany artifact. Sacrificing quality for quantity, Cole stuck Liam again and again until he’d dug all the way down to a breastplate that felt more like the hull of a battleship.