Marcus Pelegrimas - The Breaking

Jessup tried standing up. He couldn’t even make it halfway before a fresh wave of agony took his breath away. He didn’t want to look at his leg. The wound was bad, and knowing more than that wouldn’t do him any good. Acting on nothing more than primitive instinct, he lifted the Shunkaw’s severed head and tossed it at the werewolf’s feet.

The Full Blood with the brown coat was nearly double the size of the silver one. Scars lay just beneath the fur of its shoulder and cut a nasty groove down one cheek like cracks hewn into the side of a mountain. Its lips quivered while its nose twitched to pull in Jessup’s scent.

“I heard of you,” Jessup said. “Burkis, ain’t it?”

Expelling its breath with a powerful snuff, the Full Blood furrowed its brow and examined him with renewed interest.

“That’s right,” Jessup said. “Ain’t no place you can hide from us no more. Did that friend of yours set these things loose? Just like he sicced them Half Breeds on Kansas City?” Since that didn’t get a reaction from the Full Blood, he tightened his grip on the holdout pistol. “It don’t matter how many Half Breeds you make or how many other beasties you dig up. We’ll find them and bury them just like I found these child-stealing bastards!”

The smaller Full Blood looked at the larger one expectantly.

One second, Burkis was on four legs, and the next he’d stretched into a form with a slender torso and limbs that grew into fully realized arms and legs. Front paws became hands, one of which slapped the gun from Jessup’s hand. “You didn’t find us, Skinner,” the Full Blood snarled. “We found you.”

“Okay. So, now what?”

“Now, you’ll keep an eye on this one,” Burkis said as he pointed a clawed finger at the other Full Blood.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me,” the werewolf snarled in a voice that caused birds to scatter from trees a mile away. “Keep her alive and keep her away from the others of my kind.”

“Why would I do that?”

Burkis lowered his head to glare at Jessup in a way that made the Skinner clench. “The Breaking is coming, and her life could make the difference between only some of you feeling its wrath or your entire species being lost amid a torrent of snapping bones.”

It had been a long drive from Rochester. Despite the fact that Paige had made longer trips in a much crappier car, she felt every mile as if each one had knuckles to rap against her temples. She missed the rattling comfort of the Chevy Cavalier that had served her so well before sputtering its last breath. What little solace she could gain from the two-door Hyundai she’d rented had been eroded by the company she’d been forced to keep.

“Are we there yet?” Rico groaned. When he saw the death glare Paige shot him, he flashed an expanse of blocky teeth. “Just kidding.”

“Wasn’t funny three hours ago and it ain’t funny now.”

“Why didn’t the nymphs teleport us to where we needed to go?” asked the young Skinner who’d passed off a fake ID well enough to sign the car’s rental agreement. “Are the Mounties cracking down on tittie bars on Canadian soil?”

“I already told you. After the Nymar set us up to take the fall for all those cops that were killed, the nymphs want to keep their distance from us for a while,” Paige explained.

The man in the passenger seat wore a thick biker’s jacket wrapped around a solid muscular frame. After several days of hopping from one cheap motel to another, Rico’s face had become overgrown with the promising start of a graying beard. It was the best opportunity short of surgery to separate himself from the pictures that had been making the rounds on the national news networks after the legal trouble started. Rico was no stranger to scraping the law the wrong way. Even though the last several weeks had been filled with enough running and hiding to make the Skinners feel more like prey than hunters, he hadn’t missed a wink of sleep.

Paige sat in a relaxed posture behind the wheel, with one elbow propped against the window frame so she could keep the tips of her fingers pressed against her forehead. Whenever the car skidded on a patch of wet pavement, she corrected with an instinctive tilt of the wheel or pump of the brakes. “Is there a reason you decided to bring up the nymphs again?”

“Yeah,” the man in the backseat replied. He extended one finger to point at a billboard on the side of the road that read: TURN RIGHT FOR ANDREA’S CHAMPAGNE ROOM. LIVE DANCING AND BUFFET.

When Paige looked at the other Skinner, using the rearview mirror, she found a man in his late twenties with light olive skin, a large nose, and hair cut into a flat top that could be found on any soldier after his first day of boot camp. He’d been fidgety ever since she picked him up at a safe house in a wooded section of New York’s Wayne County. The nervousness was easy enough to explain, since all Skinners had either been burned out of their homes by Nymar or placed on the Most Wanted lists by local and federal authorities. “What makes you think that’s a nymph bar?” Paige asked.

“The buffet. We could stop in and check. Or maybe you could call Tristan. She’d be able to tell us where to go for—”

“Oh she’ll tell us where to go, all right. Besides, it’s too late to need any help with transport. The Nymar we’re after is in Toronto, and we’ve been in Toronto for fifteen minutes.”

“What about gettin’ home?” Rico asked. “You tellin’ me we gotta drive all the way back to St. Louis from here?”

“We’ll figure something out.”

“Just like you figured out with Cole?”

Paige’s foot slammed against the brake pedal, putting the car into a skid that made a stomach-wrenching sound of rubber brushing against pavement that still glistened with rain. They were on a section of the Gardiner Expressway that looked down on a row of squat gray buildings to the left and had a view of an ornate structure with tall towers topped with small green domes on the right. Several cars honked at her, which did nothing to prevent her from coming to a stop on the side of the road.

Her hair had been clipped into a pointed bob the previous summer, and although she tried to maintain the style in the following months, it had grown out into a simpler shape that was only slightly longer along the sides than it was in back. Anger filled her brown eyes, and the nostrils of her subtly bent nose flared as she asked, “Just what the fuck was that supposed to mean?”

“You heard me, Bloodhound. You were at that warehouse in Denver when the shit went down with the Nymar and those dead cops. Or, I should say you were there at the end when you were flown in via helicopter like a goddamn rock star.”

“Yeah,” the guy in the backseat chimed in. “What’s the deal with that?”

Paige jabbed a finger at the younger man as if she meant to shatter the car’s rear window. “You don’t get to talk to me like that. In fact, do yourself a favor and stop talking altogether.”

When the guy prepared to defend himself, Rico waved at him and said, “Best listen to her, Steve. You weren’t there.”

As she shifted her eyes toward Rico, a hint of pain could be seen amidst the ever-present fierceness. “Any reason you decided to spring this on me now after we’ve been in the car all this time?”

“I was hoping you’d tell me on yer own. After all we been through, it’s the least you could do.”

“It’s between me and Cole,” she said while cranking the steering wheel so she could reenter the flow of eastbound traffic. “And when are we supposed to talk? We’ve been on the run, living off of beef jerky and coffee for two weeks.”