Marcus Pelegrimas - The Breaking

As soon as that werewolf came at her, Paige snapped her right arm forward to drive the tip of her machete into its face. Her weapon only glanced along the Half Breed’s face after it twisted its head away, and instead sank an inch or so into its shoulder. The creature snapped its jaws in a desperate attempt to rip her apart, but with a bit of good timing and a strong pull on the machete’s handle, Paige steered its face toward a jagged section of torn roof. When one set of tusks punched through the metal and became stuck there, she placed the barrel of her pistol against its forehead and was about to squeeze her trigger when the Half Breed surprised her again.

The creature pulled away from the shredded roof, leaving its two tusks embedded there after a sharp tug that was strong enough to jerk the machete from Paige’s hand. The thorns in the weapon’s grip opened her palm even farther as it was taken away from her when the Half Breed hopped away from the overturned SUV.

Paige quickly reloaded the Beretta and sent round after round into the Half Breed’s chest and head. Although the bullets didn’t kill the creature, they forced it back far enough to let her climb out through the roof. Every time the Beretta bucked against her palm, agony ran up through her savaged right hand. In an almost perverse way, the pain excited her. It was the most she’d felt in that hand since before it had been nearly petrified by the batch of prototype ink she’d injected in Kansas City.

“Where is the young one?” a vaguely familiar voice bellowed.

Realizing it came from the Half Breed responsible for her cars, and the intense heat she felt from them, Paige launched herself at it. Without breaking stride, she holstered the gun, reached out to grab onto the machete that protruded from its cheek and used her momentum to drive it in even farther. After sinking it several more inches, she dropped down so all of her weight pulled the machete like a lever. As tough as the creature may have been, the Half Breed couldn’t outmuscle a weapon infused with fragments of a Blood Blade that cleaved all the way through its skull.

Paige landed in a seated position, rolled to one side and pulled her weapon free of the mutilated remains of the werewolf’s head. The Half Breed flopped onto its chest amid a tangle of limbs that suddenly had all the strength of wet knotted rope. She jumped to her feet and took quick stock of her situation. There were no fewer than eight werewolves swarming over the SUV. They scattered as a pair of thick hands covered in black fur clamped around the SUV and pulled it down onto all four wheels with the ease of a child correcting an overturned go-cart.

The Full Blood stood in his two-legged form, towering over the SUV and snarling through a mouthful of daggerlike teeth. “Don’t make me ask again,” Liam snarled in a voice that was barely comprehensible through his stalagmite teeth.

After circling around the rear end of the SUV, Paige could see that most of the Amriany had gotten out as well. Milosh and Nadya stood across from her, positioned at the other corner of the rear bumper and surrounded by four Half Breeds. Nadya had a MAC-10 in her hands, which must have been stashed in one of the bags they’d carried from the plane. Milosh wrapped both fists around the knives he’d been sharpening during the flight, and Gunari stood less than two paces away from the massive Full Blood. The hatchet in his hands was bigger than something that could be found at a hardware store, and the metal of its blade was smeared by the same dark coloring as a Blood Blade.

“What young one?” Gunari asked.

Paige was impressed with how well the Amriany held their ground. She’d given up on counting how many Half Breeds surrounded them, and the presence of a Full Blood was enough to tip the scales irrevocably away from their favor.

As his single, crystalline brown eye shifted in its socket, something moved beneath the scar tissue filling the hole where Liam’s right eye had been. “You know goddamn well what I’m talking about. Why else would you be here?”

“We are here because you have overstepped your bounds,” Gunari said. “Just because the Skinners allow you to roam free doesn’t mean we will let you do as you please.”

Liam pulled in a breath through nostrils wider than quarters and let it out through a mouth that had shifted into something better suited for forming words coated in his thick cockney accent. “Gypsies, eh? I thought I recognized that stench.”

“I mean what I told you,” Gunari said with a venomous tone. Taking a step closer, as if Liam wasn’t one of the most destructive forces on the planet, he added, “Whatever business you have here is done. Get out now before—”

“Before what ?” the Full Blood roared. “Before the humans see us? Too late for that, I’d say! Before the Skinners organize to put us in our place? Too late for that as well. Things ain’t goin’ the way they been goin’. Not anymore!” Sweeping a clawed hand toward a pair of Half Breeds that snarled through a set of curved tusks, he said, “Take a look at these wretches. When the Breaking Moon rises, this’ll be all of your faces! Human, Skinner, Ammrianny, it won’t matter.” When he spoke the true name of Gunari’s people, Liam let the word roll off his tongue like something he’d hacked up from the back of his throat.

“We won’t let that happen.”

“You won’t,” said the second Full Blood who approached the SUV from Paige’s side like a cat slinking up to a wounded rodent. “Because you don’t even know what he’s talking about.”

Paige’s scars hadn’t warned her of the other approaching Full Blood because her senses were already on fire from the pain running through her body after the crash and the heat that flooded through her palms to the point of overloading them. Although obviously possessing a Full Blood’s stature, the other werewolf kept closer to the ground and moved as if her glittering violet eyes could see straight through to the truest essence of whatever was before them.

“These hunters do not know about the Breaking Moon,” the second Full Blood said in a voice that was purely feminine, despite its emergence from a hellish maw. “They have come because of the commotion you have caused, Liam. Nothing more.”

Since she was closest to the other Full Blood, Paige asked, “How can you be so sure?”

The female werewolf looked just as likely to pounce as she was to sit down and make herself comfortable. “Because all of your thoughts are known to us, Skinner.”

“The Mind Singer is dead.”

“We don’t need him any longer. Do you truly think we are so primitive that we cannot think several steps ahead of a bunch of clannish brutes like you? Maybe we should thank you after all, Liam. The Skinners and Amriany alike seem to have mistaken us for common dogs that don’t pay attention to the shifting world around them.”

“Oh, it’s about to shift, all right,” Liam said.

Focusing on Paige, the female werewolf spread her paws out to plant them in a stance so firm that it seemed not even the hand of God could pry her loose. “After what the leeches did to you, there is only panic among the Skinners. I think you don’t even know who I am.”

“I know,” Nadya said. Without taking her eyes off the Full Bloods, she nodded toward Paige and explained, “Her name is Minh. She roams the territory east of Europe.”

“Knowing my name is one thing,” Minh said. “When the Breaking Moon rises, you will be just as surprised and helpless as the rest of the humans.”

“So you don’t think they know about the young one?” Liam asked.

“I’m not sure,” Minh replied while tilting her head, as if that was enough to screw Paige to a wall. “Do you know about the young one?”