Extinction Agenda

Extinction Agenda

Skinners

Marcus Pelegrimas

Dedication

Many thanks to everyone who helped me through a very tough year. You listened to me when I ranted and were still there when I ran out of steam. The brownies you sent helped more than you know.

Very special thanks go out to Karen. You’re a great editor and an incredible friend.

I wouldn’t have wanted to do this without you.

Contents

Prologue

The wolves are coming in from the forests,circling the village that is under my protection.

Perhaps they know, perhaps they don’t care that I am here.

They move in, lapping up our scent, salivating at the prospect of separating limbs from our bodies.

The wolves don’t give a damn about this village or about the hopes, dreams, families, or friends of its people.

They come in from the forests to claim what they see as theirs.

When this siege is over, there will be another.

And another one after that.

—
From the journal of Jonah Lancroft, 1867

There is no record of the village referenced in this entry.

I
n the months following the Breaking Moon, a cold descended upon the world as if to numb it for the carnage of a burgeoning war. That night’s victories prevented the Full Bloods from spreading the Half Breed plague across an entire continent in a matter of hours. Only as autumn sank into winter did the Skinners realize how close humanity had been to the brink of its destruction. Although the Full Bloods had been stopped before, using the earth’s own energies to spread the Breaking, the Half Breeds had still been unleashed, and their bite was still just as deadly. Angry breaths spewed from the mouths of shapeshifters as they roamed city streets in packs. Humans shivered in their homes, their tired eyes watchful over the barrels of hunting rifles or shotguns. Such weaponry had been bought up rapidly once the werewolves spread throughout the country, despite the fact that normal ammunition was somehow becoming increasingly useless against the creatures that seemed to have grown thicker coats for the winter. When a shot was fired, the noise drew sharp, black eyes toward its source. Even if that bullet had somehow dropped one of the Half Breeds, others would stampede the would-be hunter and decorate the stark white ground in a spattering of dark red.

As the months wore on, local police departments were tasked with keeping order in panicked jurisdictions. Large cities and small towns alike were dragged into what many thought was the end of the world. Monsters charged in from the hills, howled at the moon, tore through families. Overconfident at first, police forces, local militia, and even the military either fed the ranks of the dead or were turned into members of a pack. Whether those people were to be called victims, heroes, or martyrs ceased to matter. Dead was dead, and in this uncompromising winter people wanted to live. Fear led to panic, which settled into the desire to fight. No human emotion mattered to the wolves, however, as they kept running and feeding and killing and maiming. Their numbers grew exponentially, and when some packs were cleaned out, it wasn’t until after dozens of locals had been added to their ranks. Just a few stray Half Breeds meant more deaths and casualties. More casualties meant more Half Breeds, and the howling never waned.

The military had been called to action as a way to maintain order in the streets, divvy out the emergency food, and escort medical supplies to where they were needed. When the Full Bloods showed themselves, battles raged. Unfortunately for the cold, frightened world, the Full Bloods showed themselves often.

While the United States suffered the worst of the initial turmoil, the nightmare was not contained by any political border. It swept out from the siege of Atoka, Oklahoma, and the occupation of Raton, New Mexico. Before the media could debate whether the creatures were truly werewolves or just “diseased canines” from previous sightings in Wisconsin and Kansas City, the Half Breeds had made their presence all too clear. As bodies piled up, explanations became scarcer. Before long, nobody seemed to care what the creatures were or where they came from. They just wanted them to go away.

But the beasts weren’t going anywhere.

It was going to be a long, brutal winter.

“T
he Skinners know we’re here, Tara. This isn’t smart.”

Pacing across the front window of a town house on Battery Avenue, a skinny woman with stringy blond hair pulled aside a filmy curtain to get a look at a quiet section of Baltimore. Tara’s round face would have been pretty if not for the black tendrils creeping beneath her skin along both cheeks. Although the pattern was more or less random, one half of the markings reacted in perfect synchronicity with the other. They shifted beneath her flesh, sometimes twitching out of hunger. Where one tendril stretched out, another on that side pulled back so neither of her two spores could claim a lion’s share of the host. She paused when headlights splashed across the pavement as a car sped past the town house at highway speed. Like the rest of the country, most of Maryland’s authorities were too busy elsewhere to worry about traffic violations. “The Skinners already had their shot at you, Cobb,” she said. “They came up empty.”

The other man in the room stood at average height, his muscular build wrapped in a sweater frayed along the bottom. A thick turtleneck was stretched out enough to display a ring of black wavy markings around his entire neck. Some of them met the narrow goatee that had been shaved to a point above his Adam’s apple. The ones at the back of his neck reached all the way up into a thick crop of light brown hair that would have perfectly suited an edgy businessman from the mid-1990s. Even so, he cared for himself well enough to make the look seem timeless. When he didn’t say anything, he ground his teeth and allowed his lids to droop down over crisp green eyes ringed almost imperceptibly with quivering black filaments.

“They
did
come up empty, right?” Tara asked.

“I was told about those two Skinners in Toronto less than an hour before they kicked in my door.”

Tara placed a hand against the window as black claws snaked out from beneath her fingertips. “What did they get?”

“One of my personal PCs. It functioned as a small backup server and was used to post updates through ChatterPages.com.”

Tara’s claws scraped against the glass as she slowly balled her hand into a fist. “So they know how we’ve been passing our communications? They might even know everything we’ve been setting up ever since we took control?”

“The ChatterPages stuff has already been changed,” Cobb said. “If they have been listening in, they would have put their information to use by now.”

Moving in a flicker from the window to where Cobb stood, Tara clamped a hand around his throat and applied just enough pressure to raise him onto the balls of his feet. “That information should have been destroyed,” she hissed. “That was the order.”

“Right,” Cobb said as his two upper sets of fangs eased out from where they were sheathed in his gums. “An order given by Hope. Not you.”

“Hope put me in charge of making sure the order was carried out.”

“She may have given you some duties during the uprising, but that doesn’t mean anything now that she’s dead. The others are entrenched within their own cities watching the wretches tear the world apart. Why would they feel the need to obey orders given by a wild-eyed Double Seed?”

Even as Tara tightened her grip on his throat, the tendrils on either side of her face twitched in a way that was just frantic enough to prove his point. While most Nymar were created by a vampire spore attaching to their heart, only a select few could survive the process of having more than one introduced to their system. That feat won no respect with other Nymar, however, who saw only a raging temper brought about by the disproportionate hunger of two separate spores living in the same body.

“I am more than just a Double Seed,” she warned. With a thought in the right direction, Tara was able to widen her tendrils into thin stripes that could paint her entire body in a black cloak. “Because of what Hope and I did, all of our kind will soon become Shadow Spore.”

“I know that. But without me, the uprising never would have happened.”

“If you’re talking about a bunch of backstabbing pricks who don’t know who to thank for having entire cities to run, I already know about them. Just because the Nymar who followed Hope don’t respect me doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t.”

“What I said before is just the consensus,” Cobb told her. “That’s how they see you. If I saw you that way, I never would have told you where to find me.”

“What makes you think I couldn’t have tracked you down myself?”

“The Skinners haven’t been able to pull off that trick, and that’s one of the few things they’re good at anymore.”

She released him and walked back to the window. Holding her fingers to her lips, she licked the longest of her nails before they retracted. “The plan was to wait until the smoke cleared after the uprising before we started looking for the nymphs. Things may have gotten more out of hand than we thought, but it’s still just as good a time as any to hunt those sweet little dancing girls down.”

“You got that right. The Skinners that were protecting them before have a lot more to keep them busy now. But,” Cobb added, “there are more than Skinners to worry about. Those things that run loose on every street in this country are after us as well. The Full Bloods have something to prove after being kept at bay by our lies for so many years.”

“Which is why we need to find the other Shadow Spore.”

Cobb shook his head. “That was never the plan. Whatever you and Hope had going, it no longer applies. Hope’s gone and I only came out from behind my main terminal to put the Skinners out of the picture for a while. All we need to do is ride out this storm and gain control of whoever’s left.”

“And what if it’s the shapeshifters?” Tara asked. “Only a Nymar seeded with both of the original Shadow Spore can ever defeat a Full Blood.”

“We have strength in numbers. That’s how it’s always been. We turn as many as we need to throw at our enemies so that established Nymar take the least amount of casualties. This may not be the fight we were after, but it’s only a matter of scale. When it’s time for our kind to step up against the Skinners, the humans, or even the shapeshifters, we’ll be ready. I’ve started recruiting through the Internet and already the Nymar in most major cities have come close to tripling in number.”

Lowering her voice as if there were sharper, unseen ears to intrude on her conversation, Tara said, “The Full Bloods won’t stop after riling everyone up like this. There’s no reason to think they’ll even stop after overrunning this country. Even with superior numbers, we can barely hope to withstand the wretches they’ve been sending after us. We need the other Shadow Spore!”

“How do you even know there is another Shadow Spore?” Cobb asked. “We were lucky to find the one in Lancroft’s basement.”

“I’ve seen records from the decades when the Lancroft Reformatory was fully functioning. There were two Shadow Spore, just like we’ve always been told. And—”

“ ‘And when the two can become one, even the Full Bloods shall quake,’ ” he recited. “I’ve heard the stories too. Every species has its stories. You know why? Because none of them wants to admit it’s dominated by another. Stories tell us there’s always hope, always something to tip the scales. Well you know what, Tara? Sometimes you’re just outclassed.”

Her features were gaunt, no matter how much blood she might have drunk in the last hour or two. Although the two spores attached to her heart shared a space, there was rarely enough food to go around. She turned toward the window as a distant howl drifted through the air. “You heard about the assassin I sent to find Cole Warnecki after he was dragged to prison?”

“That was right after the uprising,” Cobb said. “There was a lot of posturing and plenty of big promises made regarding payback and whatnot. I was the one passing all of that garbage along, remember?”

“It wasn’t garbage,” she told him. “It took a while, but he found where Cole was being held.”

“I could have told you that much. It was the prison in Colorado that was all over the freaking news!”

“And then you never heard about him again,” she continued. “He was supposed to be waiting for a trial or being questioned, but
that
was a load of shit!” The more she spoke, the angrier Tara became. “Why is it that we’re always supposed to be the liars, when we’re the only ones telling the humans exactly what we want? They line up at our Blood Parlors to be bitten. They know what they’re getting, but the Skinners decide to burn us down. The Full Bloods act like they’re so high and mighty, when they’re the ones that have been sneaking among us for centuries like snakes.”

Knowing better than to try and calm her down, Cobb held up his hands and walked back to a computer desk set up in what was meant to be the town house’s dining room. “No need to tell me about it. I’ve been spreading that word for years.”

“Well it’s time to finish what we’ve started with the Skinners as well as the Full Bloods. There’s supposed to be some group that splintered off from the rest.”

“You mean the Vigilant?”

She nodded. “I want to hunt down as many as it takes to get to the heart of their operation. Surely they’re doing something against these goddamned shapeshifters. We need to get whatever weapons they’ve got.”

“And then what?” Cobb asked as he settled into a creaking office chair. “Stand toe-to-toe with Full Bloods? Leave the insanity to the crazy people. How many times do I have to tell you to just . . . be . . . patient?”

“You can stop telling me right now,” she snapped. “Because I’m sick of hearing it. What kind of message does it send if we stay hidden while the Skinners do the fighting? Even if we mop up what’s left, nobody will respect someone who leads a battle fought in the dark just to claim the scraps.”

Cobb tapped his keyboard and shrugged. Although he knew it wouldn’t go over well, he couldn’t let his other matter drop. “And what about the killer you hired to take out Cole? I assume he found something, even if he didn’t get his job done.”

“What makes you think he failed?”

“Because,” he replied simply, “you would have reminded me several times by now if that wasn’t the case.”

Her smile was more like an image from an old reel of moving picture film—unsteady and twitchy. “I guess you’re right about that. He did find Cole. And when he checked in before making the kill, he told me that Cole wasn’t being held in a prison at all. It may have been one at some other time, but there were only a couple Skinners and a few very special prisoners there.”