Forged From Ash (21 page)

“Who told you this?” Max asked.

“The one who gave me my orders. The Full Blood who was most pivotal in undoing the humans’ world.”

“Esteban?”

She nodded slowly, fighting back the urge to react to the pain from burnt skin scraping against melted nerves that were healing just enough to become active once more.

“No one has seen Esteban for years,” he continued. “The Skinners nearly killed him after Liam was destroyed.”

“Esteban’s territory is boundless. He has risen to the top of the Full Blood ranks, claiming this entire world as his own. He must be keeping company with someone.”

“Surely the other Full Bloods will not allow him to claim their territories.”

“That,” she said as exhaustion crept in on her from all sides, “is their war to wage. We will do as they say.”

“No!” Max growled ferociously. “Mongrels have never bowed to Full Bloods! We have been the only ones to stand up to them throughout all ages. We have built our whole society on standing against all oppressors, mortal and immortal alike. Even when I struck the bargain with Liam himself, it wasn’t so we could serve the Full Bloods. It was so we could take some of their strength and add it to our own! We are more than them. Our numbers are greater, and now we can influence the wretches to do as WE tell them.”

“Stop preaching to me,” Nishta said. “I don’t have the patience for it.”

Silence fell between them — at least, as much silence as could be granted while Half Breeds tore through the streets and sporadic gunfire popped from surviving pockets of human residents.

When she felt Max’s hand brush against her face, Nishta almost snapped at his fingers. The pain from his touch was offset by the tenderness behind it, and she allowed herself to breathe a little easier.

“I’m not undermining your position within this pack,” he said. “We should just be prepared for the event that its leader might fall. There are worse threats than the humans out there. We have already spoken of the tremors coming from deep within the earth. Kawosa wasn’t the only Mist Born to be awakened. We can’t risk our entire pack being decimated by one blow delivered to its leader.”

“And no leader can survive without trusting another in her pack. Especially,” she added while turning toward the sound of his voice, “one who is already so close.”

She might not have been able to see, but Nishta could tell Max was smiling at her. “When we strike at these cities,” she explained, “we are not just killing humans. That can be done however and whenever we choose.”

“We’ve been targeting command posts,” Max said. “Or the closest thing to them. And then we have been allowing a select few to live. Why?”

“So the humans can do the one thing humans are good for. Cry for help. When that call is answered, we will destroy the last remaining fighters the humans have to protect them.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

St. Albans, WV

R
ico decided not to go into the store neighboring the tattoo parlor right away. Instead, he waited to see if any more Half Breeds would be flushed out by the fire or if the flames might spread beyond the gutted diner. It wouldn’t do him much good if he was on the phone when either one of those threats rose up to bite him in the ass. It turned out his experience with Half Breed dens being too squishy to be very flammable was mostly accurate. The fire consumed a good portion of the diner but died out while spreading into blood-soaked wood or beds held together by werewolf drool and urine. The air smelled like the devil’s outhouse, but at least the store at the end of the row was untouched. After scrounging for what supplies he could find in the tattoo parlor, Rico headed inside to see if Haley had told him the truth.

The young girl didn’t wander too far from the strip mall. She’d crossed the street and walked down a ways to huddle in the doorway of a gas station, watching him intently from afar. Rico pretended she’d done a great job of hiding from him and approached the front door of the place without acknowledging that he was being watched. There were a few large windows on either side of a door which was mostly made of glass and reinforced by steel bars. Thanks to all the paper covering the storefront from top to bottom, he still couldn’t get a look inside. The papers were faded, but he could make out a few words and bits of drawings here and there. The lettering was large and blocky. The pictures looked to have been of bulky meatheads in brightly decorated spandex. Testing the door to find it open, Rico stepped inside to confirm his suspicions.

“Well if this don’t take me back,” he said while looking at rows upon rows of comic books lining the wall to his left.

The racks were littered with scraps of torn paper covered in layers of dust. Still, enough comics had survived to give Rico a glimpse of several scenes drawn with varying degrees of skill. At the front of the store were a few recognizable faces like Batman and Spider-Man. As he moved further into the place, Rico saw others he didn’t recognize. A few more steps and he spotted something that brought a smile to his face.

“Hello, beautiful!” he said while reaching for a comic that was curled at all the edges and stained from a water leak from some time ago. On the cover was a green face contorted in rage and buildings that were being smashed to pieces by flying fists. “Wonder if there’s any more of you around?”

The aisle was cramped, and Rico barely had enough room to turn around. When he did, he was treated to the sight of rows of long white boxes stuffed full of comics wrapped in individual plastic bags. Rico went to the one marked with the appropriate letter of the alphabet and started flipping through. He’d never been as big of a comic collector as some people he knew, but seeing the bombastic artwork and larger-than-life heroes that had filled his youth was like opening a bottle and smelling clean air from simpler days. He didn’t find as many issues as he’d hoped for, which didn’t stop Rico from perusing some of the other bins. He was glad to find a pile of volumes that collected storylines featuring Wolverine and Jonah Hex, but when he tried to remove them from the box, they came up as one pulpy brick.

“Son of a bitch!” he growled. Looking up, Rico saw a huge brown stain on the ceiling marking a spot where water must have dripped down to ruin the books below. Dropping the mess and wiping his hands on his shirt, he moved toward the front of the shop’s single room.

There was a glass case there that doubled as a sales counter. A clunky cash register was at one side along with stacks of advertisements, a cup of pens and a solar powered calculator. Inside the case were stacks of trading cards from everything that wasn’t a sport. As much as he wanted to look through scenes from early 70’s science fiction shows and the pile of cards highlighting Buck Rogers girls, Rico stepped around the counter to look for the phone he’d been promised. It was near the cash register, sitting on a pile of old Yellow Pages.

 He picked up the receiver, heard a dial tone and then pressed the buttons that would connect him to Daniels.

“Yes, Rico,” Daniels said hastily. “Be quick. I’m working.”

“Did you somehow find a way to get Caller ID?”

“No. I just don’t get many phone calls anymore. What is it?”

“What do you think? I got some of that stuff you wanted.”

Glass vials knocked together, and the Nymar grunted as if each of them weighed a ton. “You got
all of it
?” Daniels asked.

“I said SOME. I got some samples from them labs, some of the beakers or whatever was in there, some crap off the floor…”

“Do you mean stuff from the floor or actual crap?”

Rico let out a breath as he wondered how a Skinner’s life could still sometimes revolve around so much shit. “Actual crap,” he said. “And stuff from the floor.”

“Excellent!”

“Then you’ll like this even better. I found some pretty strange Half Breeds. They looked different and healed a lot quicker than the others.”

“That’s not much of a surprise,” Daniels said. “With all the attacks, there have been so many humans turned that the generational cycles for that species have been getting closer together.”

“I know all that,” Rico snapped. “But these were different. They seemed to be feeding on more than just meat. They drank blood. Sucked it down like some assholes you’re real familiar with.”

“You’ve seen a Nymar-Half Breed mix?”

“You know about these things?”

“Other Nymar scientists have been trying to breed them throughout various points in history,” Daniels replied. “Not our brighter moments.”
“As opposed to using sex clubs as a front to feed off of people like leeches? Yeah,” Rico said. “You guys have laid down a real rich historical tapestry.”

“Do you honestly want to compare the sins of our forefathers? I can think of some atrocities committed by Skinners new and old alike.”

“Fine, fine. Do you want this stuff or not?”

“I do. How long will it take for you to get to my lab?”

“I’ll need a few days to get to you,” Rico said. “Maybe a week.”

“That works. I’ll use that time to gather anything I can find on our research in this field and put together the necessary materials for experimentation on the samples you’re bringing.”

Active phone lines weren’t easy to find, and they were getting rarer as time wore on. Most people stopped asking why some lines of communication were open and others weren’t. The government took some responsibility for the technical achievement, but that story didn’t fly with much of anyone. The world governments couldn’t even keep the wolves from ripping the infrastructure of their nations apart, so maintaining any semblance of a functional communication network seemed well beyond their grasp. Skinners had forgotten more ways to be paranoid than most conspiracy theorists would ever know, so they never stopped questioning the whole phone and internet conundrum. Even more, they all assumed someone was listening to any conversation lasting more than a minute or two. The how’s and why’s of such an operation would be figured out later, but Rico felt the eyes of the nameless overlord shifting toward him the longer he spoke.

Lowering his voice and glancing around as if he might spot a shady figure trying to look inconspicuous while reading a water-logged issue of Doctor Strange, Rico asked, “Why would anyone want to cross Nymar and Half Breeds, anyway?”

“I can only speak about what I heard from a few Nymar historians,” Daniels replied. “The last documented experiments took place in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. There were other experiments done much earlier, and they all boiled down to one thing. Siege weapons.”

“You mean like attacking a castle with battering rams and catapults and shit?”

“Basically…yes. Instead of trying to break down walls or march against an army, the Nymar wanted to use the Half Breeds to attack the soldiers themselves. By putting them under Nymar influence, it was thought they could be controlled or at least directed.”

“I’ve seen what happens when a Nymar latches on to a shapeshifter,” Rico said. “It ain’t pretty.”

“Insanity was the least of the side effects,” Daniels told him. “Henry’s spore only survived in a Full Blood body because Mishonyk was a master of his craft. Half Breeds are another matter entirely. They’ve never been successfully seeded. They’re already crazed, and the spore drives them even further off the deep end. Even worse, they seemed able to sense the spore inside of them. They could smell it, possibly, or maybe hear it. That, combined with the spore’s tendency to move about as it settles in, drove the Half Breed subjects into gnawing at their own bodies to get it out. And once the hunger kicked in, they also fed on any blood they could find. Even their own. By all accounts, it was horrific.”

“I don’t know. Something that makes Half Breeds rip themselves apart sounds pretty damn good right about now.”

“That’s because I didn’t mention what happened to the human populations of the places where those experiments were set loose. Or even the animal population for that matter. When the Half Breeds finally did die, it was only after launching into a frenzy of epic proportions. All that was left for miles in any direction was bloody carcasses.”

“Miles?” Rico asked.

“That may have been exaggerated in the written records, but I don’t have any trouble imagining a crazed Half Breed ripping thorough any living thing to drink their blood while something inside them drove them even more insane than normal.”

Reluctantly, Rico said, “Yeah. I see your point there. So could someone else be trying to come up with a way to control the Half Breeds?”

“You’re the one looking into it,” Daniels replied. “You tell me. But not over this line. It’s probably not secure. Where are you calling from, anyway? Is it safe?”

“It’s just one of the phones that happens to be connected to a live wire,” Rico said. “In some old comic book store.”

He didn’t need to be able to see Daniels to know the excitement in his voice had to come through a wide, goofy smile. “A comic book store?” the Nymar gasped. “Are there any undamaged books around?”

“Yeah. Some.”

“Get some for me! OH! What about
Green Lantern
? Are there any issues of
Green Lantern
there? I don’t care if it’s
Green Lantern Corps
,
Green Lantern
,
New Guardians
,
Justice League
…are there Justice League books there?”

“Don’t get all worked up,” Rico said. “I thought you were more of an
X-Men
guy anyway.”

“Does that mean I can’t read anything else? I’ve been craving
Green Lantern
lately. So what?”

Rico looked around at the boxes and shelves. “I’ll see what I can find. But…what’s it worth to ya?”

“After all we’ve been through together…you can’t pick up some comics and bring them to me without something in return?”

“Not when I gotta bring them across the damn country! This comic book deal is more of a Cole thing anyway. I barely know what to look for.”

Just mentioning the name of their mutual friend created a sharp drop in the conversation. Rico filled the conspicuous silence by asking, “You heard anything from him lately?”