Teeth of Beasts (Skinners) (32 page)

“Hey!” Rico shouted from the front room. “Let me know if this does anything.”

The black trails drifting from the runes tapered into wisps before cutting off completely.

Paige jogged out of the bedroom, anxious for any bit of progress she could get. “I think those runes are weakened. Is that what you meant to do?”

Rico studied a cluster of runes on the wall between the front room and the kitchen. Even though it was at the other end of the house, it was still within spitting distance of the bedroom. Cole emerged from the bedroom and asked, “What’s going on?”

“There’s a door being covered up by these runes,” Rico told him with a scowl. “Whatever Lancroft is protecting has gotta be through there.”

When Cole looked at the wall, he could only see more runes. “What door?” he asked.

Screwing his face into a confused grimace, Rico grunted, “Damn! It was just there a second ago.”

“Oh for Pete’s sake,” Paige said as she stomped toward the wall. “Just start wiping these symbols off and let’s see what’s here.”

“You can’t just wipe them off,” Rico insisted. When Paige tried using the sleeve of her jacket to do just that, she was hit by a jolt comparable to sticking her finger in a socket. “Told ya,” he sighed.

Cole watched the street through the front window, saw the little lady with the dog stationed at a patch of grass on the nearby corner. Before he could get too suspicious, the dog squatted.

“What if we break the wall?” Paige asked.

“Tried that while you were in the other room,” Rico told her as he turned to show both her and Cole the left side of his jacket. “It didn’t work out so well.” The heavy canvas had been burnt to ash, and the leather patch on his shoulder was scorched black. “Melted a few layers of skin on my arm, but that’s all right,” he added with a tired smirk. “Chicks dig the scars. I weakened ’em a little, but you can’t just go around busting walls down. Whoever put them there will know if that happens.”

“Are you sure?”

“No, Paige! I’m not sure. I’ve been tryin’ to figure these things out through books and old letters since before you came along, but it’s like learning how to fix an engine without ever gettin’ your hands on one. Just give me a minute to think before you start kicking anything down.”

“The runes we saw at Lancroft Reformatory were mostly intact,” she said. “But Henry came and went as he pleased. Half Breeds made a den there, and I sure as hell didn’t feel any magical barrier.”

Squatting down to follow a line of blocky script that turned vertically toward the floor, Rico said, “That whole reformatory was a heap of rubble. You think maybe those runes were deactivated on purpose once Lancroft moved along? Or is it possible they’re
why
the reformatory was a rock pile?”

Paige pursed her lips as she thought about that. Unable to come up with an answer that would further her cause, she left Rico alone and joined Cole at the window.

Across the street and two houses down, a door opened and a man with a gut big enough to hang over his boxers stepped onto his stoop. A compact car parked in the middle of the street, and its driver stepped out to join the woman and her dog. All of them turned toward the man in boxers to watch as he repeatedly snapped his head violently to one side.

“Uh, you may want to turn those protection runes back on,” Cole announced. “Either this place has a Neighborhood Watch or someone knows we’re here.”

The first one to come to Cole’s side was Daniels. He looked nervously out the window as more people stepped outside. “He’s right. These people are displaying some troubling symptoms.”

Paige took in the scene with a simple, “Huh. That’s strange. Looks like our Rune Master wasn’t as careful as he thought.”

“How bad is it?” Rico asked.

Boxer Guy’s head straightened to a proper angle before twisting viciously to one side. Cole couldn’t hear the crunch of breaking bones, but recognized the way the man’s body swelled to another shirt size. “It’s about to get a whole lot worse.”

Henry’s thick head swung at the end of his broken neck, but his lips flickered as he spoke in a string of unending syllables. Although Cole couldn’t hear the words, a few choppy sounds drifted through the back of his mind like snippets of a song from a poorly received radio station.

Rico looked back and forth from his notepad and frantically examined one symbol after another. “I don’t feel a Full Blood anywhere near here!”

“He’s in another body,” Cole said, “I’m looking right at him.”

Rico’s hand trembled as he reached out to touch the wall. Finally, he used the tip of his first two fingers to trace the runes in front of him while making a few lines that hadn’t been predrawn.

Outside, Henry screamed at the other neighbors who’d gathered around him. When they screamed back, dark viscous fluid poured from their mouths. The only one who wasn’t infected was the dog, and it ran away as fast as its four legs could carry it. As the underdressed man in boxers got closer the house, the broken transmissions in Cole’s brain became a bit clearer.

…
s, Skinners…see you. I see…ou. IseeyouIseeyou-Iseeeeeyoouuu.

At least a couple dozen people had stepped out of their houses or cars to gather in the street. Pestilence must have flowed through Philadelphia a lot worse than it had in St. Louis because there were no clean faces to be seen. They looked at the little house with eyes that oozed black tears. As Henry loped toward the house’s front porch, all of the Mud People followed.

Both of Paige’s batons flowed into their bladed forms. “Can you get those runes to work or not?” she asked Rico.

“Probably.”

“You’ve got five seconds.”

Henry threw himself at the door.

“Make that three seconds!” Paige shouted while she and Cole jumped away from the front of the house.

Henry and the Mud People thumped against the door without budging it. The panes in the windows didn’t rattle in their frames and not even a speck of dust was dislodged. Outside, Henry backed away from the porch. The Mud People stared at the house and hacked up mouthfuls of thick paste.

Henry charged the door at full steam. As soon as his feet hit the porch, something flowed from his back like a gust of wind that ruffled his shirt and appeared amid a brief flicker of illuminated dots behind him. When the man’s face punched through the door like a bloody battering ram, there was no consciousness in his eyes.

Cole followed the barely noticeable trail of orbs as they flowed back into the broken body that lay halfway across the threshold. Lifting a freshly split head on a cracked neck, Henry moaned, “Dr. Lancroft don’t want you here.”

The only thing Cole could think to do was kick Henry back out through the door. Henry skidded onto the porch, but immediately scrambled toward the house on all fours like a wolf in man’s clothing. No matter what face he wore, he was still there, leering at the world through bloodshot eyes and screaming through a diseased mouth.

“Got it!” Rico announced.

Half a second after his front end crossed the threshold, Henry was pinned down by a force that Cole saw as a murky wall of black smoke seeping from the Skinner runes. Henry’s chest and chin hit first, forcing the air from his lungs along with the very essence that had been controlling him. Orbs scattered from his back, leaving the man behind.

Outside, the Mud People stopped.

They were close enough for Cole to hear their strained breathing.

“That did it, huh?” Rico said proudly.

All of the Mud People set their sights on the front door and jogged toward the house. The fastest among them was a young woman with short blond hair and a slender frame that absorbed a flurry of orbs like water soaking into porous desert rock. Her mouth twisted into a feral snarl and her head snapped to one side. Before her spine gave way, Cole charged outside, pushed through the first wave of Mud People and cracked the side of his spear against her chin.
Despite the monster possessing her, the woman’s body was still human, and the blow dropped her to the sidewalk before Henry had a chance to break her.

“If that hidden door is what we’re after, then get it open!” Paige shouted.

Rico struggled between flipping through his notebook and tracing the runes. “I don’t know how to get it open without shutting the rest of them off, and the runes are the only things keeping Henry out of here!”

When he looked up, all Cole could see was a wave of mud-smeared faces and clawing, desperate hands. They swarmed him from all sides, grabbing and punching and slapping in a wild mess of frenzied attacks. None of them did any real damage, but it was enough to push him down and keep him there. If he lowered his head to protect his face, one of the Mud People clawed the back of his neck. If he pushed some of them away, others would crawl under his guard. The moment they started digging their teeth into him, Cole gave up on defense and focused everything he had on offense.

I remember the golden haired one. She was so soft, but I didn’t have enough money for them both.

Cole checked the woman he’d knocked out. She’d gone limp and was bleeding from the mouth, but at least her head was properly attached. He swung an elbow to catch one of the Mud People in the temple, drove his knee into the ribs of another, and then spotted Henry’s essence soaking into a small figure walking toward the house.

Several of the Mud People grabbed any piece of Cole they could reach. Willing his spear to blunt on both ends, he backed toward the house while knocking aside as many of them as he could. The figure approaching the door was a small boy whose head was already cocked to one side.

“We can only lower the defenses for a few seconds!” Paige shouted at him. “Run for it!”

Cole shoved through the growing crowd and said, “No. Keep them up.” Seeing the hesitation on Paige’s face, he shouted, “Do it!”

She turned and said something before a wave of dark
smoke formed in front of her. Judging by the way she wheeled around to tear into Rico, she’d wanted to be on the other side of that barrier when it went up.

The sheer number of Mud People was enough to weigh Cole down. Just keeping his head up and feet moving pushed him to his limit. He pushed just a little bit harder and hoped the ink didn’t turn his arm into a useless piece of meat. The patch of skin pinched as if the needle was once again biting into him, but it gave him enough strength to shove past the hands that clutched at his clothes and limbs. After breaking free of the crowd, he scooped the boy into his arms and pushed him face-first into the smoky barrier.

Instead of a quick, powerful jolt, Henry was given a prolonged taste of the runes’ power. The kid kicked and fought to get away, but Cole held him in place. Although his body didn’t show the first hint of a wound, whatever was inside the boy rattled as if it was being shoved into an electric fence. A few more seconds of that and the orbs flew from the human shell. This time they sped in different directions, causing a single sigh to emerge from every one of the Mud People. The ones that had been on their feet collapsed. The boy, as well as the people who’d been crawling on all fours, merely settled on the ground as if they’d decided to take a nap.

The instant the smoky barrier dissipated, Paige grabbed Cole’s arm and pulled him into the house.

Rico stood by a newly revealed door and declared, “I bet you’ll
both
study those runes now!”

Looking down to the kid on the porch, Cole asked, “What about him?”

“He’s out,” Rico said. “Just like the rest of them.”

“For how long?”

“Hopefully long enough for us to see what’s in this place that’s valuable enough to be so heavily protected.” With that, Rico opened the simple wooden door he’d worked so hard to uncover.

Paige gave Cole a quick once-over. “Are you okay or do you need a minute?”

“I’ll be fine,” he replied. The serum in his blood gave him
a slight chill, but nothing was broken. “How long do you think we have until the cops arrive this time?”

“I’d say we’re on our own here,” Daniels replied as he stepped forward with his cases clutched in his arms and hanging from straps off his shoulders. “Given the number of people that got here on such short notice, it seems a safe bet that this whole neighborhood is infected. Maybe the whole city.”

Nodding as he walked toward Rico’s door, Cole said, “Good. I’ve had my fill of cops for a while.”

Reaching for the tattoo machine, Daniels feebly asked, “Would you like a touch-up?”

Less than half of the Pac-Man design had faded, so Cole said, “No, but thanks.”

“I brought a bunch of healing serum. I’ll inject as many of those folks as I can.”

“You do that.”

No matter how suspicious he was of the Nymar or how angry he’d been a few minutes ago, Cole found it difficult to hang on to all of that when he watched Daniels hurry outside to tend to the sleeping Mud People. He wanted to apologize to the squirrelly Nymar, but also knew what it was like to be hunted by things several rungs higher on the food chain. Daniels didn’t need to be coddled. If anything, he needed to keep scurrying and twitching at every sound. Those were survival instincts in motion, and Cole wasn’t about to dull them by trying to make nice. Suddenly, Paige’s cruel sparring sessions made a whole lot of sense.

On the other side of the hidden door was a stairway leading down to a cramped room that felt like it had been carved from one massive block of subterranean concrete. The only things on the walls were thin cracks and cobwebs lit by a single bulb encased in a recessed metal cage. One door led out of the room, and Rico stopped before pushing it open. “These drops wouldn’t have worn off already, right?” he asked.

“They lasted a few hours before,” Paige replied as she looked around. “I just don’t think there’s anything around here to see. What about you Cole?”

“Feels like I’m in a tomb. Could we just move on?”

“Sounds like a plan,” Rico grunted as he walked into the next room.

That room was larger than the one at the bottom of the stairwell and was cut from the same cracked cement. Cole considered himself slightly taller than average, but he swore the top of his head was close to brushing against the thick wooden beams crossing the ceiling. A few small rectangular windows were boarded up along the upper portion of the wall, which he assumed opened to ground level at the base of the house. Once the smell of blood and dead meat hit him, he wished all of those windows were open.

Along both sides of the room were long workbenches where carcasses of Half Breeds, Mongrels, and a few smaller creatures in various stages of decomposition were being held by expertly fashioned wooden racks. From what he could tell, the fluids from the bodies had been drained into old baby food jars that were stacked next to a large tool chest in a corner. The chest was as tall as the workbenches, and when Cole pulled open one of its thin drawers, he found teeth organized by size in the spots where drill bits or socket wrenches should have been.

Moving along the other side of the room, Paige examined a set of wire racks bolted to the walls. Everything from tongs, saws, hammers, and drills hung above each bench. If any equipment was missing, its spot was marked by an outline traced on the wall. “Holy crap,” she said as she touched the crude shape of a claw hammer within the rack that was its home. “If hell had a version of my dad’s garage, this would be it.”

Rico lingered in front of a metal locker set up near another door at the far end of the room. The tall, narrow cabinet opened to reveal a collection of weapons including pikes, stakes, and even a small pitchfork. All were carved from similar kinds of wood and each weapon’s handle was adorned with short, bloodied thorns. “Whoever this guy is, he’s been a Skinner for a hell of a long time.”

“The only name we’ve heard is Jonah Lancroft,” Cole said. “Why can’t you believe that’s the man we’ve been after?”

“Because Lancroft was a Skinner from the 1700s. We’re
lucky if we can make it through our fifties. Three hundred years is a bit of a—” Rico’s next words caught in his throat. He reached into the locker, past the pitchfork, and grabbed a cane with a sharpened end and spikes along the handle. “Son of a bitch,” he snarled.

“Is that Ned’s?” Cole asked.

Rico held the cane so he could get a closer look at the handle. “Yeah. It’s his. He put notches on here for every Half Breed den he cleared out. All forty-nine of ’em.”

There were plenty of notches on the handle, but Cole didn’t need to count them. Paige and Rico had known Ned a lot longer and they recognized the cane all too well.

Something rushed through the next room that sounded as if it had brushed all four walls along the way. A light flickered beneath the thick wooden door to reflect off the metal locker with a soft green glow. Rico set the cane down and grabbed the door handle while drawing a .45 from its holster. Cole and Paige gathered around Rico and nodded for him to open the door. He did, then stepped away so as not to obstruct either of his partners.

If there were lights in the next room, the Skinners didn’t need them. The glow given off by the Dryad temple provided more than enough illumination for them. Cole stepped into the room behind Paige. Rico brought up the rear and whispered, “I’ll be damned. This place sure looks familiar.”

The room was close to triple the size of the one at Bunn’s Lounge, but every other detail, from the engravings to the texture of the walls, was identical. Cole approached the still swaying beads and stretched a hand out to feel the crackle of residual energy against his fingertips. The symbols on the walls pulsed with a power that matched the ones Tristan had drawn, but three of the four corners were obscured by something he’d mistaken for shadow. On second glance he picked out the traces of crimson within the black grime hanging in the air. “A Skinner’s been through here.”

“Yeah,” Rico replied as he waved his fingers through the gritty mist. “And one’s been writing on the walls.” He walked toward one of the corners in the back of the room where the symbols shifted to a more angular script.

Paige made a sharp hissing sound that stopped him in his tracks just before he crossed the beads hanging from the ceiling. “They’re still crackling,” she warned. “You sure you want to go through those?”

“Good point. I’ll cross at the wall. Maybe it’s safer if the beads ain’t on both sides.” After pushing aside some of the hanging strands, Rico slid his shoulder against the wall and moved forward. Once he was past the curtain, he asked, “What have you got over there, Cole?”

“A perfect spot to hide some collectibles.”

“What?”

Before Rico could scoff, Paige said, “I know this sounds dumb now, but let him run with it.”

Cole grinned and approached the murky spot in the corner on his side of the beads. Even though he couldn’t read the Dryad script or Skinner runes, he’d seen enough of them both to tell that both were on that wall. “In games that have exploration levels, you should always look back to make sure you haven’t missed any nooks or crannies where something cool might be hidden. If you’re ever going to find a bunch of extra ammo, new weapons, or collectible items, you’ll find them in places that are meant to be overlooked.” Having traced the shape of a door framed in Skinner runes mingled within the Dryad script, Cole triumphantly added, “Like this one right here.”

Rico came over and studied the wall. With so much script flowing in so many different directions, it was easy for the eye to get lost. “Hey, you’re right,” he said while tentatively brushing his fingertips over certain symbols. “I think that’s a cloak and alarm combo.”

“Can you get us past it?”

“It’s not as complicated as the one upstairs. Give me a sec.”

Rather than hang over Rico’s shoulder, Paige walked to the side wall and shimmied past the beads. Her first cautious step was quickly followed by a hop that took her past the curtain and to the other half of the room. Walking toward the corner that Rico had originally spotted, she asked, “What’s over here? I can see where the symbols change again.”

Rico continued to work while referencing his notebook.
“Looked like a larger cloak. Not like the others, though, so it’s probably not a door. Could just be hiding something else that isn’t supposed to be seen.” Glancing back at Cole, he added, “Maybe it’s an extra life?”

Squaring her shoulders to that corner, Paige rubbed her hands together anxiously. “Can I just reach in there?”

“As long as our homeowner wasn’t trying to hide a guard dog, poisonous plant, or open flame, you should be fine.”

She stood there for a few seconds before taking one of her batons from where she’d tucked it under an arm. Holding it in her right hand, she shrugged and muttered, “Why turn my arm into a lump if I can’t get some use out of it?” Before Cole could offer an opposing opinion on how a wounded arm would still be better than a bloody stump, she reached toward the corner until the baton, her hand, and even her arm up to her elbow disappeared.