When he pulled himself to his feet, Paige shouted, “Henry, no! Stay here! Tell me about God!”
But her words were lost amid whatever else was swirling through Henry’s mind. He shoved past Cole and ran across the hall. Cole looked into the den and was just in time to see Henry squat beneath the hole leading outside and then jump straight up through it.
“Cole?” Paige called out from behind him. “Did he get away?”
“I sure as hell couldn’t do much to stop him!”
“Grab one of those Half Breeds,” she said as she anxiously patted Cole’s chest, “and I’ll help carry it to the car.”
“You want to bring one of those dead things with us?”
“That’s right. You made it this far, so don’t punk out on me now. We need to get moving. Half Breeds only howl for a few minutes before they start hunting, and we need to make sure we don’t lose sight of them.” She made a straight line for the Half Breed directly beneath the entrance in the ceiling. “This one’s perfect,” she said while pointing to the werewolf carcass as if it was the prettiest Christmas tree in the lot. “Hand him up to me and we can get the car started before the rest of those things start running.”
“What in the hell are you talking about?”
“Just do it!” she growled with more ferocity than the monsters outside.
Chapter 23
The phone in Cole’s pocket chirped in its familiar way. Despite the squealing of the tires against the pavement and the dangerous pull of the steering wheel in his hands, he reflexively dug the phone from his pocket and flipped it open. Angrier at himself for answering the damn thing than he was at the actual ringing, he snarled, “Yeah. What is it?”
“You guys doubted me, but I found the place,” Walter said from the other end of the line.
“What?”
“I’m in Janesville. I’ve been scouting all the parks all day long and I finally found one that fits my vision!”
Turning his head away from the phone, Cole announced, “Walter found his park.”
Paige was in the backseat with the dead Half Breed across her lap. Although the werewolf had shrunken a bit since it was killed, it didn’t shift all the way back to the putrid, gnarled thing it had been while it was asleep, and it was still a long ways from anything human.
“Great,” Paige said as she pulled up a handful of the werewolf’s fur and started cutting it away with her hunting knife. “That just gives us a fat load of nothing, since we’ve already found our own way to get to Misonyk.”
Cole looked out the window at the stretch of I–39 he was currently using as his own personal autobahn. With the sun long gone and the full moon hanging overhead, the road was only illuminated by an occasional streetlight and the rare billboard. The pale light coming from the moon was enough to put a nice glow on Henry’s back as he launched himself into the air to cover the ground at anywhere from ten to twenty yards per jump.
“Yeah,” Cole said. “Paige says great job.”
Walter dropped his voice until he was almost drowned out by the roar of the Cavalier’s motor. “A bunch of Nymar are gathering, and it looks like one’s in charge. He could be Misonyk. From what I can see, it looks like a lot of these guys are freshly turned.”
Suddenly, another shape bolted from the side of the road and flashed into Cole’s side mirror. The Half Breed was one of two others that had showed up to howl at the moon near the ruins of Lancroft’s East Wing and had yet to stray too far from Henry. When the werewolves originally bolted from the mansion, they headed south. Although Henry stuck fairly close to I–39, the Half Breeds came and went like flickers of shadow across the surface of a choppy lake.
“We should be there pretty soon,” Cole said. “Which park is it?”
“Palmer Park near I–39. You can’t miss it. Just turn off at—”
Suddenly, one of the Half Breeds dashed across the interstate in front of the car. Cole had to pull the wheel hard to the right to avoid hitting the werewolf, which caused him to swerve almost directly into a roadblock of twisted muscle. Henry sat in the middle of Cole’s lane. At the last second, Henry hopped back and swatted at the Cavalier as if the car was a pesky insect.
“What the hell are you doing?” Paige shouted. “I’m working with sharp objects back here!”
Cole gritted his teeth and swerved back onto the road. Henry leapt over the Cavalier to land a few yards ahead of it. The moment his feet hit the ground, he was running again. “Gotta call you back,” Cole said into the phone before he flipped it shut and tossed it onto the passenger seat. Squinting into the rearview mirror, he made sure Paige hadn’t cut anything that wasn’t supposed to remain attached.
The backseat was all but filled with dead werewolf. The Half Breed’s front two legs were wedged between Cole’s seat and his door, the curved claws scraping against his left leg. Its hind legs were wedged in a similar fashion between the passenger seat and that door. Paige sat with her legs tucked beneath the carcass so her hands were free to work. The details of that work became a little clearer when Cole heard something that sounded like thick, wet canvas being ripped apart.
“You might want to crack the window,” she said.
Before Cole could take a closer look, a smell hit him that made him regret that he had to breathe at all. “Good Lord!” he groaned as he lowered the window. “Are you cutting that thing open?”
“Just taking some of the fur,” Paige said. “Skinner isn’t just a clever name, you know.”
“Jesus. I think I’m gonna puke.”
“It’s not as bad as all that. If you’d like a lesson in what makes a Half Breed tick, I could point a few things out for you.”
“No thanks,” Cole said as he twisted the wheel once again to avoid another of the Half Breeds. “I’m getting a good enough look for myself.”
Paige glanced through the side window and then twisted around to look out the back. She cursed loudly and shook her head. “The rest of them are splitting off on their own,” she said.
“Good! Maybe they’ll stop trying to run me off the road!”
“Not good. Not good, at all. If they split off, they’ll just go hunt somewhere else. We’ll have to come back later to track them down.”
Before Cole could think too much about that, he caught sight of Henry landing a ways ahead of him on the side of the road. Henry turned and hunkered down a bit, his eyes glittering in the glare of headlights before he sprung toward the car with his arms held wide open.
“Oh shit,” Cole grunted. “Hang on!”
Fortunately, Paige didn’t have much room to move. She stretched her arms out and braced herself as Cole slammed his foot against the brake pedal to throw the Cavalier into a fishtail. He struggled to straighten the vehicle’s course, but that didn’t seem like such a great idea either.
Henry waited for him in the middle of the interstate. Swelling up to somewhere over seven feet tall, he lowered his shoulder and ran toward the car like a linebacker that had been deprived of red meat a month before Sunday’s game. Focusing so much upon Henry and his fight with the steering wheel, Cole almost didn’t notice that he was about to cross lanes and swerve into the path of an oncoming semi.