Slowing his pace, he allowed himself to drink in the calm tranquility of a dawn where the humans were too frightened to stick their noses into the daylight. There were no longer any planes crossing overhead. When the other Full Bloods were aided by Kawosa to extend their howls in every direction, dozens of the flying machines had dropped from the sky, their pilots and passengers randomly subjected to the Breaking. Jet planes had plowed nose first into the ground. Randolph passed several wrecks that had been turned into metallic dens by the wretches that survived the crashes.
There was a bare minimum of vehicles on the roads. Although Randolph had grown accustomed to the constant roar and stench of trucks, cars, and motorcycles, being without them was infinitely better. The air was easier to ingest, and the humans were forced to keep their piercing screams and grating music within the confines of whatever shelter they could find. When the wretches got hungry enough to make their rounds among the humans, even those annoyances were silenced.
In the distance he could hear gunfire. There was always gunfire.
Humans fought to protect their homes or keep the wretches at bay.
Soon, none of that would matter.
The quiet Randolph sought would be a complete one. No more gunfire. No more belching machines in the skies or on the roads. No more overconfident howls from the likes of Esteban or others of his kind flexing powers that had lain dormant for very good reasons. No more soldiers. No more Skinners.
Maybe . . . no more Randolph.
That last possibility had kept him from playing his hand until now. Ever since the humans became strong enough to pave over the earth and spread their young like locusts, he’d thought of ways to do away with them. Perhaps that was his natural instinct as a predator, or perhaps there was something within the human race that made them louder and more insufferable than other species. Whatever the reason, he’d held back his growing intolerance.
There was a Balance to be maintained, and extinction was no way to serve it. But through meddling on both sides of the scale, human and shapeshifter alike had upset the order of things. It was within human nature to strive for more, but the Full Bloods needed to be above that. Humans built their structures, forged their metals, and eventually whittled their own numbers down through sheer stupidity and greed. The power within a Full Blood’s grasp was much greater, however, and needed to be guarded. It had to be preserved, not wielded. Once something so beautiful was forged into a weapon, the Full Bloods became no better than the strutting humans.
Randolph covered another few miles in an easy, loping stride. He found another plane wreck he’d smelled a while ago, as well as a line of cars that had crashed into each other along a stretch of highway. Judging by the bones and flaking bloodstains on the cars, most of the drivers had been attacked by Half Breeds rather than turned into them. More than likely the people in the cars, distracted by the wreckage, had slammed into each other. Even after their world had crumbled, mankind could still find a way to shame itself.
Doing his best to filter out the stink of dead flesh and rusted steel, Randolph shrugged the makeshift sling to a more secure spot over his shoulder. As soon as he felt the slight weight of the torn wing against his back, he quickened his pace into a run that would make him almost impossible for mortal eyes to spot.
Extinction had already sunk its teeth into the living things of this land. The only question was if it was to be a quick or slow process.
Chapter Seventeen
The tendrils wrapped around Cole’s insides changed the experience of teleportation into something that left him dizzy. Mystic natural forces tugged at his clothes, pulled at his skin, and drew him forward like a massive intake of breath. Not only did he feel like he was falling from one temple to another, but it seemed as if something was shoving him forward even faster than anything as commonplace as inertia. The sounds he heard didn’t just assault his ears. The pulsing rhythms invaded his skull, slid against the back of his tongue and extended probing fingers beneath his clothes and rib cage to stroke his heart until his next breaths welled up and finally exploded outward into . . .
“What in the hell was that?” Waggoner shouted.
He had to shout because that was the only way to be heard over the driving beats coming from no fewer than ten towers of speakers situated strategically around the perimeter of a cavernous room. Soon, Paige staggered through the curtain as well, to grab her ears and wince.
Theirs was one of a dozen curtains, each at the edge of a large stage teeming with dancers of all shapes, sizes, colors, and states of undress. When Cole looked around at them, all of the dancers’ bodies congealed into a writhing mass of smooth, glittering flesh. There were definitely several bodies on all the stages, and he knew they weren’t combined into a single entity, but between all the writhing arms, strutting legs, and twirling hair, his eyes simply didn’t know where to start.
“I think we got fried in transit,” he said to anyone within earshot. “Because if this isn’t heaven, then I don’t want to know what is.”
Normally, when Cole felt the Dryad influence tugging at every Y chromosome in his body, he looked to Paige for support or at least a swift knock upside his head. This time even she was speechless as they were approached by a group of four girls dressed in nothing but ankle bracelets and streaks of metallic paint applied expertly to make it seem as if their skin had flaked away to reveal solid gold chassis. These women may not have been robots, but they were anything but human.
One of the dancers, a thin Hispanic nymph with a narrow upper body and perfectly rounded hips, smiled and said, “Oh my. Looks like Taylor wasn’t kidding. The new guy’s cute. Think you can keep him under control?”
“To be honest,” Cole said, “I doubt if I’ll be able to keep myself under control.”
The other three dancers consisted of a taller woman with coffee-colored skin and a full, generous figure; a petite young blonde; and a more mature blonde who seemed to have stepped out of the pages of Playboy’s golden years. The floor beneath their feet pulsed in time to the music, and the patrons occupying seats around the stage gazed up intently to see what would happen next.
Cole followed the tallest nymph toward a corner at the back of the room. It was tough taking his eyes from the swaying perfection of the Hispanic nymph’s backside, but there was plenty more to catch his attention. Women climbed poles that stretched down from the heights of a cathedral ceiling, or they crawled along horizontal bars without the slightest lapse in balance. The entire latticework glowed with colors that shot through the structure to illuminate it like pipes filled with blue and green luminescent water. Three cocktail bars were worked by six tenders, all of whom were human women, still gorgeous despite the supernatural competition around them. They smiled at the Skinners who passed, not seeming to notice the weapons strapped to their bodies or the gear they carried.
“Where the hell are we?” Cole asked.
The tall Hispanic Dryad pivoted toward him, which did nothing to break the line of her stride. “Didn’t Taylor tell you?”
“She said something about a hub.”
“There you go,” she replied with a flourishing wave toward a sign hanging above a towering wine rack made of gnarled wood. The sign looked to have been pulled from a vein of ore and crudely bent into two words: THE HUB. It was spelled out in smooth, yet rugged letters accentuated by the curving glyphs Cole had come to know as Dryad script. Now that he’d seen those markings, more of the symbols could be found etched into the walls, floor, and pillars stretching up past the poles from which several nymphs swung or twirled. If he could see the ceiling through the bank of milling steam hanging like a smoky layer of clouds, he guessed there would be markings on it as well.