“She took an unfortunate fall and lost some blood,” Daniels muttered. “As for the smell, I needed to use the heating element in order to—”
“You knocked out the cleaning lady so you could feed?” he interrupted.
Daniels pondered that for a second and then flashed him a smug grin via the rearview mirror. “Oh, no. That would be wrong.”
Since the cleaning woman had been able to walk and wasn’t screaming at the time, Cole let it slide. The wound running along the side of his leg was still tender. Paige had helped him wrap it up as Daniels was collecting his things. She’d patched her own wounds as well, but in a way that seemed like the medical equivalent of fixing an oil leak by slapping some tape onto the wet spots.
“You both look pretty torn up,” Daniels said. “Shouldn’t you go to a doctor or something?”
“We’ll rest up as soon as we’re done making these rounds.”
“What rounds might those be?”
They were parked along Cliff Drive, which bordered North Terrace Park. It was late, which meant the street was relatively quiet and the nearby University of Medicine was mostly dark. This was the fourth stop they’d made since racing back into Kansas City, and Cole was beginning to feel as though he’d made the entire trip on foot. “We found a bunch of Half Breed dens scattered around the city,” he explained. “She’s checking them now to see if we cleaned them out or not.”
“What if the things are out hunting?” Daniels asked. “It’s that time of night.”
Absently brushing his palm with his fingertips, Cole felt nothing more than the rawness that came from having the thorns rip through his skin and the minor irritation caused by Daniels. “They’re not around the city. At least, there’s not as many as there were before.”
“The moon’s out. They run real fast.”
“Yeah, Dan. I know.”
“It’s not Dan.”
“What?”
Leaning forward from the backseat caused a shift in the delicate balance of all the crap piled around the Nymar passenger. “My name is Daniels.”
“Oh, and I suppose that big bald spot is just a temporary hair migration?”
Daniels leaned over and looked in the mirror. He started to run his hand over the top of his head but stopped as if his skull was an eggshell that had already been cracked. “That was mean.”
“Sorry.”
The driver’s door was pulled open then and Paige dropped in behind the wheel. She landed with a strained huff, which became a wince when she turned the key in the ignition. “What are you sorry for this time, Cole?”
“Nothing. You find anything?”
“There was one Half Breed way in the back,” she replied. “Just a day or two old by the looks of it. I put it down and knocked in enough dirt to bury it. Considering that’s the only Half Breed we found in any of those dens, this was a pretty good night.”
“I’ll say it was!” Daniels chimed in as he grabbed the backs of both seats and pulled himself forward.
“Watch it!” Paige snapped. She started to turn around but flinched and settled back into her seat. “Just don’t knock those cases around so much, okay?” She put the car in gear and drove away. “I want to stay somewhere outside the city. If any authorities saw anything, they’ll be looking for those werewolves, but I don’t want them to get lucky and stumble upon us.”
Daniels slumped back and allowed the piles of cases and other supplies to slide over him like a slow motion avalanche. “We were set up just fine before.”
“And if anyone was following us before, they’d head straight for that place,” Paige said. “I’ll bet there’s at least one cleaning lady at that hotel that’s got some interesting stories to tell.” Taking a deep, obviously strained breath, she headed for I-35.
“Tell us about the breakthrough,” Cole said.
For a few seconds Daniels sulked by pushing around as many of the cases as he could reach. When he was done with that, he leaned forward again. “This,” he announced while extending his hand to display a heavy square attachment that had been soldered onto the tattooing machine, “is one of them.”
Paige looked at the machine and then shifted her attention back to the road. “Isn’t that the same thing I unwrapped at your apartment?”
“Yes, but the device you ordered requires a separate power supply. This battery pack not only allows you to use the machine wherever you like, but it even makes the necessary adjustments in speed and has a life of several hours.”
“So that’s what you were burning in your room?” Cole asked.
Daniels slumped back and grumbled, “I also needed to use my heating element to melt down shavings from the Blood Blade. After that, I was able to further isolate the medium that bonded the shapeshifter blood to the specially forged metal. That is, of course, after I separated the shapeshifter proteins and such from the plasma.”
“Is it ready for use?” Paige asked.
Reluctantly, Daniels scooted away from her side of the car and replied, “Not yet. We should be able to start our first trials after I iron out a few more wrinkles.”
“What sort of wrinkles?”
“The sort that transfers properties of the metal to the recipient along with the shapeshifter properties you so desperately want, no matter how many times I tell you the entire process is too dangerous to be considered.”
“Gotchya,” Paige said as she reached for the radio dial.
They drove north on I-435 until it changed into I-29 about halfway to St. Joseph. Cole savored the fresh air that blew in through the window to wash away the lingering stenches of Half Breed and the gunk that attracted them. Before long Paige pulled to a stop outside a quiet, three-story hotel advertising satellite TV and an indoor swimming pool.
“I see you guys spring for the nice places when you have to stay there,” Daniels grunted on the way up to the second floor.
“Yeah,” Paige sighed. “It’s a huge conspiracy. I’ll check on you in a while.”
Cole followed her with cases hanging from both shoulders, under his arms, and in both hands. Like any good pack mule, he kept his head down and his feet shuffling until he was told to stop. When he looked up again, he was in a room that smelled like air-conditioning and deodorizer. Compared to how he’d spent the earlier part of his night, it was a little whiff of heaven. On that same train of thought, he noticed something else about the room. “There’s only one bed.”
“Yeah. It’s all they had. Find my medical kit and pile the rest wherever you want.”
The medical kit was a large tackle box that had been modified to hold all manner of goodies in little compartments divided among the main container and two upper trays. By the time Cole had set everything else down, Paige already had the kit open and was selecting several different items from her collection.
“Take your pants off,” she said.
Cole stopped right where he was. “No dinner first?”
“If you want to bleed some more, crack a few jokes while I patch myself up. That scratch on your leg looked pretty bad, so I thought I’d start there.”
The scratch she’d mentioned had gotten bad enough to cause most of that leg to go numb below the knee. The feeling returned quickly enough when she started poking him. “Why don’t I just go clean it up first while you—”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Paige grumbled. “You must be the only man to think twice after a woman tells him to strip. I must really look like shit.”
“No,” Cole said as he watched her peel off the cotton button-down shirt she’d thrown on in order to look a bit more presentable to the front desk clerk. “It’s not that.”
Technically speaking, Paige should have looked a lot worse than she did. Her clothes were stuck to her skin thanks to all the dirt, sweat, and blood they had absorbed at the campground, and her face was tired and dirty. But somehow she managed to make him forget about all of that just by dropping her voice a little and raising an eyebrow. “All right, then. You want me to go first?”