It took several attempts, but after Cole stabbed the creature’s chest several times, it finally noticed and opened its jaws. Paige jerked her arm away and then sent it straight back to pound the creature’s temple. The werewolf staggered sideways, only to be impaled by Cole’s spear as well as Paige’s machete.
When it stopped moving, Cole placed a bloody hand on Paige’s shoulder and asked, “How’s your arm?”
“Fine,” she snapped as she pulled away and looked at her arm. The skin had been stripped away along several tracks where the Half Breed’s teeth had dug in, revealing what looked more like a broken sculpture of human anatomy than something that was actually alive. Some of the tissue beneath her skin was scraped, but not nearly as bad as it should have been. “It’s…fine,” she repeated.
They were distracted then by the groan of twisting metal.
Liam had grabbed onto the top of a police cruiser with one hand as round after round of pistol and shotgun bullets thumped against his back, ribs, and head. The cop who dove inside for his shotgun was still there, and fired a powerful blast up through the roof. Liam pulled in a breath that swelled his entire body. The streetlights shining on his coat glinted off the spent bullets trapped in his fur like lead ticks. Squatting down to look through the cruiser’s windshield, he saw the single petrified officer who’d sought refuge there. He then brought his fists down on the top of the car, crushing that section of the roof.
Paige got to Liam first and used her sickle to slash at the base of his spine. Her curved blade didn’t even penetrate the outer crust of bullets acting as makeshift armor within Liam’s fur. Cole arrived then and announced his presence by driving his spear into the Full Blood’s chest. The bone and muscle in that section of torso might as well have been an iron plate.
Whatever pain Liam felt was channeled into his fists, which continued to hammer the top of the car. Inside the vehicle, the policeman shouted and kicked at the other door. The frame was so bent by now that the man’s only avenue of escape was through one of the shattered windows. Before he could take his chances at crawling between shards of broken glass, however, he was knocked down by a section of roof that buckled under Liam’s fist. Snarling and panting more from excitement than effort, Liam climbed onto the roof to flatten it under his weight.
Cole hopped onto the hood of the car, where he was immediately grabbed and taken down by several policemen.
“Clear our line of fire, damn it!” one of the cops bellowed.
“Let go of me!” Cole shot back. “Can’t you see we’re the only ones scratching that thing?”
By now Liam was pounding both fists onto the roof to silence the man inside. Squatting down on the ruined vehicle, he looked around at the officers and issued a challenging roar. His jaw hung open, exposing dozens of daggerlike teeth that filled a mouth large enough to clamp down around a telephone pole.
“Brave Skinner,” Liam snarled as more gunshots blazed through the air and bullets thumped harmlessly into the thick tangle of black fur. He didn’t look at the cops or even at Cole. Instead, he glared down at Paige. The Full Blood took one step off the roof and reached out for her, but was forced to pull his hand back before Paige’s sickle chopped it off. “Strong Skinner,” he mused.
Liam’s attention was drawn skyward, where Cole thought he could hear the distant chop of helicopter blades approaching. As much as he would have liked to see an Army gunship swooping in to save the day, he had a much easier time imagining live video of him getting his head knocked off, filmed by the traffic copter of a local news station.
Pushing that out of his mind, Cole yelled, “Hey, you skinny little fuck!”
The Full Blood turned away from Paige to look at him.
Cole stood in the street a few paces from the police cruiser with his staff held in both hands across his body. “Yeah, I just said that. I’ve seen what you look like when you’re not covered in all that hair. You’re a little prick who was probably a smart-mouthed, sickly little runt his whole life. I bet you got your ass kicked a lot in school too.”
As Liam listened, the cops around him let up on their firing. Cole assumed they had either taken a moment to reload or finally realized their bullets weren’t even making a dent. The Full Blood narrowed his eyes and crawled down to the street. From between rows of saliva-drenched fangs, he growled, “Dead Skinner.”
As the Full Blood’s steps thumped on the concrete, Cole worked to keep his cocky smile in place. He backed up at the werewolf’s approach, however, and nodded to Paige, who looked at him as if to ask just what the hell he was doing.
Liam had just taken his third step forward when a flurry of arms, legs, and narrow bodies exploded from under the police cruiser. There were only two of them, but their elongated torsos and slender limbs wrapped around Liam’s legs like an army of serpents, to claw at him anywhere they could reach.
Another wave of gunfire erupted from nearby, but none of it was directed at Liam. The next batch of Half Breeds answering Liam’s howl were tearing down Eleventh Street like a whirlwind of sharp teeth and scraping paws. The cops managed to slow a few of the creatures down before the Half Breeds got to the main group of humans, but the remainder split up to charge the police from other angles. In another few seconds they would be inside of shotgun range.
Cole and Paige didn’t have time to worry about them. Liam might have been brought down to one knee by the Mongrels, but he was quickly regaining his composure and furiously digging his claws into the creatures attached to him. He grabbed one Mongrel by the head to pull it off of him, but the burrowing shapeshifter had sunk all of its claws in, and it came away like a barbed arrowhead carelessly pulled from a deep wound. Flaps of skin tore loose from Liam’s thigh and a spray of blood trickled from the wound, all of which only served to further enrage him.
The sickle in Paige’s left hand moved through the air in a blur, while the one in her right stayed close to her body, to repel anything that might attack. Cole prodded the Full Blood again and again but was at a bad angle and risked hitting one of the Mongrels instead. It wasn’t until he buried the spear into the patch of gray fur where the broken tooth was embedded that he knew he’d struck pay dirt.
After hitting the chink in Liam’s armor, Cole wished his spear was sharper or even hooked at the end to do more damage. It creaked in his hands, and the Full Blood twitched as if something had scraped against a raw nerve. Judging by the howl that ripped through the air, the spearhead might have even made contact with the tooth still lodged in the werewolf’s flesh. Liam grabbed the spear and pulled it out, but howled as it snagged on a piece of flesh before finally coming loose. Sure enough, the end of the spear had sharpened to a finer edge and curled into a hook.
Liam howled and grabbed a Mongrel that had clamped onto his arm. Tightening his fist around its chest, he squeezed until the burrower’s spine and several ribs cracked. For good measure, he pounded his other fist into the limp Mongrel’s skull and then gnawed off a large portion of its body.
Ben crawled up along Liam’s back and bit his neck with a set of short, thin teeth. Liam pulled him off, but the burrower wriggled out of his grip and scurried onto the street. From there, Ben let out a series of high-pitched chirps that sounded like a mix of lizard and bird cries.
Within seconds more of the burrowers came to Ben’s side. Some of the Mongrels were wounded and a few were still wrestling with Half Breeds, but no fewer than eight of them answered the call. Cole had expected Paige to join the battle as well, then saw that a Half Breed had blindsided her. He ran past Liam, impaled the Half Breed on his spear, and pulled it away so Paige could drop her right-handed weapon down like a sledgehammer.