Then Liam did the one thing she’d been praying he wouldn’t do. He stopped in the middle of the road and rolled onto his back.
Paige reacted without thinking, bringing her knees up to her chest, placing her feet against the Full Blood and pushing herself away. Liam hit the cement and rolled back and forth as if putting out a fire. Headlights from cars that had stopped or were wrecked around and behind them bathed the two combatants in illumination from several angles. The moment Paige whipped around to get a look at the Full Blood, she was forced to dodge a set of claws that were longer than short swords. She raised her right arm, but her weapon only blocked a fraction of the blow. Claws raked through her hardened flesh as though scraping against brick, the impact of the swing knocking her flat against the pavement.
More cars honked and crashed into each other, but Paige couldn’t see any of it. Her face rested against the concrete and she was too tired to lift it. The Full Blood snapped at a pair of cars that honked wildly as they drove by, straightening his upper body and shifting effortlessly to stand upon two legs.
Reaching over his shoulder, Liam grabbed at what seemed a large thorn protruding from his back. His thick fingers brushed against the sickle, which brought something resembling a smile to his face. When he got ahold of the weapon and pulled it out, he released a breath that might have been lodged in his throat since the blade first hit home. He was about to toss it away when Paige threw the machete in her right hand with enough inhuman force to plant it solidly within the gray spot on Liam’s side.
He reacted to the blow as if she’d stabbed a raw nerve. Craning his head all the way back, he roared and allowed the sickle to slip from his hand. Paige, certain that he was about to flee, scooped up the weapon and got to Liam before the pained howl had completely left his throat. When he lowered his head to run along the shoulder of the interstate, she’d already grabbed a handful of fur in her powerful right fist and used the machete to pull herself up and back onto him. The Full Blood was no longer interested in flipping cars. He ran along the highway for the quickest couple of miles Paige had ever experienced before launching himself up and over the guardrail.
They sailed over a canopy of branches and leaves, but Paige could tell they weren’t anywhere near a park. The air smelled of smoke and rusted steel. The ground beneath Liam’s feet crunched with loose gravel or broken cement as he brushed against a few large things to try and knock her off. Failing that, he came to a stop. His chest heaved like a powerful engine on the verge of overheating. Just as Paige recognized one of the nearby things as a boxcar, Liam threw himself against it. She was barely able to dismount with her weapons in hand before being squashed.
“You’re accomplishing nothing, Skinner,” Liam said while shifting into his upright form. “If I don’t kill you now, I’ll only kill you later.”
They were in a train yard. Several darkened warehouses were lined up just beyond a couple sets of tracks. Behind them Paige saw smaller sheds and rows of empty boxcars, all a stone’s throw from the Missouri River. She didn’t know exactly how far Liam had taken her, but could no longer hear police sirens.
Liam squatted down with his knees bent and his elbows resting on them. He eyed her with a little bit of everything showing upon his face: exhilaration, lust, hunger, even a good deal of curiosity. “If the Mongrels are here, that means this city is way out of your control. Or did you have something to do with that?”
She didn’t answer his question. Instead, she tried not to think about the pain flooding her body while she opened and closed her right fist to get some blood pumping through it.
Liam wrinkled his nose and said, “I already know you deal with the leeches, so I’m surprised you didn’t recruit them to help you. But the Nymar don’t fight for their territory any longer, do they? They hide inside their noisy taverns and frilly clothes, whining endlessly about how hard they’ve got it. Maybe I’ll show them what to do with their power. Wouldn’t that be funny?”
“You know what I think is funny?” Paige sneered. “A big bad wolf like you doing so much talking when there’s a fight to finish.”
“Just picking your brain,” Liam mused as he casually waggled his long, clawed fingers. “I suppose I can do that just as well when the wretches tear your head open.”
Before Paige could charge the Full Blood head-on, Liam leapt up and back. His hands touched the side of a crane used for loading oversized cargo containers, then he grabbed onto the steel beams and climbed toward the top of the crane. It began to groan and shift under his weight, so he stopped halfway up and raised his face to the black sky.
Paige recognized the howl from when she and Cole had been driving downtown. Being so close to its source was another experience altogether. The sound shook her on a primordial level. Instincts came to the surface that made her want to run until her legs would no longer carry her.
But she wasn’t the only one to feel that urge. Half Breeds emerged from the nearby warehouses and from beneath the dirty sheds bordering some of the older sets of tracks. There were at least ten of them scraping up from their pits, hungry and eager to stretch their newly formed muscles. Just when things looked like they couldn’t get any worse, stragglers from downtown howled from other parts of the city. The first of those creatures to arrive showed plenty of wear and tear from tangling with cops, Mongrels, and Skinners, but didn’t show any signs of slowing down.
Not only could Paige feel those demonic snarls grating inside her ears, but she felt a rumble beneath her feet. She tried to loosen up her right arm in preparation for a fight, but the limb felt too thick and heavy to be of much use. Standing alone in that train yard, she swallowed the regrets that rose to the back of her throat and got comfortable with what remained.
She’d had a good run.
As the Half Breeds circled, their crazed, once-human eyes focused upon her. Then every set of thin, pointed ears perked up as another voice demanded to be heard.
It was a howl, but compared to those she’d heard earlier, this was musical. The new voice didn’t need to compete with Liam’s. It was a pure, single note that wove through everything else in the simple, unstoppable way a river might cut through a mountain. Liam took notice and shifted on his perch to look toward the row of low buildings along the river to the north.
A second Full Blood stood on top of a warehouse at the far edge of the train yard. Its head was pointed straight up and both of its massive arms were stretched out, with fingers splayed as if it was preparing to battle anything the gods dared to send his way.
For a few moments the Half Breeds seemed confused. Then one of them started running toward the other Full Blood. Before it had gone more than twenty yards, the rest of the wretches followed suit. They bolted straight past the crane where Liam snarled down at them and raced for the opposite end of the yard. Once all of the Half Breeds had gathered at the foot of their new master, that Full Blood unleashed the full fury of its teeth and claws upon them.
What followed was an ugly display of nature’s most unsympathetic rule. The newly arrived Full Blood ripped the first Half Breed apart and sent both pieces flying against the side of the building behind him. The rest of the leaner werewolves attacked in a frenzied battle for survival, simply because they knew it was too late to try and escape.
“To hell with you, Randolph!” Liam shouted from on high. “I don’t need them!” Shifting his eyes to Paige, he dropped from the crane and scrambled toward her. His eyes were unnaturally clear. Every one of his features had become angular and rougher around the edges, as if the last drop of humanity inside of him had dried up.