Caught between Rico and the guy on the toilet, the first muddy figure was quickly brought down. He didn’t give up the fight, however. Instead, he clawed at whatever he could reach and even sunk his teeth into Rico’s ankle.
“Son of a bitch!” Rico growled as he knocked his other foot into the mud man’s jaw.
The cell door came open amid a series of creaks and metallic rattles, allowing a small group of cops to wade into the brawl. A few more stood outside the cell, which meant they could only watch as Henry sprang up from the floor to charge at the first officer he saw.
“You won’t cover me with the bag again!” Henry cried. The moment he got a hold of the officer’s neck, he sank his jagged fingernails in and pounded his head against the cop’s face. “I did what you told me!”
The cop on the receiving end of the assault struggled to pull him off while his partners slammed their nightsticks against Henry’s ribs without making a dent. Bones cracked and blood flew, but Henry didn’t seem to feel any of it. Cole managed to snake an arm around Henry’s throat from behind and pull him away, but the cop in front of him saw something that shook him right down to the core.
Henry’s mouth opened wide and his eyes bulged from their sockets. What came out of him wasn’t so much a scream as it was a hungry, bleating howl. Filthy hands clawed at the cop while several other officers fired their Tasers into the wild man’s chest. Electricity pulsed through Henry’s body, forcing Cole to let go and trip backward over one of the benches.
The sickening thump of skull against steel rattled through the cell as Rico slammed the first muddy man’s forehead into the toilet.
Star and Barbara weren’t doing too well against their opponent, but a pair of cops tipped that balance. Nightsticks pounded against another mud man’s torso, tearing flesh away to reveal a surface that glistened wetly in the dim light. More electrodes were fired into the exposed areas, causing the man’s back to arch and his arms to stretch out to either side.
Several uniforms filed into the hallway, aiming guns into the cell and screaming for everyone to hold up their hands and lay on the floor. Cole barely heard those commands through the raging tirade streaming through his mind. The officers in the cell did their best to force Henry down, but only received more punishment as their reward.
“I didn’t plan on hurting them!” Henry shouted as clubs, fists, and boots pummeled his body. “Those children tried to hide from me! I just want to sit in my corner!”
The Lord has no forgiveness for those who don’t know their place. TheLordhasnoforgiveness but now they will do what I say and allwillbeforgiven.
“Go to your corner, Henry,” Cole said as he inched toward the man who refused to sit still no matter how much of a beating he was given. When he heard those words, Henry dropped the officer whose face he’d been chewing and knelt amid some other cops that were hurt too badly to get up. Even as he was warned to stay back, Cole approached Henry and said, “Misonyk is dead. Remember?”
Henry looked at Cole and then back to the cops. His head swung at the end of his neck like a pendulum and his eyes struggled to compensate for the peculiar motion. With his shoulders slumped forward and his hands pressed flat against the floor, he reminded Cole of the Henry that had been a twisted beast at the end of Misonyk’s leash, writing nightmares into the heads of other monsters.
“You were quiet before,” Cole said. “Just go back to your corner and be quiet again. Nobody has to hurt anyone.”
Henry turned his head, which seemed impossible considering his circumstances. Catching sight of the encroaching cops, he reared up and bowed his chest out as the muscle tissue began to swell inside of him.
Cole knew all too well what kind of damage a Full Blood could do. They were the most dangerous werewolves in existence, but only if they were allowed to transform all the way out of their human skin. Praying his hypothesis was correct, he threw himself at Henry, wrapped both arms around him and grounded the wailing creature before it could launch itself at the police officers.
Everyone else in the cell responded instinctively to the escalation of the fight. Cops swarmed in to fill the cage, swinging their nightsticks, firing their Tasers and aiming their guns at anything that moved. One of them grabbed Cole by the wrist and dragged him down so his arms could be cuffed behind his back, and the prisoners swung at anyone they could reach, whether the other man was in a police uniform or not.
“I can help you!” Cole said. “You don’t know what he is!”
Henry’s skin stretched to its limit as his scream was cut short by a clubbing blow delivered straight to his temple. His head snapped to the side as the broken ends of his backbone scraped against each other, but at least he dropped. After that, the police officers were able to sort out the mess.
Cole and Rico’s hands were stuck through different sections of the front wall of the cell and cuffed in place. Barbara and Star were similarly restrained, and all of them were placed so none of the prisoners could get to one another. Cole watched as wounded prisoners were escorted away and others were scraped up off the floor.
All of the mud men were covered in sweat and gave off a putrid, pungent stench that must have come from the viscous fluid coating their skin. The one who’d gotten his head cracked against the toilet lay splayed upon the floor. Underneath the flap of torn scalp was a slick surface that looked like the side of a wet tree stump.
Henry lay on the floor, gazing at the bars with clearer eyes. The murkiness was gone and there was no trace of blood within the white surrounding his dilated pupils. When the paramedics arrived, one of them checked Henry’s pulse and examined his waggling head before announcing, “This one’s dead. His neck’s broken clean through. Looks like he also sustained some massive trauma to the face.”
“He sure did,” one of the cops said. “Bastard tried to kill us with his bare hands.”
The paramedic motioned for gurneys to be brought in so Henry, toilet guy, and the more seriously wounded men could be taken away.
Rico turned to Cole and made himself comfortable against the bars. “Since it seems like we’ll be here for a while, how about you tell me about this Pestilence crap again.”
Chapter 12
The next morning, Paige woke to the smell of burning Nymar and the piercing shriek of her cell phone. Although the ring tone became more tolerable once she got her wits about her, the smell only got worse. She rolled out from under the covers of her twin-sized bed and reacquainted herself with her unfamiliar surroundings. It was a guest room only because of the bed, but was mostly filled with books that were either waiting to be shelved or sold to a secondhand dealer. Volumes in all conditions were piled throughout the room, giving it an overall smell of pulp and cardboard.
She’d fallen asleep after taking off no more than her boots and socks, so she poked her head outside to find traces of light and movement coming from Daniels’s makeshift lab. Smoke drifted through that door, but she didn’t exactly want to know what parts of Peter Walsh might be burning. And despite all of these halfhearted distractions, her phone stubbornly refused to stop ringing.
Paige didn’t recognize the caller information on her phone’s screen, so she jabbed the annoying device and squawked, “What?”
“Miss Strobel?”
“Yes.”
“This is Stanley Velasco of Liberty Bail Bonds. Walter Nash said you have some friends that require our services.”
Forcing her fingers through her thick black hair, she winced as she discovered a series of knots created during her tossing and turning in a twin bed that doubled as a book pedestal. By the time she stormed across her room to pull open the heavy curtains covering the window, her brain had woken up enough to remind her that Walter Nash was Prophet’s real name and that he’d told her to expect a call from Liberty Bail Bonds. “You were supposed to call last night,” she said.