“Good,” Cole said breathlessly as sweat rolled down his face. “Just a little longer and I should have this.”
Lambert kept his forearms pressed against the front of his cell and his head leaning against them. “Don’t know what you’re getting so excited about. What the hell’s supposed to happen if you cut through another one of those? Nothing happened when you cut the first one.”
“Sure, nothing you can see. Ask Frank what happened.”
The guard struggled a little, but his movements seemed to come from reflex instead of any earnest attempt at escaping Frank’s grip. He was allowed to move away from the bars just until there was an inch or so between his face and that of the reptile man. Then Frank closed that distance with a sharp pull that momentarily subdued the guard. “The bars were smoking before,” he said.
“Huh?” the other inmate asked.
Although Lambert was confused, Cole wasn’t. He’d used Ned’s eye drops a few times and had seen the smoky trails drifting off objects affected by active Skinner or Dryad charms. “What about now?” he asked.
Frank strained to keep the guard under control as the guy started to come around. The quick recovery meant he was probably a Skinner, Cole thought, or at least had something in his system to help with healing. “No,” the Squam said. “Not anymore.”
“Good.”
“Get that asshole to open the door,” Lambert said.
Sucking in as much air as he could, the guard, awake now, replied, “Fuck that and fuck you.”
“Kinda figured you’d be that way,” Cole muttered. “Which is why I thought I’d get out myself. Just hope this works the way I think it will.”
Since the arrival of the first guard, Cole’s senses had jumped to high alert. Every rattle he heard, every echoed voice, every creak within the walls, pounded through his ears. The sound of the elevator might as well have been claps of thunder as the car rumbled upward. He put his adrenaline to use by cutting the bar with increased vigor. Although the groove didn’t meet up perfectly with the first one, he jammed the wood chip in and wiggled it back and forth until the slice of iron finally gave way. Having seen enough of the runes to recognize the simple locking designs that showed up on most of the doors in Lancroft’s Philly house, he knew exactly which ones to cut. Once the sequence was interrupted, the circuit was broken and the low square door separated from the rest of the bars.
“Sweet!” Cole shouted. “About damn time something went right!”
He shoved the door open and crawled through. As soon as he was out, he climbed to his feet and looked for the runes the guards had touched to open the door properly. They were also like the designs used by Lancroft. Similar runes were on every door in the row, situated just outside any prisoner’s reach. Since Lambert was closer, Cole ran to that cell and ran his finger over the one specific rune Rico had made him memorize so he wouldn’t lock himself in or out of a closet or basement.
The skinny prisoner let out a whooping laugh when his door clanked once and swung open. “I gotta learn about those runes!” he said while crawling out of his cell. He then dashed across the corridor to slap a hand on Cole’s shoulder and pull him away from the wall next to Frank’s cell. “What’re you doing?”
“Letting him out,” Cole replied. “What do you think?”
“I think that’s a mistake.”
“The mistake is wasting time and turning away any help we can get. Now get your hand off of me.”
“That thing ain’t one of us,” Lambert said. “If we get out of here—”
“You won’t get out of here,” Frank warned. “Not if you plan on walking past this cell.”
Lambert stood as close to nose-to-nose with the Squam as the bars would allow. “Yeah? And how do you think you’ll stop us, Lizard Boy?”
Before Frank could answer, the door to his cell clanked and swung open. Cole stood with his finger still on the unlocking rune and met Lambert’s glare with one of his own. “He already helped us by taking care of this dipshit.”
The dipshit in question tried to swing his billy club, but his arm was stopped by a block that Cole performed out of pure reflex before bending his arm back and snapping his elbow into the guard’s jaw. After taking the club, he allowed Frank to leave his cell and toss the guard in to take his place.
“The elevator’s almost here” Cole said while locking the door. “We need to deal with whoever’s in there. Can’t be a lot of them. It’s not that big an elevator.”
Nodding toward the Half Breeds pacing in their cage, Frank said, “Let them out. They’ll tear the guards apart.”
“After they’re done with us,” Lambert said. “Or they’ll hit the guards first and then us. Either way, we won’t be able to put those things down.”
“He’s right,” Cole said. “If we want out of this, we gotta fight for it until help arrives.”
“And what if we don’t last that long?” Frank asked.
Perhaps Paige’s teachings and attitude problem had an effect on him, because Cole replied, “Then we don’t deserve to get out.” Not another word needed to be said.
When the doors opened, all three of them charged the elevator, Cole at the head of the pack. The first thing he saw was the barrel of a shotgun pointed at the floor near his feet. The man holding the shotgun started to raise it, but didn’t get halfway before Cole grabbed the weapon midway along its barrel and pounded the club into the guard’s face to drive him back into the elevator. Waylon and two more guards were in the elevator, all them armed with either shotguns or wooden clubs. By the time the first guard went down, those clubs were shifting into deadlier, bladed forms. Lambert took the shotgun Cole tossed to him while driving his foot squarely into another man’s gut, then slammed the stock into the third guard’s face, knocking him cold.
Frank was last to arrive but made one hell of an entrance. He grabbed Waylon in one hand and the last guard in the other to slam both of them against the inside of the elevator. Both men kicked and struggled, prompting Frank to pull them closer while opening his mouth to expose even rows of identical teeth. Before he could chew anyone’s face off, the ratcheting sound of the shotgun’s pump action filled the cramped space.
Cole ejected a shell that had been ready to fire, but the sound captured everyone’s attention when he asked, “Why are we being kept here?”
“To serve your time for killing those cops.”
“Don’t. Fuck. With. Me.” Cole had never been so close to killing someone in such a calculated, up-close, and potentially messy way. Waylon must have read that in his eyes, because he quickly dropped his attitude.
“You’re here because Jonah Lancroft wanted to consolidate all of the Skinners he could trust as well as the ones he can’t.”
“Lancroft is dead.”
“But his Vigilant aren’t,” Waylon said. “He wanted us to prepare for the Breaking Moon. That’s when the shapeshifters have a chance to overrun our entire society. He wanted to make sure they weren’t allowed to converge on common ground, but that’s already been allowed to happen. Not only that, but they’ve been given even more power since Kawosa was allowed to escape.”
Sirens wailed inside the prison as whoever was monitoring the cameras on G7 took notice of what had happened there.
“Shit,” Lambert said. He pointed the weapon he’d confiscated at one guard’s head. “There’s gotta be a way to get out of here other than the front door. Take us to it.”
“We won’t need that,” Cole said.
“You got a better way? I don’t even know how many guards are in the shithole.”