“What’s it do?”
Jessup shrugged and stuffed a quarter of a sandwich into his mouth like a hamster stuffing wadded tissue into its cheeks. “Hell if I know. Ever since these damn Full Bloods have been making their presence felt, all kinds of shit’s been turning up. And don’t take offense to any of this, girlie. We’re talking big picture stuff here.”
“You can call me a damn Full Blood all you want,” Cecile replied. “Just knock off the girlie crap.”
He chuckled and nodded. “Sure thing. Anyways, I thought all the Chupes and Squams and Half Breeds were coming out of the woodwork because they’d been scattered from wherever they were hiding on account of the big bad wolves coming around. Then there was the Mud Flu, which just about cut the Half Breeds down to nothin’. Now, buggers I haven’t seen for years are cropping up all over the goddamn place, most likely because the whole ecosystem is out of whack.”
“You mean like the food chain?” Cecile asked.
“That’s exactly what I mean. Kind of like when hunters take out too many of the coyotes in a certain area or bobcats in another. That’s when all the other things poke their noses out and spread all over the place.”
“But the big wolves are back,” Cole pointed out. “Now more than ever.”
“Which don’t bode well for us. These little peckers have been out long enough to find better food and bigger dens and warmer beds and greener pastures and …you get the point.”
“Got it about five minutes ago,” Cecile grumbled.
“What about the Nymar?” Cole asked. “Have you found a lot of Shadow Spore?”
“Hell no,” he spat while tearing open a candy bar as though he was ripping off a small animal’s head. “Why would they be out where we’d just pick ’em off? The whole point of burning out as many of us as they could was so they could set up shop all over the place. The cops are either on their side or believe them bloodsuckers are victims being stalked by folks like us.”
Cecile didn’t even look up from her sandwich when she asked, “Well, aren’t you? Stalking them, I mean.”
“Think I liked it better when she was givin’ me the silent treatment,” Jessup grumbled.
“So we don’t have to worry about Nymar,” Cole stated.
Jessup was quick to reply, “I wouldn’t go that far. Just because they’re not out skulking in the alleys everywhere don’t mean they’re not a threat. Fact is, they’re a bigger threat than they realize. And you should pay close attention to this too, young lady. Those Nymar used to spread rumors and outright lies about how they ruled the cities to keep your kind out. That’s no lie anymore.”
“Trust me,” she said. “Randolph is a lot more pissed off about that than you are.”
“This is his territory,” Cole explained. He stood up and turned his back to both Jessup and the girl. “And this shit is really getting hard to choke down.”
“It’s all I got,” Jessup said. “There’s tuna salad somewhere, but it might clean yer plumbing out more that you’d like.”
“Not the sandwich,” Cole said. “Why the hell do we care what a murdering animal like Randolph has to say? Why should we care what he wants? Have things slid too far down the crapper for us to even try to be Skinners anymore?” Shifting his eyes to Cecile, he asked, “Do you even know how many of our friends that goddamn beast has killed?”
“You think the Full Bloods are setting you up?” she asked. “Then you guys really must not know a lot about them. They don’t need to set up anyone but themselves. Everyone else is just tall grass to them. When it gets in their way, they mow it down. And when it’s time to mow, there’s nothing that can stop them. I’ve only been one of them for a little while, but I can see that much already. How long have you guys been fighting them?”
Cole was still fired up. He looked to Jessup to see whether he stood alone against the wolf in a teenage girl’s clothing.
“Look,” she continued, “I know people are dying. I saw it on the news and on the Internet. Randolph told me about what’s out there. You kill them, they kill you.” Quickly raising her hands, she added, “And yes, I know it’s not a game. Skinners have died, but you’ve got to see this from my side here. You don’t just kill werewolves. You peel them and drain them and I don’t even know what else. I may have eaten a human being, but you guys even give me the creeps.”
It gave Cole the creeps to hear her talk about things so candidly. Then again, he knew from experience that it didn’t help anyone’s sanity to tiptoe around the truth. Sometimes it felt good to just embrace the madness and move on.
“Obviously you and Randolph aren’t friends,” Cecile continued. “But if the Full Bloods wanted to find you, they could. I barely know how to move around in my other body, but I feel like I can smell and hear everything there is. I think Randolph’s older than all of us combined. When he talked about Skinners, he told me to see if I could trust you and then tell you the whole story about what’s going on with the Breaking Moon. He said you needed to know because if anyone had a prayer of hiding me away from the others, if only for a while, it was a Skinner.”
“And what can you tell us?” Cole asked.
“The Breaking Moon,” she replied, as if reciting something she vaguely remembered from a dream, “is why the others are here.”
Farther down the road a few cars rolled by. They were too far away for the Skinners to worry about and might as well have been in another universe than Cecile.
“There’s some kind of heat inside of us,” she said. “Full Bloods, I mean. Those big dogs too. Are they Half Breeds?”
“Yes.”
“I remember Randolph mentioning that now.” According to the look on her face, Cecile was hearing plenty of things in her mind at that moment. She winced at the screams the same way Cole had when he’d been awakened to his new world. “The heat is real. I can feel it all the time. It’s some sort of power,” she continued. “Randolph described it as the fuel that allows them—I guess us— to do what we do. I thought it sounded crazy, but I can feel it working when I change. It’s like a match is always on inside me. Kind of like, you know, inside a furnace?”
“A pilot light?”
She nodded and then smiled wistfully. “I used to like watching my dad light the pilot light at the old house back in West Virginia. Sometimes I snuck down there and left the little door on the side of the furnace open so that little flame would go out. Dad would go down there with a coat hanger he’d twisted up to hold a match and I’d follow him to watch.”
A semi pulling a trailer rumbled down the interstate. After it passed, a stray breeze swept across the camp. Her hair fluttered like streamers against her unmoving face. Crossing her arms and standing against the wind, she looked less like she was bracing herself against the elements and more like she was giving them silent commands to function around her.
“When my dad would light the match and stick it into the end of that bent metal hanger,” she said, “he told me to stay back. Then he stuck the match into the furnace and …whoosh!” Even as she said that word, her eyes sparkled as if she was looking at the little spectacle that had captivated her all those years ago. “The flames just exploded in every direction. They filled the whole furnace and all these streams of fire came out of all those metal pipes or whatever was in there. You know the ones I mean?”
“Yeah,” Jessup replied. “I do.”
She nodded, acknowledging him, but just barely. “That’s what it feels like when I change. Inside, there’s this little flame in me. Always burning. When I change, though …whoosh. It fills me up. Kind of like sex, but more.” She glanced over at him with the sly expression of a girl who’d done the deed, but not enough times for it to have lost its shock value. When Cole failed to react in kind, she rolled her eyes and nodded. “I’ve had sex, don’t you worry about it.”