Waggoner nodded and Paige followed suit. She could feel his words sinking in without the slightest touch of invasion that accompanied the lesser psychic manipulations pulled off by Nymar or even the Mind Singer himself. Kawosa’s words were wrapped in something that made them feel as if they’d been spoken by a loving parent who only wanted the best for his precious little babies.
“Now,” Kawosa said, “you have to go back to the other Skinners and tell them you found nothing here because there is nothing in this building. There is no reason for them to risk themselves and they just need to find somewhere to hide because the authorities must surely be on their way.”
“Right,” Paige said as she looked up to finally meet his gaze. “The cops or Army have to be on their way.”
“Exactly.”
“Because I’m gonna call them.” With that, she drew her Beretta using the hand that began creeping toward her holster while Kawosa had been talking. She removed the pistol in one fluid motion and fired a round at his head.
In the fraction of a second between taking aim and pulling the trigger, Paige got a look into Kawosa’s eyes. They began as light blue and shifted into a dark violet while widening with genuine surprise. Surprised or not, he had just enough time to pull his head to one side and avoid the nine millimeter rounds that were fired at him. By the time she pulled her aim to track him, Kawosa was shifting into a form that drew the mass of his body into a more compact frame. His hands shifted into paws and he dropped to all fours. His ears stretched into long points and his face tapered to a narrow snout.
Kawosa barked at the other Half Breed while jumping toward the door. Waggoner was there to catch him and managed to wrap both arms around the shapeshifter’s midsection.
“Hold him steady!” Paige said as she scooped up her machete. She tried to swing at the Half Breed, but the werewolf was more than quick enough to evade the weapon.
Kawosa squirmed, kicked, and thrashed in Wagoner’s grasp, but didn’t have the multiple breaks in his skeleton that would allow him to twist free or attack like a Half Breed. The other werewolf in the room lunged at Waggoner and sank its teeth into his hip. Waggoner dropped to one knee, screaming in agony. When his grip loosened, Kawosa broke free. The shapeshifter took less than two steps before Paige’s machete cut into his back.
Paige pointed her Beretta at the Half Breed and started firing. It shook its head furiously, as if trying to turn away from the gunfire while simultaneously ripping off a portion of Waggoner’s body. Her machete had become embedded less than half an inch into Kawosa’s flesh and couldn’t be driven any further. Instead of trying to fight a losing battle, she twisted the blade until it was angled to slice a piece off Kawosa’s back the way a butcher might carve off a thick slice of ham. She managed to draw the blade through his flesh for about an inch or two before Kawosa flailed too much to be held. Once he sank his claws into the floor and dragged himself toward the door, he pulled forward and tore off the piece of him Paige had been cutting. Then he bolted from the room, leaving them to contend with the remaining Half Breed. Paige flipped her bloody prize off the machete and onto the floor, then drove the blade straight down through the back of the creature’s neck to sever its spine.
Waggoner wanted to go after Kawosa but couldn’t take one step before he crumpled to the floor. “Son of a bitch! What got me?”
“There was another Half Breed waiting in here for us. That one,” Paige said, jabbing a finger at the twitching werewolf. “Right there!”
“That wasn’t there before …was it?”
“Yeah. It was. That thing that ran out of here just told you it wasn’t.”
“And I believed him?” Waggoner asked.
“Yep. That’s his shtick.” Paige picked up the meat she’d carved from Kawosa and turned it over to examine both sides. “But not anymore. At least not if I can get this wrapped up before it dries out. Where’s a grocery store around here?”
“There’s a Town and Country back down on Court Street and a few other places along Mississippi Avenue.”
“Which one’s closer?”
“Mississippi Avenue is pretty torn up and there’s lots of folks taking refuge there. That means there’ll be those wolf things prowling around.”
“Half Breeds,” Paige corrected. “Let me see your palm.”
Grudgingly, Waggoner leaned back and stretched out his wounded leg to show his callused but relatively scar-free hands. “That’s right,” he said. “Half Breeds. That’s what Bill and Jesse call them. You looking for scars like they have?”
“You’re not a Skinner,” Paige mused. “If we get out of this town in one piece, we’ll have to talk about offering you a membership. Now which way to Mississippi Avenue? We should check on some survivors and see if any of them have some plastic wrap.”
After spending so much time in Atoka, there weren’t many medical supplies left in the green truck. Still winded from running back to the pickup, Paige sifted through the supplies to find a baby bottle filled with a few squirts of the light blue fluid used to sterilize Half Breed wounds. The bottle was from Jesse and Bill’s supply, and there was barely enough left to drizzle on Waggoner’s hip. From what she could see, the creature’s teeth hadn’t gotten down to the bone, but it was better to be safe than sorry. If they were closer to the spot where the Amriany were hiding, she would have raided their medical kit to heal him up even better.
After dressing his wound as best they could, Waggoner was feeling good enough to support his weight on a hastily bandaged leg. Paige didn’t need to examine the wound to know it was bad. When they arrived at a small ranch style house on South Mississippi Avenue, Waggoner refused to stay in the truck.
“You’ll need me,” he told Paige. “Last time I checked, there were three families in there, and they ain’t about to open the door for a stranger.”
“We just need to grab a few supplies and make sure they’re alive.”
“And they need to protect their loved ones. Besides,” he added while pulling himself from the truck, “I told them we’d come along to look in on them, and that’s what I’ll do.”
“Are they protected in there?”
“They got one of them panic rooms in the master bedroom. Bet they didn’t think it would come in so handy, huh?”
He knocked on the door to announce their presence as they entered the house, shouted through a reinforced wall and mentioned four people by name, but still he and Paige found themselves looking down a trio of shotgun barrels when the panic room door swung open.
“You guys need to come up with a secret knock,” Paige said as she helped Waggoner sit down inside the cramped secret room. “That would cut down on a lot of grief.”
“You don’t know what grief is, lady,” said a man in his late fifties with a salt and pepper beard and skin tanned to a dark bronze. “For all we know, you could turn into one of those things.”
Barely taking notice of the guns pointed at her, Paige looked at the people in the room and focused on what she could feel in her scars. “Seriously, a secret knock isn’t that hard. Two quick followed by three slow. Or what about the ol’ shave and a haircut?”
One of the people not holding a shotgun was a short woman with cropped red hair and a kind, soft face. “Shave and a haircut?” she asked with a distinct New Jersey accent.
“You know …” Paige stretched out a hand to strike the first part on the wall. Knock …knock knock-knock knock. Before she could get to the last two, something rumbled beneath their feet.