Jory, Tru, and Paul squared off against it as the fight two floors above them raged on. With all that noise filling the house and basement, the rumble of continued digging was easy to miss.
At the farthest end of the brick hallway, something else churned beneath the floor. Unlike the wild scraping that had announced the hybrid’s entrance, this was quicker and more systematic as it buckled the floor beneath the last darkened cell. After several attempts to dislodge the bricks, the digging moved one cell over, where the bricks were pushed aside by a set of strong, flat hands emerging from the dirt. Max poked his narrow snout up from the shadows, blinked a set of vertical eyelids and wriggled out of the hole he’d dug. Randolph emerged soon after, pulling himself out with powerful if drastically constricted paws. He couldn’t get out of the hole fast enough before shaking the pebbles and grit from his coat like a dog sloughing off the rain.
The cell was the size of a closet and reeked of excrement from more than one species. Iron bars were fitted into a frame with a door so narrow that a normal man would have to turn sideways in order to pass. Randolph shifted into a form that was compact and upright. His fur became a thick mat over flesh that looked dense as tire rubber, his movements stiff and his features becoming blocky and indistinct. The only thing that remained of the man known as Mr. Burkis were the crystalline gray-blue eyes staring out from the primitive face.
His compact form moved easily through the narrow opening. In the darkness his thick, dark brown fur made it easy for him to remain unseen by the Skinners who were already distracted at the other end of the hall. He approached the neighboring cell, placed one hand upon the bars and immediately pulled it back with a pained hiss. One quick glance at the rusted iron allowed him to pick out the Skinner runes etched into the iron that had scorched his fingers.
“Are you Kawosa?” Randolph asked in a voice that sounded as if it had been strained and compacted along with the rest of his body’s mass.
The creature in the cell kept its back pressed against a wall. At first its large unblinking eyes were simple reflective surfaces in the shadows. Then they became darker, redder, and finally took the same blue gray color as Randolph’s. “You are Full Blood,” the creature said in a voice that was smooth as milky honey.
“When did the Skinner capture you?”
“Since I cannot see the moon or sun, I do not know how many days have passed.”
“Answer me. Are you Kawosa?”
The creature took no notice of the battle raging in the hall. He was too enthralled with the sight in front of him to care about rumblings in the distance. “There have been a people who called me by that name,” it replied.
“How did the Skinners catch one like you? If you are Kawosa, such a thing shouldn’t be possible.”
“Do you think I am a god?”
Randolph had to think about that. He blinked heavily, as if the weight of his answer pressed upon his brow. He considered lying to the creature but gave up on that almost immediately. “I have heard stories. Legends. Some say you are a god or maybe a demon. But some say the same about our kind. All I know is that we need something to tip the scales back in our favor.”
“Or,” Kawosa mused while narrowing keen eyes, which had now become violet, and slinking forward upon bony legs, “do you just want to keep me away from the Skinners? It simply wouldn’t do for them to sink their hooks and knives into me, now would it? That is, after they found a way to kill me or simply waited long enough for me to die. Just like they did with poor Henry. Do you even know what horrors Lancroft had to inflict to kill him?”
With every word, Kawosa’s voice took a new tone; a concoction that changed as new ingredients were sprinkled into the mix.
“Can you break these bars, Full Blood?” For the first time since he’d stepped forward, Kawosa’s eyes disappeared as he closed them and drew a long breath. They snapped open, green and vibrant, as an incomplete set of crooked fangs were displayed beneath raised lips. “You’re the one they called Standing Bear. Could it be you’re working for the Skinners now too?”
“You know better than that. I’ve been trying to find you for years, and all I discovered was that your trail ended when it crossed with Jonah Lancroft’s. Only recently has he been found and dealt with.”
“Yes,” the creature sighed. “I nearly got a taste of the woman who did the dealing. So sweet.”
“If we stay here much longer, we will be forced to fight these Skinners as well as any more that come to help them. And then there are the humans.”
“You fear them?”
Randolph took a moment to gauge his response. “They have numbers and technology at their advantage. I don’t know how much of that you know about.”
“They’ve always had their toys. How do you plan on getting me past these bars?” Kawosa asked.
“Tell me you want to leave and we should be able to clear a path.”
“I want to leave.”
“Then stand back.”
Shifting into his four-legged form, Randolph swatted at the floor with a massive paw. A few seconds later the rumbling beneath him commenced. Bricks trembled as Max passed under them, but the ones anchoring the bars hardly moved. At the other end of the hall the hybrid Mongrel yelped as both Nymar descended upon him. Jory waited for the other two to clear a path before delivering a finishing blow that sent a wet crunch down the hall.
Kawosa backed into the darkness from which he’d come. He shifted his blank reflective eyes toward the floor as the bricks started to buckle and split. Dirt and subterranean filth spewed up like pus from an old wound once Max concentrated his efforts on the section of floor beneath the bars. Those bricks, either strengthened by the warding runes or powered by some other force, held firm. They did, however, need a solid foundation. Once that was removed, they shifted and slid within the churning ground until the bars were the only thing holding them in place.
Randolph looked at Kawosa again, finding the creature’s eyes closer to the top of the cell and encased in a lean shape that bristled with coarse fur.
“Can you break the plane of the bars?” Kawosa asked.
“With the bricks of your cell disrupted, the runes should be weakened enough for you to—”
“That’s not what I asked. Can you break the plane of the bars?”
Hunkering down on all fours, Randolph leaned so his snout was almost touching the old iron. “We don’t have time for this.”
“All this world has for me are its curiosities. Meeting you this way is a surprise. I like surprises. I want more of them.”
“If I were to start performing tricks for your amusement, then that would be a very big surprise indeed. You can stay here until the Skinners figure out a way to cut you apart, but if you want to leave, let’s bloody well leave.”
The smile Kawosa showed was crooked and verging on childish, which made it a disturbing addition to a face such as his. Rather than test his luck with the bars, he sank his claws into the earth beneath the broken floor and pulled himself under the upturned dirt. It was a short crawl through decades-old filth before his lean frame emerged inside the cell next to his old residence. By the time he pulled himself completely out of the hole, Kawosa was a wiry man with skin the color of scorched desert rock. He wore a tattered leather loincloth and a collar around his neck that might have once been attached to a shirt or some sort of tunic. Long stringy hair hung in front of his face but wasn’t enough to obscure his rich, chocolate-brown eyes.