The Breaking

CHAPTER Nine


The plane touched down at Atoka Municipal Airport on a strip of concrete that barely seemed long enough to accommodate it. After tires screeched against concrete, the Gulfstream came to a stop that nearly sent every one of its passengers into the nose cone. As soon as it rolled off the strip and completed a quick 180-degree turn, the engines cooled off and the door popped open.

Gunari stormed the stairs that swung down from the side door as if the war he wanted to join was ten feet in front of him, carrying a duffel bag of supplies, weapons, and ammunition in each hand. Drina had been one of the pilots, which meant this was the first time Paige saw her. Her long, dark blond hair was pulled back and held in place with a black baseball cap. After looking Paige over with a set of striking green eyes, she slung a FAMAS assault rifle over her shoulder and headed down the stairs. Nadya came out next, with Paige following close behind. Milosh made no effort to hide the fact that he was keeping an eye on the Skinner as he brought up the rear.

Gunari’s briefing had been quick and concise. According to the Amriany Far Seers, shapeshifters were converging in or around the small town of Atoka, Oklahoma. One of them was supposedly confirmed to be Liam, which meant he was probably after something. Although Gunari didn’t know what that something was, he didn’t want a Full Blood as dangerous Liam to get it. Despite many years of disagreement that existed between the two groups, Paige assumed any Skinner would agree with that line of reasoning. Other than the Full Blood, there were Mongrels and Half Breeds circling the city. Since the Amriany Far Seer hadn’t been completely clear on that point, Paige decided to take that with a grain of salt.

“There’s something wrong with your plan,” she pointed out. “The slowest of those creatures can run from one state to another in less time than it took your plane to land. How do you know they’re still here?”

“We’ll soon find out,” Gunari said. “Get into the car.”

Idling next to a row of shacks next to the airstrip was an SUV that looked as if it had been sitting there through the last dozen dust storms that whipped across the Oklahoma landscape. The Amriany piled in, and Paige made sure she was the last to get inside. If things went too badly, she would gladly take her chances with gravity by jumping out of another moving vehicle.

“You guys really have your stuff together,” she said. “Private jets. Cars at every airfield.”

“What’s the matter?” Milosh scoffed. “You don’t know how to call ahead for a car?”

“Sure. It’s the jet that I have a little trouble with. Must be some deep pockets back home.”

“Don’t worry about our money, Skinner,” he replied in a way that harkened back to their earlier conversation about kernels. “Be more concerned with making yourself useful. Otherwise, you’ll be watching that jet take off from the ground as it leaves you here when this is through.”

“If we make it through, you mean.”

Milosh smirked and nodded. “Right.”

Before they made their first turn onto West Liberty Road, Paige could feel the heat in her scars become even worse. She’d started feeling it when the jet was still on its way down, but now it was an intense, stabbing reminder that Full Bloods were nearby. Out her window she could see only a low building with a wide garage door and an empty parking lot. Turning to look at the other side of the street, she spotted a group of dark shapes rushing at the SUV like a fleet of pickup trucks barreling through an intersection.

Drina was behind the wheel of the SUV and she steered hard toward the incoming shapes while gunning the engine. “Hold on!” she screamed.

All Paige could do was jam both feet against the floorboards and wedge her arms against the door and ceiling. The impacts against the SUV came in a flurry of solid thumps that knocked the vehicle off half of its tires and flipped it onto its side. The Amriany shouted back and forth at each other in their native language while they and Paige tried to find the fastest way out.

Milosh and Nadya were in the backseat with her. He climbed up to stand on an armrest so he could reach up and shove open his passenger door. After sticking his head out for all of a second, he pulled it in again before it would have been lopped off by a set of claws that sliced through the air like a set of conjoined filleting knives.

Swearing under his breath, Milosh pulled a 9mm from a holster clipped to his belt and fired as he climbed up and out of the SUV’s side door. All around her, Paige could hear glass shattering and metal groaning as it was bent and peeled apart. Since she was on the bottom of the pile and had to wait her turn to escape, she busied herself by pulling the gnarled wood of her right-handed weapon from the holster on her boot and willing it to shift into its bladed form. It grew into a roughly formed machete by the time her left hand had found her Beretta. She fired reflexively at the claws that raked through the roof, which had been turned into a thin metal wall only a few inches away from her shoulder. The metal came away to reveal the snarling face of a Half Breed.

It wasn’t one of the normal creatures she’d been hunting for so many years. This was one of the newer beasts that had emerged since the werewolves were forced to either evolve or be wiped off the face of the earth by Lancroft’s Mud Flu. Its fur was thicker and more like the wiry coat of a Full Blood. Even though her bullets snapped its head back and chipped away at its solid body, they were barely enough to force the creature away from the SUV. She continued firing, however, until she scored enough head shots to put it down. Before she could get too excited about that, another Half Breed stalked toward the opening the other had made. Its eyes narrowed into angry slits, and a long, wide snout opened wide to reveal a set of curved tusks that stretched out from its upper and lower jaws.

As soon as that werewolf came at her, Paige snapped her right arm forward to drive the tip of her machete into its face. Her weapon only glanced along the Half Breed’s face after it twisted its head away, and instead sank an inch or so into its shoulder. The creature snapped its jaws in a desperate attempt to rip her apart, but with a bit of good timing and a strong pull on the machete’s handle, Paige steered its face toward a jagged section of torn roof. When one set of tusks punched through the metal and became stuck there, she placed the barrel of her pistol against its forehead and was about to squeeze her trigger when the Half Breed surprised her again.

The creature pulled away from the shredded roof, leaving its two tusks embedded there after a sharp tug that was strong enough to jerk the machete from Paige’s hand. The thorns in the weapon’s grip opened her palm even farther as it was taken away from her when the Half Breed hopped away from the overturned SUV.

Paige quickly reloaded the Beretta and sent round after round into the Half Breed’s chest and head. Although the bullets didn’t kill the creature, they forced it back far enough to let her climb out through the roof. Every time the Beretta bucked against her palm, agony ran up through her savaged right hand. In an almost perverse way, the pain excited her. It was the most she’d felt in that hand since before it had been nearly petrified by the batch of prototype ink she’d injected in Kansas City.

“Where is the young one?” a vaguely familiar voice bellowed.

Realizing it came from the Half Breed responsible for her cars, and the intense heat she felt from them, Paige launched herself at it. Without breaking stride, she holstered the gun, reached out to grab onto the machete that protruded from its cheek and used her momentum to drive it in even farther. After sinking it several more inches, she dropped down so all of her weight pulled the machete like a lever. As tough as the creature may have been, the Half Breed couldn’t outmuscle a weapon infused with fragments of a Blood Blade that cleaved all the way through its skull.

Paige landed in a seated position, rolled to one side and pulled her weapon free of the mutilated remains of the werewolf’s head. The Half Breed flopped onto its chest amid a tangle of limbs that suddenly had all the strength of wet knotted rope. She jumped to her feet and took quick stock of her situation. There were no fewer than eight werewolves swarming over the SUV. They scattered as a pair of thick hands covered in black fur clamped around the SUV and pulled it down onto all four wheels with the ease of a child correcting an overturned go-cart.

The Full Blood stood in his two-legged form, towering over the SUV and snarling through a mouthful of daggerlike teeth. “Don’t make me ask again,” Liam snarled in a voice that was barely comprehensible through his stalagmite teeth.

After circling around the rear end of the SUV, Paige could see that most of the Amriany had gotten out as well. Milosh and Nadya stood across from her, positioned at the other corner of the rear bumper and surrounded by four Half Breeds. Nadya had a MAC-10 in her hands, which must have been stashed in one of the bags they’d carried from the plane. Milosh wrapped both fists around the knives he’d been sharpening during the flight, and Gunari stood less than two paces away from the massive Full Blood. The hatchet in his hands was bigger than something that could be found at a hardware store, and the metal of its blade was smeared by the same dark coloring as a Blood Blade.

“What young one?” Gunari asked.

Paige was impressed with how well the Amriany held their ground. She’d given up on counting how many Half Breeds surrounded them, and the presence of a Full Blood was enough to tip the scales irrevocably away from their favor.

As his single, crystalline brown eye shifted in its socket, something moved beneath the scar tissue filling the hole where Liam’s right eye had been. “You know goddamn well what I’m talking about. Why else would you be here?”

“We are here because you have overstepped your bounds,” Gunari said. “Just because the Skinners allow you to roam free doesn’t mean we will let you do as you please.”

Liam pulled in a breath through nostrils wider than quarters and let it out through a mouth that had shifted into something better suited for forming words coated in his thick cockney accent. “Gypsies, eh? I thought I recognized that stench.”

“I mean what I told you,” Gunari said with a venomous tone. Taking a step closer, as if Liam wasn’t one of the most destructive forces on the planet, he added, “Whatever business you have here is done. Get out now before—”

“Before what?” the Full Blood roared. “Before the humans see us? Too late for that, I’d say! Before the Skinners organize to put us in our place? Too late for that as well. Things ain’t goin’ the way they been goin’. Not anymore!” Sweeping a clawed hand toward a pair of Half Breeds that snarled through a set of curved tusks, he said, “Take a look at these wretches. When the Breaking Moon rises, this’ll be all of your faces! Human, Skinner, Ammrianny, it won’t matter.” When he spoke the true name of Gunari’s people, Liam let the word roll off his tongue like something he’d hacked up from the back of his throat.

“We won’t let that happen.”

“You won’t,” said the second Full Blood who approached the SUV from Paige’s side like a cat slinking up to a wounded rodent. “Because you don’t even know what he’s talking about.”

Paige’s scars hadn’t warned her of the other approaching Full Blood because her senses were already on fire from the pain running through her body after the crash and the heat that flooded through her palms to the point of overloading them. Although obviously possessing a Full Blood’s stature, the other werewolf kept closer to the ground and moved as if her glittering violet eyes could see straight through to the truest essence of whatever was before them.

“These hunters do not know about the Breaking Moon,” the second Full Blood said in a voice that was purely feminine, despite its emergence from a hellish maw. “They have come because of the commotion you have caused, Liam. Nothing more.”

Since she was closest to the other Full Blood, Paige asked, “How can you be so sure?”

The female werewolf looked just as likely to pounce as she was to sit down and make herself comfortable. “Because all of your thoughts are known to us, Skinner.”

“The Mind Singer is dead.”

“We don’t need him any longer. Do you truly think we are so primitive that we cannot think several steps ahead of a bunch of clannish brutes like you? Maybe we should thank you after all, Liam. The Skinners and Amriany alike seem to have mistaken us for common dogs that don’t pay attention to the shifting world around them.”

“Oh, it’s about to shift, all right,” Liam said.

Focusing on Paige, the female werewolf spread her paws out to plant them in a stance so firm that it seemed not even the hand of God could pry her loose. “After what the leeches did to you, there is only panic among the Skinners. I think you don’t even know who I am.”

“I know,” Nadya said. Without taking her eyes off the Full Bloods, she nodded toward Paige and explained, “Her name is Minh. She roams the territory east of Europe.”

“Knowing my name is one thing,” Minh said. “When the Breaking Moon rises, you will be just as surprised and helpless as the rest of the humans.”

“So you don’t think they know about the young one?” Liam asked.

“I’m not sure,” Minh replied while tilting her head, as if that was enough to screw Paige to a wall. “Do you know about the young one?”

Without blinking, Paige replied, “Of course we do.”

“Be careful what you say, Skinner. Your history with the Amriany isn’t pristine, but something tells me you might care what happens to that one.”

When Minh glanced toward the windshield of the SUV, she drew Paige’s focus to the body hanging out halfway through the shattered field of safety glass. Drina was covered in blood from wounds that had been opened by the crash and closed by whatever method the Amriany used to toughen their systems. Even though a Half Breed’s teeth were firmly embedded in her shoulder and sunken in almost to the gum line, she maintained a grip on the side of the werewolf’s neck with one hand while fumbling for her FAMAS assault rifle with the other.

“If we even suspect you’re lying to us,” Minh purred, “she’s dead.”

“We were coming to see if anyone had found her yet,” Gunari said. “It looks like you haven’t.”

“You know the young one is a she?” Liam asked.

Before he could answer that, one of the Half Breeds turned to look at him with eyes that contained much more than the brutish instinct of a hungry animal. Like a cloud dissipating in a windy sky, the feral wildness cleared to show pupils the color of milk that had gone bad weeks ago. “That was just a guess,” it said. Shifting into a lanky form clothed in dirty rags as if he’d simply stepped out from behind a screen, the man hung a head weighed down by a mane of shiny black hair. “More like a bluff, but a good one.”

When she looked at the lean figure that climbed up to stand on two legs, Paige saw the shapeshifter that had held the police away from the warehouse in Denver long enough for the Nymar to get their dirty work done. Even worse, she’d felt the subtle power of the First Deceiver for herself. For all she knew, Rico was still suffering under it.

The pressure of Kawosa’s words pushed against her ears, and his gaze pressed upon her eyes.

Judging by the strained expression on the Amriany’s face, Gunari felt it as well. “It’s not a bluff,” he said in a voice that could have been dipped in the same alloy as Paige’s machete. “We’re here to make sure you didn’t find a way to get to her. How else would I even know it’s a her?”

“Fifty-fifty chance,” Kawosa replied while crossing his arms. “You can’t lie to me, human. Tell me what you know of her.”

Before she could think about saying anything different, Paige told him, “I don’t even know who the hell you’re talking about.”

“And the Breaking Moon?”

“Never heard of it.” Even as she spoke, Paige couldn’t believe hers was the voice that put life into those words. As much as she wanted to staple her mouth shut, she added, “The Amriany found you, and as long as it means killing more f*cking shapeshifters, I’m along for the ride. You can take the moon, the sun, and every planet spinning around it and shove them up your ass.”

“Good,” Liam growled as he dropped down to all fours and sprouted multiple layers of muscle beneath his sleek black coat. “ ’Cause that means there ain’t no reason to keep you healthy.”